Ex-Head of Recycling Company Hires Lawyer

The former head of an Orange recycling company, now under investigation for involvement in the suspected misappropriation of up to $6 million in city funds, has hired Los Angeles criminal attorney Robert Shapiro, a member of O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” defense.

Shapiro informed the Orange County district attorney’s office last week that he represents Jeffery Hambarian, who was fired in March as chief operating officer of the recycling company, after an audit revealed that the city might have been defrauded.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Guy N. Ormes, the deputy in charge of special assignments, said Monday that Shapiro called him early last week and left a phone message saying that he now represented Hambarian.

Ormes said he talked to an associate of Shapiro twice after getting Shapiro’s phone message.

“I really don’t want to get into what they did or didn’t say,” Ormes said. “They just wanted to notify us they represented him.”

Orange City Atty. David A. De Berry said he received a call last week from Shapiro’s associate. “She wanted to know if we were prosecuting the case. I referred her to the D.A.”

Shapiro did not return telephone calls to his Century City office.

The city disclosed June 5 that Orange police and the district attorney’s office had launched a criminal investigation in mid-April of Orange Disposal Services Inc. and its recycling subsidiary, Orange Resource Recovery Systems Inc., after a “fraud audit” by a national accounting firm confirmed irregularities with the company’s books.

Both companies were started by Sam and Alyce Hambarian, who have held exclusive contracts since 1955 to collect the city’s garbage. In recent years, their sons, Michael, Donald and Jeffery, have served as company directors, and Michael has overseen trash operations, while Jeffery was the chief operating officer of the recycling concern.

Z. Harry Astor, who represents all the Hambarians except Jeffery, said Jeffery was fired in March after the allegations of theft first surfaced, and that the Hambarians have restored some of the missing funds to the recycling company.

“I have no reason to believe, by any conversations I’ve had with them, that [Sam and Alyce] are making any payments to Mr. Shapiro,” Astor said.

Three Orange Police Department detectives have been assigned to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing, and the city has said in court documents that “salvage revenues belonging to the city may have been misappropriated for personal use by one or more members of the Hambarian family.”

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The city first learned of the irregularities when an auditor hired by the companies reported that he could not fully account for revenue from the sale of material extracted from the city’s trash.

Under terms of the city’s exclusive 10-year contract with the recycling company, revenue from the sale of the salvaged material belongs to the city and must be properly accounted for.

Search warrants were executed last month at the recycling company’s North Glassell Street offices and later at two Los Angeles County restaurant-bars where informants told police that checks made out to the salvage company were cashed.

One of the informants said he personally cashed about $1 million in salvage checks. The second informant told police that at least $6 million in checks were cashed over a period of years.