A New Clark Kent

Steve Soboroff is at a loss. He can’t understand how he acquired this reputation as a hothead. And now here’s this list in Los Angeles magazine, about the most powerful people in the city, just reinforcing the absurdity: * “Rep: Bighearted tough guy who takes a project by the horns and gets it done. Downside: Notoriously short temper.” * Who is this temperamental guy? Patti Soboroff has never seen that side of him. Neither have their kids. “I’m the most patient guy in the world,” he announces. Later, on the way to school, he chats with 13-year-old Miles about the article. “There’s a difference,” he tells his son, “between being passionate about something and being out of control.” * And that would be? * “I don’t know,” he says and bursts out laughing. * That is the problem with passionate people, especially passionate self-made multimillionaire people with political aspirations who lack years of seasoning on the public stage. They can’t always divine the line between passionate and out of control. So, when confronted with numskulls who can’t grasp the beauty and common sense of a simple, elegant concept, they erupt. They think they’re being passionate. Everybody else thinks they’re out of control. Consider last summer’s confrontation between Soboroff and the L.A. school board, when it seemed as if the board was going to vote down his proposal to expedite the air-conditioning of its schools:

“My God!” Soboroff exploded. “You’ve got to stop it. Or you will have a legacy that makes the MTA board look like the best board ever.”

Soboroff chairs the citizens’ committee that oversees how the district spends the $2.4 billion approved by voters last year for school repairs. He had led the battle against the district staff, which had insisted that it should do the job. That day the board would decide whether to give the $150-million task to outsiders or keep it in-house. Despite Soboroff’s admonishment, he won. He almost always does.

But could he win an election?

Could he navigate the minefield of a political campaign without blowing himself up? Could Steven Louis Soboroff be--would he even want to be--the next mayor of Los Angeles?

“I am absolutely 100% undecided,” Soboroff said a week after the November election. Noting the triumph of Gov.-elect Gray Davis and alluding to the fall of Al Checchi, he added: “All of a sudden, it’s real good to have experience as a politician, and the blame for that goes to businesspeople who tried to buy an office.”

Chances are you’ve never even heard of him, but Steve Soboroff’s handprints are all over the most important civic projects in Los Angeles: the Alameda Corridor, the new and improved Los Angeles Zoo, the new downtown sports arena, the campaign to retrieve professional football, the push to restore luster to a faded parks system and the repair of the city’s decrepit public schools.

“I call him Clark Kent,” the mayor has often said about the 50-year-old Republican, whom he plucked from the obscurity of commercial real estate five years ago. Known as a “closer” and “doer,” Soboroff was first unleashed on the Harbor Commission, where he brought his considerable real estate expertise to the Alameda Corridor project--the high-speed, cargo-only rail route between the port and downtown--which was conceived during the Bradley administration. Soboroff helped guide negotiations with three cantankerous railroads, and the project is finally under construction and due to be completed in 2002.

Officially, Soboroff is Riordan’s senior advisor (with a City Hall office), president of the Recreation and Parks Commission and the mayor’s appointee to the Proposition BB Oversight Committee--the LAUSD watchdog group. He gets paid for none of this and devotes about 31/2 days a week to city business. Unofficially, Riordan says, Soboroff is “the best friend I’ve ever had.”

He is also, at least for now, the man Riordan hopes will succeed him in 2001.

Of course, by the time Riordan’s second term ends, the political landscape of Los Angeles may have heaved seismically. Still unresolved are the issues of charter reform and the possibility of a newly empowered mayor, San Fernando Valley secession, the expansion of LAX and the movement to break up the school district--all of which could have profound repercussions on the next mayoral race. Will Los Angeles be looking for another tough-talking political outsider or a career politician with more finesse than wealth?

There is no end to the speculation about who will succeed Riordan, and the posturing has already begun. Though the mayor has urged Soboroff to consider running, it now appears that Riordan’s political machine may not be part of the inheritance. In October, political powerhouse Bill Wardlaw, architect of Riordan’s campaigns, pointedly announced that “the next mayor will not be a Republican businessman.” Soboroff had a few choice words to say in private but was unwilling to pick a public fight with Wardlaw.

Democratic political consultant Pat Reddy believes that the next mayor of Los Angeles will be one of three people: Soboroff, Zev Yaroslavsky or Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. But would Soboroff, who wears his heart on his sleeve, be able to withstand the rigors of a mayoral campaign?

“If Soboroff thought the press was tough [before], wait till they look into his finances and his life,” says one seasoned consultant, an admitted “Zev guy.” “Everything you’ve ever done in your life will be looked at by your opponents. He’s in real estate, you know, so he’s lied to somebody, he’s been sued by somebody or alienated someone. Dick Riordan had unlimited resources to overcome everything. He spent $10 million on his first campaign. Soboroff has no political base or ties, and he doesn’t have Riordan’s wherewithal.”

This last, of course, is early and furious spin. Soboroff has plenty of time to build his base and gather funds--he estimates it will cost about $8 million to run--and, though Soboroff downplays it, Riordan has not been stingy about introducing him to the right people with the right-sized wallets.

Riordan and Soboroff are temperamentally quite different, say people who know both. Soboroff is more emotionally open than the mayor, less likely to hold a grudge, more balanced between family and work. Their political similarities, however, are apparent.

Like the mayor, Soboroff has a business mogul’s disdain for the bureaucratic process; he calls it a “virus” and “brain dead” in one conversation, a “cold sore” in another. And like the mayor, he clashes with the civil servants and politicians who stand in the way of what Riordan and Soboroff believe is best for Los Angeles.

And what might that be?

Simply put, if it’s good for the economy of the city, if it improves the schools or parks or public safety, if it’s cost effective, if it foils the bureaucracy or reduces traffic, then it’s good for Los Angeles.

Soboroff pays a price for his passion, none higher than during the protracted and very public struggle to build a new sports arena downtown. The major players acknowledge that it was Soboroff who, in early 1996, got the ball rolling on the more than $300-million project next to the money-hemorrhaging Convention Center. When finished, the 20,000-seat arena will be home to the Lakers, Kings and Clippers.

Since the mayor had put himself at arm’s length from the deal, citing a conflict arising from his ownership of the nearby Pantry restaurant, Soboroff became the project’s public defender. The public-private deal, in which the city would issue some $60 million in bonds, then became the topic of intense scrutiny and vitriol on two fronts.

First, Councilman Joel Wachs, a potential mayoral candidate in 2001, raised objections to public investment in the project. He threatened to put the issue to voters unless risk to taxpayer liability was reduced, prompting the developers, Ed Roski Jr. and Philip Anschutz, to threaten to abandon the project.

Second, Times columnist Bill Boyarsky took the developers to task for failing to make public the leases signed with the Lakers and Kings. Boyarsky’s point: If the teams bailed on the arena before the end of the 25-year bond repayment period, taxpayers would be out millions. He wrote that Soboroff “scoffed” at his concerns. (“The implication was clear,” Boyarsky wrote, “I was too ignorant to appreciate what a good deal this is.”)

While Boyarsky’s columns nettled, it was Wachs who drew blood. Wachs accused Soboroff of orchestrating a taxpayer giveaway to “billionaire team owners and mega-millionaire players.” Soboroff, by far the political greenhorn compared to the seasoned Wachs, blew up in several memorable forums--a public affairs TV show, a Valley homeowners meeting, even cyberspace--prompting veteran political consultant Rick Taylor to call him a “dream opponent.”

In a Times essay about putting the arena deal to voters, Wachs wrote that Soboroff “first cut a deal with the arena developers that could have cost the city more than $180 million” (which could only have been true if the arena were built and never used). Infuriated, Soboroff fired off angry e-mail to Wachs. And in a memo to former Riordan advisor Michael Keeley, who was advising Wachs on the arena initiative, Soboroff, who is Jewish, accused Wachs, also Jewish, of being sacrilegious for appearing on KCET’s “Life & Times” on Yom Kippur and “lying” about the arena. (Wachs’ office and KCET said the show was taped earlier in the week.)

The mayor, sitting it out, was not pleased with the impolitic personal assault on one of his staunchest allies on the council. “He got angry against Joel, which you don’t do publicly,” Riordan says. “That’s just not good PR. He learned a lesson from that.”

“It was a real hell week, a real initiation,” says Soboroff, who admitted that the episode gave him “heart palpitations.” “What I felt was, if I lost every friend I had at City Hall, every relationship, if I could never go back into City Hall, let me go down saying this arena came to Los Angeles because I worked on it.”

In the end, Boyarsky’s columns led to public disclosure of the leases, which were ironclad, as promised. Wachs’ campaign led to guarantees that the developers, rather than taxpayers, would repay the bonds in the unlikely event the arena generates less revenue than projected. And Staples Center is under construction.

Wachs, however, refused to return phone calls for this story. After five attempts to contact him, a spokesman phoned to say that Wachs “would rather not have to produce quotes on Steve Soboroff.”

“Tell him I’ll take him to the first game in the new arena,” Soboroff says. “If I have an extra ticket.”

*

Soboroff says he has done nothing that could come back to haunt him in a political race: never been arrested for drunken driving, not only never dodged the draft but tried to enlist during the Vietnam War and was refused for medical reasons, never smoked a joint, never had a midlife crisis, adores his wife and dotes on his five children, who range in age from 5 to 15, and tries to be home each night by 5:30.

He sincerely and innocently offers up his life as if it’s some multifaceted jewel: Check out my office while I’m in Asia with the mayor--you’ll learn a lot about me just by looking at what’s on the walls. Here’s a book about how to make government work better--check out the chapter on me. Here’s a magazine story calling me one of the 10 most powerful people in Los Angeles. Here’s a list of people to call. Let me fax you the latest newspaper clip about me. Come watch me run a Rec and Parks meeting. Here’s the keys to my electric car--let’s take her for a spin. Check out my beautiful home--come on over for a Soboroff family dinner.

But he can also joke about being bald and out of shape. He admits that he and his wife have been in counseling together to learn how to communicate better. He says he’s a B-minus at everything he does. And he is disarmingly forthcoming.

Says Riordan: “You might say he’s a boy scout, not a politician.”

So certain is Soboroff of his honesty, his integrity, his goodness, that he gave a reporter the entire text of a negative research report he commissioned on himself in January, the very kind an opponent would buy. “He came up with nothing,” Soboroff says, handing over the three-inch-thick binder.

Chapter headings include:

--”Alameda Corridor project conflict of interest?” Not exactly. The report says Soboroff owns property “close enough to possibly appreciate once the project is completed.” Said property is miles away, in Sun Valley.

--”Supports close to $2 billion in tax increases.” So did voters, who approved the school and park bond measures in question.

--”School repair fiasco.” While the Prop. BB oversight committee got off to a bumpy start, the pace of repairs has picked up. Overall, it’s too early to judge.

--”Dereliction of his civic duty.” Researchers reported that Soboroff has missed every primary election since 1992, which would mean he has never cast a ballot for Riordan. “They thought I didn’t vote in the election Riordan was elected,” Soboroff said in an initial interview about the research report. “That was wrong. I mean, gimme a break.” He says he often voted absentee. But at The Times’ request, the county registrar’s office checked the records and could find no evidence that Soboroff voted, even absentee, in the 1993 and 1997 primaries. “We can assume I didn’t,” Soboroff says later, sounding perplexed. “I don’t have an ‘I voted’ sticker on my calendars. But I was into Riordan . . . it doesn’t make sense.”

--”Represents companies accused of racial discrimination.” In 1996, Circuit City was found guilty by a federal jury of discriminating against blacks at its corporate headquarters in Virginia. In 1995, Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of Office Depot, accusing the retailer of discriminating against black employees and customers. Both chains are clients of Soboroff’s real estate business.

--”Hothead.” (See discussion of Staples Center, above.)

Finally, the report notes that Soboroff will almost certainly face accusations that he is a hypocrite about education. If he believes so much in the public schools, why are his five children being schooled privately? Simple, he says: “When Jacob [now 15] started school, it was a nonissue. Now it’s about stability and fairness to the other four.”

The upshot of all that “negative research”? “What’s my downside?” Soboroff asks with a shrug. “I got a life. I’m not worried.”

So, here’s an irresistible theory: Steve Soboroff’s downside is that he doesn’t believe he has one.

“I’m willing,” he says dryly, “to take my chances on that.”

*

The Soboroffs live high above Sunset Boulevard in pacific Palisades. Guarded gates shield the neighborhood from unwanted visitors. The 8,000-square-foot home boasts an ocean view, a circular staircase, five children’s bedrooms plus a master suite, a pool, a basketball court, two washers and two dryers. It was built with materials imported from France, a mistake they will never repeat, Soboroff says sheepishly: “We found this floor that had been in France for 200 years, and we dug it up and brought it over. It cost a fortune. It was stupid. Then you put it in and, three hours later, you stop seeing it. It was $300,000 more than getting regular tiles.”

The $3-million home cost a million dollars more than the Soboroffs had planned. “It was the late ‘80s,” he says, “and things were good, and I was making more money than I could spend. To me, home symbolized family. So I just overdid it.”

Sitting in her family room in front of a huge hearth, Patti Soboroff, 46, says she accepts her husband’s increasingly public profile and the possibility of a political campaign. “I think I am comfortable with the scrutiny,” she says. “I would never stand in the way of something that is important to him.”

The Soboroffs met at a clothing store on Montana Avenue where Patti worked. At 30, she had been married once before and had had a series of relationships with, as she put it, “some real winners.” Steve Soboroff was different. “This guy is too good to be true,” Patti thought. “He was so nice--great physique--but he was wearing polyester pants.”

That was February 1982. They married in October, and their first son, Jacob, was born the next year, and three more children followed: Miles in 1985, Molly in 1987 and Hannah in 1988. The family was complete. And then a fifth child appeared out of the blue.

In May 1993, Patti learned that her brother, estranged from the family, had reluctantly given up a baby girl for adoption. “When my mom told me about her,” she says, “it wasn’t even an issue. This child belonged with us. She’s my blood.” The Soboroffs brought Leah home when she was 20 months old.

“Our four children embraced this child immediately,” Patti says, “and my brother was ecstatic when he found out.”

Her husband, she says, is a “fabulous, devoted, dedicated father. His kids are his life. There’s nothing perfect, and there are times I want to strangle the guy--but for the most part, he is amazing.”

“She is a great balancer, she is very grounding,” says Steve Soboroff. He likes to say they’ve maintained a Midwestern sensibility despite their affluence. Both grew up in middle-class homes--Patti in Minneapolis, the daughter of a deli owner, and Steve in Chicago, the son of a hat manufacturer whose business collapsed when hats went out of style in the mid-1960s.

At one point, Irving Soboroff even moved his wife and three children to Arkansas to try to save the business before migrating to the San Fernando Valley. It was Steve’s mother, Evelyn, who would turn out to have a real entrepreneurial flair. Licensing the name Shaxted from a Chicago retailer, she opened a custom linens-and-gift store in Beverly Hills. The business flourished.

Steve Soboroff says he was lonely in high school and socially “behind” because the family had moved so much. He attended four high schools--two in Illinois and one in Arkansas before graduating from Taft in Woodland Hills in 1966. He ran track at Taft, he says, but was a mediocre student.

There was another reason for his shyness. “I was real cross-eyed,” he says, “and because of that, I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence. I was very, very quiet.” Indeed, in his black-and-white second-grade class picture, he’s the little kid with the big ears, eyes cast downward.

Soboroff’s grades weren’t good enough for UCLA, so he ended up in Tucson after hearing that some of his Chicago friends were bound for the University of Arizona. It was a good move.

He steered clear of the peace movement (he got tossed out of ROTC for wearing saddle shoes, he says, and tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of his eyesight). “I joined Big Brothers,” he says. “I got my kicks that way.” And still does: 30 years later he is chairman of Big Brothers of Greater L.A.

Soboroff got good grades and was even voted Greek Week King one year. “Yeah,” he says, “8,000 women voted for the most popular guy. The finalists from each house would go around saying stuff like, ‘I can drink beer standing on my head.’ And I would say, ‘I’m in Big Brothers and here’s my little brother.’ I got 87% of the vote and the other 15 guys split 13%. I loved college.”

His summers weren’t bad, either. Among Shaxted’s well-heeled clients was Anne Douglas, wife of Kirk, who complained to Steve’s mother that she’d had terrible luck with baby-sitters. Evelyn Soboroff knew just the guy for the job.

“It was my responsibility with [older sons] Michael and Joel to take care of the kids [Peter and Eric],” Soboroff says. “I went on vacation with them. I would answer Kirk’s fan mail at Paramount and take the kids here and there.”

“It was the best forged signature we ever had,” says Anne Douglas, “and we have missed him ever since.”

Once he settled on real estate as a profession, his father, who’d urged his son to “do big,” set up an introduction with J. K. Eichenbaum, a “very famous shopping center guru” who would set the course of his career. With Ben Weingart, Eichenbaum developed Lakewood Center Mall, Fallbrook Square and Eastland Mall. Soboroff asked Eichenbaum to pick his courses each semester on the theory that the developer, having guided his education, wouldn’t be able to refuse him a job. And he didn’t.

Soboroff went to work for Eichenbaum in 1971 and, for the next eight years, paid close attention. “What I studied was not the deals but the psychology of the deals,” Soboroff says. “He would make people think they were doing something for themselves when they were doing it for him.”

Two years into the job, Soboroff realized he was not exempt from the manipulation: “Eichenbaum was on the phone. He was saying, ‘I’m gonna send my right-hand man over. He’s gonna review this deal, and if he says it’s fine, we’ll do it.’ But he hadn’t pushed the button down, the guy was on hold. And when he thought I had left, he pushed the button down and said, ‘I’m gonna send my boy over to pick up the papers.’ ”

After that, Soboroff began plans for The Shopping Center game, a daylong annual teach-in at UCLA, now in its 25th year. He invented it purely as a way to make connections outside Eichenbaum’s circle. He’d pick people he wanted to do business with and invite them to speak.

“Did it pay off?” Soboroff asks, gesturing at his office. “You’re sitting in it.” Soboroff’s homey office is on the second floor of a tasteful, Mediterranean-style two-story building on a trendy Montana Avenue corner in Santa Monica. Robert Redford, an inspiration to Soboroff on environmental issues, is a tenant.

With a variety of partners, Soboroff also owns shopping centers in Mar Vista, Malibu and elsewhere, yet strenuously objects to the word developer. “The connotation is someone who takes something, paves it over and builds high density. I have never added a square foot to anything. I’m a recycler.” Soboroff also negotiates real estate transactions for retail chains looking to open new stores in the L.A. region.

He pegs his net worth at $10 million, rich by any measure but not wealthy enough to be able to stop working altogether to attend to city business, especially with five children in pricey private schools.

“I always wanted to have a big portion of my income--90%--coming from rents, because rents show up whether I am here or not. But the market fell apart, so the reality is more like 40%. In other words, I still have to work to make a living.”

*

One day after his tumultuous appearance on behalf of fast-track air conditioning before the Board of Education, Soboroff faced the Los Angeles City Council. His term on the Recreation and Parks Commission, to which he was appointed in 1994, was up for renewal.

Councilwoman Rita Walters rose. Soboroff grimaced slightly. “I rise in opposition to this appointment,” said Walters, the only council member who voted against the arena, even though it is in her district. Soboroff, she said, doesn’t adhere to city contracting procedures, he doesn’t understand the arm’s-length relationship between vendors and officials, and he insults people who come before him.

Soboroff can indeed be harsh. Sometimes it’s misfired humor, sometimes impatience. But he often rushes over to his target, hand outstretched, hoping to assuage hard feelings. “I am sure he feels you shouldn’t take it personally, even though he’s just called you a Bozo in front of the whole world,” a Recreation and Parks staffer says acidly.

Although Walters denies it, Soboroff’s allies say her opposition stems from close ties to former Recreation and Parks General Manager Jackie Tatum. Tatum, who is generally viewed as a public relations asset for the department but a weak manager, was recently nudged into retirement by Soboroff and the mayor.

Several weeks later, Walters said she objected to the Recreation and Parks Commission’s decision to award contracts for the city’s golf concessions to a company that was not the staff’s first pick and whose owner had donated $50,000 to the mayor’s campaign to reform the city charter.

Soboroff said the commission picked the firm that it believed would generate the most income for the city. However, after objections were raised by members of the city’s golf advisory boards and the union that represents golf course workers, the City Council overturned the commission’s decision.

Yet Walters’ opposition to Soboroff prompted bouquets of support from nine other council members. “He has had an aggressive agenda,” said Mike Hernandez. “Rec and Parks needed to be shaken up.” Soboroff was reconfirmed, 14-1.

After five years in the thick of civic battle, Soboroff is still adjusting to the hidden agendas, paybacks and power struggles of the political and bureaucratic spheres. It is a world, he has learned, where the distinction between passion and fury is meaningless, where even a victory can feel like defeat.

Leaving the Board of Education’s meeting room after securing the hard-fought victory on the air-conditioning contract, Soboroff should have been elated. Instead, walking up the aisle toward the exit amid handshakes and pats on the back, he looked drained. Quietly, almost under his breath, he said, “I don’t know if I have the personality for this.”

The clouds pass quickly. Steve Soboroff is not a guy who stays down for long. Doesn’t have time. After all, his want-to-do list has included helping to build a baseball stadium in Northridge, replacing blacktopped school playgrounds with lawns and shade trees, recruiting more girls to city-sponsored sports, reducing school district costs by combining insurance policies (already accomplished) --the list goes on.

A doer dwells neither on victory nor defeat.

A doer does.