Michael Choppin; Long Beach Developer

Michael J. Choppin, controversial Long Beach real estate developer who built that city’s 27-story Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center on Ocean Boulevard, has died at 60.

Choppin died Monday in Long Beach of cancer, which had begun in his pancreas.

In 1969, he co-founded and then took over Investment, Development, Management, also known as IDM Properties Corp. The company built and sold houses, apartments and commercial buildings in five Southern California counties before going into bankruptcy in 1992.

Choppin, who personally handled the firm’s site selection, arrangements with investors, and sales and management of properties, began as a real estate salesman after he was mustered out of the Army in the late 1950s.

He formed his company a decade later with aerospace engineer John Kinzer, whom he later bought out, and guided it to create quality apartments that would reap high rents and low vacancies. He applied the same concepts to commercial construction, completing two dozen major buildings from 1981 to 1987, primarily in downtown Long Beach.

But when the bottom fell out of the commercial real estate market, IDM’s debts outweighed assets by hundreds of millions of dollars. The FBI investigated and investors sued. Choppin was never charged with any crime, and litigation was settled in 1995 in a way, Choppin told The Times, that “vindicated” him.

Once a high-profile Long Beach citizen who served on several boards and commissions and helped draft a city plan and bail out the financially troubled local symphony, Choppin sold his mansion and everything down to worn boxer shorts and maintained a low profile.

Earlier this year, he made his first attempt at a comeback by planning 32 houses on a strip of land that had been the old Pacific Electric railroad (Red Cars) right-of-way in Long Beach.

“I’m trying to start all over again,” Choppin told The Times in July.

But outraged residents who wanted the area transformed into a public park protested, and the Long Beach City Council defeated Choppin’s proposal.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10:30 a.m. today at St. Cyprian’s Catholic Church, 4714 Clark Ave., Long Beach.