Checchi: He Still Aims at the Top

Al Checchi gazes into his past, quickly calming the frenetic energy that has kept him squirming in a desk chair at his gubernatorial campaign headquarters. He lowers the chair, which he has been balancing on its hind legs like a suit-coated acrobat on a high wire.

He is remembering a time when he was flying up the corporate ladder at Marriott. A 27-year-old whiz kid, he had risked most of the company’s resources on a deal, and it was falling apart. He remembers that the phone rang. It was someone “very high up,” whose tone Checchi recalls as taunting.

“Well, bright boy?” the caller began. Even in repeating it, Checchi’s voice turns brittle, and he stiffens.

“I said, ‘I am not going to give up.’ And I went and made the deal happen.”

For a few seconds, Checchi is no longer the multimillionaire Democrat whose presence has dominated California politics this year. He is instead a chip-on-the-shoulder grandson of impoverished immigrants, a man with an odd name who felt he couldn’t get the breaks given to WASPs and was determined to outdo them anyway.

For all the slick imagery that he purveys in his first campaign for public office, the real Al Checchi is far more complex. Critics see a ruthless businessman who knocked heads to amass a fortune and now, bored, uses the same tactic to dally in politics. Friends see a passionate pragmatist who is living a dream born in the idealistic 1960s. Whichever he is, Checchi is certainly still out to make the deal happen.

Al Checchi is rife with contradictions. He bemoans the failure of Californians to pass school bonds, yet didn’t vote in a 1994 election when $2 billion in bonds were on the line. He uses photos of himself with President Clinton to boost his political standing, yet slams an opponent for siding with Clinton on the most important vote of his presidency. He vows to run a positive, issues-oriented campaign but tries to plow under his opponents as if they were competitors for a big business takeover.

Alfred Attilio Checchi, 49, is proud, impatient, brilliant, arrogant, loyal, driven, sentimental, disdainful and fiercely private, according to those who know him. He projects a tough-as-nails air even as he cries unashamedly when talking about tender moments in life. He alternates well-cut suits and ravaged cutoffs, catered lunches at his Beverly Hills estate and dinners at a $4.95-a-platter Mexican joint.

He is very used to getting what he wants. And he wants to be governor.

Immigrant Background

Al Checchi’s father was a civil servant. Arthur Checchi worked his way up in the Food and Drug Administration, landing in Washington, D.C., in the heady days of the Kennedy administration. It was an elegant, emancipating age, and it did much to form Al Checchi.

Checchi’s lifestyle, however, was certainly not Camelot. His grandparents had emigrated from Italy years before; none spoke English. A grandmother worked in a sweatshop. A grandfather labored with a pickax.

Checchi’s parents were better educated but not prosperous; life on a bureaucrat’s salary kept them renters for years. Checchi attended an all-boys parochial high school, Our Lady of Good Counsel in suburban Maryland, on a scholarship.

He revered his father’s public service and was enthralled by the charismatic and ruthless Robert F. Kennedy, who was attorney general when Checchi’s family lived in the capital’s suburbs.

But it was not the Kennedy glamour or wealth that captivated Checchi. It was the kinship that the Italian Catholic Checchi felt with the Irish Catholic Kennedys, with all their outsider, scale the American Dream sensibilities.

To this day, Checchi invokes Kennedy in many of his speeches. He chokes up nearly every time he mentions the presidential candidate’s death, which occurred on Checchi’s 20th birthday.

“There was an empathy he had . . . and yet at the same time he was very tough,” says Checchi. “He wasn’t just an idealist. Maybe I saw a little of myself in that--in that I believe in achieving your objectives. You’re not particularly useful as a leader if you say pretty words and nothing happens.”

At the same time, Checchi’s background fed a grudge that he harbored well into adulthood.

“I was very conscious in Washington that we had no social standing, that we didn’t have any of the benefits that wealth can sometimes give you, and that other people who had these things would have access to things in society that I did not and it was not by virtue of anything that they did,” he said. “And I resented that.

“It was a source of motivation for me--I was going to show them that irrespective of not being a WASP . . . on sheer ability and performance I would succeed.”

His attention to the future sharpened dramatically in the summer of 1968. Kennedy was killed that June, shortly after Checchi had returned home from his second year at Amherst College.

That summer, Checchi went golfing with a high school buddy and the friend’s brother. After the round, Checchi says, he started into the back seat of the brother’s Volkswagen. No, his friend Bobby Rafferty demurred, you won, so you get to ride shotgun.

Ten minutes later, another car ran a stop sign and smashed into the Volkswagen. Rafferty’s neck was broken. He died in the back seat.

Checchi says the death helped him focus. He felt the touch of destiny, and returned to school newly determined. Within a few breathtaking years, he had moved through Harvard Business School and Marriott, then on to a lucrative tenure with the Fort Worth-based Bass Brothers investment empire, which sent him to California in the mid-’80s when it acquired an interest in Disney.

A few years later, Checchi donated an addition to the gymnasium at his old high school. The complex is called the Robert Rafferty Center.

Business Success Before Politics

Politics was only part of Checchi’s plan to beat the WASPs at their own game. The other part was money.

Both Checchi and his wife, Kathy, whom he met on a blind date and married 24 years ago, say their idea was to become rich before embracing politics. Business would make them wealthy.

He describes its appeal in self-confident terms. “I was good at it,” he said. “I have a very analytic mind . . . and I have a mind that is creative, and I would dream things up and then I’d be able to analyze them.”

He was aiming at the top.

“I was always a leader,” he says, in typically blunt fashion. “You know, I’m a kid who has been president of his class since the third grade. . . . It just seemed natural to me.”

Checchi’s friends contend that critics are wrong to accuse him of being a political dilettante. They say he has talked about public service since his teenage years. His bent was publicly evident as far back as 1984, when Esquire magazine profiled some of the nation’s best and brightest under age 40--one of them a little-known governor named Bill Clinton.

Checchi was included, and in a passage notable for its bravado, said: “I’d consider my life fulfilled if I could negotiate a disarmament treaty with the Russians.”

Checchi did, in fact, try to move into politics here in the mid-’80s, after quitting the Bass Brothers job that had made him rich. But Democrats loved Checchi’s wallet more than his ideas, a fact that still rankles him.

He turned back to business and with partner Gary Wilson successfully bid for Northwest Airlines. The purchase, which took little of Checchi’s personal fortune but reaped stunning rewards, ultimately gave him the platform to run for office and his opponents the ammunition for criticism.

Northwest, during Checchi’s tenure, slid into near-bankruptcy and was rescued by union concessions and government assistance. Once the company recovered and went public in the spring of 1994, he took a smaller role and focused anew on politics.

“He had played the game and won, and really had a passion for doing something not in the business sector,” said Kenny Slutsky, a lifelong Republican who considers Checchi his best friend.

Checchi’s decision to run for California governor was greeted with some consternation even at home. At first, his wife called it his worst idea ever. Daughter Kristin, 18, thought criticism would wound her father. “I worry about Dad going through this,” she told her mother. “He’s really proud of what he’s done . . . and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for him to see people just discarding that, attacking that.”

The campaign also threatens Checchi’s coveted privacy. For a man of his wealth, Checchi lives discreetly. Although his holdings in Northwest alone have risen a staggering $129 million since his formal announcement last fall, putting his estimated worth at more than $700 million, he has no boat, no beach house, no private plane. He owns two homes, the second in Washington, D.C. He vacations with his family in a motley rental on the Maine coast.

The three Checchi children--Adam, 21; Kate, 13; and Kristin--did not know the extent of the family’s holdings until their parents told them as Checchi’s campaign began.

Checchi is fiercely protective of his children--in part because of the still-painful loss of a newborn child in 1982. He also demands privacy for himself. When it came time to make public his tax returns, he released limited details. He refuses to allow interviews of his sisters or parents.

Otherwise, Checchi has embraced political combat. Buttressed by $25 million of his own money, he has run more television ads than anyone before in any primary anywhere. The all-time national spending record for a state race--through the general election in November--is $29 million. Checchi will spend that much before the primary in June.

He has taken bold stands, opposing the voter-approved ban on affirmative action and popular measures against illegal immigrants. He talks movingly about racial reconciliation and rehabilitating troubled youths rather than locking them in prison--two areas where many politicians fear to tread.

He has also done things that are either novice blunders or intentionally misleading. He claimed in a campaign ad to have “marched” with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Actually, he attended King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, as a 15-year-old brought by his parents.

“There are many who made the civil rights movement possible, but I do not recall Mr. Al Checchi,” civil rights pioneer Andrew Young said archly in a letter to one of Checchi’s opponents, Rep. Jane Harman of Torrance.

Checchi also came under fire for remarks seen by many as disdainful of public education, when he said he will not move his children out of private schools if he is elected. And he has had to explain that because of the press of business or negligence, he failed to vote in four of the last six statewide elections.

He angered some Democrats with an ad criticizing Harman’s vote in support of Clinton’s 1993 economic plan--a curious gesture given Checchi’s attempts to gain favor by advertising his positive relationship with Clinton.

Tony Coehlo, a Democrat and former California congressman who has known Checchi for years, accuses him of choosing ambition over integrity.

“I have a concern about his understanding of policy and how it may impact people,” said Coehlo, who added that he has rescinded his endorsement of Checchi because of his ad’s implicit criticism of the Clinton economic plan. “It’s not just about making the ship run right, but it’s a question of who the ship is running right for.”

He Says He Wants to Make a Difference

One way or another, talk about Checchi centers on one question: Why would a guy who can afford to do anything run for governor? He says he wants to make a difference.

“I’m not afraid to lose,” he says. “I get to say what I believe. . . . I don’t want the job just for the greater glory of going to Sacramento and riding around in a limousine--I think you do know that I have alternatives.”

In Checchi’s Beverly Hills home, a wooden box brims with notes from more than 200 friends. The missives date to June, when Checchi’s wife gave him a surprise birthday party. Guests were asked to write him a simple message, about friendship or life’s greater meanings, that he could open this year when things got tough.

It may be a measure of Checchi’s self-confidence or his faith in destiny: He has not read any of the messages yet.

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Profile: Al Checchi

Political Party: Democrat

Born: June 6, 1948, Boston

Education: Bachelor’s in economics and American studies, Amherst College, 1970; MBA, Harvard, 1974.

Family: Married to Kathryn Checchi for 24 years; three children: Adam, Kristin and Kate.

Background: Marriott Corp. 1974-82, rose to direct the raising of all capitaland worldwide hotel development; 1982-86 a principal at Texas-based Bass Brothers investment group; moved to California in 1986 and, with partner Gary Wilson, led the 1989 purchase of Northwest Airlines, the nation’s fourth largest carrier.

Career accomplishments: At both Marriott and Disney, helped reorganize businesses in ways that analysts said helped strengthen them for the future. At Bass, among other things, aided the group’s acquisition of a controlling interest in Walt Disney. At Northwest, took over an airline that was profitable but poorly managed. Loaded with debt, plagued by recession and fallout from the Gulf War, the airline came within a hair’s breadth of bankruptcy. Union concessions and government loans helped ease the crisis, and Northwest emerged stronger for it, analysts say. Layoffs during the downturn totaled 4,300 workers, but Northwest now employs 12,000 more than when Checchi bought it. Since going public in 1994, the stock has shot upward, and wages have bounced back.

Strategy: Presents himself as an outsider willing and able to shake up Sacramento as he has done with corporations. Spent millions of his own money to gain name identification and hammer his opponents as stale political veterans. Appeal to the increasingly important independent voters, as well as to Republicans--both of which can vote for him in June’s open, or blanket, primary.

Quote: “I have been very, very fortunate, make no mistake about it. But I’ve worked very, very hard. Now there are many people who work very hard and don’t have the good fortune that I did. But I did work hard at everything.”