Bad News Shadows Ex-TV Anchorman

When former KCBS anchor Larry Carroll was a 13-year-old growing up in Chicago, he had a dream that he was on television reading the news.

Less than a decade later, the dream came true in Los Angeles. “Through absolutely no manipulation of my own, the events of my life led me inexorably down that path,” Carroll said, marveling at his teenage prescience.

But there are two paths that have defined Larry Carroll’s life. One is the road that his warmth, charisma and intelligence charted almost effortlessly from Chicago to Pomona College to a three-decade career in TV broadcasting.

The other is a misguided journey into failed business projects, financial troubles and ultimately, an investment scam that has landed him in a San Bernardino County courtroom. He is nearing the end of his trial, charged with five felony counts including conspiracy and securities fraud. On this path, he says, he is as cursed by bad circumstances as he was blessed by good ones in his TV career.

“I have this amazing skill for going into some kinds of business ventures and ending up hammered,” he said.

San Bernardino County prosecutor L. Gordon Isen contends that Carroll was in desperate financial trouble and became a willing partner in an elaborate plan to steal $2 million from the owner of a water park in Newberry Springs, a sand-swept town east of Barstow.

Carroll’s attorney, Rex Julian Beaber, says the only victim is his client. Beaber says Carroll was the “innocent wrapper,” a celebrity shill manipulated by swindler masterminds--who have so far evaded indictment--into luring marks to bogus deals.

Carroll had become one of Southern California’s most visible television broadcasters--and one of its few long-lived black anchors. He earned awards, led parades and appeared at charity events--and even accompanied a fugitive on his surrender to police. He was known as a smart guy who knew his way around town.

Since his legal troubles began with his indictment in February, Carroll--so the picture of a perfect anchorman that he’s played one in TV shows and movies--has gone from earning $330,000 a year to being unemployed, close to losing his reputation as well as his sprawling Chatsworth home. If convicted, he may face a five-year prison sentence.

How he got here is a story of his seemingly unquenchable desire to be an entrepreneur--and his repeated failures. While he easily handled his day job as an anchorman, he never mastered his finances and always seemed to be searching for the next deal.

“I have a view of Larry as being incredibly trusting,” said Beaber, who is also a psychologist, glancing at Carroll. “As it turns out, he was--forgive me, Larry--the perfect dupe.”

Fresh from Sunday church services where he sang in the choir, Carroll wears slacks and a thin turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pushed above the elbows. He sits back on a sofa in Beaber’s Century City office, the sunlight streaming in through walls of glass, as he gives an account of his life. At 48, his skin is smooth and unlined.

Carroll is a brilliant talker. He can tell in extraordinary--sometimes windy--detail every story of his life in perfectly structured sentences. It’s a talent he put to good use on the air when drafted to anchor breaking news coverage requiring a calm and chatty demeanor.

Wide Range of Interests

“Larry is a fantastic ad libber and a very good live reporter,” said Larry Perret, a former news director at KCAL-TV Channel 9 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 during Carroll’s tours of duty there.

Carroll grew up juggling commitments. The only son of attorney Lawrence William Carroll Jr., a Cook County Circuit Court judge, Carroll marched in civil rights demonstrations while in high school at the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory School. At Pomona College, he balanced school work with radio station and local television jobs, all before graduating in 1973 with a degree in economics.

Within months of leaving school, he won a job as a news writer and producer at KABC-TV Channel 7. By 1974, he was a weekend anchor. Over the next 11 years he anchored, worked as a senior correspondent, and produced two documentaries on famine and relief efforts in East Africa.

On one of those trips in December 1984, Carroll met a woman in a hotel bar in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. By the next day, he was in love.

Carroll had already married and divorced twice before. But after his new friend escaped to Djibouti, Carroll found her and brought her to Los Angeles, where they were wed in 1986. “It was almost like a fairy tale,” said Roman Carroll, 41.

In a business that lives and dies by the fickle tastes of audiences and constantly changing station general managers, Carroll has been the ultimate survivor.

But he never made it to the pinnacle of his profession--anchoring a weekday 11 p.m. newscast. At KCAL, which he joined in 1989, he anchored the late evening newscast while the main anchor covered the war in the Persian Gulf. After that, Carroll returned to reporting and weekend anchoring before losing his contract in 1993.

Later that year, he became a local correspondent for NBC News--working, he says, longer hours for less pay. In 1995, he jumped ship for KCBS, to anchor weekends and early evening weekday broadcasts.

Colleagues describe him as warm and genial--if also distracted in odd ways. At KCBS, he is remembered by one former manager as constantly on his cell phone--even sitting at his desk in the newsroom--or stalking the fax machine waiting for what appeared to be personal business.

In fact, he was distracted. His outside ventures were fizzling; his personal debts were mounting.

Carroll has always had grand dreams of financing jazz and other music shows, but they have never come true. Plans to stage and televise a “world music festival” in Acapulco in 1982 with several partners went awry when a Mexican TV network backed out. He was left with $100,000 in debts.

Then, in 1983, Carroll was part of a group that produced a jazz festival on a cruise ship. The event was an on-board success, he said, but the video rights were never sold. Carroll’s share of the production finances for the jazz cruise was $116,000, according to court records.

Compounding Carroll’s financial woes were the medical bills racked up by his and Roman’s first child, Yenea, who was born so prematurely, he said, “I could fit her whole body in my hand.” Yenea is now a 12-year-old seventh-grader--and older sister to a healthy 9-year-old boy, Lawrence Carroll IV. She suffers from a profound hearing loss and blindness in one eye and has required expensive medical care.

Then, Carroll said, he found out his business managers had neglected to pay his taxes. By the end of the 1980s, he said, “I was in deep doo-doo.”

The newsman filed for bankruptcy protection in 1989, listing $327,751 in liabilities, including $159,315 in back taxes. Among his debts was a bill for $68,195, owed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The bankruptcy was dismissed in 1995, leaving him without protection from his creditors.

In January 1994, the Northridge earthquake left his Chatsworth house uninhabitable and in need of $80,000 in repairs. (The family eventually moved to another house nearby.) After being out of work for three months in 1993, Carroll had just started working for NBC at a lower salary. He said he got out of his NBC contract in 1995, pleading financial hardship, and returned to local television.

Carroll says it wasn’t his escalating debt that made him jump at a chance in 1997 to get involved with a group of high-flying financiers.

A plan to stage another music festival--this time in the Mexican resort town of Cabo San Lucas--led him to a group of investors recommended by an acquaintance, Ronald Long. The investors allegedly promised to put $2 million into Carroll’s concert.

Although they never did make good on their offer, the newsman at the time was convinced they were legitimate and would eventually come up with the money.

They did offer him a deal in November 1997 to turn $30,000 into six figures. So he wrote them a check--using funds he said he had earmarked for back taxes. Within weeks, he was told his investment had earned him $430,000, although he never saw the money.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Isen contends Carroll’s financial situation in 1998 was so desperate that he was driven to this investment scam.

‘You’re Digging Yourself a Giant Hole’

Carroll’s former financial advisor, Ray Fisher, testified this monththat his client failed to keep current with his tax payments. As a result, the IRS in 1998 revoked an earlier settlement for back taxes, leaving the newsman liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Fisher said in court. He testified that in 1998 he warned Carroll, “You’re digging yourself a giant hole, which you may not get out of.”

Prosecutors say Carroll turned to crime after a chance encounter with water park owner Terry Christensen on a police charity motorcycle ride through the desert in September 1998. When the developer talked about plans to expand his park, Carroll suggested he might get financing from the same people with whom he had invested.

The newsman later contacted Christensen and proposed several high-yield, no-risk investment options, including one that would turn $2 million into $18 million in 10 days. Carroll would reap a finder’s fee.

But the proposition led to a sting operation when Christensen, wary that the deal was too good to be true, told a friend in the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. An undercover investigation resulted in indictments against Long--who had been previously convicted of real estate fraud--Carroll and Michael Patterson, a friend of the newsman and a partner in the Cabo concert plan.

Charges against Patterson were eventually dropped. A fourth man has since been indicted and will be tried at a later time.

In hours of audiotape, Carroll and Long are heard touting various investment deals to Christensen and undercover investigator Robert Schreiber, who posed as Christensen’s financial advisor.

Beaber says Carroll is the real victim.

“This had a whole lot more to do with aspiration than desperation,” said Carroll. “I thought we had found an entrance into a world of financial trade that would liberate us to do all kinds of different and important things. . . . It wasn’t about some paltry little sum I owed the IRS. I’m proud to pay taxes.”

These days, Carroll can’t even pay his lawyer; Beaber works pro bono. Longtime Carroll friend Frank Wilson, a Pasadena minister, said a defense fund has raised about $90,000.

In the past 30 years, Carroll was unemployed three months. “Until now,” he said.

He may be an anchorman without a newscast, but Carroll must still play the part. He has spoken about his case on a local radio station’s community affairs program, penned a defense on his Web site at https://carroll4justice.com, and schmoozed at a convention of minority journalists. “I figured I might need some contacts about getting a gig,” he said.

No matter the trial’s outcome, Carroll’s rise as a television broadcaster may be over. He certainly still looks the part--earlier this month,he played a TV anchorman on the set of a Dolph Lungren movie.

Carroll hopes there is yet another path.

“This may be one of those left turns that God has put in my life that makes me explore my other talents,” he said.