Glitz, Cash and a Dream Lead to Trouble in Taft

An old movie is playing in people’s heads around this quiet oil patch town of 7,000, where the most serious traffic problem is people stopping their cars in the middle of the road to gab.

The movie is “The Music Man,” about a shifty salesman who makes chumps out of a lot of small-town folks. According to some locals, it bears uncomfortable parallels to the scandal rocking City Hall and threatening the fiscal health of municipal government.

Only this version has nothing to do with musical instruments and pool halls. Gretchen Belli, a San Francisco socialite and former daughter-in-law of famed “King of Torts” attorney Melvin Belli, came to town offering to rescue this western San Joaquin Valley community from its economic doldrums. How? She was going to help it get a railroad.

If that sounds improbable, some people in town are convinced she would have succeeded except for a misguided do-gooder who raised questions about the bills she was submitting, and the lack of documentation backing them up.

Of course running up consulting fees of more than $1 million in less than eight months is no small thing for a community with one movie theater, two stoplights and a budget of just $3 million.

Her detractors say Belli bedazzled people who wanted to believe they were more important than they were. In the end, the railroad never came. Now, investigators from the Kern County district attorney’s office in Bakersfield are looking into the matter. They served search warrants on Belli’s Marin County rental house and took away computers and documents. And the city has filed suit, accusing the former member of the San Francisco Arts Commission of fraud.

“What we got for $760,000 is nothing,” said Councilman Cliff Thompson, referring to the amount the city already has paid Belli.

L’affaire Belli has spread far beyond City Hall. The community is divided into warring camps, the city manager has been fired and a recall election is scheduled Tuesday against Thompson, spurred by those who think he went overboard in his zeal to go after Belli. The campaign has gotten muddy. Pro-recall signs around town show Thompson with the numbers 12.04.2001 under his picture. Though the numbers refer to the date of the election, it looks like a police mug shot, a not-so-subtle reference to Thompson’s arrest several years ago for taking a swing at a fellow who made a remark about his wife.

“This is down-in-the-gutter politics,” said Thompson, a burly oil rig worker.

Things have gotten so nasty up and down Center Street that the Daily Midway Driller newspaper has stopped running letters to the editor about the ruckus.

“Everybody around here is like family,” said Gene Fisher, a reporter at the paper. “That’s why it gets so bad” when they fight. Nobody knows your vulnerable spots like your relatives.

Belli declined to answer questions directly, because of the legal maneuvers against her, said Martin Reilley, her Santa Rosa attorney.

Reilley was amused by suggestions that his client so blinded city fathers that they lost their senses. “The notion that she hornswoggled the city is untrue,” Reilley said. Unlike “The Music Man,” he said, “I doubt they are that stupid in Taft.”

They certainly didn’t start out stupid. Taft might seem to be in the middle of nowhere, if you didn’t know what treasure lies underground. It is 17 miles west of Interstate 5 in west Kern County, down a two-lane country road meandering through a flat, nearly treeless landscape. But around the turn of the last century, oil industry geologists and engineers uncovered one of the biggest fields in the continental United States.

Standard Oil set up its Western regional headquarters in Taft and began strawing up the black gold. Taft flourished.

“Way, way back, when oil was king, Taft was a cosmopolitan town,” said Eric Ziegler, the former city manager. The Los Angeles Philharmonic once broadcast a concert nationally from downtown.

Taft’s ties to the oil business remain indelibly stamped on the town. The welcome sign at the city limits says, “Industry, Oil, Recreation.”

But the empty storefronts along the main streets attest to the fact that the oil industry stopped gushing money around here years ago. By the 1980s, the city had begun to regret its reliance on big oil.

“When you are a one-crop economy, you are extremely susceptible to bad news,” said Bill Baker, the city councilman credited by some--and blamed by others--for bringing Belli to town.

When Baker was elected in 1994, the city was near bankruptcy. It managed to eke along partly by throwing out the welcome mat to a federal prison. After winning a $2-million settlement from the state in a prison contract dispute, the city decided to spend some in the hope of making a lot more. Realizing that Taft couldn’t keep suing its way to prosperity, city fathers decided to look into diversifying the economy.

Bringing back the old Sunset Railway seemed like a natural. It could attract new industry by offering an easy way to move products to market rather than with trucks struggling over the narrow highway. The trouble was, it would cost millions to repair the track.

The city began looking for ways to get the federal or state governments to help Taft buy the railroad. And that’s how Gretchen Belli entered the picture.

The folks in Taft didn’t know much about her, but she impressed them with tales of the famous people she knew and the strategies she could undertake to bring the railroad back to town, officials said.

According to published reports, she started her career as secretary to Melvin Belli, the legendary lawyer who revolutionized civil law in America.

She married Belli’s son, Caesar, and was appointed in 1990 to the San Francisco Commission on Film and Video Arts. She came to know movers and shakers in Hollywood, Sacramento and Washington, connections that city officials say she touted around Taft.

Controversy first attached itself to her name after Melvin Belli died in 1996. Warfare broke out in the Belli family over his estate. Caesar and Gretchen and Melvin’s sixth wife, Nancy Ho Belli, traded nasty, and public, accusations about who loved Melvin most. The couple also made news when they removed a skeleton from Melvin’s office. No ordinary sack of bones, “Elmer” was the famous prop that Belli used in arguing medical malpractice cases. Gretchen claimed Belli promised her the skeleton. She didn’t get to keep it, but the bones did attend her 1996 Halloween party, according to San Francisco Weekly.

Her contact in Taft was Councilman Baker, a schoolteacher turned small-town political strategist. A mutual friend, Los Angeles publicist Chris Harris, introduced them, he says. Belli was interested in searching for the mythical lost treasure of Czar Nicholas of Russia, and Baker was a lover of history. In the end, no search was mounted because Harris concluded the treasure story was a hoax.

Nonetheless, Belli and Baker stayed in touch, and he sometimes attended the kind of Hollywood parties with her that admit the semi-rich and semi-connected. When the railway project got going, Baker brought her to town. By that time, she and her grown son, Jacob, had opened a consulting firm in Marin County. Her business card read, “Government Relations.”

“It was felt she had some political ability to help us out,” said Ziegler, then the city manager.

He declined to discuss what that ability was. “I’ve been thrust into a political spot I don’t want to be in,” he said.

Others in town say she claimed contacts with everyone from Rep. Gary Condit to Gov. Gray Davis. Her resume, obtained from the city, says she graduated from Mississippi State College for Women with a bachelor’s degree in arts. Though the resume is weighted with film and media credits, it also states that she served as recently as 1998 as a research lobbyist for the President’s Export Council, part of the Commerce Department.

When she visited Taft, she dazzled her listeners not only with stories about her contacts but her lifestyle.

“She said she lived in this spectacular home,” said John Gibson, whose firm does legal work for Taft. “She even invited officials up to visit.”

In fact, she was living in a rented house.

Soon, the bills started rolling into a City Hall where officials scrimp and save to redo the sidewalks downtown and to build a skateboard park. “In three months, she billed 400, 485 and 585 hours” at $200 an hour, raged Thompson. “That’s 16 hours a day for two people.”

“This project should not have cost over $70,000,” he said. Before the brakes were put on, Belli was paid $760,000.

The bills included tickets to San Francisco Giant baseball games and replacing a tire. Reilley says the charges related to her city work. Eventually, the city stopped paying. That happened after Thompson was elected to the council.

Though they are sworn enemies now, Baker, class of ’64 at Taft High School, and Thompson, class of ‘70, share a common history as sons of oil. Baker grew up in the oil fields on Missouri Hill, named for a group of Missourians who lived up there. “When my dad made foreman, we moved to Silk Stocking Row,” where company higher-ups lived, he said.

Baker went off to school, then came back to teach at the community college in town. Intelligent, slim and athletic looking, he gives off an air of a person wanting to do better.

Thompson, who wears an FDNY cap, stayed true to his blue-collar roots. Stocky and mustachioed, he takes care of the turbines on offshore oil rigs. He has the straightforwardness of a man who says what he thinks and knows it’s right.

The fiery Thompson envisioned himself as a new broom in City Hall. He first helped rein in the use of cell phones and city credit cards. Then he turned his attention to the railroad project and Gretchen Belli.

He asked for documents and, when he didn’t get what he wanted, he went after the city manager. When Ziegler’s contract came up, the council, led by Thompson, declined to renew it. Ziegler denied keeping the council in the dark. And Reilley said that far from refusing to provide supporting documents, Belli gave the city “reams and reams” of them.

As the controversy deepened, the hostility in town grew to levels no one had seen in years. People divided into pro-Ziegler and Baker groups and pro-Thompson groups, and if not that, at least anti-Belli groups. A recall was started against Thompson, and his old criminal record surfaced. He admits to hitting a man who made a comment about his wife a few years back, but said he’s since learned to control his temper. But he still doesn’t back down when he thinks he’s right. He kept questioning expenditures and refusing payment.

Belli resigned and hired Reilley to get the rest of her money, estimated at $245,000. “When all is said and done, the city is going to owe her the money plus attorney’s fees,” he said.

The city filed suit in July accusing Belli and Associates of misrepresentation and submitting false claims. Then the district attorney’s office opened an investigation.

“We are investigating all aspects of the payments to the consultant and what justification there is for it,” said Kern County Dist. Atty. Edward Jagels. The county’s grand jury also is looking into it.

Asked what he thought Baker would get out of helping Belli make a small fortune, Thompson said he believed that Baker wanted to run for higher office and hoped to get Belli’s help.

Others around town think there’s another reason: love.

Just as in “The Music Man,” said Thompson, “Bill Baker got all starry-eyed” over the big-city woman with the famous name.

Baker and Belli denied having anything but a business relationship. “She wouldn’t be interested in somebody like me,” he said modestly.

Stories circulated about the two being seen kissing. “We may have done a social peck,” he said. He blamed a friend of his ex-wife for circulating the rumor. As for whether Belli promised to help him run for statewide office, Baker said “there’s been lots of talk” about various things.

Baker is convinced he is a victim in the saga who only wanted to do good for his city. As proof, he pulled out a note and picture sent to him anonymously. “Resign, you don’t want this to go public,” said the note.

The picture was of a glass crack cocaine pipe in a cardboard box sitting on letters addressed to Baker. “I have never done dope,” he said angrily. Retired from teaching, Baker lives with two dogs, one named Pretty Woman.

Thompson claims victimhood just as earnestly. “I love Taft,” he said. “I’m tired of being recalled for doing my job.”

Some people fear that the railroad project is getting lost in all the infighting and name-calling.

“A majority of the people think the railroad is a good idea,” said Fisher, the Driller reporter. “The question is the handling of it. We’ve spent a million dollars and what do we have to show for it?”

Before Belli’s arrival, Thompson said, the city had money in the bank and was hoping to buy a new fire engine. That’s off, now.

Reilley said Taft might have had a lot to show for its investment had Thompson not stuck his nose in. Baker and Reilley said Belli moved the project along swiftly, and cite a glowing letter from a top state official to back up their claims.

Tom Messer, who described himself as chief of Caltrans’ Freight Planning Branch, wrote a letter in March on state letterhead praising Belli’s work. Calling himself the “freight rail expert” in California, Messer said Belli and Associates had been so successful in its efforts that the Federal Railroad Administration had ranked the Sunset Railway “the No. 1 project from California” under the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing Program.

“She could have gotten us $20 million,” said Baker.

Gibson, the city’s attorney, was not impressed by the letter. He said he believes Messer was a paid consultant for Belli. A spokesman for the California Department of Transportation, Robin Witt, said the letter, dated March 14, 2001, “is not an official document of Caltrans and does not represent the views of this department.” Witt said the department is looking into the situation.

As events move inexorably toward Tuesday’s election, the warring factions do agree on two things: Taft should get its railroad, somehow. And second, when this is all over, there will be no 76-trombone parade down Center Street.