The Bolshevik Who Beat Belmont

The first and only time Dominic Shambra met with the man who would ruin his life, he was unimpressed.

* A veteran of more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Unified School District, Shambra had seen them all: gadflies, geeks, hysterical parents packed into gymnasiums to protest the closure of neighborhood schools. You listened, nodded and then moved ahead. Now Shambra had a new job, one set up outside the brutish and unwieldy educational bureaucracy. His charge was to build something new--a high school that would make money for the district--and to get it done despite the customary obstacles.

* On this occasion, in March 1997, the designated road kill was a union agitator, an aging radical with eyebrows like the Grinch, a ponytail like a girl and niggling questions about Shambra’s project just west of downtown. As the school district’s director of planning and development, Shambra had been called to district headquarters to hear the activist out. They sat at a rectangular conference table in the school board president’s office. The union man produced an accordion file of documents. He spoke mostly to the president, glancing occasionally at Shambra as he talked for 90 minutes about problems with the deal. Shambra said little. Sometimes he smirked.

* “I have never seen a person so nervous,” Shambra recalled in a recent interview. “His voice quivered . . . He was shaking like a leaf . . . The guy was so absurd in what he was saying . . . I walked out and said, ‘How does that guy get anything done?’ ”

Nearly four hellish years later, Shambra knows better. That jittery guy, David Richard Koff, 61, a $48,000-a-year researcher for a union representing bellhops, housekeepers and waiters, is blamed--or credited--with burying the Belmont Learning Center, into which the district sank nearly $160 million before abandoning it three-quarters-finished. Certainly, he didn’t do it alone. The media swarmed Belmont, and there were plenty of coincidental developments, most notably the rise of union power after decades of decline and the discovery of explosive methane and deadly hydrogen sulfide at the Belmont site at 1st Street and Beaudry Avenue.

Yet Koff’s dark brilliance was to exploit twists in the Belmont saga, wringing from them a compelling public narrative. “You can lay out facts, but I tell a story,” Koff would later say. And what a grim fairy tale it was: A school project designed to help a hard-luck neighborhood transmogrified into an insider deal, a boondoggle, an environmental freak show. An exhaustive internal school district audit vindicated this view, and, last January, board members voted to mothball the structure. The school became the whipping boy for every politician, editorial writer and parent fed up with L.A. Unified’s abysmal test scores, crumbling campuses and prideful administration.

Koff was “the catalyst who brought those forces together and gave them a reason to whack the district,” concedes a consultant for Kajima Corp., a subsidiary of which was building Belmont until it got booted from the job. “Is he the reason the project got derailed? Yeah, you can draw that line.”

i met david koff in 1998 when he cold-called me and suggested we get together. I didn’t know much about Belmont. I knew even less about Koff. I didn’t know he is one of the most committed Bolsheviks in America.

The oldest of two sons, Koff was anything but radical growing up in Van Nuys. Home was the picture of 1950s middle-class life. The boys were Cub Scouts, Mom was a den mother. Father Harry Koff was a sometimes cantankerous survivor of the Great Depression. His ticket to the suburban dream was the relentless way he sold disability insurance to medical professionals. “My husband . . . had a way of barging in on people and breaking them down,” Geri Koff, 85, recalls of her spouse, who died in 1991.

At home he was no less demanding. “If you used the wrong word, he’d correct you. If you made a far-out statement, he’d challenge it,” says Charles Pollack, David Koff’s boyhood friend, who is now a Berkeley psychiatrist. “His dad was a stickler for doing the right thing, and very forceful about it.”

By all accounts, David, cerebral and shy, did the right suburban thing. Perfect school attendance. Straight As. Tennis team letterman. National Merit Scholar. Student body president when he graduated from Van Nuys High in 1957. “He was the tall, good-looking, crew-cut athletic guy,” says his younger brother, Bob Koff, 57, an Agoura Hills entrepreneur and founding member of the Chairman’s Club of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. “But then he went through this . . . transformation into a very driven, socialistically oriented person who began to take up causes and pursue them.”

The change took place at Stanford University, where Koff studied political science. It was a period of campus restlessness. Koff befriended students associated with the campus Socialist Caucus. He grew a beard. While studying in Europe, he visited the Socialist World Youth Festival and broke the engagement to his high-school sweetheart. Her dreams, he told his family, were “too bourgeois.”

In December 1960, as a college senior, Koff joined a group of African exchange students on a “fact-finding” tour of the civil rights movement in the South. At an Alabama church, where blacks were conducting a fund-raiser for sit-down strikers, a Kenyan graduate student in Koff’s group was invited to speak. He laid out this vision: The struggle in Alabama was no different than the struggle in Kenya. Southern racists were no different than British imperialists. The battle over segregated lunch counters was no different than the war of Mau Mau rebels over bush land. “I felt a tingling of awe . . . ,” Koff remembers. “It was my first exposure to the commonality forged by struggles for liberation, my first sensing of the unity that exists--regardless of border or language or race--among those whose enemies are racism and exploitation and inhumanity and oppression and occupation. It grabbed hold of me and it hasn’t let me go.”

After Stanford, he traveled to Africa as a Woodrow Wilson fellow to study the Mau Mau revolution for a 1966 master’s degree from UC Berkeley. At a Nairobi nightclub one night he met his future wife--a black woman from Kenya who had polio. It was more than love. Koff’s 1969 marriage was a political statement. His bride, Msindo Mwinyipembe, was a broadcast journalist who had worked at the BBC.

Koff dropped out of his PhD program to make documentaries, which, in turn, allowed him to indulge his fascination with revolutionaries. “They’re fearless but not reckless,” he says, his voice reverential. “They have this supreme confidence in the justness of their cause. Their actions are not tempered by what the adversary may threaten to do to them.”

Through films, Koff could give voice to militants and the oppressed. During the early 1970s, he and his wife produced a trilogy of films on colonialism in Africa, including one on the Mau Mau uprising against the British. In 1976, Koff wrote and co-produced the less-polemical “People of the Wind,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for its depiction of the hardships endured by Iranian nomads.

Two years later, the couple struck the ideological hot button with a documentary made for PBS about racism in England. “Blacks Britannica” examined the issue through the eyes of the black underclass. The film, said the New York Times, “not only documents [black] militancy but, quite clearly, the structure and tone endorses it.” Executives at WGBH, the Boston PBS station that paid for the film, were floored. They refused to air it unless Koff softened the tone. He refused. “It was agitprop,” says David Fanning, Koff’s executive producer and now senior executive producer of PBS’ “Frontline” series. “I thought the film was more a work of propaganda than of journalism . . . .”

During the 1980s, Koff, who attended Jewish religious classes as a boy, produced a pro-Palestinian film that upset Jewish groups and was banned from PBS stations in Washington and New York. He then floated proposals about coal miners and class discrimination in America, but final funding never came together. He worked temp jobs, then moved his family back to California and his boyhood house, which his father had kept as a rental. One Sunday in 1989, while he was working the crossword puzzle in The Nation, Koff’s eyes fell on an ad. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union was looking for researchers. He was 50. He had never pulled down a steady paycheck, never had company health insurance. He made a call. He got the job. “In a way,” Koff wrote to a friend, “everything I’ve done, all the way back to my professional training in academic research, can be brought to bear in this work . . . .”

*

BELMONT NOW STANDS A WOEFUL SPHINX, ITS OPENINGS SEALED BY plywood and its perimeter protected by a graffiti-tagged fence. Things weren’t supposed to end this way. The district had hoped Belmont would solve many problems at once: ease classroom crowding in a neighborhood full of new immigrants, replace a high school built during the Calvin Coolidge presidency, restore glory to a paralyzed school bureaucracy that hadn’t built a large high school in 25 years.

School officials threw away the old script. Rather than put out blueprints and invite construction bids, they asked teams of builders and architects to submit grand designs for a school that would not only provide classrooms but incorporate thousands of square feet in retail space. Belmont was a capitalistic dream, an “EduMall” where students could learn while the school district collected lease payments from retail stores.

By early 1995, the district was poised to choose from three proposals. Their favorite was from a partnership led by Kajima Urban Development, a subsidiary of the Tokyo-based Kajima Corp. Kajima’s plan represented a small urban renewal project: Four academy buildings, 203 units of low- and moderate-income housing, a gymnasium atop a four-story parking garage and 80,000 square feet of retail space tucked into the hillside. This Belmont Learning Complex was pricey--$30 million more than the nearest competitor--but promised to make the district $1.3 million in annual rents.

In June 1995, a fax machine whirred in a small suite of unmarked offices downtown. Out popped a five-paragraph blurb from the Los Angeles Downtown News, a free weekly that, for the first time publicly, named Kajima as a leading bidder. The fax was for Koff, by then a senior researcher for the union, and, in a larger sense, a saboteur in the labor revolution. When a corporate target needs to be softened up for negotiations, researchers like Koff swing into action with “reform campaigns.” The purpose: political pressure. Their MO: Ambushes and rear-guard attacks, often using damaging information they have unearthed from public records. In this case, the union’s Local 11 was fighting Kajima’s parent over organizing 285 hourly workers at the New Otani Hotel near City Hall. Kajima Corp. is a 48% shareholder in East-West Development Corp., which owns the hotel.

Fax in hand, Koff began looking into Kajima’s dealings with the school district. His first break came two months later. At a September 1995 school board meeting, the board was to vote to open negotiations with Kajima exclusively when an Orange County attorney stepped to the speaker’s stand and dropped a conflict-of-interest bomb: Kajima was a major client of O’Melveny & Myers, the law firm that was the district’s legal consultant on the Belmont project.

The revelation was astounding. Why weren’t we told? a board member asked. Staff members explained that O’Melveny attorney David Cartwright, who worked with Shambra, had disclosed the relationship months earlier and the district’s general counsel thought it was not a conflict of interest. The board then voted 4-0 to award the bid to Kajima. Three members abstained, uneasy about the project, and Koff had something he could exploit.

Here’s the thing about scandals: The details may grab you, but it’s the narrative that brings them to life. More than anyone else involved in Belmont, Koff understood that truth. Belmont is huge, a subject that spills over into legal, political and technical realms. Get near it and you fall into a black hole. Jim Crogan, who investigated Belmont for the state, remembers how he felt when he first saw the boxes and boxes of documents involved. “It was like having the biggest puzzle in the world dumped on your living room floor but you had no picture to guide you.”

Koff became that guide. He did it with superior knowledge, a near photographic memory and a storehouse of documents--more than 75,000--copied from lawsuits, transcripts, logs, photographic archives, leaked memos, bid sheets, field notes, government reports and hearing transcripts. But it was how he wove a story of conflicts of interest, deception, overpayments and malfeasance, and his meticulous persistence in telling it that created the narrative that swallowed up Belmont. “As many times as I heard him describe the Belmont Learning Complex scandal--the documents behind it and who was negotiating with whom and what kind of conflicts of interest--it would become like a novel,” recalls Jack Gribbon, the union’s lobbyist in Sacramento. “He had a very linear and chronological way of explaining things, so that in the course of an hour it would unfold and you’d have a grasp of what happened. At the end of it, people would be kind of speechless.”

And if a question came up? “He would whip the document out of the bag, turn to page 252, point to paragraph 12 and [the answer] would be right there. And he had highlighted it in yellow because he knew it was a question.” Something else was happening, too. No longer did Koff see Belmont as simply another spear to hurl at Kajima. He now believed that the school district was abusing its public trust--and the poor people Belmont was meant to serve. For him, Belmont had become a symbol of oppression.

Koff told his story to everyone: legislative staffers, lawmakers, school officials. He told it during every public comment period at every government hearing he attended. Most of all, he told it to reporters.

In the beginning, Belmont was all but ignored by TV stations. Newspapers considered it an “education” story and assigned coverage to beat specialists who had professional relationships with school district officials. Koff wanted to nudge coverage into the hands of investigative reporters, outsiders prone to see Belmont as he did--a questionable, if not corrupt, real estate deal. After reading “Dirty Tricks,” an account of how British Airways officials planted news stories to attack rival Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Koff decided to become an “aggressive source.” He made house calls, hauling boxes of documents up driveways in his 1982 Volvo wagon.

“Editors and publishers are always killing stories, rewriting editorials, playing down stories,” Koff said later. “This happens every day on the other side, for those who have power. But the fact that a representative of a union . . . is able to turn the tables, not only is there nothing wrong with that, the more it happens, the better our democracy would be.”

He made his first move with the press in September 1995. He met with LA Weekly writer Howard Blume, who recalls their first encounter: “He had a full folder of material, expertly prepared . . . Most of it, to my mind, was propaganda.” Blume’s feelings underscored the psychological tension Koff inspired. Reporters and politicians loved him for his knowledge and his documents but were nervous about his union agenda and unorthodox appearance.

“I told him at one point: ‘David, you look really weird. You don’t look like a credible source,’ ” says KCBS-TV Channel 2’s Linda Breakstone. “ ‘It looks like you were smoking dope in Topanga.’ ”

Koff’s discussion with Blume prompted the writer to examine Kajima and Belmont further. In a December 1995 story, Blume raised the first hard questions about the project. Thus began Koff’s hijacking of the narrative, aided by Kajima’s public relations blunder: the company clammed up, refusing to answer questions. Damage control was left to Shambra and other school district officials. Did the district use fuzzy math for Belmont, the most expensive school in California history? Wasn’t it a problem that the district’s bid evaluation panel included two O’Melveny attorneys? Why did Shambra hire so many high-priced consultants? Why couldn’t Kajima find an anchor tenant for the retail space?

And those old oil wells on the property--did they pose a hazard?

The Belmont Express was still moving down the track but was starting to slow. And Koff kept digging.

In April 1997, just days after the passage of the $2.4-billion Proposition BB school bond measure, he found something else. He spied a switcheroo. Voters had approved measure BB after the district emphasized that the money would be used to repair existing schools. Belmont, whose price tag had ballooned to $200 million, was to be paid for with other funds, school officials said. But on the first school board agenda after the vote, Koff found language proposing the use of BB money for Belmont.

The next morning, he called Day Higuchi, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union. Higuchi became enraged. “You can’t print what I said,” Higuchi now recalls. Within days, the union and Local 11 filed suit, eventually foiling the district’s plan. The district had kept its intention to use BB money for Belmont under wraps as a campaign strategy in the San Fernando Valley, where residents wary of the downtown school had supported the measure because they wanted air-conditioning installed in Valley classrooms.

The resulting furor begat one of the scandal’s most memorable headlines, in the Daily News: “BETRAYAL! School Repair Bond May Also Fund ‘Taj Mahal High’.” Belmont was becoming an albatross.

Based in part on a Koff discovery--that school officials made a $20-million mistake in Kajima’s favor on bid spreadsheets--state lawmakers started an investigation. An audit committee, chaired by Democratic Assemblyman Scott Wildman of Los Angeles, issued several critical reports--the first of which was lifted nearly word-for-word from a memo Koff had submitted. He had become an unofficial consultant to the investigation.

“Koff and I operated as a team,” says Jim Crogan, a freelance journalist hired to run the committee’s investigation. “We both had a common purpose--to get to the bottom of this, to expose the corruption, expose the incompetence, expose the sweetheart deals and expose the arrogance.”

To many, Shambra had become the symbol of that arrogance. A meaty, gruff bulldog of a man, the life-long educrat loomed over Belmont like a Sicilian uncle. He had no background in finance or construction, but he had an advanced degree in Getting Things Done. “There were so many times along the way, during these various votes, where Shambra and his crew had triumphed,” Koff says. “They would march boldly out of the board room, throwing a few glances at me as if to say, ‘See who’s got the power here, brother?’ ”

Yet by January 1998, Shambra had been worn down. “It was one issue after another. It was keeping things alive, keeping it going,” Shambra recalled. “One crisis was resolved, another was created.” When investigators accused him of destroying documents, he blamed his filing system and took early retirement.

His going-away party featured the usual Belmont believers, including Vickie Castro, the school board member in whose district Belmont was being built. Castro knew the sting of Koff and Local 11, which months before had helped foil her bid for an Assembly seat. So it was with a special relish that Castro presented Shambra with a Davey Crockett coonskin cap--the figurative ponytail of David Koff. Shambra exclaimed: I don’t want his scalp. I want his head.

Guffaws all around. The Belmont crowd could afford to laugh. For despite all the concerns, the school district had broken ground months before, in August 1997, although the project had been scaled down. Kajima was getting paid. For all intents and purposes, Koff and his annoying union had lost.

“We beat him,” Shambra recalls. “We got the thing built. It was under construction.”

*

THAT’S WHEN MY DANCE with Koff began--shortly after Shambra retired and a year before I wrote a word about Belmont. I didn’t cover education for this newspaper. But Koff had seen my byline on an investigative story so he called.

We agreed to lunch at Smeraldi’s inside the Biltmore Hotel downtown. He came bounding down the street, wired as a teenager, a tall and erect figure with his arms pumping and a janitor’s key chain jangling on his belt. Up close, he looked like a Dr. Seuss character, with a long, owlish face crowned by waterfall eyebrows. His voice was low, conspiratorial. He was shy, to the point of flinching, and excruciatingly polite.

He had a bag of documents, but they didn’t interest me that day. Something else did. Something in his eyes. Say what you will about Koff, he was a man who believed in something bigger than himself. He had stayed true to his vision for decades, long after his comrades had donned suits.

We kept meeting. He kept talking. And I kept listening.

In January 1999, mindful that a school-board election was just four months off, my bosses at The Times pulled me into an office and told me to start digging into the school district. I went back to my desk and called Koff. “Come to my office tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

The next morning he presented a copy of a draft memo. It was written by the district’s property director and circulated to the top brass shortly after the March 1994 purchase of the main Belmont parcel--24 acres on the edge of a shallow abandoned oil field. The director wrote that a crucial environmental study provided by the seller was inadequate because it had not thoroughly examined the potential for toxics at the site.

The memo was a smoking gun. A district safety team had suspended construction at Belmont around Thanksgiving of 1998 after discovering that the original environmental tests were insufficient. Now Koff could show that district officials knew four years earlier about the potential problems. The memo turned what appeared to be a random act of God into the inevitable consequence of bureaucratic ineptitude, or hubris. At moments like these, you don’t worry about getting used as a reporter. Instead, you wonder if you can use back--whether the information you’re getting is true. Where it leads is beside the point. For different reasons, we both wanted a story. My immediate interest had just coincided with his long-term plan.

After confirming the memo’s authenticity, red-faced school officials admitted that they took a “calculated risk” by purchasing the property and thought they could fix the environmental problems as they went along. On Feb. 4, 1999, The Times printed its first front-page story about Belmont. “Toxic Cleanup at Belmont May Cost Millions,” which I had written with colleague Doug Smith, left school board members outraged. Lawmakers like then-state Sen. Tom Hayden called for a criminal investigation, predicting “heads will have to roll.” The district quickly removed David Cartwright, the O’Melveny attorney who had worked on Belmont for years. School Board President Jeff Horton--a hard-core Belmont backer locked in a tough reelection battle--put a motion on the agenda for Feb. 23, 1999, directing the district’s internal auditor to investigate the acquisition and environmental reviews of the property.

Koff didn’t think Horton’s proposal went far enough, so he threw a switch that sent the Belmont Express on a track to purgatory. He called Jesus E. Quinonez, the attorney for the teachers’ union. “He spotted the issue,” says Quinonez. Horton’s motion did not call for a review of the selection of Kajima, overpayments to consultants or conflicts of interest. So Koff and Quinonez wrote a proposed amendment to broaden the investigation and to authorize the auditor to spend as much money as needed. Quinonez met with board member Julie Korenstein, a longtime Belmont foe, who agreed to offer the amendment.

When Korenstein made her move, Horton accepted it, saying he hoped the investigation would clear away the accusations and innuendo surrounding Belmont. “I was sitting in the audience and it appeared Horton looked directly at me as he said that,” Koff recalls. “I smiled serenely back . . . .” Voters would eventually sweep Horton and two other incumbents out in favor of a reform slate backed by Mayor Richard Riordan. What had been a thin majority for Belmont over the years, had become 7-1 against it.

As media interest flared, reporters quickly learned that the road to Belmont led through Koff, and his pager chirped for interview and document requests. A story appeared on the front page of the New York Times and local television stations were running segments on the toxic school. Koff’s tips to Daily News reporter Greg Gittrich produced other revelations, including that state officials had prevented the use of an underground utility vault at Belmont lest it ignite the methane.

And in September 1999, the district auditor released his report. It found, in essence, that Koff was right. Top school officials on Belmont had misled board members into violating state environmental laws. The district’s contract with Kajima was so defective that it didn’t have an escape clause, didn’t include any environmental hazard insurance and left the district holding the bag for every penny of toxic cleanup costs. O’Melveny & Myers, the law firm that helped write the contract, had breached its professional duty and should be sued.

The report also included a page acknowledging Koff’s contribution. Auditor Don Mullinax said that he felt compelled to add it because Koff had been such a valuable resource. “He didn’t come in with gossip and rumors,” Mullinax recalls. “He’d pull out a binder of information and would walk me through what he had . . . We would get that information to the investigative team and the majority of everything he provided us panned out . . . We realized the guy was credible.”

Eleven days before the report came out, Koff testified before the Belmont Commission, which was appointed by the school board to take measure of Belmont’s environmental woes. “I mean, everybody . . . was really taken with his presentation,” says Ira Reiner, former Los Angeles County district attorney who served as the commission’s executive director. “He was a superb presenter of the history of what I think can be fairly characterized as universal misfeasance and malfeasance of everybody whose fingerprints were on it. And I think the entire commission agreed with his assessment.” His testimony marked his transformation from a partisan pariah into the project’s unofficial historian.

The commission ultimately concluded that Belmont’s environmental problems could be fixed and recommended 4-3 in October 1999 to finish the construction. But at a raucous meeting on Jan. 25, 2000, school board members refused. They shuttered the project, citing fears of toxic poisoning and unknown costs from future lawsuits. As people filed out of the board chambers that night, the two old Belmont warriors crossed paths. Shambra walked up to Koff, who had been sitting off to the side in the audience.

“Don’t think it’s over yet,” Shambra said.

“Dom,” Koff said, “this thing will never be over.”

*

THEY WERE RIGHT. BELMONT continues to churn. The school district booted Kajima from the job in June, then sued the construction firm and its subcontractors for fraud. The district sued O’Melveny & Myers for malpractice and the firm has fought back with a flurry of discovery motions, including one demanding all of Koff’s correspondence with 140 entities and people, including reporters. The district is now exploring whether to try once again to open the school, or to sell it.

Yet the workers at the New Otani still aren’t unionized. Students are still crammed into the old Belmont High. Their parents still feel frustrated and betrayed. “They used David Koff to attack the community,” says David Lugo, 43, a Belmont parent and neighborhood activist.

Koff says he’s unrepentant, and he continues to stalk Kajima at other projects in Orange County and overseas. Even with Kajima no longer involved, Koff still testifies about Belmont, fighting any proposal to revive it. Asked if he feels he deprived students of a new school, he replies: “You mean the Belmont Gas Chamber?”

And Shambra can’t escape Belmont’s hold. He is writing his own narrative, a book he says proves that the school was taken down by a conspiracy that includes Local 11, Koff, Mayor Riordan and the Legislature’s investigative committee. He’s tried to get consulting jobs, but his calls aren’t returned when people realize his role in Belmont. Recently, I asked Shambra whether David Koff has wrecked his life. “The whole thing ruined my career. Your story!,” he said, pointing at me. “Your story ruined my career!”

Not my story. David Koff’s.