For County’s Sake, He Whistled While He Worked

You probably never heard of Larry Bales. He spent his 33 years in the Orange County assessor’s office often driving his bosses nutty and, in a couple of cases, getting them indicted and sent to jail.

Ah, they’re just not making public employees like they used to.

“I’ve never been in the in-crowd,” Bales says. This tends to happen when you blow the whistle on your superiors, challenge them in elections and testify against them before grand juries.

Bales, 60, retired as a deputy appraiser last month after suffering a heart attack on Aug. 2. Almost from the time he answered a newspaper ad for a job in county government in 1969, Bales, an Oklahoma native who knew almost nothing about Orange County, didn’t like what he saw.

You’d think he would have quit. Or that he might have just kept quiet.

Instead, he went to a grand jury in the early 1970s and testified about what he thought was a bribery case involving superiors. Eventually, two successive county assessors were indicted and convicted on bribery or related charges, as well as a chief deputy assessor.

By the 1990s, Bales was still tormenting his bosses. In 1994, he blew the whistle on the assessor’s failure to make a deadline on property-tax appeals. That failure eventually cost the county an estimated $1.6 million.

When Treasurer Robert Citron tried in 1995 to direct the blame for the county’s bankruptcy to Merrill Lynch, Bales called it “the biggest cover-up in the world” and said blame lay with county officials.

Over the years, Bales tipped reporters to other real or perceived misdeeds in county government. He says he also went to the grand jury “a couple other times and nothing happened.” All the while, he says, he was simply heeding his father’s long-ago advice that the country faced greater threats from within than without.

The years haven’t altered that viewpoint.

“We may have a 9/11, but that’s not going to kill us as a country,” he said last week at his Tustin home. “But our own corruption will. When people no longer watch government, that’s going to be our downfall. From within, not without.”

If it weren’t for the fact he was proved right so many times, people would have dismissed Bales as a crank. Instead, his was a career that deserves a parting toast.

“I tried to preserve a little bit of the institutions, a little bit of America,” he says. “That’s important to me. I’m not bitter. I have a good attitude, even though I had the heart attack.”

He stumbled into the bribery scandal of the 1970s by accident. He was doing an appraisal when an electronics company manager offered him free equipment for a favorable assessment.

“They started talking to me about the way things happen,” Bales says. “I said, ‘Where do they do that?’ and they said, ‘Orange County.’ ”

“I realized I was right in the middle of a bribery situation,” Bales says. “I could have kept my mouth shut and got a stereo out of the deal and a promotion, but, no, stupid Larry goes to the grand jury.”

That led to the convictions of his superiors and, Bales says, his own blackballing.

“I sat in a corner [of the office] doing remedial stuff for nine months.... I don’t think I was making an announcement saying I was talking to the grand jury, but they knew.”

At least four times--he’s not quite sure himself--he’s run for county assessor or recorder. Bales’ last try for office came last March, when he got 35% and lost to another of his superiors in the assessor’s office.

Unchastened, Bales still laments what he considers irregularities in the county’s method of property assessment and says taxpayers are “still being cheated.”

But he also knows his days of windmill-tilting are done.

“That’s a burden that’s off my shoulders now,” he says.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.