Davis Recall Casts Light on Issa

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) was just back from a Middle East trip in late April when he turned his attention to matters closer to home.

Efforts to recall Gov. Gray Davis appeared to be stalled. Hungry for money, groups backed by veterans of the ill-fated Bill Simon Jr. campaign, a former assemblyman and an anti-tax advocate had collected only a small portion of the nearly 900,000 signatures required to put the matter on the ballot.

Then came Issa, a high school dropout turned self-made millionaire, a man indicted as a teenager for allegedly stealing a Maserati with his brother -- the charges were dropped -- who went on to build a massive personal fortune selling anti-theft devices for cars.

In a little more than two months, Issa, whose worth has been reported at more than $150 million, has donated $645,000 to the recall effort, brought in professional signature gatherers and mailed petitions around the state, all while gearing up for his campaign to replace Davis.

With Issa’s prominence has come scrutiny. While his money has fueled the anti-Davis forces, Issa’s political, personal and business records have become targets for groups backing the governor and searching for a foothold in efforts to defeat the recall attempt.

In events around the state Tuesday, leaders of the anti-recall effort attacked Issa’s anti-abortion position as being out of kilter with the state’s voters, 60% of whom say abortion should be legal always or most of the time, according to a Times poll of voters taken last fall.

Carroll Wills, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against the Recall, said Issa’s record needs to be examined by voters being asked to sign recall petitions.

“The recall is not about California’s future. It’s about Darrell Issa’s future and his desire to be governor of California,” said Wills, who added that Issa’s involvement “has been not motivated by grass-roots outrage but motivated by calculated ambitions. Look at the record of the people behind it -- Issa is the engine driving the train.”

Scott Taylor, Issa’s gubernatorial campaign manager, said raising Issa’s position on abortion is a scare tactic by Davis backers.

“His view on abortion is a deeply personal one,” Taylor said of Issa, a Roman Catholic. “He believes it should only be done in extreme circumstances and not as a form of birth control. [But] the majority of the Legislature is pro-choice. It’s scare tactics that somehow if Darrell Issa is governor, women will lose the right to choose.”

Taylor, who first worked for Issa in his failed 1998 primary run for the U.S. Senate against Matt Fong, said Issa welcomes an examination of his record.

The second-term congressman emerged as a player in the state’s Republican Party in the early 1990s with half a million dollars in donations to his party’s candidates. A Vista resident, he had made a fortune in anti-car-theft devices with names such as Viper, Python and Wasp.

It had been a steep, rocky rise for the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, most notably when he was indicted along with his brother on felony auto theft charges. Issa insisted that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and charges were eventually dropped.

As a boy in the Jewish section of Cleveland, Issa said, money was always an issue. “I had to figure out how to pay for college,” he told The Times last fall.

He found a way -- dropping out of high school and joining the Army, later earning an equivalency diploma and a college degree. In 1980, he bought into a Cleveland company that had manufactured CB radio parts and started doing electronics work for another local company in the anti-car-theft business.

He took over the anti-theft company two years later after its founder failed to pay a $60,000 loan from Issa on time. The man, Joe Adkins, later accused Issa of hustling him out of the $1-million-a-year business he founded.

In addition, an executive whom Issa wanted to remove from the company, as well as another employee, told The Times in 1998 that he had brought a gun to work in an effort, they believed, to intimidate them.

Asked about the incident during his Senate run, Issa said he had no memory of ever having a gun at the office.

“Shots were never fired. If I asked [him] to leave, then I think I had every right to ask [him] to leave.... I don’t think I ever pulled a gun on anyone in my life.”

Questions also were raised about a fire at his manufacturing plant in Cleveland, seven months after he took over the anti-theft company and shortly after he had increased his insurance coverage.

Investigators did not rule out an accident, but they said burn patterns at the scene made the fire suspicious.

These reports, which came late in the 1998 primary campaign, created problems for Issa and fodder for his opponent, Fong.

Asked about the incidents, Taylor said Tuesday that Issa had lent the money after he was given inaccurate information from his colleague and “took what was appropriate action.”

Taylor said the fire was an “unfortunate occurrence -- Congressman Issa had nothing to do with it.” He said money Issa received in an out-of-court settlement with his insurance company, which had contested the claim, was “not nearly enough to cover what was actually lost.”

After losing to Fong, Issa said, he became ill. But he regrouped in a way that may pay him dividends among the Republicans he is courting for the recall. “After Darrell Issa’s loss to Matt Fong, he was the picture of class and grace. He did everything he possible could to help Matt Fong in the general election,” said Steve Schmidt, a Washington-based Republican consultant who worked for Fong. “There are no doubt a lot of Republicans in California who remember that. Darrell has paid his dues.”

Issa ran and won his congressional seat two years later, becoming one of only a handful of Arab Americans on Capitol Hill. Since then, he has hewed closely to Republican orthodoxy, supporting military action in Afghanistan and Iraq and backing President Bush’s tax cuts.