Former EPA Official Is Indicted
A former official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of scheming to defraud a client who had hired her consulting firm to help clean up a toxic work site.
Rita M. Lavelle, 57, of Temecula, who served as head of the EPA’s Superfund program during the Reagan administration, was charged with one count of wire fraud and two counts of making false statements to FBI agents.
In 1983, Lavelle was convicted of lying to a House subcommittee investigating conflicts of interest by officials in charge of the toxic cleanup program. Twenty-two people, including the EPA’s top administrator, were fired or forced to resign as a result of the investigation, but Lavelle was the only one indicted. She served five months behind bars.
Her name resurfaced two years ago, when a congressional panel disclosed that former President Clinton’s half-brother, Roger, had solicited $100,000 from her to arrange a presidential pardon. She reportedly told him she was broke and couldn’t afford his fee. Her pardon request was not granted.
Lavelle could not be reached for comment about Wednesday’s indictment.
The new charges revolve around her activities as a partner in an environmental consulting firm, NuTECH Enterprises Inc., of Oceanside. Also accused in the case was Robert V. Cole, 67, a partner in DeNova Environmental Inc., a hazardous waste storage facility in Rialto.
The intended target of the fraud scheme, according to prosecutors, was Joseph Bertelli, 86-year-old owner of the Lemco Corp. of South Los Angeles, which had been in the business of buying and reselling salvaged goods. In April 2000, the EPA ordered Bertelli to remove all hazardous waste from his facility. He hired Lavelle to oversee the operation.
At the time, prosecutors said, Lavelle was trying to collect $35,000 on a debt owed her firm by DeNova Environmental. According to the government, Lavelle and Cole then devised a scheme to defraud Bertelli of the money. It allegedly involved forging Bertelli’s name on documents to show that he owed DeNova more than $52,000 for the removal and storage of hazardous waste.
Prosecutors said that Lavelle and Cole then used those documents to obtain $36,441 from Capital Partners USA Inc., a firm engaged in ‘factoring.’ Typically, factors advance money to businesses in exchange for the right to collect the businesses’ accounts receivable. The amount advanced is usually less than the money due the business.
When Capital Partners tried to collect on the $52,000 from Bertelli, it discovered that the documents bearing his signature had been forged and that DeNova had never removed any hazardous materials from his property, prosecutors said.
Lavelle and Cole will receive summonses to appear for arraignment next month in Los Angeles federal court. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said that Lavelle’s NuTECH and Cole’s DeNova were no longer in business.
Before being appointed to run the EPA’s Superfund, Lavelle was employed by Aerojet-General Corp., one of the companies found to have dumped toxic waste at the Stringfellow Acid Pits near Riverside.
The government charged that she had committed perjury when she testified before Congress that she had been unaware of Aerojet’s involvement at Stringfellow while she was making decisions concerning the site. Other EPA officials testified at her trial that she had ignored warnings to stay out of the case because of her prior connection to Aerojet.
To the end, Lavelle insisted she was innocent. “I was framed,” she told reporters in 1985 on her way to prison. She accused “people in the Justice Department and people in the White House” of making her a scapegoat.
