Getty retains unblinking eye

Ronald L. Olson, attorney at law, pursuer of Imelda Marcos, protector of Warren Buffett, enricher of Michael Ovitz and veteran becalmer of troubled corporate waters, got a call last summer from the Getty Trust.

It was Getty Chairman John Biggs, Olson remembers, sounding him out about joining the trust’s board. That didn’t happen, perhaps because Olson was already on more than half a dozen boards. But a few months later, with public problems raining on the Getty like a spring storm, the phone rang again.

Which is why Olson is now on retainer as official fact-finder and unofficial conscience to the Getty Trust, the wealthiest art institution on Earth yet one of the most beleaguered. His mission: part accountancy, part antiquity, part diplomacy.

First, Olson is looking at Getty finances -- while the state attorney general’s office, spurred by a series of Times investigative stories about the perks, pay and policies of Getty President Barry Munitz, probes in the same area. (Last week, the Council on Foundations, a Washington advocacy group for nonprofits, put the Getty on probation over the same questions.) He says he hopes to wrap up that research in three months, if not sooner.

The other half of Olson’s mission -- likely to take much longer and have broader effects -- is recommending which museum artifacts, if any, should be returned to Italy, where officials say the works were smuggled out of the country. In both cases, he’s reporting to a committee of five Getty trustees -- there are 16 in all -- in large part about events that happened on their watch.

“The investigation is going to dig out the facts,” Olson says evenly. “And whatever comes of those, whatever judgments are made, is a matter for the special committee.... I’m not coming in with any preconceived idea about Barry Munitz’s tenure at the Getty, either staying or leaving or anything else.”

Olson’s advice on the museum’s antiquities, meanwhile, could not only affect the current Italian prosecution of former Getty curator Marion True -- who is accused of knowingly buying looted goods -- but also help reshape the relationship between elite museums and national governments around the world.

All this amounts to a profoundly ticklish assignment, but it puts Olson in familiar territory: amid big reputations, large amounts of money and questions of integrity.

To reach Olson’s office at Munger, Tolles & Olson, 35 stories above Walt Disney Concert Hall, a visitor steps past a color-splashed David Hockney lithograph and ducks into a conference room full of outdoorsy Western vacation snapshots. Olson has three grown children. His wife, Jane, has been active with Human Rights Watch and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. The lawyer himself is a 64-year-old former halfback, rangy, self-effacing, disinclined to give anything away.

For instance: “The Getty will be billed for the time we put into it. I’m not going to tell you the hourly billing rates.”

Olson still speaks with a trace of rural Iowa in his voice; he says “acrost” and has his hometown weekly, the Manilla Times, delivered to his home in Pasadena. But after more than 30 years of high-profile litigation, he moves with ease among arcane subjects and mighty clients, his fees ample enough to maintain one vacation home in the Sierra foothills and another on the Santa Barbara coast. He denies any art expertise, yet when speaking of a monumental stone carved by the Maya, he knows to call it a stele.

In his marching orders, he says, there are no limits to where his questions might lead or whom they might hurt. But there’s also no guarantee when -- or even if -- the public will hear his report to the trustees.

“In all likelihood, the essence of our investigation is going to be made public at some point,” he says. “As I see this assignment that the special committee has, it’s all about enhancing, reaffirming, some would say rebuilding, the integrity of the Getty. And how do you do that? Very often, sunlight is an important part of it.”

Many in the nonprofit world say they would like to see more transparency now. Exactly how, they wonder, are trustees supposed to investigate problems that may stem from their disengagement, perhaps even their own conflicts of interest?

“To simply issue something saying, ‘We’re all clear’ isn’t going to do the trick,” says Maxwell Anderson, a museum leadership consultant, former director of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and former head of the American Assn. of Museum Directors.

“If you’re in a situation where a conflict of interest is at the root of concern at the museum, then it seems essential that the process of introspection be free of that,” Anderson says. “So I guess they’re starting out with a difficulty. But the proof is in the pudding.”

The Getty “could not have found a better person,” insists Antonia Hernandez, president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based California Community Foundation. “I do know Ron. And I do know that he would not be retained to sugarcoat anything.”

“I couldn’t think of anybody with more intelligence and integrity and political skill,” says Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication and a friend of Olson’s since 1977.

From his youth in Crawford County, Iowa, Olson moved on to play halfback for Drake University, then left Iowa behind to study law, first at the University of Michigan and then at Oxford.

He prosecuted civil rights cases for the Justice Department and served as general counsel for the California Democratic Party. He made partner at Munger Tolles in two years. Among his assignments in the last 20 years:

Chasing Imelda Marcos: Olson was part of the legal team hired by the Republic of the Philippines in 1986 to go after the money that exiled strongman Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, took out of the country. After Ferdinand Marcos’ death in 1989, a U.S. federal judge ordered a freeze on the Marcos assets around the world, and Imelda Marcos had to give up Swiss bank accounts, jewelry and art.

Insulating Buffett: The billionaire investor asked Olson in 1990 to get one of his holdings, the investment firm Salomon Bros., out of trouble in the wake of a financial scandal. Olson’s work led to Salomon’s paying a $290-million civil fine, but the firm steered clear of criminal prosecution. In a 1995 interview with The Times, Buffett said, “We would be out of business [at Salomon Bros.] if he was not involved in our case.”

Enriching Ovitz: The super-agent turned Disney president relied on Olson to cut his Disney deal. Stepping down in 1997 after just 14 months in the job, Ovitz pocketed $109.3 million in cash, options and other benefits. Olson likes to point out that his client “took nothing from Disney on the way out that wasn’t negotiated for on the way in.”

Yet if the Getty leadership wound up deciding it didn’t want to hear what Olson had to say, that wouldn’t be a first.

In 2003, Olson was hired by concerned board members to conduct an internal probe at Mexico’s second-largest television broadcaster, TV Azteca, whose billionaire chairman, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, had been accused of self-dealing. With a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pending (the company was then listed on the New York Stock Exchange), Olson spent several months digging and made a report that Salinas and his board allies largely ignored.

Olson went on his way, two board members resigned in protest, and last January the SEC charged Salinas Pliego and two others with civil fraud, alleging that he concealed a series of self-dealing transactions that netted him $109 million in personal profit. Olson declines to discuss the Azteca case.

James Jones, one of the two board members who resigned and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 1993 to 1997, says of Olson: “I found him to be absolutely on target on good corporate governance, No. 1, and No. 2, to be dogged in trying to get at the truth.” Olson understood, Jones says, the delicate balance of “keeping an organization viable and yet doing the right thing.”

It’s that balance that many outsiders are watching closely at the Getty. If Olson “perceives his assignment as being an independent investigator and prosecutor, then he’ll do that,” says J. Michael Hennigan, a veteran Los Angeles attorney whose firm has both opposed and cooperated with Olson’s many times over the last 30 years. But “if his assignment is to defend the board, that’s what he’ll do.... It all depends on what the retainer says.”

Olson says he has never socialized with Munitz, although for a few years “he and I were both on something called the Los Angeles Business Advisors,” which meant sitting in a room with about 30 other people every few months.

As for Getty neighbor and Munitz friend Eli Broad, who bought a Brentwood property from the Getty Trust in 2002 for $700,000 less than its appraised value, Olson sees him as “a small part” in the Getty puzzle -- “one transaction, so far as I know.” And Olson bristles at the idea that Munger Tolles’ continuing legal work for builder KB Home could “taint” his Getty work.

Broad, who co-founded the Fortune 500 company in 1957, hasn’t held a leadership role in it for several years. But the KB board includes three current or recent Getty trustees: Munitz, Luis Nogales and Ron Burkle.

Olson acknowledges many “troubling” questions hanging over the Getty, including about the doings of former curator True, who in the mid-1990s took two personal loans on the same Greek vacation home from two professional contacts.

Soon after stepping in, Olson says, he and his team came upon evidence of the second loan: True had borrowed from museum donor Barbara Fleischman and her husband, now deceased, within days of a 1996 agreement by the Fleischmans to sell the Getty a set of antiquities for $20 million and to donate many more. Barbara Fleischman went on to join the Getty board in 2000 as a trustee -- and remains one, despite chairman Biggs’ public statement that “everyone’s uncomfortable” over the revelation of the loan.

“Those facts were troubling, because they were not known by either the management or the board” until this year, Olson says. When The Times learned about the transaction and began preparing a story, “the committee decided to share our information as completely as I could. We didn’t try to put a lid on it, and we didn’t try to bury it.”

The resulting article didn’t make the Getty look particularly good, but Olson believes disclosure was clearly the right move. In these decisions, as in other projects, he says, he likes to keep in mind a favorite quotation of his buddy Buffett:

“Eventually, you get the reputation that you deserve.”