Reprint Paradise Lost? Part Ten: Who's Minding the Store?

In order for this Republic to properly function it is imperative that our law enforcement institutions perform their stated duties and uphold and enforce the law. In addition, we are dependent upon a free press to inform the people and provide them an accounting of how our institutions and elected public officials perform. Lastly, those public institutions that hold themselves up as guardians of the public trust also must perform according to their stated missions. Unfortunately, none of these three groups have met those challenges during the Transcam and Landscam travesties in California over the last three decades.

Having received some subtle, and not so subtle discouragements, and feeling like Jake Gittes in Robert Towne’s film Chinatown, in 1998 I began to have concerns about my safety, so I visited the FBI. I went to The Phillip Burton Federal Building near San Francisco City Hall, took the elevator up to the 9th floor where the office of the FBI is located and told the receptionist I wanted to speak to an investigative agent; with visions of nose-slitting dancing in my head.

In good time, a young woman appeared. “Mr. Trainor? I’m Special Agent Nancy Devane,” she said. “Please tell me what brought you here.”

I told Special Agent Devane I was onto a story, and I was starting to get scared. She asked me to wait while she called her superior. A few minutes later she came out and handed me a piece of paper with her name and another agent’s on it, and the time and place I should   meet with them. “2 P.M. 9-10-98, 310 Grand Avenue, Oakland, CA” it read. Below that, Devane wrote down her mobile phone number.

Three days later I went to the FBI office on Grand Avenue in Oakland. I brought a number of documents along with me including the evidence of URS insider stock options, and the white paper I co-wrote for the City of Tustin in 1983, which helped kill the first high-speed rail initiative by exposing special interests. This turned out to be ironic, like everything over time.

Devane came out and asked me to follow her, escorting me into a back room where she introduced me to her superior, an intense black man in his mid-forties with hard eyes. He introduced himself: “I’m Special Agent Carl Chandler,” he said, not extending his hand. He asked me to sit down and tell him why I’d come.

I told the agents I was working on a story that seemed to have taken an unexpected turn, and said I was afraid of what might be in store for me if I dug any deeper. I gave them my documents, and they asked if they could copy them. Then they asked what I wanted from the Bureau.

I said I wanted their protection, so I could finish the story in one piece and get it into print. Chandler and Devane thanked me for coming, in and bringing the material. Then they asked if there was anything else that I wanted from the Bureau. “Just one thing,” I said. “What’s that?” asked Special Agent Chandler. “I want to be there when you take Willie Brown out of City Hall in shackles,” I said.

I went back to the FBI a half-dozen times, once in 1999, twice in 2000, once in 2001, once in 2002 and once in 2005. I hand-carried to them computer diskettes and reams of paper full of facts and chronologies, additional factual documentary evidence provided by the principals through their public financial statements, news stories, records of political campaign contributions, and corporate financial records. As far as I can tell, nothing was ever done with it. I might just as well have thrown it in the ocean.

The FBI wasn’t the only investigative agency to ignore the story.

In late 1998, I called up Wayne Imberi, an old friend who worked at the California Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento. The FPPC is the state watchdog agency in California, created by legislation sponsored by Jerry Brown when he was California’s Secretary of State. I told Imberi what I had and he set me up with an investigator named Donna Morrow. I gave her a copy of the 28-page story I’d written on the Bay Bridge and she told me she’d get back to me.

When I hadn’t heard anything for a month, I called her back and asked her whether the FPPC had begun an investigation. She said she didn’t recall the matter. “It’s all there in the document I brought you,” I said, “Why don’t you try reading it, and call me if you have any questions.” I never heard from Donna Morrow, after that admittedly sharp response.

In 1999, I tried another federal agency. This time it was the Securities Exchange Commission, at their office in San Francisco. An investigator named Christopher Cooke came out to speak to me. I told Cooke the same story I’d told the FBI and FPPC agents: there was a scam going down involving transportation issues that were being used as vehicles to manipulate publicly traded stocks; that the insiders at these corporations, and their political allies, knew a deal was in the works that would yield multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts for certain corporations, and they were using this knowledge to make themselves a killing on insider trades. I voiced the opinion that all of this was illegal the last time I looked, and gave Christopher Cooke another pile of documents and a diskette. He gave me his card and thanked me for coming in.

Two years later, I called the SEC office in Los Angeles and told their chief investigator there, Tom Zambrano, all about Transcam and my dealings with Christopher Cooke. I said the SEC didn’t appear to be moving forward with an investigation. Zambrano gave me the name and phone number of Robert Mitchell, another investigator in the San Francisco SEC office.

In October of 2001 I called Robert Mitchell and spoke with him for twenty minutes or so. I wrote him a letter early the next year, asking if the SEC could possibly investigate my claims about Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blum and friends. No agency would move against this well-connected, politically wired machine.

In 2002, I filled out a 211 “whistleblower” claim with the IRS. I showed Michael Hunter and Todd Andersen, the two IRS special agents with whom I met all my files and charts. They copied all of it, and told me they found me a credible witness and were recommending an investigation to their superiors at the next level. Whatever level that was, it was silent on the matter.

In early 2005 I called Joel Moss, the FBI agent in charge of the political corruption division in San Francisco, and spoke to him over the phone for twenty minutes or so, trying to get an answer to the question of why they weren’t pressing an investigation into the new high-speed train machinations. Moss didn’t say much, and I never did get an answer from him or anyone else in our so-called regulatory agencies.

I also wrote letters to my U.S. Senators and Congressmen in Oregon and Washington, seeking their help and protection in exchange for my cooperation with any prosecution of the principals. Nobody responded.

If the investigative agencies were lax, the working press was even lazier.

On September 29, 1998 I called 60 Minutes in New York and asked to speak to Mike Wallace. I was acquainted with one of Wallace’s former producers, Chris Schenyl. Chris told me that if I ever had a major story I should contact 60 Minutes. A few moments passed while the receptionist put me on hold. Then Mike Wallace came on the line. I told him about the Bay Bridge deal and Willie Brown. He seemed interested. “Well, who’s going to break the story?” Wallace asked. I told him that I wasn’t sure just yet, that I was still trying to find an outlet. “Well, call us when you’ve found someone who’ll break it,” he said.  I didn’t say, “I’m breaking the story now, to you, god damnit!” I just told him I’d work on that, and started circulating the story more widely. Again, nothing happened.

In mid-October of 1998 I was tuning my first draft of the Bay Bridge story. I attempted to tie all the seemingly-disparate pieces together: the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island and Indian gaming, Catellus Development, John Foran and Nossaman, Guthner, and the first bullet train scam. I prepared a boilerplate letter dated October 16, 1998 to accompany the simultaneous submission of my story, to let editors know that I had all the information multiply sourced and could provide the documentation to substantiate all my claims.

The San Francisco Examiner responded favorably, especially their main investigative reporter Lance Williams. I went in and spent some time with Lance and Steve Cook, the investigative reporting Sunshine Team’s chief editor. When I left the building, I was feeling good. A week later, Lance Williams sent me a letter. It wasn’t so good.

In a letter dated October 30, 1998, Williams wrote: “the paper is not able to publish your piece as written, but is interested in developing aspects of your work into a story or stories, as described below.”

What was described below was the Examiner’s offer to publish the two most difficult and dangerous parts of my story separately. If the stories made it to the front page of the Sunday paper, I’d be paid $350 per story; if they made it to page one on another day I’d get $150. I wasn’t being offered a staff position, nor would I be under the Examiner’s corporate umbrella, which would have entitled me to legal protection in case I was sued.

One day in March of 1999 I was at the Sacramento Bee and told editor Bill Moore what I was working on. He asked to see a copy of the story. He read it and said he didn’t think the Bee would run it. “Willie [Brown] is a pretty litigious fellow,” Moore said. I told him that I thought newspapers were in the business of publishing the factual truth, no matter whose toes might get stepped on, but Moore wouldn’t touch it.

The world of news had radically changed. With the consolidation of media into a half-dozen mega-corps, it seemed the press was more interested in ignoring or even suppressing the truth than they were in exposing it.

Four months after I’d finished the first story I contacted the online journal Salon.com. David Weir, one of my editors from California, was then Salon’s Managing Editor. I emailed Weir some stories. By then I’d decided to chop the long narrative up into discrete AP-style pieces. Weir emailed me back, expressing an interest in publishing my work. He put me in touch with editor Darryl Lindsey, and we set up a meeting in early May 1999 at Salon’s office in downtown San Francisco.

Lindsay and I began to talk. Lindsay was interested in the URS stuff, but told me that he “couldn’t see Willie” in it. Richard Tolmach had offered the same opinion when I showed him the first draft in late 1998, but Lindsay and I managed to work out a deal by the end of the first meeting. Salon would publish my stories starting with the URS Griner issue and then run six subsequent pieces for a $1000 each, plus expenses.

Lindsay also agreed to my request for expenses to travel to Vancouver, B.C., where I wanted to interview Li Ka Shing, the reclusive Hong Kong billionaire who had backed out of the Treasure Island development deal. I felt he was a critical link in unraveling the chain. I went back home and waited for the contract to arrive by mail, as Lindsay had promised.
A week later the contract arrived, but before I signed it, I talked with Lindsay again and found that he wanted me to interview Richard Blum. I told Lindsay that I was certainly prepared to do that but I first wanted to have the entirety of our deal in writing.

We dickered back and forth for a week. Then Lindsay told me to sign the contract and interview Blum. I told him I wasn’t about to do that unless the deal was in place; that Salon would run the whole series, and send me to Vancouver. “What’s this about Vancouver?” he asked. I reminded him of what we discussed but he said he didn’t remember it. We came to no satisfactory agreement, and I had to move on.

Later that summer, I thought I’d finally found an outlet that would publish my stories when I met John Mecklin of the alternative Bay Area newspaper SF Weekly. Mecklin and his paper had published some hard-hitting investigative stories on Willie Brown’s ethically questionable doings, including a piece on Willie’s investments in property that was under the aegis of Catellus Development. Mecklin and I sat in his office discussing the project for close to an hour. He was interested in the URS stock issuances during the Bay Bridge process too, but like others didn’t see Willie in the deal. I told him he would if he ran the whole series; that it was through the interconnected issues and the relationships of all the players that Willie Brown’s guiding hand could be seen.

By the end of that meeting, we had a deal. Mecklin agreed to pay me $3200 for the URS story.

A week or so later the deal fell apart. Mecklin thought an email I’d sent them had put them in jeopardy, and Richard Blum might sue them. When I read the email to Lance Williams over the phone, he said he didn’t see a problem. “That’s nothing,” he said.  “All you did was state some facts and your belief that Richard Blum and Dianne Feinstein were involved in something sleazy.” At any rate, Mecklin killed the story, although he was decent enough to pay me an $850 kill fee.

I couldn’t understand why a story of this magnitude had become so difficult to sell, and asked some of my colleagues what they thought. ”When magazines like California died, there went your market, Richard.” Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee said to me one day at his office. Bill Moore told me that investigative journalism wasn’t dead, but that now newspapers would only publish hard-hitting investigative stories written by staff members.

I’d heard that same story from the Capitol bureau correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. Former Mayor of Sacramento Burnett Miller had a similar opinion: “When the Bee went from a family operation owned by the McClatchy family to a corporate enterprise they became much more timid,” Miller told me. Mark Dowie offered a more brutal assessment. “It’s like there’s one television camera that’s set up in the middle of Kansas, and what that camera can see is what’s universally accepted as the day’s news.”

By the time I got half way into the book, I’d been turned down by every mainstream and alternative newspaper in the State of California, including the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.  My record was no better at the national level; everybody from the Atlantic Monthly to Wired Magazine passed.

California’s public interest groups weren’t any more responsive than the press or the investigative agencies. They all turned a blind eye to the story unfolding in their front yard.

The person most responsible for prompting me to cover the Bay Bridge story was Rick Feher, a member of the design team Coman-Feher. When I first met with him, Feher described himself as an activist and former journalist, and a Green Party member. He said he was an ally who wanted to help me get my story out.

Feher did make one significant contact: the late David Brower. Brower was a fighter and he had taken on the new board of The Sierra Club, which he once headed, accusing them of selling out. Brower wrote a story critical of the Headwaters Forest deal, publishing it in the Chronicle’s December 23, 1998 edition, characterizing it as a half-billion-dollar government shakedown. “If we allow tycoons like Charles Hurwitz (the CEO of Maxxam, the company that owned the Headwaters Forest) to exact hundreds of millions of dollars by staring down the government, more will line up behind him,” Brower warned. It was a prophecy that has since proved to be true.

Brower seemed inclined to provide us with some backing, and Feher outlined his proposal for a project titled “CALTRANCE”, an acronym that stood for CALifornia TRANsportation Crisis Elimination.
After we’d discussed the project, Brower turned to Feher and asked him “Is there anything I need to sign?” I took that to mean a check. Feher sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing. The activist couldn’t bring himself to act. Once again, talk but no walk.

In 2005 I traveled to Oakland to meet with my new literary agent Tom Miller, who was also the corporate counsel for Global Exchange. This was the same public interest group whose support I had unsuccessfully tried to enlist in the summer of 2003.

The agent said he had an inside track to a publishing house called Avalon and asked me to come down to Oakland, where we could meet with Avalon chief Charlie Winton. Miller also said he thought we could get my stories published in the Berkeley Daily Planet, a small leftist newspaper. We met with Winton, but he didn’t want to risk publishing my book.

A few months later the Berkeley Daily Planet stiffed me for the series of stories we had agreed on. I wrote the first four parts of what was supposed to be a ten-part series and sent them down to the agent who passed them along to the BDP. Becky O’Malley, the publisher of the BDP then said she wanted one story, for which she would pay me $50. I told her we had a deal for a series. When I brought up breach of contract, she told me to get lost. “No good deed goes unrewarded,” she snidely wrote me in an email. My agent Tom Miller didn’t press the issue with her, or demand that I be paid for the work I’d done.

In April of 2005 I traveled back to Oakland to convene another meeting at Tom Miller’s office. I had prepared a new series of eight political corruption charts with updated figures and new details. In attendance were my agent, Emeryville Vice-Mayor Ken Bukowski, Richard Tolmach and myself. The law firms of Judicial Watch and Terence Hallinan attended the meetings via speakerphone. Rich Tolmach was standing in for The People’s Advocate, the other public interest group I had contacted in 2003 during the Recall Gray Davis campaign.

I had traveled to Sacramento in February 2005 to meet with Tolmach and his contact at The People’s Advocate headquarters. The People’s Advocate is the group who brought the Jarvis-Gann property tax limits into being. This is also the same group who are responsible for instituting term limits, largely in reaction to the iron reign of Willie Brown. That reaction backfired; now the only ones who know anything around The Building are lobbyists. The legislators are too transitory to know much about what’s really happening.

Ted Costa, the People’s Advocate executive director and board member, volunteered that he had a rich backer who would underwrite the political corruption litigation. All I had to do was find an attorney who would take the cases.

I contacted Fred Lerach’s law firm in San Diego and spoke with one of their main attorneys, Dave Walton. Lerach’s firm is a formidable bunch of litigators, and they’ve taken a number of controversial cases regarding securities fraud and public corruption. Walton passed on the cases, but referred me to the LA law firm Sturmgasser & Woocher.

Fred Woocher was with the FPPC when the Political Reform Act went through in 1974, so he knew the law well. Tom Miller and I went to Woocher’s office in Santa Monica on June 13, 2005.
Initially Woocher seemed interested; then he got cold feet and cancelled out later that summer, after I did more work on the project pro bono. This consisted of documenting Mehdi Morshed’s stock holdings in transportation firms, and his wife Linda’s contracts for work on the high-speed rail project.

I next tried Eugene Scheiman of the east coast firm McCarter and English, referred to him by Daniel Sheehan, the Pentagon Papers attorney who formerly headed The Christic Institute. Scheiman seemed interested and asked me to prepare some more material. I did. Scheiman passed on the cases in late 2006.

Between 2005 and 2007 I contacted every public interest group I could think of. I tried Common Cause, the Green Party, and Ralph Nader, all for a second time. Nobody would help. Then I went to all the investigative agencies again, including the IRS and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento. My agent wrote the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento McGregor Scott a sincere letter on May 24, 2005, asking for an investigation. He described the two assaults I had suffered, and the story that I was working on. Once again, nothing happened.

I went to The Project on Government Oversight in early 2005, recommended to them by Daniel Ellsberg. I tried The Committee to Protect Journalists in late 2006. Then I filed another whistleblower claim with the U.S. Department of Transportation Auditor General, then another with the California State Auditor’s office in 2009. They all did nothing. I went to every public interest law firm I could get hold of out of the Yellow Pages. They offered encouragement but gave no real support.

Jeff Baird, the Catellus Desert Wildlands whistle blower was accorded the same heads-buried-in-the-sand response by law enforcement, as were a number of U.S. Customs agents who filed suit on a tangentially related case.

Baird voiced his concerns about the Catellus desert land swaps to the FBI, the SEC, and the Department of the Interior. He also sent letters to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and President George W. Bush. Of course there was no reply from George or John. Return letters from the SEC (dated April 10, 2001) and the Department of the Interior (dated May 3, 2001) thanked Baird for writing them and said they’d pass his letters on to the proper agencies. “They blew me off,” says Baird, shaking his head disgustedly. “I couldn’t believe it. It was a thanks, but no thanks kind of deal.”

Everywhere I turned, there was no relief, but this had become old hat for me, dating back to my assignment in June of 1997, to write a magazine story about the new Bay Bridge design competition. Six weeks after I was given that assignment I was assaulted on a city street in Sacramento. I woke up in the hospital four days later. For months after that I was barely ambulatory, and I am permanently disabled as a result of my injuries. I can’t prove it had to do with my reporting, but who thought transportation and land use issues could prove so potentially dangerous?

Finally, publisher Kris Millegan of TrineDay took on the story, and after several years, we now have the book, Paradise Lost?.

I did what I did for what I think are good reasons, and there is no way I can undo that, even if I wanted to. I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I knew who and what I was taking on… or maybe I didn’t, but I surely do now.