Hard Times for Teflon Tom

By Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles

Anyone who can boss Los Angeles for 16 straight years without falling on his face needs a bit of luck, a bit of skill or a thick coating of Teflon -- and maybe all three. Through four terms, Mayor Tom Bradley, 71, managed to keep his troubled nation-within-a-state from disintegrating completely without himself succumbing to hubris or, worse, scandal. A diffident, dedicated man, Bradley seemed the personification of rectitude. He never got too big for his britches. Bad judgment was something else.

In January, after the mayor began his campaign for a fifth term, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner warned that it would publish a series of tough "challenges" on the city's problems, ranging from gang warfare to freeway gridlock. "We'll try not to let ((Bradley)) forget he's participating in an election, not a coronation," promised the newspaper. That threat did not sit well with Bradley. The Herald Examiner found itself shut out of the mayor's office: no press releases, no phone conversations, no personal contact -- an invitation, if there ever was one, for reporters to start scraping away at the Teflon. Result: three weeks before the election, the paper began running articles about the mayor's financial dealings. He is currently under investigation by city, state and federal authorities.

The Herald Examiner reported that Bradley, who earns $102,000 annually as mayor, was engaged last year as an adviser to a Chinatown bank that paid him $18,000. Bradley also earned at least $70,000 as a director of a savings and loan bank for ten years. Although both matters were on public record and on the surface did not seem to represent a conflict of interest, the facts beneath the surface suggested otherwise. It turns out that city deposits in the Chinatown bank were doubled after Bradley made a phone call to the Los Angeles treasurer. The savings and loan bank, meanwhile, was involved in a multimillion-dollar tax dispute with the city, and had been awarded several zoning changes. Following those disclosures, Bradley repaid his $18,000 fee to the Chinatown bank and quit his job as director of the thrift institution, but the taint of impropriety remained. "Dubious moonlighting," the Los Angeles Times called it.

"Dubious" certainly was the term for fresh disclosures that the city paid $400,000 to a trade task force run by a business associate of Bradley's. The Securities and Exchange Commission, moreover, is looking into the mayor's ! holdings in stocks, real estate and junk bonds; parts of Bradley's portfolio were handled by Drexel Burnham Lambert, whose deposed junk-bond king, Michael Milken, contributed to Bradley's political campaigns.

It was a measure of the mayor's long-standing reputation for honesty that the shocker did not prevent his re-election to a record fifth term last month (though this time by a narrow margin), but he has resolved to exonerate himself. Bradley has appointed a commission to rewrite the city's ethics rules in a "clearer and cleaner" fashion, and last week told the city council, "While not a legal mistake, my decision to engage in outside employment was an error in judgment because of the possible perceptions it created; for that I accept responsibility. I assure you that this experience taught me a painful lesson. I am determined to learn from it."

He may get his wish, but Tom Bradley's Teflon is gone.