Hand Jobs and Handouts
Deputy Mayor Troy Edwards became Leland Wong’s go-to boy
By the start of 2003, Wong’s power was at its peak. As a planner of Hahn’s Asia trip, he had managed to keep Fierstine — his biggest obstacle on Evergreen — at home in Los Angeles. He had a deputy mayor with little knowledge of the harbor or airport turning to him regularly for advice. And he terrified port staffers, who feared that he could return to the harbor commission and punish them for contradicting his wishes.
Wong repeatedly told port staffers, “I may be back,” explained Fierstine, in his first public statements since his grand jury testimony. The words were delivered as a joke, but everyone took them seriously, Fierstine said.
“There was a lot of speculation that he was coming back to the harbor, and everybody was afraid of that, because of the way he does business and does tactics,” he said. “I mean, you don’t get promoted if he doesn’t like you, even if you’re qualified.”
WEEKS AFTER HAHN AND HIS ENTOURAGE returned from Asia, environmental activist Noel Park went to his mailbox in early 2003 and found a surprise: a slender envelope sent anonymously with no return address. Inside was the Evergreen lease proposal signed by Keller and Acevedo only a few weeks earlier.
For Park, who had long criticized the port for failing to control its diesel emissions, the document was highly unusual. For one thing, the San Pedro resident had received assurances from Hahn’s harbor commissioners that they would stop approving port expansion projects without consulting a community panel convened by the mayor. For another, the pact had been reached during Hahn’s much ballyhooed trade mission to Asia — one where the mayor announced everything from AMP to the golden monkeys — yet somehow it had never been discussed publicly.
Furious that the port had paved the way for another terminal project without community involvement, Park went to the harbor commission to chew out harbor commission president Nick Tonsich. Tonsich responded by saying he had never seen the agreement mentioned by Park. Because by then, the Hahn administration, his harbor commissioners and port executives had divided into two camps: one seeking to give space to Evergreen, and the other favoring Evergreen’s competitor, P&O Nedlloyd.
The secret delivery of the Evergreen agreement was one of the several ways in which Wong’s world was starting to unravel. Fierstine told auditors for City Controller Laura Chick of the pressure Wong was exerting on behalf of Evergreen. Although the issue received scant mention in Chick’s audit, Fierstine’s whistleblowing showed up in the audit’s backup notes, and were detected by reporters. Meanwhile, Wong’s bosses at Kaiser were starting to wonder why the executive was spending so much company money — funds that were supposed to help underprivileged families — on massages and Lakers tickets for well-connected figures like Miguel Contreras, who headed the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor until his death in 2005.
Kaiser employee Debbie Hernandez, a secretary who worked for Wong, told prosecutors that she directly confronted her boss about the massages for Contreras, only to be told, “This was how business gets done.” Wong then explained that Contreras was a key player in Kaiser’s labor-management partnership. “What he said to me was, ‘Whatever Miguel wants, Miguel gets,’?” Hernandez told the grand jury.
WHILE KAISER LOOKED INTO Wong’s spending habits, the divide in the Hahn administration continued to widen, with the Evergreen camp — Edwards and Keller — feuding with the P&O camp, composed of Fierstine and Tonsich, the commission president. Dismayed that Tonsich and his colleagues still planned to award a lease to Evergreen’s competitor, Edwards showed up at a meeting of the commission in November 2003 to set them straight. Fierstine told Edwards that Wong was improperly interfering. Edwards then demanded that Fierstine — the port’s lead negotiator — leave the closed-door meeting.
“He tried to kick me out, and Nick [Tonsich] spoke up and said, ‘No, he’s right. Leland is the problem,’?” Fierstine recalled this week. “Troy was furious. He said, ‘I want you out of the room.’?”
Edwards also berated Hahn’s volunteer harbor commissioners, prompting one of them to strike back. Commissioner Tom Warren, a crusty bigwig in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, publicly asked for a legal opinion to determine whether they had the legal authority to defy Edwards’ directive — dramatically pushing the dispute out into the open. That grabbed the attention of Hahn chief of staff Tim McOsker, who showed up a month later to mediate the dispute, offering to satisfy both sides by restarting the competition for the lease.
By the time McOsker met with the commission, Kaiser had placed Wong on paid leave. McOsker learned weeks later that Wong had been fired for misappropriating funds, and he told Wong to resign from the DWP commission as well. But by then, prosecutors had begun issuing subpoenas for e-mails, city contracts and other documents dating back to the Riordan era. Prosecutors demanded that Edwards testify about contracting at the airport. Edwards resigned in April 2004, the same month that investigators raided Wong’s home in San Marino.
Now Trending
