Hand Jobs and Handouts

Deputy Mayor Troy Edwards became Leland Wong�s go-to boy

Comments (0) By David Zahniser Wednesday, Oct 11 2006

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Only when Wong and Edwards were gone from the Hahn administration did Fierstine feel the freedom to terminate the contract of the port’s overseas marketing agent in Hong Kong. Fierstine concluded that the firm’s principal, William Wong, had little expertise and was traveling to Shanghai repeatedly to meet Leland Wong (no relation) without the port’s permission.

Even when Wong was at the DWP, Fierstine feared retribution if he severed the contract with the firm, which had ties to Leland Wong dating back 20 years. That, at its essence, demonstrated the corrosive power Wong had over many of the port’s civil servants. “I’m not stupid. There’s certain things you can do, and certain things you can’t do,” Fierstine recalled.

The Handoff: Troy's boss, then Mayor Jim Hahn, with an Evergreen honcho

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Not that Wong’s departure provided much relief. Fierstine — who had spent several weeks on stress leave — was reassigned to a job he never asked for: marketing of the port’s waterfront promenade, a recreational project that he hated. Fierstine quit instead.

If any reassurance can be provided from the Wong affair, it is that his efforts on behalf of Evergreen were so often blocked. Keller wrote a lease agreement in Asia with Evergreen that was not binding, assuring that the harbor commission could reject it later on. Hahn’s harbor commissioners repeatedly rebuffed requests for financial assistance to Evergreen, while the DWP rejected another break suggested for the shipping line.

In an unseen way, the system worked. But by the time it did, Wong and Edwards had already undermined the Hahn administration from within, paving the way for its demise.

One of the ironies of the D.A.’s case is that another former airport commissioner helped bring Wong down. One-time Riordan appointee Dan Garcia, now Kaiser’s ethics compliance officer, told prosecutors that his company discovered that Wong was spending company money on political fund-raisers — and went so far as to have his own staffers call potential contributors.

With Kaiser preparing to oust him, Wong asked Garcia for help with a severance package. Garcia told Wong that he’d have a better shot if he explained who benefited from Kaiser’s largess, from at least $18,000 worth of massages to roughly $250,000 in game tickets.

“And I asked him,” Garcia told the grand jury, “as directly as one human being can ask another: ‘Who were they?’ And that you have to disclose them. And he said, ‘Well, I can’t tell you that,’ and ‘You don’t want to know’ — or words to that effect. And he said, ‘You know who they’re really for,’ which I took to mean that he had given all or some of them to public officials.”

If Wong reaches a deal with the prosecution, he could finally answer questions at the heart of pay to play — the fund-raising practices that triggered the investigation in the first place. For now, that doesn’t look too likely. In a statement, Wong’s attorneys said prosecutors asked slanted questions, and built a case based on multiple promises of immunity. They predicted that Wong will be cleared by a jury.