Kinde Durkee Was Trusted by California's Top Democrats — Until Millions of Dollars Vanished

Glazer was as colorful as Durkee is colorless. As a business manager for Hollywood celebrities, he had worked for Laurel & Hardy, and he loved to sing their comic songs. He also collected the paintings of black and Chicano artists.

His interest in activism drew him into political finance. He raised money for John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and handled the books for Gov. Pat Brown.

Kinde Durkee’s mugshot

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More About

• Kinde Durkee
• Jules Glazer
• Dianne Feinstein
• Election Campaigns
• Politics

He seemed to know everyone. "He was considered the premier political accountant in California," recalls Bill Carrick, Feinstein's longtime media consultant. One of Glazer's proudest moments came when he helped to clear Mayor Tom Bradley — a friend and a client — of wrongdoing in a finance scandal.

Glazer lived comfortably, but he was not wealthy. His business ran on volume. He had lots of clients, low costs and low margins.

"He had somewhat of a cookie-cutter approach to how you deal with campaign finance," says David Gould, a rival treasurer. "Take as many clients as you can and do as little work as you can."

It was Glazer who taught Durkee everything she knew. She was just 18 years old, a pastor's daughter fresh out of high school, when she went to work for him, helping to raise money for George McGovern's campaign.

She arrived in time to witness the last days of the pre-Watergate era. In those days, enforcement was lax, if it existed at all.

And even after a wave of reform in 1974, it took time for the culture to change. Enforcement still was largely about ensuring compliance rather than exacting punishment. That was one reason Glazer could afford to take on hundreds of clients: If he had to cut corners, he could.

While Glazer prided himself on his attention to detail, he did tend to file a lot of amendments, Gould says. But as regulations grew tighter, and punishments more severe, the job became more labor-intensive. Glazer's high-volume approach would not work forever.

As Glazer contemplated retirement, he increasingly turned responsibility over to Durkee. By the 1990s, he had moved to the desert, near Palm Springs, commuting to work only occasionally.

Durkee still turned to Glazer for the bigger decisions. But when he wasn't around, she was in charge.

"He did see her as someone who would be a protégée," says Michael Glazer, Jules' son. "She would call him for advice. He was tickled by that."

Jules Glazer died of cancer in 1999. According to a friend, his widow sold the business to Durkee for $50,000 — a steal.

Durkee did what she had to do to hang on to her top clients, Gould says. As the years went by, and costs increased, Durkee never raised her rates.

"She didn't charge anywhere near what the real cost was," Gould says. "You've got to realize there's a problem there."

Feinstein obviously didn't see a problem there. She was getting a great deal. And as Durkee's top client, she got good service to boot.

"We never had trouble with media buys. There was never any sense that we didn't have the money we were spending," Carrick says. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

When Jules Glazer Business Management became Durkee & Associates, clients didn't notice much of a difference. They'd been dealing with Durkee for years, and she had always been cheerful, self-effacing and helpful.

But she was a different person around anyone who pried into her books. To auditors, she could be unhelpful to the point of stonewalling. An odd transaction might have an innocent explanation. But Durkee's explanations were often strange and even slightly unsettling.

Property records show that she got into financial trouble almost immediately after taking over the business. In 2000, she failed to pay $6,377 in federal small-business taxes, according to an IRS lien. The taxes were later paid, but in subsequent years she fell behind repeatedly on state and local taxes.

At the same time, strange things were happening in her accounts. California's Franchise Tax Board, or FTB, does routine, random audits of campaign accounts. Those audits are turned over to the Fair Political Practices Commission, which can levy fines or refer cases to the DA for prosecution.

In 2002, an FTB audit of Christine Kehoe's Assembly campaign turned up some irregularities. In the course of reconciling bank records with public-disclosure statements, the auditor found that Durkee had paid $79,236 in campaign expenses out of her own business checking account.

That was unusual. Durkee's money should have been kept strictly separate from her clients' funds. But here they were mixed up.

Kehoe's committee reimbursed Durkee for those expenses, and everything else seemed to be normal. Durkee told regulators that her business-account number had been mistakenly printed on Kehoe's outgoing checks.

But that mistake went uncorrected for almost a year. If that was sloppiness, it was extreme sloppiness. As an accountant, Durkee should have noticed that money was flowing out of her own business account for almost a year. Why didn't she stop it?

Another suspicious transaction came to light in a lawsuit arising from the 2002 race for mayor of Long Beach. Durkee had served as treasurer for a candidate, Councilman Dan Baker, and for California Citizens for Neighborhood Empowerment, an "independent" group backing Baker's campaign.