Belmont: The Billion Dollar High School

Chapter 4: The Uphill Battle Begins As I entered the meeting room, the air was alive with electricity. I knew from my long years as an investigator that I had assembled the "best of the best." There were almost 20 people in the room, all seasoned professionals. As we went around the room, with everybody introducing themselves, I was impressed by the talent in front of me — including former white-collar crime investigators from the FBI. Then it was my turn. I introduced myself and explained the scope of work. We were to investigate this school building project known as the "Belmont Learning Complex." Our immediate task was to develop a list of documents that would explain what had happened to date. And then we needed to create a witness list – people that could tell us what they said, what they did, and where the bodies were buried. And then there was the deadline. We had to give the School Board a report on our findings within six months. There were some grim faces in front of me but determined. We brainstormed for several hours, deciding who would pursue which angles. Anticipating the massive quantity of documents, we expected, we had to come up with a unique and an entirely new way to index and file all the hundreds of pages we knew we were about to receive. The data retrieval system had to identify the persons, places, and subjects in an electronic database that would help us link all the variables of the information to establish cause and effect. And then, it would need to identify where that specific document was stored so we could access it at will. Our computer geniuses were challenged with this task. They set up the document storage at the law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis, where they thought they would have enough space. Boy, were they wrong! And so, we drafted a couple of memorandums to request all documents. On March 26, 1999, we sent out our written request for all Belmont-related documents. These requests went to the LAUSD Chief Administrative Officer David Koch and Chief Financial Officer Olonzo Woodfin asking for their full cooperation. The silence was deafening. Although all the key figures within LAUSD had made solemn and public statements pledging their full cooperation, the reality was anything but cooperative. Some of the school district staff completely ignored the request letters. Obviously, from their past experiences with the office of the Internal Auditor, they had no respect for our mission and our authority. When we leaned on some of the senior staff, they were openly defensive and completely uncooperative. So, on June 14, 1999, I sent a letter to School Board President Vicki Castro and Superintendent Ruben Zacarias requesting their assistance in getting staff to provide documents. And we also began having our former FBI guys visit staff offices to put a little more pressure on folks. We finally began to get responses. We got tons of stuff: dozens and dozens of boxes of files. Every day another shipment would come in. Our investigators began digging through the documents and discovered they were being buried in mostly useless junk. Apparently, the LAUSD staff had said, "You want documents? Here's your stinking documents!" and tossed everything with the slightest reference to the Belmont project into a box – unsorted and with no information about what the documents referred to and no information about what was in the box. They sealed it up nice and neat, and then defiantly shipped it to us. "Take that!" we could hear their thinking, as each box hit the floor at Preston Gates & Ellis. Undaunted, my staff combed through the mountains of papers, date stamping, coding, indexing, and storing each sheet so that, in the case that some gem of information was relevant, we would be able to retrieve it. At the same time, we began our interviews. Over the ensuing six months of investigations, we interviewed more than 65 individuals. Many of them several times. We developed a unique script that we would recite before starting the interview. It was intended to set the interviewee at ease, but I'm sure that many of our witnesses felt like suspects being given a Miranda warning. Many times, the subject of our interviews would question whether they needed a lawyer or their union representative. Although it wasn't intentional, I guess we were quite intimidating. The investigation into the Belmont Learning Complex had begun in earnest. It was a massive, exhausting, demanding, and frustrating task. But slowly and surely, we started to see the project take shape. As we looked over the vast piles of paper and listened to the witnesses, we began to see a vague form of the project. With our excellent investigators, we began to see the potential problems that perhaps were the cause of the fiasco. Progress was slow and tedious. And we had to fight for every piece of evidence. The resistance was unrelenting. In fact, just nine days before we released our first report, we received six boxes of Belmont-related documents from the General Counsel (Richard Mason) that he said he "just happened to locate" – six months after our initial request. It was going to be an uphill fight all the way to the top.