Threats of Suits, Violence : L.A. Police Pension Board: Risky Duty

Meetings of the Los Angeles Board of Pension Commissioners are usually informal affairs, as police officers troop in, one by one, to bare their most private psychological or physical problems--and usually walk out with tax-free pensions expected to amount to millions over their lifetimes.

If the commissioners, who last year approved 80% of the stress claims they heard, take the unusual step of denying a pension, they risk being sued--or even physically threatened.

When one of his clients left a 1982 pension hearing empty-handed, attorney Edward Faunce was so upset that he placed an angry phone call to Gary Mattingly, general manager of the pension department.

Faunce said, as Mattingly later told the board, “The only way to change this system was to come down here and blow it up.”

Faunce further threatened “to advise his police clients to forget the disability proceedings and to bring their guns down here to kill each goddamn . . . member of the board,” Mattingly told the board.

Faunce, who has characterized city pension proceedings as an “administrative ‘Gong Show,”’ said in an interview that his client deserved a pension, and the board finally gave it to him.

He denied threatening the commissioners’ lives. But he acknowledged being “pretty angry” with them and recalled saying that maybe he should “just let these people (his enraged police clients) come on down there.”

The board tried to discipline Faunce for his outburst, he said, but “I told them to go to hell.” He added, however, that he voluntarily stayed away from pension hearings for several months.

It was not the first time that tempers have reached a flash point in police pension disputes.

M. Lewis Thompson, former general manager of the pension department, recalled being yanked by his tie into the hallway outside his office one day by an angry applicant, who hit him in the chest and grabbed his eyeglasses, waving them around, before Thompson finally calmed him down.

He also recalled a tense pension hearing when an officer claiming a psychological disability sat sprawled in front of the commissioners, his service revolver prominently displayed on his hip, refusing to leave while they voted on his case.

“The board excused him and he sat there and wouldn’t leave,” Thompson said. “They thanked him again, excused him and he still sat there.”

The commission president broke out in beads of sweat, Thompson recalled, as the applicant was asked yet a third time to leave. “He finally left, but it was a touchy situation.” Afterward, the board--which had already passed an unenforced rule prohibiting guns at hearings--considered setting up a lock box outside the conference room at City Hall South, where pension applicants could deposit their weapons.

Runs Afoul of Brass

However, the proposal ran afoul of the department’s top brass and of psychiatrists who warned it would emasculate officers to strip them of their guns, pension officials recalled.

As a compromise, a security guard today stands by the door during pension meetings.

Presiding over the meetings is a seven-member board composed of five mayoral appointees--a corporate attorney, a private school administrator, an accounting executive, a bond broker, and a marketing consultant--as well as elected representatives of the Police and Fire departments.

With the help of a professional financial consultant, the commissioners guide the fund’s $1.6-billion investment portfolio and also rule on every pension application.

Rash of Claims

During the last five years, the board has been troubled by a rash of stress-related disability claims.

No stress pensions were awarded in 1970, for example, while 175 officers won them from 1980 through 1984. Assuming a pensioner lives to the age of 72, he will receive an average of $823,000 in current dollars, up to $2.7 million if cost-of-living increases are included.

The pension system is supported largely by Los Angeles taxpayers. For every dollar paid out in salaries to police and firefighters, the city contributes an additional 58 cents to the pension system and the individual worker contributes 7 cents. The city’s total contribution to the pension fund reached $220 million this fiscal year.

Rising costs and questionable pension claims have prompted various calls for reform of the system over the years. But the commission, historically divided on what should be done, has not pushed for change.

“They (commission members) generally don’t get involved in major reforms,” said City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, who has pushed for changes in the system. “Possibly, they view their role as a maintenance operation that would just follow policy, whatever the mayor and council dictated.”

In 1981, the commissioners wrote a letter to a city councilman asking for a study of “the accelerating number of psychological disability claims.” But as Commissioner Bert Cohen pointed out at a recent meeting, “To go from 1982 to 1985 and not get anything accomplished is kind of disconcerting.”

Paid $50 for each weekly meeting, the commissioners come to the job looking forward to “getting a badge” and a prestigious post, but end up facing “a tremendous amount of work,” Thompson said.

Before each meeting, commissioners are presented with a mountain of often contradictory medical reports, work histories, transcripts from state workers compensation hearings and other documents. Unlike many city commissions, the board does not have a staff recommendation to guide them in their decision-making.

Called Prejudicial

(The staff used to make recommendations, but this practice was scrapped by the board about five years ago when the city attorney’s office warned that the recommendations could be “prejudicial” and might result in legal complications if the board did not follow the staff’s advice.)

The paper work for meetings got so heavy that files are now copied on both sides of the page--and still the paper work stacks up a half-foot thick for each meeting, Mattingly said.

Newly appointed Commissioner Sherman Andelson, the brother of Democratic Party activist Sheldon Andelson, said he spends seven hours a week preparing for meetings.

Andelson, who is president of a large Los Angeles accounting firm, said he sought out the post because “I thought it would be more investments. . . . I didn’t realize there was this much medical stuff.”

He said he has no medical expertise--except, he joked, for a “back operation.”

The commission’s senior mayoral appointee, Bert Cohen, who said he recently helped the mayor’s office select the board’s three newly appointed commissioners, also has a strong financial background as a Beverly Hills government bond broker. He said he, too, has no medical expertise “except that my dad was a pediatrician.”

Mostly concerned with the performance of pension fund investments, Cohen can sometimes be seen reading magazines at hearings while pension disability cases are presented.

Practice Defended

He defended this practice, explaining that he reads The Economist and Forbes to keep abreast of economic trends affecting the pension system.

Recently, he has also took to meetings a portable cellular telephone, which he calls his “toy,” to keep up with his private business affairs.

As pension hearings drag on, Cohen conceded he has fallen asleep “a few times,” mainly because he gets up at 4 a.m. for the bond markets. “If someone said I’ve fallen asleep, that’s probably right,” Cohen said. “Some of the cases ! And those lawyers !”

The commission’s questioning of a pension applicant can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours before the board finally decides whether he is disabled from performing even light-duty police work, and if so, whether the disability is job-related.

To a large degree, the commissioners are bound by court decisions and workers compensation rulings that increasingly favor the applicants.

‘In the Eye of the Beholder’

One landmark California Supreme Court decision is commonly interpreted by pension attorneys to mean that “stress is in the eye of the beholder”--leaving it up to each individual to define what is stressful for him or her.

“It’s extremely dangerous,” Assistant City Atty. Siegfried Hillmer, the board’s longtime adviser, said of the decision. “How can you eliminate fraud? How do you separate the good from the bad claims?”

Another key decision by the state’s 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles effectively forced the police pension board to give lifetime, tax-free pensions to disabled officers who have previously convinced state workers compensation officials that their injuries are even slightly job-related.

Furthermore, as the pension system is structured under the Los Angeles City Charter, there is a presumption that applicants with disability claims are entitled to pensions. Hillmer said the commission is “not hard-nosed” and gives the benefit of the doubt to applicants in close calls.

As newly appointed commissioner David Velasquez, an administrator at the private Brentwood School, put it: “I am a basic optimist in human nature so I believe in most cases, people are not malingering.”

Those officers who are denied by the board are free to “update” their claims and try again.

Along with the built-in advantages the system provides to pension applicants, many officers also hire private attorneys skilled in presenting stress cases.

Encino attorney Ron Stillman, who has represented pension applicants for 10 years, said, “I know the system better than they (the commissioners) do.”

At pension hearings, applicants have attorneys present their cases for them. But the city has no lawyer to actively argue against questionable claims.

Hillmer, who is the lone city attorney assigned to handle all police and fire pension work, attends the hearings, but he has a limited role, answering only technical legal questions from board members.

The task of questioning officers--and ferreting out phony claims--falls on the commissioners, who must act as prosecutor, judge and jury.

Pension commissioners could restructure the process to give the city attorney a greater role and to allow staff greater input, but they say they are comfortable with the existing system.

Commission President David Bow Woo said he does not think the city attorney should play a more active role. “The city attorney’s position of . . . not presenting a case and not digging into all the stuff is probably the better position,” Woo said. Without the city attorney’s input, he continued, “we have a more expeditious hearing.”

Furthermore, he said that if there is something questionable about an applicant’s claim, the Police Department is usually able to call it to the board’s attention during the hearing.

Data From Department

Sometimes, if police officials believe an applicant is lying and have investigated his pension claim, a police representative will volunteer information.

But it is tough to disprove a stress claim, said Lt. Ed Gagnon, the department’s medical liaison officer.

For example, former South Bureau Traffic Officer Robert Seaburn, 36, won his pension even though the commissioners at first voted unanimously to oppose it.

Seaburn said he was depressed, mainly because he did not get along with his bosses. But a sergeant told the pension board that Seaburn was “a fraud’ who had been suspended for two personnel complaints and had even discussed with friends “how he was going to rip this system off for a pension.”

At the end of the hearing, former Commissioner Karl Moody said he had never seen a case “where it was more obvious . . . that somehow this applicant has managed to fool the doctors.”

The board rejected Seaburn’s bid in 1983, but was forced to reverse itself in December after Hillmer advised that there was not enough evidence to refute psychiatrists who found Seaburn disabled by depression. Seaburn got a $1,251 monthly pension.

In ruling on disability claims, commissioners are required by law to send applicants to at least three doctors selected by the pension department and to give primary weight to the medical reports in making their decisions.

Often psychiatric evaluations conflict, yet the board rarely cross-examines the doctors to test them.

“It’s a bit of a malady in the system,” Hillmer acknowledged.

In trying to decide which doctors to believe, the commissioners can face a dilemma.

Officer’s Breakdown

In 1981, Richard Hardwick, 37, applied for a stress pension after suffering a “psychotic break.”

One psychiatrist said Hardwick was “relatively symptom-free” but nevertheless incapable of doing any kind of police work. Two other psychiatrists concluded that he was able to work restricted duty for the Police Department.

After much agonizing, the board in 1983 narrowly approved Hardwick’s disability pension. Hours after the vote, the obviously disturbed pensioner walked onto a freeway in Ventura County, threatening passing motorists with a stick. Shouting obscenities and reaching into his waistband for what proved to be a hammer handle, Hardwick charged toward a sheriff’s deputy and was shot to death.

With medical findings often unclear and the stakes so high, various influences on the commissioners sometimes come into play outside the board room.

During the noon break, the commissioners occasionally thrash out cases in private. Commission President Woo once voted down a pension before lunch, then voted in favor of it after lunch.

The case involved Eugene Soman, 42, a police helicopter pilot who became depressed when he was suspended from flying after making an unsafe landing.

Woo said he changed his vote and decided to give Soman a $2,007 monthly pension after discussing the case with another commissioner during the lunch break.

“I realized I was wrong,” he said of the first vote.

Sometimes the commissioners are taken to lunch by Ron Clem, a director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League. Clem, who regularly represents police officers seeking pensions, said individual cases are not discussed at lunch--just policy issues.

Akin to Lobbying

“A lot of these new commissioners don’t even know how the Police Department works, what a light-duty job is,” Clem said. “The only reason the league picks up their lunch, when we do it, is because there are things we want to discuss with them. . . . You might call it lobbying--the fact (is) we want to keep the commission, as a whole, in rapport with the league.”

Woo said that the lunches do not influence commission decisions. “If we felt it would prejudice anything before us, we shouldn’t be on the board,” he said.

Officers who lose their cases before the board can appeal to the courts. They win about 60% of the time, according to the best estimate of Hillmer, whose records indicate that he had an unusually good showing last year, winning 11 of 16 appeals.

Judges who review the cases make their decisions without seeing the applicant. The judges have broad power to independently review a case and overturn pension board rulings. Except in rare situations, they are forbidden to take new testimony. Instead they read the file and listen to attorney arguments. Their rulings can be long but often are just a few brief paragraphs.

“They review a sterile piece of paper,” Moody said of the judges.

“It’s really difficult,” acknowledged Superior Court Judge Vernon Foster. “It’s one of the most difficult areas of judging--looking at a cold record and rejudging.

“By the time it gets to me I don’t have any control over what the evidence is, it’s already in,” Foster continued. “It’s up to the board to have an adequate record to show the reason why he (an officer) is faking. They may know these things but without putting these things in the record it doesn’t get to me.”

John Schuster Jr., 36, is one of many former officers who have gone to court during the last decade and won pensions after they were turned down by the board.

Upset at ‘Injustice’

Schuster, who worked in the 77th Street Division gang detail, claimed after seven years on the job to be suffering from “progressive psychiatric problems” arising from a four-year-old gunshot wound.

He said he had become so upset at injustice in society that he once considered getting attention by murdering a class of kindergartners.

“Soon I’ll kill somebody,” he told the pension board.

The board denied Schuster his pension in 1979, ruling in a 4-1 vote that he was fit to return to duty.

As one commissioner said before the vote, “I can’t say he is a liar, because I cannot probably prove it. But I do not believe the man. . . . Maybe he went through the school of acting here in Hollywood.”

The board noted that Schuster had told varying stories to different psychiatrists--with one doctor saying he exhibited “a tendency for theatrical performances that raise some questions about motivations.”

But the board was overruled three years later in 1982 by Superior Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian, now retired. Schuster got his $1,366 monthly pension.

Tevrizian, who said believes that many police officers are genuinely stressed out by the job, remembered Schuster’s threat, and said, “There was a possibility he could go back and shoot somebody.” If he did, Tevrizian added, he could have been accused of ignoring “all the handwriting on the wall.”

‘Too Spooky’

In another case, Judge Bruce Geernaert granted a pension to former Police Officer Josephine Wiggs because he felt--if she was telling the truth--she was “too spooky” to be working on the force, said former Deputy City Atty. Beverly Mosley.

Wiggs, who had worked undercover in the early 1970s for the now-disbanded Public Disorder Intelligence Division, said she tripped over a phone jack in 1981 and hit her head on a desk. “This caused continuing pain and seemed to be a starting point for development of mental problems,” Wiggs asserted.

She told a psychiatrist that she was afraid the Police Department was plotting to kill her to prevent her from testifying about her illegal PDID spying activities. The last post Wiggs held with the Police Department was working as a witness coordinator in Traffic Court, where her supervisors said she did an “excellent” job.

But Wiggs told the pension board that even this was too stressful because she didn’t like crowds and could “smell people’s skin.”

The board denied her a disability pension when the department said there was a job for her with no public contact.

But Geernaert, who said he could not recall the case, overruled the board last year, and Wiggs now receives a $1,372 monthly pension.

While the board regularly loses individual pension skirmishes in the lower courts, it has also lost several precedent-setting battles in the appellate courts.

One key case involved former Valley traffic supervisor Dennis Dakins, who said he was under “unimaginable mental pressure” because of antiquated department personnel practices, biased media coverage of police and failings in the criminal justice system.

In the Dakins case, commissioners had to grapple with what exactly caused his alleged emotional trauma. If the job caused the stress, Dakins would get a more generous pension than if the stress was caused by something else.

The board ruled his stress was not job-related and awarded him the lower amount. He sued.

A state appellate court eventually ruled that since Dakins had already convinced workers compensation officials that his disability was, in some degree, job-related, the pension board could not disagree.

Easier Eligibility

Now, pension attorneys say that even if the workers compensation ruling establishes that a disabled officer’s stress is only 1% job-related, the pension board must also consider the injury to be job-related, making the applicant eligible for a tax-free disability pension amounting to at least 50% of his former salary.

This critical ruling from the state 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles was recently clouded by an opposite decision from the 1st District Court of Appeal in Oakland, now on appeal to the state Supreme Court.

But in the meantime, the Dakins case has paved the way for pension applicants in Los Angeles, like former Vice Officer Thomas Oberhaus, to win more lucrative pensions than they would have gotten otherwise.

Oberhaus, 40, went berserk one day in 1978, leaving work early and driving to a park where he walked around in the rain, wildly firing bullets into the air, according to psychiatric reports.

The board decided that Oberhaus’ mental problems did not stem from his police work, but from “vulnerabilities” and underlying personality traits that he had brought to the job. Psychiatrists pointed out that Oberhaus, as a child, had witnessed the “cold-blooded murder” of his mother.

In 1980, the board ruled that Oberhaus, who had resigned and gone to work as a Hollywood actor and stunt man, should be retired on a taxable, non-service disability pension.

But, after the Dakins decision, Oberhaus qualified in 1983 for a more lucrative $1,825 monthly pension. He also got a check for benefits retroactive to his date of resignation in 1979. The check amounted to about $33,000.

Next: Changing the System