Made $500,000 by Using Political Clout at HUD, Republican Party Official Brags

A Republican national committeeman from Florida boasted Monday that he had cashed in on his political clout at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to make hundreds of thousands of dollars as a consultant on low-income rent subsidy projects.

The GOP official, William Taylor, said he had worked at times with Deborah Gore Dean, the once-powerful aide to former HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr., to get approval of federal grants in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Those grants brought him fees and equity interests totaling more than $500,000, Taylor said.

Used GOP Stationery

The former Florida Republican Party chairman said that he frequently used Republican National Committee stationery in his private business correspondence with government officials and sees nothing wrong with it.

“Your huge fees make some of us upchuck,” declared Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), the normally mild-mannered chairman of the House subcommittee on employment and housing, which is investigating alleged favoritism and abuse in HUD programs.

“All you have to offer is political influence peddling, and you could be a lot less smug about it,” Lantos said.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) also appeared shocked by Taylor’s nonchalant description of how he had openly capitalized on his political connections.

“I wish you were a Democrat,” Shays told Taylor. “You cashed in on your party.”

Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked Taylor if he saw nothing wrong with making personal profit from politics. “I’d guess you’d have to say,” Taylor replied, “that the answer to your question is yes.”

System Called ‘Sick’

Shays, noting that Taylor still held his national party post despite his high-priced consulting work, said: “It tells me how sick the system has got.”

Taylor said he received $35,000 from a private developer involved in a project for the homeless in Jacksonville, Fla., at the same time that he was on a $72,000-a-year retainer from the city for working on the same project. He testified also that he had received $60,000 during one year to lobby for the city of Tampa at the same time that he was on the Jacksonville payroll.

On a HUD-approved subsidized rental project for low-income residents in Lufkin, Tex., he said, he received a $15,000 fee and a 10% equity interest now worth about $400,000 in return for about 100 hours of work.

“Let the record show you were paid $4,000 an hour,” Lantos said. “And you just used a little bit of political influence.”

Defends His Actions

Taylor, a rotund man with a white mustache and wispy white hair, at one point defended his role as a Washington point man for real estate developers, describing the HUD headquarters as an intimidating place.

“That’s a big building,” he said. “There are lots of people over there . . . . Many times, I spent hours walking the halls, looking for someone to help me.”

Later, however, he said that “a lot of people could do what I do.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) noted that the Texas project had put $400,000 in Taylor’s pocket without much work on his part. “It sounds like no-sweat equity to me,” Frank said.

Taylor snapped back: “It’s serving a lot of poor people in East Texas.”

Frank countered: “It could serve a lot more if HUD had the additional $400,000.”

Taylor told the committee that he had pleaded no contest to a criminal charge of conflict of interest in Jacksonville, paid $5,000 in court costs and agreed never again to seek work for the city as a lobbyist as part of a plea-bargaining arrangement.

The agreement was reached after prosecutors charged that Taylor had asked for $25,000 from a New Jersey developer to guarantee that HUD would approve a grant for a luxury hotel in Jacksonville and to help the developer obtain the city contract to build it.

Was Shown HUD Ruling

Another witness, Washington attorney Lynda M. Murphy, testified that she once was allowed by Dean to see an important HUD ruling affecting a client of her law firm before Pierce, then HUD secretary, signed it.

Murphy testified that she later hired Dean as a consultant for her law firm and said the two are still friends.

“She was very much hands-on with the Reagan Administration,” Murphy said, explaining why she hired Dean after her departure from HUD in July, 1987. Murphy said her activities had been limited at the time because she was expecting a child.

Helped by Dean

When Dean was still at HUD, Murphy said, she received Dean’s assistance in obtaining a federal grant for a low-income project in Richmond, Va. Dean has invoked her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the House panel.

Murphy denied, however, that she had sought Dean’s assistance on behalf of DRG Funding Corp., a mortgage lending firm involved in HUD’s co-insurance program for apartment buildings. Murphy began working for DRG in September, 1985.

Yet she acknowledged that she had been allowed to look at a letter lifting an extraordinary disciplinary requirement imposed on DRG before the letter was signed by Pierce on May 10, 1985. “Debbie knew I was interested in it,” she told the panel.