Pope shows lifetime jobs aren't always for life

The world seems surprised that an 85-year-old globe-trotting pope who just started tweeting wants to resign, but should it be? Maybe what should be surprising is that more leaders his age do not, considering the toll aging takes on bodies and minds amid a culture of constant communication and change.

There may be more behind the story of why Pope Benedict XVI decided to leave a job normally held for life. But the pontiff made it about age. He said the job called for "both strength of mind and body" and said his was deteriorating. He spoke of "today's world, subject to so many rapid changes," implying a difficulty keeping up despite his recent debut on Twitter.

"This seemed to me a very brave, courageous decision," especially because older people often don't recognize their own decline, said Dr. Seth Landefeld, an expert on aging and chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Age has driven many leaders from jobs that used to be for life — Supreme Court justices, monarchs and other heads of state. As lifetimes expand, the woes of old age are catching up with more in seats of power. Some are choosing to step down rather than suffer long declines and disabilities as the pope's last predecessor did.

Since 1955, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice — Chief Justice William Rehnquist — has died in office. Twenty-one others chose to retire, the most recent being John Paul Stevens, who stepped down in 2010 at age 90.

When Thurgood Marshall stepped down in 1991 at the age of 82, citing health reasons, the Supreme Court justice's answer was blunt: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and falling apart."

One in 5 U.S. senators is 70 or older, and some have retired rather than seek new terms, such as Hawaii's Daniel Akaka, who left office in January at age 88.

The Netherlands' Queen Beatrix, who just turned 75, recently said she will pass the crown to a son and put the country "in the hands of a new generation."

In Germany, where the pope was born, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 58, said the pope's decision that he was no longer fit for the job "earns my very highest respect."

"In our time of ever-lengthening life, many people will be able to understand how the pope as well has to deal with the burdens of aging," she told reporters in Berlin.

Experts on aging agreed.

"People's mental capacities in their 80s and 90s aren't what they were in their 40s and 50s. Their short-term memory is often not as good, their ability to think quickly on their feet, to execute decisions is often not as good," Landefeld said. Change is tougher to handle with age, and leaders like popes and presidents face "extraordinary demands that would tax anybody's physical and mental stamina."

Dr. Barbara Messinger-Rapport, geriatrics chief at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that half of people 85 and older in developed countries have some dementia, usually Alzheimer's. Even without such a disease, "it takes longer to make decisions, it takes longer to learn new things," she said.

But that's far from universal, said Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on aging at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarians Study.

"Usually a man who is entirely healthy in his early 80s has demonstrated his survival prowess" and can live much longer, he said. People of privilege have better odds because they have access to good food and health care, and tend to lead clean lives.

"Even in the 1500s and 1600s there were popes in their 80s. It's remarkable. That would be today's centenarians," Perls said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain turned 71 while running for president in 2007. Had he won, he would have been the oldest person elected to a first term as president. Ronald Reagan was days away from turning 70 when he started his first term as president in 1981; he won re-election in 1984. Vice President Joe Biden just turned 70.

In the U.S. Senate, where seniority is rewarded and revered, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond didn't retire until age 100 in 2002. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the longest-serving senator when he died in office at 92 in 2010.

Now the oldest U.S. senator is 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The oldest congressman is Ralph Hall of Texas who turns 90 in May.

The legendary Alan Greenspan was about to turn 80 when he retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006; he still works as a consultant.

Elsewhere around the world, Cuba's Fidel Castro — one of the world's longest serving heads of state — stepped down in 2006 at age 79 due to an intestinal illness that nearly killed him, handing power to his younger brother Raul. But the island is an example of aged leaders pushing on well into their dotage. Raul Castro now is 81 and his two top lieutenants are also octogenarians. Later this month, he is expected to be named to a new, five-year term as president.

Other leaders who are still working:

—England's Queen Elizabeth, 86.

—Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, 88.

—Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, 83.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 79.

__

Associated Press writers Paul Haven in Havana, Cuba; David Rising in Berlin; Seth Borenstein, Mark Sherman and Matt Yancey in Washington, and researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Read More..

Ex-Bell officials defend themselves as honorable public servants

Less than three years ago, they were handcuffed and taken away in a case alleged to be so extensive that the district attorney called it "corruption on steroids."

But on Monday, two of the six former Bell council members accused of misappropriating money from the small, mostly immigrant town took to the witness stand and defended themselves as honorable public servants who earned their near-$100,000 salaries by working long hours behind the scenes.

During her three days on the stand, Teresa Jacobo said she responded to constituents who called her cell and home phone at all hours. She put in time at the city's food bank, organized breast cancer awareness marches, sometimes paid for hotel rooms for the homeless and was a staunch advocate for education.

"I was working very hard to improve the lives of the citizens of Bell," she said. "I was bringing in programs and working with them to build leadership and good families, strong families."

Jacobo, 60, said she didn't question the appropriateness of her salary, which made her one of the highest-paid part-time council members in the state.

Former Councilman George Mirabal said he too worked a long, irregular schedule when it came to city affairs.

"I keep hearing time frames over and over again, but there's no clock when you're working on the council," he said Monday. "You're working on the circumstances that are facing you. If a family calls … you don't say, '4 o'clock, work's over.' "

Mirabal, 65, said he often reached out to low-income residents who didn't make it to council meetings, attended workshops to learn how to improve civic affairs and once even made a trip to a San Diego high school to research opening a similar tech charter school in Bell.

"Do you believe you gave everything you could to the citizens of Bell?" asked his attorney, Alex Kessel.

"I'd give more," Mirabal replied.

Both Mirabal and Jacobo testified that not only did they perceive their salaries to be reasonable, but they believed them to be lawful because they were drawn up by the city manager and voted on in open session with the city attorney present.

Mirabal, who once served as Bell's city clerk, even went so far as to say that he was still a firm supporter of the city charter that passed in 2005, viewing it as Bell's "constitution." In a taped interview with authorities, one of Mirabal's council colleagues — Victor Bello — said the city manager told him the charter cleared the way for higher council salaries.

Prosecutors have depicted the defendants as salary gluttons who put their city on a path toward bankruptcy. Mirabal and Jacobo, along with Bello, Luis Artiga, George Cole and Oscar Hernandez, are accused of drawing those paychecks from boards that seldom met and did little work. All face potential prison terms if convicted.

Prosecutors have cited the city's Solid Waste and Recycling Authority as a phantom committee, created only as a device for increasing the council's pay. But defense attorneys said the authority had a very real function, even in a city that contracted with an outside trash company.

Jacobo testified that she understood the introduction of that authority to be merely a legal process and that its purpose was to discuss how Bell might start its own city-run trash service.

A former contract manager for Consolidated Disposal Service testified that Bell officials had been unhappy with the response time to bulky item pickups, terminating their contract about 2005, but that it took about six years to finalize because of an agreement that automatically renewed every year.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Miller questioned Mirabal about the day shortly after his 2010 arrest that he voluntarily told prosecutors that no work was done on authorities outside of meetings.

Mirabal said that if he had made such a statement, it was incorrect. He said he couldn't remember what was said back then and "might have heed and hawed."

"So it's easy to remember now?" Miller asked.

"Yes, actually."

"More than two years after charges have been filed, it's easier for you to remember now that you did work outside of the meetings for the Public Finance Authority?"

"Yes, sir."

Miller later asked Mirabal to explain a paragraph included on City Council agendas that began with the phrase, "City Council members are like you."

After some clarification of the question, Mirabal answered: "That everybody is equal and that if they look into themselves, they would see us."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

Read More..

Ruling Adds Another Chapter to Unsolved Italian Jet Crash

ROME — Itavia Flight 870 was entering the final leg of a routine domestic trip from Bologna to Palermo, Sicily, one clear summer evening when it suddenly plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the small island of Ustica, killing all 81 people aboard.

Mechanical failure was ruled out early on, and almost 33 years later, the causes that led to the crash on June 27, 1980, are still a topic of passionate debate in Italy, fueled by three decades of inquiry boards, parliamentary commissions, countless expert reports and one of the longest judicial inquiries in recent Italian history. But despite all that, no formal charges have ever been filed in connection with the crash.

The crash, known as the Ustica affair, has produced legions of conspiracy theories here, the way the Kennedy assassination — or, on a lesser scale, the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996 — have in the United States. But in the Ustica affair, the case for a cover-up is far stronger.

Last week, when Italy’s highest court ruled that the country’s Defense and Transportation Ministries had to compensate the families of some of the victims, the court implicitly acknowledged the most widely accepted theory behind the crash: That a missile fired by a warplane had hit the twin-engine McDonnell Douglas DC-9 of Itavia, a now-defunct domestic Italian airline. But the court did not say where that missile came from.

To conspiracy buffs, it was vindication — to a point.

“It’s like the O.J. Simpson affair, where he got off in criminal court but was found guilty in a civil procedure and had to pay damages,” said Andrea Purgatori, an investigative reporter whose exhaustive book on the disaster and the presumed cover-up was made into a 1992 film.

Over the years, several Italian Air Force officials have been investigated for withholding evidence — wiping clean flight tracks and radar scans — and four generals were tried on charges of treason and obstructing investigations. But no one has been convicted.

In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that conspiracy theories have proliferated over the years. The crash has been blamed on U.F.O.’s (several Web sites subscribe to this reconstruction) or domestic terrorism (the Bologna train station was bombed not five weeks later, killing 85 and wounding dozens more). In this scenario, the plane went down after a bomb exploded onboard, most likely in the toilet.

The missile theory gained a new impetus in 2008 when Francesco Cossiga, the prime minister at the time of the Ustica affair, said in an interview that the flight had been shot down by French military planes. Mr. Cossiga did not provide further details, nor can he. He died in 2010, at age 82.

At the time, proponents say, Italy was covertly allowing Libyan aircraft to fly through its airspace undisturbed. They did so by gliding in the slipstream of Italian domestic aircraft, where they could not be detected by radar. On the night of June 27, 1980, there were unsubstantiated reports that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was on one of those planes, the theory goes, and French forces tried to shoot it down to kill the Libyan leader, but hit the DC-9 by mistake. Don’t ask why. It has to do with rebels in North Africa and jockeying for oil concessions between Italy and France.

But Colonel Qaddafi had been warned of the plan and never boarded his plane, according to this reconstruction, which also says the pilot made a successful emergency landing at sea. There, a British submarine reached it and deployed scuba divers to plant explosives to sink the plane and to silence potential witnesses to the assassination attempt.

One hypothesis, detailed by an investigative journalist, Claudio Gatti, holds that the plane was shot down by Israeli forces that mistook it for a plane carrying enriched uranium earmarked for Iraq. “No country would attack in the Mediterranean for anything but extraordinary reasons,” and Israel “had that reason,” Mr. Gatti said. “It’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

The Western warplane scenario has gathered weight through the years, as Italian prosecutors disclosed that several NATO planes were flying in the same airspace that night.

Prosecutors in Rome are still pursuing the Ustica affair. Several international rogatorie — legal requests for information — have since been sent to Belgium, France, Germany and the United States, but responses have been slow in coming, leading the victims’ families to accuse those countries of dragging their feet.

Prosecutors say there are no time limits to such requests, which “depend solely on the collaboration that countries see fit to give,” said Erminio Amelio, one of the prosecutors currently leading the criminal investigation, which has passed through various hands over three decades.

Even though much has changed since that night in the Mediterranean almost 33 years ago, official sensitivities are still high, and no one expects any of the governments thought to be involved to come clean anytime soon.

“This is an incredible story, where a series of colossal lies have been told,” Mr. Purgatori said.

Read More..

Are You Loving LeAnn Rimes's New Bangs?

Stylewatch
Style News Now

02/11/2013 at 04:48 PM ET

Courtesy of Leann Rimes

First, Duchess Catherine cut hers. Then, Michelle Obama made the cut. And now we think we can officially declare bangs to be the hairstyle to have, because LeAnn Rimes has debuted her blunt new fringe on Twitter.

“Love my Andy LeCompte! I got banged,” she joked on Twitter of the new cut, along with a photo of her smiling next to the renowned celeb stylist. “Love em! Was time for a fun change.”

The star stepped out the night before her Saturday cut in a glam mini and her signature loose, blonde waves. But she decided not to take her new do for a spin on the Grammys red carpet, tweeting “I like my PJs better!”

We can’t say we blame her, but we hope she doesn’t keep the finished cut under wraps for long. We need more bangs inspiration for our Pinterest board.

Tell us: What do you think of Rimes’s new bangs?

Read More..

Need surgery? Good luck getting hospital cost info

CHICAGO (AP) — Want to know how much a hip replacement will cost? Many hospitals won't be able to tell you, at least not right away — if at all. And if you shop around and find centers that can quote a price, the amounts could vary astronomically, a study found.

Routine hip replacement surgery on a healthy patient without insurance may cost as little as $11,000 — or up to nearly $126,000.

That's what researchers found after calling hospitals in every state, 122 in all, asking what a healthy 62-year-old woman would have to pay to get an artificial hip. Hospitals were told the made-up patient was the caller's grandmother, had no insurance but could afford to pay out of pocket — that's why knowing the cost information ahead of time was so important.

About 15 percent of hospitals did not provide any price estimate, even after a researcher called back as many as five times.

The researchers were able to obtain a complete price estimate including physician fees from close to half the hospitals. But in most cases, that took contacting the hospital and doctor separately.

"Our calls to hospitals were often greeted by uncertainty and confusion," the researchers wrote. "We were frequently transferred between departments, asked to leave messages that were rarely returned, and told that prices could not be estimated without an office visit."

Many hospitals "are just completely unprepared" for cost questions, said Jaime Rosenthal, a Washington University student who co-authored the report.

Most hospitals aren't intentionally hiding costs, they're just not used to patients asking. That's particularly true for patients with health insurance who "don't bother to ask because they know insurance will cover it," said co-author Dr. Peter Cram, a researcher at the University of Iowa's medical school.

But he said that's likely to change as employers increasingly force workers to share more health care costs by paying higher co-payments and deductibles, making patients more motivated to ask about costs.

The study was published online Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. A California study published last year about surgery to remove an appendix found similar cost disparities.

Commenting on the study, American Hospital Association spokeswoman Marie Watteau said hospitals "have a uniform set of charges. Sharing meaningful information, however, is challenging because hospital care is unique and based on each individual patient's needs."

She said states and local hospital associations are the best source for pricing data, and that many states already require or encourage hospitals to report pricing information and make that data available to the public.

U.S. insurance companies typically negotiate to pay less than the billing price. Insured patients' health plans determine what they pay, while uninsured patients may end up paying the full amount.

The study authors noted that Medicare and other large insurers frequently pay between $10,000 and $25,000 for hip replacement surgery.

Sean Toohey, a grains broker at the Chicago Board of Trade, had hip replacement surgery last summer at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. An old sports injury had worn out his left hip, causing "horrendous" pain on the job, where he's on his feet all day filling orders.

Toohey, 54, said his health insurance covered most of the costs, and it didn't occur to him to ask about price beforehand. He was back at work two weeks later and is pain free. That's what matters most to him.

"I never really looked or paid attention" to the cost, he said.

He paid about $7,900, but wasn't sure what the total bill amounted to.

The average charge for hip replacement surgery at Loyola is about $42,000, before the negotiated insurance rates. The most expensive items on a typical hip replacement bill include about $11,000 for the hip implant, said Richard Kudia, Loyola's vice president of patient financial services

Kudia said some patients do ask in advance about costs of surgery and other medical procedures, and those questions require "a little bit of research" to come up with an average estimate. Costs vary from center to center because "there is no standard pricing among hospitals across the country. Each hospital develops its own pricing depending on its market," he said.

An editorial accompanying the hip replacement study said "there is no justification" for the huge cost variation the researchers found.

A few online sites provide price comparisons for common medical procedures, but the editorial said that kind of information "is of almost no value" without information on hospital quality.

A proposed federal measure that would have required states to force hospitals to make their charges public failed to advance in Congress last year but could be revived this year, the editorial says.

"It is time we stopped forcing people to buy health care services blindfolded," the editorial said.

___

Online:

Journal: http://www.jamainternalmed.com

Read More..

Boy with rifle, guns threatened to kill 23 classmates, police say

A 12-year-old student in northern San Diego County has been admitted to a hospital for "evaluation and treatment" after being taken into custody on suspicion of sending an email threatening to kill a teacher and 23 students, the Sheriff's Department said.

Detectives served a search warrant Saturday night at the student's home and seized several computers and "numerous" rifles and handguns, the Sheriff's Department said. The student was taken into custody as the warrant was being served.

The student is suspected of sending a threatening email Friday night to an administrator at Twin Peaks Middle School in Poway, mentioning 3,000 rounds of ammunition and threatening to shoot to kill a teacher and 23 students.

"There is no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in making the threats and it is believed to be an isolated incident," according to Sgt. Dave Ross.

A task force of detectives and computer specialists from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies had tracked the email to the student's home, the Sheriff's Department said.

The case will be turned over to the San Diego County district attorney's office for evaluation.

ALSO:

Dorner manhunt: Search resumes in Big Bear mountains

Dorner manhunt: Officers opened fire on mother, daughter

Dorner had history of complaints against fellow LAPD officers

--Tony Perry in San Diego

Read More..

3 North Korean Doctors Are Killed in Nigeria

POTISKUM, Nigeria (AP) — Assailants in northeastern Nigeria have killed three North Korean doctors, beheading one of them, officials said Sunday.

The attack on Saturday night in Potiskum, a town in Yobe State, comes after gunmen killed at least nine women who were administering polio vaccines in Kano, the major city in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.

The assailants apparently killed the North Korean doctors inside their home, said Dr. Mohammed Mamman, chairman of the Hospital Managing Board of Yobe State.

The North Korean doctors had no security guards at their residence and typically traveled around the city without a police escort, officials said.

All three bodies had what appeared to be machete wounds.

Two of the men had their throats slit. The assailants beheaded the other doctor.

The doctors lived in a quiet neighborhood in the town. There was no room to house them at the hospital, where they would have had some protection, Dr. Mamman said.

Initially, doctors at the hospital who worked with the three men identified them as being from South Korea, while the police said they were from China.

But Dr. Mamman said that the three men were from North Korea and had lived in the state since 2005 as part of a medical program between Yobe State and the North Korean government.

More than a dozen other North Korean doctors work in the state under the program, which also includes engineers, Dr. Mamman said.

He said all the North Koreans would receive immediate protection from the security forces.

“It is very unfortunate,” he said of the killings.

The Yobe State police commissioner, Sanusi Rufai, confirmed that the attack took place and said that officers had begun an investigation.

Mr. Rufai said the police had already arrested 10 people, though the police in Nigeria routinely round up those living around the site of a crime, whether or not there is any evidence suggesting their complicity.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency did not immediately report the three doctors’ deaths on Sunday.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, though suspicion fell on the Islamist sect Boko Haram. Members of the sect, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege,” have been attacking government buildings and security forces over the past year and a half.

In 2012 alone, the group was blamed for killing at least 792 people.

Read More..

Pink Reveals Her Secret to a Happy Marriage: Listening ... in Moderation

By Marisa Laudadio

02/10/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Three-time Grammy winner Pink, 33, who is up for best pop vocal album at this month's Grammy Awards – and kicks off her U.S. tour on Feb. 13 – shares the secrets behind her music.

You're nominated for The Truth About Love. So how does the magic happen?
When I start a record, I'm like, 'God, I wonder if I can even sing.' But I write poetry and keep a journal, then the first day I go into the studio, I'm like, 'Here we go, I'm turning the faucet on!' I bottle it up for so long that the inspiration is always there.

How'd you get Eminem to be on 'Here Comes the Weekend'?
He wanted me to be on his last record (2010's Recovery), so I said, 'Yeah, let's swap.' I'm a die-hard Eminem fan. I think he's awesome.

You vent about your husband, Carey Hart, in many songs. How does he feel about that?
He's like, 'Look, I know you, we have a good sense of humor, and I know what I signed up for. I only listen to half of what you say anyway!' When he starts listening to me too much, we have problems!

What does your 20-month-old daughter Willow think of mommy’s music?
The first time she heard my music, she kind of looked at me and got the weirdest expression on her face. I wondered, 'God, what's going on in there for her?'

Many people will be partying hard Grammy night, so what's your best hangover cure?
Drink a beer as soon as possible! I used to be able to drink a bottle of wine and not get a hangover. Now, after two glasses I have a headache.

The 55th annual Grammys will air Sunday, Feb. 10, on CBS at 8 p.m. ET/PT (7 p.m. CT) from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Read More..

After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

___

Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

Read More..

Old mystery: Why did Gardena help get police vests to Cambodia?

A decade ago, Gardena Police Capt. Tom Monson was surprised to discover that a $5,190 check had been mailed to his station from the Honorary Consulate of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

Monson was unable to figure out what business the small police agency had with the government of Cambodia.

Shortly afterward, Monson was presented with another vexing puzzle. His police department had recently purchased 173 bulletproof vests from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department — a lot, considering that the department had fewer than 100 officers.

Then he noticed the price of those vests: $5,190. The same amount the Kingdom of Cambodia had paid to the department.

So began a mystery about ballistic vests, international police connections and local politics that still endures 10 years later.

A Times investigation has found that top sheriff's officials used the City of Gardena to funnel hundreds of bulletproof vests to Cambodian police.

Sheriff's media representatives gave The Times differing accounts about the transaction, initially denying any sheriff's officials were involved in sending the vests to Cambodia, then offering explanations contradicted by records and interviews. The officials involved in the transaction refused to discuss it.

Prompted by The Times' inquiry, Sheriff Lee Baca recently asked the county auditor-controller's office to examine the sale, and a sheriff's spokesman called that review "a complete vindication" that proved the transactions were "above board." But Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe said in an interview she was only told that the vests were sold to Gardena, not that Gardena was a go-between to get them to Cambodia.

"The word Cambodia didn't even come up in the conversation," she said.

It is not unusual for U.S. law enforcement agencies to donate used or obsolete equipment to other departments, including foreign ones. But in this case, the vests were sent through an intermediary and not declared to customs officials, as required by federal law. Instead, they were stuffed inside one of a number of patrol cars that the Sheriff's Department was shipping directly to Cambodia, avoiding the rigorous vetting process the U.S. government requires to prevent body armor from getting into the wrong hands abroad.

The U.S. Customs Service launched an investigation into the sale of the vests in 2002, and federal agents were told that the transactions were coordinated by Paul Tanaka, who is both the sheriff's second-in-command and the mayor of Gardena. Other members of the City Council were kept in the dark about the purchase — and the vests were never claimed by the city. They were picked up from the sheriff's warehouse, signed for by a sheriff's reserve, then packed into a patrol car headed for the Southeast Asian country.

The existence of the federal probe was never made public until now. Customs agents decided not to seek criminal charges, concluding there wasn't enough evidence to show that anyone involved in the transactions knew the relevant export laws.

David Johnson, a Washington, D.C., export controls attorney who reviewed the records for The Times, called that a "curious rationale," saying authorities don't have to prove knowledge of the law to press charges. "On its face, it seems like someone was going to great lengths to obfuscate the actual transaction," he said.

After closing the case, federal authorities referred the matter to sheriff's investigators. But a sheriff's spokesman said the department did not conduct its own investigation.

The spokesman, Steve Whitmore, said officials did nothing wrong and sent the vests through Gardena because they were under the mistaken impression that county rules prevented them from dealing directly with foreign nations. He could not explain why that same misunderstanding did not apply to the patrol cars, which officials did send directly to the Cambodians as part of the same shipment.

Tanaka declined to comment for this story. Several of the Gardena council members serving at the time said they never knew about the vests. "I'm very troubled by it," former Councilman Steven Bradford said in an interview.

::

City records showed that Gardena had made two purchases from the Sheriff's Department, the first in May for 173 unused ballistic vests and the second a month later for 300 used vests at a cost of $3,000. Monson and a colleague notified federal authorities.

Records obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act detail the customs probe. Though the names of those interviewed were redacted, it is clear that investigators approached City Manager Mitchell Lansdell.

Lansdell, the records indicate, explained that the purchase was ordered by a councilman who also worked for the Sheriff's Department — a profile that fits only Tanaka. That councilman, the city manager said, called him at home and told him to buy vests that were about to be put up for sale by the Sheriff's Department.

Read More..