Bradley: Still Under a Cloud

City Atty. James K. Hahn finally has released his report on the conflict-of-interest charges lodged against Mayor Tom Bradley, and the mayor, as he promised, has broken his long silence on the matter.

Unfortunately, after all these months, the people of Los Angeles still are without an answer to this melancholy affair’s central question: Has Bradley behaved in a fashion that is merely insensitive or one that actually is corrupt?

From the outset, we have expressed skepticism about Hahn’s ability to answer definitively that most important of the questions raised by the mayor’s irregular conduct of his personal finances. The city attorney’s report--serious and voluminous though it may be--justifies that skepticism. Lacking both the power to subpoena documents and compel testimony under pain of perjury and a staff experienced in prosecuting major felonies, Hahn’s investigation inevitably falls short. The one forthright consequence of the undertaking--the civil suit charging Bradley with six violations of the financial disclosure laws--derives not from the city attorney’s probe but from information gleaned out of the mayor’s own amended statements of economic interest.

In his televised address, Bradley insisted on characterizing Hahn’s findings as an absolute exoneration of his conduct. He repeatedly cited the absence of any criminal charges as a vindication of his personal integrity. Hahn, to the contrary, told The Times and others on Wednesday that his investigation left him with serious reservations about the mayor’s credibility.

And, as Hahn himself said when he released his report Wednesday: “No vindication of the mayor’s conduct is intended, implied or should in any way be inferred” from the decision not to pursue a criminal prosecution. In the matter of Bradley’s perplexing relationship with Far East Bank, for example, the city attorney said, “the mayor clearly stepped into that gray area of the law between factual innocence and a chargeable offense.”

In the end, then, Los Angeles is left exactly where it was long months ago--with a city government functioning under a cloud. It is imperative that the local, state and federal agencies currently conducting their own investigations into the conflict-of-interest charges against Bradley pursue their inquiries with all the speed that prudence and the law allow.

In the meantime, City Council President John Ferraro and his colleagues now must do what should have been done at the beginning: The two three-member council committees currently probing the mayor’s conduct--Finance and Revenue and Government Operations--ought to be combined into a single investigatory panel with Ferraro sitting as a seventh member. That new committee ought then to hire an experienced, nonpartisan lawyer to act as its special counsel and provide that person with whatever staff is required to conduct a thorough investigation, including the public testimony of witnesses under oath.