O.C. May Tap Sigoloff as Wizard Who Could Sort Out Financial Mess

Sanford C. Sigoloff is the very picture of the toughest boss you’ve ever had.

Stern of visage, lean of frame, Sigoloff is a take-charge guy with a sharp mind and a photographic memory. He has revived companies that were thought to be near death--but at the cost of thousands of jobs.

And now, Sigoloff is the leading candidate for Orange County’s new chief executive post. County supervisors are interviewing others, but they seem inclined, on an interim basis, to turn to this 64-year-old wizard of corporate turnarounds in their hour of need.

If selected, Sigoloff’s mission--for up to nine months--will be to sort out the financial mess in which the county has wallowed since it filed for bankruptcy protection in December.

Sigoloff’s carefully crafted reputation gallops before him: Mr. Chapter 11, Ming the Merciless, the hard-driving perfectionist.

There is also a softer Sandy Sigoloff: the man who sent house plants to the spouses of overworked executives and wrote personal letters for laid-off employees. The father and grandfather who missed his first meeting of the state Board of Education early last year to take a long-postponed skiing vacation with his family.

But Sigoloff is not infallible. He wasn’t able to save retailer L.J. Hooker Corp. five years ago. He has never stuck around to run a company he has resuscitated. He has left unhappy shareholders and unions in his wake.

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Last year, Sigoloff withdrew his nomination to be interim state superintendent of schools when it became clear that political opposition could block his confirmation. Gov. Pete Wilson then named him to the Board of Education.

More broadly, there are those who wonder if it is possible to apply business practices to the public sector. Though the concept is politically popular, it has met with mixed results.

Still, there are plenty of people who think Sigoloff is perfect for the position.

“I think he’s uniquely qualified for the job,” said businessman Eli Broad, who is chief private-sector adviser to a special state Senate committee that conducted hearings into Orange County’s financial crisis last month.

Broad knows Sigoloff well: Sigoloff worked for Broad in the early 1980s as vice chairman of the Kaufman & Broad building firm, and is now a director of Broad’s SunAmerica financial services company as well as the separate Kaufman & Broad Home Corp.

Broad, a Brentwood neighbor of Sigoloff’s, said the executive’s training--he studied physics and chemistry at UCLA--and his superior organizational skills allow him to attack and quickly solve complicated problems.

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“I think after the debacle (Orange County) had, the financial markets need to know there’s someone in charge,” Broad said.

But the transition from the private sector to the public sector has never been easy.

Roger Johnson, for example, took an eye-opening trip from Irvine, where he was chief executive of Western Digital Corp., to Washington, where he runs the General Services Administration for President Clinton.

“Absolutely everything I had been trained for (in the corporate world), all I had learned, my instincts, value system, were not applicable here,” Johnson told The Times last year. “One and one kept coming up three, one, 27.”

UC Irvine business professor Judy B. Rosener said it is naive to believe that good business practices and capable corporate executives will always work out in the public sector.

“I don’t have any doubt that there are certain skills associated with business that are applicable to the public sector,” Rosener said. “But people don’t understand the relationship of business and government and the differences between business and government.”

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Government officials can’t hire and fire with the same alacrity as executives in the private sector, she noted. Output and success are measured differently when there are no sales or profits to track. Political shoals must be navigated.

“There are reasons why we give degrees in public administration,” Rosener said.

Sigoloff is probably best remembered for his somewhat stiff performance in a wildly successful series of television commercials for the Builders Emporium home improvement chain, a subsidiary of Wickes Cos. He was brought in to rescue Santa Monica-based Wickes in 1982--and promptly put the conglomerate into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. It was one of the largest corporate filings ever.

The commercials, featuring Sigoloff’s piercing stare and the slogan, “We got the message, Mr. Sigoloff,” helped boost Builders Emporium’s sales and built up Sigoloff’s image as the self-described “toughest man in retailing.”

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Sigoloff brought to Wickes a team of loyal lieutenants who worked long hours six or seven days a week. He reduced the payroll by 10,000, selling or closing operations that were losing money or didn’t fit with his vision for the company. He personally inspected stores and demanded improved service and merchandising.

Sigoloff called himself Ming the Merciless after the central villain in the Flash Gordon comic books, a favorite from his youth. To build camaraderie, the Wickes management team members--who talked of working in the “Ming Wing”--were given their own nicknames from the comics.

And Sigoloff got results. Sales and earnings improved; Wickes emerged from Bankruptcy Court protection ahead of schedule in 1985.

Then, like many in the 1980s, Wickes went on a buying spree, picking up other companies with the help of junk bonds floated by Michael Milken of the ill-fated Drexel Burnham Lambert investment firm. Wickes figured prominently in the government’s 1988 lawsuit against Milken for securities laws violations, but neither Sigoloff nor Wickes was ever accused of wrongdoing in any of Milken’s schemes.

The Wickes legacy left some troubled.

Anger over Sigoloff’s tenure prompted labor to oppose his 1993 nomination as state superintendent of schools. Glassworkers Union President James Hatfield wrote Gov. Wilson that he blamed Sigoloff for Wickes’ hostile bid for Owens-Corning Fiberglas. That bid forced a restructuring at Owens-Corning that cost thousands of jobs.

Wickes paid $300,000 in 1988 to settle government charges that it evaded federal antitrust notification rules during its bid for Owens-Corning. The firm did not admit wrongdoing, and Sigoloff said Wickes paid the fine to avoid the cost of litigation.

That same year, Sigoloff attempted to lead a management buyout of Wickes, but he dropped the plan when earnings proved disappointing. The company then was sold to an investor group and Sigoloff abruptly quit.

In 1989, he took on L.J. Hooker--a retailer whose units included the New York department store chain Bonwit Teller--but he was not able to turn it around. Sigoloff left in 1992, saying the company was in much worse shape when he took over than he had been led to believe.

Sigoloff has since run a Santa Monica management consulting firm and served on corporate boards.

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The Ming the Merciless image is not the true Sigoloff, according to Michael Sitrick, a longtime spokesman for Sigoloff who has played a prominent role himself in Orange County’s recovery efforts.

Sitrick said the real Sandy Sigoloff is the man who, when Wickes was forced to close its money-losing Aldens mail-order unit in Chicago, pleaded with the bankruptcy judge to allow better severance packages than the bankruptcy code allowed. Sigoloff, he said, personally wrote letters to major Chicago employers trying to find jobs for laid-off workers.

“This is typical of the way Sandy works,” Sitrick said. “One of the things that people need to understand about Sandy is, although he makes tough decisions, he is very compassionate about the people those decisions affect.”

* UNDER FIRE: County auditor-controller faces new, tough scrutiny. A3