He is the biggest developer in Marina del Rey, owner of hotels, apartment houses, offices, restaurants, shops and boat slips.
Yet when Abraham M. Lurie became delinquent on nearly $1 million in property taxes last year, the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, which oversees the marina, claims it knew nothing about it.
Months after private lenders declared him in default on more than $1 million in loans secured by his county leases, the Department of Beaches and Harbors professed to know nothing about it.
And when Lurie needed the department's approval to sell nearly half of his holdings to mystery foreign investors in order to save himself from financial ruin, the agency made no effort to find out who they were.
For Los Angeles County, the risk of ignorance was substantial.
A financial collapse of Lurie's operation could have depressed county revenues and real estate values throughout the marina. But Department of Beaches and Harbors Deputy Director Chris Klinger conceded:
"I had never been aware he was having those sorts of problems."
His boss, Director Ted Reed, blamed the department's ignorance of Lurie's tax delinquency on "a hole in the system."
Lurie's problems surfaced when The Times sought to determine the identities of his secret foreign partners in a transaction approved last August by the Board of Supervisors.
In an article Sunday, The Times reported that the marina's new leaseholders are members of a Middle Eastern investment group headed by billionaire Saudi Arabian businessmen and arms brokers--Khalid and Abdul Aziz Al-Ibrahim, brothers-in-law of King Fahd.
But the inquiry also shed new light on how the county manages the marina and on the long and often cozy relationship between the county and Lurie, a major campaign contributor to the supervisors.
The mammoth Marina del Rey project began in the early 1960s, conceived as a novel partnership between government and private enterprise that would give taxpayers a share of the profits. For some of the early investors, profits were elusive.
Lurie acquired his first marina properties in 1968 by taking over the foreclosed leaseholds of some of those pioneer investors. Eventually, he became the largest leaseholder in the marina, developing his new waterfront properties with hotels, restaurants, shops, boat slips and tourist facilities.
