Well-Connected Builder Battles in L.A., Bay Area

Public works construction magnate Ron Tutor has lived by a simple, merciless creed: "We ask no quarter. We give no quarter."

Now that is coming back to haunt him.

Tutor has made big marks on California's landscape while amassing hundreds of millions of dollars, a yacht he rents out for hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, and a Boeing 737 jetliner.

In Los Angeles alone, he has built or rebuilt the Central Library, the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, the Coliseum, the new federal courthouse, the Alameda Corridor and most of Metro Rail.

Sharp and determined, he can speak for hours in perfect sentences and clearly remember details of business transactions from years ago. He is quick to turn others' mistakes to his advantage.

He also is politically astute and well-connected. Records show that Tutor spent more than $75,000 to help elect James K. Hahn mayor of Los Angeles, and donated $50,000 to a cause favored by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. When Gov. Gray Davis needs to get somewhere quickly, Tutor's private jet is at his disposal. But records show that Tutor has not voted in a county, state or federal election since 1994.

Though Tutor treats his friends well, he is unremittingly contentious with his adversaries. Today he is struggling to fend off the city of San Francisco and Southern California's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, both of which have launched potentially catastrophic challenges to some of his business practices.

He also has found time to sue a small airport near his Idaho vacation home. Officials there had the nerve to tell him his plane was too heavy to land.

The MTA charges that Tutor is dishonest, and has pursued him in court with a sustained legal effort, hiring a team of lawyers with the patience and economic wherewithal to scour tens of thousands of highly technical documents -- years after the fact -- looking for undetected mistakes they can use against him.

Lawyers are nibbling at him, finding evidence that suggests, to them at least, that his company inflated bills by making a series of false claims. Tutor rails that the lawyers are not only wrong, they are also liars.

"You've got to understand that lawyers lie," he said recently. "If you don't understand that, we're wasting this whole morning."

His chief bete noir is a private attorney hired by the MTA , David Casselman, who beat him in a Superior Court trial in 2001. In that case, Tutor-Saliba, which Tutor owns, was ordered to pay the transit agency $30 million.