Agents

The adjective du jour is "extraordinary." Scott Boras uses a thesaurus better than anyone in baseball. He has advertised players as special, as premium, as iconic. For Stephen Strasburg, and for Boras' mission to get him paid as if he were a free agent rather than a draft pick, baseball's most powerful agent has chosen "extraordinary." As in: "The equation of how an extraordinary talent fits in really has little or nothing to do with the other aspects of the draft."

A new exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art features six grainy, black-and-white ink-jet prints showing passports used by CIA agents involved in the widely reported 2003 abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, Italy. The CIA station chief claimed Abu Omar had perhaps fled to the Balkans, but Italian authorities later charged that the cleric had been taken to two American military bases and then transferred to Egypt, where he underwent torture. The printed passport data, said to have been retrieved from Italian hotels where the American agents stayed, made me wonder two things: First, could foreign agents -- say, from Spain -- be checking into California hotels right now with falsified documents, preparing to kidnap UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo to stand trial for war crimes in international court?

The board president of the nation's biggest public employee pension fund is urging his fellow directors to avoid private meetings with go-betweens who help pitch private-equity investments to the fund. The California Public Employees' Retirement System board has ordered an outside investigation of the role of those intermediaries, known as placement agents, in the agency's massive investments, and board President Rob Feckner said members should not associate with the agents, at least for now. Feckner's memo, issued Thursday afternoon, came as his agency is buffeted by growing concerns about the role of intermediaries, money and influence in CalPERS decisions and calls for reforms in the way CalPERS handles its affairs.

For Florence Mattar, each open house has a routine. She drives around the neighborhood placing signs, brings in fresh flowers, stocks the refrigerator with bottled water and sets out a sign-in sheet. Similar scenes play out across Southern California every weekend, with one expensive exception. The Tuscan-style house she is "sitting," to use the industry term, is listed at $21.9 million. And anyone is welcome to see it. All 9,691 square feet of it. Whether spurred by the down housing market, the opportunity to promote themselves or a determination to make a sale, a select group of area real estate agents has raised the bar on public open houses above $10 million -- to $12.9 million in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Brentwood Park, $18.9 million in Pacific Palisades and even higher in the "bird streets" area of the Hollywood Hills, where Mattar's reclaimed stone, brick and wood listing sits serenely at the end of a cypress-lined driveway.

A La Cañada Flintridge couple trying to save their home from foreclosure were arrested along with three others on suspicion of beating, torturing and robbing a pair of loan modification agents they believed had done nothing to help them rescue the residence. Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, both 52, allegedly sought mortgage assistance from Lamond Dean and Luis Garcia, two loan modification specialists, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. Authorities said the homeowners thought agents had taken their money and done nothing to help them.

When big investment firms want to tap public pension funds for money, they often put in a call to Alfred J.R. Villalobos. From a modest office near Lake Tahoe's casinos, Villalobos has spent years helping Wall Street players like Apollo Management gain access to the vast wealth held by the California Public Employees' Retirement System and other funds. By his own estimate, Villalobos netted his clients at least $16 billion in capital through 2005. His two firms have earned about $53 million in fees from investment funds that did business with CalPERS over the last seven years, records show, a sum that impresses even hardened veterans of state politics.

In what federal prosecutors described as the longest sentence ever imposed for a financial crime in Southern California, a Riverside County man was sentenced today to 100 years in prison for operating a three-year Ponzi scheme that bilked investors of about $35 million. Richard Monroe Harkless, 65, who ran the scheme from 2000 to 2003 through a company he called MX Factors, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips in federal court in Riverside. In letters to the judge, victims of the massive scheme said they were forced to file for bankruptcy protection, put off medical operations or postpone retirement as a result of their losses.

Highly paid financial intermediaries at the center of a growing uproar over the way California's huge public pension plan invests its money may soon be required to register as government lobbyists and regularly report their fees and clients. In recent months, disclosures have shown that some of these politically connected intermediaries, known as placement agents, are paid millions of dollars to help private-equity investment firms win lucrative contracts with the California Public Employees' Retirement System -- the $200-billion fund known as CalPERS -- and other government pension funds.

When the Minnesota Twins selected left-hander Eddie Bane with the 11th pick in the 1973 draft, the contract negotiations lasted only slightly longer than it took Bane to say "yes." And three weeks after his last college game he was living his dream, pitching in the major leagues in front of a sellout crowd of nearly 46,000 at Metropolitan Stadium. It's been nearly three months since Stephen Strasburg, the top pick in the June draft, pitched his last game for San Diego State.