Consultants

USC football Coach Pete Carroll employed a former NFL tactician last season to help with the team's punting and kicking game, an arrangement that may have violated NCAA rules that prohibit consultants from coaching, The Times has learned. Carroll's action could widen a continuing investigation by the NCAA, the governing body of major college sports, which has been looking at USC football for more than three years and the school's basketball program for the last year.

The night Darrell Steinberg was chosen to be the next leader of the California Senate, his campaign consultant, Richie Ross, sent out a flurry of enthusiastic e-mails to people in his political network. "I am pleased that my 10-year client and friend" has been elected the next Senate president pro tem, Ross wrote, adding that Steinberg's ascension would "be good for the issues we care about."

The Los Angeles County district attorney's Public Integrity Unit is reviewing whether a high-level consultant for the Los Angeles Unified School District's building program engaged in a conflict of interest. David Demerjian, head of the unit, said Wednesday that his office has been looking at Bassam Raslan, a district regional director of construction and an owner of TBI Associates, which he co-founded to supply staff to the district's $20-billion school construction effort.

In brief comments on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, former President Clinton said that his fundraising relationship with a Chinese company involved in Internet censorship did not pose a potential conflict of interest for his wife's presidential campaign. Even though the Chinese Web firm, Alibaba Inc., recently carried a government-issued Internet "wanted notice" urging the arrest of Tibetan protesters, he said that he backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's tough words on China.

When a Santa Barbara County prosecutor decided to give a filmmaker his files on fugitive Jesse James Hollywood, he figured that the publicity might help catch the accused killer. Instead, the prosecutor's work on the film "Alpha Dog" spurred an appellate court to remove him from the case on the grounds that he participated in "the public vilification" of a man who was to stand trial for an alleged murder that could bring the death penalty.

A prominent Emory University psychiatrist received at least $2.8 million in consulting fees from companies whose drugs he was evaluating and failed to report a third of it, congressional investigators studying medical conflicts of interest said Friday. The allegations against Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, the latest in a series of such charges, are the most striking to emerge from the probe, which seems likely to alter the cozy relationships between prominent academics and the drug industry.

When Kimberlee Heale was a little girl growing up in Covina and San Diego, she used to ask her father, a firefighter, to describe traffic accidents. By the time she took a tour of the FBI Crime Lab as an eighth-grader, she knew that a career in forensics was for her. "It was just the whole idea behind being able to put pieces of a puzzle together to figure out what somebody did," she says. "It was pretty interesting to me."

The Orange County Great Park board voted this week to pay $285,560 to a fundraising consulting firm to help determine how to raise millions to help pay for improvements at the public park, which remains largely undeveloped. The money will pay Washington, D.C.-based Chora LLC to study how the park board might raise $22 million to pay for a pod-shaped shelter, palm tree court and performance area in a small "preview park," as well as more studies.

California's former top alcohol regulator has taken a job advising lawyers for the industry he regulated until his retirement in August. Jerry Jolly, a 31-year veteran of the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, began work this week as a consultant to the wine, beer and spirits-industry practice of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a San Francisco law firm with offices worldwide, including Sacramento.

Lydia Kennard, the former Los Angeles airports director who resigned at the end of January to work for an aviation-related real estate company, was granted a lucrative consulting contract Monday. Calling Kennard a "superstar" and "not replicable," the city Board of Airport Commissioners approved the one-year contract, with a two-year extension option, at its regular meeting. The board had modified its original deal, however, after about a dozen people spoke against bringing Kennard back.