Mismanagement

Altair Maine said he was so little supervised in his first few years of teaching at North Hollywood High School that he could "easily have shown a movie in class every day and earned tenure nonetheless." Before second-grade teacher Kimberly Patterson received tenure and the ironclad job protections it provides, she said, "my principal never set foot in my classroom while I was teaching." And when Virgil Middle School teacher Roberto Gonzalez came up for tenure, he discovered there was no evaluation for him on file.

A nonprofit agency that has managed taxicabs at Los Angeles International Airport for years has been recommended for another LAX contract, although a 2007 city audit found that the company had mismanaged money and violated state workers' compensation laws. After evaluating competing proposals from two companies, the staff of Los Angeles World Airports recommended Friday that airport commissioners at the Jan. 11 meeting award a new five-year concession contract to Authorized Taxicab Supervision Inc. An evaluation panel concluded that the firm was the most qualified bidder.

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced it would pay Native Americans $3.4 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed the federal government cheated tribes for more than a century of royalties for oil, mineral and other leases. The settlement ends a 13-year legal battle that led to 3,600 filings, millions of pages of discovery documents and 11 separate appellate decisions. It is the largest settlement Native Americans have ever received from the federal government, eclipsing the sum of all previous settlements, according to the plaintiff's lawyers.

Anyone who has spent time in or around government, from the deeply embedded bureaucrat to the young policy wonk, knows that there are two important issues in funding a public program. One, is it getting enough money? Two, is the money being spent wisely? On both counts, California's method of financing its schools gets a big fat F. On a per-pupil basis, our schools are among the most poorly funded in the country, and no one can be sure that the money they do get serves its purpose.

Los Angeles Police chief-designate Charlie Beck is widely admired as a capable manager who has tackled some of the department's thorniest issues with a steady hand and a disarming personality. He is credited with cleaning up the Rampart Division, ferreting out disarray in the crime lab and championing greater transparency and accountability in the department. But a Times review of court records found one incident over his 32-year career in which Beck was accused of mishandling a crisis, stifling reform and covering up the misuse of taxpayer money.

Dodgers fans didn't need to witness this week's divorce wrecking ball to feel the rubble and cough the dust. By the time Frank and Jamie McCourt chose to publicly level their marriage, their ownership legacy had already been disintegrating. To those who watched the Dodgers fall three wins short of a World Series for the second consecutive season, perhaps none of the salacious allegations are as disturbing as the team's inability to trade for Cliff Lee. To those who heard about the cleanup hitter taking a shower while his teammates took a bath, perhaps none of the ugly finger-pointing is as unsettling as the ownership's coddling of Manny Ramirez.

Under a federal program to transform government facilities into models of energy efficiency, Honeywell International Inc. came calling on Army commanders here with a deal to replace the base's decades-old steam power plant. The company proposed installing millions of dollars in new heating equipment and hooking the base to the local power grid -- all free in exchange for the company getting the bulk of future energy savings. It was precisely the kind of deal that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington were pushing at facilities across the country -- modernizing aging machinery without the government spending any money of its own. But today, the Ft. Richardson deal, one of the largest among hundreds of similar contracts, has sunk into a morass of accounting disputes and allegations of misconduct.

The last time Staples Center was filled to capacity for a prominent fight that attracted a national television audience, the insistence of one observant trainer saved the California State Athletic Commission from potentially suffering more than embarrassment. That was the night two hardened, plaster-caked inserts were to be wrapped into the hands of Antonio Margarito as he prepared to defend his world welterweight title against Shane Mosley. "I know for a fact that if I wouldn't have been there saying something, he would've walked right into that ring," said Nazim Richardson, Mosley's veteran trainer.

Insurers have agreed to pay $118 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing Broadcom Corp. officials of mismanagement and unjust enrichment through the misdating of stock options. The settlement doesn't cover co-founders Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III. Broadcom disclosed the agreement with its providers of insurance covering corporate officers and directors in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Friday. The accord would settle a lawsuit brought by investors on behalf of the Irvine microchip firm, whose $2.2-billion restatement of its financial results in January 2007 was the largest by a U.S. company in a wave of option-misdating scandals.

The leader of an embattled South Los Angeles gang intervention agency has pledged to press on with his work, even as he conceded that his agency is about to lose its contract in a second pocket of the city, two weeks after City Hall officials severed ties with him. "It's in God's hands now," said Kevin Mustafa Fletcher, a former member of the Swan gang and the executive director of Unity T.W.O., one of the city's more high-profile gang intervention agencies. In an impassioned three-hour interview at his Avalon Boulevard headquarters Wednesday, Fletcher said he had been unfairly targeted -- swept up in politics and abandoned by former allies who are themselves looking to cash in on the flood of public money that the city is setting aside for gang intervention.