Nonprofit Organizations

In an industrial zone a few blocks off the 101 Freeway, the Tarzana Treatment Center relies on government contracts and nonprofit tax status to serve drug addicts in poverty or trouble with the law. A clerk sits behind protective glass in the lobby. Down a hallway in the detox wing, down-and-out men are curled on their cots. The coat hooks in the rooms flip down so patients can't hang themselves. It hardly seems like the headquarters of a $45-million-a-year business.

Tarzana Treatment Center, the largest publicly funded provider of drug rehabilitation in Los Angeles County, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond what the law allows to lease buildings from its own executives and board members over the last year, according to a report by county auditors. The review was ordered by county supervisors in June after a Times story revealed that executives at the nonprofit receive compensation that is unusually high for the industry and benefit from other lucrative financial arrangements.

Their name, the Businessmen, was derived from the slang term "taking care of business." They were among several dominant African American gangs -- the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Del Vikings -- in the early 1960s in the neighborhood then known as South-Central: the precursors to the Bloods and the Crips. Now, the Businessmen of South Park have traded their fedoras for bifocals, and their whiskers are gray.

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama once arranged for a $200,000 grant to jump-start an urban venture capital fund for a nonprofit group run by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The state grant was the sort of faith-based initiative now at the center of a rift between Jackson and Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Obama's embrace of this approach, championed by President Bush, led Jackson to lash out at his fellow Democrat this week.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has asked the city to block the eviction of a nonprofit organization from a city-owned building that City Councilman Bernard C. Parks said was illegally being used by the group to organize voters against his bid for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. For eight years, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education's headquarters has been at 1715 W. Florence Ave.

Federal authorities investigating a nonprofit program run by mayoral candidate and former NBA star Kevin Johnson have suspended its funding after finding possible criminal and financial irregularities, officials announced Thursday. Johnson and his St. Hope Academy have been barred from receiving or spending federal funds for up to a year or until the ongoing investigation is concluded.

Debra Akello watched in horror as television news reports flashed images of her Kenyan countrymen engaged in bloody ethnic battles. "Do you see what's happening in my country?" a distraught Akello asked her close friend and mentor Joy Dorsey Burton. "People are dying. People are being displaced from their homes. . . . And many don't have access to medical care."

A nonprofit housing organization has received a federal tax exemption retroactive to 2004 despite being linked to a corruption investigation into the Los Angeles labor union that founded it, according to Internal Revenue Service records and officials. The charity had been operating without an exemption since the Service Employees International Union local launched it more than four years ago.

A nonprofit organization founded by California's largest union local reported spending nothing on its charitable purpose -- to develop housing for low-income workers -- during at least two of the four years it has been operating, federal records show.

First it was the curfew. Then the checkpoints and the car bombs. Later, it was the Iraqis' fear of being seen entering a compound occupied by foreigners. Eventually, for the U.S. nonprofit organization training Iraqi healthcare workers, the risks outweighed the returns. Iraqis couldn't come to them. Americans couldn't go to the Iraqis. So to avoid working in Baghdad, RTI International moved classes to Jordan and Egypt, flying trainees back and forth.