Trusteeships

Question: Are you stating now that he left the party before it was over? Answer: When Liberace leaves . . . the party is over. That is what I am saying. --Dorothy McMahon, Liberace's maid, testifying about pianist's last Christmas. Celebrity is to Las Vegas what steel is to Pittsburgh. Here in the kingdom of Wayne and Frank, a city of excessive light and hyperbole, entertainers are fed to the strip's neon maw and made over as celebrities, as living legends. Immortals.

U.S. District Court Judge Manuel L. Real, who has endured a rare public censure by the federal judiciary, the threat of impeachment and removal from several cases for questionable conduct, now faces demands to account for $5 million or more in apparently missing trust funds. Lawyers for rival Filipino groups laying claim to the seized assets of late Philippines Dictator Ferdinand Marcos have petitioned a federal appeals court to demand that Real provide a detailed accounting of $35.

The Teamsters Union has made a counteroffer to the government in an attempt to settle the massive racketeering suit filed against the union by the Justice Department last June, according to knowledgeable sources. The union's proposal, as might be expected, would give the government considerably less control over the union than two Justice Department settlement offers that the Teamsters board rejected within the last five weeks.

In an unexpected twist, a former Labor secretary tapped to resolve a dispute between two high-profile labor leaders essentially rendered a split decision Thursday. At issue was whether the officers of United Healthcare Workers-West, based in Oakland, broke union rules when they set up a tax-exempt fund for patient education, which the Service Employees International Union said was a secret war chest in a fight against its parent union.

The Teamsters Union has launched a political and public relations counteroffensive in an attempt to head off a possible Justice Department takeover of the 1.7-million-member union. On Sunday and Monday, the union placed full-page ads in 15 newspapers around the country, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, asserting that a court-ordered trusteeship of the union would be no different than suppression of the Solidarity movement by the government in Poland.

It's simple mathematics: If you invested $1 in 1952, and your investment kept pace with the rate of inflation--nothing more, nothing less--that dollar would be worth $5.29 today. That's a 429% increase. So how come the $2-million trust fund a Berkeley woman and six members of her family inherited in 1952 is worth "only" $3.2 million today--a 63% rate of return over the last four decades? The question seems simple, but the bank that administers the trust didn't want to answer it.

Liberace's attorney testified Tuesday that he made more than $400,000 in legal fees in 1987 for his work on the late entertainer's estate and trusts. Beverly Hills attorney Joel Strote defended the fees as reasonable for the amount of work he did as executor of Liberace's estate and trustee for two trusts set up by the famed pianist. "This was anything but a windfall," said Strote, who billed the estate $58,475 in one month alone.

Citing illegal gambling activities, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren's office took on the federal government Tuesday, recommending license revocation for the federally appointed trustee and ordering license cancellations for three top managers of the Bicycle Club poker parlor in Bell Gardens.

Three years ago, Harris Enterprises Inc., which owns the Camarillo Daily News and 50% interests in the Simi Valley Enterprise and the Moorpark News-Mirror, put itself up for sale. Members of the founding family of the Hutchinson, Kan.-based company, who own a majority of Harris' stock, wanted to diversify their holdings, and media properties at the time were fetching handsome prices. Harris' suitors included Thomson Newspapers and Ingersoll Publications.

The campaign recently started by a major union against Bank of America just might serve as an intriguing example of how billions of dollars in workers' pension funds can be used as an alternative to strikes in many instances.

This West African nation, where child soldiers once roamed the countryside in a grotesque civil war and militants chopped off limbs to terrorize the population, sometimes seems like a rare success in international efforts to rebuild failed states. Peacekeepers disarmed 70,000 combatants and pulled out last year with the country at peace. The rebel leader is dead.

Two newly elected trustees for Glendale Community College said their goal was to maintain a high level of education despite state budget cuts that will severely limit the number of classes offered at the 25,000-student campus. "When you cut classes, it adversely affects the educational plans for the students and delays their life," Ara James Najarian, a Glendale attorney, said Wednesday. "They plan to go on to a UC school and they can't because they get stuck on a community campus."

Two of Enron Corp.'s creditors asked a judge to strip the company's top management of power by ordering an independent trustee to run the energy trader as it reorganizes under the largest-ever Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The Regents of the University of California and the Absolute Recovery Hedge Fund said in court papers filed late Friday that Enron's "management has inherent conflicts of interest" that are detrimental to the Houston-based company. They asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur J.

Gov. Gray Davis has appointed Sacramento attorney Kyriakos Tsakopoulos as a trustee of the California State University system, the governor's office announced Wednesday. Tsakopoulos, 31, is executive vice president and general counsel of AKT Development, a Sacramento land development firm. His appointment must be confirmed by the California Senate. The Cal State board of trustees has 24 voting members. If Tsakopoulos is confirmed, two vacancies will remain.

Mirroring a law passed to benefit Holocaust victims two years ago, Gov. Gray Davis has signed legislation that will allow victims of the Armenian genocide and their heirs to pursue unpaid insurance claims in California courts. The bill by state Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno) allows victims of the genocide at the hands of Turks from 1915 to 1923 to file suits in California against insurers to recover money allegedly owed from policies.

David Pierpont Gardner, president emeritus of the University of California and the University of Utah, has been elected chairman of the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Gardner succeeds Robert F. Erburu, who was named chairman emeritus after completing his third four-year term on the board and seven years as chairman on June 30. Meanwhile, two new members were elected to the board of trustees: Barbara Fleischman and Luis Nogales.

Federal prosecutors, responding to a recent jury verdict rejecting government charges that Teamsters Union elections were corrupted by organized crime, are planning to sharply cut back an unprecedented effort to take over the nation's largest union in an attempt to rid it of alleged mob influence, The Times learned Wednesday. Government sources said that U.S. Atty. Rudolph W.

In the wake of state legislation passed this week, the Compton Unified School District is on the verge of an unprecedented state takeover on the grounds that the system has failed to properly educate its students. Unless Gov. Pete Wilson vetoes a bill approved by the California Legislature on Monday, a state-appointed trustee could take over Compton Unified as early as Jan. 1, 1993.

The amount of money allegedly stolen by a private Riverside conservator and her attorney from the estates they managed has grown to nearly $1 million, according to grand jury indictments announced Monday by the Riverside County district attorney's office. The updated prosecution of Bonnie J.

Native Hawaiian leaders are ratcheting up efforts to gain federal recognition as a sovereign people following the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated their special voting rights. Last week, the justices struck down as unconstitutional the state's practice of allowing only those people with native Hawaiian blood to vote for the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The board oversees a $300-million fund to benefit native Hawaiians.