OFFICE AUTOPSY : Successor to Flamboyant Coroner Noguchi Target of Mismanagement Charges

It was just a few years ago that Los Angeles County’s self-styled “Coroner to the Stars,” Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, was demoted for poor management of the busy medical examiner/coroner’s office.

After a series of court battles in which Noguchi failed to get back his job, the flamboyant former coroner settled into a job as a pathologist at County-USC Medical Center. Now, his successor, Ronald N. Kornblum, who took over the office in 1982, finds himself and his agency under intense scrutiny by county and outside investigators.

Once again, there are allegations of poor management and criminal activity. Some of the scrutiny was initiated by Kornblum himself, who hired a special investigator to look into reports of wrongdoing.

Consulting Team Hired

How well the coroner’s office is managed is being studied by the county auditor-controller’s office and a private management-consulting team hired by the Board of Supervisors in June in response to growing complaints. The aim of the private firm’s study is to determine whether the office is “providing effective and efficient services.”

The district attorney’s office is investigating whether coroner’s office employees helped mortuaries perpetuate a double-billing fraud involving indigent veterans. Another case involves drivers for a defunct trucking firm who were using phony county identification cards.

Other incidents referred to the district attorney’s office include:

- Possible thefts from bodies by a coroner’s investigator.

- Illegal use of a coroner’s identification card to free someone from jail in Mexico.

- Possible kickbacks to a coroner’s employee from a private firm that finds heirs.

- The discovery of a coroner’s employee with burglar’s tools near a looted Los Angeles residence from which a body had recently been removed.

- The arrest of a coroner’s investigative aide in a Memphis, Tenn., airport in the company of a person with a large amount of cocaine.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert H. MacKenzie, who works in the prosecutor’s major frauds unit, is in charge of all criminal inquiries involving the coroner. He declined to be interviewed.

Some Blame Kornblum

But one former coroner’s employee, who has been cooperating with investigators, told The Times: “There are people in the coroner’s office who should be in jail right now.”

Some blame Kornblum for the department’s troubles.

Among them is Dr. Sharon I. Schnittker, a deputy medical examiner for 14 years who resigned last fall to work for the Utah Medical Examiner.

“He’s extremely aloof,” Schnittker said. “He didn’t attend doctors’ meetings. It was very difficult to discuss ongoing problems with him. . . . For me it just reached an intolerable level. I found the whole environment just totally chaotic.”

Not His Strong Suit

Kornblum acknowledges that administration is not his strong suit. “I’m a scientific person,” he said. As for his administrative abilities, he said: “I’ve never had any formal training. If I have an Achilles’ heel, that’s where it is.”

But his bosses apparently disagree. Given the pressures that Kornblum must endure in the face of a growing workload and the problems he inherited from the Noguchi era, the current coroner has done remarkably well, some officials said.

“In my opinion, Dr. Kornblum has done an excellent job in running a very difficult department,” said Richard B. Dixon, the county’s chief administrative officer. “He gets high marks as a pathologist and, given the constraints, high marks as an administrator.”

For the last three years, county agency heads have been rated on their performances and given pay raises by the Board of Supervisors based on these evaluations. Dixon said performance ratings played a role in raising Kornblum’s salary to its current annual level of about $118,000 from $103,000, his pay level when he was named permanent coroner on May 29, 1987.

‘Performing Satisfactorily’

“It’s clear he has been performing satisfactorily or he would not have received the increases he got,” Dixon said.

Earlier this year, Dixon said, the coroner’s office filled the long-dormant post of chief deputy, giving the office a full-time administrator.

During Noguchi’s 15 years as coroner, he frequently clashed with county supervisors over his running of the department. Given to holding press conferences whenever celebrities became coroner’s cases and to taking on lots of outside consulting work, Noguchi headed a department that was “basically running itself,” according to a county auditor. The office had a big backlog of cases, the auditor found, and a lax security system had apparently allowed coroner’s employees to steal valuables and drugs from bodies and death scenes.

Kornblum heads what has become the nation’s third-busiest coroner’s office, behind New York City and Chicago’s Cook County. It handled 17,825 cases last year. Its 16 doctors, including Kornblum, performed 9,027 post-mortems, including 6,218 autopsies.

The office has 181 employees and a budget of $10 million. Given his department’s increased workload, Kornblum won an extra $729,000 this year from the supervisors. “We’ve got too many cases to handle. We need more staff,” he said.

Not Too Worried

Kornblum, 55, told The Times he was “not really too worried” about the current investigations.

One reason Noguchi got into hot water was his penchant for taking on consulting work and ordering his employees to help him conduct private research. His critics complained that it interfered with the coroner’s performance.

Earlier this year, Kornblum disclosed in court testimony that he had asked his niece, who works in a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department laboratory, to test a suspected murder weapon for blood. At the time, Kornblum was testifying as a $150-an-hour consultant in an Orange County murder case.

“It’s true,” Kornblum told a reporter. “It was not a very wise thing to do. I thought it was the quickest way to resolve the case.” He added that he does consulting work “two or three times a year.”

Kornblum said his niece did the work on her own time.

Hired by Noguchi

A graduate of UC San Francisco Medical School, the former Ventura County coroner was hired by Noguchi as his chief of forensic medicine in 1980.

Kornblum believes that much of the current controversy about the department stems from his hiring last March of Karl Harris, who has both an extensive educational background, including a doctorate in psychology, and law enforcement experience as chief of the police force that protects the campuses of Los Angeles’ community colleges.

Kornblum made Harris, 57, his assistant chief of investigations and then, almost immediately, gave him a green light to form a special internal investigative unit amid reports of internal wrongdoing.

Potential Fraud

It was not long before Harris’ sleuthing crew presented Kornblum with a potential fraud case involving the burial of indigent veterans. Harris uncovered evidence that some mortuaries, with the help of coroner’s employees, were billing the county and the Veterans Administration for the cremation and mortuary expenses of poor veterans.

Under the alleged scam, a mortuary would first collect approximately $400 per body from the county for burial costs. Then, with authorization from a contact inside the coroner’s office, the mortuary would also put in for burial benefits to the Veterans Administration--without reimbursing the county.

In this way, a dishonest mortuary could pick up as much as $1,400 per body, said one former coroner’s investigator.

Both the county auditor and the district attorney’s office are investigating the allegations. Assisting them is the investigative arm of the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Secret Service, according to an informed source.

With Kornblum’s blessing, Harris’ unit met more than a year ago with the county chief administrative officer’s head of special investigations, Harry Koulos, on the alleged veterans scam. Koulos relayed the information to the county auditor and the district attorney. Officials do not know how many bodies might have been involved.

Phony Identification Cards

Harris’ crew also found that drivers for the defunct trucking firm, Central Transportation of Sunland, were using phony county identification cards when they picked up bodies at homes and hospitals. Officials of the firm, hired without a contract to reduce some of the coroner’s drivers’ workload, said they had the cards printed to cut the red tape involved in taking possession of bodies.

Firm officials said they had authorization to have the cards printed from a coroner’s official, Gary Siglar, who had not obtained county identification cards for Central Transportation’s drivers. Siglar denied giving such authorization.

In addition, authorities are investigating whether any of Central Transportation’s drivers, some of whom have felony records, had anything to do with burglaries at the homes where they had picked up bodies.

Between May, 1988, and last February, continuing internal investigations turned up about 80 problems, ranging from alleged criminal wrongdoing to shoddy work, a knowledgeable source told The Times. The individual, a key source for government investigators, asked for anonymity.

Harris and Kornblum, meanwhile, had a falling out and Harris left at the end of 1988. “Kornblum had an opportunity to clean house and make it a squeaky-clean department,” said Harris, who believes he was forced out for doing his job too well. “He just dropped the ball because he fears publicity. He just covered it up.”

‘Probably a Mistake’

Kornblum, however, said Harris ran amok.

“Frankly, hiring (Harris) was probably a mistake,” Kornblum said. “Unfortunately, he took a bad situation and made it worse. . . . It was my own fault for allowing it to happen. (Harris’ internal investigative group) became their own little private Gestapo.”

A final determination of any wrongdoing on the part of any coroner’s employee may be months away.

J. Tyler McCauley, the veteran chief of the county’s audit division, is coordinating the audit. The county staff work is being augmented by the Harvey M. Rose Accountancy Corp., which is preparing a $180,000 management study due by mid-November.

Rose, a former California auditor-general, and his San Francisco-based firm have a long track record.

“We’ve done work for 28 grand juries in 16 counties since 1982,” Rose said. “My staff lives, eats and breathes government operations.”

Three outside experts are working with Rose’s staff:

- Dr. Richard Mason, forensic pathologist for the Santa Cruz County sheriff-coroner, will study the efficiency of the coroner’s doctors.

- Dr. Randall C. Baselt, director of the Chemical Toxicology Institute of Foster City, will analyze the coroner’s lab work.

- Wesley Johnson, a retired Santa Clara County assistant sheriff, will evaluate the coroner’s investigations.

Times Community Correspondent Karen Denne contributed to this article.