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Life & Times Transcript

05/12/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Mike Carona was called America's sheriff, so why are three challengers gunning for him in the Orange County election?

Mike Carona>> We just finished our fifth annual citizens survey. Ninety-five percent of the citizens that we surveyed believe that Orange County is a safe place to live. Ninety-eight percent have a confidence in the Sheriff's Department.

Val Zavala>> And then, how were some of the most famous paintings in Europe returned to their rightful owner? A story of loss with a happy ending.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> Orange County Sheriff, Mike Carona, is running hard to keep his job. He went from media darling to the target of bad press and now he wants a third term, but can he survive the barrage of criticism from three other candidates? Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, talks to all the men who would love to be head of the second largest Sheriff's Department in California.

Roger Cooper>> For almost eight years now, Mike Carona has been the Sheriff of Orange County. For a while, he was a rising star in Republican politics. His name was mentioned for Lieutenant Governor and even United States Senator. CNN's Larry King dubbed him America's Sheriff after the swift arrest in the abduction and murder of little Samantha Runnion.

But today, Carona is in a far less flattering political light. The last time Sheriff Mike Carona ran for reelection, he was unopposed. This time out, he has three challengers, three challengers who think this time the sheriff is vulnerable. Carona got the Republican party's endorsement only after a second close vote. Then the union representing the deputies in Carona's own department endorsed a challenger. What's happened to America's Sheriff?

Peggy Lowe>> I think that Sheriff Carona was really riding a very high flight up until a couple of years ago when allegations started surfacing about corruption that had bubbled up within his department.

Roger Cooper>> Orange County Register reporter, Peggy Lowe, points to a long string of negative developments.

Peggy Lowe>> He fired his number two man, a guy named George Jaramillo, and since then, just charge after charge has come out alleging some criminal and some unethical things in the Sheriff's Department and the sheriff has really suffered for that reason.

Roger Cooper>> So who would like Carona's job? His challengers are Bill Hunt, a Sheriff's Lieutenant who oversees San Clemente policing. It was Hunt who won the deputies' union's endorsement.

Bill Hunt>> We're at a crossroads with the Sheriff's Department right now. We're going to go one direction or another.

Roger Cooper>> Ralph Martin is an Orange County resident who has thirty-two years experience with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department where he's a Commander.

Ralph Martin>> I came to the conclusion that they need a wholesale change in leadership for the many changes that need to be made.

Roger Cooper>> And Bob Alcaraz, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff Sergeant who has thirty years experience.

Bob Alcaraz>> Absolutely, the Orange County Sheriff's leadership needs to change.

Roger Cooper>> What's Carona's response? He maintains that political opponents are re-circulating bad press over and over again.

Mike Carona>> Well, I think that's just it. They've hit the headlines so much. There are a number of people out there who want to keep the negative things that have occurred in the headlines.

Roger Cooper>> But his opponents say that it's not just headlines that are plaguing Carona, that it's his own leadership.

Ralph Martin>> Or lack of leadership. I think it's about experience and the lack thereof and really a vision for the future.

Bob Alcaraz>> He's not focused. His eye is off the ball. He's not paying attention to a lot of the details.

Bill Hunt>> And I've got a vision to take this department from a good department, which we are with some troubled leadership, and turn it into a great department.

Roger Cooper>> Despite the course of criticism, Carona is fighting back, arguing that his record deserves another term.

Mike Carona>> I've been elected for two terms. I think I've done a great job for this community. Over the last seven years, we've dropped the crime rate to an all-time low. We have some of the safest cities. In fact, if you take an amalgam of the cities patrolled by the Orange County Sheriff's Department of the safest places in California, it's one of the safest places in America to live.

Roger Cooper>> But his opponents say that you can't make public safety a top priority when you're bogged down in political and PR problems.

Ralph Martin>> There needs to be changes first of all starting with, you know, taking us off the front page of the tabloid type section. You're seeing too many things on there that are embarrassing to law enforcement.

Bill Hunt>> We're going to make the organization transparent. We're going to cooperate and open up to the press and to the public that we serve. We work for them. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to focus on our main priority which is public safety. To me, politics takes a back seat to public safety.

Bob Alcaraz>> Simply for me, from my view, if Carona was an applicant for Orange County Sheriff's Department today, his application would not be accepted. He's blaming others. He's not taking responsibility.

Roger Cooper>> There is one decision Carona is taking responsibility for.

Mike Carona>> I take full responsibility for having hired George Jaramillo and I take full responsibility as well for having fired George Jaramillo. I did not know when I terminated him about the corruption issues or the criminal cases that are going on.

Roger Cooper>> Jaramillo is facing bribery charges, accusations he denies, but Lowe says that some of his legal problems have tainted Carona. Any allegation against the sheriff himself?

Peggy Lowe>> There have been some involving the sheriff. For instance, right now he's facing investigation on campaign finance allegations, two claims of sexual harassment. There's an FBI investigation surrounding his department. We're not quite certain of all the details of that. Then, of course, George Jaramillo, this number two guy, is still up on bribery charges. So there's quite a lot that he's defending right now.

Mike Carona>> We've had some issues. George Jaramillo is an issue. We've had other allegations that have been made against me. All those will prove to be false and everybody behind those has a political agenda. The reality is, the community is safe and the department is running well.

Roger Cooper>> But his opponents disagree. They say the investigations don't just distract the staff, they tarnish the department's image.

Bob Alcaraz>> I do believe it's tarnished. I do believe morale is bad. And I do believe the leadership needs to be changed.

Bill Hunt>> It's the issues and the scandals and the problems within the department that our people are being picked on for and that's unacceptable. It needs to be changed.

Ralph Martin>> He brought in unqualified and, might I say, undeserving people into the ranks to be Assistant Sheriff and I think that has caused him all of the troubles that you're seeing.

Bob Alcaraz>> And it's embarrassing and it's a shame to anyone that's wearing a uniform, even retired. I didn't go this long in law enforcement to have this profession blemished so much. It needs to be fixed.

Roger Cooper>> Peggy Lowe says Carona himself has been the main issue in the Sheriff's story, pushing other issues to the side. Is there an issue in this race other than Carona?

Peggy Lowe>> That's a good question. Actually, there are and I don't know if there will be time within this race to look at some very good issues because whatever everyone is talking about are the scandals that are surrounding Carona right now.

Roger Cooper>> Sheriff Carona is trying hard to move the focus from himself to his record in the community.

Mike Carona>> We just finished our fifth annual citizens survey. Ninety-five percent of the citizens that we surveyed believe that Orange County is a safe place to live. Ninety-eight percent have a confidence in the Sheriff's Department.

Roger Cooper>> Will that be enough to convince voters to keep him in office despite his problems? Lowe handicaps the race this way.

Peggy Lowe>> There's been scandal after scandal, but Carona is still the guy to beat. He's the incumbent, he has a million dollar war chest, he's supported by Arnold Schwarzenegger who has a great deal of support, and the challengers aren't that strong. So the odds makers would probably bet on Mike Carona.

Roger Cooper>> And yet, to capture the Sheriff's Office, one candidate would have to dominate, winning more than fifty percent of the vote in the June 6 election. Otherwise, the race will continue into the fall with a runoff between the top two vote-getters. Whoever wins will be taking on a big job as top cop for the ninth largest jail system in the nation and the second largest Sheriff's Department in California. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> He's spent twenty-five years traveling the world documenting the stories of the men and women who survived the Armenian genocide. He wants to capture their stories on film before they're lost forever to history. He himself is more than ninety years old and time is of the essence.

Every day, Michael Hagopian navigates his way through a narrow hallway in his home-based office in Thousand Oaks. He sits down in front of an old Movieola that still cuts film the old-fashioned way. He has spent countless days, months, years here surrounded by shelves filled with work prints, nearly all of them labeled with Armenian names.

Michael Hagopian>> This guy is Armenian. He's in New York.

Val Zavala>> For the past twenty-five years, Hagopian has traveled the world interviewing survivors of the Armenian genocide that happened more than ninety years ago. He has about four hundred interviews on film.

Michael Hagopian>> I felt, with small funds I had, I wanted to use to get the survivors before they died.

Val Zavala>> Can you give us an example of some of the variety of the people?

Michael Hagopian>> Oh, yeah. They're both men and women. The youngest age probably is about seventy-five. I've gotten them up to a hundred five.

Val Zavala>> The documentary is far from finished, but Hagopian has edited a short reel with clips.

>> "Because they knew that my father was quite a religious man, Armenian, and they made me dig up some of the famous celebrities who were buried in the churchyard, dig them up and made me urinate on them."

Michael Hagopian>> One survivor asked me on film, if the Turks wanted to move us out of the war zone because they wanted to prevent us from being in the pathway and save us, why didn't they take their whole family? Why did they leave them there? It doesn't make sense.

Val Zavala>> Once he made a trip to Vermont to interview a survivor who was a hundred five years old.

Michael Hagopian>> So I made a special trip. My associate producer and I got on a plane and we went over there. We set up the cameras and she would not talk.

Val Zavala>> Why? Why not?

Michael Hagopian>> She couldn't talk.

Val Zavala>> Oh, she couldn't talk. Emotionally, you mean?

Michael Hagopian>> Emotionally. Her descendants, her daughter and son, they just couldn't figure it out. It just overcame her.

Val Zavala>> But most survivors were able to speak, sometimes for hours, about their past, recounting even the most barbaric acts.

>> "I saw with my own eyes a woman who didn't have no milk in her breast, so her baby was crying. One of these Turkish soldiers grabbed the baby by the arm, tossed the little thing up into the air and another Turkish soldier caught it with his bayonet on his rifle. She made a little squeak and she was gone."

Val Zavala>> Hagopian himself has a story. He was born in Turkey. His family survived only because his father was a skilled physician.

Michael Hagopian>> He survived because the Turks needed him. He was the best surgeon in town. When the governor got sick or the big moolah, they called him. But they had him on a list. Every time they'd say, "Doctor, we're going to send you with a nice safe caravan." Instinct told him, so he'd say, "Oh, I'll wait for the next one. I got a lot of patients."

Val Zavala>> His family eventually came to America and settled in Fresno. Hagopian went to Berkeley and Harvard and studied political science, so how did he get into filmmaking?

>> "We used to say that this child was born during the Armenian massacre."

Val Zavala>> He was teaching at UCLA when he realized how little good material was available on Armenian history, so in the 1970s, he started making educational films.

>> "The Christians were gathered from their homes and herded outside the towns."

Val Zavala>> Then he moved on to documentaries.

>> "The darkest invention yet devised by nation states: genocide."

Val Zavala>> And in 1979 to help fund his project, he founded the Armenian Film Foundation. The Foundation has produced numerous documentaries on Armenian history.

>> "This collection will be made available to future generations of scholars, universities, libraries and television networks."

Val Zavala>> Now in his nineties, Hagopian has one more documentary he wants to finish.

Michael Hagopian>> This third film is very important because it's really using the survivors to tell the story. Producers like to talk the story, but I'm trying to tell the story through the mouths of the survivors.

Val Zavala>> The most difficult part will be choosing the best among four hundred interviews. This is an interview with an Armenian priest. He was approached by a stranger asking forgiveness. The stranger, it turned out, had killed the priest's family.

>> "And then he lifted up his arms and asked me for forgiveness and I told him, "God bless you, God forgive you, but I don't know who you are." He told me that he killed father, three brothers and he confiscated our home and our garments."

Val Zavala>> How do you pick and choose from all those interviews?

Michael Hagopian>> You know, an old-timer in Hollywood told me once, he said, "You haven't got a film unless it hurts you to throw out material."

Val Zavala>> The final film will be called "Caravan Along the Euphrates".

[Film Clip]

>> "If you would ask me who I am, I couldn't tell you because I don't know what's my real name. I don't know when I was born. I don't know where I was born, I don't know who my parents they were."

Val Zavala>> What do you want to accomplish before you die? What do you most want to accomplish with this Foundation? What do you really want to get finished?

Michael Hagopian>> I want the truth of what happened to be known and, if through films we can do that, that's the message. I've got the background in making documentary films. I've got the historical and political background. These two combined have made it possible for me to kind of be a pioneer in this method of dissemination about what happened to the Armenian people.

Val Zavala>> He's a pioneer who's committed to leaving a legacy, a legacy that brings to life the stories of those who managed to survive a brutal chapter in Armenian history.

[Film Clip]

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Val Zavala>> In the late 1990s, an effort began to return valuable art that was looted by the Nazis during World War II. Among the most prized paintings were five by Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt. Now a ninety year old woman in Los Angeles knows these paintings well because they belonged to her aunt and uncle who lived in Vienna before the war. It took her eight years to win these stunning paintings back, but now they're here in Los Angeles and Vicki Curry has the remarkable story of their return.

Vicki Curry>> It was an unusually wet day in Los Angeles, but nothing could dampen the spirits of Maria Altmann. This was the day she was reunited with a long-lost part of her heritage, five celebrated Gustav Klimt paintings, paintings the Nazis stole from her family sixty-eight years ago.

Maria Altmann>> "Today is the day where, after so many years, a wish came true."

Vicki Curry>> After eight years of legal battles, the paintings were returned to Maria at the end of March. She's now sharing her joy at their return with the public, putting them on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Maria Altmann>> "Now my hometown is Los Angeles and these paintings, thanks to the museum, followed me to my present hometown. It's just wonderful."

Vicki Curry>> The incredible story of the paintings starts in early twentieth century Vienna when that city was a center of modern art and ideas. Maria's Aunt Adele and Uncle Ferdinand filled their palais, their mansion, with works of art. They were particularly entranced with the work of Gustav Klimt. Ferdinand commissioned Klimt to paint two portraits of Adele. The first became famous in the art world as a premier example of what is known as the artist's gold style.

Stephanie Barron>> These paintings represent the high point of Viennese art before the first World War. Moreover, they are -- certainly the gold painting is one of the icons of twentieth century art.

Vicki Curry>> The beautiful Adele died young when Maria was just nine years old and the girl treasured the portraits as part of her precious memories of Adele.

Maria Altmann>> I remember her. She always wore long white dresses, always a long gold cigarette holder, which was unusual for those days.

Vicki Curry>> So many wonderful memories over the years and then the bad memories when newly-wed Maria's world changed forever.

Maria Altmann>> When the Nazis came on March 11, 12 in 1938, my father was dying and my husband was taken to concentration camp. The last thing I was fascinated with was with what happens to the paintings, what happens to the palais. I couldn't care less.

Vicki Curry>> Maria and her husband eventually managed to escape and made their way to Los Angeles. They were not able to take anything with them. Meanwhile, her Uncle Ferdinand fled to Switzerland, also with nothing. He died there in 1945. What about the Klimt paintings? The Nazis took them and placed them in the Austrian National Gallery.

Maria Altmann>> Everybody was dead. Each belonged to my family. I didn't care everything they had taken from me, but they had robbed everything out of the palais.

Vicki Curry>> After the war, Maria's family tried to get back their property, but the Austrian government made it difficult for exiled Jews to do this. And they also told Maria that her aunt had given the Klimt paintings to Austria.

Randol Schoenberg>> And there was this dispute over Maria's aunt's will, Maria's aunt who died in 1925. She'd asked her husband, Maria's uncle, to give the paintings to the Austrian Museum when he died. But, of course, they were stolen from him before he died and he died in poverty in Switzerland in 1945. The lawyer for the family, in the post-war era, decided to essentially give up on the Klimt paintings to get other paintings out.

Vicki Curry>> The family couldn't dispute Austrian officials since they didn't have access to the relevant documents. Eventually, Maria dropped the matter.

Randol Schoenberg>> So I think, for her, it was pretty much a closed chapter until 1998 when this journalist, Hubertus Czernin, dug up the story and made it alive again.

Vicki Curry>> That's when everything changed. Suddenly the subject of Nazi-looted art was news again. Austrian officials, under pressure from the public, opened their archives and that's when journalist Czernin discovered that post-war officials had lied about Adele's will.

Hubertus Czernin>> The main art historians and managers of the museums didn't want to lose the best paintings after the war.

Maria Altmann>> "I thought, well, yes, maybe she left them to the Gallery. She always said one day they'd be at the Gallery. But under different circumstances. Not the trucks coming driving up to the house and removing everything from the house there was."

Vicki Curry>> Maria asked attorney, Randol Schoenberg, to help re-open her case. She chose him because the two families had known each other in Vienna and later again in Los Angeles.

Randol Schoenberg>> I remember the first time I went to Vienna when I was eleven years old and saw the gold portrait in the Austrian Gallery. My mom pointed out and said, "You know Maria Altmann? Your grandmother's friend? That's her aunt, Adele." Little did I know that, thirty years later, I'd be bringing that painting to Los Angeles.

Vicki Curry>> But it wasn't easy. Even though the documents showed the paintings had been stolen, Austria put up a fight.

Hubertus Czernin>> I think there was no other case where the Austrian government or the art bureaucracy fought as intensely against the restitution as this one.

Randol Schoenberg>> The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the gold portrait that's behind me, is one of their most famous paintings. It's on the cover of the guidebook of their National Museum and I think there was a real resistance on their part to giving that up if they had any possible legal argument.

Vicki Curry>> Maria sued Austria and, several years later, Austria finally agreed to return the paintings. That was this past January and thousands of visitors rushed to see the Klimts before they left Vienna. Many people there feel the paintings are part of the country's national heritage, but Schoenberg says they're artifacts of an Austrian Jewish community that no longer exists.

Randol Schoenberg>> It was wiped out by the Nazis. The people were either killed or went into exile and these are symbols of that community. I think it's very fitting that they leave Austria as that community did and come now to the United States.

Maria Altmann>> "I'm a person that tries not to resent, so it's difficult for me. I was very angry at times, but now that we resolved it, I try to see the good part of this."

Vicki Curry>> The good part is that the people of Los Angeles now get to see these famous Klimt paintings. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art helped transport the paintings and will display them through June.

Stephanie Barron>> There are no Klimt paintings outside of the East Coast, so this is a tremendous opportunity for people to see these paintings. Really a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Vicki Curry>> The family hasn't decided yet what will ultimately happen to the paintings, which may be worth as much as three hundred million dollars. For now, Maria Altmann is just happy to share these memories with her family.

Phil Altmann>> It was really about reclaiming our family's past and to see the paintings in person for the first time today with my son and with my grandmother is something I'll forever treasure.

Maria Altmann>> "I can't be happier to know that they're here now and, after a long stay away from my family, we can enjoy them now in Los Angeles."

Val Zavala>> The Klimt paintings will be on display at LACMA through June 30. For more information, you can go to their website at lacma.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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