Charles Hurwitz - Isn't He In Jail YET?
A Long History of Lying and Stealing His Way to the Bank
December 31, 2005
Early in his career--in 1971-72, Hurwitz pled no contest to charges of fraud before the Securities and Exchange Commission involving Summit Insurance Co. During the late 1980s, he crashed United Savings Association of Texas, leading to one of the biggest S & L failures--for which U.S. taxpayers footed a $1.6 billion bailout bill. As CEO of Maxxam, he raided Pacific Lumber's $55 million pension fund after his takeover of PL. This wasn't the first time he'd looted a worker pension fund--previously, retired Simplicity Pattern workers benefits were reduced from $10,000 to $6,000 a year on average thanks to Hurwitz.
When he arrived in northern California, Hurwitz made his philosophy clear right away to PL employees, announcing "The story of the golden rule [is]: who has the gold, rules."
The company he keeps also is telling: Maxxam took over Pacific Lumber with the help of two notorious corporate criminals, Michael Milken and Boyd Jeffries, both of whom then did time for ripping people off via stock manipulation. Formerly a law-abiding company that participated as a productive and accepted part of the community, Pacific Lumber under Hurwitz management has become a reckless lawbreaker.
PL leaves a wake of crimes, violations, and bad deeds harmful to the community and the earth--far too great to enumerate here. They are responsible for everything from clearcutting when they had a permit only to thin; to failure to remove trash; to vilification of community leaders.
Further, they don't clean up after themselves. They have failed to maintain roads and those roads have failed. They have failed to remove unstable soil as required.
But we are not talking about littering. Their violations have severely degraded fish habitat and caused unstable slopes to slide. These violations include improper stream crossings, failed or non-installed culverts, extending a clearcut into a creek, and sending loads of sediment into streams.
There is also outright fraud, as when their forester supplied false information and incorrect flagging in spotted owl habitat; or when surveys of marbled murrelet were falsified, "lost," or not done at all; and finally when submission of incomplete landslide data got PL a considerably higher allowable annual harvest rate. Simply put, PL lied to state and federal agencies so that it could log 100,000 additional trees on unstable slopes, thereby violating unfair business practice statutes and gaining the company $40 million in additional annual revenue. Many of their violations are uncorrectable, so the damage is permanent.
All the violations are fully documented. PL has been found guilty, fined, punished, warned, and repeatedly protested by state and federal courts, elected representatives, shareholders, and neighbors. After 500 violations of Forest Practice Rules, PL was put on probation in 1997 but their compliance with laws and regulations did not improve. PL temporarily lost their timber operator's license in 1998 because their flouting of the law became impossible to ignore. Once they regained their license they racked up another 100 violations.
When taken to task for their law-breaking Palco goes after its critics in reactionary ways, like flooding the local media with ads, calling forest protectors "terrorists". They hired contract workers with a verifiable history of assault to climb trees and forcibly remove protesters by extremely reckless methods. They poured a quarter of a million dollars into a campaign to recall a duly elected official who dared file a lawsuit against the company, after fraudulent business practices were brought to his attention.
They lie, they vilify, they try to run their critics out of town--or at least out of office and out of the trees. Enough is enough.
