When I began covering California politics for the Sacramento Union a half-century ago, I paired up with another reporter, K.W. Lee, to probe how the Legislature spent money on internal operations.
K.W., short for Kyung Won, had already made waves by revealing that a legislator who owned a travel agency had been using the state-provided telephone in her district office for expensive transcontinental calls to set up hotel and travel reservations for her clients.
The Legislature should have censured the member for misusing taxpayer money. Instead, it responded by making it virtually impossible for reporters to access financial information.
The lame response encouraged Lee to double down on his reporting. He discovered a back door to legislative finances by reviewing records of invoices in the State Controller’s Office.
That was in the pre-digital era, of course, so he and I spent countless hours searching through the paperwork. What we found — plus some revelations from an inside source — resulted in a series of articles about lavish spending.
It included buying office furniture, remodeling and other services by favored vendors without bidding, as well as a free kitchen makeover from the remodeling contractor for the legislative employee who managed contracts. Legislators also used legislative sergeants-at-arms as chauffeurs, personal errand-runners and even petsitters.
One invoice was particularly irksome. The Assembly paid a huge bill from a car rental business because a legislator had parked one of its cars at Los Angeles International Airport for a month and forgot about it.
Our revelations were so embarrassing that Leo McCarthy, speaker of the state Assembly, agreed to allow limited access to the Legislature’s finances — still less than the full open records law governing other state agencies, but a bit better than complete secrecy.
During those weeks of poring through sheaves of invoices, I discovered that Lee was not only an extremely intelligent and ferociously aggressive journalist but the most interesting and utterly unique person I had ever met.
He was born in Korea — then a Japanese colony — in 1928. He attended college there and immigrated to the United States in 1950 after, he said, barely escaping death because he was a kamikaze pilot in training when World War II ended in 1945. Lee covered the civil rights movement in the South during the 1960s and wrote about political corruption in West Virginia and the plight of Appalachian coal miners before coming to Sacramento and joining the Sacramento Union staff.
While investigating political malfeasance was Lee’s occupation, he was preoccupied with the plight of a fellow Korean immigrant, Chol Soo Lee, who had been convicted of a 1973 gang-related murder in Chinatown San Francisco and sentenced to death. Over the years, Lee wrote more than 100 articles about the case, finally resulting in a new trial, acquittal and freedom. His work inspired the 1989 movie “True Believer.”
It seemed to Lee’s friends that he was always on the brink of succumbing to illness. He survived bouts of liver and stomach cancer, undergoing a liver transplant in 1992, which was something of a miracle given that liver disease had claimed both of his parents and all six of his siblings.
Through all of his health crises, Lee remained committed to aggressive journalism — even founding the English edition of the Korea Times in Los Angeles — and to recognition of the contributions Asian Americans were making to California. He also continued to push me and other journalists to delve into political malpractice with his characteristic bluntness.
Lee died on March 8, three months shy of his 97th birthday. It’s amazing he lasted that long and even more amazing that he accomplished so much. This column only touches a few highlights in a life that deserves a spot in the California Hall of Fame.
