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He drives a dented 12-year-old Mercedes, but three years ago he plunked down roughly $2.5 million to acquire not one but two adjacent homes in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. One house was torn down last week to make way for improvements to the other.
He greets visitors to his downtown office sans shoes and coat, hair askew and with his tie loosened. But what an office, with views down to the roof of Los Angeles City Hall.
From his high corner warren in the California Plaza building, Richard J. Riordan declares: "I just like to be free and be myself." A merchant banker, leveraged buy-out artist, investor, land speculator, restaurateur, lawyer, civic leader and philanthropist, Riordan, one of the city's wealthiest men says, "No matter how much money you have, somebody is going to have more. If you try to keep up, then you are back in prison again."
In his free sort of way, Riordan -- whose net worth is very conservatively estimated at $100 million -- lives his life as if trying to defy easy categorization.
Riordan has represented the Teamsters union on the board of directors of the old PSA airline -- "their leadership out here is quite honest and has membership's interests at heart," states Riordan -- and yet he is a heavyweight Republican fundraiser.
He used his money contacts to spearhead and help finance the successful drive to rid the California Supreme Court of former chief justice Rose Bird in 1986. During that time he penned a column denouncing Bird, in the Los Angeles Times.
Bird "had an anti-business attitude, which was bad for the little people of this state," Riordan asserts. "She set herself up as above the law. Take the death penalty, which I personally do not support, but which most people do. She decided to overrule the dealth penalty in every case, although the citizenry and legislature had voted for it."
But Riordan can deftly jump to the other side of the party aisle; he raises money for Democrat and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. (Riordan landed a 1984 appointment to the city's Recreation & Parks Commission, of which he is now president).
In April, the supermarket chain Boys Market Inc., a company controlled...