`Who Is Michael Kojima?' -- Gop Won't Like Answer: Sons Call Big Donor At Bush Bash A Con Man

LOS ANGELES - The week before last in Washington, the Republican Party held the single biggest political fund-raiser in U.S. history, a lavish black-tie affair that raised $9 million. The largest donation - $400,000 - came from Michael Kojima, a mysterious Japanese-American businessman from Los Angeles who sat at the head table with President and Barbara Bush.

The next day, party stalwarts, reporters and prominent Japanese-American businessmen began asking, "Who is Michael Kojima?"

The Republican Party, the party of traditional family and business values, isn't going to like the answers.

For starters, Kojima's two teenage sons call him a "con man."

His company, International Marketing Bureau, from whose assets he told fund-raisers the donation came, is nine months delinquent on its California state tax return. Moreover, records show, it is run out of the office of his wife's student-exchange program - a purportedly charitable endeavor.

When one of Kojima's several former wives heard about her husband's donation, she burst into tears. Kojima, she said, still owes her $100,000 - not to mention child-support payments she says he failed to make over the years.

"He doesn't even support his own sons," said Soon Kojima, a Los Angeles garment designer who has a $100,000 court judgment against her former husband. "How can he give so much to the Republican Party? I do not understand. I ask President Bush, please give money back. I would be very, very appreciative. My sons need (the money) for college."

Also chasing Kojima are North Carolina flounder fishermen, Indonesian bankers, Japanese shippers and a Los Angeles shopping-center chain. All told, the party's newest deep pocket appears to be well over $1 million in debt.

PROBLEMS EXEMPLIFIED

Kojima's questionable past exemplifies the sorts of problems that have led to widespread calls for cleaning up the virtually unlimited flow of big-money contributions into political campaigns.

In theory, federal law limits political contributions to $5,000. But in practice, loopholes allow virtually unlimited contributions. Congress has passed a law to place some limits on those loopholes, but Bush is expected to veto the bill.

Kojima's large contributions started around the same time as his difficulties with the North Carolina fish company, in the summer of 1988. On Thursday, Carolina Pride Seafood Inc., filed a federal lawsuit in Raleigh, N.C., asserting that the two GOP committees, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, are legally obligated to hold the $400,000 in trust for the creditors. The suit also accuses Kojima of fraud.

The lawsuit was filed after their attorney, Deyan Ranko Brashich, read about the mystery man in the newspaper in a New York pub the day after the fund-raiser.

"I slammed the bar with my open palm and probably said a couple of unmentionable expletives," Brashich said. "He walked away with $280,000 of my client's money."

Jeff Scott, a Los Angeles attorney for Indonesia-based Bank of Lippo, says he plans to consult with his client to determine whether he, too, should look to the Republican Party to reclaim some of its losses.

He said he has a judgment totaling about $600,000 against Kojima and some of his partners in a series of restaurant deals.

In both those legal cases, Kojima pleaded poverty. Two of his companies were plunged into bankruptcy. His creditors said they had all but given up looking for him - until he showed up with the president of the United States.

"As far as I knew he was a down on his luck restaurateur who had made a few bad business deals," said Scott. "Where in the world did he get the $400,000?"

Neither Kojima nor his attorney, T.J. Pantaleo of the Los Angeles law firm Cummings & Pantaleo, returned telephone calls. "We don't know how to reach him," said a secretary, who explained that the firm rents space to several "tenants" like Kojima.

White House officials almost certainly knew something about Kojima. One senior official said a "due diligence" Secret Service security check routinely would have been conducted, if for no other reason than to make sure Kojima wasn't a danger to Bush over beef tenderloin and asparagus spears.

As it turns out, the honorary chairman of the dinner, former Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, had dinner with Kojima in Tokyo just three weeks earlier. Baker did not return telephone inquiries this week.

"He (Kojima) impressed me as someone who really would like to be a go-between on deals out of ego and profit," said a prominent American businessman who attended the dinner party with Baker and Kojima and his wife. "He dropped a lot of names and liked to give the impression he was in with everybody on both sides of the Pacific."

WHO IS HE?

So, who is Michael Kojima?

The portrait painted by public records and interviews suggests a college-educated drifter - a onetime chef, salesman, utility company worker, and would-be dealmaker. In one 1975 job application, he listed the reason he had quit a store manager's job as "ambition." In a court deposition, he said left another job because it "wasn't my company, that is why."

He has married at least five times - two Korean and three Japanese women, according to Soon Kojima, wife No. 2. Not until a Los Angeles Times interview late Wednesday did she disclose to her sons Tom, 17, and Jerry, 19, that they had at least three other half-siblings. Until now, she said, she had tried to protect her sons from their father's "other lives."

Her sons assured her they had long ago reconciled themselves to an absentee father who came in and out of their lives "whenever he needed money."

Although Kojima has no known criminal record, his sons called him a "con man." Tom recalled taking off elementary school one day to stand guard at the family's bank to make sure their father did not withdraw the family savings.

Added Jerry: "He just kinda comes into our lives sometimes - when he's having money problems. He leeches off of other people - that's the best way to describe him from my point of view."

Their mother described her former husband as highly intelligent, a "nice, friendly man" who could never seem to live up to his ambitions. She said she had married Kojima twice - the second time when he convinced her he had reformed.

According to court records, when they were divorced the second time in August 1990, a judge awarded her $100,000 plus child support. The $100,000, she said, was to repay savings he had taken in a purported attempt to avoid a bankruptcy.

Exactly how much Kojima has given to the GOP over the years is not clear. Available records show he has donated at least $532,000 since 1988, including at least $5,000 to the political action committee started by Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the Senate GOP leader.

Kojima's former wife, Soon, who said she voted for Bush in 1988 despite the fact that she is a registered Democrat, said "please tell him (Bush) Mike Kojima's sons need this money more than (the) Republican Party." If Bush refused to return the money, she said, she had a second request: to turn over her former husband's address.