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Contaminated Site Languishes While Partners Await Trial

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Four years ago, customers bought bagels, snacks, liquor and Mexican food at the Canoga Center.

But the only signs of life now at the little strip mall, which sits vacant behind a 10-foot-high fence and razor wire, are the shining eyes of stray cats peering from dark doorways.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 11, 1998 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 11, 1998 Valley Edition Metro Part B Page 3 Zones Desk 2 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Plating company--A story in Sunday’s Times incorrectly stated that San Fernando Valley businessman Allan Boren filed for bankruptcy in 1995 after environmental pollution charges were filed against his plating company. His attorney says that Boren has not filed for bankruptcy.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday March 1, 1998 Valley Edition Metro Part B Page 3 Zones Desk 3 inches; 104 words Type of Material: Correction
Canoga Center--A Feb. 8 article about the now-closed Canoga Center in Chatsworth should have reported that contamination cleanup at a plating shop located at the rear of the center was performed by a private environmental company. Subsequent soil testing was conducted by a firm hired by center owner Allan Boren at the request of the district attorney’s office, according to Maureen O’Brien, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case. Also, Boren did not own the Mexican restaurant once located at the site. The bagel concern at the center was an office, not a shop. Finally, Manhattan Bagel Co. has said it discovered accounting irregularities at I&J;, a Valley-based subsidiary that employed Boren as chairman, after he left the firm.

Pigeons have claimed what remains of the Chatsworth Plating Co., a firm that Los Angeles County prosecutors allege poisoned the lot on Canoga Avenue.

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San Fernando Valley businessman Allan Boren--the owner of both the plating company and the shopping center--was charged by the district attorney’s office almost three years ago with 24 felony counts of illegal storage and dumping of deadly chemicals into the Santa Susana Wash, which runs behind the center.

Boren, 33, has also been the target of at least half a dozen civil suits and federal tax actions over the years in connection with business dealings.

Since the mid-1980s, he has been involved in a series of ventures, including contract work between his plating company and the aerospace industry, and a four-year stint in the bagel business.

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The future of his Canoga Center ghost town remains in doubt while he and business partner Eric Cano, also 33--operator of the plating shop and Boren’s friend since high school--await trial. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for later this month. Both have pleaded not guilty.

County Fire Department hazardous waste crews cleaned up the worst of the chemicals after the charges were filed in June 1995. But soil and water tests, conducted by an environmental testing firm at the request of the district attorney’s office, have yet to determine when and how the property can be used again.

The center’s troubles have drawn little attention from neighbors, in part because it is separated from other businesses by an undeveloped block to the north.

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Retirees living in the mobile home park south of the wash, who alerted authorities to the alleged contamination, say they don’t worry much about health hazards now. They prefer the quiet of the abandoned shopping center, whose clientele in the past, some say, created traffic noise and rowdy disturbances.

But authorities are trying to resolve the case.

“One of our main emphases is to clean up the site,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Maureen A. O’Brien, who is overseeing the case. “We are not looking for top-end” punishment for the men, she said.

A Northridge-grown entrepreneur who attended Monroe High School, Boren bought Chatsworth Plating in 1985, becoming a tenant at Canoga Center. In 1991 he bought the center, slowly moving in his own businesses--including a Mexican restaurant partly owned by Cano and a bagel shop.

The I & J bagel shop was one in a 17-store Valley chain that Boren acquired in 1992. In July 1995, during a bagel boom, I & J merged with the Manhattan Bagel Co., a New Jersey-based chain that grew to 115 stores with the acquisition, the second-largest bagel shop chain in the country at the time.

Boren became chairman of Manhattan’s San Fernando Valley subsidiary, Cano the president.

Meanwhile, Boren’s plating business troubles had begun in 1994, when residents of the mobile home park complained to Los Angeles County Fire Department officials of foul smells coming from the plating shop. Hazardous materials investigators began looking into the site.

By the fall of 1994, investigators had gathered enough information for a 24-count indictment that alleged, among other things, dumping into the wash and illegal storage.

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The district attorney’s office alleged that Boren and Cano stored cyanide, zinc, cadmium, chromium and nickel in insecure containers. Some of the chemicals leaked out the back of the building and flowed into the city’s flood control system in rainstorms, the indictment alleged.

The investigation was lengthy and involved several agencies, including water control officials who feared the chemicals’ acids would eat away the flood control channels’ concrete walls.

The charges were filed after investigators tested the chemicals, according to the district attorney.

Boren was arrested at his Chatsworth home and released on $20,000 bail. Cano turned himself in and was released on his own recognizance.

According to investigators, Boren had been urged to correct certain violations as the investigation unfolded, but he seemed unable or unwilling to do so.

Layn Phillips, the lead attorney for the two men, said at the time that Chatsworth Plating had ceased operating four months before the charges were filed.

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According to one source close to the investigation, in its last months of operation and after the mall was vacated as its businesses left, Chatsworth Plating ceased operations, and the site was used only to store the flammable chemicals.

“Anybody could have jumped in and set the place on fire,” said Gary Hight, of the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s Valley Fire Prevention Bureau, who visited the property unaware that the county Fire Department was conducting its own investigation. “We’re talking the gas chamber,” he said, referring to the possibility of deadly fumes from some of the chemicals.

Meanwhile, in December 1995, six months after the environmental pollution charges were filed, Boren’s and Cano’s resignations from their positions with I & J Manhattan Bagel Co. were announced in a company news release.

In June 1996, Manhattan announced it would restate its first-quarter earnings because of improper accounting practices it had uncovered.

The irregularities--involving $350,000--were confined to its San Fernando Valley subsidiary and had occurred during Boren and Cano’s tenure, the company said in a news release at the time.

The company said the improprieties included “improperly recorded franchise fees, payments made for purported public relations work, real estate finder’s fees, bonus and vacation pay, and inflated receivables and inventory,” totaling $350,000 on a pretax basis.

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An internal investigation was to be conducted.

A Manhattan spokesman said last week that the company would not reveal its findings and would not discuss the circumstances surrounding the separation of Boren and Cano from the bagel company.

Boren resigned in December 1995 and sold his stock in March 1996, the company spokesman confirmed. But Cano didn’t actually resign until March 1996, the spokesman said.

Boren, battling lawsuits by creditors, declared bankruptcy after the charges were filed.

Prosecutors in the pollution case have said they do not know whether Boren’s other financial problems may have affected his and Cano’s ability to operate the plating company properly.

At the time of his arrest, Boren owned a $1.9-million home he had built in the Santa Susana Mountains, west of Chatsworth. Court records indicate the men have ties to at least one other residence in Boca Raton, Fla.

Deputy Dist. Atty. O’Brien said the men, if found guilty, could be sentenced to up to three years in state prison and thousands of dollars in fines, though the district attorney is more interested in cleaning up the site than in maximizing punishment.

“There is always a potential for a settlement, if we can come to an agreement that is satisfactory to the community--clean up the lot and also have a punitive aspect,” she said.

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Tom Pollack, Boren’s attorney, said his client has already paid for the initial cleanup: the removal of most of the chemicals soon after charges were filed.

Pollack maintains the charges against Boren and Cano stem from damage the plating facility sustained in the Northridge earthquake and that the pollution occurred unintentionally.

“We are a product of the earthquake,” he said recently in a telephone interview. “The owner has been attempting to remedy the property.”

As part of the pretrial actions, Boren hired an environmental consulting company, which performed a soil test to determine the degree of the remaining contamination.

That study is now in the hands of investigators. The results cannot be revealed, according to the district attorney, because the criminal trial is pending.

But “there’s not a significant public health risk,” said Tom Clinger, the county Fire Department’s supervisor of site mitigation.

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The Irvine-based environmental company that performed the soil study will also dig wells on the site and surrounding property to test the ground water.

In time, the company will recommend a plan to clean up the site. The cleanup could include chemical treatment of the soil and ground water or actual removal of dirt from the property.

Once clean, the property could be returned to Boren.

“Once it is determined there are no materials, it is completely up to the owner what he wants to do with it,” O’Brien said.

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