same one Ballreich attended in the 1960s—went into lockdown after someone reported a prowler lurking. It was not the last suspicious sighting, not with a cunning murderer running free.
Police discovered Ballreich lying face up with what the coroner’s office described as “massive open head trauma.” The second wound came from a gunshot that struck him in the upper, left side of his back and exited through his chest, leaving behind a grisly, seven-inch gash. Either blast was lethal. Police extracted gunshot residue from the scene.
The coroner’s office reported three salvos were fired, but only described two of them. Ballreich, it said, appeared to have been “walking on the sidewalk” when the gunman pulled up. This may be critical. While he was an avid runner, he was wearing underpants, not an athletic supporter, at the time he died. Some have speculated whether that meant he was meeting somebody under the pretext of exercise. No drugs were detected in his system. Overall, the autopsy determined that Ballreich had been healthy except for coronary occlusions. Still in his wallet was his old Arkansas driver’s license.
Detectives mulled the possibility street gangs were involved. Four days before the murder, a twenty year old gang member had been killed about a mile away. They also interviewed members of the Lincoln Club, a Republican political action committee that Ballreich volunteered at and advised. Before he died, he had counseled the PAC about its donations and involvement with various campaigns.
The Sheriff’s Department interviewed Lincoln Club employees at the PAC’s El Monte offices, a former worker there confirmed. Nerves were already on edge at the small organization after employees complained about a bizarre series of petty crimes directed at them. Staffers had reported a slashed tire, a tampered car gas tank, a stolen purse and signs of an intruder at one of their houses, among other unexplained events. Suspicion fell on a recently fired employee—a woman who had known Ballreich well.
Bill Ukropina, a volunteer with the Lincoln Club and former chairman of its Pasadena branch, said he was unaware that the homicide investigation touched the group. Nor, he said, was he aware of Ballreich’s personal issues. “I never saw any side of Steve other than a cordial, professional one,” Ukropina said. “He was such a talented guy. He made excellent presentations. He brought a lot to the world, a lot to the community. I miss him.”
Ultimately, the Sheriff’s Department decided both the Lincoln Club and roving gang violence probably had nothing to do with what happened to him. It was not clear why detectives ruled them out. Perhaps other avenues were more fruitful. Ballreich’s landlady, a longtime friend, had watched him rush out of his South Pasadena apartment on the November 1991 afternoon that he was shot. “The day Stephen died, he’d come home, and all of a sudden left in great haste,” said this source. “He peeled rubber out, like it was some big emergency. If he was upset and in a hurry, somebody must’ve called him.”
Born, the friend from their days together in the Young Republicans, said police were curious in learning about Ballreich’s gambling habits. For years, Ballreich had wagered on football games and prizefights. Williams, the former councilman, acknowledged remembering one of Ballreich’s bookies from the 1970s. So, could a new debt from a lingering vice have precipitated what transpired on Marguerita Avenue? There are tantalizing aspects to the idea. The Sheriff’s Department, Born said, located somebody who remembered seeing $5,000 in cash in Ballreich’s apartment not long before he left it a final time. “The Sheriff’s Department thought he was meeting someone the night” said Born. “Why [else] would he have $5,000 on the floor of his apartment? Why not keep it in the bank?”
Which leads us back to the beginning—November 1991. If it was not an indiscriminate drive-by, and it was not something else random, then why was a once high-profile person drawn to his old neighborhood and effectively assassinated? Was it a violent exclamation point about an unforgivable sin or a warning to others? “[Sheriff detectives] had a particular interest in who might know he was running in that area on that street on that day at that time,” said Francis, his ex-business partner. “Who knew him well enough to know that? It narrows the circle of people who would be of primary interest.”
The question may be unanswerable. When you sweep everything else aside, you realize that Stephen Ballreich died the same way he lived—spectacularly, disturbingly. It is symmetry not lost on longtime buddy Glenn Thornhill. “One of my friends ran into an Alhambra policeman, and the cop said, ‘We don’t know who did it. Steve Ballreich told so many different stories to so many different people we could be talking to the responsible person and we wouldn’t even have a clue.’”
Operation Bald-Headed Eagle
Was a convicted smog-credit swindler also part of shady international money repatriation schemes with links to the CIA?
—Pasadena Weekly, August 20th, 2009
The remnants of Anne Sholtz’s old life are evident in the smaller things. They are visible in the GPS tracking bracelet—standard issue for felons in home detention—that looped around her ankle for a year, and in her idled passport. They are traceable in her pillow, which rests today in a leased home miles from the $5 million hillside estate that once broadcast her transformation from Caltech economist to business phenom.
Yes, the wreckage from that existence—the economizing, the isolation from connected friends who now shun her—is graspable. Where the picture turns as murky as Southern California’s whiskey-brown smog is how Sholtz, as a then-thirtysomething go-getter, was able to deceive the very air pollution market that she helped to conceive, and the lessons it holds for keeping financial crooks out of the trillion-dollar greenhouse gas trading system that President Obama has trumpeted as a key to curbing global warming.
Unless you are in the arcane field of emissions trading, chances are you have probably never heard of Sholtz before. Last April, the former Pasadena pollution broker was convicted in federal court for masterminding a fraudulent, multi-million dollar deal for credits in Southern California’s novel smog exchange. Despite pleas that she sock Sholtz with years behind bars, U.S. Central District Court Judge Audrey Collins gave her just a year in home confinement.
Fortunate with a light sentence in that downtown L.A. courtroom, Sholtz, nonetheless, sustained heavy losses outside of it, squandering, among other potential, her chance to build a unique and lucrative pollution trading business, with access to President Obama or Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as an industry confidante. Those opportunities gone, she now drives her mother’s car, not the Mercedes or SUV she previously did. Rather than expanding her patented ideas into climate change, she checks in with her probation officer.
Blown prosperity for Sholtz; it has been no bonanza for others, either. Between criticism over its secretive, mixed-bag prosecution of her and evidence of Sholtz’s role in a scheme to extract millions in overseas U.S. aid with men purporting to be American intelligence and military operatives, the Department of Justice’s L.A. office probably wishes she would just fade away. Local smog regulators at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), whose market-based regulation proved vulnerable to her deceptions, can relate. The trouble is, some events are just too big to disappear. And the Sholtz case, no matter its relative obscurity or connection to complex regulations, fits that mold because it underscores the need for vigorous oversight of emissions markets against seemingly inevitable Wall Street-style chicanery.
Saying that she hopes to reconcile the events that dragged her from eco-visionary to convicted felon and industry pariah, Sholtz, forty-four, gave the Pasadena Weekly her first public comments in seven years. These days she is a freelance auditor examining white-collar fraud (ironically, for the federal court system that processed her case) and proclaims herself “happy” and “debt-free.” Just don’t mistake that resilience for satisfaction, or expect to hear weepy remorse from her about the ruins smoldering in her wake. Channeling other emotions, Sholtz said that she was “disappointed” in
