Fatal incident reflects new boldness among offshore smugglers

The small Coast Guard inflatable vessel was 20 yards from the panga, an open fishing boat that law enforcement officers say has become the craft of choice to ferry untold numbers of marijuana bales and undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Southern California.

Spotted earlier by a Coast Guard cutter, the panga was running without lights, a standard practice in the illicit trade, according to investigators.

The four men on the boat dispatched from the cutter Halibut approached it cautiously, about 200 yards from the shore of Santa Cruz Island, off the Santa Barbara coast. In the darkness, they turned on their blue flashing lights and shouted, in English and Spanish: "Stop! Police! Put your hands up!" according to court documents filed Monday.

In response, the two men aboard the panga throttled their engines and headed straight at the small Coast Guard boat, ignoring shots fired by a crew member, provoking a collision that left a chief petty officer dead and his colleague injured. Then the two men kept going.

One of two men thrown out of the inflatable, Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III of Redondo Beach, died of a head injury caused by a propeller, according to the affidavit, which was filed in connection with the murder case against two suspects detained as they tried to flee to Mexico.

Officials say the tragedy underscores the dangers posed by smugglers who have foregone well-policed land routes in favor of the sea. Although more than 500 maritime smuggling incidents have been logged off the Southern California coast since 2010, this was the first violent death, authorities said.

"Most of our interdictions off of California can only be described as benign," Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggars said. "There may be an attempt to evade, there may be a short pursuit, but we haven't had anything like this."

The men on the panga, Jose Mejia Leyva and Manuel Beltran Higuera, both Mexican nationals, were charged in Horne's death in U.S. District Court. Authorities believe they had been supplying gasoline to other smuggling craft operating off the California coast.

According to the affidavit, military aircraft followed their 30-foot craft as it made its way toward Mexico. With the two men futilely trying to restart their sputtering engine 20 miles north of the border, another Coast Guard vessel overtook them. Crew members demanded their surrender at gunpoint. When the men kept trying to start their engine, the Coast Guard crew doused them with pepper spray.

Encounters with seaborne smuggling have nearly doubled since 2010, with the steepest increases found along the more secluded, less patrolled beaches of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Santa Barbara County, the surge has alarmed local authorities. In an April letter to Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara), Sheriff Bill Brown said the county experienced 16 "panga incidents" since the previous July, including the beaching of a four-engine, 45-foot "super-panga" that could easily have outpaced his department's sole vessel.

"It's a direct byproduct of increased pressure at the border and increased maritime enforcement to the south of us," Brown said in an interview Monday. "They're going further out to sea and they're coming further north."

Capps said she is asking federal agencies for additional enforcement funds in Santa Barbara.

The greatest number of coastal smuggling cases still occurs in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties. But intensive interagency efforts based in San Diego and Long Beach have forced some smugglers farther up the coast, officials said.

"It's not so much that efforts are being stepped up as that agencies are pooling knowledge and experience and expertise," Eggars said. "The beautiful thing about Los Angeles is that there's a ton of law enforcement here."

Upgraded technology, such as infrared radar and enhanced video, is being shared among agencies, he said, along with "actionable intelligence."

But smugglers have powerful incentives to take the risk. Dozens of people, paying an average of $6,000 apiece, can cram into each panga. Police say marijuana bales hauled by a typical panga can sell for millions. There's a huge expanse of sea — the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is nearly 1,500 square miles — and major roads, including U.S. 101, run right by potential landing areas.

Boat pilots often try to outrun law enforcement and some high-speed chases have ended with U.S. officers shooting out gasoline tanks or performing swerving maneuvers to stop the pangas, said a federal law enforcement officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"They aggressively try to get away, but not turn their boat on another boat like they did the other night," the officer said.

On occasion, the rugged terrain of Channel Islands National Park has served as a staging area for smugglers. 

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‘The Daily’ doomed by dull content and isolation

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was too expensive. It lacked editorial focus. And for a digital publication, it was strangely cut off from the Internet. That’s the obituary being written in real time through posts, tweets and online chats about The Daily, the first-of-its-kind iPad newspaper that is being shut down this month.

Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. said Monday that The Daily will publish its final issue on Dec. 15, less than two years after its January 2011 launch. The app has already been removed from Apple’s iTunes, where it once received lukewarm ratings.

The Daily had roughly 100,000 subscribers who paid either 99 cents a week or $ 40 a year for its daily download of journalism tailored for touch screens. But that wasn’t enough to sustain some 100 employees and millions of dollars in losses since its launch. At the time of its debut, News Corp. said The Daily’s operating costs would amount to about half a million dollars a week, or around $ 26 million a year.

When News Corp. launched The Daily, it was touted as a bold experiment in new media. The company hired top-name journalists from other publications, such as the New York Post’s former Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and said it poured $ 30 million into the newspaper’s launch. Now, the company is acknowledging that The Daily no longer has a place at News Corp., which is being split in two to separate its publishing enterprises from its TV and movie businesses.

Murdoch said in a statement that News Corp. “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.” Some employees are being hired in other parts of the company.

Critics say The Daily’s day-to-day mix of news, opinion and info-graphics wasn’t that different from content available for free on the Internet. And despite a high-profile launch that drew lots of media attention, the publication failed to build a distinctive brand. There was no ad campaign touting its coverage and stories weren’t accessible to non-subscribers, so it didn’t benefit from buzz that comes from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Trevor Butterworth, who wrote a weekly column for The Daily called “The Information Society,” says the disconnect between the app and the broader Internet curtailed its reach. He was laid off in July when the publication shrank from 170 workers to about 120. As part of the purge, The Daily cut its dedicated opinion section and dropped sports coverage in favor of using a feed from its News Corp. sister outfit, Fox Sports.

“Stories weren’t widely shared or widely known,” says Butterworth. “It felt like I was writing into the void.”

When it launched, The Daily was meant to take advantage of the explosion of tablet computer sales, and the notion that people generally read on them in the morning or evening, like a magazine.

But each issue came in a giant file — sometimes 1 gigabyte large — and took 10 or 15 minutes to download over a broadband connection, which is unheard of for news apps, says Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter.com, one of the first community blogs on the Internet.

Because the stories weren’t linkable, The Daily didn’t benefit from new Internet traffic that would have come from content aggregators like Flipboard and Tumblr.

“They ignored the obvious, which was the Web,” Haughey says. Although many people are foregoing buying a laptop for the lightweight convenience of a tablet, the day hasn’t arrived yet when all online access will come through apps rather than the Web. “Maybe in five or 10 years, the Web will be less important,” he says. “For now it seems like they were missing out.”

It may also have been a problem that News Corp. launched The Daily from scratch into an environment where readers tend to gravitate toward trusted sources and established brands. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, 84 percent of mobile device users said a news app’s brand was a major factor in deciding whether to download it.

One of the intangible challenges The Daily had was standing out in a sea of online journalism, both paid and free. Some national newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have carved out a niche with informed coverage of sometimes complex topics and have gained paying digital subscribers by limiting the number of free articles they offer online.

Gannett Co., which publishes USA Today and about 80 other newspapers, has succeeded in raising circulation revenue at local papers by putting up so-called online “pay walls,” taking advantage of the fact that there are few alternative sources of coverage for certain communities.

Without a unique coverage niche or a local monopoly, The Daily was caught between two worlds.

By being digital-only, the publication didn’t have a defined coverage area. It was “in competition with everybody and everything,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Yet it failed to carve out its own niche in that larger universe, he says.

“Its lack of editorial focus played a role,” Benton notes. “It was sort of a pleasant, middle-brow, slightly tabloidy mix of news and features. And there’s lots of that available for free online. I would imagine if ‘The Daily’ were starting again now, they would invest more in establishing their brand identity early on.”

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Court upholds $319M verdict in 'Millionaire' case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a $319 million verdict over profits from the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and rejected Walt Disney Co.'s request for a new trial.

A jury decided in 2010 that Disney hid the show's profits from its creators, London-based Celador International. The ruling Monday by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found no issues with the verdict or with a judge's rulings in the case.

"I am pleased that justice has been done," Celador Chairman Paul Smith said in a statement.

Disney did not immediately comment on the decision.

The ruling comes more than two years after the jury ruled in Celador's favor after a lengthy trial that featured testimony from several top Disney executives. The company sued in 2004, claiming Disney was using creative accounting to hide profits from the show, which first ran in the United States from August 1999 to May 2002 and was a huge hit for ABC.

The jury found that Celador was owed $269.2 million, and a judge later added $50 million in interest to the judgment.

The appeals court determined the verdict was not "grossly excessive or monstrous" and that it was not based on speculation or guesswork.

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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

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Collecting on travel insurance is not smooth sailing

When it comes to travel, especially involving something as pricey as a cruise, it's wise to take precautions. You never know when you may have to cancel your trip.

Bill and Sally Mathews paid $1,140 for travel insurance as part of about $12,600 they plunked down in March for a July cruise along the Danube River with Grand Circle Cruise Line.

"We've never had to use travel insurance," Bill Mathews, 85, of Redondo Beach told me. "It just always seems like a good idea to have it. We travel a lot."

This time, it turned out, the insurance was a good investment — or it would have been had the insurer, Trip Mate, made good on its policy right away. But that's where the Mathewses' trip up the Danube turned very blue indeed.

It could have been a lot of fun. Starting in the Black Sea, the ship was scheduled to travel to Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.

"We'd never been to this part of the world," Mathews said, "so we were really looking forward to it."

Unfortunately, his wife, Sally, 81, had a flare-up of a condition called Mycobacterium avium, which is akin to tuberculosis and can cause intense coughing fits. She went to her doctor shortly after booking the cruise, and he prescribed the same drugs she'd required during prior episodes.

"The problem is, the medicines make her so weak she can barely get around," Mathews said. "They leave her thoroughly exhausted."

In May, he contacted Grand Circle and said they'd have to cancel their trip. As per Grand Circle's policy, the Mathewses were entitled to a refund of 60% of their ticket cost from the cruise line. Trip Mate was supposed to make up the difference.

"Grand Circle responded with sympathy and a check for $7,292," Mathews said. "From Trip Mate we heard nothing."

He contacted the company in July and was told a few weeks later that his claim had been denied. Trip Mate acknowledged that Sally had visited her doctor after the cruise was booked but insisted there was no evidence that her condition required cancellation of the trip.

"The plan states a covered sickness must necessitate medical treatment at the time of cancellation," the insurer said.

Mathews appealed the decision. His wife's doctor submitted a letter to Trip Mate in September affirming that she'd been treated for Mycobacterium avium and was prescribed several drugs with "significant and debilitating side effects."

The doctor said that Sally "was forced to cancel her trip with my complete concurrence."

But that wasn't good enough for Trip Mate. The company wrote to Mathews several weeks later saying that the appeal also had been denied.

Trip Mate's position was that, the letter from Sally's doctor notwithstanding, "the medical records on file do not document you received medical treatment at the time you canceled."

Mathews figured he could retain a lawyer to go after the roughly $5,000 he felt he was owed by Trip Mate, but that seemed like a relatively small sum for what probably would have resulted in thousands of dollars in legal bills. So he came knocking at my door instead.

I contacted Linda Finkle, Trip Mate's executive vice president, who agreed to look into the matter. A day later, I received an email reiterating that the information received from Sally's doctor "did not show that the plan requirements for trip cancellation due to a medical condition were met."

However, Finkle said Trip Mate "again contacted the medical provider … and information not previously included has just been received. Based upon this new information, we are in the process of advising Mr. and Mrs. Mathews that their claim will be paid."

Well, that's impressive — maybe.

I asked the Mathewses to contact Sally's doctor. They said the doctor told them he had not received any further communication from Trip Mate and had not submitted additional information.

Finkle's follow-up letter to the Mathewses, however, said Trip Mate had learned that Sally had been in telephone contact with her doctor prior to cancellation of the trip and thus "determined that benefits may be paid."

In any case, I'm glad the Mathewses will get the money they're rightfully owed. Hopefully, their next excursion to uncharted waters will go more smoothly.

Better business?

A Google search will turn up numerous complaints about Trip Mate. For its part, the Better Business Bureau said it has received 105 complaints about the company in the last three years.

Yet the bureau gives Trip Mate a rating of A+. As an "accredited business," Trip Mate pays the bureau hundreds of dollars in annual fees.

I reported last week that the bureau says no correlation exists between a company's rating and its accreditation.

That's about as believable as an insurer bending over backward to make sure all valid claims get paid.

David Lazarus' column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.

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Coast Guard officer is killed after suspected smugglers ram his boat

A veteran U.S. Coast Guard officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers rammed his vessel near Santa Cruz Island, casting him into the ocean with a fatal head wound.

Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had fallen under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat — a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another Coast Guard crew member into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our shipmate," said Adm. Robert J. Papp, the Coast Guard commandant. "Our fallen shipmate stood the watch on the front lines protecting our nation, and we are all indebted to him for his service and sacrifice."

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Using a helicopter and a 45-foot boat stationed in Los Angeles, the Coast Guard later found the panga and stopped it.

Two men were detained. The Coast Guard declined to identify them or say whether drugs were found aboard the boat. A second suspicious vessel was believed to have been traveling alongside the panga before the incident.

"We are actively working to ensure that all of the individuals involved in this illegal activity are brought to justice," said Coast Guard Capt. James Jenkins.

The Coast Guard was unable to provide a detailed account of Horne's service.

He had been heralded by the agency on several occasions.

He appears to have arrived in Southern California last summer after serving for two years as an executive petty officer in Emerald Isle, N.C. There, he received a Coast Guard Commendation Medal for his leadership in 63 search-and-rescue cases, in which 38 lives were saved.

According to an account of the medal ceremony, the most notable of those operations involved a boat that capsized in a North Carolina inlet in 2010. The account said he coached his team through "treacherous" sea conditions to rescue five people.

The Coast Guard also noted Horne's involvements in a January operation in which the Halibut found and stopped two boats operating at midnight with no lights. The boats contained 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

In the last five years, as U.S. authorities have become increasingly successful at blocking traditional land routes, smugglers have taken increasingly to the sea — ferrying both drugs and immigrants. Authorities believe a smuggling vessel is launched toward California every three days; the number of immigrants and smugglers arrested at sea or along the coast more than doubled to 867 in 2010 from the previous year.

Drug runners and human smugglers have run ashore at a dog beach in Del Mar, at Crystal Cove in Orange County and next to the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Border Patrol agents have been diverted from land to sea, and an agency supervisor recently called the ocean "the front line."

The eruption in sea-based smuggling has created the same cat-and-mouse game in the ocean that has long existed along the U.S.-Mexico border. Smuggling boats often travel without lights and at a slow speed to limit their wakes. When U.S. agents began disrupting routes into San Diego beaches, smugglers began conducting counter-surveillance, using radios to direct boat pilots to unguarded beaches.

scott.gold@latimes.com

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Nintendo president apologizes for bulky day-one Wii U firmware update

As we noted in our first impressions, Nintendo’s (NTDOY) Wii U is charting new ground with its wireless GamePad and touchscreen controls that engage gamers in the living room like never before. But before you can even set up the Wii U, a mandatory firmware update is required upon power up. Gamers everywhere were frustrated to learn that the firmware update, which is pegged anywhere between 1GB and 5GB, takes hours to download and could even ”brick” new consoles if the power was cut off. In an email conversation with IGN, Nintendo’s global president and CEO Satoru Iwata said was “very sorry” that Wii U owners were experiencing network issues and that other services such as Nintendo TVii weren’t available at launch. Iwata said he believes “users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box.” 

Gone are the days when electronics are sold as finished products with set features out of the box. It has become normal for today’s connected electronics to require frequent firmware updates and patches to fix compatibility with other gadgets and to add new features. At what point should consumers stop tolerating devices that don’t work immediately after unboxing? The way we see it, the answer might be “never,” as it’s hard to argue against the fact that new software updates breathe new life into aging consoles.

Iwata also explained that the Wii U’s “Miiverse” online service isn’t meant to replicate existing services such as Xbox LIVE.

“We have not thought that offering the same features that already exist within other online communities would be the best proposal for very experienced game players,” Iwata told IGN.

Nintendo fans can read more Nintendo nuggets over at IGN’s feature that includes mention of a new 3D Super Mario and Zelda game.

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Young down by boardwalk for benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn't see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.

Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross' storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.

People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.

"I couldn't see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual," he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.

Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $75 and $150, although Young notes there's no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.

Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York's Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there's enough star power there, he said.

"It wasn't going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference," he said.

Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon's "Imagine."

Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to "anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play."

It's hard to resist wondering whether Young's epic "Like a Hurricane" will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.

"Anything's possible," Young said. "We have the equipment."

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Call That Kept Nursing Home Patients in Sandy’s Path

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Workers were shocked that nursing and adult homes in areas like Rockaway Park, Queens, weren’t evacuated.

Hurricane Sandy was swirling northward, four days before landfall, and at the Sea Crest Health Care Center, a nursing home overlooking the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, workers were gathering medicines and other supplies as they prepared to evacuate.

Then the call came from health officials: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, acting on the advice of his aides and those of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, recommended that nursing homes and adult homes stay put. The 305 residents would ride out the storm.

The same advisory also took administrators by surprise at the Ocean Promenade nursing home, which faces the Atlantic Ocean in Queens. They canceled plans to move 105 residents to safety.

“No one gets why we weren’t evacuated,” said a worker there, Yisroel Tabi. “We wouldn’t have exposed ourselves to dealing with that situation.”

The recommendation that thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City had calamitous consequences.

At least 29 facilities in Queens and Brooklyn were severely flooded. Generators failed or were absent. Buildings were plunged into a cold, wet darkness, with no access to power, water, heat and food.

While no immediate deaths were reported, it took at least three days for the Fire Department, the National Guard and ambulance crews from around the country to rescue over 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents. Without working elevators, many had to be carried down slippery stairwells.

“I was shocked,” said Greg Levow, who works for an ambulance service and helped rescue residents at Queens. “I couldn’t understand why they were there in the first place.”

Many sat for hours in ambulances and buses before being transported to safety through sand drifts and debris-filled floodwaters. They went to crowded shelters and nursing homes as far away as Albany, where for days, they often lacked medical charts and medications. Families struggled to locate relatives.

The decision not to empty the nursing homes and adult homes in the mandatory evacuation area was one of the most questionable by the authorities during Hurricane Sandy. And an investigation by The New York Times found that the impact was worsened by missteps that officials made in not ensuring that these facilities could protect residents.

They did not require that nursing homes maintain backup generators that could withstand flooding. They did not ensure that health care administrators could adequately communicate with government agencies during and after a storm. And they discounted the more severe of the early predictions about Hurricane Sandy’s surge.

The Times’s investigation was based on interviews with officials, health care administrators, doctors, nurses, ambulance medics, residents, family members and disaster experts. It included a review of internal State Health Department status reports. The findings revealed the striking vulnerability of the city’s nursing and adult homes.

On Sunday, Oct. 28, the day before Hurricane Sandy arrived, Mr. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation in Zone A, the low-lying neighborhoods of the city. But by that point, Mr. Bloomberg, relying on the advice of the city and state health commissioners, had already determined that people in nursing homes and adult homes should not leave, officials said.

The mayor’s recommendations that health care facilities not evacuate startled residents of Surf Manor adult home in Coney Island, said one of them, Norman Bloomfield. He recalled that another resident exclaimed, “What about us! Why’s he telling us to stay?”

The commissioners made the recommendation to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo because they said they believed that the inherent risks of transporting the residents outweighed the potential dangers from the storm.

In interviews, senior Bloomberg and Cuomo aides did not express regret for keeping the residents in place.

“I would defend all the decisions and the actions” by the health authorities involving the storm, said Linda I. Gibbs, a deputy mayor. “I feel like I’m describing something that was a remarkable, lifesaving event.”

Dr. Nirav R. Shah, the state health commissioner, who regulates nursing homes, said: “I’m not even thinking of second-guessing the decisions.”

Still, officials in New Jersey and in Nassau County adopted a different policy, evacuating nursing homes in coastal areas well before the storm.

Contradictory Forecasts

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Chinatrust Bank to move U.S. headquarters to downtown L.A.

Chinatrust Bank has agreed to move its U.S. headquarters to downtown Los Angeles from Torrance.

The bank will rent two floors in 801 Tower, a company representative said. The high-rise is in the financial district north of Staples Center.

"We wanted to be in a major financial area," said Brian Gregson, head of U.S. retail banking at Chinatrust. "This is the early stage of getting our ducks in a row to start some expansion."

The bank's name will be affixed on top of the 25-story tower at 801 S. Figueroa St., he said.

Chinatrust, which is based in Taiwan, has 12 branches in the United States, including seven in Southern California. The bank will move about 175 employees to the new headquarters by the middle of next year, Gregson said.

Terms of the lease with landlord Mani Bros. Real Estate Group were not disclosed, but data provider CoStar said the agreement is for 10 years. At current rents, the lease for nearly 40,000 square feet would be valued at nearly $20 million.

Chinatrust's decision to move to downtown L.A. is part of a recent trend for businesses to relocate their main offices to the financial center, reversing the exodus of previous decades, real estate broker Ted Simpson of Cushman & Wakefield said.

"This speaks to the emergence of downtown L.A. as a corporate headquarters destination not seen since the 1980s," said Simpson, who represented the bank in the transaction with his partner Michael Ma.

Other companies to recently move their main offices or regional headquarters downtown include law firm Haight Brown Bonesteel and architecture firm Gensler.

"Corporations are once again choosing downtown for its attractiveness to its employees, not just low cost," Simpson said.

Average rents are cheaper downtown than on the popular Westside, in part because downtown has higher vacancy. Large corporations including Arco and First Interstate Bank left downtown in past decades or substantially reduced their offices.

Apartments going up in N. Hollywood

Apartment complexes planned before the demise of redevelopment agencies in California continue to rise in North Hollywood.

The projects in the NoHo Arts District near the northern terminus of the Red Line subway include the recently completed NoHo Senior Villas for elderly low-income tenants.

A larger, $50-million market-rate complex is under construction nearby and has reached its top height of six stories.

Phoenix developer Alliance Residential Co. is building the 308-unit market-rate complex called the Ferrara at 5031 Fair Ave. It is intended to be resort-like with outdoor dining facilities and bars, pools, cabanas and an outdoor movie venue.

"Our goal is to create a luxurious urban getaway for the residents," said Jonas Bronk of Alliance.

The Ferrara is slated for completion late next year.

NoHo Senior Villas, at 5525 Klump Ave., has 49 units and was built by Clifford Beers Housing and PATH Ventures for $16 million. Most of the units are reserved for seniors who were homeless and are living with a mental illness. The five-story complex has on-site facilities for mental health and social service personnel.

Both projects were designed by Killefer Flammang Architects of Santa Monica.

Also recently completed in North Hollywood was the $32-million NoHo Senior Arts Colony. It is intended for residents age 62 and over with interests in such pursuits as singing, acting, photography and writing.

The two senior housing projects are in the former North Hollywood Redevelopment Project Area, which offered tax breaks to developers. State officials dissolved local redevelopment agencies this year to save money.

roger.vincent@latimes.com

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