The Fix Is In

Investigators from the California Attorney General's and the state auditor's offices interviewed Campbell, who supplied them with piles of UCSF contract and bidding documents, internal memoranda, and charts highlighting what she claimed was a pattern of corruption in her erstwhile department. She also gave investigators the names and telephone numbers of several roofing-industry professionals who had published articles in trade magazines asserting that Tremco has long had a policy of instructing its sales reps to insinuate themselves into the lives of public officials in order to promote the use of proprietary specifications.

She gave investigators copies of a 1997 report in Midwest Roofer that published Tremco's internal guidelines encouraging sales reps to offer "free" spec writing to public officials in order to restrict use of materials to Tremco products. Campbell also steered government investigators to a 2000 report by the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, Waste and Abuse in Public School Roofing Projects. The path-breaking investigation concluded that by convincing public school district officials to use proprietary specs, Tremco and several other roofing companies siphoned off more than $6 million in excess profits from $38 million worth of roofing jobs. A Tremco spokesman says school officials selected his firm's materials on the basis of quality and that Tremco was not involved in any improper or illegal activities.

Two roofing consultants were shown to have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in improper payments in the form of fees for "inspecting" roofs. A commission spokesperson says the state board of architecture sanctioned one of the consultants, but no criminal actions were filed. He says that corruption in roof spec-writing is a national problem.

Meanwhile, the Dayton Daily News published a series of investigative reports showing that New Jersey's problems were but a microcosm of a larger universe of corruption. In October 2000, staff writer Steve Bennish reported on Campbell's charges: "UCSF Counsel Chris Patti acknowledged university administrators favored Tremco enough to let the company 'help' write roof replacement specifications, calling Tremco an 'industry leader.' He also acknowledged the FBI investigation, but said no charges resulted and university officials did not suspect Campbell as the tipster."

The California Attorney General's Office in 2001 handed Campbell's allegations off to the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, since they seemed to be national in scope. A state investigator who pored over Campbell's paperwork for several years said her charges "stretched further [across the country] than we had the resources to look at."

But federal prosecutors declined to take up the case a second time, saying that "it failed to show anti-trust violations." (Campbell says her case is not about federal antitrust issues, which would involve collusion between materials suppliers; her charges concern public contract fraud covered by state law.) A spokesman for state Auditor Elaine Howle refuses to confirm or deny that Howle's office is looking into Campbell's allegations. But Campbell says she supplied Howle's investigators with UCSF documents as recently as last June and that "the investigation is not dead." In addition, the FBI recently reinterviewed Campbell, apparently as part of its broad probe of the nuclear labs.

Her wrongful-termination suit, however, has foundered. After a federal judge ruled in 2000 that her case was not a federal matter, it was remanded to San Francisco Superior Court. Campbell got a new attorney, Martin F. Jennings, who's working on a contingency basis. (Campbell lives hand-to-mouth doing small architectural jobs.) Jennings appealed this month to the California Supreme Court after a state appellate court ruled that Campbell can't sue UC because she "did not exhaust her administrative remedies." The fatal Catch-22 occurred because Campbell filed her grievance under what turned out to be the wrong university personnel policy before she filed her whistle-blower suit; therefore, lower courts have ruled, she is not entitled to protections in state law for whistle-blowers.

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The library of Campbell's sunlit apartment near Golden Gate Park is stuffed with boxes full of UCSF memoranda, specifications, contracts, and telephone logs: potential evidence of wrongdoing that Campbell often shares with law enforcement agencies and regularly combs through in preparation for her day in court.

But it's unlikely that her mountain of paper will ever see the light of a courtroom if the California Supreme Court rules against her. Although Campbell's suit does not name Tremco, it is clear from her documentation and from FBI agent Graham's deposition that she's targeting the Ohio firm. (The bulk of her court filings relates to whether or not she exhausted her administrative remedies, and she says Tremco is to be named when and if her lawsuit is allowed to proceed.) Tremco spokesman Carl Zeitz says Campbell's claims about his company "have no merit."