Troubled times for OneUnited Bank CEO

Troubled times for Kevin Cohee

By Boston Herald Staff
Thursday, August 12, 2010

Kevin L. Cohee purchased a controlling interest in the Boston Bank of Commerce in 1995 and was elected chairman and CEO in 1996.

• September 1999: Boston Bank of Commerce acquires Peoples National Bank of Commerce with branches in Miami and Lauderdale Lakes, Fla.
• May 2001: Boston Bank of Commerce acquires Founders National Bank of Los Angeles, whose co-owners included Janet Jackson, Jheryl Busby and Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
• January 2003: With the support of U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, Boston Bank of Commerce beats out Illinois-based, white-owned bank to buy Family Savings Bank of Los Angeles and create OneUnited Bank.
• Janury 2004: Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, joins the board of OneUnited and acquires stock in the bank.
• February 2006: OneUnited begins offering online banking services.
• April 2007: Cohee arrested in sodomy case.
• May 2007: Cohee arrested on narcotics possession charges.
• April 2008: Sidney Williams’ term on the board of OneUnited ends, but he still holds shares in the bank worth about $350,000, or between 5 percent and 15 percent of the couple’s combined net worth.
• August 2008: Charges against Cohee are dismissed.
• August/September 2008: Cohee lobbies Waters and U.S. Rep. Barney Frank for a meeting with Treasury Department officials and for assistance for OneUnited.
• Sept. 9, 2008: Cohee and others meet with Treasury Department officials. The meeting reportedly focuses on OneUnited’s potential losses - more than $50 million - from federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Oct. 3, 2008: $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program signed into law.
• Oct. 27, 2008: Regulators issue cease-and-desist order against OneUnited. The company is ordered to sell within 90 days the $6.4 million home at 703 Palisades Beach Road and a Porsche the bank bought for Cohee’s personal use.
• December 2008: OneUnited, which had orginally asked for $50 million, receives $12 million from federal bailout program.
• Aug. 16, 2010: OneUnited and other small banks are due to make dividend payments to the Treasury Department. OneUnited has missed five payments in a row. 

Bank exec woes

Barney Frank, Maxine Waters say they didn’t know about charges

ALL-STAR LINEUP: Kevin L. Cohee, center, officially marks his bank’s acquisition of Founders National Bank of Los Angeles in 2001. Celebrants include, ‘Magic’ Johnson and music industry executive Jheryl Busby.

By Jessica Van Sack
Thursday, August 12, 2010

The married bank honcho at the center of the Maxine Waters ethics firestorm was arrested for allegedly sodomizing a woman and possessing cocaine at a company-owned manse just months before U.S. Rep. Barney Frank arranged a controversial taxpayer bailout for the Hub-based lender.

The charges against OneUnited Chairman and CEO Kevin L. Cohee, 52, who splits his time between Chestnut Hill and Santa Monica, were dismissed - including allegations of possessing cocaine, illegal narcotics and opiates in his company’s $6.4 million beachfront villa. Cohee agreed to participate in a “drug diversion program” in exchange for the drug charges being dismissed, according to Santa Monica Police Sgt. Jay Trisler.

Accusations of sodomy were dropped shortly after his arrest in April 2007. During that investigation, the police searched his company-owned home and arrested him on the drug charges.

“It was completely without merit,” Cohee told the Herald yesterday. “No convictions. Not even any charges. Utter and complete nonsense that went nowhere.”
In testimony to a House ethics panel, Waters called Cohee a “friend” and said she had been to one of his homes for a Christmas party and a fund-raiser.

Cohee’s legal plight played out until the drug charges against him were dropped in July 2008 - the month before he began working to secure a federal bailout for his bank, raising serious questions about the degree of vetting by federal regulators and members of Congress.

Frank, who chairs the powerful House Financial Services Committee, said through a spokesman that he was unaware of Cohee’s past legal troubles when he helped ensure that OneUnited - the Bay State’s only African-American-owned bank - would be eligible for a federal bailout.

“He didn’t know that,” Frank spokesman Harry Gural told the Herald, referring to Cohee’s arrest and the dropped charges. “He would have looked into it if someone had told him this. If there appeared to be merit to it (the charges), he would have called it to the attention of federal regulators.”

Frank has previously denied Waters had any sway over his efforts to help OneUnited, but admitted he was working on behalf of Cohee and disgraced state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson.
In October 2008, federal regulators and the Bay State’s division of banks ordered OneUnited to sell its $6.4 million beachfront property in Pacific Palisades, a prestigious area between Santa Monica and Malibu, and sell its bank-owned Porsche and other cars - like the gray Jaguar that Cohee was driving at the time of his 2007 arrest.

Regulators also demanded the bank end excessive payments and benefits for its executives.
At the time of his arrest on the sodomy accusation, Cohee told police he met his accuser, a woman he briefly dated, while she worked as a stylist on a photo shoot being filmed at the bank-owned home for an “MTV series,” according to a police report.

OneUnited lawyer Bob Cooper released a statement saying, “It is essential to reiterate and make clear that Mr. Cohee has no criminal record.”
Cooper added that the house “where Mr. Cohee resided was fully furnished and contained the personal possessions of others.”

Cohee’s courtroom drama is the latest twist in the ongoing ethics controversy dogging Waters, the California congresswoman. She faces conflict-of-interest charges for allegedly making a call to the Treasury Department on behalf of OneUnited as it sought to offset the $50-million hit it sustained from the federal takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Cohee, a Harvard Law graduate and former Wall Street investment banker, has long advocated for fair treatment of minorities by the nation’s banks, and OneUnited has been praised in the past for helping lower-income neighborhoods spur growth.

In January 2003, Cohee and his wife acquired a bank in Waters’ district after the congresswoman’s outspoken advocacy for Family Savings Bank to remain in African-American hands. The acquisition nearly doubled the size of Cohee’s bank, which he re-branded OneUnited.

The following year, Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, joined the board of OneUnited. He remained a member until April 2008, retaining shares worth about $350,000 in the bank.
A spokesman for Waters, Mikael Moore, said the congresswoman did not know that Cohee had been arrested or that the charges were dropped.

“She was not aware,” Moore said.

For his part, Cohee downplayed the ethics allegations that Waters now faces. “These midterm elections are coming up,” he said. “People are determined to win.”

OneUnited Bank has checkered past

Bank at center of Rep. Waters inquiry has checkered past 

Kevin Cohee, chairman and chief executive of OneUnited Bank. His connection to Rep. Maxine Waters dates back to at least 2002, preceding his bank’s acquisition of another black-owned L.A. institution. (Los Angeles Times / August 12, 2010)

OneUnited Bank has been criticized as having a poor record of lending to people in some low-income areas. It also paid for a luxurious lifestyle for its chairman despite posting huge losses.

By E. Scott Reckard and Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times
August 12, 2010

Advertisement

OneUnited Bank, the financial institution at the center of a congressional ethics investigation involving Rep. Maxine Waters, paid for a luxurious lifestyle for its chairman, including a Porsche and a house on Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica despite his having a record that includes arrests and allegations of drug use.

The bank has been criticized by regulators in Florida for having an unusually poor record of lending to people in low-income neighborhoods. It also has failed to pay back $12 million in federal bailout funds.

The bank chairman, Kevin L. Cohee, assembled one of the country's largest African American-owned banks, with more than half a billion dollars in assets, in a coast-to-coast acquisition spree unusual for a bank focused on lower-income customers.

Yet although the bank touts itself as an institution for the underserved, its directors approved paying a reported $26,500 monthly lease for Cohee's beach house in Santa Monica and providing him the all-expenses-paid luxury sports car — until regulators ordered a halt to such corporate largesse. Waters' husband, Sidney Williams, served on the board of the bank from January 2004 through April 2008 and owns 3,500 shares of the bank's stock, according to the House Ethics Committee's report of alleged violations.

Cohee's high-flying perks came despite his having been charged in 2007 with felonies after his arrest by the Santa Monica Police Department on suspicion of possessing cocaine, crack cocaine and concentrated cannabis, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. The case was dismissed the next year after Cohee completed a drug diversion program.

He was also arrested in 2007 after a woman filed a complaint alleging that Cohee had forcibly sodomized her, according to public records. Prosecutors did not pursue the assault charge. The Boston Herald quoted Cohee as saying that the arrest was "utter and complete nonsense that went nowhere."

Cohee could not be reached Wednesday for comment on the arrests.

Accusations that Waters, who represents a heavily minority district in South L.A., dispensed special favors to OneUnited Bank are just the latest controversy for the closely held Boston bank that has faltered in recent years. The bank has lost more than $30 million since 2008, and has seen deposits plummet.

Five of OneUnited's 10 branches are in the Los Angeles area, all in neighborhoods with large African American populations.

Unlike its peers that have typically expanded in their local markets, OneUnited set its sights across the country. It grew by acquiring two of L.A.'s black-owned financial institutions, Founders National Bank and Family Savings Bank, and a troubled Miami bank.

In the Florida market, OneUnited's last two reviews by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. produced ratings of "substantial non-compliance" with federal laws that require financial institutions to lend to local communities — the lowest rating possible.

OneUnited has made just three home loans over the last 31 months in economically hard-hit Miami-Dade and Broward counties, said Kenneth H. Thomas, an independent banking consultant.

He said that of the deposits raised at OneUnited's two Florida branches, less than 10% has been loaned back to the community. Typically, 50% is needed to meet the federal requirements.

OneUnited has argued that it is only being cautious in one of the most overinflated real estate markets in the country. But Thomas accused the bank of using its Florida branches as a "deposit outpost" while concentrating on lending in other markets under the direction "of heavy-hitters from Boston, L.A. and D.C."

"They're red-lining our communities here in Florida," Thomas said.

The connection between Waters and Cohee dates back to at least 2002, when the congresswoman lobbied heavily for Family Savings to remain black-owned when it put itself up for sale.

Family Savings ultimately backed out of a deal with a white-owned banking firm from Illinois and accepted a slightly better offer of about $12 million from Cohee's bank.

In creating one of the nation's largest African American banks, Cohee assembled a powerful board that includes a number of wealthy Bostonians and Washington lobbyist Leander J. Foley, a White House advisor during the Carter administration.

Cohee added glamour to power when he acquired Founders, which was owned in part by former Lakers great Earvin "Magic" Johnson. A spokesperson for Johnson said he retains an investment interest in the bank but is not involved in day-to-day operations.

In 2008, regulators concluded that OneUnited had "engaged in unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law."

Industry tracker MinorityBank.com calls OneUnited the worst-performing minority financial institution in the country.

When the economy melted down in 2008 and the government took over mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, OneUnited was hard hit. It lost more than $50 million in investments in Fannie and Freddie securities.

Waters arranged an emergency meeting in September 2008 with Treasury Department officials to discuss funding through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP.
In response to regulatory orders, OneUnited raised $17 million in private capital from Boston's State Street Bank, strengthening its finances. It later obtained $12 million in bank bailout funds from the U.S. Treasury — money it has not yet repaid.

Indeed, OneUnited is among just eight banks nationwide that have missed five consecutive quarterly TARP dividend payments, according to Neil M. Barofsky, special inspector general for the TARP program. More than 700 banks received TARP money.
The House Ethics Committee has accused Waters of violating three House rules in seeking aid for the bank, given her husband's financial interest. She has denied wrongdoing, saying she didn't benefit financially and was acting on behalf of minority banks in general, not just OneUnited.

Cohee and a bank lawyer, Robert Cooper, declined to be interviewed by The Times. They issued a statement saying OneUnited "cannot comment on matters related to allegations facing Rep. Waters … due to the ongoing nature of the proceedings."

"The bank continues to focus on providing critical financial products and services in a responsible manner to underserved urban communities of Boston, Miami and Los Angeles that have been devastated during the current economic downturn," the statement said.
In 2008, when OneUnited posted huge losses, the Massachusetts Division of Banks and the FDIC launched a regulatory review.

The regulators imposed heavy sanctions on OneUnited, requiring it to raise capital, tighten its lending policies, avoid over-concentrating its investments and rein in executive compensation, including halting payment on the Cohee beach house and selling the Porsche it had supplied him.

scott.reckard@latimes.com
stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com
Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Ansel Adams garage-sale find debunked?

Ansel Adams garage-sale find debunked? 

Experts say Yosemite shots are by Earl Brooks

August 8, 2010 

 

Rick Norsigian's 10-year quest to prove that he turned up a trove of "lost" Ansel Adams photo negatives at a Fresno garage sale now has a rival explanation advanced by Norsigian's opponents: They were taken by a heretofore unknown photographer from the Fresno area named Earl Brooks.

The suggestion was made July 27 by Brooks' 87-year-old niece, the same day that Norsigian made headlines by proclaiming that his find had been validated and was worth $200 million. Now, Marian Walton's theory has been endorsed by Adams' former business manager and two of the famed photographer's assistants. They shared their evidence with The Times this weekend.

Arnold Peter, the Beverly Hills attorney who is helping Norsigian market the pictures and a documentary film about his find, last week issued a rebuttal to numerous criticisms raised about the Norsigian claim. If prints attributed to Walton's long-dead Uncle Earl indeed turned out to have been created from the Norsigian negatives, Peter said, it only proved that, at some point, Ansel Adams made prints from the negatives, and they somehow found their way into Earl Brooks' hands.  

Norsigian held a packed news conference July 27 at a Beverly Hills art gallery to reveal what he and his team of hired experts said was conclusive proof that his 65 old-fashioned glass-plate negatives of scenes from Yosemite and coastal California were previously unknown pictures that Adams shot during the 1920s and early 1930s.

The conference made the evening news in the Bay Area. Watching TV in her den in Oakland was Walton, a former secretary and grandmother of four whose family hailed from the Fresno and Visalia area. She saw Norsigian's picture of the Jeffrey pine on Yosemite's Sentinel Dome flash on her screen. "Oh my gosh," Walton thought to herself. "That's Uncle Earl's picture!" She didn't even have to get out of her chair to make the comparison -- it was hanging on the bathroom wall, in clear view from where she sat, she said in a recent interview.

Walton called the TV station, KTVU, and the next day, after her weekly tennis game, she got a visit from a reporter and Scott Nichols, owner of a San Francisco photo gallery that did a considerable business in Ansel Adams prints. Nichols took the Jeffrey pine picture and three other Yosemite shots from Uncle Earl that Walton had kept in a drawer.

KTVU did a story on Walton's picture, with Nichols saying there was only a minute difference between it and the one on Norisigian's website, which the Fresno school district employee had posted as one of 17 images he'd begun selling for $7,500 for a hand-made print, $1,500 for a digital one and $45 for a poster.

Nichols told The Times last week that the slight differences in the tree's shadow and the clouds behind it were probably caused by a short time lapse between the taking of each picture. Everything else -- the focus, brightness and angle, were the same. It was the best evidence yet, he said, of what he and other dealers, as well as Adams' family and professional circle of former assistants already had concluded: that Norsigian's negatives had been shot by somebody other than America's greatest nature photographer.

On Friday, Nichols sent digital images of Marian Walton's four pictures to William Turnage, Ansel Adams' former business manager and now managing trustee in charge of granting the rights to publish or copy Adams' work, and to Alan Ross, John Sexton and Rod Dresser, photographers who worked closely with Adams as his assistants during the 10 years before his death in 1984.

Last year, Norsigian's team sent Ross 61 of the images, hoping he would confirm that they had been taken by Adams. He didn't. So, Ross was able to make comparisons not just between Walton's prints and the 17 pictures Norsigian had published, but also to most of the Norsigian find.

The findings: One of Walton's prints, showing Old Inspiration Point road in Yosemite, is a seemingly identical match to an unpublished Norsigian image, Ross and Sexton said in e-mails that Turnage shared with The Times.

The three others were close matches, the two former Adams assistants said, differing slightly in such details as the shape of water spray at Bridal Veil Falls -- suggesting they were different takes from the same photo session. 

As telling as the identical photos showing the park entrance road, said Nichols, were flaws in one of the slightly different waterfall pictures. The Norsigian negative of the falls and the almost-identical print belonging to Walton had identical scratches and white spots, Nichols said Saturday, meaning they were taken by the same camera, whose internal imperfections -- possibly, specks of dirt --  registered the same on each image.

Nichols said that with four pictures either identical or apparently from the same photo shoots, it's enough to prove that the entire Norsigian find must be the lost work of Uncle Earl, not Ansel Adams. Sexton noted in an e-mail that, "now, of course, the Norsigian crew will claim that Uncle Earl didn't make the four photographs" but must have bought them from Adams or at Best's Studio, the Yosemite photography store that sold Adams' work. Adams married Virginia Best, daughter of the studio's owner, in 1928. The studio remains in business as the Ansel Adams Gallery, with their grandson in charge.

In an interview last week, Sexton told The Times that conclusive proof could well lie in the negatives themselves. Because all 44,000 Ansel Adams negatives are archived at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, a physical comparison should be made between Norsigian's negatives and identically sized glass negatives from the archive -- with particular attention to clear spots along the negatives' borders that invariably were caused by the wooden holders and metal clips used to slot the negatives into old-time cameras.

Mark Osterman, an expert on photographic processes at the George Eastman International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y., and Paul Messier, a Boston-based photographic conservator with high-profile expertise in photographic authentication, said last week that such proof could be telling if there were distinctive irregularities in the known Adams negatives that had been caused by the plate holders. Because photographers used their holders over and over, Norsigian's negatives should then have the same unexposed clear spots as the known Adams negatives. Messier said other useful comparisons could be made by testing the chemical composition of the two sets of glass plates, and their emulsion residues.

Walton said she had owned the four photographs since her father's death in 1981; he told her they were taken by his older brother in 1923.  Walton said she last saw her uncle in the late 1930s, when she and her parents paid a visit to the ailing man in Visalia, not long before his death.

She said she didn't know much about Earl Brooks, other than that he married twice and liked to take pictures. "He had an adventuresome spirit. He did travel around a lot," including a stay on a commune in an eastern state. "I don't think he had much schooling, but he was a good photographer."

As for Norsigian, "I may burst his bubble," Walton said. "I'm not trying to do anything but get to the truth. I hate to see anybody taken advantage of on the premise that he has what he thinks he has."

-- Mike Boehm

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He is glass-plate positive

A Fresno antique buff is certain that negatives he bought at a garage sale are from the legendary Ansel Adams. It's been a lonely point of view.

April 21, 2007|Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer

Fresno — RICK NORSIGIAN discovered the object of his obsession one sunny Saturday seven years ago at a garage sale.

A painter for the Fresno school district by day and inveterate antique buff the rest of his waking hours, Norsigian was combing through suburban castoffs when he came across a time-weathered wooden box. The crate was heavy with old glass-plate photographic negatives.

Frozen in early 20th century black and white were sharply detailed shots of Yosemite landmarks, the San Francisco waterfront, Carmel's historic mission and scenic Point Lobos.

Norsigian bought the five dozen negatives for about 75 cents apiece. They were a nice bit of memorabilia, he figured, nothing more.

Still, over the months that followed, when he gingerly pulled the delicate plates out of faded manila envelopes to show friends and relatives, nearly everyone said the same thing: These old glass negatives look like the work of Ansel Adams.

A notion slowly took hold of Norsigian: Perhaps this was a misplaced collection of the American photographic legend's early work. Maybe he had turned up a lost treasure.

Antiques had always been Norsigian's fixation. The 60-year-old grandfather spent a lifetime carting home an oddball collection of old stuff from auctions and estate sales around his Central Valley hometown. His good-natured wife, Pam, drew the line at letting it overflow into the master bedroom and bath.

But nothing amid the home's antique sprawl -- not the vintage gas pump or cylinder phonograph or prized 1909 pool table -- ever hooked him like the glass-plate negatives.

At first, he knew little of Adams, who died in 1984. Norsigian had never been to a photography exhibit. A plain-talking blue-collar guy, he preferred tinkering with his 1928 Ford to visiting museums.

Now, suddenly, he was boning up on all things Ansel. He put away his hot rod magazines and for months pored over a dozen Adams biographies and photo books, footnoting each with Post-it notes.

Page after page yielded coincidences.

Adams, who was born in San Francisco in 1902, worked early in his career with 6 1/2-by-8 1/2-inch glass-plate negatives just like the ones Norsigian had found. During the 1920s he shot mostly in Yosemite and the Sierra but also at San Francisco's Baker Beach near his family home and in Carmel, spots featured in Norsigian's negatives.

In the photo books, Norsigian found several Adams prints resembling his garage-sale negatives.

One negative shows Sentinel Dome's weather-sculpted Jeffrey pine, but at a different angle from what Adams immortalized. Several are tight shots of billowing Nevada Falls, a frequent subject for Adams' lens. Another depicts a gnarled oak tree fronting distant Cathedral Rock. During the 1940s, Adams printed virtually the same picture, but with a shapelier oak in the foreground.

Norsigian's most tantalizing biographical discovery was the 1937 blaze that engulfed Adams' Yosemite darkroom, destroying a third of his work. Some of the Fresno glass plates, he noticed, seemed scorched at the edges.

The man who sold Norsigian the plates in 2000 had told him they came from an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles. Norsigian learned in his reading that Adams had moved briefly to L.A. in late 1942 to teach.

Sketching a timeline in his mind, he became increasingly convinced that the negatives had been salvaged after the fire, carted to Southern California and then somehow left behind.

"It took me awhile to figure it out -- all the pictures I have, they're trying to tell a story," Norsigian said. "These are early Ansel Adams, before he became famous."

*

ITCHING for proof, he took a day off from work on a fine spring morning in 2001, packed the pickup with family and a picnic lunch and prints he had made from the negatives and headed up the winding road from Fresno to the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley.

Glenn Crosby, the gallery curator, invited Norsigian into a back room while his wife and two grown daughters browsed out front, baby granddaughter Ashley gurgling.

On a big table they spread a dozen photographs printed from the glass plates. Crosby didn't give an opinion but he asked his guest: Would you like to talk to Adams' heirs?

That afternoon, Norsigian drove home excited, sure that the question meant that Crosby had seen the same thing he had.

For months, Norsigian waited. Finally, late that summer, he received a phone call from Jeanne Adams, wife of Ansel's son, Michael. They wanted to come see the negatives firsthand.

When the big day arrived, Pam spent the morning tidying up an already tidy house as Rick battled nerves.

Michael Adams arrived with his wife as the Central Valley heat settled on the Norsigian house. The air conditioner ran hard, but Norsigian found himself sweating. Adams, a retired Air Force officer and physician, declined a soft drink and settled on a couch with his wife.

Norsigian covered the coffee table with prints.

The couple gazed at each shot, not saying much. Norsigian remembers Michael Adams suggesting that the quality seemed similar to Ansel's. Norsigian showed them the wooden box, pulled out a few glass negatives.

Then the couple asked to see the fraying manila envelopes the plates had been stored in, each one marked with distinctive handwriting.

They looked at the writing, then at each other. Nothing was said. Finally, Jeanne Adams turned to face Norsigian.

This isn't Ansel's handwriting, she told him. His was much smaller.

It didn't hit Norsigian until late that night -- his hunt might be over, his treasure fool's gold. It might be time to give up.

But in the days to come, the unanswered questions gnawed at him. Night after night, he kept picking up the books. If not Adams, he wanted to know, who else might have shot the images?

Numerous photographers plied their trade in Yosemite during the early 20th century. D.J. Foley and Julius T. Boysen operated studios in the valley, as did the prolific Arthur C. Pillsbury. Adams often praised the work of Yosemite predecessor George Fiske, who died in 1918.

Norsigian, however, couldn't stop thinking about Adams. He needed a second opinion. There were other experts out there.

He sent his prints to Mary Street Alinder, Adams' biographer and assistant in the final years before his death. Alinder's book had become his Adams bible. He had read it seven times, all 500 pages. If anyone had answers, Norsigian figured, she would.

Alinder wrote back in April 2002 to say she was baffled. The size and apparent fire damage "seem to indicate they might be Ansel's," Alinder wrote. Although some of the images looked like the work of Adams, "some do not," Alinder said. "The handwriting just complicates matters." She thought the writing on the envelopes might belong to Virginia Adams, Ansel's wife, but conceded she was no handwriting expert.

The possibility was enough to keep Norsigian going -- and bring out his stubborn streak. At work, he was known as a guy who didn't bow to the old-boy system. Now, in pursuing his quest, he proved every bit the bulldog.

After another Adams biographer, Anne Hammond, expressed doubt that Norsigian's negatives came from the famed photographer, he began peppering her with e-mails. Finally, Hammond gave up and conceded she really didn't know.

Norsigian haggled for months to get handwriting samples from the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, home to Adams' archives. Eventually, he lost his temper and dashed off a growling e-mail. "You people are supposed to preserve history," he wrote, "not destroy it!"

His hunt was becoming everything to him. The negatives had come to dominate his thoughts and conversations. Buddies at work knew all the twists and turns. He showed them the prints, kept them posted on the latest developments.

Attaboy, Rick, they'd tell him.

Alone at work, brushing paint on a blank wall, his mind dwelt on what new evidence might prove to the world what he already believed. He chatted endlessly on the telephone with his grown son, John, who shared his father's yearning for proof.

His wife lost him to evenings spent on the computer hunting for clues. He searched the Library of Congress' online photo archives, hoping to spot a rare Adams print that might match one of his negatives. Hours in front of the screen got him nowhere.

Meanwhile, he kept searching for an Adams expert with a different point of view -- and eventually found one.

Jonathan Spaulding, yet another Adams biographer, was at the time an associate curator with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In September 2003, Norsigian took more time off from work and drove to Southern California.

Spaulding voiced several possibilities.

He said the print of a park ranger standing atop Diving Board Rock at Glacier Point looked like Ansel Hall, a pioneering Yosemite naturalist who befriended Adams in the early 1920s. Spaulding said the car pictured in front of the Carmel mission in another of the shots might be the 1926 Buick owned by Albert Bender, an Adams benefactor known to take road trips with the photographer.

None of the negatives approached Adams' best work, Spaulding said, but in the early 1920s the photographer still had not developed the mature style of decades to come.

*

NEWLY energized, Norsigian hit the books again, digging up a reference to a Carmel trip Bender took with Ansel and Virginia Adams. Norsigian also hunted down a pair of antique auto experts, who confirmed that the car in his picture was a 1926 Buick.

Norsigian had an idea. The search now seemed like a detective story. Maybe a detective could solve it.

After work one day, he met with a forensic crime expert at Cal State Fresno who agreed to help at no charge. Norsigian knew it was a long shot but asked if it might be possible to coax fingerprints off the old envelopes or decipher a license number on the Buick that he could then trace to Bender.

The crime expert dipped the brittle envelopes into a bath of ninhydrin, a chemical that reacts with the amino acids of fingerprints. Any surviving print, the expert said, would reappear in ghostly purple.

Nothing.

Next he turned to the Buick photo. The criminologist used his computer to magnify the car's license plate. Despite the digital assist, the image remained too fuzzy to read.

Just as Norsigian was ready to pull his hair out once again, the lead he had gotten on the Yosemite park ranger paid off.

Searching the Internet, Norsigian learned that Ansel Hall, the ranger he suspected was in the photo, had a daughter living in Colorado. He called her up.

Merrie Winkler and her husband, William, recalled that Hall, who died in 1962, had vivid memories of the young Adams from the early 1920s as a pesky budding photographer who eventually won him over.

After the photo arrived in the mail, the couple peered through a magnifying lens at the ranger on the rock. They wrote back in December 2003.

There was no doubt, they said. It was Hall.

With that, any uncertainty left in Norsigian evaporated like saltwater on a ship's deck.

But his hunt was taking a toll.

A night didn't pass when he didn't fret over finding proof. His wife was growing antsy about his preoccupation.

He had spent $10,000 on trips, research and the dozens of framed prints that now hung on nearly every wall of the house.

And he had grown wary -- enough to rent a safe-deposit box for the glass plates. He knew anything related to Adams was valuable. A print of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" recently sold for $609,600. Norsigian considered his negatives a national treasure also worth plenty.

But without an expert stamp of approval, attempts to interest the big New York auction houses led nowhere.

*

BY 2004, a dark suspicion had crept into Norsigian's thoughts. He wondered if his authentication attempts were being stymied by photographic scholars' ingrained fear of upsetting the Adams estate.

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust closely guards the reproduction and exhibition of the photographer's work. Perhaps the best way to break the logjam, acquaintances told Norsigian, would be to enlist the trust in authentication.

An ominous response came in March 2004. William Turnage, the trustee who propelled Adams to financial success, dismissed any interest in Norsigian's negatives, warning that the trust "owns all rights to Ansel's name and likeness" and that any unauthorized use would be referred to attorneys.

Norsigian's wife wondered aloud if maybe it was time to quit. She fretted that they could get sued, lose everything they had worked so hard for -- the house full of antiques, a good life on the eve of retirement.

At times they bickered. Maybe you should give up, she said. He soothed her and, undaunted, headed in the next new direction.

Norsigian needed an expert on his side. So he asked Alinder to vouch for his negatives. But repeated e-mails went unanswered. By summer he had grown weary of waiting. He ended up irking her with an intemperate e-mail accusing her of refusing to "help prove history."

In 2005, he sent a package of prints to the Smithsonian Institution. The museum's photo archivists seemed enthusiastic in a phone conversation but less so in a letter simply wishing him luck.

More recently, Norsigian's negatives found the lap of an aging aide-de-camp of Adams.

Rondal Partridge, still spry at 89, has a long and storied career of his own -- son of photo pioneer Imogen Cunningham, apprentice to the legendary Dorothea Lange, late-1930s lab assistant to Adams.

Partridge was there in 1937 when Adams' Yosemite darkroom went up in flames. They had just returned from an outing with Edward Weston, a co-founder with Adams of the legendary photo collective Group f/64, when fire belched out the darkroom's windows.

"I don't remember any glass negatives, but there might have been," Partridge said.

Adams in those days was "a bit of a genius and a bit of a nut," Partridge said, up at 6 a.m., fueled in part by Irish whiskey. But nobody, he said, "has ever reached the level of photographic technique that Ansel did."

Norsigian's negatives don't begin to approach that skill, Partridge said as he flipped through the prints in his Berkeley hills home.

"Oh, no. Oh, no. Not Ansel."

Flip.

"Noooo. Noooo."

Flip. Flip.

"These are not compositions Ansel would have made," he concluded. "I'm 99% certain."

He shrugged. "This is a real mystery."

*

IT'S a mystery worth solving, said Spaulding, now chief curator at Los Angeles' Museum of the American West. Spaulding suggests that Norsigian's negatives be lent to an archive where scholars could study them and form opinions.

Adams' heirs don't want any part of the puzzle. Jeanne and Michael Adams declined to comment.

Their son, Matthew, president of the Ansel Adams Gallery, said the family wishes Norsigian would take no for an answer.

"We've looked at them, and they're not Ansel Adams' negatives," Matthew said. "I've heard some people build greenhouses out of glass-plate negatives. Maybe that ought to be considered in this case."

Norsigian scoffs at the dismissal. Naysayers, he contends, are looking at the negatives through the wrong end of the lens -- judging them not by the early and unperfected Adams but by the huge talent he became.

He's sick of weak-willed experts, their hopeful words in private melting away in public. "I'm 100% certain, no matter what they feel," Norsigian said. "I've got all this evidence."

This search that began so innocently so many years ago, he said, now has taken over his days and nights and become "a knot in the stomach that won't go away."

The truth is right there on the horizon, in black and white. He's sure of it.

*

eric.bailey@latimes.com