Criticism was often levied at Dobelle over his hiring of Chief Financial Officer J.R.W. "Wick" Sloane; his wife, Betsy, who headed the UH Foundation; and Paul Costello, vice president for external affairs. But internal contracts and memos provide more information about the circumstances surrounding others.

The appointment of Lestz raised questions about influence in hiring and still generates strong opinions among those who worked with him.

Willa Tanabe, former dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies, said she was "pressured" by the UH fiscal office headed by Wick Sloane to put Lestz in her department after his unpaid sabbatical year at UH, and to hire him at pay far above other faculty even though "many of our faculty clearly outshined this guy."

"The fiscal people called and said the president wanted him to be here and it would be good if he could be in our school and the president would take care of the funding," said Tanabe. When she resisted, another way was found to hire Lestz, she said.

Housing allowance

Lestz was paid $80,000 through Dobelle's office and the Office of International Affairs, $40,000 as the first Freeman Foundation "distinguished professor" and $29,000 for a housing allowance over a year and a half. Tanabe said no other faculty receive housing allowances, with faculty union spokesman J.N. Musto, executive director of the University of Hawai'i Professional Assembly concurring that no one in the faculty bargaining unit has a housing allowance.

But Dobelle said it was a small price to pay for someone contributing so much to the university, especially during Lestz's sabbatical year, in which he worked on UH projects but wasn't paid by UH.

As "Senior Advisor for Global Affairs," Lestz accompanied Dobelle on trips that cost the UH Foundation $11,130, charges that Deloitte and Touche called "disallowed and questionable" in an audit of Dobelle's $200,000 protocol fund provided by the UH Foundation for travel and entertainment costs.

After the Board of Regents fired Dobelle for "cause" June 15, a firestorm erupted. Members of the board refused to disclose the reason for their action but questions emerged about Dobelle's use of the protocol fund. A mediated settlement was reached in which regents rescinded "cause" in return for the resignation, and gave the former president $1.05 million in cash, $290,000 for attorney fees and $240,000 to pay premiums for six years on a life insurance policy. He is currently at the university for two years as a $125,000-a-year researcher.

The university has not yet released the total cost of their attorney fees.

Regents' questions

Documents released since the settlement show regents were raising questions about Dobelle's associates and the services they were providing. In addition to questions about the hiring of Lestz, there were questions about two contracts:

• One worth $440,000 over two and a half years to Jack Bradshaw of Gilbane Building Co. of Providence, R.I., as a consultant on the John A. Burns School of Medicine project in Kaka'ako, with the sole-source contract beginning at $338,000.
• And a one-year, $219,600 contract to Gordon B. King of Development Advisors LLC in Boston, Mass., for consulting work for the new medical school. The contract began at $312,000 but $92,000 was left unspent.

Documents also show there were questions about trips to Hawai'i for two East Coast associates Dobelle said were being recruited for UH jobs. One, Carmen Massimiano Jr., is the sheriff of Berkshire County in Massachusetts and traveled here in October 2001, staying at the Halekulani Hotel in Waikiki with travel and lodging expenses exceeding $2,000. The other was Trinity College squash team coach Paul Assaiante, who came in early 2002 at a cost of $1,400 to the UH Foundation. Dobelle said he hoped to start a squash program as part of UH athletics.

Dobelle defends his choices, saying associates he brought to the university weren't hired because they were friends, but because he thought they'd contribute in unique ways: Bradshaw and King because of expertise in large construction projects, and Lestz because it was "an opportunity to grab this world-class scholar that I knew, with no cost except housing. He was celebrated by Asian faculty and the Center for Chinese Studies."

He credits Lestz with bringing in a $1.6 million grant through Atlantic Philanthropies for a faculty exchange program with a university in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Grant's value disputed

UH professor of business Tung Bui, who holds the Matson Navigation Co. chair of global business, said he and Lestz headed a six-person team that won not a $1.6 million grant, but a $420,000 grant to assist with English language proficiency among teachers in Vietnam, with Lestz doing much of the early legwork. "He did some good work for us," said Bui. "(He was) a PR kind of person" more than an academic.

But Joseph O'Mealy, interim dean of the College of Language, Linguistics and Literature, thinks "the heavy lifting" for the grant was done by many people.

Although many faculty members give Lestz credit for helping with the grant plus $30,000 in seed money to set it up, others say he made a poor impression among UH's existing China specialists, based on his modest publishing record.

"Why would you bring in a China guy to a university that specializes in China?" asked professor Roger Ames, who heads the UH Center for Chinese Studies. "We have the largest center for Chinese Studies outside of China."

Barbara Andaya, director of South East Asian Studies, said at the time it seemed like a good idea for Lestz to be the first Freeman professor. "We had this new grant and this seemed like a perfect match between our program and someone close to the president. I thought it would be very good to increase the profile of Asian Studies." In the end, she said, she was disappointed with what he offered.

Lestz, who has since returned to Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., said at Trinity he helped create "a network of global learning centers" with Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries, and Dobelle hoped he would launch similar work here.

"Evan wanted to have a fresh look at all of this," said Lestz. "He felt we at the University of Hawai'i were not making as much progress as we might."

Some, such as Stephen O'Harrow, UH professor of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific languages and literature, felt Dobelle was seriously misinformed about UH's outreach in Asia.

However, O'Harrow felt Lestz served as an "active and vigorous" UH emissary in Asia, good at glad-handing and sitting at a banquet table "eating green frog innards deep-fried with hot sauce, telling jokes in Russian and making it look like fun."

Lestz said he worked for one semester without pay, only a housing allowance, and that his $80,000 salary for the second year was $14,000 less than what he received at Trinity.

Appointment defended

Dobelle also defends his choices of Bradshaw and King, saying the new UH Medical School project would never have advanced so quickly without the team put together through the Research Corporation of UH.

"RCUH had my recommendation to hire Jack and Gordon King, a senior vice president at MIT," Dobelle said. "Without Jack and without Gordon and without Rex (Johnson), that medical school would never have gotten into the ground and never would have been built, in my opinion. They were fundamental to the project.

"I didn't negotiate the contracts but recommended. We had to put a team together."

Dobelle has worked with Bradshaw on projects going back more than 30 years, including the Trinity College Learning Corridor, which turned a slum into schools in the neighborhood next to Trinity.

"I would not have been in Hawai'i except that Evan asked me to provide him with some assistance, which I had done both at Trinity and Middlesex," said Bradshaw from the Mainland. "Evan and I have been friends for 37 years."

King is a consultant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an office on the MIT campus, and considers himself "a professional associate," not a personal friend of Dobelle. Their connection goes back to when King was administering the capital program for the higher education system for Massachusetts when Dobelle was president of Middlesex Community College.

"He brought me in specifically to do this project," said King from his office at MIT, where he is a consultant. "I was asked to come out there. He knew the quality of my work and what I had done for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when I ran their capital program."

Allan Ah San, who prepared and signed the sole-source contract for Bradshaw, said he knows of no other sole source contracts for medical school projects.

"Evan must have had his reason," said Ah San. "Obviously one was trust and confidence in those two. They brought a wealth of experience. Obviously he felt very comfortable with them. It was such a big project he wanted to be sure he could trust the people he's asking to get it off the ground."