Norman Hsu’s attorney, Jim Brosnahan, told The Wall Street Journal that he arranged to pay the $2 million bond that was set by Judge H. James Ellis of San Mateo County Superior Court. The money “can also be used for restitution to any persons who might still be unpaid,” he added.
Mr. Hsu was facing up to three years in prison after pleading no contest to a charge that he had defrauded investors, but he skipped out on a court appearance and was not seen until today.
Also today, Mr. Hsu cut ties on with The New School, where he was a board member and where a scholarship is offered in his name. In a news release, the school said that he had “no involvement” with fund-raising activities.
Bob Kerrey, the president of The New School and a former Democratic senator, said he was introduced to Mr. Hsu about two years ago, and shortly thereafter Mr. Hsu joined the board of governors at the Eugene Lang College for liberal arts. He joined the university’s board of trustees last July.
“So much of the university is about the immigrant culture, and I liked his personal story, coming from China, and he had an interest in fashion as well,” Mr. Kerrey said. “It all intrigued me.”
He said that the university did not do background checks of prospective trustees and that he saw no reason to ask Mr. Hsu to resign from its board.
From $62,000 for Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York, to $10,000 for the Tennessee Democratic Party, the full extent of fund-raising by Mr. Hsu came into focus on Thursday, as campaigns across the country began returning his money in light of revelations that he was a fugitive in a fraud case.
Beyond the hundreds of thousands of dollars he raised from others for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Mr. Hsu personally contributed more than $600,000 to federal, state and municipal candidates in the last three years, a review of campaign finance records shows. It was a startling amount of money for someone whose sources of income remained far from obvious yesterday, as visits to addresses he has provided for his businesses showed no trace of Mr. Hsu.
In interviews with Democrats, a picture emerged of Mr. Hsu as someone who was frequently tapped at all levels of politics to make a contribution, bundle checks or hold an event. John Liu, a New York City councilman who said he last spoke to Mr. Hsu a few months ago at a gathering of Asian-American Clinton supporters in Washington, said Mr. Hsu “certainly had a strong reputation” for being able to raise lots of money.
“He actually told me he doesn’t get involved in municipal elections the first time I met him, but then he went ahead and gave to my campaign, and others,” Mr. Liu said, adding that he refunded Mr. Hsu’s $4,950 donation yesterday.
The Clinton campaign has said it will give to charity $23,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed, and on Thursday representatives of Mr. Spitzer and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who received $50,000 from Mr. Hsu, said they would do the same. A spokesman for Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who is a rival of Mrs. Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination, said Mr. Obama intended to give away $7,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed to his committees.
Mrs. Clinton appeared with Mr. Spitzer on Thursday at an event in Manhattan, where she made her first public comments on the matter, saying revelations of Mr. Hsu’s past criminal problems were “a big surprise to everybody.”
“When you have as many contributors as I’m fortunate enough to have,” she said, “we do the very best job we can based on the information available to us to make appropriate vetting decisions.”
Investigators believe that after Mr. Hsu skipped his court appearance in 1992, he went to his native Hong Kong and then continued working in the garment trade. At some point, Mr. Hsu, a naturalized American citizen, returned to New York and in 2003 made the first of what became hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic campaigns around the nation.
People who met him said they knew only that he ran an apparel business. Efforts to learn more about his trade hit dead-ends yesterday. Visits to companies at addresses listed by Mr. Hsu on campaign finance records provided little information. There were no offices in buildings in New York’s garment district whose addresses were given for businesses with names like Components Ltd., Cool Planets, Next Components, Coopgors Ltd., NBT and Because Men’s clothing — all listed by Mr. Hsu in federal filings at different times.
At a new loft-style residential condominium in SoHo that was also listed as an address for one of his companies, an employee there said that he had never seen or heard of Mr. Hsu. Another company was listed at a condo that Mr. Hsu had sublet in an elegant residential tower in Midtown Manhattan just off Fifth Avenue, but an employee there said Mr. Hsu moved out two years ago, after having lived there for five years. The employee, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about residents, said he recalled that Mr. Hsu had received a lot of mail from the Democratic Party.
Mike Nizza, Michael M. Grynbaum, Aron Pilhofer and Margot Williams contributed reporting. |
