Portland power brokers pressured DA Mike Schmidt during private club lunch

In late spring, a small group of Portland power brokers invited Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt to privately dine with them at the Arlington Club, one of the city’s most exclusive venues.

The men were blunt: They didn’t like the DA’s handling of destructive demonstrations downtown and warned Schmidt that he risked jeopardizing the criminal justice reform agenda that propelled him into office last year.

The prosecutor explained why his office had not sought to file charges in the vast majority of protest arrests, most of them low-level offenses like interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing.

Jordan Schnitzer, the philanthropist and real-estate mogul who attended the luncheon, said Schmidt’s reasoning made sense.

Schnitzer then told the district attorney he should tap a team of outside lawyers — he came up with suggestions of attorneys mostly from white-shoe firms — to audit his policies and practices.

“I thought that was a good idea,” Schnitzer said in an interview this week. “If what the DA told us is factual, it would seem like a sound, logical decision on his part.”

As the organizer of the luncheon put it, an outside review could provide Schmidt with perspective.

“He’s a relatively young guy and as wise as we are when we are young, a little bit of advice politically sometimes can help,” Tom Mason, a former state lawmaker and lobbyist, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The extraordinary request underscores the tension over Schmidt’s handling of protest-related arrests and highlights what some business leaders see as the prosecutor’s role in helping repair the damage Portland’s reputation suffered after more than 100 nights of unrest.

For more than a year, exasperated business owners and property managers have fumed over last summer’s chaotic protests and inability or unwillingness of elected officials to contain them.

Portland became a punching bag for former President Donald Trump and was subjected to months of ferocious critiques on Fox News; all the bad press plainly took a toll.

Institutional investors indicated they were unlikely to pump money into Portland real estate and prospective tourists said they’d lost interest in visiting the city. Indeed, hotel occupancy downtown remains down sharply even as destinations elsewhere in the state spring back.

And while many have voiced their frustrations with elected leadership publicly and privately, few have had the opportunity to dress down Portland’s top prosecutor in such a refined setting.

Mason said he and David Margulis, owner of the nearly century-old family jewelry store on Southwest Broadway and Yamhill, invited the district attorney to lunch after they heard Schmidt speak at the Arlington Club on April 28. Mason is a member of the club and law school classmate of Schnitzer’s.

The private social club dates to the 1860s and is housed in a Classical Revival building at 811 S.W. Salmon St. The club’s website says it was founded by a group of Portland’s business and civic elite whose mission was “to provide a meeting place for discussing their own and the community’s destiny.”

Mason, who previously worked in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office under Harl Haas and Mike Schrunk, said Schmidt’s speech was “vague” when it came to the topic of restoring downtown.

Emails released this week by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office in response to a public records request from The Oregonian/OregonLive show Mason began corresponding with the office May 12 to arrange lunch at the club.

‘IT’S A PRIVATE CLUB’

Mason was reluctant to discuss the May 24 meeting, stating emphatically that the club zealously guards the privacy of its members and what transpires there.

“I am serious about this,” he said. “It’s a private club.”

Further illustrating the club’s exclusive nature, a representative on Tuesday sent a link to a recording of Schmidt’s remarks in April but quickly disabled access saying she hadn’t realized she had shared the link with a reporter.

In an email, clubhouse manager April Ramirez said the club has a “a strict policy of not sharing club information with the media.” (Oregonian editor Therese Bottomly and Oregonian publisher John Maher are Arlington Club members but did not attend Schmidt’s speaking event.)

In addition to Schnitzer, Mason and Margulis, Henry Hillman Jr. also joined the later luncheon. Hillman is the scion of a Pittsburgh steel fortune and longtime Portland entrepreneur.

Margulis could not be reached for comment. Hillman did not respond to a phone message seeking comment.

Mort Bishop, retired Pendleton Woolen Mills president, was on the original list of guests but was unavailable, Mason said in an email to Schmidt’s executive assistant Jillian Detweiler. Mason wrote that Schnitzer would attend instead.

PERCEIVED ‘LACK OF PROSECUTION’

In an interview, Schnitzer said he was not at the Arlington Club event where Schmidt spoke but said he agreed to meet with him at the luncheon organized by Mason.

He said he and the other participants told Schmidt that Portland’s business and civic leaders remained flummoxed by the district attorney’s policies around protest-related prosecutions.

“I don’t want to be arrogant and talk on behalf of 2½ million people in the metro area,” Schnitzer said, “but I can’t imagine anyone not being concerned about how long the protests have gone on and about the schism between those who voiced ‘defund the police’ and the rest of us who say let’s do whatever it takes to make Portland have the best police force it can with the best practices.

“The message of Black Lives Matter was lost in the destruction of broken windows and fires,” Schnitzer said. “That didn’t help that cause, which was a worthy cause. ‘Distressed’ would be an understatement to describe downtown in the last 18 months.”

Said Schnitzer, summing up the lunch: “We were good listeners. He was a good listener. Whether our conversation made a difference or not, I don’t know.”

Early on in his tenure, Schmidt announced he would generally drop cases he called “public order crimes,” arguing that they require substantial resources and typically end in dismissal.

Backlash, including from those in the business community, prompted him to sharpen his public message and emphasize that he won’t tolerate property damage or crimes against other people.

According to data compiled by Schmidt’s office, 1,109 protest cases have been referred for prosecution; of those, prosecutors rejected 892 of them. His office has issued 85 property crime charges tied to the protests.

Mason said in an interview that the group sought to press Schmidt to do more, particularly regarding “the vandalism that’s giving Portland such a terrible reputation.”

Mason said he told Schmidt his broader political and policy agenda was at risk of getting lost amid a perceived “lack of prosecution” of protest-related crimes.

‘HOPEFULLY IT WAS A START’

Schmidt is the first outsider to run the DA’s office in decades. He campaigned on a change-oriented platform and said he would work to address racial disparities in the justice system, prioritize addiction and mental health treatment over prisons, ensure that officers who engage in brutality or misconduct are held accountable and review claims of wrongful convictions.

In his follow-up email to Schmidt’s office after the meeting, Mason seemed to acknowledge that the message the men delivered was a tough one.

“It wasn’t easy, but hopefully it was a start to doing something about the perception of what is happening in downtown Portland and more importantly preserving Mike’s criminal justice reform agenda as DA,” he wrote.

He wrote that it was Schnitzer who had made the suggestion for members of the legal community to “analyze what has been done right and not so right in response to the situation.”

Mason went on to say that the men had mentioned names of potential candidates to do that analysis, all Arlington Club members: criminal defense lawyer Janet Hoffman; longtime Portland lawyer Doug Houser, who is retired from Bullivant Houser; John Dilorenzo of Davis Wright Tremaine; Ivan Gold, former senior counsel at Perkins Coie; and Lake Oswego lawyer Wendie Kellington.

“Jordan might have some more suggestions,” Mason wrote.

Mason wrote that it was “incredibly important that Mike met Jordan.”

“I have known him and his family for almost fifty years,” he wrote. “He is charming, but beautifully frank and the bottom line he is willing to do more than talk about problems.”

In that same email, Mason wrote that he had raised the possibility of identifying “outside funding to support some special prosecutors for riot/property damage cases. There might be a lot of horsepower downtown to do this.”

Mason declined to say more about that suggestion in his interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Schnitzer said he could not recall whether the topic of a privately funded special prosecutor came up but added, “I remember saying if you need help from the private sector, come to us and tell us what you need.”

‘I APPRECIATE THEIR ADVICE’

Schmidt never followed up with the men, Mason and Schnitzer said.

“I wish the district attorney would get more active and follow up with these ideas, but the district attorney is his own person,” Mason said. “If he wants to do it, he wants to do it. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. There is nothing I can do.”

It appears the lawyers mentioned as possible advisers who would provide their expertise to Schmidt were unaware of the conversation.

Houser, for instance, said he didn’t know the meeting had taken place or that his name was circulated but said he was game to help.

“I do not admire the job that is being done by Mike Schmidt,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “What this community needs is a safeguard. We need a district attorney who is willing to prosecute. That is what they get hired to do.

“We keep releasing the same lawbreakers to go out and do it again,” he said. “It’s not a common sense situation.”

Reached this week, Schmidt declined to say too much about his conversation with the men but said they told him about their concerns for the city.

He said he talked to them about reducing gun violence as one of his top priorities. He said they were focused on vandalism.

“We talked a lot about the national reputational damage that they are concerned about and their ideas for how I could do things in a way that they think could help,” he said. “I take it in the spirit that they say it was offered. They want to be helpful and give me helpful advice.”

He said he has his own reservations about privately funding prosecutions and doesn’t plan to pursue a review of his office by outside lawyers.

Schmidt said he ordered a bowl of soup and ate while listening to his hosts, who picked up his tab. He said he is not an Arlington Club member.

His response to their offer: Thanks but no thanks.

“I appreciate their advice,” he said, “but at the end of the day I am confident in my policies and the way that we have handled this.”

— Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; skavanaugh@oregonian.com; 503-294-7632; @shanedkavanaugh

— Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie

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