Crime Beat

drove a Jaguar and stayed at first-class hotels while traveling. He took clients and business acquaintances out for pricey meals and picked up the tabs. Some said Miller told them he was an attorney, though there is no record of him as a member of the California Bar.
    “He was so good at stories,” said a businesswoman who knew Miller for years but who didn’t want to be identified. “They would get long and complicated. He could tell wonderful stories, but there was always the feeling that that’s what they were, stories.”
    It was unclear why Miller kept his wife away from his business and social interests. Dorothy Miller said that the story her husband told her was that the life he led in California was a front.
    His real work, he said, was for the CIA.
    “From the day I met him, he always told me CIA stories,” she said in a recent interview from Belle Vernon, Pa., where she now lives. “He told me it was freelance work. He was always involved in international incidents. Whatever was in the news.”
    Though admittedly embarrassed now, Dorothy Miller said she believed her husband. And there was some evidence that he was traveling abroad. He often brought back souvenirs from foreign countries and there were calls home that were put through by Spanish-speaking operators.
    Sometimes, he told her of international events that she saw on the news. Sometimes, he told her of events that never hit the news—like the time he came home with a cut leg and said he had been grazed by a bullet.
    “It was convincing,” she said. “He could explain enough and include enough details to make it believable. When I had questions he just told me I would have to trust him on it. He told me that a lot.”
    Dorothy Miller said she met few of the people her husband did business with in the Valley and never once set foot in the office because her husband said it would be a security risk. He explained that the business was a CIA front set up to trap a target in a web of unspecified international crime.
    But the trap was apparently never sprung. In 1989, David Miller moved his wife and her two sons to Orlando, Fla. She said he explained that he was closing the California office and selling their house because the family could be in danger.
    “He said it was for security reasons,” Dorothy Miller said. “He said, ‘You have to trust me.’”
    The Millers bought a new house in Orlando and Dorothy got a job at a local hair salon. She said her husband continued to travel, coming home for only a few days at a time and always regaling her with tales of international intrigue.
    What Dorothy Miller did not know was that her husband did not close his Granada Hills office and continued to live in the home they had shared there. And while it is unknown where all of his travels took him, it is clear his business and civic activities in the Valley continued until at least early this year.
    Business acquaintances said that until early this year Miller was heavily involved in establishing the San Fernando Valley Leadership Program, a 10-month seminar in which citizen activists and business and government officials spend one day a month learning about and discussing an issue of public importance, such as environmental health, transportation or crime.
    Participants in the program, sometimes numbering as many as 30, each paid $700 tuition when it was first instituted by Miller in 1987. The program, deemed a success by alumni such as Richard Alarcon, now Valley deputy for Mayor Tom Bradley, has been repeated every year since and the tuition has risen to $1,200. Inspired by its success, Miller & Associates began efforts to market the concept in other communities across the country.
    Heavily involved in the program and also anticipating an increase in his company’s lobbying and business consulting clients, Miller added Ross B. Hopkins, a former public affairs manager for Lockheed Corp., to his firm in November.
    But the anticipated boom went bust, Hopkins said.
    “He overextended,” Hopkins said in an interview. “He counted on some contracts coming in that didn’t come in.”
    Meantime, older sources of revenue—developments on which Miller had consulted—dried up as the work was finished and the contracts completed, Hopkins said. By early 1991, Miller was facing severe financial problems.
    One creditor was Jacklyn Smith, owner of a Glendora firm that sells supplies to printing companies. Smith said she had given Miller, whom she had