*Rise and fall of Bruce Karatz

One question kept coming up in the years after the former KB Home CEO was implicated in a stock options backdating scandal: Why? Prosecutors say Karatz'sentire take was $6.6 million, which is not a whole lot of money when his total compensation in 2005 alone was $135.6 million (only three executives of U.S. public companies made more that year). Over a five-year stretch, he made $227.4 million. He had a huge house in Beverly Hills, took weekend golf jaunts in the corporate plane, and was friends with Eli Broad and Richard Riordan, among many other civic leaders. So again there's the why question. In reporting for my 2007 Los Angeles magazine article, I heard any number of theories, ranging from outright hubris to an expensive divorce. Karatz didn't testify during the trial, and even if he had it's doubtful we would be getting a satisfactory explanation. Anyway, here's an excerpt from my piece:

There are plenty of people in L.A.'s business world who weren't exactly sorry that Karatz got into trouble. Some of the gripes I heard were trivial, others more serious. But much of it came down to his studious avoidance of confrontation- in business and in relationships. Get a friend or a lackey to deliver bad news. Hope that the bad news will go away. Make a high-profile gesture and then back off . One person who had a ten-year working relationship with Karatz outside of KB told me that out of the blue, with no explanation, the assignments stopped coming in. After more than three months of being ignored or getting excuses from assistants, the person finally got Karatz on the line at his Beverly Hills home. "I've been dreading this call," the employee remembers Karatz saying. "I wondered why he was dreading it. I was the one who was out of a job." He's had a rocky personal life. Karatz's first wife, Janet, filed for divorce in 1999 (KB stock options totaling $23 million helped cover the terms of the settlement), and soon after that he became involved with homemaking doyenne Sandra Lee, the host of Semi-Homemade on the Food Network. More than 20 years his junior, Lee was named KB's "national lifestyle spokesperson" in 2001, the year they got married. (There's no mention of the couple's relationship in company proxy statements.) That ended in a turbulent divorce in early 2006. Karatz is now seeing Lilly Tartikoff , widow of NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff...

Karatz and Tartikoff has since married.

*I'll be talking with KPCC's Alex Cohen this afternoon about the Karatz conviction during "All Things Considered."

Earlier: Karatz is guilty