[Winter, 1998] The 3 Cs links to Long Beach   By Tom Hennessy, Staff Columnist For a brief time in the 1940s, one of the big sports names on the east coast was Johnny Chung, superhuman quarterback for Plainfield State Teachers College. No one could run and pass like Chung, a Chinese-American who allegedly owed some of his prowess to eating steaming bowls of rice during halftime. After dutifully printing Plainfield's winning scores for several weeks, the New York Times dispatched a sports writer to the New Jersey campus to do a story on Chung. The writer returned with startling news: There was no Johnny Chung. Nor was there a Plainfield State Teachers College. The story was a hoax, created by a New York advertising man, who each week had phoned in "Plainfield's" scores and issued fictional press releases on the fabulous Chung. Chung the Second Now along comes a real-life Johnny Chung, a non-hero about to go to prison. From Torrance, this Chung is the reputed link between two intriguing entities: the White House and the China Ocean Shipping Co., a/k/a COSCO. As you know, the former Long Beach Naval Station is to be demolished and replaced with a container terminal leased to the firm. COSCO revisited While noted before in various media, Chung's alleged role as White House-COSCO liaison is re-examined in a just-published book, "Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash" (Regnery Publishing, $24.95). Authors Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II say Chung took money from Liu Chaoying, a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese army, and relayed $400,000 as contributions to various Democratic candidates and causes. The Democratic National Committee has since said that it was victimized by Chung because he never explained the illegal origins of the cash. In March, Chung, who is said to have made 50 visits to the White House, pleaded guilty to bank fraud, tax evasion and election law violations. His sentencing, scheduled originally for this past Monday, has been postponed. The book's authors, Republicans and graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, echo a New York Times report that a Clinton administration official, Dorothy Robyn of the National Economic Council, "placed a series of phone calls to Long Beach officials urging them to push the COSCO deal through". Quoting the Times from May 9, 1997, they write, "The key phone call occurred the day before the (1996) election, when Robyn held a conference call with eight Long Beach officials and said that the 'national interest would be best served if the reuse (COSCO) plan proceeds'. "Such high-level intervention is quite unusual, and one official said that the call made clear that leasing the port to COSCO was 'the first preference of the White House'." Robyn told the Times that her calls had been made at the request of Mayor Beverly O'Neill, who wanted the container terminal to help provide jobs lost in Long Beach through Pentagon cutbacks. O'Neill said she had been in contact with Robyn, but told the Times she could not remember asking the official to make those calls. We probably will never know the full story behind the COSCO deal, but "Year of the Rat," although a little too right wing for my taste, offers a fascinating perspective on the three C's: COSCO, Clinton and China.