Indian Museum Director Spent Lavishly on Travel

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Both Stanford and Ford pay for board members' travel, but West said he billed the Smithsonian for parts of some of those trips because he worked on museum business while traveling.

"Rick was rarely at the museum," said Ann Ruttle, a financial specialist at the museum from 2003 to 2006, and prior to that at the Smithsonian's main offices, where she worked extensively with institutional travel records. "I believe Rick had the most travel of any museum director."

Ruttle said she prepared a report for her superiors in 2002 showing that the Indian Museum had the most travel of any of the Smithsonian's 18 museums. She said West's extensive travel was well known throughout the institution. "I thought his travel would wane once the museum opened, but it didn't," Ruttle said.

West traveled more frequently than Small or Burke. Small was absent 403 days in the past decade and Burke 546 days in the past six years.

West, who recently retired, remains on the payroll until the end of the year. He is on the search committee interviewing candidates to replace Small.

More than two dozen of West's trips included multiple stops. One 23-day trip costing more than $18,000 began in February and stretched into March and included stops in the American Southwest, Australia, New Zealand and Paris.

While some trips had only a peripheral connection to his museum duties, others were in line with Smithsonian business. He traveled to Oklahoma and Florida for memorial services for a former board member and the funeral of the Smithsonian official who ran the museum's fundraising campaign. He visited Opera Omaha and the American Indian Center of Chicago to discuss collaborations, and made trips to visit tribes in Kansas and Montana.

Many of his four dozen trips to New York, for example, were attributed to business related to the Indian Museum's galleries at the George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan.

Expenses for the New York trips often ran more than $1,000 a night. On one occasion last year he stayed in a $559-a-night room at the W Hotel, and on another he billed the Smithsonian for a $286 meal with filmmaker and photographer Gwendolen Cates during which most of the tab went for alcoholic beverages, including a $75 bottle of Italian wine, a 1997 Barbaresco. West said Cates was an extraordinary filmmaker who premiered a movie about a Native American ballet dancer at the museum.

Other travel authorization forms cited vague reasons. For example, the purpose given for a 15-day, $19,878 trip last year to Athens, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Peru was "speeches or presentations."

Also last year, West charged the Smithsonian $6,000 for travel over 33 days from Eugene, Ore., to various destinations, including Albuquerque, New York and San Diego. West's voucher said the purpose of the travel was for "speeches, conferences, teaching." At the time of the trip, West was on a month-long appointment as a visiting chair of law at the University of Oregon. But he remained on the Smithsonian payroll because -- like Small, Burke and other Smithsonian museum directors -- West was allowed unlimited leave with pay.

A University of Oregon spokeswoman said it also paid West: $27,765 in salary for the month and about $4,000 for travel, including a separate check of $265 to the Smithsonian for part of his flight to Eugene.