Dog food lawsuit a test for Villaraigosa

The trouble of the moment for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his quest to be embraced by a multiracial city can be summed up in two reactions to the $2.7-million settlement first awarded to a black Los Angeles firefighter, then vetoed by the mayor.

Monica Kazarian, a 29-year-old resident of Sherman Oaks, was appalled that the city would hand out that much money in the case. She welcomed Villaraigosa’s veto. The incident, in which fellow firefighters fed dog food to Tennie Pierce, was “a stupid joke they played on him,” said Kazarian, who is white. “I don’t think it was a racial thing.”

But what to Kazarian was a joke struck Jay Benson, a 62-year-old retired airline worker, as something far different. To him it was an offense against a fellow African American and only the latest in a Fire Department and city whose history is all too rife with such assaults on the dignity of blacks.

“I can’t predict how it will turn out,” said Benson, while waiting for a bus in South Los Angeles. “But I know there’s a lot of anger about it among black people. It won’t be tolerated.”

Those two comments were uttered last week, the day before the scandal forced the resignation of Fire Chief William Bamattre. Juxtaposed, they speak volumes about a racial divide that sometimes narrows and sometimes widens but never fully goes away. And they offer vivid evidence of the challenges of presiding over a multiracial coalition such as the one that elected Villaraigosa last year.

For many whites, the incident is seen as silly, mildly offensive, but hardly worthy of millions of dollars.

For many blacks, it is part of a larger piece, of Rodney G. King and black men lying prone beside LAPD cars, of entrenched discrimination and demeaning treatment, of Michael Richards’ racial rant at a Los Angeles comedy club and New York police firing 50 bullets into a car carrying three black men.

“Unless you’ve felt racism,” Kimberly Chapman explained at a hair salon near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Arlington Avenue, “you may not be sympathetic to it. But if you have, it’s a feeling like no other.”

Last week was hardly the first time that Angelenos of different races seemed to gaze past each other, amazed that they did not share the same views.

For those who lived in the city in 1993, few will forget the downcast looks of police as the officers who beat King were convicted of violating his civil rights -- those somber, uniformed faces in stark contrast to the relief and exultation that cascaded through black neighborhoods and churches that same Saturday morning.

Fewer still have forgotten the joy that many African Americans expressed at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson or the befuddlement that so many whites experienced that day.

The Pierce settlement hardly registers with the same depth, but it plays on the same emotions, as dozens of interviews -- some at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, others along Martin Luther King Boulevard -- last week attested. And the challenges of managing that divided city now fall to Villaraigosa, who won his office with the support of a broad racial coalition and who has self-consciously modeled his leadership on that of Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ first black mayor and the architect of its most enduring coalition government.

“You can’t be liked by everyone at all times,” Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican political analyst, said of Villaraigosa’s handling of the firefighter episode. “Right now, the mayor is earning his paycheck.”

The challenge to Villaraigosa is compounded by an already wary African American constituency. Many blacks grumbled about Villaraigosa’s moves to take some control of Los Angeles public schools next year. Those schools are home to many black children, and the assertiveness by a Latino mayor to run them has worried some blacks.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), among others, briefly balked at the mayor’s takeover proposal, but he succeeded in ameliorating her concerns, and the recent appointment of an African American school superintendent appears, for the moment, to have tamped down that potentially divisive issue.

The Pierce case, however, revived concerns among some of those same constituents about their influence at City Hall. All three black members of the City Council voted to override Villaraigosa’s veto. A solid council majority overruled them.

As blacks and whites responded to the Pierce case, each tended to focus on particular elements.

Whites often noted that Pierce had used the nickname “Big Dog” around the station house and in a volleyball game before the incident. Feeding the “Big Dog” dog food thus seemed to them dumb but not racial. They also noted that Pierce has admitted to hazing other firefighters. How, many wondered, could he play gags on colleagues, and then collect so much money when one was played on him?

“Is it a racial thing,” asked Tim Willert of Valley Village, “or is it just boys being boys?”

Chatsworth resident Caroline Cusumano echoed many others with her amazement at the amount.

“I’d eat dog food for that much money,” she said, adding that Villaraigosa was “absolutely” right to reject the settlement.

Willert and Cusumano are white. A few miles away, on the opposite slope of the Hollywood Hills, hairstylist Paula Gray, who is black, saw the matter through a different lens.

“What if it had been the other way around?” she asked. “What if a white fireman had been given dog food by blacks?”

A woman seated nearby in the hair salon chimed in with her answer: “They’d lose their jobs and be looking at jail time.”

In political terms, the events of the past few weeks may not dramatically affect Villaraigosa. Blacks are a declining minority in a city where Latinos already represent the largest ethnic group and are well on their way to becoming its majority population. Villaraigosa’s strength among Latinos is uncontested, and he may have gained some ground among conservatives with his willingness to shrug off black allies in order to protect the public purse.

But political leadership is not just the stringing together of today’s majority. Villaraigosa views himself as a coalition mayor, a uniting force in a famously fractious city. As such, the image of black leaders arrayed against him in dismay last week is unsettling, as are the angry voices of constituents in districts that so recently helped to elect him.

There, the revelations that Pierce himself engaged in pranks against other firefighters did not negate the insult perpetrated on him. Instead, the tearing down of the victim seemed painfully familiar -- reminiscent of the discrediting of King after his beating by the Los Angeles Police Department.

“When people do bad to us,” said Dave Watson, 42, as he waited for his order at a taco stand on Martin Luther King Boulevard, “we can’t get compensated because lawyers start investigating our past to find reasons to say, ‘You’re dead wrong.’ ”

Benson, the retiree, agreed, and pointed the finger directly at the mayor. “That fireman should be compensated, and the mayor has no business sticking his nose into it.”

Councilman Jack Weiss stood in the fulcrum of the Pierce debate for much of the past month. He initially voted for the settlement, then after public outcry and new information from the city attorney’s office, about-faced and voted to support the veto by Villaraigosa, with whom Weiss is closely allied.

The whipsawing of those votes and of passionate, divided public opinion, took a toll on Weiss, as it did on others in the city’s political leadership. Some were taken aback by the naked appeals to racial solidarity -- and by the crass dismissals of the same.

“This case clearly shows that we are still a tale of two cities,” a weary Weiss said Thursday. “We are still stuck in traffic together

Still, Weiss predicted that the mayor would emerge without lasting damage. Villaraigosa’s record of supporting minorities, of condemning discrimination, is too long to be swamped by this single incident, he argued.

Thursday night, just hours before he dispatched Los Angeles’ fire chief for not bringing his department under better control, Villaraigosa himself predicted that he would turn around his African American skeptics, would woo them back.

“My support in the African American community is strong,” Villaraigosa said. “I expect that it will be even stronger after this veto because people are going to see an affirmative commitment to address the underlying allegations of discrimination and bias in the Fire Department, once and for all.”

jim.newton@latimes.com

Times staff writers Deborah Schoch, Louis Sahagun and Duke Helfand contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

What they’re saying

From people in South L.A.

‘The minds of people don’t change, man. Only time changes.’

Michael Galindo, 33, black

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‘Unless you’ve felt racism, you may not be sympathetic to it. But if you have, it’s a feeling like no other. It’s in your gut. That’s why the City Council has broken down over this. Some of those council members have felt it.’

Kimberly Chapman, 35, black

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‘It’s a reflection of the racial divide in Los Angeles. It says that we have not come as far as we thought

we had.’

Sedric Bogan, 32, black

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From people at the Sherman Oaks Galleria

‘I’m sure someone told him, “They made you do what? You should sue over that.”’

Tarek Abdelsameia, 21, white

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‘I’d eat dog food for that much money.’

Caroline Cusumano, 40, white

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‘That’s too much. A half million, tops, unless he had some health problem [from eating the dog food] ... I could see if he had a heart attack, but if he’s fine.... I think he’s just looking for money.’

Jeff Tomhare, 42, white

Los Angeles Times