Larry Flynt, Gardena’s Civic Treasure

City Hall is smitten with the smut peddler.

In the South Bay suburb of Gardena, Hustler magazine Publisher Larry Flynt has finally found a place where civic leaders embrace him, law enforcement professionals salute him and even the tax collectors cut him some slack.

Flynt’s trade in Gardena is poker, not porn, and he mostly resists any temptation to airbrush the line between them. Four years ago, to the lasting horror of local clergy, he diversified his raunchy empire by opening the Hustler Casino, a card club that dominates a major crossroads in town.

Now the staging ground for Flynt’s efforts to break the Native American monopoly on California slot machines, the Hustler Casino has grown into a top revenue generator for Gardena’s cash-starved government. It’s also been the setting for Chamber of Commerce mixers, Rotary Club chili cook-offs and a reception for the police chief.

The payoff has been mainstream esteem for a provocateur known for his court battles over obscenity, infidelity investigations of politicians and sideshow runs for president and California governor.

“I’m very happy,” City Manager Mitchell Lansdell said of Flynt’s ante to the municipal bottom line. To keep Flynt happy, the city granted a temporary reduction in the casino’s taxes, despite a budget squeeze.

Some of Gardena’s elected officials -- among them a veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor and a high-ranking Sheriff’s Department administrator -- are reluctant to discuss their relationship with Flynt, who has given thousands of dollars to their campaigns.

But when they do talk, praise reigns. Never mind that Flynt favors legalized prostitution and once offered $1 million for a rumored nude video of First Daughter Barbara Bush.

“He’s become a good neighbor,” said Gardena Mayor Terrence Terauchi, a deputy district attorney. “He’s a very good businessman.”

Flynt described his Gardena experience as “so much better” than what he had expected.

“People are much more comfortable with me now than when we were first opened,” said the gritty-voiced 61-year-old, who was shot by a sniper in 1978 and paralyzed from the waist down. “If anybody’s got any complaints, we’re not really hearing about them.”

Largely working-class Gardena, home to 60,000, is one of a handful of California cities that allow card clubs. Its tax dependence on the poker joints dates to the 1930s, a history marked more recently by failures.

Five of the six clubs had gone bust by the 1990s. The last to fold, the Eldorado, was bought by Flynt in 1998. He bulldozed the Spanish-style structure to make way for the Hustler -- a blocky, crown-shaped building with neon-ringed windows (the jewels) and a towering sign that lights up the casino’s name like a fireworks display.

The club’s interior is a stew of decorative styles: a brushed aluminum ceiling, jellyfish-like crystal chandeliers, neoclassical furniture and an atrium for smokers.

The Hustler is Flynt’s only casino. The skin mogul also owns a string of nightclubs around the country, including one that opened in December in Beverly Hills.

The Gardena casino is restricted to games in which players bet against one another. The house’s earnings -- precise figures were not available -- come from renting seats at the tables.

Flynt wants to up his end of the action. So he is helping to bankroll a proposed November ballot measure, supported by the Gardena City Council, that could permit slot machines at 11 card clubs and five horse-racing tracks around the state.

In compacts with the state, Indian tribes enjoy the exclusive right to operate slot parlors. The initiative would license 30,000 slots for the card clubs and tracks -- the Hustler Casino would get 1,000 -- unless the Native American casinos start paying 25% of their take to the state and accept other concessions.

The tribes have labeled the initiative the “Larry Flynt gambling proposition,” in hopes that his principal products -- X-rated videos and cellophane-wrapped magazines -- will taint it.

Flynt, who has sought to lower his profile in the debate, declined to answer questions about the measure, referring them to a Sacramento firm handling the initiative campaign.

But his Gardena fans, in and out of City Hall, had plenty to say.

“They’re using him as a whipping boy,” Fred Davis, president of the Gardena Valley Chamber of Commerce, said of the tribes. “It’s not right.”

Carolyn Hyatt, a chamber vice president, extolled Flynt’s charitable work in the city. “He is such a nice man,” Hyatt said. “I can say nothing but positives about him.”

Neither could Lee Ayers, an assistant governor of the Rotary Club. Its annual chili cook-offs, fundraisers for schools and the needy, are co-sponsored by Flynt, whose wife, Liz, has entered a recipe.

“He is trying to help the community,” Ayers said.

To other Gardenans, however, Flynt is more hurt than help. The casino hasn’t produced any noticeable uptick in crime, but critics say the Hustler has blighted the city’s landscape as well as its soul -- a cost they judge not worth the roughly $3 million the club contributes to Gardena’s $32.5-million budget, nor the 500 jobs it provides.

“What is morally good for the community?” said George Villa, pastor of St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church, who heads the city’s Ministerial Assn. The group had fought to keep Flynt out. In hindsight, Villa said, it didn’t have a prayer.

“The city had gotten itself into a financial hole and was looking for any type of legal remedy,” said the barrel-framed preacher, sitting in his cramped, book-lined office. In the parking lot, a clutch of sunburned homeless people waited for a church meal. “We got steamrolled.”

St. John’s stark-white campanile rises above a grimy stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard, where the storefronts feature peeling paint and hookers prowl the sidewalks after dark.

“This is the neglected part of Gardena,” said Villa, who was wounded in Vietnam and studied criminology before being ordained. His jaw tightened as he recalled the day a flatbed truck carrying a Hustler sign stationed itself in front the church.

“I was really tempted to get some lighter fluid and put a match to it,” he said.

Villa told of counseling gambling addicts in his flock, their compulsion fed by days and nights at the Hustler and its Gardena competitor, the Normandie Casino.

But the family-owned Normandie, a fixture in Gardena for six decades, has escaped much of the cloth’s wrath.

The Normandie’s ties to City Hall are at least as close as the Hustler’s. And after Flynt, claiming he had yet to turn a profit, scored his tax break in 2002 -- a partial rebate of the city’s levy, repayable at no interest once the Hustler tallies a certain gross income -- the Normandie got similar relief.

On the other hand, churches and schools welcome donations from the Normandie, while spurning Flynt.

“We don’t want him to help us out,” said Father Sal Pilato, principal of Catholic Junipero Serra High School. He was watching the baseball team bag a victory on the school diamond, next to the football field whose scoreboard, a gift from the Normandie, bore the casino’s name.

Pilato said the school could use Flynt’s money, since 40% of its 600 families live at the poverty level. “But I don’t want the Hustler name associated with a Catholic school,” he said.

Al Underwood, the Hustler Casino’s marketing director, shrugged off the critiques as he walked through the club. He calls the casino the “crown jewel” of the South Bay.

“It’s not the magazine come to life,” said Underwood. True, the waitresses, chirping “Cocktails!” among the tables, wore unrevealing uniforms. “Initially, there was fear this was going to be a strip club.”

Then again, the gift shop sells Flynt’s publications and videos, along with a small selection of sex toys.

Underwood sat at an empty poker table and listed some of the beneficiaries of Flynt’s generosity -- the Kiwanis, the Gardena Heritage Festival.

“It’s an amazing thing, the diverse number of organizations that want to be associated with us,” he said.

The City Council’s Hustler links can zip lips. Two of Flynt’s backers on the panel, Paul Tanaka and Steve Bradford, turned down or did not respond to numerous interview requests.

Tanaka is a Sheriff’s Department chief, in charge of its administrative services division. He is preparing to run for Gardena mayor.

Bradford, a Southern California Edison public affairs manager, has designs on the Assembly.

Councilmen Oscar Medrano Jr. and Ronald Ikejiri said they saw no reason to clam up about Flynt.

“He’s always done a real good job for the city,” said Ikejiri, an attorney.

Medrano, a jewelry merchant, said an ideal Gardena would have nothing to do with Flynt or even gambling. Ideals, however, don’t pay the bills, he said.

“If you stand for morals and values, the casinos, you don’t want them in town,” said Medrano. “But Gardena is a casino city. We’re not going to change that overnight.”

Many Gardena residents echo that deal-with-the-devil view. One is Ellwyn Thompson, whose family has owned a pet store in the city since 1933. It sits across from the Hustler Casino at Redondo Beach Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

“I’m a Christian and I don’t agree with Flynt’s lifestyle and what he does,” said Thompson, as he attended to a customer. “But I must say, the casino’s been more a positive than a negative.”