Hahn Again Raises Drug-Dealer Issue of 2001 Race to Attack Rival

Recycling a charge from the 2001 mayoral campaign, Mayor James K. Hahn called a news conference Tuesday to accuse rival Antonio Villaraigosa of poor judgment when he asked the White House to review the case of a convicted drug dealer.

The mayor, who summoned the media to his Miracle Mile campaign headquarters, said the councilman’s 1996 letter to the White House on behalf of Carlos Vignali raised issues that Villaraigosa has failed to address.

“There are some more questions here that need to be answered,” Hahn said.

The mayor charged that Villaraigosa “continues to evade responsibility” for his actions and he called on Villaraigosa to release all of his phone records and electronic communications pertaining to Vignali.

The city councilman, who was on the East Coast for fundraisers, has said previously that he should not have written the letter and that he let his emotions as a father get in the way of his judgment.

Villaraigosa’s campaign manager, Ace Smith, who stood outside the Hahn headquarters during the news conference, dismissed Hahn’s demands as “sad” and called them the actions of “a desperate politician.”

Smith said Villaraigosa released all of his records on Vignali four years ago. He added that it is the mayor who has refused to make records public, including his official calendars. Hahn has refused to release his old schedules, citing concerns that his family’s security could be jeopardized.

Villaraigosa, like all of the state’s top officials, has made his schedules available to the media.

“The chutzpah of a man sitting in here asking for people to release records when he won’t release what’s required by law ... is outrageous,” Smith said.

Voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment in November that placed the public’s right of access to government documents and meetings in the state Constitution.

Republican strategist Arnold Steinberg said Hahn faces some risk in trying to resurrect an attack from four years ago and said the mayor must find a way to “make it relevant today.”

“If the mayor could establish Villaraigosa as untrustworthy and too far left, then he could energize Republicans and moderate Democrats,” he said.

The Vignali episode played a starring role in Hahn’s 2001 runoff contest with Villaraigosa, figuring in a devastating attack ad produced by the Hahn campaign.

Villaraigosa, along with other politicians and leading figures, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, wrote letters to the White House on behalf of Vignali, who was convicted in Minnesota of providing the money to buy more than 800 pounds of cocaine and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Vignali’s father, Horacio, donated more than $160,000 to politicians, including $2,795 to Villaraigosa. After receiving the letters from local politicians, President Clinton commuted Vignali’s sentence.

In the waning days of the 2001 campaign, Hahn ran an ad that showed cocaine being cut as a narrator said: “Los Angeles can’t trust Antonio Villaraigosa.”

Hahn said Tuesday that the issue is still relevant.

The mayor also questioned whether Villaraigosa may have done more than write a letter on Vignali’s behalf. His campaign staff passed out excerpts from a House of Representatives report on the president’s pardons that quoted the prosecutor in the Vignali case, Denise Reilly, as saying that she had received phone calls from Los Angeles political officials. The report did not name the officials.

But Hahn said he wanted Villaraigosa to say whether he had called Minnesota law enforcement officials. He also noted that the report indicates Villaraigosa wrote the first letter and he called on him to say whether he asked others to write letters.

Smith called those “wild charges” and said they were not true.

Times staff writer David Pierson contributed to this report.