If bad judgment were a felony, Bob Greene might be sitting on Death Row. : Bad Luck Bob and His Dog

Bob Greene is the kind of guy who, if there were one hole in the ground within a 10,000-mile radius, would fall into it and break his leg. Then, when he got out of the hole and sued the hole owner, he would lose the case and be successfully countersued for falling into an unauthorized hole.

Later he would suffer a deadly deep-hole virus that would cause his hair, his teeth and his fingernails to fall out. He would lose his home and his life savings to medical bills and legal costs, his wife would run off with the hole owner and his carnivorous plant would try to eat him.

Believe me when I tell you that misfortune sticks to the man like drool to a baby.

For those who may not recall Robert Alan Greene, he was arrested last March in Laurel Canyon Park for walking his dog.

Forget that the park was probably the worst place on earth to be at the time. Dog owners were battling with children owners over the question of who ought to be leashed, the dogs or the kids, and Animal Regulation Cops were swarming over the hills like Jewish commandos at an Arab outpost.

Dogcatchers, as a police friend pointed out, are usually people who cannot qualify to be real policemen and take out their career frustrations on whoever happens to be in the vicinity during periods of high tension.

Bob Greene, of course, was the one strolling by.

The way Bob tells it, his dog Princess was on a leash. The way the animal cops tell it, Princess was walking next to him unleashed and was snarling and looking around for babies to kill.

An officer shouted for Greene to stop, but Bob said he had witnessed the “Gestapo tactics” of the animal cops before and was not about to submit to their torture and humiliation and gruesome death. So he kept going.

Another animal cop shouted words to the effect that, if Greene didn’t halt, they were going to have a real policeman shoot him. Greene thought this remark so humorous that he replied in terms suggesting that the animal officer ought to go have sexual intercourse with himself.

Bad news. Bob falls into the hole again.

“I probably shouldn’t have said that,” he reflected during a more reasonable moment the other day. “I have a big mouth.”

The animal cops thought so, too. Greene says they waited in the bushes, jumped him, beat him and booked both him and the dog. The dog was later o.r.’d, but Greene was charged with resisting arrest and failing to keep his pet on a leash.

He requested a jury trial, acted as his own attorney and, of course, lost.

“I was a fool,” Bob lamented.

Somewhere along the way, incidentally, he had mortgaged his house in Laurel Canyon to buy a sign-making business. The business naturally failed and he lost the house.

But wait. We’re not finished.

Bob was arrested that first time on March 31. He remembers it because it was Palm Sunday, but that didn’t do him any good at all. And it didn’t improve his luck or his judgment. Four months later, he went back to the park and this time, he admits, was walking Princess without a leash.

“Bob,” I asked him as gently as I could, “why in the dog-walking hell did you go back to Laurel Canyon after that first incident and not even put the dog on a leash this time?”

He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head sadly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it was just bad timing on my part.” I guess.

Greene is 55 and, as one might expect, divorced. We met in the West Hollywood sign-making shop he once owned and now works for. He sleeps in a tiny room adjacent to the office. Princess and a stray called Barney sleep in the room with him when they are not out hunting babies.

“I’d do some things all over again now if I could,” he said. I hope to God he would.

Sparing you the strange details of that second encounter at Laurel Canyon Park, Bob was subsequently charged with abandoning a pet, interfering with a dog officer and threatening a dog officer.

He is to appear in Municipal Court on Nov. 8 on those charges unless he is already in jail after sentencing next Wednesday on the first set of convictions.

“When I was found guilty,” Greene remembered, “the judge gave me a choice of being sentenced right away or of waiting until Oct. 30. I asked him what he would suggest and he said, ‘Well, if I sentence you now, you’ll go straight to jail.’ So I said I’d wait until Oct. 30.”

Greene and others involved in the Laurel Canyon Park mess insist that he is being punished not for crimes he committed but for twice testifying before the Animal Regulation Commission on the excesses of the dog cops.

Maybe so, but if bad judgment were a felony, Bob Greene might be sitting on Death Row today.

As a final example of his synaptic lapses, I asked if he were going to appeal the first conviction.

“I sure am,” he said. “A friend of mine is going to show me how to fill out the papers. I’m doing it myself.”

Oh my goodness, oh my soul, there goes Robert down the hole.

Again.