The Trouble With Terrigno : When West Hollywood’s First Mayor Was Driven From City Hall, She Took Part of the Dream of a ‘Gay Camelot’ With Her

It was the best night of her life. A city was being born, and poised skittishly at center stage on the night of Nov. 29, 1984, was Valerie Susan Terrigno, new mayor of West Hollywood and the first acknowledged lesbian leader of an American community.

A thousand people were on hand to witness the ceremony that would bring the city of West Hollywood into formal existence. The drafty auditorium where they gathered had filled so quickly that fire marshals and sheriff’s deputies had to bar the doors. Outside, those who were turned away pressed their faces against plate-glass windows; others huddled around hastily installed television monitors to watch the event in black and white.

Less than a month earlier, voters in the pistol-shaped enclave on Los Angeles’ prosperous Westside had declared an end to years of what they had seen as unresponsive county rule and had elected a city council. With three homosexual members, it was the country’s first gay-majority government. After more than a decade of increasingly bold political activism, homosexuals at last had the opportunity to prove that they could govern as effectively as anyone else. Some called West Hollywood “the gay Camelot” and talked of a purer democracy in which good intentions would not be smothered by the weight of bureaucracy.

Terrigno had dressed for the occasion with simple flair: white suit, cobalt-blue blouse, a strand of pearls. A deputy led her through the crowd to the stage. In the front rows sat proud members of her clannish Italian family. Elderly Jewish renters, swaddled in winter coats, applauded. Homosexual men and lesbians reached out for a fleeting touch. At 31, the former biofeedback therapist, telephone researcher and job counselor was on her way to becoming the most visible homosexual politician in the nation.

Onstage, Terrigno toyed with a polished gavel, then called West Hollywood’s first city council meeting to order. “I’ve worked to become a leader of our dreams and our future, and I know with power comes great responsibility,” she said in a thin voice. “It’s a responsibility I eagerly accept. . . . Our dreams are a sound investment. Don’t let them waver.”

Within a year, her dreams had come to nothing. And the city’s had been tarnished.

Valerie Terrigno, success symbol for gay strivers and emissary of a unique city, was also Valerie Terrigno, embezzler. Two weeks after her inauguration, agents from the FBI and the Los Angeles Community Development Department joined in an investigation that would reveal that while Terrigno campaigned for office, she had diverted to her personal bank accounts $7,000 in federal funds from a Hollywood job-referral agency with a large gay clientele. Two years after she had taken over Crossroads Employment and Job Counseling Services, Terrigno had run it aground.

The stolen sum hardly amounted to major-league theft, though federal officials still question Terrigno’s handling of another $12,000 of the government’s money. And her crime was hardly subtle: Her trial last March whisked by in three days; the jury convicted her after just four hours of deliberation. She was sentenced to 60 days in prison or in a halfway house, five years’ probation, restitution and 1,000 hours of community service.

But what most dismayed West Hollywood’s political community and national gay leaders was that they had had so few inklings. They had only the highest hopes for Valerie Terrigno: Attractive, intelligent and energetic, she had virtues that seemed to perfectly complement West Hollywood’s shiny ideals.

They had not looked beyond the qualities that played well on television and in banquet halls. Terrigno had portrayed herself as an experienced administrator, yet those who had worked with her complained that she was disorganized and disdainful of detail. She ambitiously sought leadership roles but often ignored the rules that came with them and alienated those who had supported her. She was able to articulate a stirring vision for a minority community, but her actions betrayed that vision.

In the chaos that attended the creation of a new city, campaigning amid a crowded field of candidates, Terrigno quickly stood out as the most electable. A politically connected and charismatic activist, she won endorsements easily and avoided the troubling questions about her character and experience that would come later. The path she took to office was hardly unique to West Hollywood: Its political novices and its voters, like those anywhere, relied on trust and favored an earnest, familiar face. In its idealism, West Hollywood thought it would be different.

The letters started coming in not long after the inauguration.

On crumpled yellow legal stationery, a woman from Missoula, Mont., wrote: “I’ve always been a dreamer, always wanting to find a utopia and always without much luck. I envy you finding yours, Ms. Valerie.” From Tahiti, a vacationing Frenchwoman named Vera sent a postcard saying she would stop in West Hollywood before returning to Paris. The card read: “Felicitation for your victory. You are an escample for a French people homosescule.” And from Turkey, a teacher afraid to give his name sent a rambling two-page letter. “Homosexuelity is completely forbidden,” he wrote. “Please, please, help me, take me near you--dear my friend, my sister.” Terrigno would carry his anguished plea in her pocketbook for months.

Each week, dozens of such letters arrived at Terrigno’s office in West Hollywood’s temporary City Hall. They continued to come for months, missives from gay men and women who read about the new city and saw Valerie Terrigno as a symbol of the pride they still struggled to achieve.

One reason for Terrigno’s political success, some gay leaders say now, is that her very appearance ran counter to the stereotype. Statuesque, with long blond hair and deep-set brown eyes, she has a prominent nose and creased forehead tempered by a casual smile. As one of her friends puts it, “She doesn’t fit what most straight people think of when they hear the word lesbian .”

Her $400-a-month job as mayor was largely ceremonial, restricted to chairing council meetings and acting as the city’s spokesperson. But at City Hall, constituents and lobbyists paraded through Terrigno’s office daily. “Everyone wanted to see the mayor,” says Ray A. Villarreal, a former aide. “They didn’t want the other council members, they wanted Valerie.”

The attention extended to her leisure time. Where she had once been able to finish a shopping trip to the neighborhood market in half an hour, it now took three hours. “I couldn’t push my shopping cart up the aisle without people stopping me,” Terrigno says.

She was a lightning rod for the press. Calls from the media piled up at the rate of 30 a day. A French television crew trailed her for three weeks. Reporters from People magazine followed her until an exasperated Terrigno refused their request to spend a morning in the apartment she shared with her lover. The attention made her uncomfortable. “People were building me into this hero, something I’m not,” she says.

Still, she relished her symbolic role. When West Hollywood hosted a gay rodeo, Terrigno rode in a pony cart, serenely waving to the whooping crowd. And in the city’s first Gay Pride Parade, the summer after incorporation, she stood at the front of the West Hollywood float, wearing a flowing white dress, her face radiant.

Soon Terrigno was in demand from gay organizations across the nation. Before the West Hollywood election, there had been only 13 openly gay elected officials in the country. Now there were three more. In the summer of 1985, Terrigno went on a hectic three-month cross-country speaking tour, appearing before somber audiences of upwardly mobile gay business leaders and parading before cheering masses at gay-pride events.

In Tacoma, Terrigno soothed two young lesbians who had been harassed at their high school. In Wichita, she autographed T-shirts. Warm welcomes extended beyond the gay community. In Tulsa, the mayor greeted her with a limousine and a motorcycle-police escort, and the city’s tiny gay community altered the date of its gay pride march to fit her schedule.

“We were thrilled to have her,” says Rosemary Dunn Dalton, who arranged for Terrigno to speak before the gay political group she led in Boston. “We found her to be candid, warm, quite sincere. I think it’s fair to say that at that point she was the most sought-after (gay) leader in the country.”

Virginia Apuzzo, former executive director of the National Gay Task Force and now a New York state official, first met Terrigno at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Like many national gay leaders, Apuzzo felt certain that Terrigno was part of a new generation of young, promising gay politicians. “She seemed to be a woman who was going places,” Apuzzo recalls. “We talked about the demands of a public life. Then I wished her well.”

Now Apuzzo and other gay activists wonder what went wrong. “It’s certainly a tragedy,” she says. “I feel sad about it. We’re a very small community and when something like this happens, we don’t have the luxury that other minority communities have, of having plenty of other leaders we can point to.”

Yet gay leaders say such embarrassments must be expected. “Every minority community has had the same heartache we’re now having. It’s part of the price we pay for getting more of our people elected,” says Tom Chorlton, executive director of the National Assn. of Gay and Lesbian Democratic Clubs. “I don’t think we should have any collective sense of guilt. But I do think there are lessons to be learned.”

The clone look was the rage in West Hollywood when Valerie Terrigno moved there in the fall of 1978. Whenever she left her apartment to go shopping on Santa Monica Boulevard, she saw dozens of gay men, each with cropped hair, plaid lumberjack shirts and tight dungarees. There was defiance in their conformity.

Homosexuals, now estimated to make up as much as 35% of West Hollywood’s population, had begun to flock to that unincorporated section of Los Angeles County in the late 1950s. The first came to escape harassment from the Los Angeles Police Department, notably a series of raids on Hollywood gay bars. By the late 1970s, Santa Monica Boulevard, once lined with small neighborhood stores, was becoming the gentrified hub of Los Angeles’ gay commercial life.

Men’s clothing shops on the boulevard were named provocatively to fit the new spirit: Ah Men, Macho, All American Boy. There were bars for men--Spike, Rafters, The Gold Coast--and for women--Peanuts and the Palm. “It was a great time and a great place to be gay,” says Bob Craig, publisher of Frontiers, a gay-oriented weekly.

It was a threatening time as well. In Miami, singer Anita Bryant was leading her campaign against a gay anti-discrimination law. In California, state Sen. John Briggs was spearheading a drive to prohibit homosexuals from becoming teachers. Many gays were at a personal crossroads, and in growing numbers they declared themselves.

One of them was Sallie Fiske, a publicist who lost her job as a television talk-show host not long after she publicly disclosed her lesbianism. In fall, 1978, Fiske and Terrigno met and became lovers. When the affair ended, they remained close friends. At the urging of Fiske--who was handling publicity for the anti-Briggs effort--and other friends, Terrigno began moving toward the forefront of gay activism.

At first, Terrigno’s friends say, she was a good soldier, attending gay rights marches and making posters. “At that point, Valerie was in Sallie’s shadow,” says veteran gay activist James Kepner. “She was the silent type in the couple, the partner who nods while the other does all the talking. That changed.”

Terrigno took on more important roles. She lobbied politicians to support AB-1, the state gay rights bill, which did not pass. She appeared on television as a guest on Wally George’s “Hot Seat,” sparring with the acerbic talk-show host, who called her a “deviant.” She became a fixture in the restaurants lining Santa Monica Boulevard, lunching with other activists.

“She was politically ambitious, and she knew how to ingratiate herself with people,” says Marc Bliefield, a gay attorney who worked with Terrigno. “She was charming in a casual sort of way. She could get your sympathy.”

Gay activists say Terrigno was a fast learner, familiarizing herself with the proper issues, attaching herself to the right people and joining the most influential factions. In January, 1984, less than six months after joining the Stonewall Democratic Club, the community’s oldest political group, Terrigno was elected its president.

By the time West Hollywood residents began talking seriously about incorporation that summer, Terrigno had joined the cityhood movement. She was boning up on local issues and had come out in favor of rent control, the most crucial concern for the area’s 85% tenant population.

According to Bliefield, Terrigno saw herself on a fast track, telling him on a weekend trip to San Francisco that she thought she would make a “good congresswoman.” But there were many in Los Angeles’ gay community who still needed convincing. When she sought campaign aid from Sheldon Andelson, a gay banker and the community’s most influential fund-raiser, he listened politely, unimpressed. “She didn’t seem to have a chance,” he says.

Instead, she financed her own campaign, lending herself $20,000. When her campaign consultant, Mark Ryavec, asked her where the money came from, she refused to give him documentation. “She had a remarkable ability to ignore the little rules that govern the rest of us,” says Ryavec, who quit her campaign after a month.

Some of Terrigno’s funding, federal authorities later insisted, came from government money she embezzled from Crossroads Counseling Services. At Terrigno’s sentencing April 30, Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard M. Callahan said she had used $1,000 worth of food vouchers intended for the poor in the two weeks before and after the election. In his sentencing memo, Callahan implied that the money paid for campaign parties. Terrigno and her attorney, Howard L. Weitzman, deny that charge.

Few in West Hollywood’s political community knew about the problems at Crossroads. In endorsement interviews, gay political clubs never asked Terrigno questions about her experience at the agency, despite frequent references to Crossroads in her campaign flyers. “We never got around to it,” says Robert Burke, an attorney who works with the powerful gay-oriented Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles. “She was dedicated, likable, and she had lots of connections in the community.”

Publisher Bob Craig, who first trumpeted West Hollywood as “the gay Camelot,” faults gay leaders for not asking tougher questions. “We were so obsessed with the idea of community that we forgot about integrity,” he says.

There were 40 candidates on the ballot, 17 of them avowed homosexuals. But most of the candidates were men, giving Terrigno an advantage. Not long after the candidates filed for office that August, a loose coalition of leftists, tenant activists and gay politicians began talks to form a slate of candidates for the November race. Valerie Terrigno’s name came up frequently.

One member of the slate, John Heilman, a gay attorney who knew Terrigno from activist circles, had reservations about her as a running mate. “She would always flake out from responsibility,” he contends. “She would never attend important meetings, she would fail to get work done, she would conspire behind your back. I didn’t want her.”

At first, Terrigno balked at joining the slate, and the slate fell apart. “That was classic Valerie,” Heilman says. But late in the race, the slate re-formed, its five members backed by the Coalition for Economic Survival, a well-organized tenant-advocate group. (On Election Day, four of the slate’s candidates won.)

Practicing what she called “coalition politics,” Terrigno won endorsements from every major gay political club. At a smaller club, where Terrigno was already unpopular, she still showed up to lobby for an endorsement. “She knew she wouldn’t get it, but she tried anyway,” says Steven Weltman, one of her longtime political foes.

Many gay activists say Terrigno was the type of politician who would rise to the top in any community, a woman who radiated charisma and possessed a knack for the infighting that characterizes American politics. “Many of the gay organizations were practicing the same kind of politics that have been the staple of the Democratic Party for years,” Weltman says. “It’s the philosophy of gender parity, making sure every minority is represented. We played the game just like the big boys. Valerie played better than anyone else.”

Gay leaders admit, too, that they went on trust, just as political factions do in any community. Because no glaring holes appeared in Terrigno’s past, they approved her. Until the final days of the campaign, even her enemies had nothing to use against her. “Truthfully, how deep do people dig in straight communities?” asks Stephen Schulte, now a West Hollywood councilman. “We make the same mistakes everybody else does.”

By the end, the campaign was moving too fast for questions. In the bars along Santa Monica Boulevard, Valerie Terrigno had scores of friends. She even interrupted campaign swings through the bars to dance with them. “They loved her in the gay bars,” says Adam Moos, who campaigned with her. “They saw her as one of their own.” And the community’s large elderly population warmed to her because of her backing by tenant activists.

One night, late in the race, Marc Bliefield joined Terrigno and several other candidates and activists for dinner at a West Hollywood health-food restaurant. “I started asking the candidates who were there, ‘Is there any reason why you shouldn’t run?’ ” Bliefield recalls. “We were doing it half-humorously, but we were also dead serious. I said, ‘This is a historic vote for the gay community. We want to be certain nothing will go wrong.’ ”

According to Bliefield, Terrigno shrugged.

“ ‘I don’t have anything,’ ” she said.

Like others before her, Valerie Terrigno had been driven to California by East Coast weather. “I could never stand all that rain and cold,” she recalls.

She shivered as she spoke. A breeze swept debris down the boardwalk in Asbury Park, N.J. In March, after her trial, Terrigno had come to the deserted beach town, several miles from her parents’ home in Neptune, to visit her ailing mother. Asbury Park had been an adolescent haunt of hers, and she still likes to visit, even in winter, when beach-towel and orangeade stands are shuttered and the boardwalk is given over to the gulls and pigeons.

Terrigno’s right arm was in a cast, her elbow broken in a motorcycle spill on Sunset Boulevard. In the dark weeks after her conviction, misery heaped on misery: Her mother developed a tumor (later diagnosed as benign). Her council aide, a close friend, was felled with appendicitis. Then came her accident.

Later, after her April 30 sentencing, Terrigno’s mood lightened. But on the Jersey boardwalk, reflecting on her past as she stared at the slate-gray Atlantic Ocean, she spoke grimly. “A situation like this shakes your sense of what life is about. I feel sad about everything. I have no idea where to pick up from this point. I just hope this won’t change peoples’ attitudes about the city or the gay movement. There are always casualties. . . .”

Terrigno’s early years were spent in the Bronx, in tenement neighborhoods of Italian, Irish and black families. Her father, John Terrigno, was a supermarket clerk and staunch union man; her mother, Marie, a housewife who later worked in a print shop. Valerie was the first of five children. The family outgrew even the largest affordable flat and, in 1966, moved to Neptune, a small New Jersey town dominated by German Methodists. They bought a white split-level home near a farm and planted a rose garden in the backyard.

A self-described bookworm, Terrigno skipped a grade and graduated second in her class at Neptune High School. In 1970, she enrolled at Hofstra University on Long Island on a scholarship. It was a lush campus peopled by the offspring of wealthy families. Terrigno, dressed in faded jeans with peace patches, felt keenly out of place.

She befriended a black woman who lived in her dormitory. They took part in anti-war and civil rights protests, the last gasps of student activism before the campus lethargy of the 1970s. Friendship gave way to intimacy. By autumn of 1972, they had become lovers. “You didn’t tell anyone at that time,” Terrigno recalled. “Gay liberation had just barely started. We couldn’t trust anyone.”

She dreamed about sunshine. At winter break, Terrigno set out with her lover and another friend in a cramped Gremlin bound for the West Coast. At first, California let them down. It was raining in Berkeley, and grizzled hippies were selling heroin near People’s Park. But when the three students reached the UCLA campus in Westwood, Terrigno relaxed. “Kids were sitting on the lawn, playing flutes,” she said. “And the sun was out.”

Terrigno and her lover enrolled at UCLA. Intent on becoming a psychologist, Terrigno loaded her roster with sociology and human behavior classes. “I didn’t want to take all the courses you have to take to become a doctor,” she says. “But I did want a job where I could help people.”

When her mother and father came to visit, John Terrigno asked his daughter about her roommate. “It sounds like you’re more than friends,” he said. Terrigno told all; her parents went home anguished. Almost a decade would pass before they could accept her sexual orientation.

Work was not easy to find. Desperate at one point, Terrigno applied for a job as a hostess in a seamy downtown Los Angeles club where women danced with men for a pittance. She was fingerprinted and licensed as a taxi dancer by the police department. But just one night at the club, Terrigno says, was enough to convince her that she should find a new line of work.

At school, she found a job more in line with her bent for psychology and social work, signing on as a part-time counselor for mentally ill convalescents at $100 a month. The first time the program’s former director, J. D. (Skip) Johnson, met her was when she stormed into his office, leading a confused elderly patient wearing a robe.

“Valerie wasn’t allowed to take that patient out of the convalescent home,” Johnson says. “But she had complaints about the patient’s treatment, and it later turned out she was right. That’s the way she was--a direct-action person. Most of our volunteers chafed under the regulations; Valerie challenged them.”

Eventually, her commitment to education flagged. Adapting to the playful California environment, Terrigno thinned her course load. She would never graduate.

Drifting from job to job, Terrigno took courses for a therapy license at New Health Institute, a biofeedback laboratory in the Wilshire area. Dr. Margaret Toomim, the director, was impressed with her ability to help clients relax. But there was no room on the staff. So Terrigno went into business for herself, advertising in the Community Yellow Pages, a directory of gay-owned businesses. Under “Counseling,” the ad read: “Effective in relief of pain, ulcers, migraines, cramps and other physical problems. Lifestyle counseling and immunological strengthening.”

Renting electronic equipment to monitor pulse and other bodily signals, Terrigno used the instruments to soothe her patients and alter their behavior. “She was so good at it, she could raise the temperature in your hands,” says Noreen Hill-Duffy, a client who became a friend.

Ultimately, though, biofeedback brought in little money. Terrigno tried other jobs. She hired on as a telephone researcher for a medical journal, soliciting advertising clients until a male supervisor tried to unbutton her blouse in public. She sued; they settled.

In June, 1981, Terrigno found work that paid decently and was similar to the social work she had enjoyed at UCLA.

She joined a staff of job counselors in Hollywood at Crossroads Counseling Services.

In its early days, the agency functioned smoothly. Promptly at 8:30 a.m., clients lined up at the shabby storefront office at 6667 Sunset Blvd. There were hollow-eyed, boyish street hustlers, just off the bus from the Ozarks and the Texas Panhandle. There were homosexuals finally out of the closet, but at the cost of their families and their jobs. There were destitute immigrants from Nicaragua and Mexico. There were drag queens, too tired to shave the morning stubble from their faces.

One of the agency’s founders was Morris Kight, now 67, the elder statesman of Los Angeles’ gay community and now a member of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. He had helped build many of the community’s cultural icons--its annual Gay Pride Parade, the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Stonewall Democratic Club.

Kight is a fastidious, keen-witted man (he bitterly refers to Terrigno as “Salary” Terrigno) who has pale gold, threadbare hair. With several other gay activists, he had opened Crossroads in May, 1981, to help unemployed homosexuals and the poor in Hollywood and to take advantage of an available $140,000 federal grant. The agency’s budget was supervised by the Los Angeles Community Development Department.

Five counselors worked in a one-room office with unadorned metal desks, gauzy white curtains and a bulletin board with job listings. When the office was busy, clients took numbers, delicatessen-style.

The first director, Pat Rocco, lasted a year. Rocco resigned soon after he pleaded guilty to one count of illegal use of food stamps. His successor was Valerie Terrigno. She had counseled clients at the agency during Rocco’s tenure, and, in May, 1982, with the approval of Kight and other board members, became director, at $11,500 a year.

Under the job description supplied by the agency, the director was to have a college degree. Rocco had not had one, Los Angeles city officials learned later. Neither did Valerie Terrigno, although her resume stated she had a bachelor of arts degree from UCLA and had done graduate work there. Kight approved her hiring without checking her resume. “We took her on face value,” he admits ruefully. “You have to have some faith in this world.”

But by the end of 1982, CDD officials say, Terrigno was displaying the disregard for rules and responsibility that would later annoy gay activists. “Her paper work was always late,” says Human Services Director Susan Cleere Flores. “Meetings were canceled with great frequency.”

Though she expressed regret for her crimes at Crossroads at her sentencing, Terrigno insists that the agency was a financial shambles when she took over, a situation that worsened and forced her to juggle funds to keep Crossroads alive.

Officials in the Human Services Division of the CDD counter that despite Crossroads’ shabby bookkeeping, its financial quirks had not threatened its health until she took over. “Before Valerie, Crossroads made a good-faith effort to respond to all our requests,” says Flores. “As long as we funded them, they got by.”

City officials say the first red flags arose early in the winter of 1983, when the agency failed to submit two months’ worth of records. CDD officials called Terrigno in to explain. “She would always have a sheaf of papers,” says Gloria Clark, CDD senior grants management specialist. “But she would never have the books we needed.”

In the summer of 1983, according to federal prosecutor Callahan, Terrigno began doing her own bookkeeping, taking advantage of confusion within the agency. Because of her continuing lack of documentation, the city had held up paychecks to Crossroads’ staff. Terrigno used a separate bank account she had maintained to pay the staff. When the paychecks were finally released, she ordered staff members to endorse their checks back to that account. But she failed to repay her own checks, thereby obtaining an extra $2,300. At her trial, Terrigno called the act an “oversight.”

That fall, Terrigno applied for and obtained an $11,000 grant for Crossroads from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The money had been released by Congress to help feed and house poor people caught up in the recession. Terrigno began writing checks for her personal use on the FEMA account.

Friends were drawn in, too. One, Jeanne Cordova, publisher of the Community Yellow Pages, remembers Terrigno asking a favor one night. “She said, ‘Would you swap checks with me? I need to move money from one account into another,’ ” Cordova recounts. Days later, Terrigno wrote Cordova a check for $275 on the FEMA account, saying she was writing it to Cordova as a “landlord.” In return, Cordova wrote Terrigno a check for the same amount.

“I had no reason not to trust her,” Cordova says. “She was a close friend. It sounded a little strange, but the way she explained it, it would help her out at Crossroads.”

At her trial, Terrigno explained that she was reimbursing herself for her own loans to Crossroads. But Flores says that if Terrigno had lent money to the agency, there were legal methods for repayment, methods Terrigno did not use. Nor did Terrigno prove that she had lent or donated money to Crossroads, Flores adds.

Investigators were not able to determine why Terrigno embezzled from Crossroads’ accounts. Some gay activists speculate that under pressure from the CDD, Terrigno angrily blurred the line between her money and the agency’s as revenge. Others believe she stole subconsciously, a kind of extension of her sloppy bookkeeping.

George Hughley, the CDD chief investigator on the case, believes it may have been a little of both. “She just wasn’t disciplined enough to be a good administrator, or a good thief,” he says.

By late summer of 1984, it no longer mattered. Crossroads was rudderless, its hours erratic, its clientele turned away. At the CDD’s request, the Los Angeles City Council let Crossroads’ funding lapse, while Terrigno resigned to run for office. “The (gay) community was suffering because of her antics,” Kight laments.

On Dec. 15, Hughley and FBI agent Patricia Chamberlain entered Crossroads’ front door. It had been closed for weeks. Inside, they found dusty mounds of files and stacks of Terrigno’s campaign literature. The agents hefted the files into a yellow city elevator-bed truck. The doors were locked for the last time.

The first public hint about the troubles at Crossroads came two days before West Hollywood’s election. Terrigno’s political foes, convinced that she was going to win, released documents hinting at her mismanagement of Crossroads funds. Some files had been obtained from Kight; others came from a disgruntled counselor.

But they had no impact. It was not until February, 1985, when news leaked about the combined city and federal investigations into Crossroads’ finances, that West Hollywood activists began wondering aloud about Valerie Terrigno. She blamed the inquiry on vendettas by her adversaries. And she maintained that the federal government was persecuting her because of her prominence as the country’s first lesbian mayor.

Crossroads was not her only problem, however. Within West Hollywood’s fledgling government, Terrigno’s erratic administrative style was making new enemies. For months, she failed to file required campaign statements, forcing the city clerk to threaten a $10-a-day penalty until she complied. And Terrigno was demanding of other city staffers, leading the interim city manager to snap one day to then-Councilman John Heilman: “The only person who could satisfy her died on the cross 2,000 years ago.”

Terrigno’s expense accounts were also late, and when they finally arrived, officials questioned some items. A personal car-rental expense appeared on her city credit card bill and her reimbursement for the bill lagged. And two weeks after she was convicted, city officials received a $600 invoice for limousine and taxi service dating back to April, 1985--an expense they found extravagant. Terrigno insisted the service had been provided free, as a gift. Terrigno’s aides, Ray Villarreal and Randy Farias, said she had received the service at a discount.

Dori Stegman, a city worker and a close friend of Terrigno, points out that in the city’s early days, “we got all kinds of free offers. There were no guidelines on what to do with them.” But in a small city with a small city’s budget, limousine rides seemed excessive. Terrigno’s successor as mayor, Heilman, said the rides “smacked of arrogance. She wasn’t elected Pope.”

Heilman had been feuding with her since their election in November, 1984. In the summer of 1985, the feud went bitterly public. In an agreement made just after the election, the council had chosen Terrigno as mayor; she was supposed to serve until August, 1985, when Heilman would succeed her and serve his own eight-month term. But in June, according to Farias, she began privately urging her friends and allies to press for an extension of her term.

At the Gay Pride Parade that month, dozens of “Keep Our Mayor” balloons appeared, tethered to parade vehicles and floats. Terrigno’s friends kept up the pressure, distributing petitions, but her council colleagues refused to extend her term. On Aug. 8, the very day that a federal grand jury was calling witnesses in the Crossroads inquiry, Terrigno announced she would give up her post.

By then, many of the friends she had won in her early days as mayor had deserted her. Out of earshot, City Hall staffers, alienated by what they saw as Terrigno’s imperious demands, were calling her “The Princess” and “Her Highness.” In less than a year, she went through seven city aides.

Farias, who stayed with Terrigno longer than any other aide, says that like many others who worked with her, he was caught up in the “Terrigno spell” at first. Farias says he reveled in the attention Terrigno received in the early months of her term and was willing to perform any small task. “She knew how to make you feel like the most trusted friend in the world,” he says.

But the longer he worked for Terrigno, the more demanding she became. She began telephoning him at night, sometimes after midnight, with dizzying lists of instructions for the next day. And sometimes in the middle of a busy workday, Farias says, Terrigno ordered him to deliver flowers to her lover “to make up after their fights. I felt like an errand boy.”

Farias quit the Tuesday after Labor Day, following a weekend of frantic preparations for a fund-raising birthday party Terrigno had scheduled for herself at Rage, a Santa Monica Boulevard dance club. According to Farias, Terrigno telephoned him at home on a Saturday, demanding that he “drop everything and drive out to the Simi Valley to pick up the party invitations. Then she told me to deliver them to every bar in West Hollywood.”

Weary, Farias missed a few bars that night, and the next day a furious Terrigno called him at home, ordering him to make the rounds again. “That was the last straw,” Farias says. “She was rude and sarcastic. When I saw her (the next) Tuesday morning, I told her I was leaving.”

Terrigno denies that she abused her staff, saying that few of her aides were able to keep up with the pace she kept for herself. “People knew what to expect from me,” she says. “Some of my aides preferred parties to typing letters.”

After her indictment in October, 1985, Terrigno’s profile rapidly diminished. She was under growing pressure to prepare for her trial and raise funds for her defense (although the gay community was lukewarm in contributing). She quit traveling; with embezzlement charges pending against her, she was no longer a prized guest on the gay banquet circuit. As mayor, she had spent up to 12 hours a day in her City Hall office. Now, as councilwoman, she appeared only a few hours each week. By March, Terrigno had become a phantom-like presence in the corridors of West Hollywood’s pastel gray City Hall building. Her office door was usually locked, her window shades always drawn. “It’s like she was already gone,” one city worker says.

When the trial ended, she never returned.

It was over in three days.

The trial was held in U.S. District Judge Laughlin Waters’ courtroom on the second floor of the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. As she listened to the proceedings, Terrigno grimly scribbled pages of notes on a thick yellow legal pad. Taking the stand in her defense, she tried to explain the financial juggling she claimed was necessary to keep Crossroads alive. But, as jurors said later, her testimony worked against her case.

Even former lovers and friends testified against her. Terrigno ran into several of them sitting over coffee in the courthouse snack bar. One was Jeanne Cordova.

There was an embarrassed moment of silence. Then Terrigno said: “I’m sorry you have to be here. I’m sure everything will be all right.” Cordova and the others stared at her. “All our mouths dropped,” Cordova says.

At dusk on a Friday night, after four hours of deliberations, Terrigno’s jurors straggled down the limestone steps toward Main Street. As television lights burned, reporters surrounded the foreman, David Brinkley.

“We judged her just like a normal person,” he said.