South Pasadena’s Terrorism Fighter : Mayor Rare Blend of Politician, Lawman

Talking to South Pasadena Mayor Lee Prentiss about his experiences on the Los Angeles Police Department is a little like sitting around the station house squad room, listening to an old pro regale the rookies with cop yarns. He’s got anecdotes about hold-ups and hijackings and high-speed chases and big time shoot-’em-ups.

But between tales of zinging shots at careening escape vehicles and arresting hold-up men, the 20-year Los Angeles Police Department veteran talks about some larger concerns.

Prentiss, who became a detective in the criminal conspiracy section in 1974, wants to help the law enforcement establishment solve some recurring problems.

“You shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” he said.

Law Enforcement Network

A year and a half ago, he founded the Tactical Response Assn., a networking organization for the police and military men who handle the high-pressure law enforcement tasks of the 1980s.

According to Prentiss, who would not divulge the size of the organization’s membership, they’re the specialists charged with storming a hijacked aircraft or coaxing a hostage out of the clutches of a gunman or shielding a head of state from snipers.

“The idea is to share information,” said Prentiss, a bulky man, with neatly trimmed blond hair and suspicious blue eyes. “If terrorists take over a 747, it’s the same when it happens in Germany, in Africa or in South America. If something worked in Africa, why shouldn’t the San Diego Police Department have the same information?”

About 3,000 law enforcement representatives--including delegations from 15 foreign countries, Prentiss said--will gather near Washington next month for the Tactical Response Assn.’s second annual conference. They’ll mull over subjects like “product extortion” and “SWAT team response” and examine the latest in James Bond-style weaponry. The central theme this year will be terrorism, said Prentiss.

In Prentiss’ home base of South Pasadena, of course, terrorism is mostly something you see in headlines.

“That’s one of the reasons I live here,” said Prentiss, a councilman for 2 1/2 years and mayor since last April. “We have one-third the crime rate of Los Angeles. Some place, you have to have peace in your life.”

Dressed in a well-worn cardigan, the 41-year-old detective/mayor, who still has the boyish, fair-and-square look of Martin Milner in “Adam-12,” was looking very much at peace, drinking coffee in somebody else’s City Hall office. (His own, like much of the rest of the building, is undergoing refurbishment.)

He is in the midst of “trying to retire” from his police job, he said. Prentiss, who won the department’s Medal of Valor nine months after joining the force for chasing a gunman down an alley, has been on leave since last September because of injuries he sustained when he hit his head while getting into a squad car more than a year ago.

“I guess it’s a matter of discrimination against tall guys,” said Prentiss, who is 6-foot-2. “I injured the vertebrae in my neck and sustained a concussion.” He will return to work Monday, he said.

Ask Prentiss about too many of his organization’s specifics and he gives you the stony-eyed look of a security guard defending a jewelry store. He can’t give you the who’s, what’s and where’s for “reasons of security.”

But he will give a little history. Prentiss got the idea for a world organization of tactical response specialists about two years ago, after sweating through some tough tactical situations of his own, he said.

Quick Response

“Things go down too quickly in a situation like that,” he said. “You have to be able to pick up the phone and call Miami or Scranton or Houston. You have to be able to say, ‘Look, I’ve got a group here from Texas. What do you know about them?’ Do you know how long it would take to put something like that out on the FBI teletype?”

As a member of the criminal conspiracy section, specializing in bomb investigations, Prentiss had been active in the International Assn. of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, another networking organization.

That group had presented him with a distinguished service award for “organizing meetings and just generally supporting the organization,” according to executive administrator Glenn Wilt.

But it was a narrowly specialized organization, said Prentiss, who was trained by the FBI in 1976 in “post-blast investigation” at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.

Using contacts he has developed during 12 years as a detective, he stitched together the Tactical Response Assn., which now has a paid staff of “four or five”--Prentiss will not be more specific--working out of an office on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena. The organization is sustained by the $50-a-year initiation fees from members and by profits from its conventions, Prentiss said.

Time Had Come

It was apparently an idea whose time had come. The organization’s first conference last year in Las Vegas, featuring, among other things, a demonstration of a Korean machine gun and seminars by some of the heavyweights in the field, drew 3,000 law enforcement people, he said.

This year’s promises to be even bigger, says Prentiss, a paid official of the organization who goes by the title “chief administrative officer.”

“Terrorism is in everybody’s living room,” he said. “It’s right there on your television screen. You can’t get away from it.”

One of the highlights of the conference will be Prentiss’ own limited-seating seminar--open only to badge-carrying peace officers or military specialists--on “defeating the LAW rocket.” The shoulder-mounted light anti-tank weapon, a favorite of Beirut guerrillas, can be used to blow up cars or to blast holes in walls.

Prentiss, a bomb expert who is frequently called upon to testify at trials, has figured out a way to beat it, he says. A secret way.

Olympic Tests

He and Arleigh McCree, a Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad technician who was killed disarming a bomb last year, ran some tests on LAW rockets at Camp Pendleton, preparing for possible terrorist attacks at the 1984 Olympic Summer Games.

“There are things you can do to stop it from functioning, even if there’s a hit,” Prentiss said enigmatically. “But I can’t discuss it with you.”

Also pitching in at the conference, which runs Feb. 8-13 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Silver Springs, Va., will be an impressive assortment of specialists in ordnance, military tactics, hand-to-hand combat or intelligence--tough, practical men who sometimes seem to have stepped out of the pages of a Len Deighton or Robert Ludlum novel.

Among them are West German Brig. General Ulrich Wegener, who in 1977 led a successful raid to recover a Lufthansa plane from hijackers and protect its passengers while it sat in a field in Mogadishu, Somalia, who will discuss anti-terrorist tactics; Alan Golacinski, a hostage during the take-over of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1978, now a State Department security expert, who will talk about hostage survival; retired Secret Service agent Philip D. Strother, who will lecture on VIP protection; New York City Police Capt. Frank Bolz, the premier expert on hostage negotiations, who will talk about his own specialty, and Dr. Brian Jenkins of the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. and president of the Tactical Response Assn. who will run a seminar on the latest trends in terrorism.

The international tenor of the organization has been achieved largely through the efforts of Jenkins.

European Experience

“It’s useful to get people from Europe involved, because they’ve had a hell of a lot more experience in these things than we have,” Jenkins said. “Unfortunately for them, luckily for us.”

Bolz, who is on the organization’s advisory board, says that the organization’s function should be to provide information.

“In New York, we made more mistakes than anybody in the world, though we never lost a single cop or a single hostage,” Bolz said. “We were the biggest lab in the world. The idea is to share the mistakes you made, so others don’t have to make the same ones.”

In his career as a policeman, Prentiss has had his share of learning experiences, he said.

Eight months after becoming a police officer in 1966, he and his partner were on patrol in Watts when they got a report of an armed robbery on South Avalon Boulevard. According to the Police Department citation, the two spotted the two gunmen and chased them at high speeds, exchanging shots with them. When the hold-up men screeched to a halt and jumped out of their car, Prentiss found himself in pursuit of one assailant on foot.

Running Gun Battle

“There was this T-instersection where their car couldn’t turn,” said Prentiss, talking in the clipped, factual style of the cop making a report. “I chased one of them down an alley, engaging in a running gun battle with him.”

The perpetrator gave up.

That’s how Prentiss got his Medal of Valor, making him at 21 one of the youngest officers ever to receive it.

It was actually his second experience with gunplay. The week before, a gunman barricaded himself in a building and started trading shots with policemen outside.

“When he stepped out of the doorway to fire at another officer, my partner and I returned his fire,” Prentiss recalled. “He got hit. Forty-five minutes later, he came out, bleeding from a head wound. I found that, even then, we weren’t prepared for a barricaded situation. That was before we had SWAT weapons.”

Another Shoot-Out

Prentiss’ eventful patrol career also included the arrest of a holdup man after another shoot-out with police. “He had a shotgun pellet lodged between his skull and his brain, but he walked out, cursing,” Prentiss said.

After being assigned to the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal conspiracy section in 1974, Prentiss got an insider’s look at some of the department’s most sensational cases. He was a member of a large team that investigated the Patricia Hearst kidnapping, and he was part of an arrest team that raided a Weather Underground safe house, where Weathermen were plotting to bomb the headquarters of a state senator.

Prentiss said he was part of an effort to develop psychological data on bombers, having developed a “bomber profile” and coined the term “explomania.” “An explomaniac is someone who gets off on the noise and the power of exploding bombs,” he said. “They’re usually sexually maladjusted, like pyros (pyromaniacs).”

How did he go from law enforcement to politics? Prentiss’ involvement in local Republican groups and conservative causes led him to run for the South Pasadena City Council in spring, 1984. It was not necessarily a logical progression, said Prentiss, who ran unsuccessfully for for the state Senate in the 24th District last November. “I was a Republican prior to becoming a policeman,” he said.

As mayor, Prentiss is widely portrayed as the executive who shepherded the City Council away from a longstanding pattern of scathing personal attacks and toward taking care of city business, though he himself was scathing in his criticisms of Councilman Robert Wagner for an alleged conflict of interest while Wagner was a member of the city’s redevelopment agency.

Critics Views

Critics say that he occasionally has pandered to right-wing ideologues.

“I’m a conservative Republican, but he’s to the right of me,” said Thomas Biesek, a South Pasadena civic leader. He cites, in particular, a Prentiss initiative to prevent the disposal in the city of “aborted fetal remains.”

“There’s a wee bit of grandstanding there, which I suppose any politician is guilty of,” said Biesek. “There aren’t even any abortion clinics in South Pasadena.”

Prentiss said that he has been an unwavering conservative for many years. He has actively opposed the state Supreme Court and its former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird for more than six years, he says. “Some of their decisions were so far out of bounds it’s incredible,” he said. “I was against Bird the first time she ran for confirmation, six years ago.”

There are frustrations in all endeavors. The hardest lesson that Prentiss had to learn as a cop came 15 years ago, he said. He was not even on duty at the time.

Midnight Flyer

Late one evening in January, 1972, Prentiss and his wife, Shirley, got onto a PSA Boeing 727 in San Francisco. It was the “midnight flyer” run between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the Prentisses got the front seat of the plane.

“I was looking right into the cockpit to see what it was like,” Prentiss said. “I had never sat there before.”

At mid-flight, a man in a rear seat grabbed a flight attendant and jammed a sawed-off shotgun against her forehead.

“He threatened to shoot her unless the plane was refueled and flown to Havana,” Prentiss recalled. “He brought her to the front of the plane. They were standing 10 or 15 feet in front of me.”

Prentiss, unarmed, remained in his seat, watching helplessly during two hours of negotiations, which led ultimately to the passengers’ release and a flight to Cuba for the hijacker and his wife.

What was the lesson that time? “I learned that you can’t always control things,” Prentiss said. “Policemen like to think they can. Sometimes they can’t.”