Councilman’s Copter Ride Raises Dust

In February, Long Beach City Councilman Edd Tuttle took a helicopter ride--an innocuous flight that normally would have drawn little attention. But the helicopter caper has prompted more than a little intrigue and gossip at City Hall:

One council member accused another of stealing his papers. The second councilman challenged the first to a lie detector test. A third asked police to dust his office for fingerprints. And police checked for prints on an anonymous letter to Sacramento.

“The whole thing is rather mysterious,” Councilman Tom Clark summed up.

It began when Tuttle and his wife flew to Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 28 with L.A. Helicopter Inc., a company seeking city approval to begin regularly scheduled flights out of Long Beach Airport.

Last month, a brief, unsigned letter was sent to the attorney general’s office in Sacramento, The Times and other newspapers alleging that Tuttle violated a 108-year-old provision in the state Constitution by taking a free ride.

Designed to limit the influence of then-powerful railroads, the provision bars public officeholders, other than public utilities commissioners, from accepting free or discounted service from transportation companies. The penalty is loss of office.

As evidence, the anonymous tipster attached a copy of a Feb. 27 letter from Tuttle to L.A. Helicopter that begins: “Thank you very much for the helicopter pass.”

At first, company officials acknowledged that Tuttle took a free “observation ride.” Tuttle, however, said that although he had received a free pass, he paid for the flight in cash. Contacted again, the helicopter company changed its story, saying the councilman paid for himself and his wife on the day of the trip.

The dispute took a twist July 21, when Tuttle, 40, told the council that his helicopter file, including the unused pass and a copy of his letter to L.A. Helicopter, was stolen from his City Hall office.

Then police entered the picture.

After taking a theft report, Long Beach police called the attorney general’s office to ask for the anonymous letter. Police chemically processed the letter for fingerprints and, according to Tuttle, found prints of the person who may have stolen his file.

Although refusing to name his suspect, Tuttle has made it clear that he has an eye on a colleague, Evan Anderson Braude, an occasional rival in council debates and the only attorney on the city’s governing body.

“The only people I know who study Constitution laws are attorneys,” Tuttle said.

Police said they are not about to force local officials to submit to fingerprinting to test Tuttle’s suspicion.

“You can’t go around fingerprinting people” unless there is sufficient cause to link them to the crime, Police Chief Lawrence L. Binkley said.

So now what?

“I may be serving people some complimentary glasses of water and lifting the prints myself” off the glasses, Tuttle said.

Campaign Statements

Tuttle said he also asked a business acquaintance to compare the typewriter characters on the anonymous letter to those of former campaign statements of other council members.

Braude acknowledged that he is Tuttle’s target.

“You can read between the lines. You know who he’s talking about, and I know who he’s talking about,” he said.

“The only thing I’ve ever taken from his office is a piece of Kleenex,” Braude added. “I had a cold, and I took a piece of Kleenex.”

Braude, 40, said his colleagues treat Tuttle’s allegations as “a joking matter. . . . I don’t think anybody takes it seriously.”

As a member of the California State Bar, Braude said, his fingerprints are on file. He offered to take a lie detector test, as long as Tuttle also agrees to do the same.

Tuttle said he is willing.

Braude and some other city officials are skeptical of Tuttle’s claim that his City Hall office was burglarized.

“I don’t think it was broadly accepted by the council that we have a security problem,” Clark said. He figures that Tuttle made a mistake by accepting a free ride, “and (at) some time reimbursed the company and paid in cash and didn’t have a receipt.

“The problem has become one in that the explanation of what happened . . . is more complex than a simple admission that the ride was taken,” he said.

On the other hand, Clark asked, if no one stole Tuttle’s file, where did the anonymous letter writer get the councilman’s letter to the helicopter company?

Councilman Warren Harwood was concerned enough about Tuttle’s theft report that he had police dust his office for fingerprints, even though nothing was missing.

“It just seemed that if people were looking around, they might be looking around in other offices,” he said.

The dusting for fingerprints showed nothing unusual, he said.

Long Beach police said their investigation of the reported theft is open, although they admitted that there is not much to go on.

The issue of the helicopter ride has been all but lost in the hoopla over the missing file.

Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Richard Martland said last week that his office does not intend to pursue the complaint in the anonymous letter, calling it “too sketchy.”

There was hardly enough information to “throw a public official out of office” under an “ancient law,” he said.

L.A. Helicopter officials said they wanted Tuttle to test their service to blunt his criticism of additional commercial airline flights at Long Beach Airport. Tuttle has been the most vocal opponent of such flights.

Tuttle and other council members did not have a vote on L.A. Helicopter’s application to make regular flights; that was up to the city’s Public Works Department, which in June issued a permit for the service.