People and Events

It has worked in the movies a few times, so Henry J. Webb apparently thought it would work at the Pacific Division jail in Venice where he was being held on suspicion of possessing cocaine.

Los Angeles Police Lt. Gabe Ornelas said Webb, 36, managed to hide himself in a sack of dirty linen, hoping he would be carried away in a laundry truck rather than go to Los Angeles County Jail in a prisoner bus.

Another officer speculated that Webb might have been trying to hide long enough so that he could not be arraigned within the required 72 hours and would have to be released.

No matter. The jail sergeant making a mandatory hourly prisoner check at about 3:30 a.m. discovered Webb was missing. He was found pretty quickly and went directly to jail.

Monrovia police, meanwhile, were still looking Wednesday for another jail candidate--a woman who wore a baggy, knee-length Army fatigue jacket when she pulled a gun and took $900 from the Professional Image beauty supply store on Huntington Drive.

Not everybody was pleased when a mile-long hunk of the Foothill Freeway in Sylmar was shut down much of the last couple of days so a movie company could do scenes for a film based on last summer’s rash of roadway shootings.

With traffic rerouted onto Foothill Boulevard from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., some motorists complained of being late to work, and Sylmar residents didn’t like the added cars milling around their neighborhood.

In addition, the California Highway Patrol, with the real shootings fresh in mind, isn’t at all happy about “Freeway,” a film that it believes could inspire more of the same. In the interests of safety, however, uniformed off-duty patrolmen handled location security for the movie company.

Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritilli said the closure was “in line with the governor’s effort to try to attract industry to California.” (Or keep it here.) And, she said, state officials “try to do it when it’s not rush hour and we have the minimum of inconvenience to the public.”

At least Wednesday was a holiday.

The makers of “Freeway” had better luck than Sylvester Stallone, who last year finally withdrew his request to close part of the Simi Valley Freeway for a movie after complaints by commuters and objections by the city councils of Simi Valley and Moorpark.

Jim Mouth, whose real name is Jim Purol, says he is going to lead the world’s first underwater rock concert today.

He conceded it might not sound like much.

Purol, 35, who has gained some fame by smoking 141 cigarettes at once--although he insists he is a nonsmoker--says his group, Atlantis, will perform at noon in 10 feet of water at the Los Angeles Swim Stadium, which is adjacent to the Coliseum. They plan to run through “Sea Cruise,” maybe a little of “Mack the Knife” and an original called “Wet Rap.”

In addition to himself on drums, there will be two low-voltage keyboard players, a guitarist and a lead singer. “It’s very hard to get a guitarist under water,” he says, as though the others present no problem.

With who knows what is going on in the Persian Gulf, the skipper of the San Pedro fishing boat Pacific Sun could hardly be blamed for being a little edgy over the three-foot-diameter metal sphere he caught in his net off the coast.

He radioed the Coast Guard to say he might have caught a mine.

A Navy mine disposal expert was dispatched. He put everybody’s mind at ease by concluding that it was some kind of buoy--probably a weather buoy belonging to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.