People and Events

It was, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Barry Staggs said, “the kind of chase where you hold your breath.” He pronounced it a “miracle” that no one was hurt.

It began near 6th and Alameda streets, where an 18-wheel rig was reported going through red lights. Officers took out after it, only to be led for nearly 20 minutes through heavy morning traffic on the Santa Ana, Pomona and Long Beach freeways.

The big truck finally swung into a trucking company parking lot in Vernon and roared around the lot several times until cornered by 10 police cars and a helicopter.

Booked on suspicion of evading arrest, driving under the influence of drugs and possession of marijuana and a controlled substance was Thomas Hollis, 35, an employee of the trucking company.

Staggs said officers questioned a passenger in the truck and concluded that Hollis may have been having a PCP flashback when he started going through red lights.

The Santa Monica cops, meanwhile, launched their new eight-member (four officers and four horses) equestrian patrol. Sgt. Barney Melekian said the unit will spend most of its time in the Palisades Park area during a three-month experiment.

The park, like many others, has not been without its problems. So officers Marianne Fullove, Andy Meyer, Ramona Messina and Mario Toti were trained for three months at the San Jose Mountain Police Academy.

“Studies in other cities,” Melekian said, “have shown that the presence of horses is assuring to the public and in fact has an impact on crime. We’re hoping they will prove themselves and that we’ll keep them.”

If it’s left up to the Grant Elementary School first- and second-graders who attended the patrol’s inaugural ceremony Tuesday morning at Santa Monica City Hall, the horses stay.

Robin Griffin, who seven years ago worked in the office of the Clippers when she was 19 and they were in San Diego, is organizing a basketball league for lawyers. She says she got the idea while dating Kamran Farhoomand, who’s in the business of setting up leagues.

It started, she recalls, when a lawyer told her that members of his firm “would rather not play with construction workers” but would like to play with “other attorneys or doctors or something.”

“The best we could offer him,” she says, “was some insurance brokers.”

He called back and suggested that she start a lawyers’ league. Attorneys, he told her, “are little boys. . . . They are very competitive.”

Griffin says she drew a warning from someone at City Hall when she began putting her posters on downtown power poles and fences. Of all people, the official felt, someone trying to recruit lawyers should not break the city’s laws. But, she says, “he ended up signing up some people for the league.”

Teams ante up $200 apiece to join and pay $40 a game--which is not quite the way it works in the pros. Griffin and Farhoomand say they think the law firms can afford it. The two-game preseason schedule will open April 17 at the Hollywood and Fairfax high school gyms.

The latest in Carrie Leigh’s search for happiness came as a surprise to her lawyer, Marvin Mitchelson. He said he hadn’t known in advance that the former Canadian model and Hugh Hefner live-in was going to marry in New York over the weekend.

“They only contact me when they want to get divorced, not when they want to get married,” Mitchelson observed.

Mitchelson said that Leigh, who has sued Playboy publisher Hefner and been countersued by him amid a great deal of acrimony, recently moved to New York to pursue a modeling and film career. Her case against Hefner, the lawyer said, is still active.

The groom was identified as one Corey Margolis.