City Council Takes Rap for Problems of Growth

Aprivate poll making the rounds among builders and politicians is causing discomfort in both groups.

Done for the Building Industry Assn. to test voter attitudes toward slow-growth initiatives, the poll showed overwhelming support (85%) for a countywide solution to the crowding, traffic congestion and pollution associated with growth.

When asked their views on growth, 67% said growth should be controlled, 27% said it should be slowed or stopped and only 5% said the free-market system should be left alone.

Conducted by a firm from Houston, the poll showed that more people blame the San Diego City Council (31%) for the problems of growth than blame the development industry itself (24%). Nearly unscathed as villains are the mayor (5%), new industry (5%) and the Chamber of Commerce (3%).

“I suppose we should be happy that the public dislikes the council even more than they dislike us,” lamented one builder. “I guess we’re only Public Enemy No. 2.”

Trigger on ‘20s

For a newspaperman who never made more than $65 a week, Jake Lingle had a knack for living the good life.

He was a legman for the Chicago Tribune in the Front Page era of the 1920s. His specialty was showing up at the latest mob murder or speak-easy raid, then phoning in the facts cool as you please to the rewrite desk.

When somebody put a bullet into Lingle’s head while he was on his way to the race track in June, 1930, a lot of nasty questions started to surface--like how was it that Lingle could live in a $300-a-month hotel suite, own a vacation home on the Dunes in Indiana, and be a business partner with the police commissioner?

The answer shocked even bare-knuckles Chicago: Lingle was the well-paid link between the Capone gang and the corrupt pols at City Hall. In the uproar, a minor hood was convicted of Lingle’s murder and sent away for eight years.

Now comes Howard Browne, La Costa resident and retired movie and television screenwriter, with “Pork City,” a novelistic treatment of the Lingle killing that asserts that the cops and courts got the wrong man, who went willingly as part of a payoff.

When it comes to Chicago in the Roaring ‘20s, Browne has impressive credentials.

For one thing, he was there. For another, he wrote the screenplays for the Playhouse 90 television drama “Seven Against the Wall” and for the movies “Capone” “Portrait of a Mobster” and “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

He also taught screenwriting for 13 years at UC San Diego and wrote a few million words for Mammoth Mystery, Amazing Stories and Mammoth Detective, now-deceased pulp fiction periodicals.

Browne says he poked at the Lingle story off and on for 20 years before completing “Pork City.” In the book, he names the man he says was the real killer--now dead--and explains the Byzantine reasons the mob arranged for someone else to take the rap.

“Lingle was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” Browne said. “He was the bagman, tipping off the mob and collecting the payments for City Hall when a speak-easy or a brothel was about to get raided. He once bragged that he personally set the price of beer in Chicago. He wore a diamond belt buckle given to him by Al Capone.”

With “Pork City” (St. Martin’s Press, $16.95) finished, Browne is working on another bloody piece of Chicago history: the 1930 slaying of Mayor Anton Cermak.

Cermak was shot to death while riding in an open car with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami. Most historians say Roosevelt was the true target and that Cermak was hit by mistake.

“That was just what you were supposed to think,” Browne said. He promises to tell the Real Story in his upcoming “Martyr.”

Bad News, George

It’s Bush and Jackson at UC San Diego, according to a presidential preference poll done in tandem with the football-or-no-football vote last week.

But political science Professor Sam Popkin, a longtime presidential pollster now working as a consultant to the New York Times-CBS Poll, says the numbers do not bode well for the vice president.

The UCSD poll, which attracted slightly more than 2,000 people at the La Jolla campus, showed Bush at 23.5%, Jackson 22.7%, Dukakis 19.2%, undecided 20%, Gore 1.9% and the rest scattered. At the same time, students backed the return of football 59% to 41%--falling short of the 67% needed for passage.

Pollster Popkin, who was not involved in the poll but was asked for a reaction, said the Jackson support is consistent with other college campuses. But he found the Bush numbers surprisingly low.

“I’m shocked on a yuppie campus like UCSD that Bush would do so badly,” Popkin said. “That election was sure to draw the jock-fraternity voters, who are Bush voters.

“When Bush gets only half as much support as football, he’s in trouble.”