Political Mailer an Eye-Opener : Girlie Magazine Excerpt Stirs Up Race as Acosta, Johnson Continues Feud

Santa Ana resident Lou Ann Viedmar doesn’t particularly care about city politics. She had never heard of City Councilman John Acosta, for instance, until she opened a package that arrived in her mailbox this week.

There, right above the pictures of half-naked women in provocative poses, was a picture of Acosta, along with part of an article from a 1982 Oui Magazine issue entitled “Leave It to Cleavage.”

According to the article, Acosta was a judge at a bikini contest--in which a woman took off her top while dancing--at an Orange restaurant and ran out the back door when police raided the place.

The package, which included a letter denouncing Acosta as a liar and a hypocrite, was sent to voters citywide by former council member and longtime Acosta foe P. Lee Johnson.

Viedmar was not amused.

“I was just outraged to receive campaign literature of this low quality,” said Viedmar, a clinical psychologist. “I almost feel victimized. . . . Why does he have to mail this hatred to everyone in the city?”

The impact of the mailer--which Orange County political observers described as unusually nasty even for the normally bitter local races--won’t be fully known until the Nov. 8 election in which Acosta is running for reelection.

But it is angering some Santa

Ana residents, and it may be causing some voters to swing to Acosta.

“It makes me sympathetic to Acosta,” said Viedmar, who also called Johnson’s law office to complain. “It would make me think whoever his opponent is is a real sleaze.”

Johnson is not even running against Acosta in next month’s council race. His motives in this case are revenge and an extreme dislike for the man he thinks helped end his own political career.

Johnson was Santa Ana’s vice mayor in 1986 when he lost a bitterly contested election to Miguel Pulido. Contributing to his loss were last-minute mailers that Johnson says unfairly accused him of beating his wife.

Johnson claims that Acosta secretly paid for the mailers. Acosta denies it.

While Johnson admits that revenge inspired his decision to send out the Oui mailer, he said his goal was to rid the council of the man he calls “one of the most detrimental factors in the city.”

“My disappointment with Acosta goes back to the very first days on the council, when he was opposed to everything we wanted to do to clean up Santa Ana,” Johnson said. “John keeps posturing himself as a self-righteous, God-fearing, law-and-order creature. . . . The guy judging the porno contest is more him.”

Englander Produced It

Johnson hired political consultant Harvey Englander to produce the mailer, and he expects that it will end up costing about $17,000. He has formed a political action committee (A Better Santa Ana Committee) to help defray the costs, but he said he has received no contributions to date.

Englander also happens to be the consultant for Councilman Wilson B. Hart, Acosta’s chief foe on the council and the man who Acosta says is behind the mailer.

Hart, however, said he contributed no money to Johnson’s newly formed committee and has no plans to do so. But he says he knew that the mailer was coming out and is glad that it did.

“At the outset of this campaign, I was giving serious thought to doing it myself (printing the mailer),” Hart said. “I wasn’t certain it was a good idea . . . but before I had to make tough decisions, Lee Johnson stepped up to the plate and asked for the opportunity to lay the record of John Acosta’s entertainment life before the voters. And I was relieved.”

Hart’s name does not appear anywhere in Johnson’s mailer, and he said that he did not see it until after it was sent out last weekend. He said he does not find the mailer offensive “at all.”

“I think it offends some people,” Hart said. “But I think it’s relevant at the same time. . . . It’s an accurate record of the facts. . . . It’s the behavior of John Acosta that is offensive.”

Johnson said he has received about 20 phone calls--mostly anonymous and from women--criticizing him for sending out the mailer. “They say they’re offended, that ‘John’s a good guy and we’re offended by what you’re doing.’ ”

Acosta says phone calls to his office prompted by the mailer, which included his phone number and urged voters to call, are heavily sympathetic to him.

On Acosta’s answering machine tape reviewed Wednesday by The Times, there were a total of 24 messages about the mailer left after he closed his office Tuesday night. Fifteen were from people who expressed their suppor, eight were critical of the councilman, and some of them used obscene language.

Wanted Acosta’s Side

One woman said she is upset by the mailer and wants to hear Acosta’s side of the story before she decides whom to vote for.

A man, describing himself only as a 10-year Santa Ana resident, said that he is “thoroughly disgusted” and that Acosta can rest assured that he will not obtain his vote.

But more typical was the message left by 22-year-old resident Colette Madrigal: “If anything, it made me want to vote for John. I hate this kind of smear garbage.”

Acosta said he at first had “dreaded” the thought of the mailer coming out because of the impact it would have on his friends and family. But now he thinks that it may actually help him.

“My gut reaction is this whole thing backfired,” said Acosta, sitting at a desk cluttered with phone messages, many of them pertaining to the mailer. “People are highly offended by his (Johnson’s) action.”

The mailer includes warnings that the envelope contains material “that all decent people consider obscene.”

Johnson said those warnings should have been enough to stop anyone offended by such pictures from going any further.

But 59-year-old Amelia Melgoza said the warnings only piqued her curiosity.

‘I Was Shocked’

“Anytime they say don’t look, that’s the first thing you do,” she said. “I was shocked that such a thing could get out in the mail. It’s the first time I got that kind of a package.”

Stories about the Oui Magazine article appeared in both The Times and the Register in 1982 (and were included in Johnson’s mailer), but the incident was not brought up in Acosta’s 1984 campaign, when he won easily.

This time, however, with the power balance of the City Council at stake and Acosta facing one of his bitterest rivals, Hart, Santa Ana political observers knew that it was just a matter of time before the issue was brought up. (Incumbents Hart and Acosta are both running for the Ward 3 seat because another ward in the city was eliminated by redistricting.)

Acosta admits that he was judging the bikini contest, which was held at Gary Cooper’s, a restaurant and bar in Orange in April, 1982. The winner, who was to be chosen a few weeks later after several such contests, was to appear as a centerfold in a future edition of Oui.

According to Acosta, only one bikini-clad dancer had come out on the stage when the music stopped and a club employee came over to tell the judges that police were raiding the place.

“My first thought was that there might be drugs, gambling or prostitution involved, and I wanted to get out,” Acosta said. “There was no nudity while I was there.”

According to the Oui article, the dancer dropped her top while the crowd chanted, “Skin to win.” When the police entered the restaurant, the article said, Acosta (who is mistakenly referred to as Joseph Acosta) ran for the exit “harder than he ever did in an election,” shouting over his shoulder, “I’ll be back next week.”

Acosta said the Oui article is substantially untrue. “I walked out,” he said. “I wasn’t hiding from anybody.”

The magazine pictures, which were reproduced in Johnson’s mailer, show a dozen women with few or no clothes on, their breasts and genitals covered by black lines. Acosta is not shown in the same picture with any of the women, but the article includes a mug shot of him.

Political consultant Englander said the possibility that the mailer could backfire and create sympathy for Acosta was one of the reasons it was distributed weeks before the election, rather than just a few days before Nov. 8, as is the case with “a typical Orange County hit piece”--which Englander insists this is not.

“There’s nothing made up, nothing fictitious,” Englander said. “There may be a sympathetic element of people who believe in this kind of stuff. But I think overall that people will view John Acosta on his actions.”

Stuart Mollrich, a Newport Beach political consultant, said he thought that the mailer took the hit-piece concept of campaigning “pretty far to the edge.”

Its impact, Mollrich said, will depend on whether voters believe that there is any substance to the charge that Acosta was judging an event that turned into a striptease contest.

“Pieces like that certainly do get people’s attention,” Mollrich said. “But the thing is so inflammatory that if they can’t substantiate it, it could backfire.”