People and Events

It was a different kind of paper chase for the legal profession.

Municipal courthouses in Torrance and Encino ran out of the toilet variety Thursday because of a dispute between the county and its supplier, prompting numerous complaints as well as some frantic searches in supply closets.

The situation has since stabilized due to the heroic efforts of relief teams from the county Facilities Management Department who rushed in fresh supplies to the courts and two other county buildings that also came up empty. The shortage also encompassed toilet-seat covers and paper towels.

“We were hearing from some angry judges for a while,” said Ken Welcome, deputy director of operations for facilities management. Despite the litigious setting, he said none of the lawyers using the courthouses that day have threatened to sue.

Still unresolved is the disagreement involving the supplier, Ellis Maintenance of Carson, which maintains that the county uses more paper than it had contracted for.

Co-owner Linda Ellis charged that the five-story South Bay Municipal Court had gone through its allotment for December in six days. “I’ve lost $35,000 on the Torrance courthouse over the 18 months that I’ve supplied there,” she said.

Chris Crawford, an administrator in the South Bay Municipal Court, speculated that remaining rolls may have been removed late Wednesday. Ellis said she knew of no such withdrawals but agreed late Friday to resume supplying the buildings, pending a resolution of the dispute.

Said Crawford: “It’s these little housekeeping things that make the difference between a building working or not working.”

There was a good reason for postponing Friday’s scheduled arraignment of two man charged with mailing out death threats to 265 Antelope Valley residents.

Nearly every local defense lawyer had been an intended victim of the alleged extortion plot and was therefore barred from representing them.

Court officials were stymied most of the day trying to locate two attorneys who had not received letters in the alleged $600,000 ransom scheme of Roman Makuch, 27, and Richard Faroni, 26, who were arrested in Las Vegas over the Thanksgiving weekend. Even the county public defender’s office declared a conflict of interest because one of its new lawyers was sent a letter.

Finally, Bill Clark, one local attorney who had been left off the mailing list, was found to represent Faroni. Then, Carl Burkow, a Van Nuys attorney, agreed to take Makuch’s case. But Burkow couldn’t make the scheduled arraignment at Antelope Valley Municipal Court, so the proceeding was postponed until Monday.

A Duarte youth who sought to take a driving test at the Department of Motor Vehicles office in West Covina the other day got a big demerit before he even started. An examiner, suspicious because the youth had arrived in a 1988 Chevrolet with no license plates, ran a computer check. The car was listed as stolen. The youth was arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto before he ever had a chance to demonstrate the proper use of turn signals.