To Serve and Protect the Seaport Shoppers

Sometimes the changes in San Diego go unnoticed for years. Then one day people notice something is different and begin asking what happened.

Take the rally in downtown San Diego last week. The topic was drugs and money, but a lot of attention was paid to five sharply dressed, heavily armed individuals marching in the parade.

The five wore crisp, dark blue pants and shirts, with bright yellow chevrons on their sleeves, shiny badges and Smokey Bear hats. They were armed with handguns, batons and tear gas.

They were older than the San Diego cops. But a heckler trying to shout down the head of the Urban League made sure to position himself far away from the ferocious-looking five.

“Who are those guys?” was a common refrain.

Answer: private security guards from Seaport Village.

The shopping complex has had its own 24-hour security force since 1982, now numbering 10 full-time members, headed by a former suburban police chief from Massachusetts.

All of this is seen as economically necessary for a trendy shopping complex that, until recently, was cheek-by-jowl with San Diego Police Department headquarters. (A new headquarters opened two years ago.)

“We feel it’s a deterrent,” said Seaport Village manager Phyllis Cicchetto. “We want people to feel safe here.”

It’s simple: If upscale shoppers feel threatened, they quickly take their business elsewhere.

When crime (real or imagined) menaces the affluent, merchants take notice, public officials catch hell and things happen. It’s different for people farther down the economic scale.

They’re allowed to hold marches and send petitions to politicians.

And Another Thing . . .

Notes from everywhere:

- A support organization has formed at San Diego State University for a much-maligned group to discuss common problems: the Heterosexual Student Union.

- With its garish yellow paint job, the Paddock restaurant in Encinitas was a civic eyesore for years, squat on the city’s busiest street, Encinitas Boulevard, just east of Interstate 5.

The Hungry Hunter chain has now bought the restaurant and taken two steps to curry community favor.

The building has been repainted a pleasing tan. And half the revenue from Tuesday’s gala opening is pledged to Jenny Pratt, a local teen-ager who was crippled in an unsolved 1987 attack.

- After some financial reshuffling, the BodyWorks fitness parlor on 7th Avenue in downtown San Diego has a new advertising tactic.

Signs (including one offering a free cholesterol test) have been placed flat on the roof of the two-story building, looking skyward. They’re visible to flabby office workers in surrounding high-rises.

Barber Buddies

One of the nagging questions from the alleged money-laundering caper of Richard T. Silberman has been: How did Silberman, a respected businessman and political insider, ever become pals with Chris Petti, a reputed mobster?

Their natural habitats seem quite dissimilar. Silberman is La Jolla, Petti is Las Vegas.

Silberman has been telling friends that Petti

is just some guy he met at the barber shop at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley. They used to talk while waiting to get trimmed, he says.

Michael Stafford, who has owned the shop for 15 years, confirms that both were steady customers but says he never saw them in the shop at the same time. “It could have happened, but I doubt it,” he said.

What does Stafford think of the criminal case in which the FBI allegedly stung the pair into thinking they were dealing in Colombian drug money?

“It cost me a very good customer,” Stafford said.

Petti is getting his hair cut free these days at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.