Jail Doesn’t Quiet Gadfly Who Nettled City Agency

For the past few years, 54-year-old William Hayes has appeared with other gadflies at Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency meetings to perform what they see as their “job” as public watchdogs over the big developers and redevelopment officials who are carving up and laying out the new downtown.

But on Sept. 15, Hayes was sentenced to 155 days in jail for disrupting an August meeting of the agency. At the meeting, Hayes so angered one redevelopment official by speaking beyond his three-minute time limit and throwing an audiotape onto a table that CRA Commissioner James Wood performed a citizen’s arrest and had Hayes taken away by police.

It was the third time Wood had placed Hayes under arrest since late last year and it capped an escalating feud between the graying, reed-thin minority rights activist from Watts and the powerful city agency.

Wood first arrested Hayes last year after the gadfly read aloud for more than an hour at a CRA meeting, complaining that the agency owed him $3,100 in relocation fees from 1985, when his apartment was razed for redevelopment.

In March, a jury convicted Hayes on a misdemeanor charge of public disturbance. Los Angeles Municipal Judge Lois Anderson-Smaltz gave Hayes a suspended sentence and placed him on probation, but last week the judge ruled that Hayes had violated probation and ordered him to jail for breaking CRA rules at the August meeting.

Wood, who denies that the agency owes Hayes relocation fees, said Hayes is so unruly “that I have no choice but to press this, because if I give in to his demands, his harassment will never end.”

However, Gloria Molina, who chairs the council’s Community Redevelopment and Housing Committee, said that the events leading to Hayes’ jailing “are unfortunate” and that she will investigate whether the court’s sentence and Wood’s actions were appropriate.

‘Unheard Of’

Molina said she learned that during Hayes’ probation hearing last week, when Smaltz asked whether he would stop badgering the CRA if released, Hayes replied, “No,” so the judge jailed him. A spokesman for the judge said she would not comment because the case is on appeal.

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky called the arrest and sentence “unheard of.”

“When we have people who are arrested for shooting, for stabbing, for selling drugs . . . and who don’t even get 30 days in jail, this sounds to me like a case for Amnesty International,” Yaroslavsky said.

Facing a release time of just before Christmas, Hayes sat in his prisoner fatigues at the Hall of Justice jail last week, wondering “what sort of city Los Angeles has become.”

“This is going to backlash and backfire,” he said, “because most people are aghast at this kind of sentence.”

Articulate and well-read, William Tut Hayes is a familiar figure in Watts and founder of the People’s United Freedom Forum, a weekly community gathering in South-Central Los Angeles at which current events are discussed.

The unemployed Hayes has picketed a CRA commissioner’s home and has repeatedly accused the agency of “railroading” the Watts community into accepting an ambitious 1,900-acre redevelopment zone that will transform some black neighborhoods into commercial and industrial areas.

Old Feud

Although the feud between the CRA and Hayes dates back years, the animosity increased last winter after Wood first arrested the activist. Wood made his second citizen’s arrest of Hayes for speaking out of turn at a May 17 CRA meeting, but a Van Nuys judge threw out those charges.

In August, Hayes was arrested a third time by Wood after he disputed Wood’s declaration from an earlier meeting that the United States had honorably dealt with Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

According to transcripts of that CRA meeting, Hayes either dropped or threw an audiotape onto a table near Commissioner Frank Kuwahara, heatedly urging Kuwahara to listen to it. The tape was of a protest by local Japanese over the U.S. government’s continuing failure to pay reparations.

Wood arrested Hayes for violating the CRA’s three-minute speaking limit and accused him of assault for throwing the audiotape.

Hayes, who acted as his own attorney throughout his case, managed a grin when asked what it all means.

“Jim Wood has never run up against a relocatee who was pushed out of his home by the CRA and who can fight like I can,” Hayes said. “I’m Wood’s Achilles’ heel.”

Mark Littman, a spokesman for the CRA, said the agency has paid Hayes $13,392 for relocation expenses and for replacement of camera equipment, a van and other belongings Hayes claimed were lost during his 1985 fight against the CRA’s eminent domain procedures. Hayes was legally locked out of his apartment. The CRA stored his belongings for 21 months at a cost to the agency of $35,362, Littman said. The building is long gone.

The CRA has offered binding arbitration to settle the dispute, but Littman said he feels that Hayes “prefers to battle with us instead of work with us.”

Show of Force

Municipal Judge Sandy R. Kriegler, who threw out charges stemming from Hayes’ second arrest in May, said CRA officials appeared “in force” at his Van Nuys courtroom the day he heard the case.

“I knew nothing about the case, which had been transferred to me,” Kriegler recalled, “but all these CRA board members are there, and I say to myself, ‘Gee, this must be really outrageous--he must have really torn up the meeting.’ Then I looked at the evidence and said, ‘What the hell’s the big deal here?’ ”

Transcripts show that two other gadflies--not Hayes--hotly accused CRA officials of lying about a deal the agency is working out with Los Angeles County to build a massive new county complex in the Civic Center area.

The meeting was not exceptionally rowdy, but Wood, known for his frequent wrangling with critics, warned the hecklers that he “was not in the mood” for their interruptions.

Hayes spoke up only once, according to the transcript, as Wood directed another speaker to use a microphone. “There’s one on the table,” Hayes said. Wood then arrested all three gadflies.

One official familiar with that arrest said the city attorney’s office reluctantly prosecuted Hayes at the CRA’s insistence and was “relieved” when Kriegler ruled for the defendant.

Deputy City Atty. Chris Lee, who prosecuted the case, could not be reached for comment. However, Wood said he has made it “very clear to my staff, and they have conveyed to the city attorney, that this entire case is very important to us. We disagree with (Kriegler’s) ruling.”

‘Pretty Strange’

Councilman Ernani Bernardi, a CRA critic, said that while he believes in public order, “the idea of arresting a citizen who may have some deep concern, unless he is really destroying property or something terrible, is pretty strange. When Mr. Wood is in a bad mood he ought to let somebody else run the meeting.”

Councilman Richard Alatorre, a CRA defender, said the jailing may be justifiable because of Hayes’ March conviction and past disruptions.

“It’s one thing for people to speak out when they feel something is wrong, but there is a process to do that,” Alatorre said.

Whatever the case, Hayes’ five-month sentence is by far the longest in the memory of city or county officials who cope with gadflies and hecklers.

Larry J. Monteilh, executive officer of the County Board of Supervisors, said the rowdiest audience members are simply ejected, “and I can’t recall any arrests except one 16 years ago, when (a gadfly) spent a night in jail.”

A spokeswoman for City Council President John Ferraro said that in rare cases when unruliness persists, the sworn officer can physically escort people from the council chambers and even arrest them. In one such case, a nude “streaker” was arrested about a decade ago.

No Officer

But CRA officials said theirs is one of the few--if not the only--controversial public bodies that has no law enforcement officer at meetings to keep the peace.

Wood said Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has repeatedly turned down CRA requests to send a police officer to the meetings, even though Wood said he is willing to pay for a police presence.

“Maybe some good will come of this whole controversy if we can get a sworn officer that we’ve been asking for,” Wood said. “It would solve the whole problem to have one present.”

But Hayes said he and the other watchdogs will remain at the CRA’s heels.

“Somebody’s got to do it.”