City Arms for New Legal War on Porn : Law enforcement: A zoning ordinance will be the city’s major weapon as it seeks to shut down pornography shops in Hollywood.

City and law enforcement officials long ago concluded that much of the prostitution, lewd behavior and other crime as well as the general seediness that plagues Hollywood emanates from the concentration of pornography shops in the area.

Now, after years of neighborhood protests, Los Angeles authorities say they are readying a new enforcement offensive against some of the most bothersome purveyors of pornography.

Their major weapon will not be vice raids or undercover work, but instead a seemingly innocuous Los Angeles city zoning ordinance amended in 1988 to prohibit the shops from operating within 500 feet of a residential area. The ordinance has survived one legal challenge and Los Angeles is now ready to put it to the test.

The first targets are a handful of Hollywood adult bookstore/video arcades that authorities allege are magnets for the crime that has blighted an area which was once the playground of movie stars.

Arraignment has been set for Feb. 1 for six men charged with running a porn shop at 1649 N. Wilcox Ave., near a residential area close to Hollywood Boulevard.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles police detectives and city Building and Safety Department investigators say they are trying to make their way through a maze of paper work to determine ownership of a number of other porn shops. Once they identify the owners, the city plans to cite them for violating the zoning code as well.

If convictions are won in the first few cases, and if the ordinance survives further court challenges, “we will be ready to go after the (porn shop) industry,” said Dan Snyder, an investigator with the Building and Safety Department, which is responsible for enforcing the zoning ordinance.

As many as 90 of the adult bookstore/video shops in Hollywood, the Melrose area, downtown Los Angeles, North Hollywood and Van Nuys are in violation of the ordinance, officials say, although some of them have received exemptions until March, 1991, Snyder said.

The city maintains that it is not trying to stifle freedom of speech, acknowledging that the porn shop owners have First Amendment rights to sell and show any legally approved pornography.

“There is a cancerous growth that exists around all these X-rated stores that is not healthy for children, neighbors and the businesses around them,” said Detective A.W. Sewell Jr., a police investigator who monitors the shops for the Los Angeles Police Commission. “Wherever these places exist, it is a mecca for crime.”

Sgt. Richard Webb, an LAPD vice officer stationed in Hollywood, says there are at least 20 adult video parlors in his area alone. “We make constant arrests out of the video parlors, mostly for lewd conduct in public,” he said. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many.”

Attorney John H. Weston, whose Beverly Hills law firm represents the “overwhelming” majority of the city’s porn shops, said the ordinance will be challenged because it represents, in his opinion, an unconstitutional attempt to put porn shops out of business.

“It’s coming to a boiling point, I suppose, and the city is wrong,” Weston said. “I have only two words to say to them. The first is ‘horse,’ and you can figure out what the second one is.”

One porn shop operator--Buzin Enterprises Inc. at 1651 N. Cahuenga Blvd.--already has moved to settle the city’s case against it by agreeing to shut down by May 8 and pay a $2,300 fine, according to the city attorney’s office.

Police said the six defendants to be arraigned on Feb. 1 are operating their business too close to residential areas and do not even have the required licenses to operate. The authorities say they have made as many as 50 lewd-conduct arrests in the establishment, known as “Hollywood-Wilcox Adult Book Theater,” during a recent six-month period.

“And police only go in those places once in a while,” Detective Sewell said. “It’s unbelievable how many violations actually occur.”

One of the biggest obstacles to shutting down porn shops has been the difficulty of determining their ownership. It has taken months, if not years, to find who actually owns and controls the outlets, police say. Most owners establish front companies to conceal their true identities, authorities said. That way, they can escape prosecution if the club is cited.

Authorities also say some of the defendants in the Wilcox case are suspected of operating five or more other porn shops through front companies.

“It has taken a great deal of work and many man-hours to ascertain who these people are,” said Michael Guarino, deputy city attorney overseeing prosecution of these cases. “It’s fair to say the paper trail left by these people involved in the adult bookstores and entertainment business makes it very unclear who is doing what.”

The ordinance for years prohibited porn shops from being built within 1,000 feet of each other, and 500 feet from parks, churches and schools. It was amended, effective in March, 1988, to prohibit porn shops--including existing ones--from operating within 500 feet of a residential area, a change that suddenly made about 80% of the businesses vulnerable to shutdown, Snyder says.

By late 1988, preliminary steps were taken to close dozens of sex-oriented businesses too close to residential areas. But prosecutors were leery of using the ordinance until pending court cases--particularly a Long Beach case before the California Supreme Court--were decided.

“We had to lie in wait for the decision, to give us the leverage we need,” Sewell said.

In late June, 1989, the state’s high court reversed earlier rulings that had said adult stores were exempt from such zoning ordinances if they split their inventory evenly between adult material and regular material. In a precedent-setting ruling, the court held that adult materials must only constitute a “significant” part of the business.

“It greatly reduces the burden of the prosecutor in these cases,” Guarino said. The tedious task of arguing with porn shop lawyers over which materials are adult, and whether to use inventory or sales figures as a yardstick, are no longer of primary concern, he says.

Last month, a municipal judge specifically upheld the city’s zoning ordinance in a case involving a Westchester “swingers” club, allowing the city to go full speed ahead.

After the ruling, City Atty. James K. Hahn announced: “A common cry of adult entertainment businesses has been that this ordinance violates their First Amendment rights. But we have taken great care at every step--from drafting the ordinance to implementing it and enforcing it--to make sure we did not infringe on those rights while also protecting the public.

“I hope this court ruling finally gets that message across.”

If the defense lawyers for the porn shops argue their free speech rights are being compromised, as the city expects they will, prosecutors will say they are protecting citizens from the “secondary” effects of the businesses--the crime, lewd conduct, prostitution and the increased noise and traffic.

Meanwhile, Sewell and other police investigators say the city zoning ordinance will come in handy in their efforts to clean up Hollywood.

“It has been in decline over the last few decades, in terms of the people it attracts and what’s going on up there,” Sewell says. “You don’t have movie stars walking the streets anymore. You have . . . nuts and crazies.”