Mikhail’s Hasty Tasties: The County’s Heartburn : Health: Does everything have to be prepackaged, even chili and onions from a sidewalk hot-dog vendor’s cart?

The layers of government in Los Angeles, despite their scope, can’t or won’t stop the traffic in illegal drugs, fund mental-health centers for the poor or trauma centers for rich and poor, clean up the water we drink or the ocean we swim in.

But one thing government can do--administer justice as it sees fit. When county health inspectors nabbed street vendor Michael Mikhail for slathering onions and chili onto hot dogs served from his cart, City Atty. Jimmy Hahn hauled the 59-year-old Egyptian immigrant before the bench. The people’s digestive systems must be protected.

Of course, Hahn was only reflecting the curious, furious passion of Richard Wagner, who heads the county Health Services Department’s division of food-vehicle inspection. Wagner is in charge of what are popularly known as “roach coaches,” hardly a glamorous job. It’s hard to fathom why Wagner’s inspectors paid such rapt attention to Mikhail and his Tasty Hasty Dogs. You wish they’d been the auditors at Lincoln Savings.

Perhaps they knew their boss had a special place in his heart (if not gullet) for Mikhail. Three years ago, in a PR dream stunt, Wagner in two days closed every cart on Wilshire Boulevard. He played Carry Nation by personally raiding Mikhail’s stand in the company of what the vendor remembers as six cops, an interesting utilization of law-enforcement personnel. Mikhail was accused of serving onions, chili and cheese in violation of state health and safety code regulations for prepackaging of self-service condiments and potentially hazardous foods, so Wagner dumped bleach on the offending food--as well as on the vendor’s presumably legal hot dogs.

You may wonder why Mikhail’s grilled onions are illegal, while those huge bowls of raw, chopped onions at Dodger Stadium, pawed over by countless thousands, aren’t. Well, we all know where to find (and sue) Peter O’Malley if we get sick. Wagner’s inspectors had to concede in court, it should be noted, that Mikhail’s onions were as free of bacteria as Peter O’Malley’s, and the chili, out of the same cans you buy at a market, was properly cooked. So the issue is not the protection of our health, but the enforcement of a rule created more for the enrichment of the manufacturers of prepackaged condiments. Wagner thereby helps ensure a mountain of empty little containers for other city workers to haul to landfills, a miracle of self-generating government.

Mikhail is no Gypsy. He stays put on Wilshire, outside buildings that house, among other tenants, the Los Angeles offices of the California Supreme Court. One of the high court justices eats his dogs with onions, hold the chili, but when Mikhail asked the judge’s help in his legal struggle, the judge told him, “I don’t practice law.” Does eating a dog with onions make the judge guilty of abetting Mikhail’s culinary crimes, like the recreational drug-users that Police Chief Daryl F. Gates would prefer to shoot?

This would all be comic operetta, Gilbert & Sullivan as rewritten by Orwell, save for the fact that Mikhail was convicted on the onions and chili counts in a week’s trial in Municipal Court, with taxpayers paying for the prosecution and the public defender. It was a proceeding marked by misconduct by health inspectors (one was caught signaling his co-workers as they testified) and by some jurors, who allegedly bullied a holdout.

Columnist Murray Kempton once wondered if there was “any better measure of a nation than the way it treats the helpless”--including children who receive inadequate education, the homeless who have no shelter and an immigrant hot-dog vendor, whose “crime” pales in comparison with our government’s lack of common sense in pursuing his prosecution.