LOCAL ELECTIONS / MAYOR OF ANAHEIM : Ex-Cop Still Likes the Action Hot and Heavy : Incumbent: Loud and proud, Fred Hunter is sure he knows what’s best for his city. And, despite ’88 squeaker, he’s also sure he’ll win big this time.

Fred Hunter had just settled into his soft leather chair when he was up again, stabbing at the air, talking trash about his days on the Anaheim police force.

“We would bust a couple (homosexuals), bust a couple whores, then buy some dope and I would get up the next morning and preach,” said the former Church of Christ preacher, using a derogatory term for homosexuals that he said he used as a policeman but would not use today.

Only moments earlier, Hunter had been out on the street where his pace had quickened, his mood darkened and the objects of his discontent were the apartment buildings ringing his restored offices on the shady corner of Broadway and Philadelphia.

“Look at this!” he called out to his trailing guest, whirling to change direction. “Look at this crap! Look! Look! Look! I don’t know how many goddamn places are like this.”

“Who pays for all this?” he asked, continuing a flurry of movement. “We do. These apartment buildings are a breeding area for crime. It gets pretty rough down here at night. But nobody fools with me, because they know I’m the mayor.”

And so it is. This guy with the carefully coiffed head of silver-streaked hair--tough-talking former undercover cop, animated preacher and personal injury attorney--who madly marched through a downtown back alley last week is the mayor of Anaheim.

For all of those reasons, there are a good number of voters in Orange County’s second-largest city who want to return him to office for a second term next month. They find his bluntness refreshing, even when it could cause him political problems.

For all the same reasons, there are those who hope he loses.

In Anaheim, it seems, you either love Fred Hunter and support him or publicly work against him, secretly rooting for him just the same.

“Hunter is a lot of fun,” said Anaheim realtor Joe White. “He’s got a good personality, and he’s a pretty fair politician. He doesn’t try to get along with anybody too much. He doesn’t feel like he has to kneel down to anyone. Fred pretty much does what he wants to.”

That wildcatting spirit is what attracts White to Hunter’s campaign, so much so that White, a longtime Democrat in conservative Orange County, is throwing his support to the Republican incumbent in his race against Democrat Irv Pickler.

“He (Hunter) fits Orange County,” said Anaheim Councilman Tom Daly, who is supporting Pickler. “He’s not that far out of step with folks in Anaheim. He tells them what they want to hear.”

Hunter, 48, brashly predicts he will clobber Pickler on Election Day, even though Pickler is expected to raise far more than the incumbent’s $100,000 contribution goal.

The mayor boasts that an army of grass-roots supporters--including the rank and file of the city’s fire and police associations, municipal workers and residents of Anaheim’s mobile home park communities--will carry him to a 2 to 1 margin of victory.

However, there are those who remember similar boasts two years ago when Hunter squeaked out a 1,392-vote victory over the same opponent.

This time, Hunter’s opponents also have a record to consider, which includes a number of stands on controversial issues that threaten to cut into the incumbent’s popularity.

One of them is rent control. Hunter is supporting a plan for rent control initiatives in local mobile home communities. This is happening in a city where former Mayor John Seymour, now a state senator, once served as president of the California Assn. of Realtors.

Hunter knows that position will likely cost him campaign contributions and support of the city’s business community, but he’s taking the risk. He talks about how the initiative would help the “little people.” He also knows, though, that cultivating the support of an active voting bloc such as the mobile home residents could mean between 4,000 and 7,000 votes in the bank, according to his estimates.

Other words the mayor likes to use these days include “down-zoning.” Aligning himself with Anaheim neighborhood groups, Hunter says he’s joining their efforts to protect Anaheim’s quickly vanishing landscape from builders of apartment complexes, like the ones that surround his law offices.

“This city has 30,000 apartment units in it,” Hunter said scornfully. “It is a haven for developers, because we’ve had weak-kneed, milquetoast politicians deciding the issues. When are we going to say no?

“There were houses here once. How about you people in Huntington Beach, Yorba Linda--why do we have all the apartments?”

Hunter’s most recent encounter with controversy came just a few weeks ago when he unexpectedly changed his mind and voted for a shorter moratorium on building in the Disneyland area.

His initial decision to support a 90-day building ban went against a city staff recommendation and rankled his colleagues. It also was out of step with the Disney Development Co., which has proposed a second theme park in Anaheim and had supported a one-year building freeze. Hunter later reversed his position.

“I’m not sure Fred really thought through the implications of what he was doing,” Daly said of the mayor’s vote. “Fred has done some of that, but then sometimes he really puts his foot in it and the rest of us grind our teeth in embarrassment.”

Some say Hunter’s actions have contributed to what is generally considered a fractured City Council, with Hunter and Councilman William D. Ehrle on one side; Pickler and Councilwoman Miriam Kaywood are on the other, leaving Daly as the swing vote.

A battle over the selection of a new city manager in March led Hunter to the district attorney’s office, where he formally accused Pickler, Kaywood and Daly of conducting an illegal meeting, a violation of the state’s Brown Act, to select a preferred candidate. The district attorney’s office announced Thursday that there was insufficient evidence to act on Hunter’s allegations.

One of the few things Hunter and Pickler have been able to agree on is the city’s effort to keep a proposed 7,000-bed regional jail facility and a dump site out of Gypsum Canyon and the collective view of Anaheim Hills residents.

The mayor’s views on the jail seem out of character considering his heavy leanings toward law-and-order issues. He says crime, specifically illegal drugs, is the “No. 1 issue in Anaheim.”

But not even the fight against illegal drugs has gone without some political drama. Last spring, the mayor formed an organization called “Hunter’s Brigade,” which attempts to incorporate public figures in talks to school children about drug abuse.

Anaheim City School District officials have since shut their doors to Hunter’s crusade because of what they described as the program’s “political overtones.”

“He (Hunter) tends to view things from an ‘us versus them’ mentality,” Daly said. “I don’t see him working to bring people together very often and that disappoints me. But that’s Fred’s personality.”

Daly and Pickler believe Hunter is beholden to his “political clients”--police officers, firefighters, union workers and mobile home residents, an odd alliance given all the comfortable accouterments of his personal life.

Hunter, married and twice-divorced father of four, claims to take home “$300,000 to $400,000” a year from his legal practice. His home is located on what he describes as the “best street” in the upscale Anaheim Hills section of the city. Yet, he likes to think and act in the role of underdog--like the cop of old who used to roam the downtown streets at night looking for a bad guy to bust.

He is most comfortable talking about those days between 1965 and 1975 when he admits “bending rules” to get his way.

“Yes, I would use creative ways to get around the search-and-seizure rules,” he said. “I used intelligent ways to beat the system. I used to use honeys a lot--girls, women.”

He said women were used to lure suspects out into the open so that he and his partners were no longer restrained by search-and-seizure regulations.

“If I bent the rules, that’s how I did it. The guys who worked with me know what I’m talking about. Sometimes, I raised eyebrows.”

Hunter’s former police partner in Anaheim, William Essex, recalled that Hunter possessed skills that allowed him to “get down and dirty with a heroin addict,” smooth-talk the women and draw the praise of senior citizens.

“A lot of it was because we were younger,” said Essex, now chief of security at the University of California at Davis. “We would stretch things a lot, and we would get burned for it.”

He also remembers the dead times on the street when in between calls Hunter would pull out index cards to study for classes at Western State College of Law. Hunter never earned an undergraduate degree. He started his legal practice in 1975 after graduating from law school in 1974.

“He’ll always be controversial,” Essex said. “He does things pretty much the way Fred Hunter wants to. Now he’s mayor. It’s amazing what can happen in this world.”

Although the mayor is full of predictions about how badly he plans to beat Pickler, there is one thing that seems to concern him.

He believes the Pickler campaign is planning to bash him with allegations of a drinking problem. He said the allegation reportedly stems from a late-night telephone call he made to a local reporter from his Washington hotel room in March, 1989. During the conversation he accused Pickler of a misapplication of city funds. The charge was later shown to be unfounded.

Hunter claims he “made a mistake” by talking to a reporter after he had been drinking, but he expects Pickler’s campaign to make it an issue.

“I have never had a drinking problem,” Hunter said. “I’ve been here 25 years, I have a wife and four kids. Name one person who has ever seen Fred Hunter drunk.”

Harvey Englander, Pickler’s political consultant, declined to say whether his candidate planned to make Hunter’s personal behavior an issue. But Englander did confirm the campaign has been gathering information in a general survey that includes questions about the mayor’s behavior and how it relates to the use of alcohol.

Hunter refers to Englander as “the scumball of the earth.”

“I fully expect that to come out,” the mayor said of the 1989 incident. “This is gossip to take down Fred Hunter.”

Unlike his days on the police force, Hunter said, he is taking the “high road” on his own campaign and is running a clean campaign.

“I’m coming right up the middle, just like the Green Bay Packers,” Hunter said. “You, Irv Pickler! You rich developers! Look out!”