Lawyer Calls Coast Highway Speed Enforcement a Racket : Courts: Suit alleges RICO violations by Huntington Beach for three tickets without required traffic survey. A federal judge’s allowance of $60-million claim chills city officials.

Is this laid-back coastal city a racketeer?

On Monday, that novel question comes before a federal judge in Los Angeles. A Seal Beach lawyer, who has accused Huntington Beach of operating a speed trap illegally for nine years, believes the practice amounts to a violation of RICO, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled in August that the anti-racketeering law applies to the unusual case and refused the city’s request to dismiss the suit.

That ruling stunned city officials, because the suit seeks $60 million in damages. The judge’s ruling also brought national attention to the Huntington Beach case because it expanded the reach of RICO, a law passed by Congress in 1970 as a tool to halt organized crime.

RICO has been successfully used to prosecute many other types of crimes, but has never been applied to the legality of a speed trap.

Ernest J. Franceschi Jr., a lawyer in Seal Beach, filed the RICO suit after being arrested three times for speeding on Pacific Coast Highway between Warner Avenue and Main Street.

There are three speed limits along that stretch of Coast Highway. Near Warner, the edge of the city limits, the speed is 55 m.p.h. It then drops to 45 m.p.h. and 35 m.p.h. as the highway nears Main Street. Radar is used to enforce speed limits.

State law allows use of radar in such situations. However, the law specifies that an engineering and traffic survey must be conducted at least every five years along highways where radar is an enforcing tool for speed limits below 55 m.p.h. If such surveys are not made, state law says, a speed trap exists.

Huntington Beach, which initially denied having set up a speed trap, has now acknowledged that the city’s engineering and traffic survey on that stretch of Pacific Coast Highway was out of date.

“I think for a period of time it is undisputed that a speed trap, as defined by the (state) Vehicle Code, existed on portions of the highway,” said Deputy City Atty. Robert Sangster.

But Sangster said the city now has updated its survey of Pacific Coast Highway so the speed trap situation no longer exists. Sangster also said the city disputes Franceschi’s contention that “extortion” was involved.

” . . . The issuance of traffic tickets does not amount to extortion,” Sangster said.

Franceschi’s suit argues that “the act of stopping a motorist (by) using a speed trap and requiring him to sign the citation promising to appear in court and post bail constitutes ‘extortion of signature’ . . . “

In addition to charging RICO violations, Franceschi’s suit alleges that Huntington Beach, Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg, Orange County Municipal Court and the West Orange County Judicial District also violated federal civil rights laws by illegally depriving motorists of money and freedom without due process of law.

Franceschi’s suit calculates that the city of Huntington Beach and the West Orange County Judicial District have collected at least $20 million in forfeited bail or fines from arrests for speeding on Pacific Coast Highway during the 1980s. The federal RICO law allows for triple damages to be claimed, and therefore the suit asks $60 million in behalf of all persons who have paid fines or forfeited bail for speeding on that portion of the highway during the past nine years. The court would decide how the money would be returned to the various motorists.

The suit also asks the federal judge to reverse the conviction of all motorists found guilty of speeding while the alleged trap existed.

Franceschi, 33, was on a visit to Hong Kong on Friday and could not be reached for comment on Monday’s hearing, but said previously he did not file the suit for frivolous reasons. Franceschi said all three of his speeding citations were dismissed in Orange County courts because he proved radar was used without an updated traffic-engineering survey as required by law.

Thousands of other motorists do not know about the state’s law against speed traps, Franceschi said, so they unwittingly forfeited bail or paid fines.

Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays said Friday that Franceschi had been clocked at 80 m.p.h. before police pulled him over. “I don’t think anyone who is driving 80 m.p.h. on a stretch of highway that causes more accidents than just about anywhere in the state should be able to get away with it,” Mays said.

But Franceschi, in previous rebuttal to such criticism, has said that no city should be allowed to violate the state’s law against illegal use of radar.

Huntington Beach police engaged in a “cavalier and callous disregard for the very laws which the have been sworn to uphold,” Franceschi said.