No Answers on Misstep at City Hall

I sat outside Mayor Tom Bradley’s office Tuesday, waiting for a chance to ask key staff members about the administration’s latest, and dumbest, political caper.

It appears that six of the mayor’s assistants have been caught campaigning for a Bradley-backed City Council candidate, Rita Walters--on city time, with city computers. Bradley already has reprimanded the accused, including Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani. But if the allegations hold up, it’s a violation of state law. Police detectives are investigating.

There’s much about the operation that seems dumb, not the least of which is that, at the very time the mayor’s staff was helping Walters, police already were investigating similar allegations stemming from earlier Bradley campaigns.

Just as bad, this comes as the mayor is locked in a political death struggle with Police Chief Daryl F. Gates over the Rodney King controversy. And now his supposedly devoted underlings have handed the chief potent ammunition.

How, I asked, could anyone be so stupid?

I’ve been around political campaigns enough years to have seen many examples of how elected officials and their staff gain a political advantage by using the resources of their office.

The mayor mixes politics and government all the time--and it’s usually perfectly legal.

An example of that is his practice of “area days,” spending an entire day around the harbor, in the San Fernando Valley, the Westside or other parts of the city. Mayoral aides go out ahead of time and perform all the functions of political campaign workers. They arrange meeting sites, set up facilities for television and radio coverage and make sure there’ll be a crowd to greet the mayor.

Bradley’s days and nights are perpetual campaigns. Banquets, store openings, school graduations, speeches to neighborhood organizations, visits to the black, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Latino communities. Trips into the predominantly white Republican northern San Fernando Valley and Westchester.

So put yourself in the shoes of Bradley’s City Hall workers. If your boss swings through the city day and night in his city car on political errands, if you’re regularly advancing mayoral “area days” on city time, then it’s a very short leap over the blurred line to engage in political work on your city computer.

Fabiani apparently jumped that line when he sent out a computer message to the staff urging them to attend a fund-raiser for Walters. Seeing a message like that from Fabiani flash across the screen certainly gave another message to the staff: It’s OK to help Rita.

It affirmed what the staff knew, that Bradley badly wanted Walters to win. She’d be a reliable ally and the mayor owed her. Walters had planned to run for the City Council in 1987 in the 10th District, and felt Bradley betrayed her by endorsing someone else.

Still, with a police investigation under way, this was the time to stick to the rules. Again, how could Fabiani & Co. have been so dumb?

The first person caught in my one-man stake-out of the mayoral brain trust was Phil Depoian, a veteran aide. He pointed out that when the mayor’s career began, nobody cared if staff members did a little political work on company time. Some of the young aides, he said, didn’t seem aware that the rules had changed.

You might remember this rules-have-changed defense. It’s the one Bradley raised as he attempted to explain away his dealings with Far East National Bank.

Next in the docket was Bill Elkins, Bradley’s boyhood friend and UCLA fraternity brother. Elkins is the mayor’s chief political operator in South Los Angeles, where Walters is running. Elkins was deeply involved in the earlier allegations of politicking on city time, as he allegedly received many campaign contribution checks for the mayor in his City Hall office.

Did you have anything to do with this? I asked.

“Certainly not,” he said. “Absolutely not. I’ve been involved in campaigns up to my elbows, but at 6 a.m. or after work.”

How could anyone do this? I asked.

“Raise that with Mark,” he said. “Mark’s the point man on this.”

Ah yes, Mark. That would be Mark Fabiani, a sprint-for-success yuppie sort who was last seen orchestrating the mayor’s brilliant campaign to oust Gates.

Fabiani was in Hawaii last week when the mayor reprimanded him for this latest business. Gates is still chief.

I waited all day to talk to Fabiani. I sat outside his office for a couple of hours and then left word that he should call me. By 6 p.m. I still hadn’t heard from him and it was time to turn in my column. So I gave up. If the “point man” was explaining himself, it wasn’t to me.