20th Candidate Joins Race for Mayor : Politics: Lawyer J. Stanley Sanders, the second prominent black to enter, grew up in Watts and was a Rhodes scholar.

Focusing on crime and counting on his ties to Tom Bradley’s traditional base, J. Stanley Sanders, a respected downtown lawyer who made his way from Watts to Oxford, will become the second prominent African-American to join an ever-expanding field of mayoral hopefuls.

The candidacy of Sanders, who is not a well-known public figure, and the size of the field, which now numbers 20, are signs that the Los Angeles mayoral race is regarded as a free-for-all where there is no dominant figure and where a relatively unknown candidate has a fighting chance.

As long shots go, Sanders, 50, has a lot going for him. After growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, he became an honor student and All-American football player at Whittier College, won a Rhodes scholarship and earned a law degree from Yale. Returning to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he embarked on a successful law career, eventually establishing his own firm, which specializes in corporate practice. Though he has never held elective office, Sanders was appointed by Bradley to two city commissions and is currently president of the Recreation and Parks Commission.

Sanders is likely to be taken seriously even by those who don’t give him much of a chance of winning. That is because of the role he could play as a spoiler, cutting into the support of better known candidates such as Councilmen Michael Woo and Nate Holden. Holden is the other prominent black candidate.

“The loser in this is Councilman Mike Woo,” said black political consultant Kerman Maddox. “Woo has been aggressively going after the African-American community. He already has Nate Holden to contend with. Now, he’s got Sanders, the sort of polished, well-educated candidate who, if he’s packaged right, could appeal to a big slice of black voters, the professionals and the elderly.”

Sanders said Wednesday that he sees himself competing with Woo for Bradley’s old voter base of blacks and liberal Westsiders. Woo has been working especially hard to court black voters, repeatedly reminding them that he was the first member of the City Council to call for the resignation of former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates after the police beating of Rodney G. King.

“I’ll be most competitive with Mike Woo,” Sanders said, and then he took a swipe at the councilman’s credentials.

“I think it may be too early for him to be thinking of him as mayor. I don’t think he has had the opportunity to demonstrate leadership at the council.”

Vicky Rideout, a top aide in Woo’s campaign, responded that she thought Sanders has a long way to go before he is a threat.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful of him,” Rideout said. “But I don’t think he is very widely known by voters of any persuasion. I think that there may well be people in the black community who want to vote for a black candidate who may find him more acceptable than Nate Holden, and we’ll compete with him on those terms. But we’ve been running for quite awhile. We’ve been running hard, raising money, and we’re not going to cede any community.”

As a latecomer to elective politics, Sanders will have to overcome the impression among some people that his time has come and gone, that he could have been a contender 10 or 15 years ago.

“He’s been around for awhile,” Maddox said. “A lot of people talked about him as a potential candidate for years and years. You would have expected him to do it earlier.”

Another black lawyer stated the case against Sanders more bluntly.

“This guy had everything going for him,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be named. “But he lost his momentum. He wakes up in 1992 and he’s a black lawyer who is better known downtown than he is in the African-American community. The grass-roots people don’t know him at all. I don’t think he can raise the money or put together the coalition he’ll need.”

Sanders said he has hired Joe Trippi, a veteran Washington-based campaign consultant who has worked for Bradley as well as former Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale. Sanders’ fund raising lags well behind the efforts of several other candidates, including Woo, lawyer Richard Riordan, Assemblyman Richard Katz, Councilman Joel Wachs and Holden, all of whom have reported raising more than $200,000. But Sanders said Wednesday that contributors have pledged $100,000 to his campaign and that he is confident he can raise more than $1 million.

Sanders said his campaign will focus on law enforcement, economic development and education. These are familiar themes in the campaign, but Sanders promises a singular approach to all three.

He said that the rioting last spring unleashed a citywide crime wave, including two burglaries at his home in the mid-city neighborhood of Lafayette Square.

“Crime is really out of hand,” he said. “We’ve not been able to put back into the bottle the genie that was loosed in April and May, and we need a strategy to restore some of the domestic tranquillity we had before then.”

Other candidates emphasize the need for more local police officers, but Sanders said he will push for more help from federal authorities in cracking down on the drug trade, which, he said, is behind 50% of the serious crimes in the city.

He said his approach to economic development will differ markedly from the efforts of Rebuild L.A., which he characterizes as concentrating on attracting large manufacturing plants to the city.

“My emphasis,” Sanders said, “will be on small-business development, growing out of my own experience, representing small- and medium-sized businesses over the last 20 years. They are the job creators, and they are the ones that deserve our attention.”

Remarking that education was his “personal salvation,” he stressed that he would find ways as mayor to play a role in improving educational opportunities even though city government has no authority over local schools.

“More than anything, my parents instilled in me one single overriding truth,” Sanders wrote in a speech he intends to deliver today. “That education formed a foundation on which, with hope and hard work, a future can be built. . . .

“That simple truth propelled me from home, through the streets of Watts, through the classrooms of Jordan High School and to the halls of Whittier, Oxford and Yale.”

For the moment, that glittering resume may be the most conspicuous thing about Sanders’ candidacy.

To live up to its promise, Maddox said, Sanders “will have to get out there early, roll up his sleeves and campaign like gangbusters.”