Accused Gunman ‘Did What I Had to Do’ : MCA: In first interview since arrest, ex-driver talks about tower shooting.

Life, as John Brian Jarvis knew it, had ended. What else was there to do but shoot up the MCA building?

A few weeks before, his mother had died and he didn’t even have money to bury her. That April morning, he was down to $16.87.

It was all he had because he couldn’t get a job, and he couldn’t get a job because he was sure that he’d been blackballed by MCA, where he’d once worked as a movie studio driver. He said, no matter where he’d been--and he’d been up and down California--the corporate suits would say sorry, what’s this on your record?

He’d had it. He parked his weary Ford station wagon and pulled out the deer rifle. There it was in the four-power scope, MCA world headquarters, the black-glassed tower in Universal City that was keeping him down. He fired. He kept firing in a staccato rhythm, squeezing off three dozen shots.

It was like spraying graffiti--but with bullets instead of paint.

“What I did, it was almost a political statement,” Jarvis, who is due to appear today in Los Angeles Superior Court, said from County Jail this week. “The black castle, the wicked witch of the east, the ominous black tower that was almost untouchable--I blew that theory away.”

Speaking by phone in his first interview since he was arrested April 20 after firing 36 shots at the giant entertainment firm’s high-rise headquarters and at a Bank of America branch next door, Jarvis added: “I did what I had to do. It just got to be that time.”

Jarvis has pleaded not guilty to 16 felony counts, seven of assault with a deadly weapon and nine of shooting at an occupied building. He is being held on $1-million bail.

Seven women were hurt in the barrage of shots, two hit by bullets and five cut by flying glass.

If convicted of all charges, Jarvis, 58, faces a sentence of more than 20 years in state prison, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn, the prosecutor in the case. With various legal enhancements, Jarvis could draw the equivalent of a life term behind bars, Conn said.

A plea bargain is a distinct possibility, according to Conn and Stephen P. Galindo, one of Jarvis’ defense lawyers.

“I made my move,” Jarvis said. Referring to prosecutors, he added, “It’s their turn.”

Although he has pleaded not guilty, Jarvis does not deny firing the shots. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done was fire that first shot,” he said. “Because that was the end of my universe. Everything was gone. The only thing left was jail.”

From jail, Jarvis said it was important for him to talk. Jail is a dangerous place, particularly for someone who shot at the headquarters of a conglomerate “that put Ronald Reagan and George Bush in office,” he said.

People who don’t understand that, who don’t believe in conspiracy theories, “just don’t know what the hell’s going on out there,” Jarvis said.

“I’d like somebody to know what’s going on,” Jarvis said. “If I do get killed, I want somebody out there to know what happened.”

Defense attorneys have called Jarvis sane but suffering from increasing stress, and he called that a fair assessment. “I just reached the very end of my string,” he said.

Born in Oklahoma, Jarvis grew up in California, in the Bay Area. He said he served two years in the Army and attended three colleges before getting a two-year degree. He got married, had a daughter and became a real estate broker in Walnut Creek, east of Oakland.

The marriage broke up. He got married again and, in 1974, when it ended with no children, he moved to the San Fernando Valley. “I came down for vacation and stayed,” he said.

Through friends in the movie industry, he caught on as a driver for MCA at Universal Studios, working through the Teamsters union, Studio Transportation Drivers Local 399. After a few years, he earned seniority, meaning that he was entitled to regular work.

All Jarvis knew, he said, is that in 1981, he suddenly stopped getting calls for work. He said he doesn’t know why.

Since he wasn’t working, he lost his seniority. Because he lost his seniority, he couldn’t work. It was a vicious circle, he said.

At some point, he said, he was mistakenly put on a “no-hire” list. This was a mistake that MCA and the union later put down to computer error, defense lawyer Alan Sharpe said.

He bounced around California, looking for a job. He lived on credit cards, running up $13,000 on three different Bank of America cards, he said.

The bank “hounded” him, he said, referring his account to collection agencies all over the country that demanded payment in full. But he couldn’t find work anywhere.

He blames MCA. “Everywhere I went to work thereafter, this thing followed me around,” he said. The details, he said, will come out at the trial. “But it’s rock solid.”

Those who don’t believe that MCA has the reach to do such a thing, he said, should read the 1986 book “Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob.” Police found a copy of the book in Jarvis’ station wagon, with passages he deemed important underlined in red.

The book, written by Dan E. Moldea, purports to set forth ties between the entertainment firm, organized crime and Reagan, dating back to the former President’s days as an actor.

The Washington Post’s review concluded that “very little is proven in ‘Dark Victory,’ though a great deal is implied and insinuated.” Jarvis called it a believable “expose.”

He added: “I’m nobody. They had the audacity to screw some little man like me. They’ve got all these billions of dollars, the power to put Presidents in office and they’ve still got time to screw someone like me.”

MCA spokeswoman Christine Hanson said that was nonsense. “As to us blackballing him everywhere he went, MCA in no way interfered with his attempts at gainful employment,” she said. “This is absolutely not true.”

Hanson also said it was “company policy not to comment on the contents of a book such as ‘Dark Victory.’ ”

Unable to work, Jarvis eventually moved in with his ailing mother on the ground floor of a two-story tan stucco apartment building in Pleasanton, east of San Francisco Bay. She had a pension that provided money for both of them. In return, he cared for her.

This past February, she died at age 79. She had wanted to be buried next to her sister but there was no money, so Jarvis had her body cremated.

“You can imagine how I felt,” he said. “How do you feel about cremating your mother? That’s the bottom line, I guess.”

Without his mother’s pension, Jarvis had no income. His daughter was in Idaho, and he saw her rarely. For years, he had been thinking of shooting at the MCA tower. The time, he decided, had come.

Some news accounts, he said, have painted him as “some sort of maniac” or as a “disturbed individual.”

“Not really,” he said. “The thing is, I just got pissed off and ran out of time and money.”

His first plan, he said, was to do it April 12, the Monday after Easter. But “the Rodney King trial was going full-bore,” he said, referring to the federal trial of four police officers accused of violating King’s civil rights. “I didn’t want L. A. to explode again,” he added.

The King jury came back April 17 with verdicts. The following Monday, the 19th, Jarvis drove down from the Bay Area to Palmdale. The morning of the 20th, he said, he ate a solid breakfast--scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. He drove straight to MCA and “very calmly did my thing.”

He fired as if he were back in the service, “one shot every two seconds, bang, bang, bang; this is what I did, it was just an instinctive thing.” He fired until he “decided that was enough.”

He directed a couple of rounds at the Bank of America building, he said, in retribution for being “hounded.” Mostly, he shot at the MCA tower.

He remains chagrined by his inaccuracy. Of 36 shots, 21 hit MCA headquarters.

If you do the math, Jarvis said, 21 of 36 is 58%. “On the range, it’s 100%,” he said. “I was just shooting off-hand. This was the most inefficient way of shooting a rifle.”

Initial press accounts of the shooting reported that the gunman swigged from a bottle of bourbon between shots. That was wrong on three counts, Jarvis said. He did not drink at all while firing and, afterward, sipped water, not bourbon, from a canteen, not a bottle.

Some news reports have since labeled him an “accused sniper.” He said: “A sniper is someone who shoots someone at night and then disappears. I didn’t do that.”

Jarvis stressed that he did not intend to hurt anyone. “I’m real sorry about that,” he said, speaking of the women who were hurt.

Even with the four-power scope, he insisted, he couldn’t see people inside. “Oh, no,” he said. “All I could see was a big, black building.”

Besides, he said, he left his .357-Magnum and a 12-gauge shotgun locked in the car while he fired the 7-millimeter rifle. “If I had wanted to do a Rambo, I could have raised hell,” he said. “But I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

Since people were hurt, Jarvis concedes that he is unlikely to convince a jury that what he did was right.

“Bottom line, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, I committed a violent act and hurt some people,” Jarvis said. “I shouldn’t have done that.

“But there was no other way. My world ended. It slowly ground to a stop. It ended when my mother died. It ended for real on April 20. I slammed that door. Boy, did I slam it.”