Carole Little Sews Up Deal With Mayor Riordan : Jobs: Meeting persuades the apparel maker to stay in Los Angeles and take over the former May Co. distribution center.

Encouraged by a meeting earlier in the week with new Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the chief executive of California Fashion Industries on Thursday closed a deal to buy the old May Co. distribution center in inner-city Los Angeles.

Leonard Rabinowitz, who with designer Carole Little is co-chairman of the company that makes clothing bearing her name, said the firm intends to spend $10 million to purchase, renovate and expand the building and could begin moving in employees as early as next week.

The deal brings to a close a yearlong dilemma for the Carole Little company, which had been on the verge of expanding its own inner-city facilities when it became a victim of the 1992 riots. Since then, Rabinowitz has been reconsidering his commitment to the inner city--indeed, the state--and had been tempted to move most of the company’s 800-plus employees to Nevada. What finally persuaded him to stay, he said, was the response from Riordan in a meeting Tuesday at which Rabinowitz asked for help in expediting the city’s building permit process.

“If that meeting with the mayor didn’t go the way it did,” Rabinowitz said Thursday, “I don’t think I would have done the deal.”

The deal is the first victory of sorts for the new administration at City Hall. In his electoral campaign, Riordan billed himself as a businessman who could help staunch the region’s loss of jobs and businesses. Carole Little is one of the premiere names in the Los Angeles garment industry, and while the California image has been an important ingredient in its success, a move would have been more harmful to the city than to the company, local economists have said.

The building, a 380,000-square-foot facility on South Grand near the Harbor Freeway and Exposition Park, was closed at the end of last year. May Co. spokesman Jim Abrams said the volume of merchandise being moved through the region had outgrown the facility. The company now uses outside contractors.

Rabinowitz said Carole Little intends to expand the site to about 500,000 square feet and will use it as a design and distribution center.

The move into larger space will enable the company to expand its work force quickly to about 1,200 and eventually to as many as 1,500, Rabinowitz said. The clothing company has been bursting at the seams of its current complex of buildings, at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Main Street, about eight blocks from the May building. The company initially intended to expand on a nearby parcel of land, but Rabinowitz began casting his eyes elsewhere after the company suffered $11 million in damage during the riots.

Since then, the Carole Little site has become an armed fortress. Rabinowitz said greater police protection is his top concern. And he found comfort, he said, in Riordan’s promises to beef up the city’s police force. After the move into the new building is complete, he said, the company will put its current facility up for sale.

Rabinowitz said he requested a meeting with Riordan to “get a temperature on the new mayor’s feeling about the inner city, to see if a commitment existed. . . . So, will the mayor be responsive? I got an answer before he walked in the door: He took the time to come see our facility,” he said. “That in and of itself is a statement that he is interested in inner-city businesses.”

Rabinowitz said the company is not seeking special considerations. “All we want to do is cut through the red tape. I believe we can create 400 new jobs, and I’d rather do it in a year than in three years.”

After his visit to Carole Little on Tuesday, Riordan met at the California Mart, the center of the city’s garment industry, with dozens of other apparel manufacturers and suppliers, who asked the mayor to appoint a special liaison to the apparel industry.

“I commend Carole Little for their decision to stay in Los Angeles,” the mayor said in a statement pledging to make Los Angeles “business friendly.”