She’s Running for Office and Publicizing One Too

Candidates for lower offices have long utilized “grip-and-grin” pictures of themselves hamming it up with well-known elected officials, hoping the popularity of the big names will rub off on them.

So when we received a piece of direct mail last week from Mary Levin Cutler, a candidate for Beverly Hills City Council, our initial thought was that she was taking this tactic a step further.

On the outside of the envelope, under the headquarters’ address, it was noted that President Clinton’s Beverly Hills headquarters had been in the same location. This was repeated at the bottom of the letter and also included in Cutler’s newspaper advertising.

But the second-time candidate in the highly Democratic city insisted she was not attempting to tie herself to the first Democratic President in 16 years. The headquarters, she explained, was donated by its owner, whom she would identify only as a “longtime friend.”

The mention of the office’s ties to Clinton were “merely for identification” to help those who had been there during the Clinton campaign to find it, Cutler said. (The notice on the envelope, she said, was a printer’s error that could not be corrected in the haste to get the mailer out.) Nevertheless, she may want to take note of Assemblyman Richard Katz’s experience. He used Clinton’s San Fernando Valley headquarters last year for his mayoral campaign--and finished fourth in the primary.

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BULGARIAN BOON: From his 16th-floor perch in a Santa Monica office tower, Latchezar Christov thinks big thoughts about Bulgaria.

He must. He is the “honorary” consul general in the recently opened consulate on Wilshire Boulevard, responsible for tending to the needs of the estimated 15,000 Bulgarian expatriates in the Los Angeles area and making American companies interested in the Balkan nation.

Christov is a Bulgarian-born American citizen (hence the “honorary” designation), who runs the West Coast office for the New York-based investment house Laidlaw Holdings. At the consulate, he presides over a staff of three: himself, his wife and a part-time helper.

Modest as the staff may seem, Christov has big plans for Bulgaria and the United States. The former Soviet bloc nation, which democratized in 1989, is just waiting to come alive with business, he said. And he is not shy about admitting that his position could help his own company make strides in his homeland. Christov himself is picking up the unspecified cost for the consulate because Bulgaria is too poor to finance it.

“One of the reasons I’m doing this is because Laidlaw is a very entrepreneurial firm,” said Christov, 54, a Topanga Canyon resident who fled communism with his parents and sister in 1948. “I think it is a nice marriage of opportunity to wear the two hats of investment banker and consul general.”

What does Bulgaria have to offer? A well-educated, highly skilled populace, among other things, Christov said. It was the center of electronic research and development for the Soviets, Christov said, pausing to add: “But unfortunately it was for weaponry for the Soviet Union.”

Labor costs are low and enthusiasm is high, he promised.

Quoting a former high-level American diplomat, Christov said Bulgaria is “the biggest-kept secret in Europe.”

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COURT ORDER: Things are getting back to normal at the Santa Monica Courthouse, but it is hardly business as usual one month after the Northridge earthquake downed ceiling tiles, broke water pipes, shattered windows and emptied file cabinets.

A cartoon drawn by Presiding Judge David M. Rothman and pinned on a corridor wall sums it up: “The Rockin’ ‘n’ Rolling Santa Monica Court.”

With the acoustic tile ceilings removed because of possible asbestos danger and the carpets ruined by flooding, courtrooms look like stage sets, and the goings-on in one court can be heard in another.

Deprived of their waiting room, jurors pace the hallways, making way for deputies to escort criminal defendants to and from hearings.

“It sucks all the energy out of you,” Rothman said. “I never realized how much acoustic tiles made this place livable.”

With asbestos removal almost completed, all the courtrooms are expected to be back in use this week, Rothman said.