Chocolate Drives Them to This Traffic School

At this school, the lessons come sugarcoated.

Make that chocolate-immersed.

When they’re not selling chocolate at the Robin Rose candy and ice cream shop in Venice, Robin Rose and her husband, Roy, use the stuff to attract students to their traffic school for chocoholics.

The school, started several years ago, serves up trays of chocolates and ice cream as it guides traffic offenders through the subtleties of the California Vehicle Code. The sweets have been “no small contributing factor” to the business’s success, Robin says, though there were some problems early on--when there was an all-you-can-eat ice cream policy.

“That literally took the profit out of the traffic school business,” she said.

Now, however, there’s a limit of one scoop per student, and all’s well again. Except, that is, when students think a chocolate-covered curriculum means they can take it easy.

Said Robin Rose: “Woe to he who plans on reading his legal briefs during class.”

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SO SUE ME: At least one prosecutor is not happy with her job in the district attorney’s Santa Monica office. And she’s not afraid to say so, either.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Monika Blodgett, who was the supervising deputy in the Torrance office, is now a lower-profile trial prosecutor in Santa Monica.

Last week Blodgett met with reporters from The Times and another newspaper and said she was being demoted and transferred to the non-supervisory job in Santa Monica because she had complained about some of her Torrance predecessors “giving away the courthouse” with lenient plea bargains in criminal cases.

Her predecessor in the top slot in Torrance was none other than her boss, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whose 1992 campaign included promises he would halt overly generous plea bargains.

Blodgett, who retains a noticeable accent from her native Germany, also said she was being harassed because of her heritage, often being referred to by other D.A. office personnel as a “Nazi.”

By the time she got home on the evening of her media interviews, Blodgett said later, there was a message on her answering machine ordering her to report Downtown the next day. Apparently the D.A.’s office had been alerted to her remarks when reporters called the office for comment. The next morning Blodgett was suspended for one day and, she said, forbidden to return to the Torrance office. The grounds for the disciplinary action, she said, included “insubordination” and failing to report contacts with the media.

“This is outrageous,” Blodgett said last week. “Even D.A.s have First Amendment rights.”

The district attorney’s office has declined to comment, calling the disciplinary action a “personnel matter.”

* ROMANIA MANIA: Is there something going on here? Last week we introduced you to Latchezar Christov, the consul general of the recently opened Bulgarian Consulate in Santa Monica, who is making big plans to foster business between the United States and his homeland.

Now comes word that another group of Eastern Europeans, Romanians this time, want a piece of the action.

Tonight a group of Romanian movie executives and a diplomat from the embassy in Washington will join Romanian immigrant George Lascu, 43, at his L.A. Farm restaurant on Olympic Boulevard for a gala to kick off the California/Romania Trade Council.

The movie executives, from Bucharest Studios, are in town for this weekend’s American Film Market in Santa Monica. Lascu saw it as the perfect time to launch the council, which hopes to facilitate business between Californians and Romanians.

Sunday’s bash will include a mishmash of California businesses representatives in the computer, financial services, furniture and agricultural sectors, to name a few. Mihai B. Sion, a trade counselor at the Romanian Embassy in Washington, plans to attend.

“They should all get along fine--Romanians like a good time,” said Bernard Stroppa, a colleague of Lascu. “The Romanians actually prefer the American freewheeling style. They’re all very ‘hail-fellow, well-met’ types.”