Possible Roberti Successors Are Nearly Invisible

They have been virtually invisible, but in a little more than one week, one of them could be vaulted into a post that pays $75,000 a year, boasts a trove of perks, and gives its holder power and prestige.

The five are candidates in the April 12 recall election that targets state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) for removal.

If Roberti’s political machine--equipped with a panoply of consultants, phone banks, literature and supporters from Hollywood to Sacramento--stumbles and is unable to muster more than a 50% vote against the recall drive, one from this almost anonymous quintet will become the next senator, literally overnight.

But so far, they have languished unseen in the shadows of Roberti’s costly media blitz that has relentlessly attacked his foes as “assault weapons extremists” who are wasting taxpayer money by trying to unseat a lawmaker who will be forced from office in December by term limits.

In part, obscurity has been inflicted on the challengers by a lack of money. Collectively, the five have less than a 10th of Roberti’s $750,000 political war chest. And without money, the group has been unable to effectively communicate their message to voters through paid advertising or events engineered to catch the media’s eye.

A recent Los Angeles Times poll confirmed their political predicament. The five are barely known even to those voters most likely to vote, the poll found.

The five are:

* Randy Linkmeyer, 37, worked as a sales representative for a national gun distributor for a number of years until he bought Art’s Guns, a small store in Canoga Park, in 1990.

Linkmeyer has put together perhaps the most ambitious campaign of the five. He has produced a series of 30-second TV ads that are airing on local cable channels and, for this weekend, he organized free gun safety seminars at five San Fernando Valley shooting ranges.

At a recent candidates forum, Linkmeyer rented a hospitality suite for his supporters and the media while his campaign director button-holed visitors for campaign contributions.

But the Sherman Oaks resident was not involved in the grueling, months-long signature-gathering phase of the recall and for this he is resented as an interloper by some of the old hands.

Linkmeyer, however, contends that his commitment is unassailable and points to the fact that in 1989, when Roberti was enacting his controversial ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles, he helped co-found the Constitutional Rights Federation to fight gun control.

He later left the organization, he said, because it was captured by radicals who advocated the abolition of background checks on gun purchasers and the legalization of machine-gun ownership. “You won’t find anyone stronger on the Second Amendment than myself, but I’m not a radical,” Linkmeyer said.

Despite his gun interests, Linkmeyer said his first priority as a state senator would be to decentralize--not break up--the Los Angeles Unified School District. His two school-age children are in private schools, and “it makes me mad as hell that I have to pay private school tuition when I’m paying taxes for the public schools because I can’t trust them with my children,” he said.

“If I accomplished nothing else as a senator, I would want it to be that I gave the schools back to the parents and children.”

* Dolores White, 59, is a real estate broker who is making her second bid to knock out Roberti and win his seat.

In 1991, when Roberti first ran for the Valley-based 20th District seat, White was one of nine who challenged him. The longtime Republican Party activist got 10.5% of the vote at that time.

Last year, she and four others initiated the recall campaign, culminating in January with the determination that the recall election had qualified for the ballot by gathering more than 20,000 signatures.

White, who has a master’s degree in economics from UCLA and was an assistant professor at Cal State Los Angeles, has won the support of the county Republican Party’s Central Committee, of which she is a member.

“This recall is history in the making,” White recently said at a candidates forum in Van Nuys. “They are watching this election all across the nation.”

White is the only woman in the race, and the only one of the challengers who--responding to a question at a candidates forum sponsored by the National Rifle Assn.--answered that she did not own a gun.

Like her fellow challengers, she has strong views on the need for stiffer penalties for criminals and a strong stand on immigration control. “I favor a one-strike-and-you’re-out provision for sexual offenders,” White said.

Complaining about the huge costs of providing welfare, health and education benefits to illegal aliens with large numbers of children, White told an audience in Van Nuys that “we’re the ones who should be having them (children) and certainly we should take away all the benefits to illegals, no matter what country they come from.”

* Bill Dominguez, 43, is a systems analyst who lives in Van Nuys. Introducing himself to an audience of pro-recall supporters recently, Dominguez said: “I’m the one who started this party.”

In fact, Dominguez, the only Democrat among the challengers, was the leader of the coalition that organized the signature-gathering chapter of the recall campaign.

Dominguez has frequently cited his family history to explain his own heart-felt views that gun control laws interfere with the public’s right to rise up in arms against a domestic tyrant. In the early 1960s, the Dominguez family fled Cuba as refugees from the Castro regime.

Dominguez recently told a group that he got his first gun when he was 8 years old and had it confiscated when he was 11 by Fidel Castro’s henchmen. Because of his youthful experiences, Dominguez said he is “not quite as complacent as many people in this country are” about the dangers of dictators.

Like White, Dominguez was a candidate in the 1992 special election. He has also been a leading figure in Californians Against Corruption, a Signal Hill-based group, and the California Voters Alliance, a Woodland Hills group, both of which have tapped gun owners throughout the state and nation to support the recall.

Despite his work, Dominguez inadvertently helped hand a public relations coup to the Roberti camp when he reported the theft of more than a dozen guns from his home. The Roberti side crowed that Dominguez’s arsenal was proof of the recall leader’s overpowering fascination with guns and belied his attempts to characterize the recall drive as the work of good government reformers.

* Al Dib, 63, retired owner of a produce business, has run four times for public office, his last time in 1993 when he ran for the Los Angeles City Council seat being vacated then by Ernani Bernardi. Dib has been active in community affairs for years and has been a confidante of Councilman Hal Bernson.

Although a newcomer to the recall, Dib has staked out a radical position on gun control issues. At a recent forum, he urged the abolition of laws outlawing concealed weapons and machine guns.

His campaign adviser is Manny Fernandez, who, along with Linkmeyer, co-founded the Constitutional Rights Federation. Fernandez, who pleaded guilty to owning a machine gun in the early 1980s, was purged from the recall coalition after he was quoted as saying that the movement was the gun lobby’s revenge against Roberti.

* Larry Martz, 51, is a handyman who lived in the South Bay until about a year ago, when he moved to Van Nuys.

Martz, chairman of the Valley chapter of the American Pistol and Rifle Assn., describes himself as an avid participant in political organizations and causes, including protests against federal laws aimed at regulating vitamins.

“Sometimes I feel like a Don Quixote, but I have to participate because there is so much corruption and special-interest influence,” he said recently. “Maybe I am a little crazy, but so was Einstein and Edison.”

In recent years, Martz said he was a volunteer in Ross Perot’s presidential campaign and Richard Riordan’s campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. He has circulated petitions for numerous initiatives, and is working to get signatures for the Save Our State initiative to place new controls on immigration.

If elected, Martz said his top priorities would include breaking up the Los Angeles school district, repealing laws that give authorities wide-ranging power to seize the assets of drug dealers, and requiring full disclosure of foods that have been irradiated or treated with hormones.

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