Tables Turn for Bitter Rivals in San Diego Drama

What a difference a decade makes.

Ten years ago Dist. Atty. Edwin L. Miller Jr. was in headlong prosecutorial pursuit of Mayor Roger Hedgecock, a battle that raged daily in the courts and the media. Miller emerged triumphant and Hedgecock was ousted from office, protesting that he was the victim of a vendetta by his political enemies, Miller and the press.

Convicted of conspiracy and perjury for the methods he had used to win the mayor’s office in 1983, Hedgecock was forced from office by state law.

His top political strategist, a former Del Mar mayor named Tom Shepard, reluctantly pleaded guilty to conspiring to break various laws on contribution limits and financial disclosure during the 1983 campaign.

Although spared jail, Shepard left California and entered a self-imposed period of exile as a political untouchable. Other Hedgecock insiders from the ill-fated campaign were similarly sullied.

Flash forward to last Tuesday. The scandal-ridden days of 1984 are long gone.

“The people who were facing very, very tough times back then and had a number of persecutors--among them, Mr. Miller--are now having the last laugh,” said Michael McDade, Hedgecock’s chief of staff during his abortive tenure as mayor.

Miller--the dean of county prosecutors in California--suffered a humiliating primary defeat, placing fourth in a five-candidate race, barely nosing out a perennial candidate who has been slammed as a slumlord and wife-beater.

As Miller’s political problems increased in recent months, particularly with a critical grand jury report and two failed and controversial prosecutions in child molestation cases, Miller’s foes found a ready platform for their views on Hedgecock’s radio show.

Miller, 68, will soon be out of office but Hedgecock remains as the city’s top radio talk-show host and a political force to be reckoned with. His daily three-hour program dishes up a conservative brew of political analysis and invective.

Woe to the local pol who dares to avoid the Hedgecock show or takes political positions contrary to those of the host. When Miller declined on election eve to come on the show, Hedgecock blasted him on air as a coward and attempted to taunt him into leaving his high-rise office and joining the other candidates in debate.

If Hedgecock has emerged from disgrace, so too has Shepard, who has re-established himself as the city’s top campaign consultant and counts among his clients Mayor Susan Golding.

In Tuesday’s election for sheriff, Shepard’s latest client, former San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender, demolished first-term Sheriff Jim Roache.

Near the end of the race, Roache complained bitterly that Shepard was again violating the law by running a deficit campaign. The charge was denied and the local press showed little interest in comparisons between Kolender 1994 and Hedgecock 1983.

With Miller defeated, two candidates will engage in a November runoff for district attorney: Municipal Judge Larry Stirling, and former Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst. The Pfingst campaign is well populated with former Hedgecock operatives.

The two political consultants who guided Pfingst’s primary battle were insiders in Hedgecock’s 1983 campaign. Pfingst’s pollster was named by the grand jury as an unindicted co-conspirator of Hedgecock and Shepard. Pfingst’s media coordinator is the former producer of Hedgecock’s radio show.

Pfingst joined the San Diego district attorney’s office in the fall of 1984 shortly before Hedgecock and Shepard were indicted, but he had no part in the case. He has not made political corruption one of his campaign issues.

Not everyone is cheered by the return to prominence of Hedgecock et al.

“It’s a sad commentary on San Diego politics that people are so unconcerned with political ethics that they would allow this crew to have the control they have,” said San Diego political consultant Ann Shanahan-Walsh.

The return is not seen as particularly surprising in San Diego, where politics is a sport played by a few dozen aficionados.

“Nobody ever said the Hedgecock people lacked political talent,” said Peter Kaye, retired associate editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Where they were short was on the ethical side.”

Was Hedgecock happy at Tuesday’s turn of events that had his old foe vanquished and so many of his friends victorious? Does a politician count votes on election night?

“He couldn’t stop grinning,” said Jim Valentine, current producer of Hedgecock’s show on KSDO radio. “He’s come full circle.”

In an interview, the 48-year-old Hedgecock explained that it was a sense of rectitude that kept him and his onetime associates going.

“All of us who were involved in those years knew we weren’t guilty of what we were charged with,” Hedgecock said. “Since we knew that, with a clear heart, we’ve gone forward in life. We didn’t run away and hide. We knew we were right.

“We couldn’t fight a system that was manipulated by people as powerful as we were up against. So we took our loss, we licked our wounds and we came back.”

Hedgecock was convicted in 1985 of having lied about his personal and political finances and his links to J. David Dominelli and Nancy Hoover, La Jolla stockbrokers later sent to prison for running a $120-million Ponzi scheme. Hedgecock appealed on numerous grounds, among them that a bailiff improperly influenced the jury.

In 1990, the state Supreme Court overturned the 12 perjury convictions because of a disputed jury instruction by the judge. The court also ruled that the judge should have held a hearing on Hedgecock’s claims about the bailiff rather than rely on sworn affidavits from jurors that nothing improper had occurred.

Rather than face such a hearing and a possible retrial, Hedgecock promised to drop all further appeals on his conspiracy conviction that was at the heart of the case: that he had lied and cheated in an effort to become mayor. He paid a $5,000 fine and, by prior arrangement, the charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor and then erased from his record.

By 1990 he was already a radio star. From his “independent perch” on the radio (and a lesser one as a commentator on a San Diego television station), Hedgecock plays no favorites and takes few prisoners.

In one short burst last week, he called the San Diego city manager a liar (the manager had opposed Hedgecock’s plan for a large-scale card room), the mayor a do-nothing (she opposed his idea for a new airport) and the Union-Tribune racist.

He also put in a plug for the “normal people” protest contingent he is organizing for the upcoming Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. He is often at odds with gay activists, who have accused him of gay-baiting, and with immigrant rights advocates, who accuse him of immigrant-bashing.

He bills himself as the foe of political correctness and regimented thinking.

One theme is constant: that he only accepted the conspiracy conviction to avoid a third trial and that he never did anything illegal. After Miller’s defeat, he provided his audience with a 20-minute explication of the case and its similarity to other celebrated cases.

“I admire a lot about him,” Hedgecock said of Miller, “but when it came to this kind of political stuff, he was as corrupt as anyone who has ever done it.”

Searching for just the right turn of phrase to describe Miller, Hedgecock decided on “a lying crock.”

Miller, in turn, treats Hedgecock like something caught on the bottom of his shoe that he can’t shake but doesn’t want to acknowledge. Others in his camp are not so restrained.

“Waiting for Roger Hedgecock to tell the truth is like leaving the porch light on for Jimmy Hoffa,” said Miller’s longtime spokesman Steven J. Casey. “It’s too bad San Diego is treated to three hours of waiting for Jimmy Hoffa every day.”