Rage and Raves : As co-author of Prop. 187, Harold Ezell’s been cast as hero and villain. How did this preacher’s son become the king of controversy?

Drawn by the television cameras, a tourist pokes his head inside the Oscar Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. In search of a movie star, he instead finds Harold Ezell--the most visible spokesman for Proposition 187-- talking into a battery of microphones. The tourist quickly moves on.

What he doesn’t realize is that Ezell, co-author of the initiative designed to cut services to illegal immigrants, is something of a celebrity after last year’s long, loud campaign.

His widely publicized name and face elicit raves and rage, favor and fear.

To those voters who propelled the initiative to a landslide victory, he is a hero. To his detractors, he is the bogyman. Ezell calls himself nothing more or less than a patriot.

Through it all, he does what he has always done: keep himself and his causes--legal immigration and, lately, voter fraud--in the spotlight.

Weeks before the November election he was ubiquitous in print and on the airwaves pushing the “Save Our State” initiative, arguing that welfare, health care and incarceration costs for illegal immigrants are soaring, and that they are not entitled to the same benefits granted citizens and legal immigrants.

Now as chairman of the citizens’ group Voter Fraud Task Force, he claims at the news conference that he has found “proof” that at least 170,000, or 2.4%, of the nearly 7 million ballots cast statewide were fraudulent.

(Shirley Washington, acting press secretary for Secretary of State Bill Jones, says Ezell’s group has not presented Jones’ office with its entire report or evidence “to substantiate the claims. At this point we are still in the process of receiving information with respect to Mr. Ezell.”)

Two months after Prop. 187’s passage, enforcement remains on hold pending a trial to determine its constitutionality.

But Ezell, who weathered frequent controversy as head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s western region from 1983 to 1989, continues to pursue his goal: a national Prop. 187 equivalent.

Because of his passion for the proposition, Ezell says that his consulting business--a firm that helps obtain legal immigration status for foreign investors willing to create new jobs in this country--has become his second priority. Ezell, 58, of Newport Beach, started the Ezell Group in 1990 drawing on his knowledge and connections from his years with the INS.

A few acquaintances have turned their backs on him, he says, because of his link to the proposition. He claims callers have threatened him and his wife, Lee.

What hurts most is being called a racist, he says. He has friends of all ethnic backgrounds, he points out, including several good friends who are Latinos.

Ezell grew up in Wilmington--then and now a predominantly Latino community--where he often ate dinner at the Garcia, Mendoza or Vasquez homes. “All those families were like my brothers and sisters,” he says.

He attended Harbor Christian Center, a fundamentalist church where his father served as minister for almost 50 years, serving a largely Latino congregation.

Ezell “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” says Daniel Darling, a Latino from Buenos Aires and friend of Ezell’s for more than 16 years. “I don’t think he needs to be defended, but he has been more than a friend to me. He helped me with my first apartment, out of his own pocket he bought me towels and silverware, dishes. He is family.”

Darling, 38, an Anaheim Hills business owner, has legal resident status and is seeking citizenship. “I don’t think Hal would be happy with me if I didn’t go all the way,” he says.

“To be called a racist is an easy thing to accuse someone of. It is also a sticky, ugly thing to peel off,” Ezell says during an interview at a Downtown Los Angeles hotel where he often conducts meetings.

And he takes issue with having become the issue. “My face has become the face to discredit, especially with the Spanish-language media,” he claims.

“Ezell isn’t the issue,” says Sandra Thomas Esquivel, news director at KVEA, Channel 52. “Our obligation is to inform people about the proposition. The Spanish media have tried to present both sides of the issue. But both sides have gotten too emotional and it is those emotions that come through and touch the audience in some way.”

Vibiana Andrade, a lawyer challenging Prop. 187 in federal court, says Ezell has made himself the focus. “We are talking about some bloated ego who now wants to play the shrinking violet,” she says.

Ezell and his supporters are “dead wrong,” she adds, because 187 “is bad policy, across the board. It really confuses the role of the state government with that of the federal government. It calls for establishing a state INS.”

Andrade, national director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Immigrants’ Rights Program, says that racism was “very much” a part of the campaign. “A lot of the rhetoric used such as ‘too many of those people’ was clearly race-based and directed at Latinos. The rhetoric was never about undocumented Poles, Italians or Canadians. It was about the undocumented immigrant from Mexico and Latin America.”

Counters Ezell: “Prop. 187 is not a Mexican, Irish, English or German issue. The issue is the color of the papers that say you have the legal right to be here. . . .

“If you’re not here legally that doesn’t make you less of a human being. It doesn’t make you a person that is trash. For this issue of illegal immigration to have become a racial issue is absolutely an injustice to every legal immigrant that’s ever come to America in the last 200 years.”

And that, he says, includes his family who immigrated, legally, through Ellis Island from England. “I wouldn’t be here today if there weren’t legal immigration,” says Ezell, one of eight members of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

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Ezell was born in Long Beach on Feb. 12, the birthday of his hero, Abraham Lincoln. In 1947, Hal Ezell--then 10--moved to Wilmington with his parents and younger brother Don.

“He was always involved in clubs, in public speaking,” says his mother, Edna Ezell, 76, who works part time as Harbor Christian Center’s assistant accountant.

“Hal’s best friends were Hispanics and blacks in the neighborhood and at Banning High School,” she says. “That’s why I find it so ironic now that he’s called a racist. People are just lashing out without realizing his background.

“Like any mother, I’m proud of my son,” she says, adding that he has always been “vocal and so obvious in standing up for the things he believes in and wants to improve on.”

“I stand for what he stands for. I’m for Prop. 187,” Edna adds, explaining that the proposition “is not against the different ethnic groups. As a state we’re just getting overcrowded and the economy is hurting--that’s why I’m for it.”

Don Ezell, 55, says politically he and his brother “are walking down the same road. We don’t disagree.” But Don, who took over his father’s ministry after Herbert William Ezell died eight years ago at age 70, says that because of his vocation, “I don’t make (Prop. 187) an issue.”

The two brothers, along with their father, operated the family’s church and school furniture business in Wilmington, which they later sold.

Harold, who attended junior college in Wilmington and Southern California College in Costa Mesa, had a career in real estate development and site acquisition before joining Wienerschnitzel, where he spent 11 years as vice president and a board member. He then ran a management-consulting firm for small businesses for almost three years, before being appointed INS western commissioner.

“Hal has always been an issue-oriented person,” says Don. “. . . He has an aggressive personality. Most people hide behind masks, not Harold.”

Don says his congregation is 60% Latino and imagines that some of his members are in the United States illegally, “but no one has quit coming to church because my brother’s name was on Prop. 187.

“People who know Harold know that he is not prejudiced. That is ridiculous. Our father raised his sons not to be prejudiced. Our dad taught us to stand by our commitments and to be consistent.”

Harold says his father--like Don--never asked for green cards from immigrant churchgoers. “But Dad also never encouraged the breaking of the law.”

Devotion to principle is what he admires in Abraham Lincoln, photos and busts of whom are everywhere in his Newport Beach office, along with photos of Harold with Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan, politicians and actors.

“Lincoln never changed his story about the evils of slavery. He never compromised. And I respect that. I think that’s why people may not like me--because I tell what I believe is right.”

He says growing up the son of a preacher was “sort of like living in a fishbowl.” And today, life isn’t much different for Ezell and his wife, who describes herself as a “humor therapist.”

“I don’t like it--the jabs, the name calling. It hurts,” says Lee Ezell, the author of several books about the dynamics of personal relationships, including “The Cinderella Syndrome,” “Pills for Parents in Pain” and “Iron Jane.”

But Lee Ezell describes herself as a “steel magnolia--very strong on the inside and on the outside, soft and feminine.” The couple shares an office, where she runs her business, Ezell Communications--”my ministry.”

Often, she subs as the host on Christian radio programs and speaks at churches, colleges and conventions on women’s issues and her inspirational life.

Funny, approachable and sensitive, Lee wants it to be known that she is devoted to her husband, who also is her opposite “emotionally, socially, in temperament--every single way. We are a good balance for each other.”

Still, some are surprised to learn they are married.

“Some people will say to me, ‘Are you related to Harold Ezell?’ or ‘You’re not the same Ezell as that white supremacist?’ I tell them ‘I’m very happy to say that we are quite personally related.’ ”

She recalls a recent invitation to address a Latino congregation via an interpreter. But there was a catch: Don’t bring Hal, please.

“The minister, such a sweet man, said to me, ‘Please come, Lee, but don’t bring your husband because my people are afraid. They tremble when they see his face. They are afraid he is going to bring the van. You know what I mean?’ ”

“When hurtful things are said there is no way to reason with those kind of people,” Lee says. “You just have to back off and know that you are clean and that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Besides, Lee says, she’s learned to live with the controversy.

“When Hal was INS commissioner, because he was so proactive--not only in amnesty but against illegal immigration--the security people told me: ‘Lee, we suggest you not publish your speaking itinerary anymore because it’s not good for anyone who wants to take some kind of potshot at his family.’ ”

The couple met at a Bible conference. By then he was twice a widower, losing his first wife to a brain tumor, leaving him with two daughters, and his second wife to lupus.

Harold and Lee were married in 1973; Lee adopted his two daughters, now ages 32 and 30.

Before they married, Lee shared her deepest secret: at 18 she was raped, became pregnant, was kicked out of her home and later gave her baby up for adoption.

Says Harold: “She had never told anybody else. She had kept it hidden for so long. As I look back on that she figured that somebody who had lost two wives would understand. And I did.”

In her books and in front of groups, Lee describes growing up in an abusive home, the daughter of alcoholic parents. “I was one of the five daughters born to the dad who wanted sons. My dad told me I was another mistake,” she says. “There was a lot of battering and domestic violence. It was a pretty crummy way for five little girls to grow up. I developed early on my sense of humor. That was what saved me.”

Several years ago Lee received a call out of the blue from her then-20-year-old daughter, named Julie. They were reunited at a Washington, D.C., hotel, and have remained close; Julie is now the mother of two children. Lee later wrote a book about their separation and reunion titled “The Missing Piece” (Vine Books, 1986).

“Hal and I have been involved in all issues. We’re a team,” she says. “He’s very strong on legal issues, whether it’s parking violations or illegal immigration. Once he gets his fire lit nobody can put it out, man. He’s like a bulldog.”

Such tenacity helped Ezell survive his controversial tenure with the INS, when he made international headlines for challenging sanctuary given to immigrants, for calling for a closure of the borders and for attending a Hawaiian fete thrown by former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, then under U.S. investigation.

Bill King, a retired chief border patrol agent who interviewed Ezell for the INS job, says Ezell “is a man who likes to take on tasks that are formidable and tough and make a success of them.”

But Ezell’s candor often got him in hot water.

In 1987, a coalition of minority and civil rights groups called for his ouster over a statement he made about illegal immigrants entering the United States with fraudulent documents.

“The term I used was ‘we should catch them, clean them and fry them,’ ” Ezell says. The comment, which he says was police slang for arresting and booking suspects, was published in a Time magazine article.

Ezell says his comment was taken out of context from remarks he had made regarding an INS crackdown on anyone--legal or illegal--who made or used fraudulent documents.

“He weathers all storms,” King says.

Recently while waiting for his car, which had been valet parked at the Burbank airport, Ezell found himself being glared at by a half dozen parking attendants, all Latinos.

“As soon as one saw me they all turned around and were looking at me. And I was thinking, ‘I wonder what these guys are thinking? Am I the bogyman? Is this guy, you know, going to call the van and pick us all up?’ And then one guy was saying, ‘La Raza! La Raza!’ I said ‘Hey man, it ain’t La Raza, it’s America. It’s America, man.’ That’s the deal.”