Snapshot Costs City Thousands

As a snippet of exposed film, it wasn’t worth much. But as provocation for a lawsuit, it sure was a doozy.

The film--before it was ruined by a burst of mid-March sunshine--showed a bearded guy in a suit. An anonymous, blend-right-in kind of guy, standing in the midst of a well-dressed crowd. Nothing glitzy, nothing glamorous. Kind of dull, in fact.

Yet that one frame of film touched off a legal battle that plodded on for eight years and cost Los Angeles taxpayers thousands of dollars. The city attorney’s office finally wrapped up the case this week by paying $10,000 to the photographer who snapped the much-fought-over shot.

The whole affair started on St. Patrick’s Day in 1988, when freelance photographer Terrence Mulgannon stopped by a reception for a visiting Israeli delegation, hoping to indulge his passion for photographing undercover law enforcement agents. Mulgannon spotted the bearded man right off and pegged him as a plainclothes security guard.

He pointed his camera, clicked the button, and presto--another photo for his collection, which he hoped to someday publish.

And another case for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office--and combative lawyer Stephen Yagman, a longtime city nemesis.

For the subject of Mulgannon’s photo, Special Agent Bill Queen of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, most decidedly did not want his picture published.

Queen was working undercover on a drugs-and-guns gig with a biker group. He fretted that some fire-breathing Hells Angel might see the photo, “put two and two together, and blow me away,” as he put it.

So Queen asked a Los Angeles police bomb squad officer at the scene to reason with Mulgannon. The officer tried. After a brief conversation, Mulgannon exposed his film. The officer and Queen both thought that was the end of it.

But Mulgannon was ticked.

After all, he had lost a perfectly good roll of film. Worse, he felt he had been coerced. Badgered. Even threatened. All to get him to destroy a photo he had every 1st Amendment right to take.

So he hired Yagman, a brass-knuckled Venice lawyer who has made a career of taking on the LAPD. And he filed the first of the legal motions that would drag the case out until this week’s settlement, hours before the scheduled start of a third trial.

Yes, a third trial. The legal fight over Mulgannon’s film featured a jury verdict favoring the officer, a judge tossing out the case, two reversals by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, a good chunk footed by taxpayers. Yagman finally agreed to drop the case this week after the city offered his client $10,000.

“The whole thing, it’s got a humorous side to it,” Yagman acknowledged, chuckling over his squawking car phone. But he insists that serious legal issues were always at stake.

The lawsuit accused the LAPD officer of violating Mulgannon’s constitutional rights by abridging his freedom of speech, depriving him of property without due process and subjecting him to an illegal search and seizure. “It’s a very small case, but there’s a very big principle involved,” Yagman said.

In the officer’s defense, Deputy City Attorney Tayo Popoola argued that Mulgannon consented to expose his film without ever being threatened. That position prevailed at the first jury trial in 1990. But rather than test it before another panel this week, Popoola said he “made what I thought was a ridiculously low offer” to settle the case for $10,000. It worked.

Popoola could not estimate how much money his office has spent defending against Yagman’s lawsuit. He’s the third attorney to work on the case and can say only that he and his colleagues spent “a lot of hours--a lot of hours” fighting over a frame of film.

That expenditure of time and money infuriates Queen, who cannot believe that his simple request for cooperation ended up socking taxpayers with eight years’ worth of legal bills.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” he said. “It costs the citizens of the U.S. and the taxpayers of Los Angeles humongous sums, all because he wasn’t allowed to print that picture.”

Meanwhile, Mulgannon is not satisfied with his $10,000 settlement. He is also determined to have the last laugh.

A buddy of his snapped photos of Queen during their first encounter in court, some six years ago. And Mulgannon intends to publish them--in his upcoming book on undercover cops.