Shifting Into Reverse

A trendy Brentwood restaurant that fired valet parking attendants caught illegally using handicapped placards to reserve convenient parking spots for patrons has quietly rehired them.

“The customers loved these guys,” said Toscana restaurant co-owner Mike Gordon, explaining why the attendants were welcomed back just two months after they embarrassed the eatery and prompted him to change parking companies.

The valets’ return has surprised the Brentwood businesswoman whose complaints about parking problems along busy San Vicente Boulevard prompted a state investigation in December.

And it has angered the parking company owner who was ordered by Toscana to remove his valet crew--and a few days later saw his eight-year contract with the restaurant terminated.

Cesar Suarez, the former parking contractor, discovered the old valets were back last week. He videotaped two of them working for the company that replaced his own Los Angeles Parking Service.

“This is so hypocritical. It’s amazing--it blows my mind,” Suarez said.

The handicapped placard scheme was revealed after Brentwood advertising executive Samantha Greenberg noticed large numbers of handicapped placards on cars parked along San Vicente.

After videotaping the valets moving cars bearing handicapped permits, Greenberg notified the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Seventeen DMV investigators took part in a surveillance operation outside Toscana in December. They watched valets attach blue placards to a Porsche and to a BMW before one attendant pulled a handicapped permit from beneath his shirt and slapped it on a Mercedes’ dash.

Valet Jorge Silva, 35, was cited by investigators when he returned to retrieve the Mercedes. They said he handed the bogus placard out the window to another valet waiting to move a second car into the spot.

When The Times reported the scam Dec. 14, Gordon responded by ordering Los Angeles Parking Service to immediately replace the restaurant’s parking crew.

Suarez transferred them to other restaurant locations but was forced to lay them off eight days later when Gordon fired his company.

“Unfortunately, they cannot continue on. No way in the world I’d continue on with them,” Gordon said at the time. “We need to make an effort to overcome the taint.”

Greenberg is now forming a group to press for tougher controls over the issuance of handicapped permits. She was stunned to see the valets back.

“I’m outraged,” she said Tuesday as she spent part of her lunch hour jotting down license numbers of cars bearing handicapped permits along San Vicente. “People should be livid.”

Not so, said Gordon.

Gordon encountered Greenberg on the sidewalk outside his restaurant. He explained that he now regrets acting “too hastily” in replacing the valets in December.

“I thought they’d parked in handicapped spaces. These guys were allegedly putting placards on cars. That’s different. They basically just used poor judgment,” Gordon said.

“It’s our feeling even if they were guilty of something and have paid their fine, it doesn’t mean they should lose their job.”

Silva pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge of fraudulent use of a handicapped permit in January in West Los Angeles Municipal Court. He was sentenced to 36 months of summary probation and fined $300--a punishment that left state officials “extremely disappointed,” according to Cmdr. Vito Scattaglia of the DMV’s Bureau of Investigations.

Greenberg urged Toscana to join her fledgling campaign against handicapped placard abuse.

She said parking enforcement officers who on Monday accompanied her on an inspection of handicapped placards along San Vicente discovered that half of them were apparently being misused. Cars with the permits park for free in metered spots.

Gordon suggested that her group push to cut back on the number of new restaurant permits being authorized along the boulevard.

And as his valets hurriedly raced to find parking places for a stream of BMWs, Lexuses and Range Rovers pulling up next to them, he pledged that Toscana parking attendants have learned their lesson over handicapped placards.

“They aren’t going to do it again,” Gordon promised Greenberg.