Designer Blues: Renowned Valley burn surgeon Richard...

By Nancy Hill-Holtzman, Andrew Blankstein and Henry Chu

March 12, 1997 12 AM PT

Designer Blues: Renowned Valley burn surgeon Richard Grossman left his operating room Tuesday to testify against interior designers David Sweeney and Dennis Wilcut, who, the doctor said, collected $600,000 from him but failed to deliver the goods. Grossman said the designer duo did apologize. . . . They face felony charges in Van Nuys Superior Court.

Duty Calls: So where did beleaguered Police Chief Willie L. Williams go Monday after apparently getting pushed out of Parker Center by a vote of the city Police Commission? Not to Disneyland. Not to Kinko’s to photocopy his resume. Not even to visit his lawyers. . . . The chief showed up, as promised, at a community crime watch organization’s meeting in Northridge.

Dictator Dilemma: The Jeopardy contestant Monday was Los Angeles school board member Jeff Horton, above. The category was the ‘30s. The answer: He led a coup in Cuba. . . . “Who was Castro?” the former teacher asked. Make that Batista, Jeff. Answers like that put Horton in the hole, but he did have a winning day last Friday, taking home $9,100.

Coaching Debut: A great basketball season is over at CSUN (C8, C10), and now it’s football time. New coach Jim Fenwick will see his team in pads for the first time when spring football practice opens today at 3:30. . . . The Matadors will conclude spring workouts with a scrimmage April 12.

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Henry Chu

Henry Chu first joined the Los Angeles Times in 1990 and worked primarily out of the San Fernando Valley office before moving to the foreign staff in 1998. He served as bureau chief in Beijing from 1998 to 2003, Rio de Janeiro from 2004 to 2005, New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and London from 2009 to 2014. He was a 2014-15 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. From 2016-19 he was international editor at Variety magazine. A graduate of Harvard University, Chu returned to The Times in March 2020 as deputy news editor based in London. He left in 2024.