Post-Nuptial Trip Is Just a Matter of Business

Get ready with the rice, but you’ll have to throw fast.

Over at the Sheriff’s Department, the Boys in Brown or Topanga Taupe or whatever they call that uniform color are insisting that this trip to Taiwan by their boss and his new bride, one week after their wedding, isn’t a honeymoon--not even a working honeymoon. It’s business, straight up.

I tell you, I cannot plumb the depths of my relief at hearing that. I had been absolutely racked by tragic imaginings of the future Frau Sheriff Lee Baca, in years to come, paging dreamily through the album of photo memories from what she had thought was a wedding trip, and sighing, “Oh, honey, remember the time I went with you to that police firing range in Taipei so you could test a new Chinese-made semiautomatic sidearm for your deputies?”

“And look--here we are in the forensics lab looking at DNA profiles of organized crime bosses. You looked so buff in that lab coat!”

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is getting hitched on Saturday to Carol Chiang, whose family is from Taiwan, the very nation whose government is ponying up the dough for the bride and bridegroom, along with an assistant sheriff and his wife and two other Sheriff’s Department employees, to travel east, where the badge-bearers can do some in-person flesh-pressing on the matter of Asian criminals and Asian victims in Los Angeles.

Presidents look august and infallible amid foreign pomp. Similarly, Baca-- who, like every Los Angeles County sheriff, languishes in second place compared to the LAPD chief in TVQ recognition here--would not be handicapped by that comparison in Taiwan. You’ll be able to count the red carpet not by running feet, but by acreage.

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They can go by many names--junkets, fact-finding trips, trade missions--just as long as they go. Overseas travel, no matter who pays for it, sits in every public official’s line of sight, shimmering and tempting as the waters on the surface of the La Brea tar pits, and just as treacherous.

Mayor Sam Yorty didn’t acquire the handle “Travelin’ Sam” by commuting from the Valley. Mayor Tom Bradley was so often jetting hither and thither that his frequent flier miles should have been bequeathed to the city.

Last year, an elevated “wed-’n’-fled” gold standard was set by Mayor Richard Riordan and his bride, Nancy Daly Riordan, who left on a two-week Asian trade mission a week after their marriage. The mayor picked up the tab for them both, while the city paid the travel costs for its other officials.

Under rules of the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, an official whose “significant other” gets the benefit of more than $300 in free air fare or such would have to pay or repay anything beyond that $300, the “gift limit.”

But: If the “significant other” is there on legit government business, even if not on the government payroll, the limit would not necessarily apply.

The Baca contingent isn’t talking. So if the future wife of the nation’s highest-paid elected public official (sheriff, $234,016; Bill Clinton, $200,000) is able to translate for her husband at conferences and official get-togethers, and if she were to employ her know-how to make connections and set up meetings--then she could indeed be doing business, and the $300 cap might not apply to her, and this friend could fly free.

Bill and Hillary honeymooned in Acapulco, just like Clinton’s idol, Jack Kennedy. If the Bacas are not honeymooning, are we seeing a partners-in-power thing emerging? Or at least spouse-as-asset, as when Jackie Kennedy wowed the French in their own language? Does the future Mrs. Baca’s presence on the trip represent a gift that her bridegroom must report and reimburse--or does she too represent county and country?

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As the “Golden Triangle” of the San Gabriel Valley is populated by larger numbers of Asians, some very rich, the Sheriff’s Department has inaugurated its Asian task force, to encourage the reporting and tracking of crimes.

In the last year, local law enforcement and the FBI joined agencies in Taiwan and China to solve kidnappings for ransom.

In one, a San Marino High School student--one of the “parachute teenagers” whose parents park them here with big allowances in big houses, to study and sometimes to avoid the Taiwanese draft while the parents return to business overseas--was kidnapped for ransom and rescued.

This is ample reason for the Sheriff’s Department to work with Taiwanese law enforcement. With the new sheriff about to move into a $750,000 San Marino home with his bride, his overseas conferences may have the coziness of a Neighborhood Watch meeting. Even global politics is local, after all.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com