Rampart and the Quiet Riordan

The mayor of Los Angeles has draped his left arm, his law-signing arm, over the handsome green leather back of his swivel chair. He is clad in a gray cashmere sweater, and in contrast to the other men on the dais, he wears no tie.

Nearly two hours into an MTA board meeting, it is standing room only, sweating room only for the hundreds who have come from the Eastside to plead with Richard Riordan and his fellow board members for more buses, more subways, more Metrolink, please, more service.

Riordan stands up. He leans over the back of his chair, listening to the speaker. He sits down. He fidgets like a man who has too much on his mind. He rears back in his chair, then leans forward. A speaker suddenly commands his attention. Esteban Torres, the former congressman who now belongs to the California Transportation Commission, is wrapping up with a flourish.

“Mayor Riordan! Mayor Riordan!” he implores. “You are about to leave office in the near future! Leave us a legacy, sir!”

Torres is pleading for Riordan’s vote, but what may have snagged the mayor was that other part, that freighted, weighted word, “legacy.”

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Riordan will be breaking the tape on his two terms in July 2001. And this week, within the span of 24 hours, he has faced a trinity of legacy-making issues, two that could ornament it, and one that could begrime it.

The first was the MTA, part of his pledge to pull the agency out of the tar pits of suspect spending. The second he had discussed that morning, at a breakfast meeting with a teachers union representative about instruction and curriculum. The mayor has no authority over education except what he has carved out, both by availing himself of the bully pulpit--some have called his a bullying pulpit--and by checkbook, backing school board candidates and school programs.

The third came Wednesday, when the Big Three, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and U.S. Atty. Alejandro Mayorkas, took the same stage (albeit somewhat uneasily). They announced a handful of feds would investigate civil rights elements of the Rampart matter. Riordan played his favorite role: the broker who brings the players to the table to close the deal.

Riordan’s first campaign promise was a bigger and better LAPD. Bigger it certainly is, about 9,000, but better is what is now at stake. Last week, I took Riordan to task for not going public on Rampart in a city that was talking of little else.

He should have “gone out fighting,” he told me Thursday, but was reluctant to beat Parks to the microphone because “when you do, you tend to emasculate the chief. I woke up and I think he woke up at the same time and said, ‘This ain’t working, people want you and me out there more.’ ”

Unlike former Chief Daryl F. Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley, who barely spoke in their last year in office, Parks and Riordan seem practically joined at the hip. “We’ve met the last year and more, constantly. We have disagreements, make suggestions. We win some, he wins some. This whole idea of bringing in the U.S. attorney, turning the district attorney around as far as quickly going after the officers, to a great extent came out of discussions with the chief and myself.”

Riordan feels “pretty good” about his handling of Rampart.

“My basic tenet is, you punish the people in charge. These officers in charge, if they didn’t know they had some bad hombres there, they should be fired for incompetence. You get more done there than punishing the people on the line--not that you don’t punish those people, but if for the last 10 years you had been punishing captains and sergeants, you wouldn’t be seeing any of this stuff now.”

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Tom Bradley, who dominated the city like a colossus for 16 years--we shall not see his like again, if only because of term limits--saw the last couple of years of his tenure piddled away in unseemly and petty scandals: his own dicey financial ties, accusations of contract cronyism, even whether he interceded for a Japanese official arrested for shoplifting at an LAX gift shop.

Will Rampart become part of Riordan’s legacy? “Who knows? I always say I hate the word legacy, which I do, because it implies I’m doing something for my legacy and not because it’s the right thing to do.”

He must know, however, that a legacy is a trick of perspective, a mote on the horizon that gets big as a beam as politicians approach their finish lines, and then shrinks or grows after they cross.

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

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Tom Bradley served for 20 years as mayor of Los Angeles.

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