Speculation Swirls Over Polanco Exit From Race

Until the day he pulled out of the race for City Council, state Sen. Richard Polanco was seeking donations and solidifying support for his campaign.

Then, nothing.

Polanco--one of the most powerful and polarizing political figures in Sacramento and Los Angeles--abruptly announced in a written statement Feb. 21 that he was withdrawing from the race.

Over the next few days he and his aides gave shifting reasons for his decision: He wanted to give full attention to his legislative duties. He wanted to step back from political life and go to work in the private sector when his term ends next year. He had lost the “fire in the belly.”

Those explanations ignored other recent developments, some of which had the potential to embarrass the senator or disrupt his political aspirations.

He had emerged as one of several local politicians who wrote former President Bill Clinton on behalf of convicted drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and accepted more than $20,000 in contributions from the prisoner’s father, Horacio Vignali.

Local leaders were lining up in support of little-known candidates in the 1st Council District.

And someone was circulating a birth certificate showing that Polanco fathered a child out of wedlock. The mother has been a member of his Senate staff since 1994 and earns $74,500 a year.

Polanco, through an aide, refused to “discuss any aspect of the senator’s personal life,” except to say that the lawmaker pays child support. Polanco declined several requests for an interview.

His uncharacteristic silence, combined with the string of explanations supplied by his staff that were unconvincing to many people, has fueled a guessing game about what and who pushed Polanco out of the race.

Most of the speculation has centered on the revelation about the child. Polanco and his wife have three children.

Details began circulating weeks before the 50-year-old Polanco left the race. Some reporters and people in Los Angeles and Sacramento political circles received copies of the child’s birth certificate.

Some of Polanco’s friends and allies believe the likely source of that document is the state prison guards union, which has fought with Polanco since he pushed for privatizing California’s prisons. Union officials denied sending out the document but acknowledged that they were considering weighing in on the local race and attacking him on a variety of unrelated issues.

“I wouldn’t have done that,” said Don Novey, president of the Correctional Peace Officers Assn., about the birth certificate. “That’s not my M.O. I wouldn’t do that to another human being.”

The child’s mother went to work for the Senate in December 1994, a month after Polanco was elected to the chamber and about a year after the child was born. Previously she was employed for more than a year by the Assembly Office of Research and had once been a secretary for a private prison firm. The 37-year-old woman now assists Polanco in his role as Senate Democratic floor leader.

Polanco’s top aide, Bill Mabie, said she is a valuable member of the staff who was instrumental in winning passage of the senator’s bill that toughened gun restrictions. She also was involved early on with Polanco’s efforts to allow California to contract with private prison companies, Mabie said. She now focuses on efforts to change child welfare protection laws.

The woman declined to be interviewed, and The Times chose not to identify her to protect the child’s privacy.

Robert M. Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, said the woman’s employment raises ethical concerns about nepotism.

“You want employees who are not related to you, who you can supervise, discipline and fire,” he said. “It’s just a different relationship when you have a relative working for you.”

Although public disclosure of the child’s existence may cause personal anguish and embarrassment, some political strategists believe that Polanco’s election bid could have survived the controversy.

“He’s young, he’s dynamic, he potentially had an incredible future in state and local politics,” said political consultant Jorge Flores, who believes that Polanco would have won had he stayed in the race. “He’s a machine. . . . It takes a lot of muscle to get someone of his stature out of the race.”

Polanco’s friends insist that the reasons behind the senator’s decision are more mundane. Accustomed to thinking and acting on a statewide scale, Polanco wasn’t up to the grind of a local election, especially one that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to win, they say.

About a week before he dropped out of the race, Polanco sat inside a downtown Los Angeles cafe with Mabie and another confidant, shaking his head and looking defeated, Mabie recalled.

The senator had just made a pitch for what should have been an easy endorsement, and knew he wasn’t going to get it.

“I don’t know, maybe my time has passed,” Polanco told his friends.

Measuring his relatively lackluster performance in a debate that evening with 39-year-old Fumio Robert Nakahiro, he added: “A kid like that. Why shouldn’t he have a shot? I just don’t have the fire in my belly.”

‘He Didn’t Have It in His Gut’

This was the crystallizing moment, Mabie said, behind the senator’s sudden and surprising withdrawal less than two months after declaring his candidacy. Still, he continued to solicit contributions and secure endorsements.

The hallmark of Polanco’s career has been his success in recruiting and supporting Latino candidates. Burning enthusiasm has “always been the standard [Polanco] has had for candidates he’s interviewed” before supporting them, Mabie said. “He always asked: ‘Would they run without my support?’ He put himself to that same measure. He didn’t have it in his gut.”

What’s more, Polanco “didn’t like being perceived as the 500-pound gorilla” in the council race, Mabie added, referring to a metaphor used by other 1st District candidates--and repeated by The Times--to characterize the senator’s intimidating presence in the local campaign.

Although Polanco was expected to win the race, it was becoming clear that he was in for a tough fight, waged by some of the numerous political enemies he has accumulated over the years.

Councilman Nick Pacheco--who has had differences with Polanco dating to the late 1980s, when the senator supported a proposal to put a prison on the Eastside--spearheaded the effort to deny Polanco the council seat.

Polanco supported Pacheco’s opponent when he ran for City Council two years ago. Now, there was talk in City Hall circles about a nascent effort engineered by Polanco to redraw council lines so the 1st District would include a portion of downtown Los Angeles that currently sits inside Pacheco’s 14th District.

Mabie denies that there was any talk of redistricting. But Leo Estrada, UCLA demographer, professor of urban planning and expert in reapportionment, said Polanco inquired about the possibility of redrawing the boundaries.

Before Polanco announced his candidacy in January, Ed Reyes, chief of staff for the seat’s outgoing occupant, Councilman Mike Hernandez, was considered a favorite to win the district, which includes Dodger Stadium, the Los Angeles River Center, MacArthur Park and Echo Park. Another candidate remaining in the race is college professor David Sanchez.

According to Pacheco, it wasn’t difficult mustering opposition against Polanco. He has plenty of foes after years of playing rough--as evidenced, for instance, by Polanco’s role in helping an ally defeat former colleague Richard Katz with a mailer that falsely suggested Katz was hostile to Latinos.

The prison guards union is another committed foe. And Pacheco said he was contacted by Novey, the union president and an arch-enemy of the senator.

“They wanted to know how we could beat Polanco on the ground in a grass-roots campaign,” Pacheco said. “They said: ‘How are you going to win this race, Councilman?’ ”

Pacheco responded by flying to Sacramento with Reyes and introducing his candidate to Novey.

The councilman knew that backing from the union, which is known to spend as much as $200,000 in local political campaigns, would go far in a district with only an estimated 50,000 voters.

Rival Gains Endorsements

After a mid-February meeting that lasted about 30 minutes, Pacheco said, Novey left open the question of whether his union would be involved.

Novey confirmed the discussion, saying: “We won’t be playing there now,” given Polanco’s departure. “But there was the potential, yes.”

Pacheco returned from Sacramento determined to make Reyes a viable candidate worthy of the union’s support.

Lending Reyes some of his staff, the councilman secured endorsements from mayoral candidate Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles,) Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles).

Each of those legislators said they backed Reyes because of his experience and political philosophies, and not as a vendetta against Polanco.

“I supported Ed Reyes because I know him,” Roybal-Allard said. “He has worked with our office over the last few years on housing issues in Pico-Union and has demonstrated a commitment to the community. I thought since Ed is already working well with us, he should continue there.”

Despite his efforts to undermine a Polanco campaign, Pacheco said he was as surprised as anybody when the senator pulled out.

“I was totally caught off guard by that,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it at all.”

State Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), a close friend and political ally of Polanco for nearly 20 years, said he told her he abandoned the race “for the purpose of seeking some private sector opportunities.”

She hopes that someday he turns his energies to seeking statewide office, or to advocating for the economic empowerment of Latinos.

“We need the Latino version of a Jesse Jackson to go into the corporate boardrooms and to demand parity and demand contracting opportunities for Latino-owned businesses,” she said. “I really feel that Sen. Polanco should play that role.”

For now, he is finishing his final term as state senator from the 22nd District. He will leave office after the November 2002 election.

Polanco returned to the Senate floor Monday after an absence of more than a week. He sat at his front row desk and turned to a stack of paperwork. Soon, several members of the Senate strolled over to engage him in quiet but brief conversations. A couple touched his shoulder.

Normally buoyant, Polanco looked sad and exhausted. He lifted his head briefly to acknowledge the support from his fellow legislators, then he hunched over his desk again to bury himself in paperwork.

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Times staff writer Carl Ingram contributed to this story.