Hard to Beat This Crowd for Scheming, Backstabbing Fun

When I was teaching, I would swear to my students, on a copy of TV Guide, that if they followed it closely, politics was not just important, it was swell entertainment: good as any prime-time soap opera, just not as much sex and a lot crummier wardrobe.

And they would share knowing smirks on the poverty of a social life--mine--that sought out its jollies in the didoes of congressmen and city council members.

I wish they’d been in court with me this week for the latest episode of “As Compton Turns,” wherein the former mayor of Compton, Omar Bradley, is suing the current mayor of Compton, Eric Perrodin, over who did what last June to get elected the top pol in the city of 93,000 people.

Death threats, forgery and fornication, official secrets, bribery--what this case didn’t have hasn’t been dreamed up by the script department yet.

This was only Day One, and by the time the court broke for lunch, we had:

* Heard from a star witness wonderfully named Basil Kimbrew, who not only didn’t cough up the expected goods testimony-wise, but turned around and said Bradley’s lawyer offered him a six-figure bribe to swear that the election was rigged.

* Watched Bradley and Kimbrew gaze at each other across the courtroom. Bradley (who once accused Kimbrew of shooting at his house) wore a handsome chalk-stripe suit, Kimbrew (who pointedly wore a bulletproof vest on primary election day) had on a dashing red tie; whether the bulletproof vest was putting in another appearance, I couldn’t tell.

* Listened to an increasingly frustrated attorney ask his falling-star witness whether he’d counterfeited ballots or had sex with a City Council member.

Oh, it was something. And during the midmorning break, I found out that Bradley’s sister and I had gone to the same college.

I can’t leave out the moment when the attorney, to verify that he and Kimbrew had met, asked what kind of pie they’d had--pecan pie a la mode for Kimbrew, lemon meringue for the lawyer. This was at the same chain restaurant in Carson where power brokers go to break bread, and where, last fall, a renowned Compton basketball coach supposedly lunched with a 17-year-old student he allegedly molested; the coach was acquitted of all charges.

Maybe my students were right about my dull life. All I know is, I’ve been eating at the wrong restaurants.

If you can’t stay up late enough for real theater, or you can’t afford the tickets, there’s Los Angeles’ community theater: free and it’s freewheeling, as rich with plots and schemes and gore as anything Shakespeare or Webster ever put on the boards.

The “community” part is towns like Compton, Bell Gardens, South Gate, Huntington Park; the “theater” is the tragicomic high dramas played out over the minutest matters in these small cities. In the fashion of relatives, the smaller the families, the nastier the quarrels can be.

“Where do you live?” is a frequent and favored challenge, for it concerns not just a violation of law but a disloyalty to whatever plucky little town one is supposed to be serving.

A Huntington Park council member was charged with perjury and a South Gate City Council candidate charged and convicted for saying they lived in those towns when investigators believed they did not. (On the other end, Compton’s Bradley once had 16 people registered to vote at his mother’s two-bedroom house.)

In Bell Gardens, where one mayor supposedly tried to run down a former council member, and another mayor was shot and wounded by a supposed assassin, a council member who led recalls against her enemies was charged with manipulating her colleagues to name her city manager at a handsome 80K a year.

None outdoes the potboiler town of South Gate, where elections turn on anonymous accusations of crime and sin, and where one winner found a disemboweled teddy bear on her front lawn, its throat slit.

Why these bloodletting battles for power in cities whose annual budgets wouldn’t keep Congress in coffee filters?

Many are now majority-minority, and African Americans and Latinos, so long disenfranchised, at last find themselves seated at the table instead of waiting on it. They may find, too, that there is so little of the public pie in these small, struggling cities that the battle over it could become all the bloodier.

In the courtroom seats this week sat several black men who looked to be old enough to remember first-hand the humiliations of restrictive covenants and Jim Crow. So they are old enough, too, to know about the poisonous corruptions of power, and the temptations it can offer to those who hold it and dispense it, whoever they may be.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com