It’s Tough to Throw Compton’s Bums Out

Here’s how bad it’s gotten in Compton: I’m out in the middle of the Civic Center plaza and a dirt-caked beggar who lives on the street is griping about the bums in City Hall.

“There’s a lot of crooks in there, stealing from their own people,” says Jesse Lopez, 36. “I see a lot. I read the paper. I’m not stupid. They’ve got their hands in people’s pockets left and right. It’s a shame, because this used to be a beautiful town.”

I suppose people say the same thing about Kabul. These days it’s a tossup as to which town--Compton or Kabul--has the more stable leadership.

It’s been nearly 10 months since Compton’s disputed mayoral election last June, yet without a single chad to consider, we still don’t know who won.

While flip-flopping judges snorkel through the cesspool, it’s a game of musical chairs in the mayor’s office. One day the throne is occupied by Omar Bradley, a machine-style boss who once called himself the Gangster Mayor. The next day it’s Eric Perrodin, who packed a concealed handgun on election day, pocketed a campaign contribution from Death Row Records, and is seen as a reformer.

That is not as peculiar as it sounds, this being a town of political operatives in bulletproof vests, ex-cons winning political appointments, and squads of investigators swooping down on City Hall with search warrants. I almost forgot to mention that everyone is a PhD, the honorary degrees bestowed by a local school of acupuncture.

So now you understand why a common beggar stands in the plaza with his indignation and an air of moral superiority. Soon as Jesse Lopez moves on to scrabble for quarters, I see a stream of Compton High students headed for the plaza, and instantly my heart aches for this kicked-around town and its kids.

You’ve got the gangs in Compton. You’ve got the drugs and the crime. But is there a more dangerous or corrupting influence on young minds than to have to walk past nearby City Hall when school lets out?

“Compton’s not all bad, we just get stereotyped,” says sophomore Chanel Williams, 15. Public officials don’t help the cause, she adds, carrying on this way. “A lot of those people are twisted.”

“They think if they do it fairly, they’re never gonna get anywhere,” says Jaquata Lewis, who turned 15 on Thursday and now must carry the burden of this cynicism into manhood.

I wander through a bleak City Hall, where employees move like zombies through another torturous day of uncertainty.

TV vans are camped outside, awaiting the next humiliation. Bradley and his posse rode into town last month, and no one expects them to leave quietly.

Perrodin won the election by a slim margin, but got tossed out of office three weeks ago by a harebrained Superior Court judge who ruled that the placement of Perrodin’s name on the ballot, above Bradley’s, was an unfair advantage for Perrodin.

I was just as confused by that ruling as I was by the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” The film was about a schizophrenic Princeton professor who won a Nobel prize for a mathematics/economic theory. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of the guy’s “theory,” and I felt the same way about the judge’s ruling. Maybe she saw the same movie and lost her mind.

Out front of City Hall, on the steps near the TV vans, I find a woman who looks as though she wants to throw herself in front of traffic.

She’s been a city employee for decades, she says, and although Bradley had ordered staff to keep their mouths shut, she can’t help it.

“We’ve got greedy people in charge. Ignorant people,” she says. “The place is run like Haiti, or an African country.”

I ask if Perrodin is the solution.

“I don’t know yet,” the employee says, but she’s looking forward to Bradley’s ouster.

“It’s greed and ego with him, and he started getting out of the realm of reality. You can’t run a city for your own personal uses. I’ve worked here a long time and this is the worst it’s ever been. You don’t know what to expect when you go to work each day. You go to a convention and you’re embarrassed to put your name tag on because it says Compton.”

On Thursday, the state Supreme Court refused to hear Bradley’s latest challenge, so he cleared out of City Hall and Perrodin moved back in as police kept watch. There was a commotion and a lot of shouting, but no bloodshed.

If you know anything about Compton, though, you know this is not the end of it. Schoolchildren and beggars in the street could tell you that.

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.