Even Investigations Fail to Make L.A. City Hall Exciting

I’m tiptoeing like some gumshoe along the marble corridors radiating from the rotunda in Los Angeles City Hall.

Funny, I don’t see any yellow plastic crime-scene tape stretched across the entrance -- any of the entrances -- to the mayor’s office.

I press an ear to one door, then another. Silence. No riffling sounds of illicit moola being counted. No shirr-and-whir of documents being shredded. No pings of computer messages being deleted.

I don’t even see anyone who looks like she has stuffed secret documents into her boots or crammed them down the back of her skirt to smuggle them out of the building, as that patron saint of secretaries, the loyal Fawn Hall, did for her boss, Oliver North, in the Iran-Contra cover-up.

Really, for a place that’s been spoken of as practically a crime scene, City Hall is a complete letdown. All the back-and-forth about blackmail and blackballing, expletives deleted, pay-to-play shakedowns, grand juries and federal subpoenas -- and not even one solitary process server lurking behind a pillar?

Maybe all the action is down at the waterfront, at the offices of the city Harbor Commission, or out near the LAX flight path, with the Airport Commission.

The two men in the middle of this muddle are Ted Stein, who was the Airport Commission’s president, and Troy Edwards, a deputy mayor who once -- and I really love this verb -- “liaised” to the city’s Big Three departments, the Harbor, the Airport and the Water and Power operations. Both men have quit their jobs, and probably not to spend more time with their families. With their lawyers, maybe.

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The TV news tease-phrase for this is “pay to play,” a matter of whether companies wanting to do business with the airport or the harbor were pressured into donating money to political campaigns, say, like those of the mayor, who appoints the commissioners.

Two grand juries -- a hometown one summoned by the L.A. County D.A., Steve Cooley, and a federal one -- are now looking into all of this. A federal subpoena, the kind that makes you go all watery at the knees, was served on the mayor’s office, forbidding it to destroy any single e-mail sent or received there since Hahn was sworn in nearly three years ago.

The feds have also subpoenaed files from the port director and from the St. Louis-based PR company whose name probably reminds you of packaged yeast but which is familiar to political junkies: Fleishman-Hillard, which in recent years has collected more than $20 million in city contracts.

There has not been, by contrast, any whiff of scandal about pay-to-play shakedowns in the rec and parks department, for those hugely lucrative tetherball concessions. This is all about the Big Three, because that’s where the money is, a billion bucks a year in contracts.

Nothing of this magnitude has happened in City Hall since Mayor Frank Shaw and his brother, Joe, operated a pay-to-play deal out of their offices during the Depression, with Joe peddling answers to civil service tests and other favors while his brother, a former grocery salesman, served as frontman. When Shaw was finally booted out, someone stuck a sign on the City Hall lawn reading “Under new management.”

Last time rumor like this found a solid footing was in 1968, when one of Mayor Sam Yorty’s harbor commissioners was convicted of taking a bribe. That’s the kind of thing Tom Bradley was talking about when he was elected mayor a year later and said that “in Los Angeles today, ‘commissioner’ has too often meant corruption.”

Yorty’s harbor commissioner’s sentence was voided because the jury instructions were flawed. But 30 years later, the guy’s wife won almost $17 million in the lottery, so don’t tell me there are no happy endings in politics.

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On paper, the post of mayor of Los Angeles is about as powerful as wedding-reception coffee, the kind where you can see the bottom of the cup even when it’s full.

Its true power is in its bully pulpit. Some mayors have been bullies, and some have been preachers, but the job demands a bit of showmanship and verve that Jim Hahn only showed us a glimpse of the night he was elected, when he jammed his arms into the air and threw back his head as the music of “I Love L.A.” soared. Whoever slipped something in his lemonade that night, can you please do it again?

(There was a little more pulpit style Monday in his State of the City address and his declaration of zero tolerance for ethical mischief.)

The election for a new mayor is a year off, and so far, Hahn has come across as a cipher. His response to this crisis has been the near-frantic support of almost any kind of campaign ethics reform anyone suggests. I’m tempted to propose using only Monopoly money for campaigns, and I suspect he’d consider it.

But I’m still waiting to hear angry voters railing about this in line at the post office or the coffee joint -- any place beyond the 90012 ZIP Code right outside City Hall’s windows.

If anything would finally, once and for all, get people to care about government in L.A., wouldn’t you think this would be it? At last, personality and story line in L.A. politics!

Evidently not. I guess they pay attention only when it’s Chinatown, Jake, and the sheep are being herded into City Hall, not into voting booths.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com. Her previous columns can be read at www.latimes.com/morrison.