A Secret Weapon of Law and Odor

Last time I looked in on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Shaun Mathers, he was refining a revolutionary crime-fighting technique at an abandoned Compton motel frequented by drug dealers, prostitutes and squatters.

Mathers took a little white tube of something called Skunk Shot, squeezed it, and out came a disgusting, horrible-smelling ooze. I can testify that it was foul enough to drive away miscreants, curl your hair and gag a horse.

To freshen the story, I checked in last week with Mathers, brother of Jerry Mathers, the star of “Leave It to Beaver.”

At one point, Lt. Mathers called Jerry and handed me the cellphone. I asked the former TV star if he thought his little brother was crazy.

“Crazy like a fox,” Jerry Mathers said from his home in Valencia. “Shaun was always the brains of the family.”

That’s why “the Beav” is planning to help market his little brother’s stinky ideas, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the year since my column appeared and was ripped off by other publications, Lt. Mathers has fielded a steady stream of inquiries from police departments, building management companies and the United States Army.

Yes, the Army.

“I got an e-mail from a major with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad,” Mathers said.

Mathers responded immediately and was told that the major’s boss, a general, had a military application in mind for Skunk Shot. But the major did not reveal what that top-secret application might be.

Mathers and his Skunk Squad partner, Deputy Scott Gage, volunteered to personally deliver a supply of Skunk Shot to the troops, but the major requested that they mail it instead.

Mathers never heard back. But within a week of the mailing, Saddam Hussein was captured.

Coincidence?

The despot was forced out of a spider hole and appeared addled, aged and cross-eyed.

“He looked like the kind of guy we would use it on,” Mathers said. “He was in the kind of place where we would have used it too. It could be a coincidence, but I choose to think not.”

Owners of the New Zealand company that makes Skunk Shot, which is primarily used by gardeners and ranchers to repel animals, flew to Los Angeles and recruited Mathers as the product’s North American sales rep.

His first sale was to a Florida police department that wanted to address a loitering problem, and the second was to a Minnesota building management company that had an issue with squatters.

A number of police agencies are now using Skunk Shot on a trial basis, and others who are interested can find product and contact information by going to www.trile.org and clicking on the skunk.

Meanwhile, the war on crime in Los Angeles County has escalated under Mathers and the Skunk Squad. He now has a product that smells like cat urine and another that smells like a fetid cocktail of rotten eggs, natural gas and petroleum. A dead flesh scent is under consideration, and annoying noises might be next, as a crowd dispersal weapon.

“Now we’re working on a delivery system,” Mathers said of the horrid scents. “We’re thinking about Wrist-Rockets.”

This gave me an idea.

I live three doors away from a teenage girl who has the loudest parties in the history of juvenile delinquency. These blast fests always extend into the wee hours. Police come and shut the party down, then leave, and it starts again.

With a Wrist-Rocket and a skunk bomb, I could send partygoers scattering. It might be effective not just for crowd control, but for birth control. It cannot be easy, even for a teenager, to get in the mood with someone who smells like a skunk.

Jerry Mathers agreed with me that there might be no limit to the number of law enforcement and novelty applications for smelly products. It’s the kind of thing you would have seen in those comic book ads 30 years ago, where you saved up coupons for X-ray glasses and whatnot.

Once his little brother figures out exactly how to market Skunk Shot and other odors, Jerry Mathers said, he’ll gladly use his celebrity to be the pitchman.

Lt. Mathers and I, filled with the holiday spirit after leaving a bar in downtown L.A., decided to experiment with his products. He opened his trunk and removed the cat urine essence, the rotten egg stuff, and a new and improved form of Skunk Shot that resembles kitty litter.

The intersection of 2nd and Hill streets, on some evenings, has a “Blade Runner” vibe. We saw someone going through a garbage can and asked if he would help us test some new crime-fighting products, but he said he was too busy.

“I’m not interested,” he insisted as he sifted through trash.

Next we saw a man with a mohawk haircut and a military jacket with a peace sign on it. I asked if he would consider helping us and he shot me a withering glance before saying, “Shut up.”

“A guy with a peace sign just told us to shut up,” I said to Mathers.

Next we came upon a couple who appeared to have just won a Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen look-alike contest. Sid wasn’t interested in helping out, but his girlfriend was game. We let her have a whiff of the cat urine first.

“That smells like garlic cream cheese,” she said.

Don’t ever order a bagel with this woman.

The rotten egg scent made her flinch, but the kitty litter form of skunk odor really knocked her out.

Imagine this, says Mathers:

Someone steals your car and you remotely activate a skunk bomb.

Someone attacks you and you spray him with a scent that helps police locate the skunk.

It’s good to know someone is thinking about these things, because crime never sleeps.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.

com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.