A SECOND CHANCE

In a life marked by steep rises and precipitous falls, Antonio Villaraigosa has often sought redemption.

Four years ago, his quest to become the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872 captured international media attention but ended in a crushing and bitter defeat by James K. Hahn.

Since then, Villaraigosa has won a City Council seat representing -- among other areas -- the Eastside neighborhoods where he grew up. He has endured surgeries and gone back to church. And now, though he pledged he wouldn’t do it, Villaraigosa is running again for mayor, hoping for another of the fortunate reversals that have graced his life.

Some things haven’t changed. He still gets up at 5 a.m. and hurls himself into the quiet early-morning mist for a series of workouts up and down the hills of his Mount Washington neighborhood, the start of a day that can include a dozen events. His progress across any room, anywhere, is still slowed by endless handshakes, brilliant smiles and slaps on the back.

But if last time Villaraigosa, 52, exploded onto the political stage, the sweep of his life seeming to embody all the possibilities of Los Angeles, this time is different.

The high school dropout who became speaker of the California Assembly is off to a less blazing start. Pundits murmur that, if he loses this time, the once-limitless luster of his political star will dim. There is also unrest closer to home: Last fall, some of his own constituents launched an effort to recall him from his council seat, saying they were outraged that he had reneged on his promise to serve four full years.

Villaraigosa admits the threat. “I think the prevailing opinion is I’ve got a lot at stake,” he said in an interview at an Eastside restaurant. “I acknowledge that.” He paused for a moment, appearing to choose his words with agonizing care, though he would repeat the phrases almost verbatim in the following weeks.

“I love this city. It’s given me more than I could ever imagine,” he said. “I’m not in this, you know, out of some sense of fear or some need to prove a point. I love this. I love service.... I am running for mayor because I know I have a unique -- in this race -- ability to bring people together, to engage them.”

To Villaraigosa’s supporters, many of whom adore him with a burning devotion, that is a key strength: using charm to craft agreement where none seemed possible.

His detractors have accused Villaraigosa of piggybacking on the achievements of others, and then showing up with a smile to take credit.

As he has moved into this campaign, Villaraigosa has emphasized style over specifics, gliding beyond deep policy discussions in favor of arguing that his leadership abilities give him the edge over other candidates.

A group of neighborhood activists gathered at a Sherman Oaks hospital one recent day, detailing their fears that an influx of apartment buildings would threaten their single-family-home neighborhoods.

Villaraigosa is known as a liberal, and some of the questions had an edge of suspicion.

The candidate sat straight in his chair. “It’s not easy being a leader,” he told them. “Sometimes you gotta talk straight: Anybody who tells you that Los Angeles is going to look like it did 40 years ago is lying.”

Still, he added, if he were mayor, disputes would be talked out. “We need a mayor who will walk into a room full of 300 people and be willing to be screamed at,” he said.

He won applause from the group. But would he win votes?

Credit to His Mother

For Villaraigosa, it all goes back to his deceased mother, Natalia Delgado.

“I’m here today,” he told volunteers last month, “because I had a mother of indomitable spirit and faith, a woman who struggled, sometimes worked two jobs, to put her kids through college. A woman who went through unspeakable circumstances as a victim of domestic violence in a home of alcoholism.”

The candidate was born Antonio Villar on the Eastside in 1953. He combined his surname with that of his wife, Corina Raigosa, when they married in 1987. They have two children, Antonio Jr., 15, and Natalia Fe, 11. Villaraigosa also has two adult daughters from previous relationships.

Villaraigosa’s father was a Mexican immigrant who sometimes beat his mother, the candidate has said, and abandoned the family when Antonio was 5. His little sisters, Deborah and Mary Lou, were toddlers. Villaraigosa’s estranged father refused to comment.

Villaraigosa’s mother held their family together in a two-bedroom apartment in City Terrace. She worked for the state, starting as a secretary and eventually becoming an equal employment compliance officer. Delgado, who learned Latin and a love of reading from the nuns who taught her as a child, read aloud to her children from Keats, the Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe, reciting “The Raven” from memory. Her children recall their home as a place bursting with books and dreams, even as her son lined his shoes with cardboard to make them last.

“If there’s a psychology to why I’m dapperly dressed,” he said, “it’s from all those years walking around with holes in my clothes.”

In the segregated world of 1950s Los Angeles, Natalia Delgado also demonstrated a gift for friendship with dizzyingly diverse groups.

It was a trait her son inherited. Early in life, he acquired the nickname “Tony Rapp,” for his propensity to chatter all day long.

Jesus Quinones, a childhood friend who is now a Los Angeles labor lawyer and -- like many from Villaraigosa’s past -- still in close touch, also remembers Villaraigosa as “bookish and nerdy.”

Although Villaraigosa was at times an angry young man, Quinones said, “he was also quite the academic, and fortunately for him he was able to draw on that.”

But in his junior year, Villaraigosa was expelled from Cathedral High School, the conservative institution on the edge of downtown where his mother had sent him.

He has said that his slide into wild behavior and bad grades began when a benign tumor appeared on his spine when he was 15, temporarily paralyzing him from the waist down, knocking him off the football team and sapping his faith in himself. But he also attributed some of his behavior to growing up in a home without a father.

“I developed a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I became very angry with the world.”

The tumor alleviated by surgery, he wound up at Roosevelt High School, a sprawling public campus in Boyle Heights.

Placed in remedial classes, he was disillusioned, and he dropped out. But he also cemented at least two relationships that stayed with him as he moved on to later success.

One was with a kindly English teacher, Herman Katz, who said he saw a spark in the wild boy and encouraged him to come back to school, which he completed by attending both day and night. Katz even paid for his SAT, a gift Katz had forgotten about until Villaraigosa reminded him a decade ago.

The other was with a boy named Gil Cedillo, now a state senator. Eventually, Villaraigosa joined Cedillo at UCLA. After graduation, the two men began a steady climb through Los Angeles’ union and activist circles.

In 1991, when Villaraigosa was an organizer with the Los Angeles teachers union, county Supervisor Gloria Molina tapped him to be on what is now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board.

Even back then, according to his wife, it was apparent that he would run for office.

“We never really talked about it, but I think in the back of my mind, I always knew,” said the soft-spoken teacher, who met her husband at a news conference in 1985 and married him two years later. “Everyone has their gifts, and I really think this is his.”

In 1993, Villaraigosa got his chance, running for the Assembly seat being vacated by Richard Polanco, a fiery leader behind the rise of many Latino elected officials in California.

Villaraigosa did not have Polanco’s blessing: He ran against Polanco’s chosen successor -- his former chief of staff, Bill Mabie -- in a brutal campaign. Villaraigosa won, a success he attributed to a grass-roots organizing across ethnic lines.

Victory was soon followed by upheaval: Corina filed for divorce within days, amid revelations that he had had an affair. The couple would later reconcile, but the incident had lasting repercussions among friends who were also political allies.

Among them was Molina, who said her personal relationship with Villaraigosa had been strained.

“Antonio has such amazing promise for the city,” said Molina, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race. Still, she added: “At the end of the day, you have to remember that he is a politician, and sometimes that doesn’t make for the best of friendships.”

A Skilled Negotiator

Villaraigosa spent his six years in the Assembly working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to put together bipartisan compromises to float school and park bonds, expand healthcare for poor families and impose bans on assault weapons.

Those achievements would not have been predicted by many when he arrived in Sacramento in 1994, an Eastside lawmaker with an almost stereotypical liberal resume, including stints as a union organizer and as president of the local ACLU chapter.

But those who braced for a left-wing radical underestimated his skills as a negotiator -- and his hard-to-resist charm, which soon had Republicans from the conservative Central Valley singing his praises.

Propelled by his people skills and the turnover caused by term limits, Villaraigosa rocketed into the top job as speaker in 1998, four years after joining the Assembly.

In 1998, he helped spearhead a $9-billion school bond measure that offered a little something for everyone: Democrats got extra money for urban schools, Republicans got a cap on developer fees. All involved -- it is a safe bet -- also received a brilliant smile and a slap on the back.

But there were some he never won over, particularly fellow Democrats loyal to Polanco.

State Sen. Martha Escutia once accused Villaraigosa of appropriating her plan to provide medical coverage for children in low-income households, which became the Healthy Families legislation. Polanco, who is now backing state Sen. Richard Alarcon’s mayoral campaign, compared Villaraigosa’s action to a student who steals another’s homework. Villaraigosa brushed aside those charges and has pointed out that he had introduced similar bills as far back as 1996.

Other lawmakers said they were grateful when Villaraigosa pushed their legislation. Former Assemblyman Fred Keeley said Villaraigosa’s involvement in Keeley’s $2.1-billion park bond bill ensured its safe passage through the Legislature and approval by voters in 2000.

“I think he is genuinely passionate about public policy and a progressive agenda that I care about,” Keeley said. “I am one of those people who is smitten by what I think is his genuine charisma.”

But amid the success came another reversal. In late 1999, Villaraigosa was seeking to remain speaker as he ramped up his first bid for mayor. But he and his replacement as speaker -- his old friend and current mayoral competitor, Bob Hertzberg -- feuded over the timing of the transition and, later, the joint Assembly campaign fund controlled by the speaker. Villaraigosa refuses to discuss details of their rift.

Turned out of the speaker’s office earlier than he had wished, Villaraigosa focused on the race for mayor.

Buoyed by influential endorsements and an effervescent campaign style, he won the general election. Hahn, a career city politician who had never lost a race, took second, earning a place in the runoff.

It turned into a bitter, brutal campaign. In the waning days, Hahn hit his opponent with a television ad dramatizing Villaraigosa’s letter to the White House on behalf of a convicted drug dealer, Carlos Vignali. The ad showed cocaine being cut as a narrator said: “Los Angeles can’t trust Antonio Villaraigosa.” Hahn won by seven points.

Villaraigosa endured two surgeries after election day, one on his vocal cords and the other on his spine, to eradicate a recurrence of his benign tumor. He has said that the 2001 campaign, in which his children had to “go to school and hear ‘Your father sells drugs,’ ” knit his family closer together.

It also brought them, particularly Villaraigosa, raised Catholic, back to church.

Villaraigosa announced after that race that he planned to spend time with his family. But a year and a half later, he emerged from private life with a run for City Council, handily defeating incumbent Nick Pacheco in another bruising campaign.

Unlike some of his colleagues, Villaraigosa has not used his time on the council to push through myriad laws. In his first year, he proposed just one major policy initiative, to negotiate drug discounts for city residents. Ten months later, the plan has yet to emerge from committee.

But he has played negotiator: Relying on contacts in Washington, he had a key role in securing $800 million in federal funding for the extension of the Metro Gold Line to East Los Angeles.

And in the fall of 2003, when Los Angeles was paralyzed by a transit strike, Villaraigosa got the two sides talking again, paving the way for a deal that got buses back on the street.

“Without him getting involved the way he did, we’d still be on strike,” said mechanics union chief Neil Silver after the strike ended.

In the last 18 months, he has established 80 neighborhood watch groups in his district and drawn more than 6,000 community volunteers to participate in tree plantings, making murals and painting out graffiti.

On the day he announced his council run, Villaraigosa also said he would not seek the mayor’s office in 2005.

“Should the people honor me with their support, I believe I have to unequivocally say to them that I intend to fulfill my full term,” he said.

For months, he stuck to that refrain. “I’m enjoying being a councilman,” he would say with a Cheshire cat grin whenever reporters would ask about a possible mayoral run.

Then he began hedging and flirting. He admitted he wanted to be mayor “like nothing else,” but said he had not yet made up his mind. Months later, he said his family had given its blessing for him to run and that he would make a decision soon.

Through much of the spring and summer last year, Villaraigosa traveled to Democratic Party events while serving as a national co-chairman for Sen. John Kerry’s presidential bid. Finally, the week after the Democratic National Convention, he flew in from the East Coast and summoned reporters to his Mount Washington home.

For a man whose public persona is usually characterized by an almost giddy ebullience, however, Villaraigosa appeared notably solemn as he announced he was getting into the race.

As for his campaign promise, Villaraigosa said it was overridden by his concern over what he called a crisis in leadership in Los Angeles. He was urged to run by people all over the city, including many in his district, he said.

He was off to a late start. Other candidates had been in for months, raising money and locking up endorsements.

Key elements of his 2001 campaign have deserted him, with organized labor siding with Hahn and the Democratic Party endorsing no one. Influential leaders, including philanthropist Eli Broad, have also switched to Hahn.

Council members Cindy Miscikowski and Eric Garcetti, both Villaraigosa backers last time, have sided with the mayor. Even Cedillo, the state senator who grew up with Villaraigosa, has backed Hahn this time around, saying he is the best person to lead the city.

Although he has raised money at a comfortable clip and has many firmly in his camp, Villaraigosa has been dogged by whispers that he lacks the zing he brought to the race in 2001. But he campaigns on.

“Too many politicians have a fear of failure,” he said. “My life has shown that I’m not afraid to fail, that success is achieved by those who don’t give up.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Antonio Villaraigosa

Born: Montebello, Jan. 23, 1953

Residence: Mount Washington, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles

Education: UCLA, bachelor’s degree (1977); People’s College of Law, law degree (1985)

Personal: Married to Corina Villaraigosa. Four children, two of them adults; one grandchild

Party: Democrat

Career: Los Angeles city councilman 2003-present; Assemblyman 1994-2000 (speaker of the California Assembly 1998-2000)

Strategy: Villaraigosa is trying to capitalize on his base on the Eastside and among liberals while attracting votes in the Valley and South Los Angeles. He is portraying himself as a consensus builder and inspiring leader who can solve the city’s problems by bringing people together.