Wanted: ‘Fixer’ for Raccoon Problem

You just can’t know what calamity lies in wait on the road of life. I never would have predicted the raccoon problem, for example, nor did I ever imagine I’d be paying good money for coyote urine.

“Bad raccoons,” my daughter now says every time we leave the house and see the damage they’ve done to the garden.

They come out at night, the cowards. They hit the neighbor’s fig and orange trees, make a mess on the back deck, and then come up front to dig for worms. The varmints have moved heavy flagstones, uprooted plants and burrowed into the new lawn, over and over and over again.

“This is what you need,” the man at Sunset Nursery said, handing me a box of powdered coyote urine.

The problem with coyote urine is that it smells like coyote urine. The first night I hung the plastic bags in my yard, the raccoons were willing to believe a coyote lurked. By the second night, I could hear them laughing. I turned a table upside down and put it over the spot where they nose into the ground and dig up worms. But the raccoons just tore up another spot, and if I’m not mistaken, I think they urinated on the coyote urine.

A recently departed editor who shall remain anonymous suggested I borrow his air rifle to address the problem. But I was already in enough trouble with animal lovers, having failed to save a dog in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

What I really needed, I realized, was a fixer. Someone with a landscaping or trapping background who could discreetly take care of the job and dispose of the evidence. But where do you find such a person?

In your Sunday Times.

I grabbed the paper and began reading Ted Rohrlich’s front-page story about the billboard owners who allegedly bribed a harem of public officials to erect and protect the billboards in their half-billion-dollar business.

In a move that will get the company into the Knucklehead Hall of Fame if proven true, the owners allegedly had some Canary Island palm trees near LAX poisoned because they blocked the view of their billboards.

The owners, brothers Brian and Drake Kennedy of Regency Outdoor Advertising, offered up to $260,000 worth of free advertising in 2001 to promote former mayor Slim Jim Hahn’s candidacy.

That alone raises questions about their judgment.

They have denied any wrongdoing, including responsibility for the palms. But a onetime Regency executive disputed that during a deposition in a lawsuit against his former employer.

“Drake ... was really proud of the fact” that the Canary Island palms were poisoned, said former executive J. Keith Stephens.

And ex-Regency attorney Paul Fisher, whom I spoke to Tuesday afternoon, claimed in a 2003 memo that Kennedy once told him the proper way to kill a palm tree was “either with a poison or with a copper spike.”

Nobody’s proved Regency did it, but three of the palm trees died.

Naturally, I began to get ideas.

If one of the Kennedy brothers is free today, could he please call?

I need to find a gardener who’s got more than a rake and a hoe in his truck. Besides my raccoon problem, one neighbor’s got a tree I don’t care for.

In a deposition, Stephens said Drake Kennedy hired a guy named Chino to play Paul Bunyan.

“They had their own corporate hit men to kill trees,” Stephens explained.

If there’s a movie in this, I’ve got dibs on the screenplay.

The talented Chino, according to Stephens, went to Sunset and chopped off a tree at its base.

“And he drug it up [the street] and into the hills and cut it up there,” Stephens testified.

Chino. That’s who I need. But what heading do I look under in the Yellow Pages?

Rohrlich’s story, by the way, got the attention of three L.A. City Council members. On Tuesday, they called for an investigation into the deaths of the palm trees. While they’re at it, I’d like an investigation into what goofball had them planted there in 2000, at $10,000 apiece, to impress delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

The council also called for an inventory of the roughly 10,000 billboards -- owned by Regency and other companies -- that litter the city landscape. If, as estimated by the city, one-third of them were illegally erected, the council members would like City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo to sue. The same Delgadillo who got $125,000 in free advertising from Regency in 2001.

Rocky, a true overachiever, makes the paper twice today. The other story says he accepted thousands of dollars in political donations from two alleged slumlords after settling a lawsuit against them.

I don’t have that kind of money to spend. But I’ve got a hundred bucks for anyone who can make my raccoons disappear.

Are you out there, Chino?