The Los Angeles Police Department has a task force assigned to the burglaries and says there are at least 30 officers working the investigation at any given time.

Crimes often tell something about a neighborhood, and these are no exception.

Although the Westside has grown to mean affluence, conspicuous consumption and rude drivers tearing through boulevards and streets in their SUVs, some of the area reflects an older, more modest and largely forgotten way of life.
Before and after World War II, single story, fairly modest homes were built on the flatlands south of Santa Monica Boulevard from Sepulveda eastward toward the Cheviot Hills-Rancho city park. Young families moved in. Children grew up there and eventually moved away. Today, while new two story homes are changing the neighborhood, many of the old one-story homes remain. Older women, often widows, live in some of them, gardening, visiting, keeping up a slower and lonelier version of a life pattern they and their families established many years ago.

These are the victims. In all but one case, the burglar entered the home between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. He enters through locked and unlocked windows. He appears at his victims’ bedside and says give me your valuables or I’ll kill you. He goes through every door and closet looking for valuables. He picks on the old and the weak, those least likely to resist. He carries a flashlight and screwdriver and wears dark clothing, dark gloves and ski mask. Victims describe him as an African American man, about six feet tall and weighting between 200 and 220 pounds.

The mystery is frightening and intriguing. How does he know his victim is an older woman living alone? How does he know she has enough possessions to make a burglary worthwhile?

He’s a pro, police say, and familiar with the neighborhood. How did he learn about the neighborhood? Does he live in the area? Did he become familiar with the homes by working for one of the fund raising groups who send frequently send people door to door? Could he be someone who blends in so well that we never give him a second look—a postman, a paramedic or even someone whose job it is to protect the neighborhood?

Or does he work with one of the utilities that serve the neighborhood? We had a couple of such workers who spent a long time in our house one day, going through every room looking for the source of the problem, which they never found. Soon after their visit we were burglarized and lost a couple of computers plus jewelry. We were away from the house a short time. The burglars worked speedily and knowledgeably. Several weeks later, a family nearby had exactly the same experience—a visit from the same utility and days later a burglary.

In the current case, the police seem to give some credence to the roaming charity or utility worker theory. After a briefing by the LAPD, the Westwood South of Santa Monica Homeowners Association e-mailed a “crime update” with a number of warnings, including “Do not open your door to a stranger. If someone claims to be from a utility or other agency, ask for photo ID.”

The break-ins have people on the Westside, especially the elderly, on edge. The eeriest part is that in this most anonymous of cities someone knows so much about where these women live and what they have in their homes.

That’s the news I took away from a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum lunch where Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl was the speaker. He represents the district and is one of the architects of the modernization.

I hate to be negative about anything Rosendahl says. As he began his speech at the luncheon, he complimented me hugely for my performance as a journalist and as a guest on his cable television show. But duty calls.

What I hate most about LAX are the food outlets (I wouldn’t call them restaurants) and the marginally maintained bathrooms. Second on my hate list are the lack of a variety of shops, found in other airports, and the generally dreary look of the place—not to mention the crowded terminals.

Rosendahl promised us a terrifically improved Bradley international terminal. But that’s no help to us poor domestic travelers.
And he didn’t mention the food outlets, shops and bathrooms in the domestic terminals.

The populist outspoken Rosendahl is an outsider on the council. He’d really be an outsider if he talked about the true reason for the sorry conditions of airport concessions. Being too much of a truth teller doesn’t help you with the council crowd.

Big companies want these concessions and are giving big contributions and hiring hot lobbyists to help them win a franchise. This is a gold mine for council members and their campaign treasuries and for the lobbyists who have such enormous clout at city hall. None of them want to shut down the gold mine.

Our airport should be as good as San Francisco’s. There, travelers find good if not great restaurants and pleasant shops that sell the city’s signature products like sourdough French bread and Ghirardelli Chocolate. There is also an excellent bookstore.

Why not have an open competition for restaurants and shops here? We love food and shopping in LA. Let’s have a tasting and shopping contest for the concessions, with the prizes going to the best cooks and retailers instead of to a bunch of tasteless backroom operators.

In seeking a subsidy from the City Redevelopment Agency, the firm’s chairman, Lawrence Bond, boasted in writing of his ability to get taxpayer subsidies, lenient parking requirements and approval for high -density projects. Bond told the city pension board, Zahniser reported, that it has proven ability and resources to capitalize on government subsidies.

The company and its employees have given more than $82,000 in contributions to city politicians and ballot measures.

This is a prime example of how the inside city hall game works. Nobody has ever heard of this company. Journalists and bloggers write much about the mayor, but it took David Zahniser to uncover one of the real players, the company chairman.

People like Bond really run city hall.

It was excellent public service reporting and it’s great that the Times has Zahniser in city hall. Hopefully he’ll survive, remain and prosper. But the paper is taking a direction away from such serious, digging reporters. This is really important local news, but is it hot enough —in the sexy sense—for the new Times? It was on B-l. Why wasn’t the story where it should have been, on A-1, the front page?

The story took time and energy—and a reporter with a lot of knowledge about how Los Angeles works. Do such reporters have a place in the Times? Or will their departures continue to be noted in endless wakes, as Jim Newton’s was?

Getting King functioning again is the most important issue in the race for the 2nd Supervisorial District seat. The hospital in South Los Angeles County has been closed for 10 months after it failed federal inspections. It’s criminal that it remains closed, but that’s what happens in the do-nothing behemoth, Los Angeles County government.

The unions representing county workers, including those from the shuttered hospital, are supporting Ridley -Thomas. They have donated at least $4 million to an independent expenditure committee campaigning for him. A total of $980,000 of it came in during the last two weeks of the primary campaign, which ended with Ridley-Thomas finishing ahead of Parks but short the majority needed for victory. The runoff will be held in November, on the same day as the presidential election.

Both have pledged to restore the hospital. But no matter who wins, the unions will be the real power in shaping the contracts and civil service rules that will govern the nurses and other medical personnel at a reopened King and the other county hospitals.

Union reps, county bureaucrats and supervisors and their aides will resolve these matters in secret, as is the custom for big issues in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, even though they involve major questions of public policy. In this instance, the county imposes secrecy because of its lawyers’ broad interpretation of an exemption from the state open meeting law for anything dealing with personnel. The way the county sees it, that could be most anything.

Nobody wants to talk much about this aspect of the King issue, not even someone unconnected to the county, like Robert K. Ross, president and chief executive of the California Endowment, a private foundation interested in improving access to health care.

Last month, Garrett Therolf reported in the Los Angeles Times that when Ross contacted county officials to help find an institution to take over King, his letter “did not address another issue that many said was a stumbling block [to opening King]: whether an operator would be required to employ members of the county’s public employee unions and be bound by county personnel rules that make it difficult to discipline or transfer workers who harm patients.”

Of course the unions will insist on such a requirement, and make their feelings known in the closed-door meetings with supervisors, supervisorial aides and bureaucrats.

Ridley-Thomas and Parks proposed solutions that shed no light on how they will handle the union issue. Parks wants King and the other hospitals run by a new authority “sufficiently insulated from political vagaries.” Ridley-Thomas wants the hospital to be run by “an administrator and governance structure that operates outside L.A. County’s political authority and its health services bureaucracy.”
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is not up for re-election, said in a Times op-ed piece that he wants the hospital turned over to the University of California, which would be “unencumbered by the county’s human resources and hiring rules.” He did not address the union issue.

In bringing up the unions and civil service rules in his story, Times reporter Therolf raised an important question. It deserves to be answered in the campaign, especially by Ridley-Thomas, the recipient of union financial support.

The dream was the topic Saturday May 30 when ACORN, the community activist organization, held a press conference-demonstration in front of a small house at 755 East 92nd Street, a home headed for foreclosure, its owner one of the many casualties of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The street is broad with bungalows on either side. It was quiet at midday, with most of the activity occurring at the bungalow owned by Millicent (Mama) Hill, who was an English teacher at Crenshaw High School before she retired in 2000 and set up a program in her home to help young women and men avoid the gang life and crime. ACORN volunteers, most of them older men and women, gathered in Mama Hill’s front yard, all of them wearing the organization’s bright red t-shirts.

Mama Hill has been operating the program on her pension, small donations and with the help of friends and supporters who assist her with tutoring, mentoring, anger management and other services needed in a neighborhood that is pretty thick with gang action despite its peaceful appearance on a Saturday.

With expenses exceeding income, and house prices rising fast, Hill refinanced her house. “I needed a loan quickly,” she said. She was promised one at 7.5 percent interest but before she signed the final papers, she was told the interest would be 10 percent “but they promised it could be renegotiated.” When she obtained the loan, the house was appraised at $405,000 but has since dropped far below that. She fell behind in her payments, and the mortgage holder is now foreclosing.

One of her supporters, Cedric R. Brown, president of Youth Incentive Programs Inc said Hill got the loan at a time when housing prices were exploding, even in this modest neighborhood, and mortgage brokers flooded the area with tempting refinance offers. “The predatory lenders took advantage,” he said. Some of borrowers were hard-pressed, like Hill. Others were tempted by the chance to pay off debts and improve their living conditions. Houses once valued at $450,000 recently dropped to $385,000 to $360,000.

Hill spoke to supporters and the two or three journalists who showed up. Then the ACORN volunteers walked the neighborhood, going door to door to urge support for Isadore Hill, a Compton city councilman running for Assembly in the area and for others who support bills pending in Sacramento designed to crack down on predatory lenders. Given the power of the financial business in the Capitol, I’d say those bills face a rough future.

Afterward, I drove a few blocks east to 1233 East 92nd Street, a brown stucco home with a tile roof and an excellently tended front yard. It is an unmarked monument to working class L.A.’s dream of home ownership.

In 1942, an African American family, the Laws, bought this very house. The neighborhood was then predominantly white. But the house deed included a restrictive covenant banning a sale to a racial minority. Such covenants were common in those days. Henry Laws and his family were African Americans, The Laws family fought the covenant. Charlotta Bass, the fiery editor of the California Eagle, espoused their cause. A judge ordered Mr. and Mrs. Laws and daughter jailed. Their sons returned from service to find their parents and sister in jail. The Laws eventually prevailed and courts began overturning the covenants.

The saga of the Laws family is a great inspiration to ACORN and its volunteers as they fight predatory lenders who, in their own way, are as vicious as the segregationists of 60 years ago