Charming the Angels

By Terry McCarthy

The fire alarm has gone off in councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's office in city hall, and the emergency strobe light is flashing, but he isn't budging. Two days after winning the Los Angeles mayoral election, Villaraigosa has business to do. It is 6 p.m., and he has been up since 3 a.m. In the past two hours alone, his assistant tells him, he has received 47 phone messages. A secretary calls security to find out if the building needs to be evacuated. But Villaraigosa, 52, once described by a fellow Democrat as having as much energy as "a hummingbird in flight," is busy taking another call, that one from Frank McCourt, the owner of the Dodgers, who congratulates the mayor-elect and reminds him that there are seats set aside for any game he chooses to attend.

When the call is over and the fire alarm silenced, this former child of the poor, gang-ridden Latino neighborhood of East L.A. stretches out his arms and says, "Me, mayor of this great city? I can't believe I am standing here." Villaraigosa is poised to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since 1872. Made of equal parts passion and personal charm, he acted during the campaign as if he wanted to shake hands with every one of the city's 4 million citizens. He could not be more different from the man he trounced (59% to 41%), incumbent James Hahn, 54, whose low-key, uncharismatic approach to the mayor's office proved a fatal flaw in an election between two Democrats that turned more on matters of style and leadership than policy.

As a politician, Villaraigosa--who in this race assembled a coalition of black, white and Asian voters as well as Latinos--has long sought to reach beyond his own community. But as mayor of L.A., which is 47% Latino, he is destined to become an icon of the nationally emerging Latino political class. There are two Latino U.S. Senators and 22 Latino mayors in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

The limelight won't be of any help to Villaraigosa as he goes about running the nation's second biggest city, however. He inherits an education system that graduates only 45% of its students from high school, festering gang violence and the worst traffic in the nation. Critics say the mayor-elect is short on substance--"an empty suit," in the words of Joel Kotkin of the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a public-policy think tank. A liberal at heart, Villaraigosa was a union organizer and then president of the Southern California branch of the A.C.L.U. before getting elected to the California state assembly in 1994. He served as speaker of the assembly from 1998 to 2000, then ran for mayor and lost to Hahn in 2001, but was elected to the city council. Throughout his career, he has shown more skill in bringing opposing sides together to negotiate deals than in generating new ideas. In this year's mayoral race he pledged to improve education and increase the number of police but offered few concrete means to achieve either goal.

And like nearly any other career politician, Villaraigosa comes with baggage: he lost the 2001 mayoral election after it was revealed he had written the Clinton White House seeking a pardon for a convicted cocaine dealer, whose father had requested Villaraigosa's help. In this year's campaign he returned $47,000 in questionable donations from employees--and their relatives--of two Florida companies with direct and indirect interests in shops at Los Angeles International Airport.

Villaraigosa is candid about the mistakes he has made. "My whole life has been one of falling down and getting up again," he says. Born Antonio Villar (he added his wife's surname Raigosa when he married), he grew up watching his father beat his mother and then took his own anger onto the streets, getting into fights. He was kicked out of one school, dropped out of another, and probably would never have graduated if not for Herman Katz, a teacher at Roosevelt High, who plucked him from a remedial English class and propelled him on to graduate from UCLA. "It didn't take a genius to figure out there was a lot going on in that head of his. He stood out," says Katz, 73.

Today Villaraigosa stands out in a city full of stars. He calls L.A. "the city of America's promise and its future." In the end it will be his ability to deliver that future, and not his ethnicity, for which he will be remembered. --With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles