The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 42

1 0 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3. 1995 LOS ANGELES TlMFi r. Metro News Tucker Testifies HI I Ml He Detected Only 'Honorable' Intent Energy from the incinerator; wa to be sold to Southern Californi Edison. il i Tucker said the 1991 meetih '(' vJ" had been arranged by Robert pay in, Compton's former planning (ji rector who was working as consultant for Macardican's Cbmp ton Energy Systems. "What was your understand of the meeting? asked Ramsey.

"Mr. Macardican wanted what he didn't do in 1984," repli Tucker, "to effectively educate ati lobby all the members of the city fc-'V. A Compton, basically to lobby an educate them." 'V sr. ir' Macardican, who testified for t(i prosecution at the start of the tria 9, said his proposal failed in 5 198 7V." because he refused to pay a bribe to Rep. Mervyn M.

DymalM Tucker predecessor in Congres: Dymally has denied the charge. At one point in the transcript Macardican tells Tucker, I maae lot of mistakes, not knowing an better. I won't make thos again." In his response oxi', th witness stand, Tucker said hh Trial: Com ton congressman takes stand for the First time in federal bribery case. By DAVID ROSENZWEIG TIMES STAFF WRITER Testifying for the first time in his own defense, U.S. Rep.

Walter R. Tucker III told a federal court jury Thursday he had no idea that anything illegal was being proposed during a luncheon meeting with an undercover FBI informant in 1991. "I perceived only honorable intentions," Tucker said about his first meeting with businessman John Macardican, who was wearing a transmitter under his shirt as they talked about a waste-to-energy conversion plant that Macardican wanted to build in Compton. Tucker, then Compton's mayor, is accused of extorting $30,000 and soliciting another $250,000 in bribes from Macardican's firm in exchange for his vote on the proposed waste project. The government contends that the 38-year-old congressman made his first bribe overture during lunch with Macardican on May 30, 1991, in a swanky private club at the Long Beach World Trade Center.

The alleged bribe demands and subsequent payments to Tucker were documented on nearly 30 hours of FBI audiotapes and videotapes, portions of which have been played to the U.S. District Court jury. Picking out quotations from a transcript of that lunch, defense attorney Robert Ramsey Jr. on Thursday asked Tucker to give his interpretation of what transpired. Tucker said he told Macardican from the outset that he had an "open mind" about his proposal.

In 1984, the same proposal was killed by the City Council amid intense community opposition. The $250-million project called for recycling and burning rubbish from cities throughout the area. no idea this might have beenj rererence to Drmery. "The first time I heard about th allegations concerning Congress man Dymally was in this investi Fancy Footwork gation, he said, According to the transcript, Ma 1-V cardican tells Tucker, 1 11 whatever has to be done." Tucke testified that he "perceived onH honorable intent" in that He said he thought Macardicai was simply seeking sound advic from someone who knew Compton "He was at his wit's end," Tucke said. "He was wanting me to giy him some guidance and direction He didn't have anyone to tell hin Jimmy Fotso of the Watts Towers Art Center leads Manchester Elementary student Nicole Hall through an African folk dance.

Mayor Richard Riordan, right, tries to follow in Fotso's footsteps. About 80 schoolchildren, including twins Anthoniece and Anthonette Bryant, left, helped launch "Art Partners" program at City Hall ceremony Thursday. Photos by KEN LUBAS Los Angeles Times where all the bones were buried" Prosecutors had objected th selected use of quotations frofo th transcript, contending that the would mislead the jury. But Judg Consuelo B. Marshall overruled th objections and allowed the defens 'v(.

to proceed. However, trial halted for the daN before the defense could Solici Please see TUCKER, Bl PERIMETERS PATT MORRISON Mew Flaws Found in Workers' Comp A Statue That Will Stand for Change hopes, and to that end he filled this warehouse with anything that might become useful: boxes of plumbing elbows, stiff lassos of wire, pounds and pounds of bolts and bits, boxes of ceramic tile, perhaps the same kind of tile that Simon Rodia used in making the spired and inspired Watts Towers a mile or so away. The boxes of tiles had to be shoved out of the way so sculptor Nijel Binns would have room to work, and sometimes the people who come to watch him have told him, "The Watts Towers don't represent me but this this represents me." The Watts Towers appear in the world's art books and guidebooks. Beneath the beams of this corrugated steel warehouse, with the paint coming off in cobwebby strips, the sculptor Nijel just Nijel, please is creating another Watts monument. Right now it is foam and clay.

By next year it will be bronze, 16 feet high, and it will show Watts what it could be. The warehouse is the biggest building on the grounds of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. It survived the rioters who stormed the gates and burned the committee's offices to the ground, looted and put the torch to the coin laundry, the toy store, the chili parlor, the food stamp center and youth center, and chased the group's founders down Central Avenue with guns drawn. Those were the riots of 1992. The first riots, the Watts riots, were in 1965, the same year that an assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan cautioned that a "tangle of pathology" threatened to destroy the nation's black neighborhoods.

It was the year that Ted Watkins Sr. started up the Watts Labor Community Action Committee to find jobs, find housing, keep kids busy, give rides to doctors' offices the counterweights to pathology. Watkins was a man of far sight and vast Whenever the Beltway boys get up a good head of steam and start chuffing about welfare and illiteracy and illegitimacy, they know and we know they're talking about i places like Watts. To the extent that numbers can 'i! approximate life, they have a point: Watts is 4 virtually laboratory-perfect specimen for demographers' scrutiny of poverty. Two out of three people are on welfare, two out of three adults are high school dropouts.

In they earned an average of $4,500 a year, while everyone else in the county averaged four times that. How far it is from mainstream, mercantile America can be judged by the trade on 'i Central Avenue: employment training welfare office, D.A.'s family and child support; unit, Social Security. When there are stores and no shopping center came to Watts until nearly 20 years after the first "1 riots they are not chain stores, lavish with Please see MORRISON, B14 from 16 to 91 weeks, adding to the time employees were off work and on the workers' compensation rolls. Other findings included a lack of separation of duties, management laxity in insisting on full documentation of claims, payments of bills for ineligible injuries and failure to implement earlier audit recommendations. The Personnel Department, which oversees the workers' compensation program, has been striving to revamp the system since revelations of a major fraud ring involving a department employee caused a sensation in mid-1994.

Until then, a series of warnings that the system was badly flawed had largely been ignored. Earlier this year, Mayor Richard Riordan and Councilman Joel Please see AUDIT, B14 By JEAN MERL TIMES STAFF WRITER it a XLos Angeles' troubled workers' compensation system, which has bqen undergoing a major overhaul for more than a year, is not yet out of Jhe woods, according to a city controller's audit released Thursday. Controller Rick Tuttle said the, audit, conducted in the wake of a highly public 1994 scandal, rein-i forced the findings of several earli-! and "discovered several new areas of concern." i Among the new revelations is evidence that the city may have million through unneces- sary payments because it was slow to start injured employees in voca- tional rehabilitation programs. Based on a review of eight cases, the audit found that delays ranged Only in LA. BY STEVE HARVEY S7 THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES LAs the place-again and again: Is there no end to the spate of catastrophes that L.A.

must suffer on the screen and in novels? One of the, latest is, "The End of the Age," a "Christian thriller" written by televangelist Pat Robertson in which a meteor strikes the City of Angels. It causes I OFFERS some nasty problems though it doesn't do as much COMPETITIVE PROMOTION City Council members and city department heads get paid so much money. Of course, it also applies to private industry the legal profession, for instance. YOU BETTER HAVE A GOOD EXPLANATION, IRS: Daniel J.B. Mitchell of UCLA found "an interesting bit of information for anyone facing an IRS audit." It's a 1995 report from the U.S.

General Accounting Office. "IRS Financial Audit." It says: "GAO cannot express an opinion on the reliability of the financial statements of the Internal Revenue Service. Among other reasons, total revet nues collected could not be verified, amounts collected for various types of taxes could not be substantiated and estimates of a accounts receivable were not dependable." damage to Hollywood Boulevard as the MTA has. MECHANICAL REPAIR SUPERVISOR (Code No. 3795) THE SALARY for Mechanical Repair Supervisor is flat-rated at $3967 a month.

In some positions, higher salaries are paid for obnoxious work. ISN'T THIS THE CITY OF We guess it's tough to stay nice and get ahead. "AVOID THIS MOVIE" GOD: Robertson isn't exactly a L.A. booster. When a fire broke out at Universal Studios five years ago, the televangelist suggested that the inferno was "the judgment of God," the supreme movie reviewer.

Robertson explained that "it's an interesting thing that the company that produced 'The Last Temptation of which many people thought was blasphemous in the extreme, finds this kind of activity taking place." (As if poor Universal hadn't already suffered enough from the movie's disastrous performance at the box office.) Investigators, by the way, found a more earthly cause for the fire an arsonist. Maybe the IRS should hire Block. II such tunes as "It's Too Late to Say You're Sorry." And they drowned out defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro, who were gabbing with the media. Shapiro, offended at the interruption of this sacred rite, accused the musicians of staging "a spectacle." We're surprised he didn't sue. WHY IT'S NO FUN FIGHTING CITY HALL: The mail carrier brought us a document that explains why Trojans are expected to win.

It centers on the halftime show by Stanford's irreverent band. Will the topic be O.J. Simpson, the ex-USC star? (It's halftime for Simpson in a sense anyway with the criminal trial behind him, and the civil suits still to come.) A year ago, when Stanford was in town to play UCLA, 21 band members gathered outside the courthouse one day during the Simpson trial. Wearing red shorts and red band jackets, they played miscelLAnv: Tired of having to tell your brother-in-law to stop smoking in your house? Let the Cigarette Smoke-. Buster do it.

A press release from Voice Products of Cleveland, Ohio, says that its sneaky product senses tobacco smoke and "then plays a verba) message, which makes it ideal to enforce no-smok, ing rules in public andor private locations." ITS ONLY HALFTIME: There's plenty of suspense surrounding Saturday's football matchup between USC and Stanford at the Coliseum, but it has nothing to do with the outcome of the game, which the 'I!.