The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 56

Southern California Kevin Campos, left, shared his ambitions at a tribute dinner hosted by Big Brothers of Greater LA. E2 Cos Angeles SSmcs TA 1 if A in ii ii Willi Comics E4, 5, 6 TUESDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2001 WWW.UTIMES.COMLIVING Kids' Reading page E7 GARY FRIEDMAN Los Angetes Times Cuban Cafecitos and All the Comforts of Home wrcTVy 1 n-ir'irM IT if, 4 landa Heard, a tax auditor from Montgomery, who has never been exposed to the fast pace or the inherent spice of sabor cubano (Cuban taste). "I've never seen anything like this." Porto's Bakery Cafe opened 40 years ago inside Rosa and Raul Porto's modest kitchen in Manzanillo, Cuba. Today, it sits in the sprawl of downtown Glendale, but its heart remains all Cuban, both in the authenticity of its food and in the spirit of its family-run management. Heard has just walked into Porto's on a Saturday morning (with 1,000 other patrons to follow throughout the afternoon) and is daunted by all of the movement around her.

Customers line up for numbers to order pastries, sandwiches or to pick up special cakes. Most are speaking Spanish. One man is playing a guitar and singing boleros. Children stare at the displays, Please see Porto's, E3 LA. at Large By MARIA ELENA FERNANDEZ TIMES STAFF WRITER Step through the electric sliding doors and your senses are bombarded.

Hear the rapid-fire speech. See the elegant pastries. Feel the energy of the ultra-animated staff. Take a deep breath and savor the aromas. Here comes Raul Porto 40, wheeling dozens of freshly baked Cuban loaves, which will sell out in minutes and warm the air in their midst, Bittersweet Cuban cafecitos brew at the coffee bar, their strong smell of espresso swirling through the first floor.

The scent of garlic rises from the kitchen, where roasted pork is dressed with mojo and sliced for sandwiches. Sweet brandy syrup used for the mystical yellow cake that beckoned patrons in Cuba and again in Southern California emanates from the basement. "Oh, my gosh," says Yo- 1 'r ANNIE WELLS Los Angeles Times Porto's Bakery Cafe was bora in a Cuban home decades ago. With it, the Porto family today provides more than just an eatery: It's also a touchstone for many of its customers. Sandy Banks Making Every Move I Count as in the Game of Life It began in 1998, as a way to stop unruly fourth-graders from fighting during lunch at 75th Street Elementary.

Teacher Lilieth El bought a bunch of $3 chess sets, hauled a handful of kids into her classroom at noon and taught them a game she had loved since she was a child. Within a few months the chess lessons had grown so popular that the South-Central Los Angeles school bought 10 more sets and launched a chess program, with El at the helm. "We had about 20 kids show up, and not one of them had ever played before," she recalled. Last year, more than 100 children turned out, after the club was mentioned at a school assembly. Principal Chris Stehr rounded up enough donated sets to give every child a chance to play, and the Tigers Chess Club was born.

They entered a few tournaments last year, but came home empty-handed. "The kids were a little intimidated," Stehr said. Some didn't win a single game. But two weeks ago, the 75th Street team's third- and fourth-graders walked off with lst-place trophies from a scholastic chess tournament in Riverside. Each child played 15 games during the course of the day.

It was the only inner-city school in the competition, and its kids tallied more wins than any other elementary team. El, who became a. certified chess coach so she could better teach the students, has big plans for her fledgling team. "They are good and they are tough. But there is a lot about the game they have to learn." She hopes to raise enough money to allow them to compete in a national tournament in Kansas City this spring.

Another teacher, Stacey Koff, volunteers with El to coach the team. Koff still considers herself a student of the game. "I'm about good enough to beat the kids, but that's all," she says. She got involved with the club after she began teaching chess to her first-graders. "They weren't getting the reading yet because of the language barrier," Koff said.

Spanish is the primary language of almost all of her students. "But I knew these were smart kids, so I started teaching them chess four at a time, during the 20 minutes of the day when we have free time. "Some of them didn't get it," she says. "But the ones that did I pushed them, because I knew they would feel successful if they could master this." Please see Banks, E3 Law Enforcement Go-To Guy 'America's Most Wanted's' John Walsh, the man cops turn to when they are stumped, is an institution in the world of crime busters. j.

etH mwh i 1 3 John Grisham Leaves the Lawyers Out of the Picture This Time Around Book Review By MICHAEL HARRIS SPECIAL TO THE TIMES "So I did the pilot. It was an amazing experience. My heart was in it because I really wanted to catch him." JOHN WALSH, above Host of "A merica 's Most Wanted" Associaiea Press Stephen Moreland Redd has been featured on "America's Most Wanted." GARY FRIEDMAN Los Angeles Times' Such is the grist of John Walsh's life. Since it first aired in 1988, 650 criminals showcased on! the program have been run to ground, most of them turned in by armchair detectives who recognized the crooks, many of whom had disappeared into the backdrop of ordinary lives. These days, of course, there are many ways for law enforcement to highlight bad guys on the lam, ranging from traditional media to the Internet.

Rare is the police department that doesn't have a Web site, complete with missing-persons and most-wanted photos (the LAPD's is particularly flashy). The FBI's Web site gets more than 1 million hits a month, and the most popular mouse click by far is the modern-day version of the most-wanted fliers. "It's moving as fast as the changing media," said Rex Tomb, head of the FBI's fugitive publicity unit. Still, "America's Most Wanted" remains the most efficient tool in electronic sleuthing, watched by more than 9 million viewers each Saturday night in its slot between "Cops" and the evening news. There have been Other such programs, including "Unsolved Mysteries," but "America's Most Wanted" is the senior citizen of those still in production.

The product of the Fox Network's infancy when there were only five outlets nationwide, it has endured 13 seasons and survived an abrupt cancellation (quickly rescinded) in 1996; Though never a blockbuster hit in the ratings wars, it has been a steady middle-of-the-pack moneymaker for Fox. And Walsh remains the staccato-voiced icon who leads his viewers each week through sordid criminal sludge. That he was approached to do the show at all was because of a murder 20 years ago his son's. The death of 6-year-old Adam Walsh is, in a Please see Crime, E3 By J. MICHAEL KENNEDY TIMES STAFF WRITER A cop was dead and the trail was going cold.

The Texas Seven had disappeared without a trace again. The rogue band of prison escapees had killed the policeman in Irving, Texas, on Christmas Eve, then slipped into the night. So the law called John Walsh. The jut-jawed host of the "America's Most Wanted" television series is law enforcement's go-to guy, the one cops call when they've run out of clues for those particularly heinous crimes that are standard fare for the weekly Fox TV show. And because of that, he's the darling of cops nationwide.

Walsh goes where other members of the media are banned; his arrival more often than not leads to a round of souvenir snapshots before work can begin. Brief mentions of the Texas Seven on two previous episodes of "America's Most Wanted" had turned up nothing. So television's top crime buster opted to head for Texas, intent on dedicating most of his show to the gang he called "scumbags and cowards." And, as usual, Walsh was treated like royalty when he got there. He listened as the Irving police told him what the Texas Seven had done to Officer Aubrey Hawkins, who was slain when he came upon the escapees as they were robbing a sporting-goods store of weapons, cash and clothing. "They said to me, 'Let us tell you what these guys did to Walsh recalled.

"They pulled him out of the car and shot him 12 times. They put their guns under his bulletproof vest and shot him. Then they ran over his head three times." A PAINTED HOUSE By John Grisham Doubleday 400 pages, $27.95 Maybe "A Painted House" is the kind of novel John Grisham intended to write all along, before he broke through with his first legal thriller. To keep his fans and publishers happy, he felt he had to go on cranking out bestsell-ing tales of Iawyerly shenanigans, even as his interest in the genre waned. Maybe.

It's worth a thought. We could see symptoms of restlessness two novels ago, in "The Testament," in which Grisham's hero traveled to Brazil, got interested in wetlands ecology, found God and gave up the legal profession. In "The Brethren," the lawyers and judges were back, but Grisham viewed them with uniform distaste; there wasn't a hero to be found, and the entertainment value of the book aside from the cynical chuckles it provoked was too dependent on an improbable plot. In "A Painted House," the plot unfolds far more naturally. The characters are closer to real people, and the setting is one Grisham knows from the inside out It's the world of his childhood in northeastern Arkansas, as seen through the eyes of 7-year-old Luke 'Chandler, who lives on an 80-acre cotton farm with his parents and grandparents.

In 1952, the Chandlers are only a little better off than the Depression-era Alabama fanners James Agee described and Walker Evans photographed in "Let Us All Praise Famous Men." Unlike their neighbors the Latchers, the Chandlers aren't sharecrop-Please see Grisham, E3 fit, I MIKE STUPARYK Ex-officer Lawrencia "Bam-bi" Bembenek was found guilty of a 1981 murder. Associated Press John List was convicted of killing his wife, mother and three teenage children..