The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her

by Joe Rothstein

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because we’ve trained them to beg for crumbs and then lick our fingers in gratitude if something, anything, good happens.”

  The outburst surprised her. She thought they were decompressing after a stressful day. Dancing fire. Excellent whiskey. Hal seemed in no mood to relax.

  They sat quietly for a few moments. She wanted to respond but wasn’t sure how.

  He turned to her, smiled widely and shook his head.

  “Sorry, Tenny. Didn’t mean to rant on you.”

  “It’s one of the things I admire most about you, Hal. You’re doing all this because you really mean it. You don’t just think it, you feel it.”

  He took a long sip of his drink. Then another.

  “When you said tonight if you had the power. That was an eye opener for me. I’ve been thinking like a lawyer, handling individual cases. And I’ve been thinking like a lobbyist, trying to convince powerful people with arguments they might or might not buy, competing with other people with more money and more influence. But the key to getting what we want is political power. And if we package it right, we can get it.”

  Hal turned to face Tenny.

  “Tenny, would you be willing to write a million dollar check to start a political action committee?”

  “What’s a political action committee, and what do I get for that kind of investment?”

  “It’s called a PAC, and it’s a legal way for people to organize for political action. We’d use it to pull together all of our allies into a single political force. We’d put pressure on people in office and we’d elect our own slates. The payoff? Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars more from the city and county and federal government for all the causes we’re working for.”

  “Sounds like a good investment. You figure out how to do it and make it work and I’m in. And if it’s as good as you say I can twist a lot of other arms for more.”

  Hal leaned over, held the back of her head with one hand and kissed her cheek hard. The sudden act of affection startled her. He moved quickly between political calculations and gratitude and back again.

  “We need a pro to create a strategy, a plan. We have to pull the groups together. We need to run real campaigns. And I know just the guy. Ben Sage. My best friend in high school. Now he’s one of the best political strategists in the country. He works out of Washington. You’d really like him. He knows everything we don’t about running campaigns. Ben Sage.”

  He hugged Tenny again, his brain afire with this transcendent idea, his body feeling the glow from two glasses of straight whiskey and now the heat radiating from this woman next him, lips close to his, arms returning his embrace, the scent of her hair.

  Tenny needed no further stimulation. Hal’s lips were just inches from hers. She dove into them, her lips wide open, devouring his tongue, running her hands wildly through his golden hair. Her sudden move pushed Hal back into the pillows. She hung on tightly, falling gently with him. She was so very hungry.

  There would be other nights. The next three, in fact. Passion had erupted with too much force to be easily contained. As the days became weeks, the intensity ebbed, but didn’t disappear. Naked body time, once introduced into the lives Tenny and Hal were sharing, would remain.

  Many years earlier Tenny had fallen in love with Andres. For her, it was love as she always had imagined it. Andres became her life. Twice since then she had met men who not only set off sexual sparks but consumed her every thought. For a while. Those encounters peaked quickly and just as rapidly declined. She felt she had so much love in her, but that love came in brief bursts. She had been there with Andres. She had little interest in revisiting the pain of a broken heart.

  

  “Did you ever sleep with him?” asked Tenny.

  “No,” Carmie replied.

  “Tell the truth. I won’t be jealous.”

  “Never really came close. I might have if things were different. But outside of just having a good time at parties with lots of other people, we never connected where it could have happened. And since I’ve been in New York, my only contacts with him have been long-distance.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Are you bragging!”

  “No, just stating a fact. Anyway, maybe he wasn’t as good then as he is now.”

  “Do you love him? Is this going anywhere?”

  “No. It’s just here and now.”

  Actually, she did love Hal. She loved him for so many things. His dedication. His work ethic. His courage. His sensitivity to others. Now, she added to that list his exceptional performance in bed. But it was a love of mind and body, not of the heart. She was so thankful for that. Falling into romantic love with Hal would have come at the expense of the other bonds they had. Their work together gave her life meaning. She woke each day with great anticipation of new adventure or satisfying causes that new day would bring. For her, the arrangement was ideal. Her true love was her work.

  Hal seemed not to want or need more either. No suggestions they move in together, or plan lives together. No words of love, except during those moments when such words are expected, when they pour forth on their own and evaporate with the last sighs on the pillow. In fact, Hal had a new true love, not Tenny, but politics.

  12

  In high school, Hal played power forward on the varsity basketball team, six foot one, all arms and legs, bone thin. A starter, not a star, but serviceable on a team that won more than it lost. Popular enough to run for student body president, not popular enough to win. Ben Sage had a different trajectory. He was the writer, the editor of the school paper, the quiet one usually found on the edges of the crowd, not in the spotlight.

  Hal and Ben met as high school freshmen. One day Hal offered to give Ben a ride home from school on his Cushman motor scooter. Three blocks from Ben’s house Ben began losing his grip and yelled for Hal to stop. Hal just laughed and accelerated faster. Ben tumbled off the scooter onto the hard asphalt, cartwheeling, scraping, bruising. That was the beginning of their friendship. Don’t ask for an explanation why. They couldn’t tell you. For the rest of their high school years they were best friends. Movies, double-dates, road trips. Then separation into their own life lanes.

  Ben never doubted where his lane would lead. He would be a newspaper man, a journalist, an observer and chronicler of action, wherever the action was. Everything interested him, but no single interest so much that he wanted to build a silo around it and call it a career. Journalism could be anything. It was a mile wide and an inch deep. That suited Ben. It was his idea of a great lifestyle.

  But as often happens with career plans, reality injects obstacles and choices seldom written into the original playbook. In Ben’s case, the life-changing diversion came in the form of a friend running for mayor of Hawthorne, a forty-block indistinguishable rectangle of Los Angeles County that they call a separate city. Ben succumbed to his friend’s plea to manage the campaign. Why not? It would be an interesting experience, helpful to Ben later in covering elections as a reporter. No one, including Ben, expected this campaign to win. But it did. And what an emotional high election night was. Ben had never felt anything like the rush. Not from alcohol or weed or even seeing his byline on newspaper stories. Others took notice of Ben. A county commissioner. A congressman. More wins. A proposal to join a political firm in Washington, D.C. More success. Now, on his own, a star in the narrow spectrum of stardom that attaches to the trade of electing candidates for public office. Ben’s firm, Sage and Searer, was on the short list of most Democratic Party candidates in the United States who could afford professional consulting and management.

  Despite Ben’s other workload, he could not resist Hal’s call to change the political dynamics of Los Angeles. Hal was one of his closest friends, Los Angeles his home base. With some rearrangement of his work schedule, Ben was able to respond to Hal’s call before month’s end. He brought with him to Los Angeles an arsenal of political weapons, includin
g strong contacts with national labor and political leaders. He persuaded those contacts to lean hard on their local affiliates to enlist in Hal’s new political creation. They called it “Lights on L.A.,” or LOLA for short.

  “I like it,” said Ben. “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets...you know, from Damn Yankees. We start with a winning image even before our first election.”

  Tenny wrote the big check she had promised and raided the wallets and purses of wealthy friends and business contacts. There’s nothing like a war chest to make a political organization real. With money and a coalition of labor, environmental and ethnic groups under the tent, LOLA immediately became a power factor in Southern California politics.

  Ben set up a LOLA office in the heart of the city’s financial district, a brash show of force aimed at the local power structure. He imported his partner, Lee Searer, to recruit a veteran team of local researchers and organizers to manage operations.

  Lee Searer was Ben’s muse, the wonk who read the eight-page newsletters and hundred-page reports others just scanned, if at all; the researcher who could spot and develop the nuggets of information that would underlie campaign strategy, the theorist who could combine unrelated information into a powerful new way of looking at things. Lee was a refugee from academia, a former professor of American history at the University of North Dakota who met Ben during a campaign for the state’s congressional seat. Lee loved the details, the demographics, the registration and turnout numbers, the polling crosstabs and data overlays. For Lee this all became discovery, and a platform for creativity.

  Ben was the artful strategist. He would mold Lee’s information and ideas into the messages that would control the campaign’s narrative. Each campaign custom-made, many breaking new ground, deploying methods never before tried. You never knew what was coming at you from a Ben Sage campaign. It would be novel, hard to defend. It would be a campaign others would try to imitate. By then Ben would have moved on, attacking from new and unexpected directions. Ben began his career as a pencil pushing journalist, but slid seamlessly into electronic communication. He loved writing and directing radio and television commercials. He was a master at training candidates to make the most of their assets before crowds and cameras. Together, Ben Sage and Lee Searer were formidable.

  Tenny was intrigued by all of the new political developments. She willingly underwrote and raised much of their costs. But politics was a world foreign to her. What she did know now, thanks to Hal, was the world of need, a world she had entered hoping to find a new life’s purpose. Immersion had changed her. It was no longer about her but about them, those she encountered in her daily work. Those who never expected to be in a free soup line.

  Families grateful for bundles of clothing. Children parked in temporary day care for parents who could neither pay nor do without their paychecks. As a charitable organization, L.A. Lights served a broad spectrum of the Los Angeles community. Undocumented immigrants were in the minority, but it was those cases that touched Tenny down to her Aragon roots.

  Gloria was one. A sixty-year-old restaurant cook who glued patches of carpet on her shoes so she wouldn’t leave tracks in the desert sand that border guards could follow. Gloria had returned to Mexico after ten years in Los Angeles to attend her father’s funeral and had no legal way back. So she spent her meager life’s savings to be smuggled across the border.

  Fifteen-year-old Julio was another. In Sonora, he was threatened with death and the murder of his family if he didn’t join a local drug gang. Father Federico Aragon shielded Julio for weeks until he could put him on a path to safe passage to the United States to live with relatives.

  Most of the immigrant women who arrived at L.A. Lights had deserted Mexico after being victims of multiple physical attacks. Lawlessness ruled their daily lives. Bandits and militias would use the darkness of night to steal, rape, and murder.

  Once, Federico wrote a letter to Tenny asking about a young woman named Delores who had come to him for protection, and whom he had helped with money, food, and the names of those who would cushion her in her flight to safety. Nothing had been heard from her since she left home. Her family was frantic. Tenny found Delores, in a white bag, with a red tag, in Arizona’s Pima County medical examiner’s office. Delores almost made it, but she had died of hypothermia. Her thin cotton clothing was no match for an exceptionally cold night during which she slept in hiding near the border.

  For Tenny, many of those from the Latino community who came through her doors were victims of a system her own family had helped create. Through her contact with Federico, she knew not just why so many of the needy were here but what they had fled from and endured to get here. The flight from thugs hired by large land owners to quash peasant land protests, the scourge of disease casually treated for lack of local medical services, the search for opportunity for better lives than they and their families had ever known. Survivors shared their experiences with Tenny. But Tenny knew more than their stories. She knew the names and addresses and motives of many who contributed to such hardship and made flight, however treacherous and uprooting, an imperative. Tenny could see both the immediate problems and their antecedents. The whole, big, ugly picture.

  Inevitably Tenny’s past became current legend among the clients of L.A. Lights. The Aragon name was too well known. The Aragon tentacles too much feared. Yet many new arrivals owed their safe passage to the aid and advice of Father Federico, whom they regarded as a saint. Tenny, in her sweatshirts, jeans, comfortable shoes, and with her generosity of time and money, was approaching that status.

  13

  The economic engine driving the Los Angeles region is more diverse than most U.S. metropolitan areas. Manufacturing, international trade, finance, entertainment, tourism, and agriculture. Serving the region with water and power is itself a major industry. So is the expansion of offices, homes, highways and other infrastructure needs to keep up with century-long population growth. For many, that growth has been the source of enormous wealth, much of it generated by the labors of one of the lowest-paid work forces in the United States. Tenny joined L.A. Lights when business leaders were promoting more growth by touting Los Angeles as a low-wage alternative to unionized San Francisco.

  L.A. Lights’ mission was to help the victims of that economic divide. Hal organized LOLA to help close it.

  Lee Searer quickly produced research documenting that tens of millions of public dollars had been invested in recent years to subsidize private projects such as hotels, sports venues, and industrial parks. In addition to actual cash outlays, taxpayers underwrote construction and maintenance of roads, ramps, and water and sewage systems to connect those projects and to advertise and promote them. Many private structures were built on public land ceded to developers or leased or sold at deeply discounted prices. Lee’s research helped Ben create a short powerful mission statement for LOLA: “Public Dividends for Public Investments.”

  The research was a wake-up call for small business people who had been paying taxes but not sharing in the rewards. A coalition of small business owners was organized to fight for a more inclusive agenda. Other groups joined: clergy for economic justice, organized labor to fight for better pay and working conditions, environmental groups for land use and recreational payback in the form of parks, green energy and pollution control.

  LOLA became the hub of many moving parts, carefully structured to pursue multiple agendas, mostly in a non-adversarial way—through the power of research and calls for equity. The effort was having success, but it still lacked the hefty punch Hal Thompson had envisioned. To do that, LOLA had to elect its own and instill the fear of political retribution in others. Hal and Ben scanned the political landscape for a suitable target, and found it in the form of Bert Wilmont.

  Bert Wilmont was one of the key gatekeepers for the business power elite. Home-builder turned politician, Wilmont had chaired the Los Angeles City Council budget committee for the past eight years. Eight years of dramatic population growth b
ut little change in the city’s financial commitment to education, transportation, affordable housing, social services. Wilmont’s tight fist had crushed many progressive plans. Wilmont had been easily re-elected three times. Now he seemed about to make it four. No candidate of substance had dared take the risk of running against him. That was the topic of this day’s LOLA board meeting.

  “Eight thousand votes, tops, would beat him in the Democratic Party primary,” said Lee Searer. “Maybe seven thousand if the turnout’s light. I’ve checked these numbers three ways. We’re talking a ridiculously low bar for such an important council seat.”

  “Then why haven’t we been able to recruit a candidate?” asked Ben.

  “Fear,” said Hal. “Everyone’s afraid of Wilmont. Cross him and forget about ever getting a return phone call. If you want a future in L.A. politics or need anything from the city council, you don’t challenge Bert Wilmont. Lee, how many volunteers can we count on if we compete in this district?”

  “Around 130 have signed up. And there’s maybe another 200 or so in the area, no more than a half-hour drive away.”

  “So, let’s assume,” said Hal, “only fifty volunteers working an average of four hours each week. That’s two hundred hours with about five solid contacts an hour. A thousand contacts a week over ten weeks. Ten weeks, ten thousand personal contacts. We can do at least that many on the phones, too. Double that for many households with two or more people and we’re talking forty thousand personal touches.

  “Ken, how many union members in Wilmont’s district?”

  “About five hundred,” said Ken Barkley, the AFL-CIO representative on the LOLA board.