Bradley Aides Regroup to Assess Gates’ Future : Police: Options to block chief’s return are studied. Mayor seeks to distance himself from the dispute.

While Mayor Tom Bradley on Saturday sought to distance himself from the dispute over the future of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, the mayor’s aides and advisers hastily regrouped to assess options for blocking the chief’s return to his job.

The mayor and his staff were attempting to recover from a stinging political defeat delivered by the City Council Friday when it ignored Bradley’s personal plea and voted to reinstate Gates. The council action would, in effect, reverse a decision by the Bradley-appointed Police Commission to place Gates on leave while it conducts a wide-ranging investigation prompted by the police beating of Rodney G. King.

In an interview in his City Hall office, Bradley said Saturday that he intends to stay out of the legal dispute over Gates’ status when it reaches Superior Court on Monday. The mayor said he will take no further actions regarding the chief’s tenure, leaving the Police Commission to deal with the issue.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen on Monday,” Bradley said. “It has been suggested that somehow I influenced the commission to take its action . . . I am removed from this.”

Some city officials expressed skepticism about the mayor’s assertion.

“For Bradley and his office to be saying they didn’t have any influence with the commission is a bunch of bull,” said City Council President John Ferraro. “(The mayor) put plenty of pressure on them one way or another.”

The commission’s action followed a month of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Bradley and Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani to oust Gates, sources have told The Times. But Bradley denied Saturday that he or anyone in his office has secretly plotted against Gates.

“I am not a devious or evil person,” said the mayor. “I never function in that way. . . . If somebody believes me, fine. If they don’t, they don’t, so be it.”

Bradley called for Gates to resign last Tuesday, one month after the videotaped beating of King, a 25-year-old black parolee from Altadena who was repeatedly struck by police officers after a car chase in the San Fernando Valley. Last Thursday, the Police Commission put Gates on a paid leave--and a day later an outraged City Council moved to reinstate Gates.

Among the developments Saturday:

Bradley’s aides and advisers huddled, reviewing legal and political options, as phone calls continued throughout the day between city officials, lawyers and community leaders, sources said.

The tactics pursued by the mayor’s office have raised concerns, even among some Bradley supporters, that that the mayor is contributing to the polarization of the city.

An estimated 5,000 people attended a Los Angeles rally where the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of the 1993 Super Bowl and future conventions in the city as a protest over the King beating. Earlier, demonstrators marched through the downtown business district to demand the ouster of Gates and to condemn the City Council’s action.

Strategy Sessions

Sources said that the options being studied by the mayor’s office, the Police Commission and outside groups include a high-profile, mass resignation of Bradley’s Police Commission appointees and a multiple-front legal challenge to the council’s action by individual police commissioners and possibly by a coalition of community groups.

One strategy, sources said, is to seek a court delay of the council’s effort to reinstate Gates until Tuesday’s City Council elections in hopes that new or returning council members could be persuaded to support the attempt to oust Gates.

After consultations with advisers and lawyers, Fabiani and Police Commission President Daniel P. Garcia said Saturday that they believe the council action was clearly illegal.

“It was a meaningless political action done for benefit of the television cameras,” said Fabiani. Both argued the council action was a transparent attempt to usurp powers vested only in the Police Commission by the City Charter.

On Friday, the council voted 10 to 3 to instruct the city attorney to settle a lawsuit that Gates intends to file Monday seeking reinstatement. A settlement worked out between the council and Gates’ lawyers would immediately return Gates to his job on the condition that he forgo any attempts to seek monetary damages from the city.

Mike Qualls, a spokesman for City Atty. James K. Hahn, said Saturday that the settlement was legal and will be wrapped up swiftly. Negotiations on the agreement were completed Friday evening, Qualls said. “Our expectation is this will be concluded fairly quickly Monday morning,” he added.

Qualls and Gates’ lawyer, Harry G. Melkonian, said they doubt that either the police commissioners or anyone else has the legal standing to block the council’s settlement with Gates. Sources in Bradley’s camp concede that it presents a difficult legal hurdle.

What Next?

It is not clear what the Police Commission will do next, Garcia said. But the commission president added that he has retained attorney Paul Grossman to represent him personally in the matter.

“We might challenge (the council settlement) in court, but that would take a while,” Garcia said. “Presumably (Gates) would be in office for some time . . . who knows where we’d be with our investigation” by the time the challenge was resolved.

“It perpetuates the drama in which he is a central character when we have (a furor over) a case of serious police brutality,” he said.

If Gates wins back his job, Bradley’s legal options are limited, said Fabiani.

“The mayor still hopes that the chief will see that his presence is hurting the Police Department and (that) the department will never recover its fine reputation as long as he is the chief,” he said.

One legal option, sources said, would be to seek a delay in the court action until after Tuesday’s council election.

But Ferraro, a Gates supporter, said it was doubtful there would be much change in the council’s position after the election. He contended that the council voted to reinstate the chief because he was not given due process.

Forcing Gates to take a 60-day leave of absence “is a terrible way to treat someone who been chief for 13 years,” added Ferraro.

One way to increase political pressure on the council would be to arrange for the resignations of the three commissioners who had placed Gates on leave, say sources close to the efforts to remove the chief.

While Bradley has denied that he influenced the Police Commission’s decision, one source familiar with the deliberations acknowledged that the mayor’s office was in close touch with the commissioners. “They felt a need to work this through with the mayor,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But to suggest that the mayor picked up the phone and forced the commission to do anything is crazy.”

The three police commissioners approached the removal of Gates from different viewpoints, according to City Hall sources. Vice President Melanie Lomax was adamant that Gates should leave office, Garcia preferred to proceed slowly and Sam Williams felt that Gates could be persuaded to resign, the sources said.

After studying their legal options, the three commissioners--all lawyers--agreed to put Gates on leave while pursuing an investigation to determine if there are grounds to discipline or fire him. They informed Bradley of their intent on Tuesday, which prompted the mayor to call on Gates to resign, said Fabiani.

Is Bradley Right?

The intense fight over Gates’ tenure has further polarized the city, politicized the issue and obscured the fundamental questions of brutality, racism and police training raised by the King beating, civic leaders said.

“The basic issue of how the Police Department relates to the community and the question of undue violence have been totally lost in an atmosphere of increasing racial divisiveness, in the debate between the mayor and the chief and between the mayor and the council,” said Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Councilman Joel Wachs, who backed the move to reinstate Gates, said the feud between the mayor and the chief is “unbelievably harmful” to Los Angeles. “If you really care about this city, it is time to say, ‘OK. We are (looking) into things that are significant in the long range, and not have this continuing battle between one individual and another and one branch of government and another.’ ”

The controversy also has become a political liability of sorts for the mayor. Although a Times poll found that 58% of Los Angeles residents support the temporary removal of Gates, the poll also found that 60% believe Bradley is trying to further his political ambitions rather than, as he stated, to mend a divided city.

The harsh community reaction and City Council outrage over Bradley’s handling of the King crisis last week has fueled criticism of a behind-the-scenes campaign to oust Gates that was handled by Fabiani shortly after the March 3 beating. Gates and Bradley, a retired LAPD officer, have been longtime adversaries.

Many city leaders said the drive to remove Gates went “out of control” with Bradley’s call for Gates to resign and the commission vote to put the chief on leave.

The confrontational approach was a departure from the mayor’s handling of Police Department issues during his 17 years in office, said former Police Chief Ed Davis.

Before last week, one former Bradley strategist said, the mayor responded to the King crisis precisely as one would expect him to.

“It was a gentle, more measured response,” said the ex-Bradley aide, who requested anonymity. “He didn’t blow the council apart. He was seen as keeping things pretty well under control.”

Then came the mayor’s startling call for Gates to resign on Tuesday. “All I know is that I was shocked,” said the former aide. “I don’t know where it went off the deep end. It’s out of kilter.”

If Bradley’s reaction seems “extraordinary,” it is only because the King episode is an extraordinary crisis in the city’s history, Fabiani said.

“I acted in good faith on what I felt were legitimate concerns,” Bradley said Saturday. “There was divisiveness in the city. The chief was at the center of the storm of protests and so long as he remained in the position it was not likely to change.”

Some of Bradley’s strongest supporters appear to be questioning the political strategy of the mayor’s office.

Remy, who served as Bradley’s chief of staff in the early 1980s, called the decision to put Gates on leave “not in the the best interest of the city.”

Richard Riordan, a prominent Los Angeles attorney and supporter of the mayor, said that Bradley should understand that the city’s business sector is “rallying around Gates” and does not support any effort to remove him at this time.

“It comes down to leadership,” said Riordan. “(The mayor) has got to back off, look at the general picture and regroup. I think he cannot go ahead (with a plan to seek the chief’s removal). I think he would be just (putting) himself deeper and deeper into a hole.”

By failing to persuade two key groups--the business community and the City Council--to join in the fight to oust Gates, the mayor and Fabiani did not have the political support they needed to challenge the police chief, according to interviews with both groups.

Several prominent business leaders and City Council members said they were not lobbied by anyone in the mayor’s office on the Gates issue. They put much of the blame on Fabiani, the 33-year-old chief of staff whose management style has won him few friends on the City Council.

Fabiani said that council members are not siding with Bradley because they do not want to confront Gates or the Police Department, particularly with Tuesday’s election looming.

“We’ve made a lot of effort to talk to council members, but frankly a lot of them are not interested in taking on Daryl Gates,” he said. “And the screaming of a couple of council members, some of whom are up for reelection on Tuesday . . . is not going to dissuade the mayor from doing what needs to be done.”