At End of His Rope, He Loaded and Fired : Guns: Although he has pleaded not guilty, defendant says shooting at the MCA building ‘was almost a political statement.’

Life as John Brian Jarvis knew it had ended. What else was there to do but shoot up the MCA building?

A few weeks before, his mother had died and he didn’t even have money to bury her. That April morning, he was down to $16.87.

It was all he had because he couldn’t get a job, and he couldn’t get a job because he was sure he had been blackballed by MCA, where he had once worked as a movie studio driver. No matter where he had been, and he had been up and down California, the corporate suits would say, sorry, what’s this on your record?

He’d had it. He parked his weary Ford station wagon and pulled out the deer rifle. There it was in the scope, MCA World Headquarters, the black glass tower in Universal City that was keeping him down. He fired. He kept firing in a staccato rhythm, squeezing off three dozen shots.

It was like spraying graffiti--but with bullets instead of paint.

“What I did, it was almost a political statement,” said Jarvis, who is in County Jail and is scheduled to appear today in Los Angeles Superior Court. “The black castle, the wicked witch of the east, the ominous black tower that was almost untouchable--I blew that theory away.”

He spoke by phone this week, in his first interview since he was arrested April 20 after firing 36 shots at the giant entertainment firm’s high-rise headquarters and at a Bank of America branch next door.

“I did what I had to do,” Jarvis said. “It just got to be that time.”

Jarvis has pleaded not guilty to 16 felony counts: seven counts of assault with a deadly weapon and nine counts of shooting at an occupied building. He is being held on $1-million bail.

Seven women were hurt in the barrage of shots, two of them hit by bullets and five cut by flying glass.

If convicted on all charges, Jarvis, 58, faces a sentence of more than 20 years in state prison, said Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn.

A plea bargain is a distinct possibility, according to Conn and Stephen P. Galindo, one of Jarvis’ defense lawyers.

Although he has pleaded not guilty, Jarvis does not deny firing the shots. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done was fire that first shot,” he said, “because that was the end of my universe. Everything was gone. The only thing left was jail.”

From jail, Jarvis said it was important for him to talk. Jail is a dangerous place, particularly for someone who shot at the headquarters of a conglomerate “that put Ronald Reagan and George Bush in office,” he said.

People who don’t understand that, who don’t believe in conspiracy theories, “just don’t know what the hell’s going on out there,” Jarvis said.

Defense attorneys have called Jarvis sane but suffering from increasing stress, and he called that a fair assessment.

Born in Oklahoma, Jarvis grew up in the Bay Area. He said he served two years in the Army and attended three colleges before getting a two-year degree. He got married, had a daughter and became a real estate broker in Walnut Creek, east of Oakland.

The first marriage broke up. He got married again and, in 1974, when it ended with no children, he moved to the San Fernando Valley. “I came down for vacation and stayed,” he said.

Jarvis was hired as a driver for MCA at Universal Studios, working through the Teamsters Union, Studio Transportation Drivers Local 399. After a few years, he earned enough seniority to be entitled to regular work.

All Jarvis knew, he said, is that in 1981 he suddenly stopped getting calls for work. He said he doesn’t know why.

Because he wasn’t working, he lost his seniority. Because he lost his seniority, he couldn’t work. It was a vicious cycle, he said.

At some point, he said, he was mistakenly put on a “no-hire” list. This was a mistake MCA and the union later blamed on a computer error, defense lawyer Alan Sharpe said.

He bounced around California, looking for a job, and ran up $13,000 in credit card charges, he said.

The bank hounded him, he said, but he couldn’t find work anywhere.

He blames MCA.

“Everywhere I went to work thereafter, this thing followed me around,” he said. The “rock solid” details, he said, will come out at the trial.

Those who don’t believe that MCA has the reach to do such a thing, he said, should read the 1986 book “Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob.” Police found a copy of the book in Jarvis’ car, with passages he deemed important underlined in red.

The book, written by Dan E. Moldea, purports to set forth ties between the entertainment firm, organized crime and Reagan, dating to the former President’s days as an actor.

The Washington Post’s review concluded “very little is proven in ‘Dark Victory,’ though a great deal is implied and insinuated.” Jarvis called it a believable expose.

Javis added: “I’m nobody. They had the audacity to screw some little man like me. They’ve got all these billions of dollars, the power to put presidents in office, and they’ve still got time to screw someone like me.”

MCA spokeswoman Christine Hanson said that was nonsense. “As to us blackballing him everywhere he went, MCA in no way interfered with his attempts at gainful employment,” she said. “This is absolutely not true.”

Hanson also said it was “company policy not to comment on the contents of a book such as ‘Dark Victory.’ ”

Unable to work, Jarvis moved in with his ailing mother on the ground floor of a two-story apartment building in Pleasanton, east of San Francisco Bay. She had a pension that provided money for both of them. In return, he cared for her.

In February, she died at age 79. She had wanted to be buried next to her sister but there was no money, so Jarvis had her body cremated.

“You can imagine how I felt,” he said. “How do you feel about cremating your mother? That’s the bottom line, I guess.”

Without his mother’s pension, Jarvis had no income. His daughter was in Idaho, and he rarely saw her. For years, he had been thinking of shooting at the MCA tower. The time, he decided, had come.

Some news accounts, he said, have painted him as “some sort of maniac” or as a “disturbed individual.” He said, “Not really. The thing is, I just got pissed off and ran out of time and money.”

His first plan, he said, was to carry out his attack April 12, the Monday after Easter. But “the Rodney King trial was going full-bore,” he said, referring to the federal trial of four police officers accused of violating King’s civil rights.

“I didn’t want L.A. to explode again,” he said.

The King jury returned April 17. On April 19, Jarvis drove from the Bay Area to Palmdale. On the morning of April 20, he said, he ate a solid breakfast: scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. He drove straight to MCA and “very calmly did my thing.”

He fired as if he were back in the service, “one shot every two seconds--bang, bang, bang--this is what I did,” he said. “It was just an instinctive thing.” He said he fired until he “decided that was enough.”