Cirque du Kobe

Photo by Dan Davis

EAGLE, Colorado — As the buzzards circle it’s only about 10 miles from the gated confines of Cordillera to the working-class town of Eagle. Viewed through the satellite-fed frenzy of the Kobe Bryant case, though, the two places are worlds apart. Like Brentwood and Van Nuys. And on the Vail Valley floor, just 1,500 feet below Cordillera, is Eagle County’s East L.A.: the Eagle River Village trailer park.

That’s where resort workers — the maids and dishwashers who run places like the posh Lodge & Spa at Cordillera — are packed a dozen to a double-wide, working the jobs ski bums no longer take and sending their hard-earned cash back to Monterrey, Chihuahua and Durango. Latino laborers, most illegal, flooded the valley in the go-go ’90s when modern robber barons like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, and Adelphia’s John and Timothy Rigas bought and built third and fourth trophy homes in gated mountain enclaves like Beaver Creek, Bachelor Gulch and Cordillera.

After a decade that saw one local real estate company average close to a billion dollars a year in sales, the cultural landscape of the ski town of Vail and the surrounding area had been forever altered. Real estate is king, dirt pimps rule the day, and snow sports are an afterthought — a value-added amenity to help sell ski-in/ski-out starter castles. Meanwhile, the number of Latinos in Eagle County, according to the 2000 census, grew to 9,682, or 23.2 percent of the population.

A 19-year-old Eagle woman working a summer job as a concierge at Cordillera claims Bryant sexually assaulted her at the hotel June 30, the night before he was to have knee surgery at Vail’s Steadman Hawkins Clinic. The married 24-year-old Bryant tearfully admitted to adultery, but says sex with the young, white graduate of Eagle Valley High School was consensual. The single charge of third-degree sexual assault filed July 18 sparked a global media circus that has caught a normally carefree community deerlike in the headlights of intense scrutiny on issues ranging from rape to drugs to race. Race in particular, like in L.A., is an issue that teeters along the socioeconomic divide.

“Definitely there is racism in this area, and this [case] brings a lot of attention to the situation,” local businessman and Latino advocate Hector De La Rosa says of the rape case against the Lakers superstar guard. “That’s the only good thing that comes from this.”

A 15-year-old racial-profiling lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department for traffic stops on Interstate 70 has been dredged up by the media as evidence of ingrained bias in a cultural backwater where a fair trial for Bryant will be impossible.

“I had people telling me it’s only a matter of time before they bring that up and do the whole Mark Fuhrman thing,” 20-year former Sheriff A.J. Johnson says of the suit the county ultimately settled for $800,000 in 1996. Johnson hotly denies his home of nearly 30 years is a racist place, and still maintains that the suit — brought by the ACLU on behalf of black and Latino motorists who constituted nearly all of the stops made by the Sheriff’s Department over a two-year-long attempted crackdown on drug smuggling — was bogus, because the federally funded program used criteria aimed at spotting drug traffickers, not minorities.

James Johnson, a two-term county commissioner who pushed for the settlement to save money, says he is living proof of the county’s overall climate of tolerance. An African-American, Johnson beat out the head of the county’s largest real estate firm to win his first term in 1992, and was elected a second time four years later despite revelations that he was convicted of cocaine possession when he was working as a housekeeper in Vail in the early 1980s.

Johnson says he wasn’t racially targeted by Vail police but was just in the wrong place at the wrong time — busted when the ski town finally decided to crack down on rampant cocaine use. The Vail Valley, where the latest census recorded just 142 black residents (0.3 percent of the population), is a great place to live, Johnson says, if you’re black or white.

“For some people to exhibit their prejudice, there needs to be a critical mass of individuals, and therefore I saw greater racism directed toward the Latino population than what I felt as an African-American,” Johnson says.

But fifth-generation Mexican-American Debbie Marquez, co-chair of the local Democratic Party and part owner of a Mexican restaurant, argues it’s not bad for Latinos: “We have our bubbas in this county, but I’d like to think Eagle County would offer a fair trial because, with the exception of the [lack of a] black population, we have a fairly diverse, well-educated community.”

De La Rosa, though, has his doubts about local justice. “I know this judge [Fred Gannett], and I know a couple of other judges in this town,” De La Rosa says. “I don’t think [Bryant’s] going to have a fair trial in this county.”

Contractor Anthony Aiello, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration and local law enforcement, disagrees: “I think he can get a real fair trial in this county. If the illegals can get away with all that they get away with, then Kobe can definitely get away with this, just like O.J. got away with two murders.”