Los Angeles City Hall as Slumlord

Perry declined to comment to the Weekly. Cardenas refused, through a spokesman, to discuss the issue, insisting that the Weekly first provide him with copies of the mayoral staff’s e-mails. A Núñez spokesman insisted Núñez sent only a “generic letter” backing housing at the Rosslyn. According to Gil Duran, a spokesman for the mayor, Villaraigosa did not speak to CRA chief Estolano about the project.

But Estolano did suddenly change her mind. When the commission heard Islas’ request four days later, at the boisterous August commission meeting, Estolano had signed off on the full $8 million.

Ted Soqui

Tough cookies: Barbara Rowe, with neighbor Hilda Quintana, are targeting their rich landlord at the tattered Alexandria Hotel.

Decrepit majesty: 100 years ago, the lavish building became the hot spot for studio chieftains.

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More About

• Jan Perry
• Alexandria
• Ruben Islas
• Politics
• Local Politics

The e-mails provided by litigants against the Alexandria provide a rare look at how City Council members privately pull strings for their contributors. The e-mails came to light amid a federal court case that went against Islas. In that case, United States District Court Judge Margaret M. Morrow on May 22 ordered Islas to provide such troubling essentials as “hot running water” — and to halt a torrent of evictions.

Islas’ attorneys admit that 100 residents have been evicted since August 2006 from the 344 occupied units at the decrepit but historic eight-story Alexandria, five blocks south of City Hall.

Barbara Rowe, one of the current residents, who are a mixture of the poor, seniors, the disabled and mentally ill, bohemians and artists, tells the Weekly, “They storm-trooped us. There were people here who were mentally unable to take care of themselves. Those were the ones they kicked out first.”

Judge Morrow, in her May ruling, showed little patience with the Community Redevelopment Agency’s behavior in the controversy, ordering its bureaucrats to launch a costly effort to track down and pay relocation fees to Islas’ evicted tenants — a slap at the bureaucrats that illustrates how ineptly City Hall dealt with Islas and his company, the Amerland Group, as bad conditions persisted at the Alexandria. (Islas did not return the Weekly’s calls.)

“Amerland came here and robbed the city,” Rowe says simply.

After the CRA board rewarded Islas the $8 million Rosslyn Lofts subsidy last summer, records show that different arms of the City Hall bureaucracy began documenting and acting upon Islas’ apparent mismanagement at the Alexandria and the Rosslyn:

In December 2007, the city’s housing department declared the Alexandria “uninhabitable” due to a lack of running water.

Two months ago, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s office filed an extensive and 36-count criminal complaint against Islas and his affiliate companies, alleging extensive violations of fire-safety codes at the Alexandria and the Rosslyn.

SO WHY WERE TONY CARDENAS, JAN PERRY and Fabian Núñez so hot to see Islas get more of Los Angeles taxpayers’ money?

Cardenas, after all, sat at a crowded CRA meeting for more than four hours. His rare presence was seen as openly manipulative — a powerful Los Angeles City Council member involving himself at a level that one commissioner who spoke to the Weekly, and who declined to be identified, termed “unprecedented.”

An insider familiar with CRA operations, who is not on the commission, called Cardenas’ pressure “awful,” saying, “It’s really intimidating to [redevelopment agency] commissioners when city councilmen attend” — particularly since the 15 elected City Council members must give final approval to the mayor’s appointees to the commission. “[Cardenas] clearly knows what he’s doing.”

(For example, last December, Cardenas publicly slammed Joan Ling, one of two CRA board members who voted against funding for Islas’ Rosslyn Lofts. Although Cardenas, Perry, Dennis Zine and Bernard Parks voted not to give Ling another stint on the CRA board, other council members backed her, and her appointment was renewed.)

Madeline Janis, the only other CRA board member to oppose Islas, told the Los Angeles Times last September that the political pressure from City Hall to back Islas had been intense.

It ranged, Janis alleged in that article, from the “direct, like having two council members sitting there the entire time,” to the indirect, “like hearing back that the developer was really angry and was going [sic] have retribution against any CRA/LA board member who didn’t support him.”

In the same article, Cardenas accused Janis of lying, saying, “I don’t know Madeline very well, but anyone who comes up with such a concoction of a scenario is confused and making things up.”

But Cardenas seems to be the one with the tainted spin. Not long ago, Janis publicly apologized to the Alexandria’s tenants for the conditions in which they were forced to live.

For his part, Cardenas insists he had been “approached” by Amerland “to do business in my district,” so he had visited Amerland housing near San Diego and found excellent conditions. (And it was in San Diego that Amerland threw a fund-raiser for Cardenas in November 2006.)

But Cardenas’ chief of staff, Jose Cornejo, tells the Weekly that Islas “is not working on any projects” in Cardenas’ Valley district. Cornejo casts aside the notion that contributions from Islas bought Cardenas’ support.