Life of Labor

In the beginning, Martin Ludlow was the answer to Miguel Contreras' prayer. The huge influx of Latino immigrants into Los Angeles had placed real stresses on black-Latino relations in L.A., and on the relations between the African-American community and labor, a movement reflective, in both its leaders and its members, of the increasingly Latino character of the local work force.

The new asymmetry extended to the political community as well. As more and more districts turned Latino, a whole new generation of Latino activists — Antonio Villaraigosa, Gil Cedillo, Fabian Nuñez and dozens more — won elections with the assistance of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, which Contreras headed. Black politics, by contrast, was still dominated by a small number of leaders who'd emerged in the '60s — Maxine Waters, Yvonne Burke, Diane Watson — and by younger electeds who couldn't escape their seniors' shadows and had little involvement in the city's newer social movements, labor most particularly.

After the 2001 mayor's race, when Antonio Villaraigosa's labor-backed bid for mayor failed due to the black community's support for Jim Hahn, Contreras realized that the gap between the African-American community and the rest of the labor-liberal alliance had become an impediment to citywide progressive politics. He began looking for younger black activists who could bridge that gap. He found two: Karen Bass, who, with the Fed's help, won a state Assembly seat in 2004, and Martin Ludlow, who, also with the Fed's help, won a City Council seat in 2003.

Ludlow's career seemed to hold almost limitless promise. The son of an activist clergyman father and an organizer mother, Ludlow spent the '90s working for a series of unions and community organizations in L.A. At various times, he was Contreras' political director at the County Fed, and Villaraigosa's Los Angeles field representative when the future mayor was speaker of the Assembly. A rousing speaker and an adept political tactician, overflowing with energy, Ludlow conveyed the impression that he was destined for a stellar political career.

His time came in 2003, when Nate Holden was finally termed out of his 10th council district seat. Holden sought to rally his geriatric legions around Deron Williams, a Holden aide whose loyalty to his boss seemed his chief virtue. Ludlow was the candidate of labor and liberals — one of two in the 2003 elections. The other was Antonio Villaraigosa, running for an Eastside council seat then held by Nick Pacheco.

With two races to focus on, Contreras made a crucial strategic decision. Villaraigosa, he believed, could beat Pacheco outright in the primary if labor made a big enough commitment of members and resources. In the crowded field of the 10th, by contrast, the primary would result in no candidate winning 50 percent of the vote, forcing a later runoff between the top two finishers — sure to be Williams and Ludlow.

"Miguel wanted all of labor's field campaign to go to Antonio in the primary," says one source active in that campaign, "and free it up to go to Martin in the runoff." That made Ludlow, who feared Williams was surging, nervous as the primary neared. So he turned to SEIU Local 99, which had quite a political operation of its own, including a predictive-dialing phone bank that enabled a campaign to reach slews of voters it might not otherwise contact.

According to two sources familiar with the case that the district attorney and federal prosecutors have been building against Ludlow and Janett Humphries, then Local 99's president, Ludlow felt at a disadvantage without a field campaign of his own. In recent years, unions have done far more for candidates than Local 99 did for Ludlow, but through the vehicle of independent-expenditure campaigns that are not coordinated with the candidate's own. What Ludlow and Local 99 set up, the sources say, was not an independent-expenditure campaign, but the unacknowledged diversion of union resources and staffers to Ludlow's own campaign.

Contreras was right: With labor's help, Villaraigosa dispatched Pacheco in Round One, and, with labor's help, Ludlow defeated Williams in Round Two. But over the past year, following a falling out between Tom Newbery, Local 99's top political operative, and Humphries, the plainly illegal arrangement became known to the local's parent international, the Service Employees International Union, which placed the local under trusteeship and, in the words of one source close to the union, "built the case and handed it over to the prosecutors."