BUYBACK BUST

BANNER WATCH

Those ABC-TV advertising banners, the subject of a Weekly article last week, aren’t coming down anytime soon. That’s despite the fact that the city has acknowledged that the yellow-and-black bunting promoting the Disney-owned network’s fall season is patently illegal.

“There is a 30-day moratorium on the banners going up or down,” says Public Works spokeswoman Cora Fossett. “It is out of our hands at Public Works. It is under the City Council’s jurisdiction to instruct us what to do.”

So far, what the city has done in response to the banner scandal and years of other illegal ads — for everything from Rupert Murdoch’s Dodgers to the Cybernet World Fest — is to return ABC’s $46,000 fee, meaning that the vinyl-coated thespian close-ups are glaring at us free of charge. Meanwhile, the 30-day moratorium means that even banners carrying no sponsorship whatsoever, such as the ones slated for installation this week for the American Cancer Society, cannot go up.

“They’re making it hard on everyone else — hard, hard, hard,” says Howard Furst, whose AAA Flag & Banner was paid more than $100,000 by ABC to install the commercial banners.

Things may get tougher still, now that the city’s street-use inspection division has come under intense scrutiny. Notice may be taken of yet another violation of the division’s own Street Banners General Rules and Regulations. Those rules say that “permits shall not be issued where the installation is within 50 feet of [an] intersection or within 50 feet of any midblock pedestrian crosswalk” and that banners “shall not be installed to obstruct traffic signs or warning devices.” ABC-TV banners do both — all over town.

Take the crosswalk at First and Fairfax, one of the few neighborhood business districts with actual pedestrians. Despite the prohibition, Dharma & Greg festoon the lamppost directly above one end of the crosswalk. A bit farther south, at the perplexing intersection of San Vicente, Olympic and Fairfax, Camryn Manheim of The Practice provides the backdrop for one signal, while Susan Lucci, from All My Children, is at another. A half-block to the east, where Ogden Avenue dead-ends into Olympic, there is a midblock pedestrian crossing decorated, some 46 feet away, with ABC Sports, advertising the “brickyard 400.”

Are offending banners ever removed? “Oh sure, all the time,” Cora Fossett says. AAA’s Howard Furst, however, says he’s never had one taken away. Starting now, he probably will.

POLICE SCIENCE

A Cambridge, Massachusetts, cop’s dopey contention that Mexican-Americans are resistant to pepper spray because of their supposed high chile intake brought to mind similar spoutings that have marked police history right here in L.A. In the 1980s, former Police Chief Daryl Gates asserted that African-Americans were dying from police chokeholds because their carotid arteries reopened more slowly than “normal” people’s. Four decades earlier, an L.A. Sheriff’s captain explained the arrest of 300 Mexican-American youths in connection with the Sleepy Lagoon murder case by saying that Hispanics love knives and bloodletting because of their Aztec heritage of human sacrifice. (Seventeen people were convicted of murder or assault, although the Sleepy Lagoon victim most likely died in a car crash; the case was later thrown out on appeal.)

The Cambridge P.D. later repudiated Officer Frank Gutoski’s statement, and a good thing, too, because we were already envisioning the repercussions here. A new injunction barring jalapeño consumption by gang members? School CURE programs (Chile Use Resistance Education — Dare To Keep Kids Off Chile) to try to get kids to kick pico de gallo and take up ketchup? New health-department ratings reductions for restaurants serving anything hotter than Pace picante? “We’re not scientists, we’re police officers,” the Cambridge P.D. said in its retraction. No kidding. That’s worth remembering the next time any officer or politician spews racial theories to justify police misconduct.

RAGING RETRO

“Uhh, I guess this is a retrofest, so I better do a retro song, huh?” So former teen idol and prepube poster god Leif Garrett introduced his 1979 chart-topper “I Was Made for Dancing” with his new band, Godspeed, at Rhino Records’ First Annual RetroFest last weekend. The festival at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was a sort of nostalgia trade show featuring everyone from Linda Blair to June Lockhart. Batman Adam West and his first-ever TV adversary, the Riddler (Frank Gorshin), signed autographs in different parts of the building. West seemed somewhat dazed and certainly confused next to the Batmobile, while octogenarian Gorshin was cranky, refusing to “Riddle me” anything, or do impersonations, his stock-in-trade.

Onetime Tiger Beat poster boy Tony DeFranco, 39, looked like a golf pro as he stepped up with his two sisters, hip-hugger-wearing, Valley-divorcée types, to belt out “Heartbeat It’s a Lovebeat” — Ay caramba! Twenty years ago, Garrett was playing arenas; this weekend, a crowd of 125 watched him decked out in floppy Janis Joplin hat and baggy trousers, sporting a visible pot underneath his shirt. The band’s accompaniment may have been sloppy. (At one point, Garrett turned to startled drummer Brian Walsh and yelled, “Drum solo!,” which completely baffled the stickman and left the band giggling like schoolgirls onstage.) And Garrett’s matinee-hunk appeal may have declined. But many of the girl-turned-woman fans screamed like it was 1979. One 40-plus rocker standing next to me had a different take: “I worked for 20 years to have a hit and never had one — if this is how it ends up, I’m glad I never had one.”