Salvos Intensify in Roberti Recall : Campaign: Senator's foes say they're grass-roots political reformers. He calls that label a cover for vindictive gun fanatics.

By JOHN SCHWADA

Feb. 8, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Depending on who’s talking, the leaders of the effort to recall State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nys) are an eclectic coalition of madder-than-hell good-government proponents or a secretive bunch of vindictive gun nuts.

Recall advocates claim to be grass-roots reformers who see Roberti, who was the powerful state Senate president pro tempore for 13 years, as epitomizing a political system gone haywire with soft-on-crime liberalism, corruption, arrogance and deal-making.

But Roberti, who last week became the first state lawmaker in 80 years to be forced into a recall election, has rejected attempts to characterize his foes as anything other than vengeful--and potentially dangerous--gun fanatics angry with him for his bill that led to a 1989 assault-weapon ban.

“That’s what this is all about,” Roberti said at a news conference last month as he held up an outlawed Uzi assault weapon.

Not so, said recall leader Bill Dominguez, who accuses Roberti of demonizing his foes to avoid dealing with their charges that he is a carpetbagger who tolerated the political corruption that has scandalized the Legislature in recent years.

But Dominguez also has acknowledged that the recall leadership has had a political marriage of convenience with gun activists.

“When we called them (gun activists) for financial help, it was almost a situation of them being ready to mortgage their houses,” Dominguez said. “But call up someone and ask them to contribute to a movement to stop corruption in government, and they’d say, ‘That’s nice--we’ll get back to you.’ ”

But while Dominguez, 43, a systems analyst with Transamerica Insurance Group and candidate in the recall election, denies that gun issues are the driving force behind his own political activism, he nevertheless shares with 2nd Amendment enthusiasts the belief that gun control is liberalism’s failed substitute for getting tough on criminals.

“I guess I’ve been hanging around these 2nd Amendment people too long,” Dominguez said recently, joking about their influence. Dominguez, whose father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba, also ran against Roberti in 1992.

The recall movement has paid a price for its alliance with the anti-gun-control forces.

Such ties have handed Roberti valuable ammunition in his bid to paint his foes as single-issue activists. Handgun Control Inc., sponsor of the federal Brady bill, has jumped to Roberti’s defense. Roberti aides have said they hope to turn the recall, scheduled for April 12, into a national referendum on gun control.

Still, the recall movement cannot be easily dismissed as merely a puppet of the gun lobby.

For example, among the five official proponents of the recall are Glenn Bailey, 38, an Encino educator and longtime environmental activist; Hans Rusche, 63, an engineering company executive and local leader in Ross Perot’s United We Stand movement, and Dolores White, 59, a real estate broker and veteran activist in county and state Republican party circles.

Rusche said recently: “This gun thing has been played up too much by Roberti and the media. There’s no question these people are involved. But the NRA (National Rifle Assn.) hasn’t supported us with money.”

Besides, Rusche said, he applauds Roberti’s assault-weapon ban. “Such high-tech weapons belong on the battlefield, not on our streets,” he said in a recent interview.

Both Bailey and White ran against Roberti in 1992. White and seven others, including Dominguez and a Canoga Park gun dealer, filed this week as candidates to replace Roberti if the recall succeeds.

Meanwhile, on Monday, state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal, who has represented the Westside for two decades in Sacramento, announced that he will run in the regular election this spring for the Senate seat now held by Roberti. Roberti’s current term expires in December, and due to term limits he is ineligible to run for reelection. In effect, if he is recalled, Roberti’s successor in the April 12 election would serve only until December.

Rosenthal faced a difficult reelection campaign because the 1990 reapportionment radically changed his constituency. His surprise decision to run for the 20th District seat held by Roberti was quickly endorsed by the key leadership of the political organization run by U.S. Reps. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) and Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

But critics swiftly likened the Rosenthal decision to Roberti’s own controversial move to the San Fernando Valley--from Hollywood--in 1992 and predicted that it would help the recall movement by fueling the community’s anger against over-the-hill politicians trying to set up shop in the Valley.

“It’s Roberti revisited,” White complained.

In more recent weeks, the recall has captured the support of a number of taxpayer, victims’ rights and government watchdog advocates. They include Ted Costa, president of People’s Advocate, a group founded by the late tax fighter Paul Gann; Ralph Morrell, a state capital gadfly, and Kevin Washburn, a leader in the “three strikes and you’re out” anti-crime initiative.

But the Roberti camp claims such views and diversity are the exception and not the rule in a movement spawned by the gun lobby.

The Roberti thesis got a major boost when the media obtained a lengthy confidential memo, laden with sinister, threatening rhetoric, written to the NRA by recall advocate Russ Howard, a South Bay resident. In the memo, Roberti is graphically described as the target of the anti-gun control movement.

“The beast is wounded,” the memo says in one section, a reference to Roberti’s costly 1992 struggle to win election to the Valley-based seat of former state Sen. Alan Robbins. “It’s time to go in for the kill before he can run for something like attorney general.”

Howard has justified the memo’s strident anti-gun control language as a natural part of a sales pitch to lure official NRA support for the recall.

Howard’s involvement with the recall also stems from his participation in a failed 1990 campaign to block the reelection of former state Sen. Mike Roos. Howard said he joined the anti-Roos campaign because of the 1989 assault weapons ban, which Roos co-authored.

On the other hand, Dominguez and Howard say they have gotten no help from the NRA for their current recall drive. “I would have killed to have gotten their mailing list (of 350,000 California members),” Dominguez has admitted.

Recall advocates say the success of their recall petition drive proves that theirs is not a single-issue campaign. More than 20,000 registered voters signed the recall petitions that outlined--as required by law--the proponents’ five-point argument for recalling Roberti (only the last mentions gun control), as well as the senator’s rebuttal.

Howard, a stockbroker who holds an MBA from UCLA, says he resents being portrayed as a gun fanatic. He points to the fact--confirmed by other sources--that he was the first research director for the Proposition 174 school voucher campaign. He also claims to have been an avid precinct worker for the campaign to oust former California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird.

Howard, 37, a lifetime NRA member, insists that it is Roberti’s alleged political abuses that have motivated his drive to oust the senator. It was in 1990 that Howard met Dominguez and joined Californians Against Corruption, a group that was organized around the effort to defeat Roos.

The group, based in Signal Hill, was founded by Dominguez and Richard L. Carone, a Rancho Palos Verdes resident and president of Finley Oil Well Services, an oil drilling maintenance firm that has publicly reported revenues of $5 million to $10 million.

Perhaps the most controversial member of the activist group has been Cuban emigre Manuel Fernandez, who once told The Times that the “whole purpose of the recall of Roberti is retribution” for his assault-weapon ban.

In 1983, Fernandez was convicted of illegally owning a machine gun.

Referring to the Fernandez conviction, Roberti campaign press secretary Staci Walters said this week said: “This is just another example of the fact that the recall proponents have clear motives to wreak revenge on Sen. Roberti because of his leadership on banning assault weapons.”

With or without Fernandez, Californians Against Corruption is little more than a front for the NRA, according to Roberti. His backers have filed complaints with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, alleging that the group violated state law by failing to disclose a $5,000 contribution received in 1990 from the NRA.