Costa Mesa Building Code Violator Holed Up in Vegas

LAS VEGAS — Every now and then Sid Soffer likes to flirt with disaster. In the wee hours of the morning he slips behind the wheel of his ’76 Caddy--a “parts” car for his real wheels back in Costa Mesa--and heads south along Interstate 15, hurtling away from the bright lights of Bugsy Siegel’s city and into the soft star-glow of the desert.

His destination: The California border.

“I felt like Al Capone,” Soffer says of one such excursion onto his native soil. “I felt like the biggest felon in the world.”

Soffer makes these little forays, he says, to keep his California driver’s license valid. But no one knows about the trips and it’s a bit unclear exactly why he thinks they keep him in the state Department of Motor Vehicles’ good graces.

But if Soffer gets pulled over, he goes to jail.

Why?

Because Sid Soffer, longtime Orange County saloonkeeper and Newport-Costa Mesa gadfly, is an outlaw. A fugitive from justice. A man on the lam. All because he refuses to accept a Municipal Court judge’s ruling that he violated Costa Mesa’s building code and must fix up a garage that had been converted, without permits, into apartments. The judge subsequently issued a warrant for his arrest.

That was two years and, by Soffer’s estimate, $200,000 ago. Even the garage is gone now--a few months after he left town, his long-estranged wife tore it down.

“They started coming to me, serving me with papers,” says Michiko Soffer. “It was a joint property, and I didn’t feel like going through what Sid went through, having to end up either in jail or running away.”

But Soffer refuses to give in and accept a jail sentence for something he says isn’t even a crime. So he’s living in exile, holed up in Gulag Las Vegas, running his business by fax and lobbing letters and legal motions over the border like the neighborhood delinquent tossing rocks at windows.

The anomalies of his life stack up like a pile of casino chips.

Far from poor, Soffer owns several properties in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, and his Sid’s restaurant on Old Newport Boulevard does a steady trade. But because he doesn’t know when his exile will end, he’s squatting in a cramped studio apartment, leading a transient’s life.

He doesn’t drink or gamble but is holed up in a place known for a preponderance of both. He has life-long friends in Orange County, and acquaintances dating from his days running bars in Laguna Beach and Newport, including the infamous Blue Beet. But those friends have to go to Vegas if they want to see him.

This is where pride has landed him. And stubbornness. And a predisposition to grand theatrics and hyperbole that have made his bars and restaurants so popular over the years.

If he weren’t so frustrated, he’d laugh.

“If you lose your sense of humor, you go crazy,” Soffer says, sitting amid stacks of legal files, boxes of restaurant paperwork, a computer and his television set, tuned this afternoon to cooking shows. “But there is no humor in this. There were a couple movies on TV last night about terrorists. They’re motivated because they believe what they’re doing is right. As a person gets more frustrated, he strikes out.

“I have more sense than to go out and blow up a building, but you can begin to understand their mentality. It’s a very helpless, frustrating feeling.”

*

Soffer has been living in Vegas long enough now to chart the changes to the city as he drives through its heart. A casino gone there, a new one going up here. Workers picketing outside the Frontier Hotel, more than five years after they walked out on strike.

For the last two years, Soffer says, he’s been doing pretty much the same thing every day. Up early, deal with business in the morning, head over to a casino for the cheap buffet lunch then fill the afternoon with busy work or research in the Las Vegas law library.

He hasn’t changed much, as if he could after all this time. He still wears his trademark brown corduroy pants and white T-shirt. His white beard is well-manicured and his eyes clear and sharp, while his conversations tend to ramble in the manner of someone with a lot of details to tell, and plenty of time to tell them.

On this afternoon, Soffer maneuvers his car along the streets, weaving a bit as he gestures to tell yet another story, narrowly missing a head-on collision. He’s on his way to a bar he hopes to buy. He and a partner put in an offer and are negotiating the details now. It’s a nice spot, small but with a good kitchen.

Truth be told, though, he’d rather be back in Newport.

“I’ve been away from my business, my family--my whole life--for two years,” Soffer says. “This is like being under house arrest.”

The details of Soffer’s self-imposed exile are myriad and conflicting, teasingly beyond a simple summation. Officially, he fled to evade a jail sentence for violating probation. His violation: disobeying Municipal Court Judge Susanne Shaw’s order to comply with Costa Mesa building codes.

“He was a slumlord,” said Costa Mesa City Attorney Thomas Kathe. “It got to the point where conditions at his property were such that we couldn’t ignore them any more.”

The property is a house and garage on Bernard Street, just northwest of Triangle Square, that Soffer and his wife bought in 1979. They moved into the house and rented out two apartments that had been carved out of the garage.

Costa Mesa building officials knew about the converted garage before Soffer bought the property, and decided not to act on complaints about it filed later by a neighbor, according to court records and documents Soffer has collected. But in June 1990, in an attempt to get him to clean up the property, the city filed a criminal complaint charging Soffer with violating seven building codes.

From Soffer’s end of it, there were no violations. Changes to the property were made before he bought it, so it’s not his fault the work was done without permits and inspections. And even if it were his fault, he argues, the city had known about the problem for years and didn’t act, so the statute of limitations had expired.

Soffer sees ulterior motives in a prosecution that he says has become a persecution. Soffer was a regular and sometimes noisome presence at City Council meetings, and city officials, he says, are glad to be rid of him.

“So long as I don’t come back, and shut up, they’re happy,” Soffer says. “But it’s become very personal between Judge Shaw and me.”

Shaw did not return phone calls requesting an interview. But her comments contained in court transcripts--the file is as thick as two volumes of Yellow Pages--reveal her annoyance with Soffer’s determination to subvert her orders to make safe properties that he was renting out.

“I begged Mr. Soffer from Day One,” she said during one court appearance over sentencing. “They [city officials] wanted me to jail him immediately. I fined him. I said, Sid, get with it. Do [the repairs]. . . . He wouldn’t get it done. . . . Mr. Soffer does not understand that there is such a thing as a court order.”

Maybe, but he certainly understands a court filing.

Soffer acted as his own lawyer in the first court battle, winning his argument that he was not responsible for the renovations having been made without permits because he didn’t own the property then. But Shaw still found him in violation for maintaining the property and ordered him to bring his property into compliance.

Soffer’s appeal was rejected after he failed to file his papers in time. And when he continued to defy Shaw’s orders, he was jailed twice for about 20 days each time. On June 2, 1995, his appeals were exhausted and he was ordered to reappear in court for resentencing.

Instead, he sent his lawyer to accept the sentence and file an immediate appeal and request release on his own recognizance, a maneuver he says the law allows in misdemeanor cases.

Shaw disagreed. And since it was her court, Shaw won the round.

Soffer was doing payroll at his bar when the lawyer’s call came.

“He said you’re not going to believe this but there’s a warrant out for your arrest, with a $250,000 bail,” Soffer said. “I picked up my paperwork, locked the door and headed for the [Nevada] border. . . . The police missed me by 20 minutes. I envisioned getting to the border and there’d be 92 sheriff’s cars and a blockade, and they’re checking everybody’s ID. That’s what they do in the movies.”

The reality was decidedly less dramatic. He drove across the line like everyone else, part of the daily stream of California drivers who slip over to Vegas for a little R & R.

The difference is, the rest of them get to go home.

*

As long as Soffer stays out of California, he has his freedom. States as a rule don’t pursue misdemeanor warrants across state lines.

But Soffer hasn’t given up trying to return. He has sent at least a half-dozen letters and faxes to Costa Mesa officials so far this year, most of them caustic diatribes. He has filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office accusing the prosecutors and the judge with breaches of conduct, including perjury. Shaw gets a special mention in the menu at his Newport Beach restaurant, telling patrons that if the quality has slipped over the past two years, the blame is hers.

The barrage is part of his strategy, Soffer says.

“I’m trying to shake them up,” he said. “They won’t budge.”

But they have noticed.

Shaw mentioned in the court transcripts the vilification her name has undergone in Soffer’s restaurant. Kathe says Soffer has turned a legal dispute into a vendetta.

“He tends to personalize his attacks on me,” Kathe says. “I don’t know why he’s doing that.”

Last month, Soffer tried a new tack. He had a lawyer file a new writ of habeas corpus on his behalf, arguing that he shouldn’t be jailed because no crime was committed. The writ was rejected, in part because since he’s on the lam, there’s nothing to release him from. He must be in jail before a Superior Court judge can let him out.

Of course, Soffer isn’t about to check into the Orange County Jail.

“I’ve been in jail twice,” he says. “Now I have to go back to jail a third time so that I can prove I’m innocent? If the warrant’s illegal, I should go to jail to prove it?”

He concedes that the city can’t back down now, or other property owners with a beef will start making civic life more difficult. Which puts both sides at a standoff.

“I wouldn’t go back to jail for anything,” Soffer says, the air conditioner in his room whirring noisily beneath a table of jumbled papers and boxes. “There’s nothing in the world like when you’re in court and the judge says, ‘Bailiff, lock him up.’ ”