Judge Dismisses Panel Members From Fukai Suit

Calling Gardena Councilman Mas Fukai’s libel suit a “fishing expedition,” a Torrance Superior Court judge has dismissed from the case four members of a political committee that Fukai says was responsible for a last-minute anonymous smear letter two years ago.

Fukai alleges that a committee formed in 1986 to block construction of a west Gardena apartment project is linked to the letter, which branded him “a liar and a cheat” and said he had once been paid off by a poker club owner.

But after a brief hearing on Tuesday, Judge J. Gary Hastings called Fukai’s case “total speculation” and exempted from liability former City Council candidate Terry Kennedy and three other members of the No on Proposition A Committee.

Hastings said that arguments by Fukai’s attorneys to justify continuing the year-old case contained “no facts that raise any inference whatsoever” that the four committee officers had anything to do with the letter.

Case Isn’t Dismissed

However, the judge stopped short of throwing out the $1-million suit against the committee, saying he could not do so without sworn statements from all its members, saying that they were not involved with the letter and did not know of it before it was sent.

Such statements by Kennedy, Herman and Mary DeNunzio, and Laura Shipley--all officers of the now-defunct committee--had been presented to the court.

Committee attorney Jerome Bleiweis of Torrance told the judge he would gather statements from all committee members. Kennedy, who ran against Fukai because of the councilman’s support for the controversial apartment proposal, said there are only two other members of the loosely knit homeowners’ committee.

Committee members, concerned about crime and traffic that they said the 84 apartments would bring to their neighborhood, gathered 2,300 signatures on a referendum to overturn City Council approval of the project and put the apartment issue on the 1986 ballot. Voters rejected the project, and single-family homes were eventually built on the Budlong Avenue site.

“This is the best news I’ve had in a long time,” an elated Kennedy, a U.S. Customs Service inspector, said in an interview. “That election was two years ago, and it’s been hanging over us ever since.

“I’ve always regretted that letter--that an interloper came into the campaign and did that. It was a personal vendetta, and it was wrong,” Kennedy said.

Fukai’s lawyers, expressing surprise at the ruling, said they were not yet sure of their next move.

“The law makes it very difficult now for us to try to turn that ruling around,” attorney Jay James said.

Fukai, a four-term councilman and chief deputy to county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, filed the libel suit in April, 1987, after an eight-month district attorney’s investigation produced no indictments but concluded that Kennedy or the committee may have been linked to the letter.

Flyer Was Illegal

Prosecutors said they had entered the case because the campaign mailer did not include the sender’s name and address and was therefore illegal.

“It’s a personal thing with me,” Fukai said in a recent interview. “It’s for my family. It’s for my grandkids. It’s for the Fukai name.”

In a memo to the judge, Fukai’s attorneys had asked for more time to discover what they called the “missing link” that would strongly connect the committee, or those acting on its behalf, with the letter.

Sworn statements by committee members establish “numerous links . . . which indicate that the committee and certain of its members were involved directly or indirectly in the mailing,” attorney Kim West said in the memo.

West said questioning other Proposition A opponents, especially Normandie poker club owner Russell Miller would help establish the link. Miller’s company contributed $11,000 to stop the neighboring apartment project.

Contribution Cited

Specifically, West argued that Blaine Nicholson, a Studio City public relations and political consultant who works for Miller’s poker club, contributed time to the No on Proposition A campaign. The committee did not disclose the contribution on campaign filing statements as required by state law, West said.

Nicholson also encouraged Kennedy to mention in his council campaign a civil suit on which the letter was based, according to Kennedy’s sworn statements. In an interview, Nicholson said he discussed the suit with Kennedy, but made no recommendation about its use.

“The author of the (smear) letter,” West argued, “only can be established through circumstantial evidence such as the obvious link between Blaine Nicholson, who wanted to use the (lawsuit), and the committee, which utilized Blaine Nicholson’s services yet failed to disclose the use of these services in the campaign disclosure statements.”

But committee attorney Bleiweis maintained in documents submitted to the judge that instead of blaming the “amateurish, puerile” letter on Fukai’s political opponents, “it makes more sense to me to speculate that a Fukai supporter wrote and distributed that letter.”

“It is so stupidly contrived,” Bleiweis wrote, “that it must have insulted the intelligence of the Gardena electorate.”

The one-page letter, sent to about 4,700 homes the weekend before election, bore the name, but not the signature, of Hirohisa Yamada, a Gardena grocery store owner.

Yamada had sued the councilman and his son, Ricky, in 1981 for alleged breach of contract, fraud and embezzlement over the son’s operation of a Hollywood restaurant under a franchise owned by Yamada.

Evidence found in a district attorney’s investigation of the mailer did not support a charge against the committee or Kennedy that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, said Steven A. Sowders, chief prosecutor in the Special Investigations Division.

But in a December, 1986, summary of the case, Sowders said that while Yamada denied sending the letter and probably had nothing to do with it, “certain links appear between the suspect mass mailing and some person or persons associated with either Terry Kennedy or the No on Proposition A Committee.”

One apparent link was that at least some of the letters were mailed to voters in envelopes bearing the mass mailing permit issued to the committee in February, 1986, the district attorney’s investigation found.