People and Events

More than 100 people have now called the cops to say that they, too, were victimized by the “yuppie panhandlers,” a couple of aspiring West Hollywood actors who supposedly earned up to $200 an hour in parking lots by pretending to be down on their luck and asking passers-by for help.

Jeffrey Duayne Allman, 31, and Tracy Chris Hartland, 24, have each been charged with 22 counts of petty theft. They are scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Los Angeles Municipal Court. Deputy City Atty. Sue Frauens said other counts could be added as the calls come in.

Terrell Garrett, whose Up From the Streets organization raises money to provide food to the homeless, said he once encountered the pair asking for money in Van Nuys and told Allman he would give them jobs as solicitors, who are paid a percentage of the donations they obtain.

Garrett said a solicitor can earn $50 or $60 a day--up to as much as $90 during the Christmas season.

Allman, he remembers, said, “Well, let me talk it over with my wife.”

But he never called back.

Despite the fact that he is too mean-spirited and--well, common --to find a nice home, he is not about to be turned out or even sent back where he came from.

Joan Coleman, executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Humane Society, says the 2-year-old, 18-inch caiman that was found in an Azusa home by police officers there on another matter won’t be put to sleep, as they say.

“We just don’t do that here,” Coleman declares. “We’ve had Wiley the Coyote for eight years and a horse named Smiley, we’ve had for 20. We have a 20-foot python that’s been here forever.”

A caiman (or Cayman, as some spell it) is a Central or South American reptile similar to a crocodile or an alligator. It has the personality of a junkyard dog. It can grow up to 5 feet and live up to 50 years--which is probably something for Coleman and her organization to think about.

This one had been kept as a pet illegally because the owner did not have an exotic animal permit. The Los Angeles Zoo doesn’t want it because they’re not that exotic. They aren’t exactly cuddly pets, either. Nobody’s been able to get close enough to this “nasty” one to tell whether it’s a boy or a girl, Coleman says.

Although Coleman says the society has a program that teaches handicapped people how to handle and love animals, the caiman won’t be in on it.

Mayor Tom Bradley had a busy morning with kids Tuesday. He helped wind up the summer phase of the city’s Clean and Green program by donning a hard hat to help one of the youth crews sweeping up trash and hoeing weeds at 1st Street and Fremont Avenue near the Harbor Freeway.

Later he had lunch on the south lawn of City Hall with the 300 junior and senior high school Clean and Greeners who have been earning money beautifying the city. He lauded them as “graffiti busters” and said they had a “vital role” in keeping the city clean.

Earlier in the morning, Bradley met with a dozen or so Loreto Street Elementary Street School kids representing the 65,000 Los Angeles County first-graders who are about to be programmed to resist peer pressure on smoking.

Providing no one weakens, they are expected to constitute the Smoke-Free Class of 2000, which is the year they should graduate from high school.

Los Angeles County schools Supt. Stuart Gothold and W. James Nethery, chairman of the California State Coalition for a Smoke-Free Year 2000, say the students will be reminded often over the next 12 years of the dangers of tobacco.

One of the kids gave Bradley a Smoke-Free Class of 2000 T-shirt.

On Bradley’s calendar of public appearances today: He is to sign a sail that will be flown by the U.S. catamaran Stars and Stripes before one of its races against New Zealand in defense of the America’s Cup.

The sail already bears several thousand signatures--and the name of the cigarette company that sponsors the “Sign the Sail” program.