State Suit Focuses on Toy Seller’s Profits : Vendor: The trinket hawker, who works outside L.A. Zoo, says the money goes to care for unwanted pets. Officials say he pockets most of it.

Garbed in a clown suit, Bernard Kessler until recently spent his weekends hawking balloons and toys in front of the Los Angeles Zoo--raising money, he says, to care for thousands of unwanted cats and dogs.

But the state attorney general’s office alleges in a lawsuit that most of the money that Kessler and his workers have made in the last four years selling trinkets at various Griffith Park sites has gone not to animal welfare but into Kessler’s pockets.

“We estimated they were selling merchandise at the rate of $350,000 a year in front of the Los Angeles Zoo, the Griffith Observatory and Travel Town (Museum) . . . telling people the proceeds were going to help dogs and cats,” Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cordi said. “Our investigation showed that most of the proceeds were going into Bernard Kessler’s bank accounts.”

Kessler’s attorney insists that his client is guilty of no more than poor record-keeping, while Kessler argues that he is being persecuted because his trinket sales compete with souvenir sales inside the zoo.

“Anybody who knows Bernie knows that Bernie is devoted to animals,” said Kessler’s attorney, David Liberman. “He never took a salary, never took a vacation. All of this was used so that he can rescue animals. . . . He’s a very eccentric guy, we’re not denying that. But he’s certainly not a dishonorable or dishonest person.”

The attorney general’s office has obtained a temporary court order barring Kessler and his wife, Sheri Mizrachi, from making any more sales until a Nov. 20 Superior Court hearing on the matter, prompting Kessler to complain that he is being prevented from helping “the little orphan kitties and puppies who need to be bottle-fed to survive.”

In a telephone interview, Kessler read from a letter that he had been planning to send to “almost every important person, including the Pope of Rome” about his plight--but then decided not to on the advice of his attorney. In the letter, Kessler muses, “Why can’t I stand proudly like the Statue of Liberty at the L.A. Zoo as my balloons wave high in the air like the American flag?”

In the Superior Court lawsuit filed Oct. 4, the state argues that Kessler has violated a number of state and federal laws governing the nonprofit organization he founded in 1985, Help Elevate Life for Pets. According to state auditors who reviewed Kessler’s bank records, sale proceeds were deposited into six accounts, five of them personal accounts and the sixth earmarked for HELP. Checks written on the personal accounts were used to pay such things as Kessler’s mortgage and car and utility bills.

Saying that he uses his Sylmar home to house 1,000 abandoned pets a year, Kessler defended his use of the HELP income to pay the mortgage. “Ninety percent of the house is used by the animals,” Kessler said. “Ten percent is used by me. We have phone bills; 95% of the phone bills are for the animals.”

At the East Valley Animal Care and Control Center, District Supervisor Tom Walsh said his office has received a couple of complaints in the last year from Kessler’s neighbors about an illegal kennel. Walsh said that on some visits his inspectors found too many animals and issued warnings. On several other inspections, the animal control officers found only a few pets.

“Where is he hiding them?” asked Walsh of the 25 to 50 pets Kessler said he cares for every day at his home.