At 2:44 p.m. Thursday, Antonio Villaraigosa walked into the newsroom of the Los Angeles Daily News, enroute to a meeting with editors and reporters, trailed by a posse that outnumbers that of Vinny Chase, the mythical rising star on the HBO series Entourage.
The mayor would love that. In his own mind, after all, he is the biggest star in Los Angeles.
Antonio had not been at the Daily News offices since Oct. 2. I know because it was my first day at the Daily News, and I was asked to sit in on that meeting. I was not asked to sit in on today's meeting. No one at the newspaper is surprised.
Today I understand Antonio refers to me as "that Castro guy." My how I have fallen. As recently as 2005, Antonio used to go to great lengths to boast to other reporters that I was the first reporter to have written about him -- in his 1994 Assembly campaign -- and that "Tony, here, has covered me the longest and written the best stories about me."
What changed our relationship was one story he didn't like: 'The Man/The Myth: The Untold Story of The Mayor's Rise from Poverty to Power,' published Nov. 19, which Daniel Hernandez in The Weekly last week called "an exhaustive takedown last year of the mayor’s self-made image" reporting how "along the way the Mexican American Prince story crossed from reality into myth."
Antonio and his entourage went ballistic. Vinny Chase and his boys could learn a thing or two. But the mayoral hatchet men's attempts at character assassination were like bad attempts from the gang that couldn't shoot straight. All they succeeded in doing was getting me calls from book publishers to an offer from one night club owner to reprise my onetime gig as a female impersonator. I just may -- at the next roast of Antonio.
For the mayor, though, it tore back the curtain. The political wizard of L.A. was exposed for who he is. After an extended honeymoon with the news media, he suddenly found himself fair game. The Washington Post published an embarrassing photo of him snoozing in the House of Representatives gallery during the president's State of the Union. A Superior Court judge then laughed the mayor's LAUSD plan out of court -- and an appeals court this week agreed. In South L.A., voters rejected his candidate to unseat an African-American school board incumbent. And last week the mayor lost the city the 2016 Olympics bid.
Finally, in the wake of his State of the City address Wednesday, the mayor finds himself contradicted by East Valley High School officials, police and students over his claim that the school is the source of a turf war among four gangs -- a claim that apparently is, if not just overstated, flat out wrong.
So the mayor is out campaigning again, supplied with breath strips, green tea, room temperature water, a sad-eyed flack who looks like Manolete come back from the dead and maybe even a hair stylist. He also needed a tour guide. On the way out, he got lost in the newsroom and wound up at a desk he didn't want to be at, ready to shake the hand of its occupant.
I turned around to a stunned look on the mayor's face and an outstretched hand.
"Hey," I said as we shook hands. "Didn't I see you on American Idol?"
In L.A., after all, even Sanjaya had his day.