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Massive civil rights action filed
by George Wiley
Stung by accusations of child pornography displays on his Internet adult sites, Redondo Beach King Harbor leaseholder Stephen Shoemaker has filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court charging the city of Redondo Beach with harassment and discrimination. Shoemaker says a conspiring group of city officials want him off the waterfront.
"The porn thing fits into the big picture of how they (the city) do things," said Shoemaker this week. "What is their ultimate desire? I think it is to get rid of the harbor lessees, and me in particular."
Shoemaker said the city has been after him ever since he went to court to force the city to rebuild the Redondo pier, which was destroyed by a spectacular fire in 1988.
"I believe the city planned to bankrupt me on the pier before I bought into it," he said. "I think everything is just a continuation of that conspiracy or whatever you want to call it."
In the lawsuit Shoemaker contends there has been a pattern of discrimination and conspiracy which have caused him not only mental anguish but financial loss.
He said he was forced to sell back to the city his Redondo Horseshoe Pier business in 1995 for $1.5 million in order to save his current lease on the Fun Factory and a restaurant.
In his lawsuit Shoemaker charges that the city has failed to keep up the areas around his leasehold so that his area appears dilapidated and run down. "They don't want to deal with mom and pop owners like me, they want to deal with big corporations like Kincaid's," he said.
Shoemaker's lawsuit charges the city with discriminatory removal of graffiti, with failure to list or advertise some businesses in city promotions, by capriciously allowing music at some pier sites but not others, by decorating some areas but not his, and by "obstructing parking, blocking access, eliminating stairways, and directing circulation traffic away from the plaintiff's businesses and businesses operated on the leasehold controlled by the defendant, City of Redondo Beach."
Shoemaker also accuses the city of holding secret meetings to deprive him of his rights, and with distributing "confidential information held in police department files" to civilian administrators.
With the filing of the civil rights suit Shoemaker is battling the city on a legally divided front. While his civil rights action heads for resolution in federal court, his child porn case continues in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Shoemaker said this week he could have settled the porn case if he'd been willing to register as a sex offender. But he refused to that.
Nor is he about to knuckle under to any other pressures the city allegedly sends his way, he vowed. "If they want to battle, they've got a battle," he said. "I was a nice citizen. They were the ones who decided to arrest me, and the question is why?"
Shoemaker thinks the answer is that the city wanted to be rid of him so that it could lay claim to his leasehold at 123 International Boardwalk. Shoemaker holds that lease until 2027.
In his civil rights action, Shoemaker seeks to have the city barred from "investing any additional public financing to develop their (the city's) private commercial leaseholds on and adjacent to the Redodno Beach Pier and King Harbor, unless equal funds, investments, and public financing are made to those leaseholds in which the defendants are not master leaseholders."
Shoemaker is effectively asking the federal courts to put the city out of business as a leaseholder in the harbor by forcing the city to divest itself of commercial leaseholds which compete with other privately held leaseholds like his.
"They are my landlord and my competitor," Shoemaker said. "To me there's something wrong with that."
Shoemaker's suit comes just as the city has settled another long-standing King Harbor legal case with Les Guthrie, owner of Marina Cove, Ltd. Guthrie was out of town this week and unavailable for comment, but according to a story last week in the Daily Breeze, the city agreed to provide Guthrie with $250,000 in rent credits, to be spread over a two-year period. That was in exchange for Guthrie's dropping a $4.7 million lawsuit against the city for failing to provide him with a letter that he needed to refinance his leasehold with a bank.
"The city has a tremendous amount of power over us," Guthrie had said earlier. "They made it clear they could make my life tougher, and I got the message."
Shoemaker said he expects it will take years for his civil rights action to make its way through the courts. Should it come to trial, Shoemaker has asked for a trial by jury. "It's a very, very difficult thing to prove," Shoemaker conceded, "but we think we can prove it, and we're willing to take whatever time it takes and pay whatever it costs."
Attempts to reach Redondo city officials or council members late Tuesday to comment on Shoemaker's lawsuit were unsuccessful. ER