Bernard Parks, one of the worst and most vicious public officials this city ever had, has colluded with the L.A. Times to lob a vindictively constructed non-bomb at his arch enemy, Mark Ridley-Thomas, the man who beat him to within an inch of his life in his last campaign for the Board of Supervisors. Mark beat Parks like a drum. Mark beat Parks like he stole some money. Mark beat Parks in an embarrassing and stunning lopsided victory that sapped his puny little political power and derailed his political aspirations.

Parks gives new meaning to the term “sore loser,” as he is notoriously incapable of accepting defeat or disappointment of any kind like a man. He’s a whiny, vindictive old codger who will do anything to anybody to get even if he feels he’s been wronged, and he has waited and brooded and seethed for almost a year to get even with Mark. Hell, he probably hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since Mark almost whipped him to death last November. So, he finally struck last week when he went to The Times with a non-story designed to smear Mark and tarnish his illustrious political reputation with innuendoes of corruption and misdeeds — not facts, mind you, not even allegations — just innuendoes. Well, I’m not having any of it. I’m going to take Parks apart and then I’m going to take the Times apart.

Where shall I begin? Let’s start with Parks having fed this piece of trash about Mark to The Times. This was the not the first time he’s done such a thing. In fact, this is an important weapon in his “I’m gonna get you, sucka!” arsenal. Remember when Willie Williams was serving as the city’s first African-American police chief and how he ultimately lost his job after a story broke in the news about his penchant for Las Vegas gambling? Linda Douglass, then a local TV news reporter, broke that story and she told me and a couple of other reporters I know that Parks hand-carried that story about Williams to her. You see, Parks hates anybody who has what he wants. He hated Williams because he wanted to be the chief and, according to the police officials who worked with Parks at the time, (who I will not name because they asked me not to) he did everything he could to undermine Williams. They said every bad word spoken or written about Williams came directly from Parks. Getting Williams out of the chief’s office was Parks’ passion.

City Council members at the time told me that Parks would pick them up and drive them around in his car for the sole purpose of badmouthing Williams. His plot came to fruition when he gave Linda that story. I’d heard about Parks’ anti-Williams crusade, and after Parks became chief, I asked him about it two or three times and he brushed me aside, saying: “I don’t want to talk about that.” Toward the end of the supervisorial campaign, I made plans to visit Williams in Atlanta so he could tell me himself all the horrible things Parks did to take his job, but I canceled the trip because I decided it was unnecessary, as Parks was already losing the supervisorial race to Mark on the issues and I didn’t need to go in that direction.

Something else I chose not to relate back then was why Mayor James Hahn fired Parks after he finally did get the chief’s job. Hahn said he fired Parks because of his gross insubordination. Hahn said he wanted Parks to work on addressing the issues in the federal consent decree and Parks refused to do it. In fact, he said that everything he wanted Parks to do, he refused! Hahn said he could not work with Parks. Damn straight! How could he effectively run the city when his underling, the police chief, chooses to ignore his directives and shine him on? Such a situation harkened back to the years when Mayor Tom Bradley and Chief Daryl Gates didn’t even speak to each other!

As they say about police shootings, this was a clean firing: Parks was rightly and righteously fired and Hahn did himself a terrible disservice by not giving the public the real skinny on why he did it. Hahn chose to take the high road and he didn’t tell John Mack or any of us in the community his reason for firing Parks until it was too late — until after Parks had played us and garnered our sympathy vote to put him on the City Council, which was Parks’ vengeful act against Hahn, for he has demonstrated that he has no more business on the City Council than I do. He ran for that seat not to do good, but to get Hahn, and that was our tragedy.

Let’s go back to Bradley for a minute. The late Jess Brewer, a Black who rose to the rank of assistant chief in the LAPD, was appointed by Bradley to the Police Commission upon his retirement from the LAPD. I liked Jess. We used to sit and talk about a lot of things — what was going on in the police department, in City Hall and in the community, particularly the community’s relationship with Gates. Brewer talked about how Parks had developed and was displaying overt disrespect and hostility for and to him and Mayor Bradley because the two of them (as well as the majority of the Police Commission) had picked Williams as chief rather than him. He said Parks really took it badly, was beside himself with fury and that he didn’t know what Parks would do. But Parks was powerless to do anything to Bradley and Brewer — except sulk and pout and run his disrespectful mouth, so he launched his scheme to get rid of Williams. Going back to the future, Hahn hired William Bratton to replace Parks as police chief and Parks went to pieces. I think it’s a tie between who Parks hates the most: Bratton or Mark. Parks hates Bratton for two reasons: 1. Hahn hired him, and 2. Bratton is better than he was. The minute Bratton hit town, Parks went into attack mode and began disputing, denying and contradicting everything the new chief said. He was as rude, obnoxious and contentious to Bratton as was that congressman who yelled “You lie!” at President Obama the other night.

Parks and his family bombarded me with so many anti-Bratton snippets that I had to tell them to stop talking to me. Bratton has been such a good police chief, whom everybody came to love and respect — unlike himself — that the only way Parks could “get even” with Bratton was to attack the LAPD as an institution. As a councilman, Parks has become an enemy of the police department by rejecting and vilifying everything they want, simply because he hates Bratton. He made that foul move to keep the name of that racist dog, Chief William Parker, on the new police building not because he’s in love with Parker, but because he’s in hate with Bratton and he was afraid that, given his popularity, the new building would be named after him. Parks has too much venom in him to even contemplate looking at a police building called Bratton Center.

Parks is also an ingrate. Originally, he was with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who gave him everything he wanted, including a seat on the MTA board seat, but he threw that back in Villaraigosa’s face with no explanation and now he acts like he hates him too. I don’t know why, but I’ll ask around.

The only people who can work with Parks are his own family, as his various campaign consultants and staff members flee him in horror: Dermot Givens, Kerman Maddox, Debbie Beavers, the Rouzans — father and daughter, Herb Wesson III, and that White woman who came from out-of-state to head his ill-fated mayoral campaign and then fled the city screaming about a month later, to name a few. Parks has no friends, allies or associates because nobody except his kin can deal with his eschewal of issues and activities that benefit the people for his obsession to wreak vengeance and get even with people who stand between him and what he wants.

So now he’s spreading lies in The Times to discredit Mark at a time when the man is on the verge of reopening the badly-needed Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital. Is there somebody out there who doesn’t want South L.A. to get its public hospital back? Are there crazy “teabaggers” out there trying to scuttle Mark’s attempts to provide adequate health care to the underserved residents of South L.A.? Is a “kill the hospital by killing the supervisor” ploy afoot? Naw, it’s just Bernard Parks being Bitter Bernie.
We’ll speak of this some more next week.