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179  11 Assembling Jim’s Portrait And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another. —Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives The details of Jim’s portrait had begun to accumulate since Industry’s incorporation . Pieces of that identity had sporadically appeared in the local press but, like jagged bits of tile, had not yet formed into public mosaic we would later accept as his likeness. Nor had the local press made the city’s image synonymous with Jim’s or even made up its mind about his place in the city’s hierarchy since it had previously portrayed city attorney Graham Ritchie as the architect of Industry’s injustice. Everything changed on June 26, 1980, when the Los Angeles Herald Examiner published the first installment of a nine-part series titled “The City of Insiders,” a comprehensive account of how Jim and his business associates ran the city. Reported and written by Scot J. Paltrow, the articles collected characteristic populist narratives to introduce Jim and the City of Industry to the paper’s blue-collar readers. Although more critical than any reporting that had preceded it, the series, by stressing the significance of Jim’s influence and charisma, reaffirmed the concept of power as personal property. Its secondary attention to the city’s governmental forms did not ask if those technologies had generated Jim’s power or molded his personality. The lead article, “How the Rich Get Richer,” initiated the series with a populist cliché; and both this article and the ones that followed it reiter- 180 city of industry ated several character-affirming narrative motifs. To begin with, Paltrow portrayed Jim as the city’s pater familias, who had used his position as a Los Angeles County planning commissioner to win support for the city’s formation . The reporter also represented Jim as the ultimate unseen powerbroker, who ran the city as his personal kingdom. According to Paltrow, “many who are knowledgeable about Industry’s affairs claim that Stafford, the city’s founding father, has never relinquished his considerable influence over his offspring.” The lead article shared details of Jim’s personality, his brutality, and his penchant for secrecy, noting that “Stafford is more than 6 feet tall, and despite his age and a slight paunch, is powerfully built. He has thick calluses on his hands, and is rarely seen outdoors without his Panama hat. . . . Stafford has refused repeatedly to be questioned by the Herald Examiner, and once ran after one of the newspaper’s photographers in an attempt to stop him from taking pictures.”1 For readers, such a characterization connoted brutality, avarice, and secrecy. Yet even though that representation was damning, it stressed the anomalous extremes of his monstrous personality, not his membership in a class that commits monstrous deeds. Paltrow and the reporters who followed him did not challenge these biographical assumptions. Rather, they magnified the significance of Jim’s personality to explain why so much wealth was concentrated in such a tiny, evil city. The series also attempted to show that Jim was running the city with the help of willing buddies and business cronies. In addition to repeating the idea in the series title, “The City of Insiders,” Paltrow identified Ed Roski, Jr.’s, Majestic Realty Company as Jim’s most recent collaborator, noting that “Stafford has direct financial interests in several of [Majestic’s] Industry projects.”2 “How the Rich Get Richer” includes a flowchart in which the major players’ names and titles appear in black print on a white field and Jim’s personal ties appear in white print on a black field. The column is headed by title boxes using the same black-white, white-black motif—the left one titled “City of Industry,” the right one “Stafford.” A solid black line on the left connects each city official’s title to the “City of Industry” box; a dotted black line on the right connects the official’s summarized ties to Jim’s name. The connotations are clear and sinister.3 Yet the article does not explain how Jim and his cronies had fashioned their identities as men of action, vision, and power; it simply accepts these qualities as innate features of their characters. Paltrow’s series employed the “abuse of redevelopment” theme to address the legal...

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