ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Ask anybody who really knows her, and they’ll tell you Laura Richardson always wanted to be exactly where she is right now. No, not surrounded by her history of house foreclosures and unpaid bills and dog-ate-my-homework excuses for government regulators, a carousel of controversy that’s being played out to the rhythmic beat-down of her reputation. But, then again, maybe she always would have taken all that, too, all things considered—if it all added up to her being a member of the United States House of Representatives. And it does.

“Yes, I know, I know you hear all the time about people who supposedly always said they wanted to be this or that or X,Y, Z,” says Charles Brown, who was Richardson’s chief of staff in what feels like way back in the day—but actually was only about a year and a half ago, when Richardson was the Sixth District’s member on the Long Beach City Council. “But with Laura, honestly, that is the truth: being in Congress, that’s directly what Laura always had in mind for herself. Always.”

Among people who know Laura Richardson, reaction to reports of her disordered financial house is more told-you-so than shock-and-awe. Fortunately for her, the bad news broke late last month, so close to the June 3 primary election that most Democrats didn’t have a chance to factor it into their decision. Still, the extent of the mess is pretty significant:

• Eight defaults on three houses —in Long Beach, San Pedro and Sacramento—in four years, including three times on the Long Beach residence in the past year, and six times on all of them in the last 14 months. (The Sacramento house sold at a foreclosure auction, although Richardson has since persuaded the lender, Washington Mutual Bank, to file to rescind the sale. That provoked the new buyer to file a lawsuit against Richardson and Washington Mutual.)

• A pattern of not paying debts—to people and businesses ranging from political consultants to a print shop and auto shops—until forced through lawsuits or the embarrassing publicity of newspaper stories.

• A tendency to omit information—legally required information—from government forms designed to supply citizens and voters with the economic interests of office holders and candidates, as well as contributions to their campaigns. The upshot: Richardson may have used her homes to help finance her campaigns, stiffing tax collectors, mortgage holders and small businesses along the way.

“I’m not surprised,” says Doris Topsy-Elvord, the Long Beach political matriarch—former city councilwoman, soon-to-be-ex-harbor commissioner—who used to be Richardson’s mentor. “Because that’s the way Laura is. That’s her personality. She’s into getting where she wants to go—and getting there as quickly as she can. And see, she got there. That’s exactly where she is.”

And here’s the thing: Despite the controversies battering her now, some of the people who know Laura Richardson best still suggest that Congress may be the best place for her.

“In the long run, we did not make a mistake in sending her to Washington,” concedes Topsy-Elvord. “We sent the right person.”

Richardson was never wishing on the shooting star that suddenly carried her across three strata of government—city, state and federal—in barely a year. In truth, that meteoric journey was almost accidental. All along, and for a very long time, she’d been tirelessly calculating and laboring, determined to build her own rocket ship out of contacts, ambition, campaign contributions and precinct walks. That’s another thing people know about Laura Richardson.

“She’s a very hard worker, I’ll put it like that,” says Topsy-Elvord. “Laura wanted to be where she is, with the power she has, and I can’t think of but two or three other people I’ve ever known who were willing to work as hard. There’s nothing that Laura wouldn’t do to get where she got.”

So when the opportunity unexpectedly arrived—when veteran Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald of Carson died of cancer in April 2007, leaving the 37th District seat suddenly vacant—Richardson grabbed it and ran. She disregarded the unwritten etiquette of the Democratic Party, which endorsed State Senator Jenny Oropeza for the office. She shrugged off whatever campaign promises she’d made just five months earlier to voters in the 55th Assembly District, who in November of 2006 had elected her to her first term in the California statehouse. She ignored her lack of many prominent endorsements and thin financial resources. Instead, she followed her lifelong dream. She crashed the election. She fought long and hard and ruthlessly. She won.

“It was a one-shot thing: If Laura didn’t do it then, she wouldn’t have another chance,” Topsy-Elvord explains.

“Nobody could have anticipated Juanita passing. Everything happened so fast. If Laura had had a little more time, I think she would have done things differently.”

Topsy-Elvord’s tongue kind of trips as she makes that last comment. She catches herself before you do, pauses for effect, emits a half-chuckle, then says with more hope than conviction: “Maybe.”

The Laura Richardson Story is the parable of the All-American Candidate, and she’s happy to recite it every time she runs for office: her humble economic beginnings, her diverse ethnic background (white mother, black father), her difficult family life (dad and mom separated when she was young), the persecution she felt through all of it, the perseverance she developed because of it. In a 2007 profile, Richardson told journalist Rachel Kapochunas that racism against her mixed-race family was “what got me since the age of about six of [sic] wanting to be a public servant.”

Charles Brown, Richardson’s former chief of staff, believes it.

“What she’s had to go through in life has been difficult for her and crucial to who she is,” he says. “The kind of racism she had to deal with as the offspring of black and white parents—where she got it from both sides. Having to deal with a split family. Even with a scholarship to UCLA, she had to pay for other kinds of things. But she did. I’ve never met somebody so willing to do what is necessary to accomplish what she wants.”

Voters almost inevitably get converted by the story of the All-American Candidate: the one about the kid born to hard knocks, who becomes a hard ass, which eventually calcifies into the kind of head we want on the shoulders of all our favorite heroes—single-minded, street-wise and inexhaustible, the kind of person who knows what she wants, won’t be swayed, and runs over anybody who gets in the way.

We get a kind of emotional kick from characters like that. But our feelings can change pretty quickly when the kick becomes too literal—if our butts happen to be at the wrong end of the hero’s big boot, if we’re the ones getting run over or if we happen to contemplate too deeply the trail of mangled opponents or principles left behind.

“I ran against Laura Richardson in 1996,” says Gerrie Schipske, the Fifth District representative on the Long Beach City Council. “That was a horrible experience.”

Schipske and Richardson competed for the Democratic Party nomination for the 54th Assembly District, facing off in the primary in March 1996. It was a hard-fought campaign, and as election day got close, Richardson swung low.

“Laura put out a vicious, anti-gay hit piece on me,” Schipske says, able after all these years to talk about the incident rather matter-of-factly.

Richardson was losing, so the last-minute mailer flailed desperately in all sorts of directions. But the central line described the openly gay Schipske—who’s been with the same partner for decades—as “a candidate committed to a radical gay rights agenda.”

The tactic seemed to backfire. Schipske won the primary.

“Lots of people were outraged, and Laura lost some endorsements,” says Schipske. “The Democratic Party came very close to censuring her for that piece. It’s haunted her ever since.”

But the ghost of Richardson’s homophobic attack shadowed Schipske for a while, too. Whether or not it affected the subsequent November election is still a matter of speculation in a race that Republican Steve Kuykendall won by only 1,726 votes.

“I have reason to be very angry with Laura, because I came within one percent of beating an incumbent,” says Schipske, who stops short of blaming Richardson for her defeat. “I don’t think what she did hurt me with general voters—I hope not—but I felt it was a really dumb thing to do.”

Ten years passed before Schipske and Richardson talked about that down-and-dirty incident—in 2006, when Schipske was elected to the Long Beach City Council, where Richardson had governed since 2000.

“Laura apologized to me, profusely and repeatedly,” says Schipske. “I recognized that it was politics, but I would hope that she wouldn’t do anything like that again.”

By then, she already had. During Richardson’s runs against Dee Andrews for city council in 2000 and 2004, her campaigns always included last-minute mailers that reminded voters of Andrews’ decades-ago drug troubles—which sent him to prison for a while—without mentioning that Andrews responded to those issues by cleaning up and living a life of public service.

And she would do it again. During the final weekend of Richardson’s run against Oropeza for Congress last year, she distributed a flier attacking Oropeza’s attendance record as member of the state legislature—writing that Oropeza “chose her own interests over kids’ by missing 137 [work days].” Richardson’s flier did not explain that Oropeza’s only extended absences during six years in office came during a four-month stretch in 2004-05, when she was receiving chemotherapy treatments for liver cancer.

All these years later, Schipske needs a few moments to gather her thoughts when she’s asked about Richardson—especially in the feeding-frenzy atmosphere of the congresswoman’s current financial controversy, which is creating such an opportunity to revisit or reveal long-suppressed hard feelings.

“I’m conflicted on this,” Schipske says, finally. “Since Laura and I have been political adversaries, it would be so easy to jump on the bandwagon and go after her. But being in politics myself and understanding how brutal and intrusive it is, maybe it gives me some perspective that people on the outside don’t have.”

Schipske suggests that the most important revelation in all of this may be what it illustrates about the actualities of political life.

“The reality is that if you want to be successful in political office, you’d better be driven. You cannot be wishy-washy about what you want to do,” says Schipske. “You have to organize your entire life—your job, your family, everything—so that it’s all focused on your goal. You’ve got to have that drive or you’re not going to make it. And you’ve got to have thick skin if you’re going to survive.

“What does all of this say about Laura? That she’s extremely aggressive—that she will fight like hell to be elected to public office?” asks Schipske. “Is that something any of us didn’t already know? Positive or negative, that’s who she is. The real question is what she’s going to do with those attributes now that she’s gotten to Congress. I would hope she’ll use them on behalf of the Long Beach citizens she represents.”

Now that’s what Charles Brown is talkin’ about.

“Nobody’s perfect,” he says, and as Richardson’s former chief of staff when she was on the Long Beach city council, he had a sometimes-too-close-for-comfort view of her large personality. “But from the standpoint of what is driving her, pulling her, it really is to serve the public. It’s not empty energy. Some people want to be on top just to be on top. Laura wants to be in a position where she can get something done. And I’ll tell you this: You’d definitely want her on your side.” Yet there are plenty of examples of Richardson playing nearly as rough with her allies as her opponents.

Court records show that at least two of the professional consultants she hired to work on her campaigns—Jeffrey Adler and Mike Orlito—subsequently sued her to collect their pay. Both men refused to be interviewed for this story. Others Richardson hired to work on her campaigns say she stiffed them. But they did not sue, and would not speak for attribution.

“She never paid me,” said one, “but I let it go. Why piss off somebody with that kind of power? Somebody with that kind of power—and that kind of personality?”

Her city council colleagues and even her constituents also sometimes suffered the ill effects of Richardson’s strange relationship with her financial obligations—particularly the Sixth District’s signature event, the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration.

Ten winners of a children’s art and essay contest held in conjunction with the celebration won airline tickets to Washington, D.C., but Richardson never delivered. Winners from 2004, 2005 and 2006 are just now receiving their tickets—from Richardson’s successor, Councilman Dee Andrews.

And when Richardson planned the 2007 MLK celebration—which coincided with her run for State Assembly during the fall of 2006—it somehow ballooned into the city’s most expensive one, ever. City documents obtained by The District show Richardson’s office laid out $80,000 just for the headlining band, Kool & The Gang, plus another $6,957.92 on their hotel rooms and $1,775 for a limousine to drive them around.

The people who actually paid the bills wondered if her timing wasn’t more than coincidence. “She was doing it as a goodbye for her being elected to the Assembly,” says Bea Antenore, former secretary for Partners of Parks, the nonprofit foundation that helps pay for certain city celebrations like the MLK Celebration and Trees on the Bay.

“She’s an ambitious woman. So she put on this grand thing.”

As a topper, Richardson left behind a $4,995.65 debt from the MLK Celebration for Andrews.

Richardson’s six-year tenure as a city council member was filled with tempestuous episodes that drew from both the political and personal sides of her life. Stories abound on nearly every floor of City Hall—hell, all the way out to the parking structure. People talk about the heavy demands she made on the staffs, her own and the city’s, and her explosive reactions when those demands were not immediately met. They say she routinely ordered city staffers out of her office; they say they heard her dressing down her own staffers inside that office.

“To some people on the outside, it looked like she was overworking people, this and that,” says Brown. “Maybe one or two people you talked to said she treated her staff wrong.” Not Brown: “She was fair,” he says. “She was demanding of her staff because she was demanding of herself.”

Actually, some of those stories about Richardson’s staff abuse include Charles Brown.

“If you heard any stories about how she fired me, that’s as far from the truth as it could be,” he offers—we hadn’t brought it up. “My wife was going through some challenges with cancer, and I had to make a choice between my wife and the Sixth District. It was a clear choice. Laura and I were singing in the same church choir the next Sunday.”

Brown says he’s known Richardson for more than 20 years. “I watched her grow up as a young lady,” he says. “We go to the same church. She’s a friend of my wife. She was a Sunday school teacher to the kids. Sometimes we talk about issues of character and ethics. Whenever she is in town, she goes to church and sings in the church choir.”

But Brown won’t recount any anecdotes about Richardson’s life. He won’t reveal any details about their friendship. He won’t give any insights into what makes her tick. In fact, his explanation for refusing to do any of that provides the most revealing moments of the entire interview.

“She is a private person,” Brown says. “I don’t know how many friends she has, how out there she gets. She keeps everything close to the vest. If you ask her, there is not a lot she would bring up because it is personal to her, private to her. She’s recently had a death in the family, her father. There are still consequences associated with her divorce [from Long Beach Police Chief Anthony Batts]. I know there are financial things with her ex-husband. As a friend and as somebody who always observed how she dealt with people and situations, it’s kind of sad. It’s too easy to say she is misunderstood, but in actuality, that is so true.”

Laura Richardson showed up in Long Beach about 10 years ago, looking for something like a fresh start.

“She asked me, would I help her,” recalls Topsy-Elvord, who was then the Sixth District city council member. “She was going to live in Long Beach. She had married Anthony [Batts, then a Long Beach Police Department commander]. She was trying to get a mentor, to get her foot in the door in Long Beach.”

Richardson came from the west side of the Los Angeles River, growing up around San Pedro, going to work in sales at the Xerox offices up in LA. She was a go-getter from the get-go, playing basketball well enough in the neighborhood to eventually play for the women’s team at UC Santa Barbara. She got an undergraduate degree at USC, a Masters at UCLA, and had risen to the top of the Xerox sales department.

“But she was passionate about where she wanted to go from there,” says Topsy-Elvord. “She lived and breathed politics. But she was a little frustrated. She’d lost that race for the assembly, and another for a school board somewhere. She was working as an aide to Juanita [Millender-McDonald], but she wanted to learn about the city where she was going to live.”

Richardson volunteered until Topsy-Elvord had an opening on her staff, when she took paid job as a 20-hours-per-week aide, while also holding down her full-time gig at Xerox. It soon became clear that Richardson was angling to replace Topsy-Elvord, who would be termed-out in 2000. Topsy-Elvord didn’t mind.

“I always supported her,” she says. “I tried to teach her political processes and time management. I asked people to give her money. I got her on boards she never even knew how she got on.”

Not that Topsy-Elvord ever expected Richardson to actually follow in her footsteps.

“We have very, very different personalities—I am a ‘we’ person, whereas Laura is more of an ‘I’ and ‘me’ person,” she says. “I’m the kind of person who can get people to work with me, because I am gracious and kind and value their opinion. I can get people to believe me when I say something; I’m a person of my word. Laura goes about it in a different manner than I do. I’m assertive, but I’m not assaultive.”

Despite all those differences, Topsy-Elvord was shocked by how immediately she fell off of Richardson’s radar screen after the election of 2000.

“I did a lot for her, and after she was elected she conveniently forgot who I was,” says Topsy-Elvord. “I don’t see how you can forget somebody who launched you, who introduced you to Long Beach.”

But, see, Laura Richardson did not forget. Whatever it was that made her switch reels with Topsy-Elvord, she carried it with her—for eight long years, until one afternoon in April, when she let it out.

“I was at the Grand Prix, when out of the blue Laura came to me and apologized,” says Topsy-Elvord. “She begged my pardon, hugged me, and asked me to forgive her. I’m a forgiving person. I always knew she knew what she had done. And so I did—I forgave her.

“Some people didn’t trust that. They told me it must be a trick, that she must be asking this for some other reason. But I believe Laura. I believe she was asking only for herself. Because there’s nothing I can do for her, anymore. She’s a congresswoman. She’s got to her pinnacle. She might not have gotten there the way she should have, but it got her there. So I believe this apology, it may be real. I took it for what it was. Now, forgiving her, maybe that might help her.”

Tags: Congress, debt, foreclosures, laura richardson, Long Beach