Even Investigations Fail to Make L.A. City Hall Exciting

Funny, I don't see any yellow plastic crime-scene tape stretched across the entrance -- any of the entrances -- to the mayor's office.

I press an ear to one door, then another. Silence. No riffling sounds of illicit moola being counted. No shirr-and-whir of documents being shredded. No pings of computer messages being deleted.

I don't even see anyone who looks like she has stuffed secret documents into her boots or crammed them down the back of her skirt to smuggle them out of the building, as that patron saint of secretaries, the loyal Fawn Hall, did for her boss, Oliver North, in the Iran-Contra cover-up.

Really, for a place that's been spoken of as practically a crime scene, City Hall is a complete letdown. All the back-and-forth about blackmail and blackballing, expletives deleted, pay-to-play shakedowns, grand juries and federal subpoenas -- and not even one solitary process server lurking behind a pillar?

Maybe all the action is down at the waterfront, at the offices of the city Harbor Commission, or out near the LAX flight path, with the Airport Commission.

The two men in the middle of this muddle are Ted Stein, who was the Airport Commission's president, and Troy Edwards, a deputy mayor who once -- and I really love this verb -- "liaised" to the city's Big Three departments, the Harbor, the Airport and the Water and Power operations. Both men have quit their jobs, and probably not to spend more time with their families. With their lawyers, maybe.

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The TV news tease-phrase for this is "pay to play," a matter of whether companies wanting to do business with the airport or the harbor were pressured into donating money to political campaigns, say, like those of the mayor, who appoints the commissioners.

Two grand juries -- a hometown one summoned by the L.A. County D.A., Steve Cooley, and a federal one -- are now looking into all of this. A federal subpoena, the kind that makes you go all watery at the knees, was served on the mayor's office, forbidding it to destroy any single e-mail sent or received there since Hahn was sworn in nearly three years ago.

The feds have also subpoenaed files from the port director and from the St. Louis-based PR company whose name probably reminds you of packaged yeast but which is familiar to political junkies: Fleishman-Hillard, which in recent years has collected more than $20 million in city contracts.