Moonlighting

Mayor Richard Riordan on Wednesday ordered the head of the Los Angeles Convention Center to immediately quit his job as a consultant to Hawaii's Convention Center Authority, saying the outside employment had gone far beyond the scope of what the mayor's office intended when it approved the arrangement in 1994. "I hereby disapprove of your contract for outside employment," Riordan wrote in a letter faxed to Dick Walsh late Wednesday.

The director of the struggling Los Angeles Convention Center has been moonlighting as a consultant to help build a facility in Hawaii that could siphon away some of Los Angeles' convention trade. Dick Walsh, who earns $131,607 a year from his post as the center's general manager, has collected nearly $80,000 from the Hawaii Convention Center Authority over the past two years, according to documents obtained by The Times.

In a coordinated series of raids Wednesday, Los Angeles County authorities seized records from the homes and offices of five county doctors in an effort to determine if they are ripping off taxpayers by moonlighting excessively at private practices and other jobs.

The county's health director has recommended firing three employees of the pathology lab at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center--including one doctor who formerly oversaw its troubled blood bank--as part of a wide-ranging investigation into improper activities by public hospital employees.

When he's not arresting lawbreakers, Seal Beach Police Officer Rick Paap is chatting it up with local movers and shakers on his call-in cable-TV show, "City Watch Live!" When he hosts tonight's on-the-air debate among four City Council candidates, Paap will be just back from an appearance on Fox television's "Beverly Hills 90210," where he portrayed--what else?--a police officer. "I had to arrest one of the stars," said Paap, an 18-year veteran of the Seal Beach Police Department.

The Santiago String Quartet, which plays Sunday at the historic Bradford House in Placentia, is not in it for the money. (Tickets are free.) All its members have day jobs, not to mention night jobs. First violinist Linda Owen, for instance, is fine arts coordinator for the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District and a member of the Pacific Symphony. So when are quartet rehearsals? "We don't get to rehearse as much as a professional quartet," Owen allowed.

Angry over revelations that the head of the underbooked Los Angeles Convention Center earned $80,000 moonlighting for a facility in Hawaii, City Councilman Nate Holden asked his colleagues Wednesday to approve a proposal calling for the immediate resignation of General Manager Dick Walsh.

Like many artists, singer Pamala Feener makes her living at a dreaded "day job"--the sort that most of us do all the time, but musicians do only when they can't find work inside their profession. And while Feener says it's frustrating "keeping a roof over her head by doing something other than what I love to do," when she does get a singing job, it's all the more fulfilling.

Chastened by sharp attacks from an angry Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, a top Department of Health Services official pledged Tuesday to root out and fire county doctors who moonlight too much, and to put in place strengthened controls to prevent fraud and waste of taxpayer money.

In the midst of a financial crisis that is forcing the layoff of thousands of health workers, Los Angeles County is investigating whether some doctors who are paid to work full time at county hospitals are shortchanging taxpayers by moonlighting excessively at private practices and other jobs, according to county officials and documents obtained by The Times.