Forget body language or linguistic clues. They don’t exist.
On Friday, Jan.13, the last day for filing for the City Council election, Dep. City Clerk Ela Valladares made numerous attempts to reach Mr. Vera to remind him of the approaching 5:30 drop-dead deadline.
He said he would drive to City Hall with his papers before closing. That was all.
He never did tell Ms. Valladares that he was retiring instead of running for a fourth term. She had to deduce it herself. And that is today’s story, which Ms. Valladares first shared with a curious member of the City Council.
Down to the final hour of the final day, Mr. Vera was what he long has been, an enigma packaged in congeniality.
Feathers and feelings, though, were ruffled at City Hall over his abrupt, unrevealing see-ya-later, slippin’-out-the-door manner of leaving. “The way he carried out his decision,” said a disgruntled woman who has known the mayor for years, “was typical Albert. It was all about him.”
Private and Public Imagery
On the dais in Council Chambers, he has perfected the role of lovable lifetime immigrant, a charmingly green patriotic American who is steeped in boyishly appealing naivete. His occasionally clumsy sallies into the English language never fail to endear him to a new set of Culver City voters.
His well-known aversion to modern forms of communication is well known. He may fly to the sun before he consents to learn how to email.
Gadget guy, he ain’t. Online may not be a curse word, but it is close enough to cursing to kiss. A cell phone and a fax machine are as fancy as he gets. Rare is the man who ever has seen Mr. Vera on his cell phone. It may not contain a ringer. Grudgingly, the fax machine in the tiny, cluttered back office of his store periodically chirps away.
As for his image, it is no accident.
Friends say he may have been naive when he came to this country as a fifteen-year-old who was all alone.
But in the nearly sixty years since then, he has studied the experts and applied all of the crucial precepts that they lived by. From them and others, he gained a reservoir of wiliness that he weaved into his own considerable native intelligence.
With a single-minded resolve that is as indestructible as the Culver City buildings he takes credit for, he has built an empire in a true modern sense.
Underpinning his meteoric rise from penniless émigré is a talent that many who know him admire and envy. In a gossip-addicted society, Mr.Vera shrewdly has elevated inscrutability to the level of art, which always covers his tracks, for better or worse.
In what is euphemistically known as the family market but actually is a wholly Albert Vera enterprise, front to back, with no competing voices, the mayor is the soul of imperturbable affability.
Man of Independent Means
His generosity is fodder for hometown legends, but it is so transparent that there is no need to exaggerate. Some loyal customers think that he gives away more food than he sells.
When the time came on Friday, Jan. 13, for the most adored politician in modern times to detonate the bombshell about his retirement from politics, he went predictably mute.
Ferociously independent, he was going to break the news on his terms. As the unchallenged boss in each of his three fulltime jobs — the vast spreads of ranch lands in the Central Valley, the Sorrento Italian Market and the City Council — Mr. Vera only operates as a lone gun. Teamwork is anathema to him.
No one questions that he has earned all of the various holdings that he has accumulated. To say it more succinctly, no one questions.
So comprehensive is his aura of authority in every arena in which he plays that it may never have occurred to anyone to contest his right to do something.
With the filing deadline looming, Ms. Valladares logically would have been the first person in Culver City to learn of the mayor’s decision.
Technically, she was. But only because she finally deduced it. Not because he told her. He never did.
Still hasn’t.
Where Was Candor?
Each time the mayor and the deputy city clerk were on the telephone throughout the day, he only told her that he would drive to City Hall before the witching hour of 5:30.
At no point did he share even an amoeba-sized glimpse of his plans.
Candor must have been on holiday out in the Fiji Islands where Mr. Vera’s cell phone wouldn’t work even if he had tried to use it.
On the final day for declaring himself a candidate, the usually ubiquitous mayor was less visible than a Republican in Santa Monica.
The tireless Ms. Valladares placed five separate telephone calls to Mr. Vera that day and one to a friend of his.
The mission every time: to nudge him into delivering his papers.
The first call was to remind him that he was running out of time faster than Tookie. The remainder were in the spirit of where-are-you?
At no point did the canny mayor let on that he was straddling a bomb.
Mr. Vera was not the only contender flirting with the deadline that day. Both incumbent Gary Silbiger and first-timer Mehaul O’Leary took their filings down to closing day. By contrast, Scott Malsin, the remaining candidate, filed his papers on the first day.
In her eighteenth year on the job, Ms. Valladares knows the drill as well as religious people know Intelligent Design. When the filing deadline beckons, Ms. Valladares often is busy coaxing and shooing candidates across the deadline before the clock on the wall blows up.
Both Mr. Silbiger and Mr. O’Leary had completed their filings by mid-morning of Jan. 13, prompting Ms. Valladares to dial the mayor at the Sorrento Market.
“I did it as a reminder,” she said. “He asked whether City Hall closed at 4:30 or 5:30. He said he would be here before closing. That was all. He did not give an indication he had anything else in mind.
“I called him later on. I wanted to verify what time he would be in. I had hoped to leave early. I had to pick up a friend from the hospital at four o’clock.
“Albert said he would be here before four. Four o’clock came and went. He still hadn’t come by five. I called a friend who gave me Albert’s cell phone number. But he didn’t answer, and I left a message. I called the store again at ten after five. When I asked for Albert, I was put on hold. Then somebody said I had just missed him.”
Without articulating the words, the deputy city clerk plainly was exasperated. She reached a conclusion.
“By that time,” Ms. Valladares told thefrontpageonline.com, “it was like, okay, he’s not going to come in.”
Quite without frills, Mr. Vera retreated into private life not by any overt action but rather by default.
Nonetheless, Ms. Valladares remained in her first floor office at City Hall until 5:30 to tie a ribbon on the day and formalize Mr. Vera’s decision.
It resembled a celebration of New Year’s Eve on the moon — a solo party with no one around to whoop it up.
With an incumbent having dropped out, state law mandated a five-day extension for additional candidates to file. Never mind that City Hall was dark on the first three — Saturday, Sunday and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. One man pondered filing but decided against it.
As Jan. 13 ended, Ms. Valladares posted notice on City Hall’s bulletin board and website. She also sent emails to Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Fulwood and to all department heads. But word galloped acrss the Culver City landscape anyway, as if Fire Chief Jeff Eastman had unfurled a monster-sized banner on his favorite fire truck.
Postscript
City Councilman Steve Rose was in his middle teens when Mr. Vera opened Sorrento Market, and that was forty-four years ago.
Informally, the gentleman who moonlights as chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce had been tracking the candidates through the filing season.
By Thursday, the day before deadline, he noted that three presumed candidates had not returned their papers. He tracked the O’Leary and Silbiger filings on Friday morning, by which time he suspected something might be up with the mayor.
After work, at 4:15, he drove by City Hall, checking in with Ms. Valladares, who told him the news. Hmm, Mr. Rose said.
Still, with an hour to go, who knew? He decided to hang out and conduct a patch or two of business.
At 5:25, after the shadows had wrapped City Hall in an embrace, the Councilman returned to Ms. Valladares’ office.
Mr. Rose offered only two words. “I’m surprised,” he said.