Candidate for
Mayor; City of Los Angeles

Joe Shea, the only pro-secession candidate in the race for Mayor of Los Angeles, is "an unbelievably dedicated community activist," said Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times columnist Al Martinez in 1997. "They ought to build a statue to guys like Joe Shea and the Ivar Hawks."

On March 20, 2001, Joe was recognized yet again for his rare qualities of leadership, this time by the Los Angeles Police Dept. and Chief Bernard Parks. "The Department commends Mr. Shea for his commitment to leadership on such a critical issue; an issue that is tantamount to the independence and efficacy of the Office of the Chief of Police. The Department urges all other candidates to follow the lead of Mr. Shea and address this matter at the appropriate time, in the appropriate forum. To do otherwise is not in the best interest of the Department and the people of the Los Angeles community," the LAPD said in an official statement on its famed Website <http://www.lapdonline.org/press_releases/2001/03/pr01141.htm>. The Department also posted one of Joe's press releases calling for an end to politicizing the question of Chief Parks' tenure during the mayoral campaign.

That praise for a lifetime of selfless public service was hard-earned. So was this comment on the front page of the Times' Metro section just after the 2001 mayoral campaign began, on Jan. 21, 2001: "Online journalist Joe Shea may shake things up, but other than that we're left with the usual suspects, a bunch of old pols and preening unknowns who couldn't get their mother's vote if they carried her in chains to the polling place."

Born in upstate Goshen, N.Y., Joe first came to California as a member of a touring acting ensemble in 1966, and then moved here with his first wife, Dr. Elizabeth Frain, in 1968. After their divorce, Joe returned to New York but once again moved to Los Angeles in 1976. He has occupied the same 1919-era bungalow on historic Ivar Street in Hollywood for more than 18 years. The small bungalow complex was singled out by the Sunday New York Times Travel section last year as evocative of the area's working-class past.

Joe Shea helped turn the most dangerous and deadly areas of Los Angeles around. On a street where 19 people were shotover a few years, and working with Clay McBride and other leaders of the Ivar Hawks, Joe helped make citizen's arrests of more than 15 drug dealers, and then went to court to testify against them. In the process, the Hawks were hailed by then-LAPD Capt. Rick Batson as a "national model for law enforcement." While cleaning up the central Hollywood neighborhood where he lives has entailed countless hours of work in organizing community leaders, encouraging change on the part of tenants and landlords, struggling with the city planning and public safety bureaucracies, preparing lawsuits and CUP hallenges, Joe won wide support for closing dangerous bars and liquor stores, boarding up abandoned buildings, painting out graffiti and other good works. Joe has also written on the need to deploy Senior Lead Officers (SLOs) for both the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News.

Joe organized community marches and vigils -- and even a funeral for one day-old infant who was thrown in a dumpster by a drug user -- and risked the wrath of special interests when he arrested the leaders of an organization that was handing out drug needles on a public street in his neighborhood to drug users in front of children passing by to and from a nearby elementary school. Joe's windshield was shot out as he watched by a murderous Hollywood drug "enforcer," and it took many nights of patrols and confrontation to bring the reign of terror to an end after 12 persons were shot or stabbed to death on the block. Today, the same block is home to an Alzheimer's home,a tourist hotel, rehabilitated low income housing, a popular restaurant, and also enjoys a nearby Sav-On.

As a crimefighter, Joe Shea was profiled in a Fox Undercover documentary as he fought the 18th Street Gang, in documentaries on CNN and CBS, and also in a nationally-broadcast KTLA television documentary on the fight against drugs in America's neighborhoods. He was widely hailed for forcing changes in management at the Hollywood Palladium after many riots there. Joe's efforts ultimately helped change the image of Hollywood as a dangerous, dirty community where no one cared what the future brought into one that speaks of a Hollywood Renaissance.

But Joe Shea is better known to users of the Internet for his key victory in the fight against government censorship of the Internet in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Shea v Reno <http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/96-511.ZX.html>, Joe risked two years in jail and a $200,000 fine to fight the Communications Decency Act, a misguided and dangerous law that passed the Congress by an overwhelming majority and was signed into law by the President. Joe acted in that case on behalf of his pioneering online newspaper, The American Reporter, the very first daily newspaper to open for business on the Internet. His victory was reported in stories in many of the nation's newspapers, on CNN, MSNBC, and on the AP and Reuters newsires, as well in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. His attorney in that case was Randall Boe, General Counsel of America OnLine (AOL), and he was assisted by Judge Steven Russell of Austin, Tex., president of the Native American Bar Assn.

Joe was featured, too, in the famed "A Day in the Life of the Internet" on Feb. 8, 1997. The American Reporter is owned by Joe and 300 other journalists in many countries around the world.Joe was honored with First Prize for Best Internet News Story at the 2000 Southern California Journalism Awards banquet hosted by Warren Beatty for his expose of a multimillion-dollar pyramid scam that involved hundreds of municipal and county workers.

The newspaper <http://www.american-reporter.com> has scored important scoops, such as breaking the story of the 1998 cease-fire that ended 300 years of open hostility between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. At a breakfast in Beverly Hills in 1999, Joe was saluted by the President of Ireland for his contribution to Irish peace. Joe's nomination helped secure a prestigious Neiman International Fellowship, providing an all-expense-paid year at Harvard University for American Reporter Correspondent Andreas Harsono of Indonesia. Harsono's work for The American Reporter spurred talk of a Pulitzer Prize for the young publication in a feature story, "Eyes on the Prize," in the Chicago Tribune in 1997. More than 130 journalists from 47 nations have come to visit Joe at his modest bungalow apartment in Hollywood since 1996 under the auspices of the U.S. Dept. of State and the U.S. Information gency. <http://usnewspapers.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa012499.htm)

Joe Shea's family has been in public service continuously since 1892, when his grandfather, John S. Shea, was named paymaster of the U.S. Customs House for the Port of New York. In 1909, the elder Shea became the first Republican since Reconstruction to gain public office in Manhattan when he was elected Sheriff of New York in a fierce contest against corrupt Tammany Hall politician Christy Sullivan, the legendary and notorious proponent of "honest graft." No other Republican was elected in Manhattan until 1954, when State Supreme Court Justice William S. Shea, Joe's uncle, was elected to the Municipal Court in New York. Judge Shea was subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court and other courts by Gov.Thomas Dewey, Mayor John Lindsay, Mayor Abe Beame, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Gov. Malcolm Wilson. Joe's father, John S. Shea,wrote the nation's nuclear battle plans during the Vietnam War as a civilian USAF Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) officer based on Hokkaido Island, Japan. Joe's brother Patrick shares his interest in politics, and is head of sales at Convergence Corp., a consulting firm whose many advisors include prominent members of the Bush Administration. His sister, Mary Ann, of Long Beach, Calif., has been a public school teacher for 32 years.

In 1975, Joe was named New York City Area Manager with responsibility for the communications of nine New York State members of the Strate Assembly by Minority Leader Perry B. Duryea, and played a critical role in the city's avoidance of bankruptcy when he persuaded the nine New York City members of the delegation to change their minds and support a federal loan guarantee from the Ford Administration, which had earlier declined to provide it. In that job, Joe replaced Alfreed DelliBovi,who became Deputy Secretary of Housing & Urban Development in the first Bush Administration. Other members of the delegation included Guy Molinari, Borough President of Staten Island, State Sens. Christoper Mega and Guy Velella, the Queens Republican chairman, and Federal Judge Dominic L. DiCarlo.

Joe left the State Assembly to resume his first choice of careers, journalism, as managing editor of the national Catholic weekly newspaper Twin Circle in Century City. He next became an executive speechwriter consultant to the chairman and president of Lockheed Corp., writing three speeches that played a part in the largest aircraft sale in history to Pan American Airways in March 1978, a deal that saved Lockheed from bankruptcy.

When the L.A. Weekly, now the nation's largest-circulation alternative newspaper, was founded in 1979 by Jay Levin, Joe quickly became one of its leading contributors, writing more front page stories for the paper than any other contributor during the first four years of its existence. One of those was credited by Levin with quadrupling the paper's ad revenue's in a single month, putting it on the firm financial foundation it has enjoyed ever since. The same year, Joe began writing and planning the famed Beverly Hills Goldbook, the international guide to the great cities of the world that has the most affluent audience of any publication on earth. He has served as an editor of the publication for the past 21 years.

Joe's life has been one of challenge, change and commitment. As a child, he turned some pretty serious encounters with the law into motivation to win a gubernatorial pardon from Gov. Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma (for breaking into a cigarette machine) and become a public servant. In 1965, as junior at Monroe-Woodbury Central High School, he was elected Youth Governor of New York State. In that role he provided over the State Legislature for a three-day weekend, was invited to the White House and met with President Johnson and U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman, and was feted at the Embassies of Israel, Kuwait and France, and escorted Brazilian Ambassador Juracy Maghales to dinner at the State Dept. In March, 1968, The Reader's Digest carried a story by Joe on Page 1 of the largest-circulation magazine in the world.

He moved to New York to become an actor, but soon grew interested in journalism while working full-time as a researcher at CBS Television. Even while appearing in a supporting role in an Off-Broadway production of Lewis John Carlino's "Dirty Old Man" he began writing for the Village Voice by walking through Harlem amid rioting on the night Dr. Martin Luther King died. In subsequent stories for the Voice, which now owns the L.A. Weekly, Shea had a bomb explode in his face in Northern Ireland, met with the Prime Ministers of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and was selected to interview Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos live on national television. In later stories for the Voice, Joe prevented the naming ofa dubious stock broker to the Securities Exchange Commission even after the broker was nominated by the President, the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Now Editor-in-Chief of The American Reporter and still a contributor to the L.A. Weekly on issues such as City Council corruption, auto recalls, voting issues, the LAPD and the downtown Cornfields riverfront issue, Joe has taken to the streetsand freeways of Los Angeles in a huge truck bearing banners on either side of it to carry his campaign directly to the people of Los Angeles. Because he has not sought out campaign contributions, Joe has been ignored by the same media that had covered his activities so extensively in the past. Even the Los Angeles Times, which has profiled him twice and reported on his community service often, noted on March 25, 2001 that "The [Los Angeles Police Dept.] even released a statement praising little-known candidate Joe Shea..."

In fact, Joe is only "little-known" because the Times and other major media outlets, none of which are headquartered in Los Angeles or owned here, oppose the dream of cityhood for San Pedro, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. As the Los Angeles Daily News said in a Page 3 article by political editor Rick Orlov on March 25, 2001, Joe Shea "is the only pro-secession candidate on the April 10 ballot." As such, Shea supports the 300,000 registered voters whose signatures were verified to move the cityhood studies forward and allow Los Angeles voters to decide about them in November 2002. Joe appears at No. 7 on the primary ballot, with the designation Secerssion Advisor. He brought the cityhood issue sharply into focus for Angelenos in October, 2000, when he moderated a mayoral debate on secession at the New Ivar Theatre in Hollywood, sponsored by the American Reporter, the Beachwood Voice, and the Los Angeles Press Club, that was widely reported in the media [in the Press Club traditionb, his name was unmentioned]. Joe was the only candidate who was asked to give up his job in order to run for Mayor of Los Angeles against million-dollar candidates, and he willingly did so, forgoing all of his income from the L.A. Weekly for the duration os his campaign. Five of his major opponents are on public payrolls and the sixth was until January.

Now 54, Joe is married to Mireya Perez Luna of Arequipa, Peru. They share their bungalow with Mireya's daughter, Cecilia; her son, Eduardo, has just finished his first year of internship as a general practice physician in Peru. Joe is fluent in Spanish and greets his many and diverse friends in 15 languages. His first wife, famed educator Dr.Betty Resnick Frain, lives in Santa Barbara. A registered Democrat, he enjoys talking about politics, and is a distinguished poet known for sonnets of exceptional grace and simplicity. Joe is a former member of Nichiren Shoshu of America, and since 1987 a member of Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church in Hollywood. He is also active in the Los Angeles Press Club. His only prior race for public office was in 1981, when he sought election to the Beverly Hills City Council. In 1986, he formed the Committee to Draft U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry to try to propel his friend into the 1988 presidential race.

As Mayor of Los Angeles, Joe will expand light rail to cover major sections of the Valley and South Central along the former routes of the Pacific Red Car line, will double the number of units available for low-income public housing by replacing the current two-story projects with four-story housing on the same land, will study the possibility of using existing freeways to create several one-way "rings" of high-speed public highways around Los Angeles, and manage the transition to post-secession Los Angeles with fairness and balance in order to preserve the essential identities and the continuing viability of the New L.A. and new cities that may be formed. Mayor Riordan has already accepted Joe's invitation to serve as head of the Office of Education Advocate in the Shea Administration.

Joe will be a strong advocate for reform and civilian involvement at the LAPD, and will maintain the current deployment of Senior Lead Officers while building the force to desired levels of staffing. He will crack down on slumlords, encourage new business, build new "pocket parks" throughout the city, and work to make the New L.A. an economic miracle of the 21st Century and the pearl of the Pacific Rim.