LOS ANGELES RACE TURNS TO A PLEA FOR A DRUG DEALER

LOS ANGELES, May 28 - City Attorney James K. Hahn is running a
television advertisement claiming that his opponent in the mayoral
race, the former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, cannot be
trusted because he wrote to the White House on behalf of a convicted
cocaine trafficker.

The advertisement, which features a crack pipe held to a flame, was
first broadcast on Sunday, little more than a week before the June 5
nonpartisan runoff election for mayor of the nation's second-largest
city.

The commercial focuses on a 1996 letter that Mr. Villaraigosa wrote
on behalf of Carlos Vignali, the cocaine trafficker, whose sentence
was commuted in January by President Bill Clinton. The message
concludes by saying, "Los Angeles can't trust Antonio Villaraigosa."

Mr. Villaraigosa, who received more than $6,000 in donations from Mr.
Vignali's parents for previous Assembly campaigns, has said he should
not have written the letter, one of several sent to the White House
on Mr. Vignali's behalf by prominent Latino officials.

Mr. Villaraigosa sent a letter to Mr. Hahn on Sunday asking him to
stop the advertisement.

"Your ad drags Los Angeles into the gutter by depicting drug addicts
smoking crack cocaine and cynically implying that I support them,"
Mr. Villaraigosa wrote.

A Hahn campaign consultant said the advertisement would remain on the
air. "We stick with the facts," said the consultant, Kam Kuwata.