Joe Cerrell combined the WHAT you know, with WHO you know, from his early collegiate days to become a power center both within the Italian American community, and the general community in Los Angeles, and Nationally.

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THE MAN BEHIND THE KINGDOM AND POWER

How political insider Joe Cerrell became the most influential
behind-the-scenes figure in Los Angeles politics

The Los Angeles Independent
By Tony Castro and Mario Villegas, Staff Writers
MAY 26 2004

It may say enough about veteran Los Angeles political consultant Joe Cerrell that when Boston real estate magnate Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers for $430 million earlier this year, amid criticism over being an outsider, the first person he hired to help him and his family fit in was Joe Cerrell.

On Opening Day, Cerrell held court in one of the McCourts' luxury suites where so many Los Angeles City Council members dropped by, that some worried about violating the state's open-meetings law - a clear sign of how Cerrell today is one of the most influential behind-the-scenes men in Los Angeles politics.

Politics and baseball have a lot in common, Cerrell boasted to reporters that day. "Winning isn't everything," he said, "but losing is nothing."

For Cerrell, a transplanted New Yorker, that road to local power began with another ambitious Massachusetts figure who called upon him almost half a century ago.

In the mid-1950s, as a student at USC, Cerrell had earned the reputation as the "kid," a high-energy young political activist and president of the Trojan Democratic Club, who was a must contact for any Democrats planning a visit to Los Angeles.

One day he got a call from Democratic Party officials who asked him to arrange a campus visit for John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts but largely unknown outside New England and Washington, D.C.

"They wanted Jack to speak at USC and I told them I couldn't do that," Cerrell recalled. "It was a Friday afternoon in May during 'stop week,' the week before final exams, when everything shuts down."

Still, Cerrell reluctantly made the arrangements.

"It was a rainy Friday afternoon and 35 people showed up in a room that held 300," says Cerrell, who remembered Kennedy being extremely nervous, unlike the calm and collected manner that later came to be associated with him.

While JFK may not have made a great impression on Cerrell, Cerrell made one on him. That summer Cerrell wound up invited to the Kennedy family box to watch the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Kennedy made a last-minute unsuccessful bid for the vice-presidential nomination and emerged as a national figure.

Three years later, USC graduate school behind him, Cerrell was the county Democratic party's executive director - and still linked to Kennedy, who by then was campaigning for the party's 1960 presidential nomination, with designs on California, the state with the largest number of delegates to be elected for the convention.

"I was his advance man. I ate dinner with him. We had connecting hotel rooms," Cerrell said, marveling at what he says is a by-gone era. "I was not the most important one on a staff of 17 like there is today. I was the staff. Nowadays, there'sbuses of staff people that travel."

The Kennedy campaign staff on those California swings was simply Cerrell and one off-duty police officer who was unarmed.

"I was the security," recalls Cerrell. "I was part of a one-man band."

In retrospect, Cerrell knows, that unique period in American political history proved to be the beginning of a new era of politics, as well as the launching of his own business that has made him a fixture in Los Angeles, not only among politicians and government officials but also among journalists seeking insight into the often murky world of power.

On any given night, you may see Cerrell talking national politics with syndicated columnist Robert Novak on CNN's "Crossfire" or being interviewed on a local public affairs show. Newspapers reporters especially love him because Cerrell doesn't beat around the bush. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected last fall, Cerrell's one-line analysis cut through all the political blabber.

"They didn't elect Arnold Schwarzenegger," he told reporters. "They elected the Terminator."

Today, Cerrell's public relations firm is the 19th largest in Southern California, with a second generation in the business. On the side, Cerrell teaches at USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics and is also a visiting professor at Pepperdine.

There is also a second generation of Cerrells in influential places in the PR trade. His son Joe Jr. is the spokesman for Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a public figure arguably as powerful as any his father has represented.

But then Joe Jr. hasn't represented the Dalai Lama, and his father did when the Tibetan spiritual and national leader visited Southern California two years ago.

It is all part of the political landscape that Cerrell, 68, has traversed over five decades, making him perhaps the most knowledgeable political insider in the city.

"Cerrell can tell you where more skeletons are buried in this town because he's helped bury more than his share," the late Hollywood restaurateur Frank Casado once said of Cerrell, who regularly met with Democratic party powers at Casado's restaurant, Lucy's El Adobe.

Nearby, Cerrell's Larchmont Boulevard office is lined with photos of the many politicians that he has worked with, the most prominent undoubtedly JFK for whom he handled every California trip from 1959 until his death in 1963.

One of the photographs shows Cerrell in the front passenger seat of a convertible with Kennedy riding in the back with confetti flying all around on downtown's Broadway one week before Kennedy was elected.

Another photo is of Cerrell with Kennedy on the family plane, and another is them together at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

"I'd sit here, he'd sit next to me and there was no security, no secret service," says Cerrell.

JFK's looks and youth made him naturally popular, Cerrell recalls. In fact one of Cerrell's favorite pictures is one that appeared in a newspaper of Kennedy surrounded by women as they stood on the beach in Santa Monica.

"I had never met anybody quite like him," Cerrell said. "He was the youngest nominee and you could relate to him, not like those old fogies. He had a young wife and had kids in the White House.

"There was just this great feeling when you were around him, the adulation that people expressed."

In November 1963, Cerrell and his new bride Lee had honeymoon plans in London and Paris, otherwise might have accepted an invitation from then Vice President Lyndon Johnson to visit the LBJ Ranch near Austin.

The invitation was for the weekend of Nov. 23-24.

In London that weekend, Cerrell learned the sad news that Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

"You couldn't call the Embassy and there were no long distance calls so I was left hoping that it was whole a lot of bull-----," Cerrell said. "I finally saw newspapers on the street with the news."

Almost 50 years, the reputation Cerrell began making with Kennedy preceded him to the McCourt family.

Last October, as the McCourts were preparing to buy the Dodgers, they were introduced to Cerrell over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Major League Baseball official Corey Busch, who formerly worked for Cerrell.

Cerrell had never done any PR work in baseball, but Busch recommended that the McCourts hire him anyway.

It all goes back to those days as a young man, sacrificing and working long hard hours for political figures that are now part of history.

"I was just there to find places for them to go and get good media coverage," says Cerrell. "I owe it all to those guys that came to the campus."

SEE PHOTOS: Joe Cerrell (top) tells the story behind the 1960 photo of him riding with John F. Kennedy in a campaign parade. Young Cerrell (bottom photo) listen to the wisdom of JFK.

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