Brett Loutensock has always been Dave Golonski’s stooge

We laughed out loud when we discovered that Burbank Police Commissioner James Etter’s accuser in this so-called threat-gate controversy is none other than Brett Loutensock (!)

How much more transparent can these people get? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how many establishment people have hated Etter from the beginning, and are now itching for a chance to toss him on his keister. Golonski proved this last year when he called for a special council vote to “reconsider” their just-made appointment, and it was all because of a personal run-in he’d had years earlier with James’ late brother Bob. The two are both lookalikes and soundalikes and this drives Golonski totally nuts.

So now we have a pretextual legal “incident” in front of the council that gives them another chance to get rid of the guy, so that they can replace him with a management toady? Give us a break.

One thing the Leader doesn’t mention in their story is that Etter’s accuser, Brett Loutensock, has been one of Dave Golonski’s longtime tenants. A few years after he came onto the council, Golonski was somehow able to buy a nice set of apartment buildings from another well-connected local investor. Loutensock became a tenant in one of them, and may still be to this day.

This kind of changes things when it comes to the sincerity department, doesn’t it? It shows that this is hardly the serious complaint of an impartial and concerned citizen. Rather, for years Loutensock has functioned as one of Golonski’s two-bit political operatives. Just writing this down makes us laugh, because even though it’s true, the mere use of these words to describe such a haplessly hamfisted duo sounds ridiculous on its face. It gives them way too much credit, but operatives they are.

Loutensock has a very sleazy past with Golonski. It began quite a few years ago, back when he went out of his way to stage a completely phony legal case down at the Coral Cafe on Burbank Blvd. Long a hangout for local union members and a number of council critics, the Coral had just tossed Golonski friend and former Leader columnist Will Rogers off the premises one morning when he tried to crash a private meet-and-greet event sponsored by Carolyn Berlin.

Knowing a setup when she saw one, Berlin had no interest in allowing Rogers to attend her event just so that he could disrupt it to pieces and then go back and lie about them in his column. The Coral was also the longtime daily hangout of the late Ted McConkey, who at the time was the nemesis of our local-family power structure (one of the things we’re most sorry about in life, BTW, is that McConkey didn’t live long enough to see these people get their comeuppance, along with being nailed from the outside– although he predicted it).

So what Loutensock was trying to do was set up the Coral with a phony discrimination case, because its proprietors had always been protecting the anti-Golonski city critics in their hangout. They’d also just thrown Rogers out of the joint during another recent incident, when he’d driven down there to confront McConkey at breakfast time about some ludicrous election conspiracy he’d been fantasizing about.

Loutensock trains seeing-eye dogs (reputedly), so after the Coral throws him out of the place because he was trying to drag an animal through the dining room, landlord Golonski then goes nuts and makes a huge public deal about it, just as if they’d been George Wallace standing in front of the university doorway or something. He even gathers together a group of his friends and supporters to “picket” the joint over this incident– and we put the word in quotes, because a more pathetic and embarrassing spectacle can hardly be imagined.

Just picture a couple of middle-aged guys in shorts with tiny little protest signs all prancing around trying to look angry, along with their haggard and even angrier-looking wives, and you’ll get a good idea of the extent of this ridiculousness. They looked like Dad night at the Finbar Fiesta.

Loutensock also has the peculiar habit of suddenly showing up at council meetings or in the letters section of the Leader whenever Golonski needs community backup on some pet complaint. And by coincidence, his naive mutterings always sound exactly like something G’ has just said a few days earlier, although without the same college-words it’s a lot more confused and brain-numbing. A more reliable knee-jerk could not be hoped-for by Dave.

So when Loutensock goes down to City Hall and attacks Jim Etter for these so-called character and ethics issues, and then goes nuts in outrage after Etter starts to fight back, just remember that this is all part of a hamfisted setup-stunt from the Golonski-Flad-Barlow contingent. The outspoken and unconventional Etter is a threat to them, so what better way to eliminate him than to engineer a phony legal issue? We’re sure one of those dishonest, absolute-immunity Barlow prosecution letters is close behind. These people are getting more and more desperate in their tactics.

Did we ever mention why Dave Golonski hated Etter’s brother so much? One of the reasons is that Bob Etter used to go around and claim that Golonski’s wife was actually his cousin of some sort (Golonski’s) , and that they were only in a common-law marriage of convenience. This used to drive Golonski absolutely crazy– which made it funny enough– but Etter always claimed he had the goods on them.

In the end, Bob Etter got sued by our thin-skinned, carpetbagging, maybe-common-law retired computer programmer, and apparently for some imagined harassment incident that saw the same Mrs. Golonski so upset and frightened about Etter driving by their house that she was compelled to rush outside one morning and chase him down the street. That’s how terrified she was of him.

Bob Etter eventually had to pay Golonski’s attorney’s fees after a prolonged legal battle, but we heard he never did so in the end, so you can chalk this up as one more reason why his brother Jim is getting the shaft.