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Buried in the paid obituaries in today's print Los Angeles Times is a short three paragraphs about a onetime fixture of the Los Angeles political scene. Leonard Shapiro was never a major player, but neither could he be dismissed as a mere gadfly, as he often was. Yes, Shapiro attended just about every meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the LA City Council, and in the manner of gadflies everywhere, he would fill out a speaker card and seethe until it was his turn to talk. He would then say his piece in a booming voice, usually about government spending or some fiscal issue, often boiling himself into a fury before his time was up and he sat down. But Shapiro, in the days before the web let anyone start a blog and search out an audience, also put his opinions and revelations in a self-published newsletter, the Los Angeles Observer. The family-written obituary in the Times says he had a peak of 2,000 paid subscribers, many of them members of the government bodies he bellowed at every week. He would carry around copies of the Observer and leave stacks in lobbies and press rooms.
"Of all the gadflies I've had to deal with, he's the most impressive because he knows the facts," an unnamed county official told Richard Simon of the Times in 1984. "It's what he does with the facts that troubles me." Shapiro, who was 96 when he died, was from Monticello, New York and in 1967 came to Los Angeles to build a beauty and health aids business. At age 60, after a heart attack, he sold the business and took up his shouting at politicians career. In 1991 he ran for the City Council from Granada Hills and two years later he ran for mayor. He didn't win or get in the runoff either time. He could, however, claim some other, lesser victories by shining light on wasteful practices or holding up the occasional spending plan or government action by filing legal papers through an attorney. "He was tenacious, obnoxious, a PITA (pain-in-the-ass) and focused on whatever issues were being discussed in City Hall," Howard Cohen, a political analyst and candidate in the Valley at the time, remembers. And there was that voice and the passionate delivery. "If YouTube was around back then, he'd have gone viral," Cohen says.
Leonard Shapiro died of Alzheimer's complications on Dec. 9. he is survived by three children, three grandchildren and a brother.
"If Los Angeles had another 100 Leonard Shapiros we'd be in a lot better shape than we are today," his wife Marlene Shapiro wrote in a 1984 letter to the editor in the Times, complaining about his being labeled a gadfly.
