here's some more about the honest mayor...
Here is the real truth about the mayor of LA.
He has tried to portray himself as some one who had to rise out of the slums.. he has said he has become this outstanding citizen without the help of anyone but for is mother.. he said he was raised only by her, as a single mother who struggled to raise him right.. WELL FOLKS.. it ain't true.
Villaraigosa's mother had remarried shorty after she divorsed Villaraigosa's father. He was actually raised by NOT only his mother but also a step-father as well. His mother was not a struggling single parent.
And his wife finally divorsed him after he was caught the SECOND time having an love affair with another woman. This woman WAS the news-reporter who WAS doing many interviews about him, making him out to be a very upstanding and honest man.. who would make a great mayor.. SURE, she was sleeping with guy! These are only 2 cases that his wife found out about. The first time was when his wife was having treament for cancer. While she was recovering.. he was CHEATING on her!. They later reconciled after 2.5 years.. not long after that.. he was exposed having the long time affair with the reporter.. who of course was later fired.
This man is so full of lies and deceit.. why is he mayor!
"God knows that I was never an alcoholic and that I never hurt his mother or abused my family," Antonio Ramon Villar Sr. said in an interview, denying the mayor's long-accepted account of his difficult childhood.
"I know the public has been poisoned against me, but this is the truth, so help me God."
Villaraigosa's claim that his father later gave another son the exact same name he had given him also is inaccurate.
That other son was christened Anthony Gustavo Villar, and today he is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Anthony Villar, 45, has gone so far as to personally contact Villaraigosa to challenge him on why he has publicly vilified their father, said Estela Villar, Anthony Gustavo's mother and the wife of Antonio Ramon Villar Sr.
The second family of Villar Sr. portrays a husband and father who has been gentle, loving, kind and deeply religious - and who in 47 years of marriage to Estela has never abused either his wife or their four children, nor shown any hints of alcoholism.
"I don't believe a man can change so dramatically in the way he behaved around one family and another," Estela Villar said in a three-hour interview at the couple's Montebello home. "If he were the way (Villaraigosa) describes him to have been, he would have shown signs with our family - and there were none."
Estela Villar said her spouse was the "model father and the model husband," who from the very beginning of their marriage turned over his paycheck, gave her freedom in running their household and to this day asks for only $40 a month spending money, most of which he uses to buy treats for their 11 grandchildren.
"My husband has never talked about his life with his other family, and I haven't pried. But I have my doubts that (my husband) was the kind of spouse and father that (Villaraigosa) has portrayed him to have been.
"What his motivation for that is, I don't know. Could it be for political reasons? Someone else would have to answer that. Do I forgive him for what he has said about my husband? I am still working on that because it hurt my family deeply.
"All I can see in this is that (Villaraigosa) is a very bitter man."
Villaraigosa's mother, Natalia Delgado, who had three of her four children with Antonio Ramon Villar Sr., died in 1991.
Villar Sr. said he and Villaraigosa's mother dissolved their civil marriage in the late 1950s. Antonio and Estela Villar married in a Roman Catholic ceremony in 1960.
According to Villar Sr., his ex-wife remarried and with her new husband moved with her family by Villar - including son Antonio Ramon Jr. and two daughters - into the City Terrace house where Villaraigosa in later years has said he was raised by a working single mother.
"I saw Antonio sporadically, three or four times later - chance meetings, but I wasn't close to them," Villar Sr said. "It just seemed better not to prolong matters. They were a family, and I had a (new) family."
Anthony Gustavo Villar would not talk beyond a brief telephone conversation about his half-brother.
"I can only see that it is only being reopened for a political reason, but I don't see that it would help Antonio (Villaraigosa) to govern," he said.
"At this point, it's a family matter, and we have no wish to have my father's life written about or investigated.
"What's important is that the truth is going to be known to those who matter."
Villaraigosa eventually transferred to
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he completed a
bachelor's degree in
history. Villaraigosa was a leader of
MEChA at UCLA. At this time, he went by the name "Tony Villar", but began using "Antonio" in the
80's.
After UCLA, Villaraigosa attended the (PCL), a non-ABA or State Bar accredited "community-run law school" in Los Angeles. Villaraigosa failed the California Bar Exam in each of four attempts, and thus remains unlicensed to practice law.
On June 8, 2007, Villaraigosa announced he would be separating from his wife. On June 12, 2007, Corina Villaraigosa filed for
divorce in
Los Angeles Superior Court, citing
irreconcilable differences. Villaraigosa acknowledged in a statement published July 3, 2007 that he is in a relationship with a Spanish-language television reporter,
Mirthala Salinas.
[11] [12][13] He said, "I have had a relationship with Ms. Salinas over time. It has evolved, and today I have acknowledged that relationship." In his statement, he added "I don't believe that the details of my personal life are relevant to my job as mayor." He intends to keep his fused last name.
[10] In July 2007, some noted that Salinas' parent employer,
NBC Universal, which is conducting a review of her reporting on the mayor in light of the news of the affair, is also currently campaigning with the city of Los Angeles for approval of a $3 billion, 20-year development plan for which they will need Villaraigosa's assistance. Some have called this a conflict of interest, but Villaraigosa said that he saw nothing wrong with the situation.
[14]
The mayor, who is widely considered to have designs on higher office, has been dogged by rumors of
marital infidelity for years. In 1994, while Corina was undergoing treatment for
thyroid cancer, Villaraigosa left town for a few days (with no notice) with a friend's wife after his victory in the state Assembly election, resulting in Corina filing for divorce the day after the election. The couple reconciled two years later.
The New Yorker magazine reported in May that these actions infuriated colleagues who had helped portray him as a family man and lost him key supporters. Some wanted to recall him from office!
Reinventing an image
The change of Villaraigosa's surname - the joining of Villar with wife Corina's maiden name Raigosa when they married in 1987 - was another attempt to reinvent his identity.
For Villaraigosa, the name change was only part of the reinvention. A low-rider image cultivated from the time he led student protests in high school and later at UCLA was discarded, down to having "Born to raise hell" tattoos removed from his arms. He replaced it with a look out of Gentlemen's Quarterly, including a personal tailor and professionally bleached teeth.
One of those in whose memory the transformation remains embedded is longtime Democratic activist and Villaraigosa critic Art Pulido, who has known the mayor since 1978 when he met the then-25-year-old Tony Villar at the Olympus Health Spa in Montebello.
"He walked in and reminded me of Zorro," Pulido recalled. "His hair was slicked back, and he had a little thin mustache, and he reminded me of Tyrone Power in (`The Mark of Zorro') movie."
Pulido, then 24, was a body builder who trained other body builders at that gym and remembers an extremely slender Villar introducing himself and asking to join the body-building group.
"He said he'd had an operation and needed to build up his chest muscles," Pulido recalled. "He said, `I wanna be part of this (body-building) team,' and we got to know each other."
For the next year and a half, Villar sporadically worked out with Pulido and his group. Pulido recalls that Villar grew stronger, though he didn't put on much muscle bulk because he was working out with lighter weights and concentrating on repetitions and not weight.
When Pulido saw Villar about 10 years later at a political fundraising event, a transformation had taken place.
"He no longer had a mustache," Pulido remembered. "His hair wasn't slicked back anymore - it was parted on the side like he wears it now. He was in a suit, and he was wearing these little specs that made him look like a college guy.
"I almost didn't recognize him. I said, `Tony, what happened to you?'
"He said, `My name's Antonio.' I said: `Antonio? So you're not Tony anymore?' He said, `Yep."'
Transformations such as Villaraigosa's, of course, are part of today's political culture and the grooming and selling of political candidates.
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