Salcido Tapped as Law Enforcement Adviser

Lt. Jose Salcido will be leaving the Santa Clara County sheriff's office after more than three decades to become a senior policy adviser to San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. Salcido is currently the sheriff's liaison to the county Department of Corrections and has taken out papers to run for sheriff. The mayor says the new appointee will be doing "community outreach" on "community issues" and will advise him on law enforcement policy issues. Salcido, who was once the subject of a Grand Jury investigation into a vote-buying scandal, has a close relationship with Reed adviser Victor Ajlouny, who was a paid consultant to the Deputy Sheriff's Association during Salcido's leadership of the union group. Salcido also is an ally of SJPOA leader Bobby Lopez, a vocal critic of San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis.

"When I meet with the chief, which I do regularly, Jose will sit in on the meetings," Reed told Fly. The chief cannot be too pleased about that. Salcido has also been an adversary of Sheriff Laurie Smith. He ran against her in 1998 and took steps this year to challenge Smith in 2010. The appointment appears to take Smith's leading opponent out of the race. "He won't be running for sheriff while he's working for me," the mayor said. Jumping out of the race for the sheriff's job, which pays more than $200,000 a year, might not be so bad an economic decision for the career lawman. Salcido will be eligible to collect retirement benefits from the Sheriff's Department while earning a $122,891 salary with the city, since the agencies have separate retirement systems. Salcido grew up in the Berryessa neighborhood of San Jose—Reed's district—and studied for his master's degree in public administration at San Jose State, where his thesis was titled "Humanistic Management in Law Enforcement."

A.P. Stump's Is Closing

The landmark downtown restaurant, A.P. Stump's, has announced that it will close its doors on July 10. The restaurant opened more than a decade ago, in the summer of 1998, during the dotcom heydey and quickly established itself as one of the city's leading restaurants. The restaurant was a collaboration between Los Gatos Brewing Company chef Jim Stump and Andy Pavicich Jr. The Pavicich family spent millions to restore the historic Masson–LeFranc Building in downtown San Jose, once the site of operations of vintner Paul Masson and today owned by the McEnery family. (It was also the site of the 1980s night spot, D.B. Cooper's.) Fly hates to see the place close but is looking forward to the "Last Waltz" dinner and party (with Black Pearl, The Groove Kings and Steve Siacotos) on Friday, July 10, at 7pm.

Great Day for Bad Fiction

San Jose State University recently announced the results of its annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The contest is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, fondly remembered for a bastardization of the opening words of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night." In truth, the novel begins with convoluted literary flourish: "A dark and stormy night it was; in torrents fell the rain—except at occasional intervals, when, by a violent gust of wind was it checked, as up the streets it swept, (for in London it is that lies our scene), along the housetops rattling, and the scanty flame of the lamps fiercely agitating, that against the darkness, struggled." For 27 years the SJSU English department has accepted long-winded entries in various categories of purple prose and picked the best (er—worst) of the lot. The author's questionable writing skills are then rewarded with publication and a small pittance (their words, not Fly's). The overall winner for 2009 is this charming run-on sentence, submitted by David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash. "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests." Fly's personal favorite was submitted by Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wis., and won in the Detective category: "She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida—the pink ones, not the white ones—except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't."

 

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