The grand opening of Hollywood's newest homeless shelter promised goodies straight from a sinful dream. “Free food, drink, condoms, syringes, and surprise packages to all homeless guests,” announced festive leaflets distributed around town in 1995. Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg was providing the indulgences. Or so hinted the fliers.

Word shot through the streets, and feet started shuffling. So many vagrants, in fact, mobbed the Gower Avenue building for the purported ribbon cutting that officials had to barricade the front door.

Where were the freebies, some hollow-eyed attendees asked? And what about the party?

Goldberg's crew stuttered there was none because the invitations were fake. The shelter was still being hotly debated and wasn't anywhere near a kickoff. This was only a community meeting, not a party. Besides: a condom-syringe goodie bag?

Whoever tricked these indigents about the salacious giveaway, hissed Goldberg's chief of staff, had committed an “evil, horrendous” deed.

But real estate developer and gadfly Jerry Schneiderman – the man who'd made those fliers – didn't care if the vagrants came all this way for nothing. He'd made his point. To him, the proposed shelter was egghead liberalism sure to drag down property values, including the five small office buildings he controlled nearby. He and other landowners argued the proposed food kitchen/access center would strand the homeless on an already-seedy block every night after the shelter closed. So here was a preview: jonesing down-and-outers milling about.

Goldberg, now in the state Assembly, relocated the shelter rather than challenge Jerry. She knew better. There was something too callous, too aggressive, about a guy who would manipulate society's most vulnerable to get his way.

What kind of deviant would pull a stunt like this? Only someone who didn't care about whipping up political enemies. Someone who knows there are far worse kinds to have.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Jerry Schneiderman descended into a Fargo-esque murder triangle that only ended when he out-maneuvered a crafty redneck killer – an extortionist who had murdered Jerry's business partner and a small knot of other Southland residents. Jerry escaped, his family, too, but not without hardcore evolution. Surviving this bad-ass changed him. Jerry mutated from an impish, make-no-trouble Jewish kid from the Valley to a cackling pot-stirrer happy to kick the city Establishment in the nuts. He has become a weird antihero in a town that loves its crusaders flawed.

Not many of those who tangle with Jerry today appreciate how he has been transformed. Transformed and also twisted.

Ask Goldberg. When she established a needle-exchange program at an elementary school, Jerry enlisted Scientologists and old ladies with video cameras to document the attracted riffraff. His brazenness flourished afterwards. Jerry instigated a mass property reassessment that ate into city redevelopment coffers. When a blind man's hunger strike inside Los Angeles City Hall shamed officials into a $2-million payout for merchants damaged by subway construction, his fingerprints were all over it. So did revelations that then-Eastside Councilman Richard Alatorre was in cahoots with a slumlord, which led to Alatorre's downfall on corruption charges.

The chunky, 52-year-old diabetic with the salt-and-pepper hair and manic cell phone habits enjoys needling the mighty, but one thing's never been transparent: What, exactly, is in it for him? Not all of these tussles involve plumping Jerry's wallet, and he certainly doesn't live like a rich man. Sure, he drives a Rolls-Royce, but straight into the parking lot of a dingy medical clinic he co-owns and where he keeps his office. He claims involvement in $200 million in real estate deals, yet lives with wife No. 3 in a modest home in Encino.

No, it's not just about money. What he is now – profiteering do-gooder, wily opportunist, charming scoundrel as much despised as respected – takes a backseat to what he represents: a new breed of L.A. agitator reliant on guile and gotcha tactics, not City Hall connections, to stand up for the little guy. He doesn't want to owe anyone anything, and if someone puts the headlock on him, he'll laugh. Go ahead. Try it.

“You won't find my name listed prominently in the records,” Jerry says, “because I've been threatened with financial annihilation by politicians and developers I've gone after. But if they want to come after me they can. I've had nastier people than them chasing me.”

Interiors

Jerry's childhood on a working-class block in North Hollywood was all about trying to separate what was real from what was weird fiction. His father was a teacher and principal with a gentle, Peter-Pan-like persona. His mother, though intelligent and artistic, was neurotic about cancer and nuclear holocaust.

Jerry himself was a smart, fat kid used to riding the bus solo from an early age and getting minced by bullies. Luckily, he could draw. By high school, when he'd shed 50 pounds on a lettuce-and-meat diet, his ambition crystallized inside an otherwise nerdy exterior.

After graduating from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design in 1971, Jerry was hired at a local interior-design firm. His wage: about $3 an hour. He bounced to other jobs, eventually settling with a boutique firm known as ERD. It was there he met Richard Kasparov, a suave designer 14 years his senior.

Jerry, though, hated the corporate feudalism. He hated how his sketches might generate $30,000-a-day for the company while he was paid so badly. By July 1976, he'd convinced Richard they should launch their own firm. They christened it Space Matters.

Richard was everything Jerry wasn't – a lady-killer, a born salesman, a Beverly Hills scion knowledgeable about wines and architecture. Fussy about his appearance, periodically moody, Richard was superbly talented and knew it. His floor plans blended industrial psychology with a craftsman's panache to create the perfect office.

With Richard the rainmaker, administration defaulted to Jerry. The role suited him, even if it fueled some peers' opinion of him as a palm-rubbing, money-grubber out for No. 1. Whatever their views, Jerry realized he needed Richard's polish. At 27, Jerry looked 12.

Their shtick was being L.A.'s fastest space-planners. Hand them ideas during the day and they'd pull all-nighters to have the schematics finished by morning.

It was a tough slog, not only because space-planners were pigeonholed as fringe-dwellers of the building trade. Late-1970s Los Angeles had a degenerate sheen that made the bearish economy and granola-cocaine lifestyles feel punitive to straight-laced businessmen. L.A. felt like an over-populated dystopia where nobody was building anything.

At least the boys hit romantic paydirt.

Jerry married a petite hospital ´´ administrator from Michigan named Ricki.

Richard's lifelong contempt for rules found him love. When a woman berated him for swiping her parking spot, he pulled a Cary Grant, yanking her into a spontaneous kiss. They wed three months later, and what a couple! Richard, the lanky, 39-year-old divorcé with the winning smile, could've fallen out of a GQ layout. Brooke, his 22-year-old, party-girl bride from Northern California, might've been Farrah Fawcett's knockout sister.

Space Matters found its own legs, too. Designers were added, new customers toasted. The money client was Paul Fegen, a Westside leasing phenom famous for leveraged deals and the purple car he drove to entice young girls.

Still, the boys were restless. They persuaded themselves that if they expanded into suite remodeling, they'd knock years off the grind. Colleagues scolded them that managing construction crews was risky, but Richard was all about the can-do.

Both men had children. Both bought houses. If they kept on, maybe they'd swap them for mansions.

By late 1978, a jail cell seemed more likely for one of them. When Jerry returned from a vacation, Brooke passed on a bombshell: Richard was embezzling.

Jerry scoured the paperwork. Sonofabitch! Richard had been covertly remodeling homes using company-bought materials and pocketing everything. His mentor, Mr. Suave, had siphoned $150,000-plus.

Brooke knew the sting of being cheated by Richard. She'd recently left him over his infidelities. More treacherous entanglements went unexplained, including a kidnapping attempt on their baby daughter.

Everywhere Richard turned now, his past seized him. Jerry lured him to the ritzy Playboy Lounge on the pretext he was schmoozing a client. What Richard got instead were corporate dissolution papers and an ultimatum: No embezzlement charges would be pressed if he surrendered his half of the firm. He signed.

Afterwards, not-so-sheltered Jerry assumed the worst was over. Richard, anesthetizing his inner demons with women and narcotics, understood otherwise. He just didn't seem to care.

Murder

On a rainy Sunday night in March 1979, Richard lay in bed at his Van Nuys townhouse listening to his latest hobby, a leggy wannabe-actress, read her part in a script. They'd already had sex, gone out for dinner, and smoked a joint.

It was all so cozy that a muffled crack from the balcony window barely registered. When the woman glanced up from her script, however, she left fly a terrible scream. Blood and brain matter were splattered around the bed. A single bullet fired from an old-fashioned M-1 rifle had killed Richard where he should have been safest.

Richard's family wailed when they heard the news. Pathologically flaky or not, Richard was loved.

Jerry, former-Valley wimp, swallowed his terror to think through the possible scenarios when word reached him. Who would assassinate a businessman like some Banana Republic politician? Was he next?

Hiring security guards, longhair bouncer-types with guns, was his first move. Fleeing his new Northridge tract house was the second, so he, Ricki, and one-year-old Zach stayed with friends for a bit. When they returned to the house, they slept huddled on the floor. Paranoid about how Richard was shot, they covered the windows.

“I hate California,” Ricki kept repeating. “This doesn't happen to normal people.”

The funeral was torture. Richard's mom, the Kasparov's coiffed matriarch, blamed Jerry and Brooke for getting “Dick” involved with diabolical people. Brooke, dizzy with grief, scared sick about her daughter, ran outside during the ceremony to vomit.

Jerry equated distance with safety for his family. He flew Ricki and Zach to his in-laws' place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, stashing them there. During his return trip west, he pondered what the hell Richard had done.

The answer materialized in Jerry's office doorway eight days later. Howard Garrett, a leather-faced redneck who did more observing than talking, had been Jerry and Richard's construction foreman until he had quit bitterly around Thanksgiving over a $35,000 debt he alleged they owed him. Now, dressed head-to-toe in blue, Howard demanded a meeting. Jerry said hurry; he had an appointment.

“You fucking Jews are all the same,” Howard responded in a smoky half-whisper. “Hitler should've killed all of you.”

Jerry froze.

“Listen,” Howard continued. “I killed Richard and I did you a favor. You owe me for half the [$150,000] life insurance money. And if you're thinking about calling the police, don't. The contract on you is already written.”

To prove his credentials, Howard volunteered forensic details about Richard's takedown only the mastermind would know. Jerry blathered the $75,000 was tied up in legalities by Richard's family. Then, Howard suggested, Jerry should try Ricki's wealthy folks. They wouldn't want to see Ricki or their grandkid hurt.

As a parting jolt, Howard reminded Jerry of why he'd needed two weeks off when he first joined Space Matters in early 1978. He'd originally said he'd been a witness in the trial of a man accused of pistol-whipping a friend to death before setting him afire in the San Bernardino desert. Actually, Howard gloated, he was no mere witness. He was the defendant. (A hung jury found him not guilty.)

“I killed before and got away with it and can do it again. You have a week to get the money.” Cool as he came in, he left.

Howard Patrick Garrett, it'd soon be obvious, was someone you didn't want having your home address.

He was 47, a native of Mt. Vernon, Missouri, with two small Arcadia design firms and a wife resembling a trailer-trash Barbie-doll. Howard's rap sheet was dotted with drunk-driving and battery arrests. Until that desert murder, nothing gruesome stood out.

What put the creep in his X-ray stare was how several of the people he'd squabbled with, including an ex-wife, ended up corpses without charges being hung on him. With his sandpapery demeanor, Howard was a maestro at ducking blame. He especially liked portraying himself as the victim of targets he was already menacing. Jamming a gun in the mouth of someone holding out on him was another favorite.

In early 1979, he formed a criminal enterprise with a half-dozen robbers and thugs he'd recruited from the tumbleweed towns of the Inland Empire. Drugs were dangled to keep them hooked. Howard had always believed the prissy, white-collar world was stacked against Joe Sixpacks like him. Screw them, he'd decided. He'd use the legitimacy of his contractor's license to snatch what had been denied. He honed a list of Space Matters' clients who kept upwards of $200,000 cash at home. Robbing and murdering these cowardly doctors and pin-stripers would be a cinch.

Before he hunted them, another had to go. Richard was personal. He'd run up a huge bill on Howard's credit, stiffing him for repayment using excuses and bluster. Richard tried placating him by lending him his Datsun 280-Z, but it wasn't enough for Howard or his hard-nosed lawyers.

So, Howard bailed a friend out of jail and persuaded him to execute Richard. Practice runs were made, alibis concocted. Naturally, problems flared. This hit man, a strapping thief named Robert Freeman, got so scared of Howard that that he tried vanishing in San Francisco. Howard stayed calm. He asked Freeman's buddy, Johnny Williams, a bookish-looking man with gangland kills on his resume, to drive up north to silence Freeman with a .357.

It didn't pan out. Neither did the first three attempts to drop Richard. Every time Johnny Williams and his wingman, a transvestite in full lipstick regalia, commuted from Ontario to knock on Richard's door and pretend they needed to use his phone because of car troubles, he wasn't there or the timing was wrong. The men grew so exasperated they robbed Richard's place, lifting, among other possessions, a Cartier watch they hawked to buy his murder weapon.

Howard raged at the flubs. When his gang drove for Richard's balcony a fourth time, Howard was there to ensure – and savor – the job got done.

“This little pipsqueak [Richard] had the nerve to rip him off,” said Jeff Jonas, then a young prosecutor drawn into the case. “He had an air of invincibility. Johnny Williams wasn't much better. To him, killing a person was like going to Bob's Big Boy.”

None of this Jerry would piece together until later.

Face to Face

After Howard's extortion demand, Jerry's concern was survival. He sped to Westwood to meet with his attorney, who we'll call Barry. Barry suggested they stroll around a nearby cemetery to speak freely. It was there he painted Jerry's choices: he could pay Howard, he could contact authorities, or he could kill him. According to Jerry, Barry endorsed the last option, because cobras like Howard never forget.

But a civilized family man murdering someone? Never, Jerry said.

A week later he was in deep with the LAPD. Detectives had suspected Howard all along but lacked evidence to arrest him. Jerry, they said, had to trick Howard into incriminating statements. Soon, there was Jerry, inside the first police station he'd ever been in, having a recording device taped to his chest. Don't worry, detectives chirped, he'd be okay. Too bad the bulky bulletproof vest they wanted him to wear had to be shelved. His beanpole frame made it look too obvious.

Jerry got Howard to agree to meet at Space Matters to discuss the $75,000 as the police instructed. Howard was one step ahead. At the appointed time, he had a young lackey show up to drive Jerry to a neutral spot. Jerry balked. Back on the phone again, he convinced Howard to meet him on the steps of the L.A. County Museum of Art. The La Brea Tar Pits next door were full of bones.

The surreal wouldn't wait. Moments after Howard's messenger departed, a heavily armed SWAT team stormed Space Matters' Wilshire Boulevard office hollering, “EVERYBODY DOWN!” With the 15-person staff on the floor, the team took up positions at the windows, guns drawn. When Jerry's workers were told all clear, they were wrecks. A gay decorator whimpered in the arms of a female colleague. If the staff didn't know who'd killed Richard, they knew now. Howard had just cruised past the office, and the cops worried he might try dropping Jerry with a drive-by blast. How, some designers murmured, could Jerry have endangered them? Jerry, squished in the worst days of his life, said the cops made him keep quiet.

Walking to his museum rendezvous, Jerry's legs were rubber. He asked himself again: Is this real? LAPD sharpshooters monitored him from the roof of a skyscraper across the street (now the home of CityBeat). A police van was parked nearby. Crappy reality.

When Howard casually walked up to him, his words reinforced that.

“I'm betting you're wired right now. You've made your choice. I'll make mine.”

The conversation lasted ten minutes. Howard was cagey about his words, though Jerry believed he'd slipped up. Afterward is when disappointment clobbered him. The recording, detectives admitted, was useless: too much street noise. There'd be no arrest.

Bottled up in his police-protected Hyatt hotel room, Jerry ran Space Matters by phone over the next weeks, venturing out only in disguise, his safe, boring life drained away. Back in Michigan, Ricki's family was jumpy that California assassins were stalking them. Two of her relatives wanted her to abort their second child. Jerry, they speculated, would wind up like Richard. Maybe he brought some of this on with shady dealings nobody heard about?

Rafi Azoulay, a burly, former-Israeli commando with an L.A. demolition business, sometimes felt like Jerry's sole confidante. Rafi was a hairy gorilla of a man legendary for threatening deadbeat clients with his bulldozer. Rafi begged Jerry to let him kill Howard.

“The mathafuckin' police afraid,” Rafi said. “Me not. I bring my bulldozer.”

Living For It

Afraid?

A quarter-century later, Jerry sits at a café munching Thai duck while explaining that the best way to neutralize an adversary is to set his own momentum against him. John DeLorean, Barry Minkow – Jerry enjoys reading how the weak became strong.

The leverage lessons of 1979 can be useful here. In December 2001, a landmark Sunset Boulevard building where Jerry housed his real estate office fell under city quarantine after an electrical fire. The landlord, no fan of Jerry's after he alerted other renters ´´ about the building's safety defects, tried unloading it on another investor. Tenants bidding to get their lost rent money returned were stymied.

Jerry volleyed with cunning, banding renters together into a creditor's association that effectively tossed the landlord into involuntary bankruptcy. Today, the renters are slated to get their money back.

The pre-Howard Jerry never would have dared that. But the modern one, the one trafficking in urban lofts and nightclubs partnerships with mysterious foreigners, lives for it.

Life or Death Bluff

As the spring of 1979 dragged on, the tension was unbearable. Howard was still loose, and the estimated 30 people he was terrorizing – businessmen, henchmen's families, random enemies – lived petrified. Jerry's mom recommended he hire the Jewish mafia. Ricki said bolt California.

Doing neither, Jerry hired two private detectives. Both were grizzled ex-cops who'd investigated strong-armings before. They developed their own dossier on Howard. What they unearthed would've done Charles Manson proud.

Two weeks before Richard was slain, Howard had choreographed a brutal home-invasion robbery at the Arcadia home of an autobody shop owner. He hoped to nab $50,000 in cash he erroneously believed was there. Johnny Williams and cohort “Crazy Eddy” Reyes tied everybody up. In their hands were automatic weapons. In their heads were Howard's orders not to leave any survivors.

A mindless sitcom probably saved them. One of the homeowner's sons had been in a back room watching Laverne & Shirley when he heard the men bust in. The boy shimmied out a window to summon help, and the invaders escaped without killing anyone.

How had Howard heard about this opportunity? Simple. He'd been tight with the family for years, so tight that he had played Santa for the kids.

What Jerry learned last from his investigators stabbed him most. Howard had stopped prowling for him. He wanted his son, Zach. Wanted to kidnap him, lop off an ear or finger, and slam Jerry into delivering the $75 grand.

Richard – he'd invoked this evil. An ex-girlfriend had picked up an instant bad vibe when she'd met Howard, warning Richard not “to fuck with him.” Others wanted Richard to get therapy. There was something sociopathic about his deceits, something tragic about the disheveled shell he'd become.

In nearly every relationship, business or personal, Richard started like gangbusters, oozing dependability and cool. But relationships demand responsibility, be it a baby or bills that he never accepted. It got more extreme as he got older, and invariably he'd leave a debris field behind of broken promises, unexplained absences and let-down, angry people.

Nothing flung him toward self-redemption. Diving into EST. Discovered affairs. Drugs. Violent outbursts. Two beautiful daughters. Not even Howard's threats pierced the denial.

Before he and Brooke separated, Howard routinely called Richard's house the instant he left for work. Make him pay up, Howard growled to Brooke. He owes me – big. Brooke believed it, one day yelling at her hubby, “GET HIM OUT OF OUR LIVES!”

Richard said relax. Howard would eventually slither away.

Two days before that assumption exploded, he'd had a final chance. A mystery woman phoned Brooke to say a hit had been contracted on Richard. Make a list of everyone who'd want him dead.

That caller, it turned out, was the court-appointed lawyer representing hit-man Robert Freeman. Freeman had come to Susanne Greene, then fresh out of law school, frightened of Howard, hoping for immunity. Hearing such a wild story, Greene was baffled how to handle it. Give a heads-up? Say nothing? She consulted with older colleagues, among them future California Supreme Court Justice Armand Arabian and Robert Shapiro, one of O.J. Simpson's future attorneys.

In the end, Greene went with her instinct. Too bad Richard didn't use his.

On March 25, his last Sunday, he arrived to take his baby out for a custodial visit. That's when Brooke informed him about the just-issued threat.

“I said, ‘You're not taking the baby after that call,'” Brooke recalled. “He went completely white. But, I still loved him. He was just in la-la land. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and never learned consequences.”

Nobody to this day understands why Richard at least didn't try to get out of Dodge.

When his turn came, Jerry couldn't think about anything else: the nightmares about Howard mutilating Zach; his fraying marriage; his capsized business. It had to stop.

And it did. One day in May 1979, he called his LAPD contact to demand either they arrest Howard using the evidence they'd stockpiled or he was driving to Howard's Pasadena apartment to confront him. Let the violence spill.

The bluff — the first big one he'd pulled in his life – worked. Detectives arrested Howard at 5 a.m. the next day as he sat on the toilet. “Oh, shit,” he said when the cuffs got slapped on him.

Despite his efforts to intimidate witnesses at his trial, he would be convicted of murder and other counts and sent to prison. Diabetes, no doubt exacerbated by his own bitterness, killed him in 1984. People who used to call regularly to ensure he was still incarcerated celebrated. Johnny, who turned evidence against him, got life.

Aftermath

Jerry was relieved and raw in the aftermath. Ricki lobbied for him to move to Michigan, where people don't get killed over business disputes. He refused, unwilling to change anything because of Howard, and they'd be divorced within a few years. It was only in recent times Ricki began keeping her curtains open.

Jerry, meantime, carried a Walther-PPK handgun everywhere. His once-trademark innocence was already capped.

The postscript got darker before it got manageable.

Jerry soon discovered that Howard could've been halted. Before starting at Space Matters, he'd been employed at a large, New York-based real estate outfit. When Howard had a fight with his boss, Howard burned down the man's garage, flashing him that evil stare. Did the man stand up? No. He called Richard and gave Howard a solid recommendation that greased Howard into the company.

In a city of imposters and secrets, space really does matter.

Brooke learned that. After Richard's murder, she fended off bankruptcy, burned through bad marriages, and survived cancer before resurrecting her own design career. Even better, she successfully raised their daughter with the common sense her dad lacked.

Jerry, who thinks about 1979 a lot, builds walls around his personal affairs. He is wary that the briefcase-toting man in his office may harbor grim intentions. But living cowed in a crooked world? With a little of Richard and Howard in his blood, how could he?

The next Jackie Goldberg better see him coming.

(Note: Richard's last name has been changed to protect his surviving relatives.)