Casey's revenge

San Diego — San Diego city attorney Casey Gwinn's top honcho, Leslie Devaney, has opened a campaign bank account to run for her boss's job. Gwinn, who at one time or another has aspired to be everything from U.S. Attorney to an assistant to incoming District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, all the while remaining stuck firmly at city hall, is finally being pried from office by term limits. Over the last couple of years, Gwinn has put the ever-loyal Devaney out front on a variety of issues he'd rather not talk about, including the city's friend-of-court brief against a Sacramento sidewalk-maintenance case favored by advocates for the handicapped and an embarrassing $91.7 million judgment against the city won by border-area developer Roque de la Fuente ... San Diego mayor Dick Murphy, who has said he hasn't made up his mind about running for reelection, has set up a 2004 campaign committee, into which he rolled about $10,000 left over from the last election. During the second half of 2002, the mayor spent $750 of his campaign funds for the "Class of '67 HBS Alumni" and $932.64 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Murphy is a graduate of the Harvard Business School. "I actually took a course in international business at Harvard Business School," he once told the Union-Tribune, "and the thing I learned there was that what works in America doesn't work in other foreign countries."...Big contributors to District 5 councilman Brian Maienschein include six members of the Israni family, proprietors of the Pacifica Companies, whose local hotel portfolio includes the Inn at La Jolla and La Jolla Shores Inn. In November 2000, Pacifica was accused by a hotel and restaurant employees union of "union busting" at the Wyndham International Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport ... District 4 councilman Charles Lewis collected $950 from employees of Vestar Development, which owns the Marketplace at the Grove shopping mall in his district.

Kerry on Massachusetts senator John Kerry's upcoming $1000-a-plate fundraiser at the San Diego Hilton will be historic in at least one way, reports the Boston Herald. It's the first time that Kerry's wealthy wife, Teresa Heinz, widow of ketchup heir and late Republican senator from Pennsylvania John Heinz, will carry the Kerry surname on the invitations. Choosing to be known as Teresa Heinz Kerry, à la Hillary Rodham Clinton, was a big step, Heinz Kerry's spokeswoman Chris Black told the paper. "She was Teresa Heinz longer than she was Teresa Simoes-Ferreira, her maiden name. She and the senator talked about it for a while. Some of her friends said she would never do it, but she was very cool about it." ... That controversial proposal to build a large metallic box next to downtown's Santa Fe Depot is coming back soon for a vote before the city council. The developer, La Jolla-based San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, says the new design is an improvement over one rejected by the council two months ago as an "ugly building," but project foe Barbara Winton has another opinion. "Last December the city council on a split 5-to-4 vote sent the MCA plan back for revision," she says in a recent news release. "There have been no significant revisions to the large, tall, square box...an oversized, four-story, metal-and-glass futuristic cube." The building is a pet project of Union-Tribune publisher and museum patron David Copley as well as board president Pauline Foster, influential mother-in-law of San Diego schools superintendent Alan Bersin.

He's back Poet Quincy Troupe, forced to quit his professorship at UCSD after it was revealed he had lied about graduating from Louisiana's Grambling State University, is making a comeback of sorts. He's on the poetry-reading circuit, latest stop Kansas City, where he told a reporter for the Star that he was kicked out of college for fighting with the locals. "I went [to Grambling] with a friend of mine, and you know, people in Kansas City and St. Louis, we dress real well. We were really hip dressers, and I knew about [jazz] and Charlie Parker and all that stuff, and they didn't like that we were getting all the girls." ... Two Russian sailors being held at downtown's federal jail are complaining about America's system of justice, the Tass news service is telling Russians. The pair was busted after an April 2001 search of their ship turned up 12 tons of cocaine. "Strongest psychological pressure is being put on the seamen so that they admit of their guilt by taking a so-called deal with the investigation, for which they are promised to be given a minimum term. But they are not taking it, as they do not consider themselves guilty of anything and do not want to spoil their honest work record," Russian consul Andrei Podyelyshev was quoted as saying.

Contributor: Matt Potter