Bomb Scare Blamed on Dispute

The man who forced a mass evacuation in Hollywood by threatening to blow up 5,000 pounds of dynamite was taking “matters into his own hands” after losing a lawsuit over a business dispute, but he did not realize the bomb scare would land him in jail, the man’s son said Sunday.

“My father is not a criminal. He wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Gary Nacham said after visiting his father, Abram, at the Los Angeles Police Department lockup downtown. “His conscience is clear because he knew there was no bomb.”

Abram Nacham, 64, of Long Beach was booked Saturday on suspicion of making a false bomb threat after he parked a truck, bearing a banner that claimed the truck was loaded with 5,000 pounds of dynamite, near Paramount Studios’ front gates. The banner also accused the American Automobile Assn. of ruining his reputation.

A spokeswoman for the automobile club confirmed that it has cautioned its members about Nacham’s auto body shop, saying the business did substandard work.

Abram Nacham, a Ukrainian Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1974, unsuccessfully sued the automobile club in 1990, claiming that it had launched a “personal vendetta” intended to ruin his Signal Hills business, Gary Nacham said. “The injustice of this was eating him alive.”

The son defended his father, saying that Abram Nacham believed that he would be set free once police saw that he had no bomb and was only trying to bring attention to his plight.

It did. About 250 law enforcement personnel responded to the scare, including police, California Highway Patrol officers and firefighters. Nearly 400 blocks were evacuated in and around Hollywood, and evacuees were taken by bus to emergency shelters at Fairfax and Hollywood high schools. Officials have yet to calculate the cost of the deployment.

“The Los Angeles Police Department takes bomb threats very serious,” said LAPD spokesman Vincent Aguirre. “We will not tolerate these kinds of action.”

After Nacham parked the truck near the front of the studios about 10 a.m., he called 911 from his cellular phone and spent the next several hours talking to authorities before surrendering at 2:15 p.m.

Nacham is scheduled to appear in court today for a bail hearing.

Abram Nacham’s wife, Bella, said the dispute with the automobile club had forced her husband to see a psychiatrist and take sleeping pills to rest at night.

“I knew he was up to something, but I didn’t know what,” she said, choking back tears.

When she learned what he had done Saturday, she said: “I was hysterical. I said, ‘This is impossible.’ ”

After coming to America, Abram Nacham worked at odd jobs until he was able to open his own auto body shop in 1982, naming it California 21 because his son, Gary, had turned 21 that year.

Among the shop’s regular customers were the Long Beach and Signal Hill police departments.

The business prospered, Gary Nacham said, until 1990, when he says two supervisors at the automobile club banned all AAA tow truck drivers from referring business to the shop. He says the automobile club’s insurance agents also urged clients to stay away from Nacham’s shop.

Gary Nacham insists the automobile club’s supervisors launched the vendetta simply because Abram Nacham was a successful Jew. At another point, Gary Nacham said they took the action because his father is a foreigner.

Gary Nacham says the vendetta cost the shop nearly $7 million in lost business. But a judge rejected his father’s lawsuit, saying that he could not prove his case.

“I didn’t know he was planning this, but I knew what led up to it,” Gary Nacham said.

Automobile club spokeswoman Layna Browdy confirmed that the club cautioned its members about California 21, but said it was because the work done by the body shop was substandard.

Browdy said the automobile club had to pay for additional repairs on some cars taken to the shop, and began cautioning its members that they could not vouch for the body shop’s work. AAA also sued California 21 in Municipal Court, seeking $8,000 to $12,000 for the additional repairs, Browdy said. Nacham then counter-sued.

“We found that we had a high volume of complaints from auto club members regarding this shop,” Browdy said. “It was a high volume of written complaints for our organization, compared to other physical damage shops.”

Browdy denied the decision was based on Nacham’s ethnic heritage or religion, noting that she herself is Jewish. “Performance is the issue,” she said.