By RICH WILKEN Special to the Palisadian-Post Fire Station 19 firefighters responded to a hit-and-run accident on San Vicente at Canyon View in Brentwood last Saturday morning at 9:10 a.m., after a bicyclist was hit and suffered serious injuries. Rescue 19 transported the male bicyclist, in his 20s, to the UCLA Trauma Center. A motorist who witnessed the accident called 911 and followed the car. ‘The initial witness to the accident followed the suspect down San Vicente to Santa Monica Canyon, when the suspect suddenly stopped and attempted to ram the witness,’ said Palisades Patrol owner Scott Wagenseller. ‘The witness, driving with his wife and children, told the 911 operator that he would no longer follow the suspect, but that he was last seen driving north on Chautauqua towards the Palisades.’ Palisades Patrol lead officer Eric Fine, monitoring the police radio band, learned of the felony hit-and-run suspect heading up Chautauqua, possibly turning onto Sunset Boulevard. Officer Fine, who was putting on his uniform shortly before his shift began, left the Palisades Patrol headquarters, located at in the 881 Alma Real building. He quickly identified the vehicle traveling westbound on Sunset at Monument, where he began following the suspect. I had just finished a Saturday morning cup of green tea at Starbucks with my geezer walking group when I observed Fine in his Palisades Patrol unit headed west on Sunset with a radio handset to his mouth. Having a radio set in my truck, a leftover perk as past Honorary Town Sheriff, I joined the chase as Fine broadcast that the suspect was entering Jin’s Shell station at Sunset and Via de la Paz. Fine continued his update, stating that he was trying to corner the suspect at the station and thought the chase might end up on foot. Thinking I could help (perhaps if only as an observer or to catch a few digital photos for the Palisadian-Post), I crossed Sunset and drove north on Via towards the alley that divides the Shell station and Sunset/Via condo units. As I began to enter the alley, I observed a silver-gray Lincoln with a shattered windshield trying to exit the station; the Palisades Patrol unit was right behind him.   To the surprise of the driver, I wedged my front bumper up against the already damaged and bloodstained front bumper of his moving car, blocking his path of escape. Concerned that the suspect might be armed, Fine, with his weapon drawn and partially shielded by the open patrol-car door, shouted instructions to the driver. The obviously inebriated driver exited his damaged car, but suddenly reentered the car, started it, and tried to make an escape. ‘We were standing there watching. The guy had difficulty walking straight,’ said Palisades High tennis coach Bud Kling, who had come over from Starbucks. ‘When he got back in the car, he tried to knock over a pole to get out of there.’ Reaching in from the passenger side, Fine attempted to remove the suspect’s keys from the ignition, while I tried to divert his attention from the driver-side window. LAPD traffic officer Davis arrived at about 9:35 a.m. to take control of the suspect and place him under arrest for a DUI and hit and run felony. (Editor’s note: Rich Wilken will soon receive a Community Defender Award from the Palisadian-Post for his volunteer efforts that saved the town’s traditional Fourth of July fireworks show last year. An architect when he’s not busy helping to corral hit-and-run drivers, Wilken will be honored at the Citizen of the Year dinner on April 23.)

Students living in Pacific Palisades have applied to attend Palisades Charter High School this fall in droves, according to Monica Iannessa, director of student services. ‘We have received over twice as many applications from residents as in recent years,’ Iannessa said, adding that she thinks the increase is due to the economic downturn, which has resulted in more families considering public school rather than private. PaliHi received 365 applications from residents for the ninth grade, and 230 of those were from residents who did not attend Paul Revere Charter Middle School, Executive Director Amy Dresser-Held said. Residents are those that live not only in Pacific Palisades, but Topanga and parts of Brentwood. ‘Historically, the number of non-Revere residents has been a lot lower,’ Dresser-Held said. The high school received a total of 1,475 applications for all grade levels and will accept about 950 students. The school’s enrollment cap is 2,760 students, and there are currently 2,678 students enrolled. PaliHi received 1,188 applications for 744 open spots for the freshman class, and 287 applications for 206 open spaces for sophomores through seniors. The available seats include the magnet school. The high school admits students in order of preference, starting with residents, then family members of current students and faculty, and Paul Revere eighth graders. The Paul Revere students are further divided in order of preference. Those who live in the Palisades, have attended a Palisades public elementary school or are a part of the Permit with Transportation (PWT) or the Public School Choice (PSC) programs are selected first. The remaining Paul Revere students and any students from outside the area were placed in a lottery on March 26 held in the auditorium, B101. Joseph Irvine, a 20-year-old from Chandler, Arizona, designed a computer software program to conduct the lottery. The new system replaced the school’s antiquated approach of drawing pieces of paper, resulting in a more efficient process. There are now 208 Paul Revere students on the waiting list and 20 eighth graders from outside the area. Iannessa is uncertain that PaliHi will be able to accept all Paul Revere students this fall. ‘We still have residents applying to the school, and we are bound to accept them,’ Iannessa said, adding the school’s charter mandates residents be given first preference. Paul Revere also hosted its lottery on March 25, and about 420 students filled out applications for the sixth grade, Principal Fern Somoza said. The school, with a total of 2,070 students, accepted 250 applicants and the remainder were placed in order on a waiting list. ‘We will issue acceptance letters to the first 250 names pulled,’ Somoza said. ‘If those families do not turn in enrollment applications by May 22, we will immediately fill those slots using the waiting list. We will continue to call the waiting list until all slots are filled.’

Author Lisa Sweetingham is excited about her Village Books appearance on Tuesday, April 14 at 7:30 p.m., when she will sign copies of her first book, ‘Chemical Cowboys: The DEA’s Secret Mission to Hunt Down a Notorious Ecstasy Kingpin’ (Ballantine Books), at 1049 Swarthmore.   ’A lot of close friends from Palisades High live here,’ Sweetingham, a TruTV (formerly CourtTV) correspondent and a freelancer for the New York Times, Spin and Venice, told the Palisadian-Post. ‘It’s like going home.’ The articulate PaliHi graduate (class of ’88), who started out at Gerry Blanck’s Martial Arts Studio in 1992, once competed on the karate circuit. Perhaps the amiable writer, who holds a blackbelt, kept her self-defense chops ready as she traveled nationwide and overseas to interview underworld figures associated with a multi-million dollar Ecstasy ring. In the process, she gained the trust of hardboiled Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials and no-nonsense Israeli law enforcement agents. What she unearthed informs the nonfiction ‘Chemical Cowboys,’ a penetrating page-turner about how a pair of DEA agents took down the elusive Oded ‘Fat Man’ Tuito, master of the once-thriving, Israeli mafia-controlled Ecstasy drug trade, which flourished from 1995 to 2001. Sweetingham, 38, all but grew up in Pacific Palisades. While raised in Venice and Topanga Canyon, she attended Paul Revere Middle School and Palisades High. ‘I enjoyed my school years,’ said the erstwhile Lisa Strum, single and now living in West Los Angeles. ‘I loved it because the teachers were really good, there was a diverse student body, and you had the beach nearby.’ In fact, Sweetingham’s first brush with reporting happened at PaliHi. She admitted she didn’t care much for the journalism class run by the late Barry Tunick, who co-created the Los Angeles Times’ crossword puzzles. However, Mary RedClay’s class fired up her writing passion. ‘She was a very outspoken, intelligent hippie,’ Sweetingham said, describing PaliHi English teacher RedClay, ‘and she didn’t let anyone get away with clich’s or stereotypes in their writing.’ By Sweetingham’s recollection, ‘Drugs and alcohol were rampant at PaliHi. Ecstasy hit the campus really big in 1986. I reconnected recently with an old boyfriend who was the sole Ecstasy dealer at PaliHi. I knew because he was dealing Ecstasy to all of our friends. No one knew where Ecstasy came from. It seemed like a fun, safe thing to do.’ Not that Ecstasy was exclusively PaliHi’s problem, but ‘in the Palisades, you probably had better quality drugs.’ First synthesized by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 1912, Ecstasy did not surface until 1976, when Alexander Shulgin, a UC Berkeley professor with a Timothy Leary-esque bent, began to take and distribute the semisynthetic psychoactive drug. ‘Shulgin was a chemist for Dow Chemical,’ Sweetingham said. ‘He called it Empathy, and he was a real pioneer in the psychedelic drug world. The thing about Shulgin that was so interesting is that he liked to try all the drugs on himself. If he liked it, he would then introduce it to his wife and his circle of friends, other professors.’ Ecstasy quickly leapt from a judiciously prescribed drug to the streets. It cost 25 cents per tablet to manufacture and sold in the clubs at $20 to $50 a pop. ‘The drug escaped the therapist’s couch and went to clubs, even grade schools. There was no more control in the taking of it,’ Sweetingham said. At first, Ecstasy was produced in Holland, ‘but the mafia in Israel started to see the millions being made,’ Sweetingham continued. ‘That’s when they began financing the pills and you started seeing a lot more warfare and a dead body showing up in the back of a Lexus SUV in Brentwood,’ alluding to an excerpt from ‘Cowboys.’ So how did ‘Cowboys’ become Sweetingham’s maiden book project? ‘When I was at journalism school at Columbia University,’ she recalled, ‘I thought this was a fascinating story, but I couldn’t penetrate that community, so I let that story go. Years later, while working for CourtTV, a source came to me and said I should take a look at it.’ Sweetingham gained the trust of the DEA and the Israel National Police to compose her remarkable account of two young undercover DEA agents”Robert Gagne and Matthew Germanowski”on the warpath to take down Tuito’s operation. ‘This wasn’t just a magazine story,’ she said. ‘It was the story of an era.’ In late 2007, Sweetingham met Israel National Police’s top official: ‘He opened up my eyes to the challenges that they faced battling the mafia there. No one in America writes about the Israeli mafia, the warfare going on between them, blowing each other up in the streets. In Israel, it’s a major part of what the police do battle with.’ Soon, Sweetingham found herself in Romania meeting a former Ecstasy dealer: ‘He knew all of the players. A lot of money had been laundered through Bucharest.’ Despite some vague threats, the young writer never felt in harm’s way: ‘Those sources who may have threatened me in the beginning ended up becoming very good sources. A lot of them were just posturing. But once people got to know me and trusted that I was writing an honest portrayal, they agreed to tell me more of the story.’ So why did criminals from Israel seize the Ecstasy market? ‘They knew that they couldn’t penetrate the cocaine, heroin and marijuana markets, controlled by brutal Mexican, Colombian organized crime,’ Sweetingham said. ‘But they saw that law enforcement was not paying attention to Ecstasy. They called it ‘kiddie dope’ and the demand was so high.’ Some ultra-Orthodox Jewish youth were manipulated into becoming ‘mules,’ obviously a conflict with their religious beliefs. ‘They didn’t know what they were carrying,’ Sweetingham said. ‘They grew up very sheltered, without television. They were told that they were smuggling ‘diamonds for the Holy Land’ [jewels sold to support Israel]. It was actually one rogue dealer, Sean Arez, a Canadian-Israeli, who roped them in. He greatly upset the Jewish community by involving ultra-Orthodox teenagers.’ By the 2000s, the Ecstasy trade evaporated ‘because law enforcement from Israel, Western Europe and DEA worked together in secretive cooperative busts’ to break the back of Tuito’s ring, Sweetingham said. ‘The way the DEA and the Israel National Police took down the Ecstasy dealers has become a model. Israel changed its laws to extradite criminals to America to be prosecuted. There’s a new kind of cooperation between law enforcement in both countries.’ Visit www.LisaSweetingham.com.

Innate Chiropractic has been around for 10 years at its Marquez Avenue location. But walk into the storefront clinic today, and you’ll experience what is virtually a brand new clinic ‘with ‘virtual’ being the operative word here. ‘We went from a traditional paper office to completely paperless almost overnight,’ said owner and founder Dr. Luke S. Cohen. Indeed, when patients check in at reception, a biometric scanner instantly identifies them and pulls up all of their records, which appear on Cohen’s computer screen in the treatment room where he will be working with his visitor. Every room has a flat-screen monitor that enables Cohen to not only view a patient’s information but educate said patient with computer-program illustrations. The dulcet sounds of Jack Johnson and Carpio waft softly into the rooms where the physical therapy takes place. An Illum Innate spine model stands in the corner of one room, opposite a flat-screen monitor offering detailed schematic explanations on spinal subluxation and degeneration. In fact, every room contains some sort of computer screen, where the multimedia format enhances the average patient’s understanding of his/her condition. Cohen has also re-invested in the equipment itself, such as top-of-line therapeutic benches and a high/low table that accommodates the wheelchair-bound. He enjoys demonstrating the hand-held Artho-light impulse device ‘for people who can’t tolerate adjustments. Kids like it a lot. I call it the Tickle Machine. Others call it the Woodpecker.’ Meanwhile, gone are the loud colors, busy posters and other wall clutter that used to adorn Innate’s walls. Every medical chamber has been repainted in softer, earthier colors, with thick wood-framed mirrors and large paintings of close-ups of tall grass and bamboo, setting a vaguely Brazilian-rainforest vibe. ‘One of our patients donated these paintings from Bali,’ Cohen explained. The overall effect: a more New Age atmosphere, with an emphasis on calm and peaceful. ‘We wanted our office to be state-of-the-art and relaxing,’ he said. Cohen, 35, originally set up shop on Marquez Avenue in 1999. He expanded his office space in 2003 after his next-door neighbor, a tailor shop, moved out. Last August, Cohen spent about two weeks completely overhauling the office, and he has since been ‘slowly finishing the final touches while maintaining a busy practice.’ At Innate Chiropractic, Cohen treats ‘a wide range of patients, from kids to the elderly,’ for a wide swath of symptoms and ailments. Contrary to popular belief, a chiropractor such as Cohen does not merely crack backs or apply reactive physical therapy to spinal injuries, such as in the aftermath of a car crash. Cohen also addresses a variety of symptoms and ailments and applies preemptive treatment to all parts of the body for neck and arm pains, migraines, sciatica and the like. ‘We identify the problems and work with the right amount of time, not just patch them up,’ Cohen said. ‘We work on ankles and knees, wrists and elbows. Most human beings, as they get older, develop symptoms in the body not normal in the neurological system. ‘Almost anyone can benefit from a chiropractor,’ Cohen added. ‘It’s similar to dentistry.’   Of South African-Jewish descent, Luke Cohen grew up the son of a contractor on the north side of Santa Monica, where he attended Santa Monica High School. Upon graduation, he matriculated into Cleveland Chiropractic College downtown, where he still lectures every two months. Since an early age, Cohen had always known that chiropractic care was his destiny, and with good reason: an expert on musculoskeletal disorders had cured him of his own debilitating childhood ailments, ‘What inspired me to become a chiropractor stemmed as a child sufferer of migraine headaches,’ Cohen said. The unbearable migraines plagued him from age seven to 17. Then a chiropractor identified the source of his problem”an imbalance in the neck”and, after a series of adjustments, Cohen was forever cured. He added that, as a teen, a chiropractor also cured him of a hip condition. ‘It took time to find the right storefront,’ Cohen said, recalling his search for Innate’s Marquez location, which he favored over, say, the Palisades business district, ‘to make it more accessible to Palisadians. It’s easier to find parking here.’ While he admits that he, like most small business owners, has been stung by the economy’s meltdown, he has his decade-long roots at Marquez Knolls to help weather the storm. ‘I’m blessed with longtime patients,’ Cohen said. And perhaps longtime patience as well: an affable, laid-back fellow, he radiates a relaxing kind of energy one would favor in a doctor of this genre. Cohen, who is single, has resided in the Palisades for seven years (his father lived here for 25 years, during which time Cohen fell in love with the area). ‘The Palisades has always been a great place to work and live,’ Cohen said. ‘It has a small-town feel. I also love living near the ocean and the mountains.’ What he called ‘a beautiful location that is healthy and family-minded’ is where he enjoys hiking, going to the beach, and spending time with family and friends. A Palisades Chamber of Commerce member, Cohen has hosted several of the Chamber’s monthly mixers over the years.     Contacts: call (310) 230-1899 or visit www.palichiro.com