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Strange, key role for pair of felons in recall lawsuit Dickson, also known as Kim Hall, has served jail time in Cleveland on convictions for forgery and receiving stolen property, according to Cuyahoga County court records, and she has also been convicted there on theft and drug- possession charges. Dickson has emerged as a key figure in an Arizona lawsuit challenging the validity of an initiative to repeal an anti-smoking ordinance in Tempe. Phoenix lawyer Susan Cannata, who represents anti-smoking activists, contended there were problems with some of the approximately 1,000 signatures Dickson had gathered. People whose names and addresses appear on the petitions have denied signing, and Dickson herself allegedly used a series of fake addresses on affidavits in connection with the petitions she has turned in, the lawyer said. "She was living in a motel with three other felons," Cannata said, "a group of people that travel from state to state doing this kind of work." KNOWLEDGE OF RECORDS DENIED Lee, in an interview, said he knew nothing about the felony records of Garrett and Dickson and denied he contacted them for a job in California working on the recall. Lee said the pair contacted him, were hired and sent to California. He said they left after getting a job with Davis supporters. Lee said several weeks after they stopped working for him, he got a call from a man named Larry Laws, a Hollywood-based petition organizer working for the Davis anti-recall petition. Laws told him he had signatures that Garrett and Dickson had collected on the recall, but never turned in. "I just found it really weird that after six or seven weeks of a brutal campaign, that all of a sudden he wants to bring these guys down in the middle of the day because he has these signatures," Lee said. "I was like, 'I'm sorry, I don't want them.' " Lee said he suspects the anti-recall campaign wanted to plant the tainted signatures with him, so they could be used as evidence in the eventual court case. In an interview, Laws denied this and said Garrett and Dickson contacted him for a job and nobody in the anti-recall camp asked him to hire them. He said that Garrett and Dickson owed him money, so he kept between 60 and 70 recall signatures the pair had collected as collateral for the $47 they owned him for a motel room. "This was the only thing they had for collateral," Laws said. "I never did get my money back." Lee said claims that potentially hundreds of out-of-state petition workers were bused to California are false. He said he brought in only seven from Arizona, including Dickson and Garrett, and that they likely remain in California as residents collecting signatures for other initiatives. "I am sitting in Arizona today," Lee said, "and they are all sitting in California." Chronicle staff writer Lance Williams contributed to this report. / E-mail Robert Salladay at rsalladay@sfchronicle.com. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
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