Lindy Peters is the former mayor of Fort Bragg and a current member of the Fort Bragg City Council. A large, affable man in his mid-forties, Mr. Peters resembles the action movie star, Steven Seagal. Mr. Peters is a former college football player also familiar to many Coast residents and sports fans as "The Voice" at both Radio KMFB and Fort Bragg High School football.
"It's a long story, but here's what really happened. Last August at Joe Caito's 50th birthday party this 22-year-old lady moved to town with a 59-year-old man. He'd gotten her a breast implant and, in Fort Bragg, she attracted immediate attention. My friend — now my ex-friend — was attending classes at The College of the Redwoods. He owns a Jag and a BMW. The 22-year-old and my friend, who’s 39 or 40, quickly became intimately involved. The 59-year-old guy found out and was so unhappy that the 22-year-old had to file a restraining order against him as if he's a violent guy, which he isn't. She moved in with my ex-best friend, the Jag and Beamer guy.
At the 50th birthday party for Joe Caito back in August, Joe's daughter was at the mike asking people to quiet down so the party could go forward with a celebration of Joe. She looked at me like she needed help to get people quiet enough so she could say what she wanted to say. I had just come back from the bathroom. Joe was standing with a drink in his hand with his back to me. I couldn’t see the drink. I slapped him on the back and said, 'Hey! happy birthday, Joe!' And a little of the drink spilled forward on to the 22-year-old, Naomi Ruth Campbell. Jokingly, like she’s kidding, she hits me in the arm, wham!
I said, 'Hey!'
She said, 'You shouldn’t have done that. Why are you laughing?'
I said, 'Well I didn’t know Joe had a drink in his hand; I didn't mean for it to spill on anybody.'
But she hits me a second time on the arm and says, 'Be more careful.'
I said, 'Hey, don’t hit me that hard.' But she hits me a third time. Wham! She conveniently left her hitting me out of her letter in your paper. By that time I’m holding Joe’s drink for him. She’s wearing pants so tight they look like they were painted on. I grabbed the back of her pants — and I admit I'd had a drink or two — so when she turned around right in front of me and bent her butt over right like she was mooning me I tipped the glass enough for an ice cube or two and a little bit of the drink to slide down into her pants.
And that’s the extent of what happened. But she's turned it into this whole big circus like it's the crime of the century. I apologized to her that night, and I also wrote her an apology because I wanted to maintain the friendship with my buddy. It was all a prank and not malicious at all, but now she's putting all these stories about me being the town drunk and a boor and a lout.
I was ready to laugh it off but Tom Yates, owner of KOZT, and you remember when he appeared before the Fort Bragg City Council when you guys wrote the article about how he'd finagled redevelopment money, which was very well written and was also totally true — that Tom Yates who came before the city council ripping you and saying what a joke your paper was while he was a true media professional who'd won all these awards — here he comes again in this thing! He sends his news man, Joe Regalski to the Fort Bragg City Hall to investigate the letter about me from Ms. Campbell in your newspaper!
The city manager calls me at home and says, 'Do you know anything about this Joe Regalski? He was just in my office wondering what the City was going to do about this letter in the AVA. So here's Yates sending his newsman after me because I work at KMFB and KMFB is one of his competitors!
I called him up. I said, 'Hey, Tom, what do you think of the AVA? Um, why? he asks. I said because do you remember when you went before the city council saying what a joke it was? So how come your newsman’s wasting the city manager’s time trying to find out what the city’s going to do about a letter to the editor — not an article — a letter to the editor in the AVA?
Yates babbled about how Regalski is his own person, and how his news guy can do what he wants independent of him and so on. Here's Tom Yates sending his newsman to City Hall to look into a letter in your paper, the paper he says is a joke but everyone in Fort Bragg reads, including him, because it's the only place anything can be talked about. I think the real problem with Ms. Campbell is that it got back to her that I'd called her a name. I mean think about it: it takes her from August of last year until April of this year to write the letter?
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