Jon Ralston on a glimpse again of the real Goodman

Friday, March 2, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

It's hardly worth paying any attention to Oscar Goodman anymore.

After years of pointing out his "all for me and one for me" attitude, his serial dissembling and his ever-spinning ethical compass, I've grown weary of His Honor as he has grown more irrelevant. Others have picked up the Oscar decoder to translate his rhetoric into reality, and he has done enough to expose himself as the unserious person he is.

Just this week, we see a story about him teaching a class at the community college on how to make a martini - and we learn he doesn't actually imbibe martinis, his supposedly signature drink, but simply pours gin into a martini glass, sans the vermouth. How emblematic of the man: An inauthentic drink for a master poseur.

His phoniness may be well established. But what many in the valley don't see often - and what motivates me to pay attention to him and remind everyone today - is Goodman's crass, thuggish side, certainly cultivated during his days immersed in the culture of La Cosa Nostra. We saw it three years ago when he reacted so nastily and threateningly to the revelations that he used his elected position to help his son ("I'm going to run the city the way I want to run the city," and "People better not sleep."). And others have privately seen the real Oscar Goodman, the fulminating, expletive-rich "Sopranos"-like character.

But this week, some readers in Florida were treated to the rarely seen Oscar Goodman as he offered outrageous comments to a Palm Beach Post columnist about the violence here in the wake of the NBA All-Star Game. The column by Greg Stoda, headlined, "All-Star weekend shooting ruins a life," was about one of three people shot outside a strip club here during All-Star Game weekend. Tommy Urbanski is now paralyzed and on a ventilator.

Enter Mayor Goodman, always so eager to do an interview and to add class and grace to a situation for all to see. Goodman, Stoda wrote, has called the Urbanski family, but the mayor declined to respond to the victim's relatives who said the city "cared more about making itself look good than anything else."

Fair enough. But then this:

"(Goodman) did, however, point out that the incident took place in an unincorporated area of Clark County over which he said he holds no jurisdiction."

This is almost too much to bear - and I'm sure it was for the Urbanski clan. In an unincorporated area over which His Honor holds no jurisdiction? He actually said that? He actually made that distinction?

The same man who has repeatedly boasted with all the requisite bravado, as he did last year to a reporter:

"I'm the mayor of everything. Everybody thinks that everything is the city of Las Vegas, and I'm certainly not going to do anything to dissuade them."

Or maybe he meant: "I am the mayor of everything and I will only dissuade people of that when it is not to my benefit."

So our Mayor Pontius Pilate washes his hands of the shooting at Minxx but takes credit for everything good that happened at the Thomas & Mack, which, it so happens, is where? In an unincorporated area of Clark County over which he said he holds no jurisdiction.

Goodman, who has never made an attempt to mitigate his gall, didn't seem to care when he told Stoda this fact that is irrelevant to the story, except in so far as he could mitigate the damage to his image.

And then this closing line in the column about Mayor Sensitive: "Goodman said his effort to contact the family falls under the heading of " 'No good deed goes unpunished.' "

Never forget it is always about Oscar. Not, in this case, about a tragic incident that destroyed a 42-year-old man's life. No, that shooting occurred - say it with me, folks - in an unincorporated area of Clark County over which he said he holds no jurisdiction.

I suppose this kind of behavior should no longer surprise anyone, coming as it does from the self-adulating mayor who actually has mused about running as a favorite son in the Democratic presidential caucus. Much of it is harmless, but too much of it sends a signal to people here - and around the country - about how little we have evolved from Goodman's salad days as a mob mouthpiece.

Not much left to say, except what his sheeplike sycophants will be chanting in a few weeks: Four more years!