The Litter King

Posted on October 5, 2002 in Neighborhood Scoundrels

We must have three or four of the yellow flyers stuffed in the handle of our garage door. So do most of our neighbors. Everyone’s grown sick of looking at them. They remain there until the winds blow them away, the rain reduces them to mush, or the property owners just toss them.

These are the calling cards of the man I crown “Litter King of Portola Hills”: Tony Kanoa, an Irvine-based realtor whose web page, like so many business pages, plasters him with testimonials and nothing about the man or his history. His webpages claim to be a community bulletin board but leave room only for commerce and carefully selected informational links. Tony Kanoa has made sure that his control of the Portola Hills media leaves no suggestion that political discussion or criticism of him is OK.

I doubt that Tony Kanoa would link to my page, this other voice from Portola Hills. I doubt that he will ever do a search on his own name because everything that is said about him that he feels worth letting the public know about Portola Hills and himself is contained on his pages. If he did find me, I suspect he’d try to bury my criticisms under a pile of industry testimonials, awards, and raw statistics showing that he’d sold more real estate on this little mountain top than any one else. He might mention the flags he distributes on the Fourth or the candy canes he sticks in the lawns of customers at Christmas. These arrive a day or so before the holiday, then disappear, to be reused next year. Or he’d point to one of the other realtors, like Flora Fanon, who also leave their faces where they can greet the soles of our boots on our doorsteps and garage doors.

But the fact remains that forests get chopped down so Tony Kanoa can print his weekly flyers and leave them where some people are silly enough to consider them nothing more than a clever marketing means. He lost me as a customer the first time I saw his face staring up at me from a discarded flyer. I shall not buy from him because I do not wish to support the Litter King of Portola Hills.