Scratching San Diego’s old wounds but not really opening them, while shedding light on some of San Diego’s newer abrasions, Dave Stutz sat a little nervously, answering Fred Lewis’ questions. District Attorney Paul Pfingst “makes prosecutorial decisions based on politics, not on justice and truth," says Stutz, citing “major unrest” in the D.A.’s ranks. “Almost three-quarters of the prosecutors have voted that the D.A. is unethical and dishonest. There’s a lot of turmoil ... It’s a pretty sad state of affairs.”

Well, couldn’t let that go unanswered. “Apparently false accusations come easy to Mr. Stutz,” says Pfingst. “His most recent ploy was to make false accusations against me in a lawsuit. That lawsuit was dismissed. Unfortunately, every large organization has someone like him.”

A deputy D.A. since 1983, still active on its identity fraud unit, and a career law enforcer dating back to his U.S. Treasury days in the 1960s, Dave Stutz is remembered in San Diego as an investigator of C. Arnholt Smith, John Alessio, Charlie Pratt and the San Diego City Council during the Yellow Cab scandal. Pete Wilson retained him throughout the 1970s to run his ethics committee. “He contacted me; I’d never met him before,” says Stutz recalling his first meeting with Wilson in 1971, the year he was first elected San Diego mayor. “I sent back some substantial (campaign) contributions and he never questioned it ... thousands of dollars. I (became) quite a fan of his. We belonged to different political parties, but San Diego needed someone who was honest and ethical, and he was.”

How times change. Or don’t. Stutz, in his “Heart of San Diego” interview debuting Feb. 24 on ITV, Channel 16 in most of San Diego County, claims the current state of ethics in San Diego “is poor” and claims “the outlook is not too good .... There is no end to greed, no end to a political system that needs to be scrutinized constantly.”

Stutz did not comment on the city’s new Ethics Commission nor on the likelihood of fresh leadership in the D.A.’s office. Pfingst faces Bonnie Dumanis, Mike Aguirre and Mark Pettine in the March 5 election.

Other new interview subjects debuting soon on the “Heart of San Diego,” sponsored by Roel Construction Co. and the Metropolitan, are publishing executive Dick Capen, Feb. 3, newscaster Carol LeBeau, Feb. 10, Dr. Richard Farson Feb. 17 and Downtown marketing guru Donna Alm on March 3. Each of the new programs is repeated twice before joining the annual rotation, so please check out the complete schedule on Page 29.

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Sonny Sturn died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack Jan. 9, according to his sister. Sturn, 65, recently returned to San Diego after about five years in Austin selling conference calling services online.

Sturn is best remembered as the marketing director of Horton Plaza, San Diego’s prototypical festival marketplace, during its construction and opening in the early and mid 1980s. He had become one of Downtown San Diego’s most visible cheerleaders for urban renewal and often an amusing and occasionally irritating sidekick to shopping center developer Ernest Hahn. As recently as the days before his death, Sturn complained that Westfield Shoppingtowns had homogenized San Diego’s shopping centers. Sturn bragged that in his heyday, he generated more newspaper publicity for his former employer, Fashion Valley, than all other San Diego County retail centers combined, then went on to exceed that record for Horton Plaza.

As a straight-commissioned advertising salesman for the San Diego Metropolitan in recent months, the nearly penniless Sturn’s last project was a full-page “cooperative” ad in the December edition welcoming NBC 7/39 to its new Downtown location. The ad was underwritten by Sentre Partners, SDSU College of Professional Studies, the Performing Arts League, Westin Hotels, Nordstrom, San Diego Repertory Theater and the San Diego Convention Center Corp., but Sturn marveled that he could not persuade CCDC, the Downtown Partnership or the EDC to participate at $300 a pop to welcome Downtown’s biggest corporate relocation in years. “How cheap can you get?” he mused. Sturn arrived in San Diego at age 15 with his family, attending Hoover High School, then San Diego State.

In addition to a sister in Solana Beach, Sturn is survived by a son, Brandon, of Encinitas and a daughter in Santa Cruz. No services were planned.

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This is the last call to San Diegans to finagle your way into the University of San Diego’s splendid new Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice to witness its first great international event, the Kyoto Laureates Symposium through Feb. 8, thanks to the Inamori Foundation.

And San Diego welcomes the five Kyoto Laureates, among the world’s greatest minds: physicist Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, director of the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology; physicist Izuo Hayashi, director emeritus, Optoelectronics Technology Research Laboratory; physical chemist Morton B. Panish, a member of the U.S. National Academies of Science and Engineering; John Maynard Smith, evolutionary biologist and professor emeritus, University of Sussex; and Gyorgy Ligeti, composer, professor, Hamburg University. Jodi Waterhouse at USD, (619) 260-4231, has more information.

Stephanie Kellems reiterates, referring to Alferov, Hayashi and Panish: The three scientists “almost simultaneously accomplished continuous operation of semiconductor lasers at room temperature. Hayashi and Panish worked together at the Bell Laboratories, while Alferov worked in Russia. Until then, laser was dubbed ‘killer rays’ because it could only be generated at a very high temperature and was considered only suitable for weapons. Their taming of the laser led to the current rapid progress in information technology, development of high luminous efficiency, compact size, light weight, and low cost semi-conductor lasers. Without their invention, we would not have CD players, LED, laser printers, fiber-optic cable, DVD, etc. It’s doubtful the Internet would have been nearly as successful if we had to be limited to copper wire communication. Even the new energy saving traffic lights in San Diego use LED (light emitting diodes) emitting laser beams.”

Our prediction: UCSD professors will outnumber USD staff at the Kyoto Laureates Symposium.

Also in town this month is Kazuo Inamori, founder of the Kyoto Prizes and founder of Kyocera, one of San Diego/Tijuana’s largest employers, and the founder of KDDI, Japan’s first telephone company to compete with the national monopoly, NTT. Inamori also was an early investor in the landmark Meridian condominiums in Downtown San Diego.