Word from inside the Los Angeles Angels front office is that Los Angeleno Arte Moreno of Anaheim has all but wrapped up his high-stakes name game.

The Orange County city went to court claiming millions of dollars in damages and trying to reverse Moreno’s decision to change the team name from Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

“Moreno has the big boys,” said a source in the team’s front office.

In a de facto sense, the fight’s been over for some time. Since the change was announced last year, the Associated Press, newspapers and radio and TV stations, including locally based Fox Sports West, have referred to them as the Los Angeles Angels.

On the legal front, the win in Orange County Superior Court will go to Todd Theodora, a former captain of the surfing team at Cal State Long Beach, who represents the club. He hails from the Los Angeles law firm Stephan, Oringher, Richman, Theodora & Miller. The loss goes to the city’s Andrew Guilford, of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.

Theodora pitched the right tone in opening arguments when he noted that executives of the team’s former owners, the Walt Disney Co., had turned down a request from the city to put the words “Anaheim Angels,” into any contract. At that moment, you could practically see Superior Court Judge Paul Polos toss the case to mediation.

The Los Angeles Angels owe thanks to the wily execs at Disney, not to mention the Anaheim officials who signed off on the lease deal.

Ball fans guessed that Moreno was a savvy marketing man when one of his first acts upon buying the team in 2003 was lowering the price of beer at the stadium.

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Lydia Kennard, who returned last year as executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, has been elected to the board of trustees of USC.

Kennard, who has a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a law degree from Harvard University, has been off the city’s radar screen for the last couple of years during the time when the airport commissioner was Ted Stein.

At USC, she joins a 50-member board that includes Alan Casden, of Casden Properties, Ed Roski, of Majestic Realty Co., and Ron Tudor, of Tudor-Saliba Corp.

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For several years now, the Milken Institute has been trying to make inroads into the Middle East largely by getting Israelis and Palestinians into the same room to talk about economics and capitalism.

Now, economist Glenn Yago, Milken’s director of capital studies, has been appointed to the International Advisory Board of the Israel Securities Authority, the Israel equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who served as a special advisor to President Bush on faith-based initiatives, has been named a senior fellow at the Milken Institute.

*Staff reporter Kate Berry can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 228, or at

[email protected]

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