EDITORIAL ANTONIO'S DELIVERABLES MAYOR SAYS HE WILL COME BACK FROM ASIA WITH CASH DEALS IN HAND.

IT was the 10-day junket through the Far East in November 2002 that was the beginning of James Hahn's undoing as mayor of Los Angeles.

That trip was little more than a junket for Hahn's supporters. More importantly, it was when public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard's unorthodox relationship with the Mayor's Office became apparent.

One of the men on Hahn's trip -- Doug Dowie, L.A. chief of the P.R. firm -- is set to be sentenced in a few weeks for overcharging the city for services. At the same time, he was providing image service to Hahn for free.

And that wasn't the only sordid legacy of the Hahn trip. Former Airport Commissioner Leland Wong was also a member of Hahn's delegation, helping to negotiate deals with a Taiwanese firm -- the same firm on whose behalf he has been charged with accepting payoffs and giving out bribes.

Hahn's China trip didn't even get us his promised golden monkeys, let alone a panda.

With all the historical baggage of the past administration's Asia trade mission, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sets off Sunday on one of his own. He vows it will be immediately evident that his version isn't just another junketing junket. It's a working trip, he says, that will produce quantifiable results many times beyond the half-million dollars the trip is costing the taxpayers of Los Angeles.

``I'm going to come back with real, tangible deliverables,'' Villaraigosa said Tuesday.

Well, we'll see.

To be sure, Villaraigosa has avoided many of the pitfalls of his predecessor. And it's true his international celebrity gets him access into circles of power that few U.S. mayors could even imagine. There is some good reason to believe that Villaraigosa will do just what he says.

While the large contingent of business executives who are coming along are paying their own way, there are still city commissioners (as Wong was at the time of Hahn's trade mission) on the delegation who are getting their way paid for by the taxpayers.

It's also hard to see how City Councilmen Dennis Zine, Jack Weiss and Jose Huizar have any specific expertise to add to the delegation. The mayor says their invitations are acknowledgment that the council is an important part of the city's power structure. Maybe, but if their inclusion is for political reasons, they should pay their freight from their individual office-holder accounts.

And although the mayor gives tantalizing hints of what deals and announcements will come out of this trip, he won't give specific details -- benchmarks on which the success of the trip can be judged.

We can't help but be a little dubious about this trip, considering recent history. But for the city's sake, we do hope Villaraigosa is right, and we wait with anticipation to see some of these ``deliverables'' he's promising.