JUNKET OR NOT, WILL THIS TRIP GET RESULTS?

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

A junket's a junket, no matter what you call it.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is calling the trip he's kicking off this weekend a trade mission. During the two-week tour through China, Japan and South Korea, he will be working hard for Los Angeles. With every ceremonial dinner, with every meeting with a head of state, with the visit to the Great Wall, the mayor and his entourage of 68 will be busy ``creating opportunities'' for you and for me and for the city's economy.

Smells like a junket to me.

Politicians junket all the time. And every single time they fly off to China or Cuba or Paris to learn about clothing manufacturing or cigar- making or smelly cheese, they insist it's all in the service of making their own government better. Really, all the glad-handing, the sightseeing, the fine dining, the brandy-sniftering and the schmoozing on the public's dime is a regular grind.

Last week, Villaraigosa came to the Daily News to sell us on his trip, and promised that this will be no fun tour. He will be busy making deals and sealing agreements for ``deliverables'' -- whatever those are.

``You're going to see a very, very packed schedule from the beginning of the morning to the end of the evening,'' Villaraigosa said. He suggested we compare his itinerary with that of the previous administration's Asia trip to see how much more jam-packed it is.

When I tried to follow the mayor's recommendation, though, he opted not to share. Maybe Mayor James Hahn's panda incident got them worried about giving too many hints about the deals they were hoping to make. (Background: Hahn's panda-getting ambitions were leaked early; the Chinese ended up saying no; Hahn lost face.)

But the actual details of Villaraigosa's trip to push tourism (which, by his own admission, is increasing each year) and encourage more trade (although those three countries already send a combined $120 billion in goods each year through the ports) are being treated as sensitively as national-security secrets.

``Clearly, it's theirs to release,'' City Councilman and trip delegate Jack Weiss told me tartly when I asked him if he had been banned from giving me just one little detail of the ``frenetic schedule'' the Mayor's Office had for him and the group.

Councilman Dennis Zine couldn't spill because he hadn't been told what the mayor's schedulers have in store from him. He just knows that wherever they take him, he intends to be a fierce advocate of the San Fernando Valley.

``But it's not like we have time to take a swim,'' Zine said. ``I've been told this is an intense trade mission where we're meeting with a lot of people in these three countries.''

The fact that Villaraigosa has been extremely coy about his $500,000 trip only invites the mind to wander. And mine does, back to November 2002.

That was when the Hahn administration was still young and bright and filled with hope as he took about 50 city officials, business people and staffers on a 10-day trip to the same trio of Asian countries. I was part of the press corps for the Beijing and Tokyo portion.

Then, too, the mayor's staff bristled at any suggestion that this might be a junket for the city commissioners, political supporters and three council members -- Alex Padilla, Eric Garcetti and Janice Hahn -- getting a free ride.

To be sure, a number of the mayor's staff members worked incredibly hard calling reporters back home at 6 a.m., arranging gift bags for the Japanese media, juggling the travel details for 50 people and keeping track of all the important cultural details so as not to offend some high-level official who might be premier one day.

But the rest of the troupe were just along for the ride. Unless you call schmoozing over shark fin soup atop the swanky Beijing Hotel or sipping wine and smoking cigars in the penthouse bar at Tokyo's even-swankier Imperial Hotel hard time. The only real work I saw them doing was standing behind Hahn or a pre-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger as the two shilled L.A.'s virtues as a tourism hot spot.

Then, too, it was difficult to pin tangible returns on the trip. L.A.'s port, airport and tourist trade are hot even without Arnold or Antonio pushing them.

Maybe Villaraigosa's junket really will provide a huge return on investment for me and the rest of the city. But I suspect it will do more for his career than for mine.