Defense of Blagojevich? Basic Brown

In his memoir “Basic Brown,” published in February, Willie L. Brown Jr. lauded U.S. Atty. Patrick J. Fitzgerald for his “admirably high standard,” saying, “he doesn’t bring indictments unless he knows he really has a case.”

But after Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested for allegedly trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s now vacant Senate seat, the former speaker of the California Assembly and former mayor of San Francisco abruptly changed his tune.

“In all my years of practicing law, I have never seen a U.S. attorney take to the podium to announce an arrest, then answer any and all questions while at the same time condemning the accused as if he’d already been convicted,” Brown snapped recently in his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And he didn’t stop there. “The feds had better come up with something more solid than just a couple of guys sitting around and talking,” he wrote. “Otherwise, this case could go up in smoke.”

The self-proclaimed Ayatollah of the Assembly did not respond to requests for comment, so it’s impossible to know for sure what set off his about-face on Fitzgerald.

But Willie-watchers, and they are legion, look at the Blagojevich defense as vintage Brown -- vigorously defending the art of politics and taunting federal agents who, during his own storied career, he wrote in his memoir, “were desperate, ruthless to get something on me.”

The dapper, Italian-suit-clad pol-about-town does not have much in common with the dowdy Midwesterner and his famously bad hair.

Sure, Brown knows his way around a federal investigation, having spent a decade or so of his tenure in Sacramento under the watchful eye of the FBI.

But Brown “could give a hoot about the governor of Illinois,” said James Richardson, author of “Willie Brown: A Biography.” “It’s always about Willie’s own legacy.”

Da Mayor, as he is affectionately known in these parts, “seems to have been on a personal crusade since leaving office to -- in his own view -- educate the public about how politics works, at least as it works according to Willie Brown,” Richardson continued.

And this, as per Brown’s two-column defense of the radioactive Blagojevich, is how it works:

“Keep in mind,” he wrote on Dec. 14, “politics is a crazy business. . . . If someone tells you, ‘I bring the gay community to the table with me, and they will be supportive of your reelection if you appoint me,’ and then you appoint him, is that a quid pro quo?”

So what if the public hates “that kind of this-for-that talk.” That’s how politics works, and that’s how it has always worked.

“The reality is, I’m not going to look among my enemies to find the best-qualified people,” Brown continued. “I’m going to look among my friends, my previous supporters -- or people I want to turn into supporters. That’s all part of the democratic system.”

The difference, though, between the much-investigated-but-never-indicted Brown and Blagojevich, who is fighting felony charges and an impeachment effort, has to do with both style and substance.

“Willie Brown was one of the smartest, if not the smartest person, I ever served with,” says Jim Brulte, former Senate Republican leader. “He could find a weakness in a person and exploit it. He had a wicked sense of humor that was disarming. And he had a cold streak that would even make a great white shark envious.”

In other words, Brown is not the kind of guy to be caught on a wiretap trolling for money and favors and spewing expletives. He instinctively knows where the line is, Richardson said, and “likes to think of himself as an artist, knowing just how far he can go.”

Brown made it unscathed through a 1980s sting operation in Sacramento, Richardson recounted, when the FBI was “wiring people and passing envelopes and they scooped up a whole lot of legislators.”

“Willie’s comment: ‘Do you think I’m so stupid that I’d walk across the street into a hotel room and pick up an envelope?’ ”

Which is why one man is a potential jailbird and the other is free to squawk.

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maria.laganga@latimes.com