Now he has crime on his radar

After his first job, which involved routinely breaking the sound barrier in an F-14, and once tangling with a Soviet MIG off the coast of Vietnam, Tom O’Brien was looking for a new challenge.

And somehow, working as a stockbroker just wasn’t cutting it.

So O’Brien -- already a law school graduate -- landed a job as a prosecutor, embarking on a path that eventually led to his appointment last year as the Justice Department’s top lawyer in Los Angeles.

For years, the job of U.S. attorney in Los Angeles has been overshadowed by other top law enforcement jobs in the region, such as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and county sheriff. Recently, however, the profile of the office -- the nation’s second-largest -- has been raised considerably because of prosecutions O’Brien was personally involved in or helped supervise.

Since he took the helm last fall, his prosecutors have indicted Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona on corruption charges; secured guilty pleas against a group of “homegrown” Muslim terrorists who planned to blow up military and religious sites across Southern California; and won a bankruptcy-fraud and tax-evasion case that was noteworthy not for the magnitude of the crime but because the defendant was Venice Beach civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, whose penchant for suing police made him a thorn in the side of local law enforcement.

Just last month, prosecutors won a big police corruption case that O’Brien had spearheaded before being tapped to lead the office. And -- in what some legal experts have deemed a stretch -- O’Brien’s office has initiated a grand jury investigation into the widely publicized suicide of a Missouri teenager who hanged herself after being duped and jilted by a made-up friend on the Internet social networking site MySpace.

O’Brien’s prosecutors believe they have jurisdiction in the case, arguing that the Beverly Hills-based MySpace was defrauded by the person who set up the false account to perpetrate the hoax.

Most of O’Brien’s priorities for the office -- terrorism, public corruption, gangs, child exploitation and white-collar crime -- trickle down from the Justice Department and mirror those of other U.S. attorney’s offices across the country.

But his own imprint, he hopes, will be shedding the “ivory tower” perception of the feds held by many local cops and prosecutors.

O’Brien’s detractors aren’t very vocal or easy to find. One former prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there has been some grumbling within the U.S. attorney ranks that he tends to play favorites and that his hard-charging style “isn’t for everyone.”

But he appears to enjoy widespread support in the office and to have the respect of lawyers in the defense bar.

Federal Public Defender Sean Kennedy, whose office defends many of the people O’Brien prosecutes, said the two had a handful of face-to-face meetings, when O’Brien was head of the U.S. attorney’s criminal division, to discuss the disposition of cases involving public defender clients.

Kennedy said he doesn’t recall ever persuading O’Brien to see things his way about a case, but he always felt O’Brien had approached the matters with an open mind.

“He listens to you and then he does what he thinks is right,” Kennedy said. “He is incredibly direct.”

Though O’Brien says being U.S. attorney is the best job he’s ever had, it may also wind up being the shortest stint on his resume. If a Democrat is elected president in November, O’Brien and other Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys may well be out of a job.

In the line of fire

Thomas P. O’Brien was born in Salem, Mass., on June 19, 1959. His family moved to Milwaukee when he was in third grade. He attended high school there, where he was an above-average -- but not stellar -- student and played running back on the football team.

During his sophomore year, he met with some recruiters from the U.S. Marines. They were decked out in their dress blues and inspired in him a sense of patriotism.

“That’s when I decided I wanted to fly jets,” he said.

After high school he attended Naval Academy Preparatory School in Rhode Island, where he played football and baseball, then moved on to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where he was captain of the offshore sailing team.

It was at the Naval Academy that he learned he would have to scale back his dream of flying jets. His eyesight, which had been 20-20 when he enrolled, had diminished.

He could no longer be a fighter pilot under Navy regulations, but he could serve as a radar intercept officer. For those familiar with the movie “Top Gun,” he would be Anthony Edwards’ Goose to Tom Cruise’s Maverick.

In fact, the Top Gun flight school made famous in the movie is where O’Brien ended up.

After a stint training fellow radar intercept officers at Top Gun in San Diego, he flew patrol missions overseas. In one sortie in 1984, flown from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off the coast of Vietnam, O’Brien and his pilot had a harrowing encounter with a MIG-23, the Soviet Union’s most menacing fighter plane.

O’Brien made a visual identification of the aircraft, and the pilot locked the F-14 Tomcat’s missiles onto the MIG.

“We were told to stand by, but we were not cleared to shoot,” O’Brien said. “It was just like the damn movie.”

The F-14 pilot peeled off when the MIG was about to enter Vietnam’s airspace, O’Brien said.

His friends from those days -- Animal, Grin, Claw and Guido among them -- recalled O’Brien as a charismatic prankster on the ground but an unflappable presence in the air.

“Tom was dead-on confident,” said Kim “Claw” Callahan, who flew F-14s with O’Brien in the Navy. “He could take the tension out of the situation. He was the kind of guy you wanted up there with you.”

Callahan, now a pilot for Delta Air Lines, cited another quality he thought would serve O’Brien well as U.S. attorney: “He was a leader,” Callahan said, recalling how then-Lt. Cmdr. O’Brien would frequently shoot the breeze with mechanics and other enlisted ground crew whom many officers ignored.

“The troops loved him,” Callahan said. “He motivated them.”

‘It was a calling for me’

After O’Brien left the Navy, he landed a job as a stockbroker in October 1987. Three weeks later, the stock market crashed on what became known as Black Friday.

O’Brien left the business world behind after less than two years.

He got his first job as a prosecutor in the summer of 1993 in the San Diego County district attorney’s office, where he worked on misdemeanor trials and made occasional appearances in felony cases.

A year later, he went to work for then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in Los Angeles, where he was eventually assigned to the hard-core gang division and prosecuted violent crimes, including 35 murder cases.

The adrenaline of taking on killers in court, O’Brien said, rivaled that of flying sorties from aircraft carriers.

“I loved it. It was real ‘Law and Order’ stuff,” he recalled during a recent interview in his 12th-floor office downtown. “It was holding people accountable; trying, in a sense, to right a wrong. It was a calling for me.”

His boss then was Dave Demerjian, now a top prosecutor in the office of L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley.

O’Brien was young and relatively inexperienced at the time and assigned to work juvenile crimes, Demerjian recalled in a recent interview. But he said the young prosecutor quickly earned the trust and respect of his colleagues and was given cases “more serious than his tenure warranted.”

“I’ve seen him in court. He’s able to respond to what’s happening and change directions. He’s quick on his feet,” Demerjian said. “And jurors love him. They want to believe what he says.”

Added Demerjian, “I figured if he stayed in this office, at some point I’d be working for him.”

O’Brien left the district attorney’s office in 2000 to work for then-U.S. Atty. Alejandro Mayorkas.

Four years later he was placed in charge of the office’s civil rights section, where he was the lead prosecutor on a police corruption case in which officers were accused of stealing squad cars from the LAPD academy and conducting home-invasion robberies staged to look like legitimate police raids. The case has resulted in more than a dozen guilty pleas and the convictions of two officers at trial.

In 2005, then-U.S. Atty. Debra Wong Yang promoted O’Brien to chief of the criminal division, essentially the office’s second in command.

After Yang left the office for private practice, O’Brien applied for her job. He was nominated by President Bush in July and confirmed by the Senate in October.

Some observers say he probably benefited from the U.S. attorneys firing scandal that was unfolding at the time, which would have made a veteran prosecutor like him more attractive than the sort of politically connected candidates who often are tapped.

But a spokeswoman for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer praised O’Brien’s work.

“Tom O’Brien has been a solid career prosecutor -- he is well-respected by his colleagues and has pledged to work hard to hold the U.S. attorney’s office to the highest standard,” Natalie Ravitz wrote in a recent e-mail to The Times.

A typical day for O’Brien begins at the gym, where he takes a 30-minute spin class followed by a weight-lifting regimen. He also walks Bear, the family Rottweiler.

He’s in the office early most days and tries to be one of the last to leave. For security reasons, he declined to talk about his family and asked that The Times not divulge where he lives.

Work these days involves significantly more meetings, travel and speaking engagements than when he was a line prosecutor -- or even a supervisor. But O’Brien said he strives to stay connected with the lawyers who actually try cases.

“Every single day I walk the office,” he said.

“Not just so they know I’m there but so they’ll have access to me. I want to give them what they need to do their jobs.”

After that, he says, he does what all good bosses should do:

“I get out of the way.”

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scott.glover@latimes.com