Haidl testimony raises reserve ‘if’

Forget the alleged affair with his friend’s law partner. Forget the alleged monthly visits to the Newport Beach home to pick up the envelope with the thousand bucks in cash inside. Forget the alleged routing of legal cases to a longtime friend so profits could be split among the inner circle.

Hey, nobody’s perfect.

But now, partway through Don Haidl’s testimony against former Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona in federal court, the most offensive stuff may be the accusations about the way they handled the department’s reserve deputy program.

What Haidl said doesn’t qualify as bombshell material. It’s not even close to being the most sensational. Some of Haidl’s testimony about the reserve program had a droning quality that may have left jurors daydreaming about what they’d do if the trial ever ends.

But if Haidl, an ex-assistant sheriff in charge of the reserves program, is to be believed, Carona’s thinking behind the program was an affront to Orange County residents.

An affair, we can live with. But when you turn a worthy program into a potential campaign donor list, then you’re playing us for saps.

First, let’s add the big “if.” If Haidl is telling the truth. If his testimony doesn’t crumble under cross-examination expected within the next couple of days.

Carona is on trial for corruption that the U.S. attorney’s office says began in the months before his election in 1998.

One of the underlying accusations was that Carona and Haidl deputized 86 friends, relatives, campaign contributors and others despite their not having background checks or the required training.

Given badges shortly after Carona took over in 1999, the 86 were the advance guard in a Carona-Haidl plan to build the existing reserve program to 1,000 people, according to trial testimony. “He thought it was a great idea,” Haidl testified last week, regarding Carona’s view of the plan. Envisioning that each of the 1,000 would conceivably donate the maximum $1,000 per person, the resulting $1 million would make Carona “unbeatable” down the road, Haidl testified.

What stinks about that is that the reserve program is, on its face, a laudable program. It gives ordinary citizens a chance to help out the department in a variety of tasks, assuming they take state-required training.

But instead of that single upside, Carona saw two, Haidl testified. Carona “also wanted to do some good” with the program, but saw it as a consistent fundraising arm.

Typically, Haidl testified, businessmen who wanted in the program were averse to attending time-consuming training classes that the state was mandating in 1999. So, as the state was on the verge of increasing the training required for some reserves, Carona -- not wanting to jeopardize a donor base -- created a new category for the professional group of reserves that would exempt them from the stepped-up training.

But it meant they could keep on contributing.

And for those recruits who basically paid for their badges, Haidl testified, a departmental “non-political form” was devised to create the impression that no politics were involved in their signing up.

The ranks of reserves eventually grew to several hundred, but it’s unclear how far the badges-for-money concept extended. Obviously, some reserves would have wanted to contribute to future Carona campaigns on their own.

But Orange County deserved a reserves program where a campaign contribution wasn’t a consideration. Where top law enforcement people weren’t working the angles when choosing reserves.

Aside from staining the purity of those who signed up for the right reasons, the testimony indicates the Carona team was willing to give law enforcement credentials to some who probably couldn’t have cared less about serving the public.

That’s how you think once bitten by the power-and-greed bug. Haidl didn’t testify to any shakedowns, but made it clear that Carona wanted the bulk of the future reserve deputies to come from the ranks of the more affluent business or professional ranks.

In a trial not short on salacious moments, the reserves program sounds pretty ordinary. It probably won’t weigh heavily on Carona’s guilt or innocence.

But if Haidl is telling the truth, doing something good for the public was fine by Carona.

As long as it also meant he was doing something good for himself.

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dana.parsons@latimes.com