Looking Out for No. 2 : Gilbert Garcetti Forges a Presence in the District Attorney’s Office

Shortly before Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner departed on his first trip to Europe--a 50th birthday surprise from his wife--he chatted with his chief deputy, Gilbert I. Garcetti.

“I told him I’d call him in a real emergency,” Garcetti recalled recently, “but only if it was an emergency.”

During Reiner’s three-week absence, the nation’s largest district attorney’s office was besieged with criticism over its handling of the McMartin Pre-School molestation case, the aborted extradition of the alleged Domino’s Pizza killers and the investigation of Rep. Bobbi Fiedler and her top aide. That probe, which Reiner and Garcetti directed, led to the congresswoman’s indictment on a felony charge just before Reiner left town.

Throughout the Fiedler controversy, critics have pointedly and personally attacked Reiner’s judgment and decisions in pursuing the case. And Garcetti has fought back, forcefully defending his boss, his office and himself in interviews with reporters.

Not once, however, did the 17-year prosecutor feel compelled to call Reiner in Europe.

“I am the acting district attorney in (Reiner’s) absence and there hasn’t been an emergency or crisis situation that warrants . . . calling him,” Garcetti said. “It hasn’t even crossed my mind to call.”

That brimming sense of decisiveness--combined with healthy dollops of drive, ambition and public relations panache--characterize the confident style with which Garcetti, 44, pursues his job.

“He’s very bright, very ambitious, very capable and very photogenic,” concedes one longtime deputy district attorney who is not on the best of terms with the chief deputy. “This guy has got a lot of strengths.”

Yet, the deputy continued, Garcetti also “makes Nietzsche stand at attention when it comes to ‘the essence of life is the will to power.’ Gil Garcetti wants to exercise power.”

Personal Challenges

Critics charge that Garcetti’s preoccupation with power sometimes results in a heavy-handedness in personnel moves and an overweening attention to detail, thus slowing the important work of the office. A native of South Los Angeles and the son of immigrants, Garcetti fought off cancer and surmounted career hurdles during his rise to the No. 2 spot in the district attorney’s office. And he deals head-on with praise and pans alike.

“I’ll use my authority in any way, in any form that I can,” he declared during a 1 1/2-hour interview last week, “to properly and ethically accomplish our goals and aims.”

And at this point, observers say, Garcetti has managed to accumulate more public presence, and power, than any chief deputy in memory--even while working for a man who hardly shies from headlines.

So high is his visibility that some observers wonder whether Garcetti is using his position to pave the way for a future run for district attorney.

“The D.A.’s office might hold some interest down the line,” Garcetti admitted. “But I can’t see that coming to fruition because I can’t see myself begging for (campaign) money.”

Garcetti’s unique position, observers say, comes from a sense of mutual trust and dependence that has been forged between him and his boss.

Managerial Skills

“Garcetti is the best thing that has ever happened to Ira politically,” noted one longtime Reiner partisan. “Gil’s the manager that Ira never was. He runs the office. The nuts and bolts of being district attorney are taken care of.”

“It’s funny, they don’t want to offend each other,” ventured Reiner’s former administrative assistant, Neil Rincover. “Certainly, what Ira says goes. There’s no question in his (Garcetti’s) mind that Ira is the D.A. And Gil is very deferential. But conversely, from Ira’s point of view, Ira views Gil as so indispensable that he treats Gil as Gil treats him.”

Reiner himself says Garcetti has been doing “an excellent job” in the No. 2 spot.

“Gil’s responsibility is to see to it that my policies are in fact carried out,” Reiner said upon returning over the weekend. “His great strengths are that he is extremely well organized and an excellent administrator.”

Surprisingly, the two men are only recent allies, having first joined only a couple of weeks before Reiner decided to challenge then-Dist. Atty. Robert H. Philibosian in the 1984 election.

At that time, Garcetti, a head deputy in the central trials division, said he disagreed so much with Philibosian’s management style and political bent that he intended to quit the office if Philibosian won election to a full four-year term.

In fact, Garcetti revealed, he had even flirted with the idea of running for district attorney himself before deciding “it was not in my family’s interest.”

Initial Misgivings

Garcetti subsequently learned from Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp that then-City Atty. Reiner was considering the race, but he had misgivings at first about helping the prospective contender.

“It just seemed like (Reiner) was a creature of the media,” Garcetti said. “. . . (and I wondered do) we have such a political animal that decisions that he will make are going to be based on politics.”

However, Garcetti was assured by mutual friends that “the guy really does . . . what he feels is right” and so the prosecutor agreed to meet the pol.

Since their two-hour breakfast to discuss the race, the pair have been virtually inseparable, with Garcetti serving openly as an adviser during Reiner’s campaign and continuing to meet daily with Reiner for months afterward, preparing for the transition of power.

When Reiner asked Garcetti to take the $84,000-a-year chief deputy’s post, the answer was a qualified “yes.”

“I told him,” Garcetti said, “that I would be the one that would be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the office. That if you expect and wanted everything under the sun to come to you, then you really don’t need a chief deputy.

Reputation of Office

”. . . By your actions,” he said he told Reiner, “our office is judged. And career prosecutors think too much of the office . . . to stand still when a politician is perhaps either abusing or embarrassing the office. And with that in mind, you are the boss and you will always be the boss, but, I said, you are going to have a fairly active chief deputy.”

These days, Garcetti rises at 4 a.m., riding his bike for 90 minutes through the streets and hills near his Encino home before driving to work at the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

His imposing 18th-floor office, next door to Reiner’s, is adorned with oversize photos of his wife and children that Garcetti, a prize-winning amateur photographer, shot himself.

During a typical 11-hour workday, Garcetti will handle a plethora of policy decisions and administrative details, from the filing of murder cases to the supervision of the recent Fiedler investigation to the assignment of office and parking spaces for deputies.

“I’ve been accused of using my power and authority perhaps ruthlessly,” he acknowledged. “I have made some management decisions that affected a number of managers and other attorneys (but) I am not going to accept less than the very best efforts from all our managers and attorneys. If I feel that someone is burned out or is not contributing what someone else could in the same position, then I’m going to move that person.”

Garcetti spends about an hour a day with Reiner himself, discussing such high-profile matters as the McMartin and Night Stalker cases, pending state legislation and the county budget.

Harmonious Workers

The two work well together, Garcetti said, because they think alike, have similar senses of humor and are both able to laugh at themselves.

“That makes a tremendous difference, it just cuts the tension tremendously. He has very high expectations, which are fine because I do too. But he also realizes human error--and will accept it--once,” Garcetti said with a grin.

Reiner’s trust and confidence in Garcetti is exemplified by the fact that the district attorney hardly winced when four of the 10 advisers who accompanied him from the city attorney’s office quit in just over a year.

“I have a lot of confidence in Gil based on Gil always bringing matters of policy to me,” Reiner said. “There are no end runs.”

As for the chief deputy’s public presence, Reiner added: “I have always put people in a position where they are publicly identified with the issues. . . . There are greater rewards than getting a biweekly salary--one is the public identification with the work we’re doing.”

In the exercise of his formidable power over a staff of 712 lawyers, Garcetti has won both praise and criticism.

Supporters view him as a thoroughly dedicated professional who treats subordinates with fairness and affability.

Called Evenhanded

“I know how hard he works. I know the hours that he spends,” said Richard Hecht, the director of central operations and for whom Garcetti once worked. “He is extremely evenhanded in his approach. He listens. . . . There is no shooting from the hip.

“He understands the importance of the decisions that he makes because they have obvious consequences both internally and externally. . . . I’m impressed by the maturity he displays.”

Critics in the office--who appear to be in the minority--counter that Garcetti is an empire-builder who has sought such control that he has become bogged down in detail, disturbing the orderly flow of important business.

“One of the things that’s apparent . . . is that he’s probably taken on more than he can chew,” said Jeffrey Jonas, head deputy of the central trials division. “Sooner or later, you’re going to crack from the weight.”

One thing that friend and foe alike would agree on is the sartorial splendor of the chief deputy, who resembles the Arrow Shirt man as he walks the halls of the Criminal Courts Building in salmon shirts and stylish suits.

Recently, a departing deputy who did not see eye to eye with Garcetti was asked by reporters to evaluate his former boss. The prosecutor paused for a long period and then said: “Well, I like his ties.”

Up the Ladder

All would agree, too, that Garcetti has a driven personality--exemplified by the long climb from his birthplace at 41st and Figueroa streets to the top rungs of prosecutorial power in Los Angeles.

Garcetti, who says he is often mistaken as being of Italian ancestry, is the son of Mexican immigrants. His father, Salvadore, was a barber for decades; his mother, Juanita, worked in a meatpacking plant.

Before his father married, Garcetti recalls, he had a “flamboyant” streak and was once arrested for gambling by a Los Angeles policeman named Tom Bradley. Garcetti’s paternal grandfather was a judge in Mexico, where he had moved from Italy. He was hanged in 1911 during the Mexican Revolution.

A graduate of the 68th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles and Washington High School in Southwest L. A., Garcetti attended USC on a scholarship. And in 1967, he earned his law degree at UCLA. Along the way, he met and married Sukey, whose family owned the Los Angeles-based Louis Roth Clothes company. The couple now have two teen-age children and Garcetti emphasizes that whatever his overall career goals, “my family is the No. 1 thing in my life.”

Before beginning his legal career, Garcetti, a Democrat, worked for a year for the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign.

Considered Another Line

He also seriously considered joining the public defender’s office, although he emphasizes that his liberal convictions on social issues are contrasted by his hard-line attitudes toward crime. He was finally persuaded to become a prosecutor, he said, by a college classmate who argued that he could have a stronger effect on the criminal justice system within the D.A.’s office.

That friend, ironically, was then-Deputy Dist. Atty. Harland Braun, who now represents Fiedler. While the pair have their obvious disagreements over such questions as whether the Northridge Republican should be prosecuted, Braun still holds Garcetti in the highest regard.

“He never lies or misrepresents anything. I trust him. We have disagreements on how things should be proceeding, but I like him a lot.”

By the late 1970s Garcetti had risen to become director of the D.A.’s Special Investigations Division, where he faced formidable professional and personal challenges.

As division chief, Garcetti headed the controversial Operation Rollout, which investigated all police shootings. Sheriff’s officials, concerned that Garcetti was overeager to prosecute law officers, demanded that then-Dist. Atty. Van de Kamp replace him.

Van de Kamp and Garcetti met, and the chief deputy remembers responding: “Do what you want to do. . . . But don’t expect me to back off and be gun shy in bringing cases.” He stayed on the job.

During the same period, Garcetti learned he was suffering from lymphoma and that he had, at best, a 70% chance of survival after surgery and chemotherapy treatment.

Self Portrait

“I looked like a walking cadaver (during chemotherapy). . . . I didn’t realize how bad I looked. I mean I lost 90% of my hair and I think it was all of the black hair. The only hair that I had left was gray.”

Nonetheless, he continued to report to work daily during his successful recovery in late 1980 and 1981.

“I can’t say that it really changed my outlook on life at all,” Garcetti says now. “Because when I first married my wife, she had a great man as a grandfather. When I met him he was in his 80s and he was already in a nursing home and he told me, “ ‘If I can give you any advice it’s, ‘Don’t wait until tomorrow.’

“And I really did take that to heart in terms of living, in terms of doing what you want.”

Times staff writer Robert W. Stewart contributed to this story.