U.S. Atty.’s Office Gets ‘Cream of the Crop’

Russell Hayman was 26 years old and just starting out as a federal prosecutor two years ago when he was assigned to the case of a lifetime.

Two years out of Yale Law School, the newcomer to the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles was picked to be co-prosecutor in the spy trial of former FBI Agent Richard W. Miller.

“It would have been beyond anyone’s wildest dreams to even think about being part of a major espionage case in their first year as a prosecutor,” Hayman said. “But that’s the advantage of working in the U.S. attorney’s office.”

David Nimmer, 31, another Yale Law School graduate, was also in his first year as an assistant U.S. attorney when he was assigned the Nazi war crimes case of Andrija Artukovic, one of the biggest extradition cases in Los Angeles history.

Upward Mobility

“One day I was working on the case of a woman who had stolen three letters worth about 50 cents, then Artukovic,” Nimmer recalled. “There’s no place else where a young lawyer could possibly get that kind of trial experience.”

Two of 100 federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, Hayman and Nimmer are typical of the breed of bright young trial attorneys who traditionally have staffed the U.S. attorney’s office.

Increasingly, they are the product of the nation’s leading law schools and the most prestigious law firms, lured by the chance for major trial experience and the opportunity for public service.

U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner says the office has always attracted the best young legal talent available. But the present generation is probably the youngest and brightest ever, he said.

“The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles is quite rightly viewed as one of the most prestigious offices in the country,” Bonner said. “They are truly the cream of the crop of the best young lawyers in the nation.”

New York Office

The Southern District of New York, which covers Manhattan, has a larger U.S. attorney’s office, with 127 assistants, and Bonner conceded that New York has traditionally been viewed as the premier U.S. attorney’s office in the nation.

“My view is that we have reached the same level and should be viewed as one of the two flagship offices in the nation,” he said. “What we don’t have is the experience level of New York. In terms of raw talent, however, we have the strongest collection of U.S. attorneys anywhere in the country.”

Bonner’s chief assistant, Richard E. Drooyan, said that one of the most difficult aspects of his job is screening the 200 applicants who apply each year for the dozen or so openings that may be available in Los Angeles.

“We have a unique situation--100 to 112 or so prosecutors for a district of 13 million people,” Drooyan said. “There’s very stiff competition for the few available spaces.”

Divided into criminal and civil divisions, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles oversees about 3,000 criminal investigations a year and represents the government in an equal number of civil lawsuits.

98% Conviction Rate

The 70 criminal lawyers in the office prosecute 1,000 to 1,200 cases annually--from postal theft to espionage--with an overall conviction rate this year of 98% and a 90% win record in the 250 cases that actually went to trial.

On the civil side, a smaller unit of about 30 lawyers defends the United States in lawsuits filed against the government and files hundreds of lawsuits of its own against targets ranging from drug dealers to environmental polluters.

Over the decades, the U.S. attorney’s office has functioned as a sort of postgraduate finishing school for dozens of the leading trial lawyers and judges of Los Angeles. Seven of the 31 federal judges in Los Angeles are former federal prosecutors.

While some assistant U.S. attorneys make the job a career, most leave after three to five years for higher office or better-paying jobs with private law firms.

Regardless of later accomplishments, many former prosecutors look back at their days in the office as the highlight of their professional careers.

Stephen D. Miller, now one of the West Coast’s top defense attorneys in the area of white-collar crime, was an assistant prosecutor from 1963 to 1966 and recalls the time as “the happiest” of his life.

“In my opinion, it is the best experience a trial lawyer can have,” said Miller, whose clients now include General Dynamics, Sears and Atlantic Richfield. “Just about everybody who has ever worked in the office has the same feeling.”

U.S. District Judge Matt Byrne Jr., another former assistant who later became a U.S. attorney in the 1960s, said part of the appeal of the job is representing the U.S. government in big cases.

“The cases are very substantial and there is great responsibility early on,” Byrne said. “It’s probably the most exciting part of any lawyer’s career.”

While today’s assistant federal prosecutors are chosen on merit and are not even asked about their political affiliations, that was not always the case. Until the early 1950s, in Los Angeles and other cities, they were selected primarily on a political patronage system controlled by U.S. senators.

It was also largely a part-time job for many federal prosecutors, who were free to run private civil law practices while representing the government in criminal cases.

Despite those drawbacks, the Los Angeles office still attracted bright lawyers, many of them with previous trial experience as military lawyers. While Bonner rates his own staff as the best ever, there is plenty of argument.

Senior U.S. District Judge Robert J. Kelleher, now 73, was an assistant U.S. attorney from 1948 to 1951 and feels strongly that the federal prosecutors of his day were not only more experienced, but also more competent than today’s assistants.

Kelleher, a Republican, said he was hired during a Democratic era only because most of the 27-member U.S. attorney’s office had quit three weeks before the 1948 presidential election, all of them assuming that Thomas E. Dewey was going to beat Harry S. Truman.

“It was a total political pork barrel in those days, so they all figured they were going to lose their jobs. The result was they didn’t have enough bodies around to run the office, so they hired me,” Kelleher said.

Kelleher takes a dim view of the emphasis today on hiring relatively inexperienced lawyers, even if they are graduates of such major law schools as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and UC Berkeley.

“They may be the smartest kids who ever came down the pike, but they aren’t winners,” said Kelleher, himself a Harvard Law School graduate. “I respect the fact that they are top students, but they are surprisingly wet behind the ears in how the world works and lacking in common sense.”

Kelleher was particularly upset with the job done by the prosecutors in the John Z. DeLorean cocaine trial, which ended in an acquittal in 1984, and was so angered by Bonner’s defense of his assistants in that case that he summoned Bonner to his chambers.

“I told him if he really believed what he was saying he didn’t have the brains to be U.S. attorney,” Kelleher recalled.

Other federal judges who once were assistant prosecutors tend to share the view that there was a higher level of experience in the U.S. attorney’s office in their day.

“Generally speaking, the lawyers in the old days had a more rounded practice so they had a more full experience than they do today,” said Senior U.S. District Judge Francis C. Whelan, 79, who prosecuted bootleggers in the 1930s and served as U.S. attorney three decades later.

Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real, another former U.S. attorney who recalls his own days as an assistant prosecutor in the early 1950s as “the best days of my law career,” also takes the position that prosecutors were generally more “seasoned” in the past.

“We never had too many Harvard and Yale people,” said Real, a graduate of Loyola School of Law. “Credentials don’t make trial lawyers.”

Bonner shrugs off the criticism from former prosecutors, saying that they tend to take a nostalgic view of the past.

“I was an assistant myself in the early 1970s and even I talk about the good old days,” he said. “There is a nostalgia and I understand it. All I can say is that when you’re convicting 98% of all the defendants you indict, it’s as high as this office has ever had.”

About half of the assistant U.S. attorneys in Los Angeles were raised in California and are most frequently products of such law schools as UCLA, Stanford and UC, Bonner said. Most of the rest come from the major law schools of the Midwest and the East.

One major trend in recent years is the hiring of new prosecutors from such major Los Angeles law firms as Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and O’Melveny & Myers, as well as some of the leading law firms of New York and Washington.

“By and large, if you’ve been able to alight at a major law firm, you have a lot going for you,” Bonner said. “They take the cream of the crop from the law schools and we take the cream of the crop from them. In big firms, it’s an intense atmosphere. They’re used to hard work.”

Bonner said he thinks it is important to have a “nucleus of highly experienced assistants,” but places a higher emphasis on academic background, potential for trial work and willingness to put in long hours on the job.

“I don’t think it’s desirable to have a majority of career prosecutors in the office,” Bonner said. “After awhile, they can lose the drive and turn into 9-to-5ers. Most of our assistants stay about five years, then move on. I think that’s probably the ideal situation.”

While the turnover rate is high among federal prosecutors, the two men who actually run the criminal and civil divisions of the U.S. attorney’s office have a combined tenure of almost half a century and are virtually an institution within an institution.

Robert L. Brosio, 50, joined the office 23 years ago and and has been chief of the criminal division for the last two decades. His brother, Fred, 58, has put in 25 years on the job, running the civil division since 1965.

“You can always say you have the best client in the world,” said Robert Brosio, explaining his lengthy career as a prosecutor. “The only thing you have to think about on this job--it’s sort of a luxury for a lawyer--is what is the right and just thing to do.”

Fred Brosio, who, like his brother, is a Stanford Law School graduate, said his original career plans were like those of most of the attorneys he has hired over the years.

“When I first came, my intention was to stay a few years and then go into private practice,” he said. “You might say I got hooked on government service.”

While criminal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office wind up with most of the glamorous trials, lawyers in the civil division perform a variety of other legal chores--such as taking depositions--that more closely resembles life in private practice.

About two-thirds of the time, the civil division’s lawyers are defending the United States against a variety of damage claims. In the rest of the cases, they take the offensive.

In the last fiscal year, the U.S. attorney’s office collected $33,840,379 for the government, most of it in drug forfeiture cases filed by civil division attorneys against major narcotics dealers.

Steve Peterson, 42, who came to the office 14 years ago after four years as a military lawyer, said he was drawn to the civil division because he had already “done a lot of prosecution and defense” in courts-martial cases.

“I thought the civil practice was a little more civilized,” said Peterson, whose major cases have included a $3.2-million drug forfeiture suit and a current defense fund misappropriations claim against General Dynamics Corp.

Peterson said the civil division spends most of its time defending the federal government against claims brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act. “That’s when the postal inspector runs over your toe,” he said.

“We won one suit recently over a grizzly bear attack in a national park,” he added. “We were once sued by a guy in a park who was hit by lightning. The theory was we should have posted a sign warning people about the lightning danger. That one was thrown out, too.”

Despite his own length of government service, Peterson, who originally planned to stay in the office for only three years, said he does not consider himself a career prosecutor and has begun to “wonder these days if I might not want to try something new.”

While many senior prosecutors talk about leaving the office for private practice, the major law firms in Los Angeles that now hire federal prosecutors for their litigation departments put an emphasis on youth--looking primarily for assistants with about three to five years of government experience.

The main reason is the morale problem within a law firm caused by bringing in new lawyers at the partner level over lawyers who have worked their way up through the ranks.

There was a time when the major law firms of Los Angeles had little interest in hiring any federal prosecutors, partly because the law firms preferred training litigators themselves and partly because of the potential personnel problems.

The law firms began changing their policies in the 1970s, however, as society became generally more litigious and the need for experienced trial lawyers increased. One obvious place to turn was the U.S. attorney’s office.

One of the first to break the mold and hire an assistant U.S. attorney directly at the partner level was Beverly Hills attorney Bruce Hochman, a former federal prosecutor in the 1950s who now heads one of the top tax law firms in California. In 1977, he hired Stephen V. Wilson, who was appointed to a federal judgeship last year.

“I could afford it because I have a relatively small firm, but I might not have done it if I had a larger firm and it was going to cause problems,” Hochman said. “Most of the firms are looking to the (U.S. attorney’s) office now. The shift was inevitable. The big firms woke up one day and realized they were hurting themselves unnecessarily.”

Richard B. Kendall, 33, is among the growing number of former federal prosecutors who have more recently been hired directly out of the office by the city’s major law firms.

Although he was first in his law class at USC and had been a law clerk for a year for U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Clifford Wallace of San Diego, Kendall, like many new prosecutors, got off to a rocky start in the U.S. attorney’s office in 1980 by losing his first two cases.

Within a few years, however, Kendall was handling the biggest cases in the office and winning them. He won the Justice Department’s award for top trial lawyer of the year in 1984, co-prosecuted Soviet spies Nikolai and Svetlana Ogorodnikov in 1985, then left the office to join the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Kendall, who is now representing the Philippine government in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against former Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos, also teaches at USC Law School and tells his students that the U.S. attorney’s office is the best training ground for any lawyer.

“When you start as a young lawyer and your client is justice--the concept of justice--there is no more perfect client to have as your first client,” Kendall said. “It’s one who makes you examine your ethics, your social values, all your basic beliefs.

But the time comes, Kendall said, when philosophy collides with the practical realities of earning a living. In his view, timing is critical.

“If you stay too long it becomes difficult to find jobs that are the same as those occupied by your contemporaries,” he said. “You have to be careful about pricing yourself out of the market.”