Wide Respect : The Sheriff: Deli King to Top Lawman

This is a lawman’s office? Two rocking horses with rag doll riders rest on the carpet. The desk and cabinet are cluttered with stuffed animals, toy trucks, airplanes, a helicopter, a space shuttle, a baby’s running shoe and a decanter of jelly beans.

A fuzzy koala clings to the pen and pencil set, which is next to the “I GRANDPA” coffee mug.

You know right off you’re not on the set of “Miami Vice.”

This is the office of Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, 62, commander of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, administrator of the biggest municipal jail system in the Free World and one of the most anomalous figures in law enforcement anywhere.

Switch of Careers

Chunky, double-chinned and bald, Block is a Jewish former delicatessen operator from Chicago who quit chopping liver at age 32 and switched careers after a Los Angeles patrolman was nice to him during a routine traffic stop.

This is a sheriff who first made his mark as an undercover vice officer--not by going after narcotics dealers, but by wearing actor Ray Milland’s toupee to fake out prostitutes, some of whom had him pegged as “Sergeant Baldy.” Perhaps the biggest bust of his career came when he arrested comedian Lenny Bruce for saying nasty things on stage at a West Hollywood nightclub.

And now here he is, an important man in a big job, not too busy to schmooze with fifth-graders.

Terrence Ware and Jose Tamayo, students from Parmelee Elementary School in Southeast Los Angeles, have written to Block, saying they plan to become deputies when they grow up. He has invited them downtown, to his homey, second-floor office in the Hall of Justice.

“You know, you look different than your picture,” Jose remarks.

“Do I look better or worse?” the sheriff asks.

“Worse.”

Block smiles. “Well, that’s the way it goes sometimes.”

“How come I never seen you on TV?” Jose persists. “You should make a commercial.”

Straight Man’s Role

Block plays straight man to an 11-year-old. “A shampoo commercial?”

“Nah,” Jose says, focusing on the shine emanating from Block’s pate. No one in the room laughs harder than the sheriff, a response that seems a genuine reflection of Block’s humility.

In a position where ego routinely is as glaring as the flashing lights atop a squad car, Block has remained a study in self-effacement, a lawman as disarming as the toy store annex that his office resembles. This sheriff is no gunslinger. (In fact, his daughter, Barbara Stone, a patrol sergeant in Block’s department, outshoots him on the pistol range.)

“I’ll fight if I have to,” he said, “but I try to get things accomplished by getting along with people.”

By all accounts, he is also a rarity among elected officials. With Sherman Block, there is no private and public persona. He is the same on camera as he is off.

Tranquil might be a good term to describe his demeanor. Steady might be another.

“Dull,” is how Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates semi-jokingly but affectionately sums up Block.

“He’s not hot copy,” said Alma Fitch, a political consultant and Block’s former campaign manager.

Even so, although he has attracted less media attention than the outspoken and more controversial Gates, Block in his five years as sheriff has quietly emerged as a respected figure in American law enforcement, experts say.

Praised by His Peers

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone in our profession who is more highly regarded than Sherman Block,” said Jerald R. Vaughn, president of the 14,000-member International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, which also includes sheriffs.

“I think he is seen as a very progressive, innovative sheriff who has done a lot, in particular, to advance training procedures and radio communications capabilities,” Vaughn said. “I’ve never heard anyone have but the highest praise for him.”

At the same time, his subordinates and others credit Block’s attentive, even-handed management style with having rejuvenated his department’s morale, which many believe suffered under the confrontational, often abrupt administrative methods of Block’s predecessor, Peter J. Pitchess.

Sheriff’s officials, deputies and acquaintances describe Block as a compassionate and gentle person, strong-willed but slow to boil, a man who thinks before he speaks and does not hold grudges. He is also, they say, a skilled cop who ascended to the top of the 6,500-member Sheriff’s Department not by glad-handing, but by being a workaholic and getting along with virtually everyone he met.

Last year, he won reelection to his second four-year term as sheriff with nearly 85% of the vote, the widest margin of victory in any political race in Los Angeles County history.

About the only criticisms those around him offer is that he can be long-winded at times and cracks up at his own sometimes corny jokes.

Others contend that as he tries to be a friend to all, he sometimes spreads himself thin. Block packs his weekdays and weekends with pre-breakfast huddles, early morning staff meetings, luncheon speeches and society dinners while accepting invitations to all manner of chili cook-offs, charity fund-raisers and award presentations in between.

He and his wife own a vacation home a block from the beach in Ventura but haven’t spent a night there in nearly a year.

“My husband can’t sit still; he has shpilkes in his tochis (pins in his backside),” Alyce Block complains good-naturedly, using a Yiddish expression. “I spend more time with the dog.”

Perhaps surprisingly, if anyone is disparaging of Block, it is Pitchess, Los Angeles County’s sheriff for 23 years. Pitchess picked Block, his undersheriff of seven years, to replace him after he retired in mid-term in 1982. Their relationship began to crumble almost immediately afterward.

Feud Over a Car

Some say that the falling-out began with a dispute over the seemingly innocuous issue of a company car. The day he left office, Pitchess asked to be allowed to briefly continue using a sheriff’s sedan until he could buy his own, Block said. Concerned about the propriety of such an arrangement, the new sheriff told his predecessor no.

“He flamed out of the office at that point,” Block recalled recently. “Almost immediately, he began criticizing me to other people, telling them that I was an ingrate and that I was undoing what he had achieved. It bothered me, but after a while, I stopped concerning myself with it. I’ve given up on him.”

“I don’t think you’d print what I have to say about Mr. Block,” Pitchess said in declining to be interviewed for this article. “I promoted him and supported him and maybe I made a mistake. I have to live with that mistake. You misjudge people sometimes.”

Even Gates has tried to intervene.

“I think it’s silly because, as I told Pitchess, he devoted a good portion of his time to that Sheriff’s Department--a lot of it has his name on it--and this ought to be a time when he can go back to the department and bask in the glory of having been a great sheriff over a great period of time.”

Pitchess, however, will no longer set foot in the Hall of Justice, and neither man will acknowledge the other’s presence at public appearances.

According to acquaintances, Pitchess believes that Block has compromised the integrity of the Sheriff’s Department by “climbing in bed” with the news media while politically undermining the department by not being more assertive with the county Board of Supervisors.

Block flatly denies the assertions, but clearly his relationships with both the supervisors and the media are better than those when Pitchess was sheriff.

Each month, Block holds a “media open house,” in which members of the press can snack on pastry baked by County Jail inmates and question the sheriff on virtually anything, including the origin of the toys in his office, many of which are made by prisoners.

Block is so accessible the rest of the time that his monthly open houses are occasional flops. Sometimes, no reporters show.

“I think it’s important to develop positive dialogue with the media, for them to know that they can come to me so that I can at least respond to their stories on the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “But as far as ‘climbing in bed’ with them, it’s just not true.”

As for his dealings with the supervisors, Block points to major construction and expansion projects for which he has won county funding, particularly the consolidation of the Harbor Patrol into the Sheriff’s Department and a $58-million communications system that will put mobile computer terminals in each of the department’s squad cars.

“I guess what I’m saying is that the board has treated us fairly,” he said. “We haven’t gotten all we would have liked, but we’ve gotten our fair share.”

The department’s budget, which stood at $345 million when he inherited it in 1982, was $538 million this year.

Block’s own salary also has increased dramatically in that time, from $62,952 a year in 1982 to $110,000 today. Some county officials, recalling their often bitter dealings with Pitchess, say Block is worth every penny.

“Sherm’s outstanding, there’s no two ways about it,” said Harry L. Hufford, the county’s chief administrative officer from 1974 to 1985. “Pitchess did as much as anybody to modernize the department, but he antagonized the supervisors to an extent. Block has the strength of his convictions and doesn’t back down from the board. He treats their office with respect. He won’t embarrass them, and they get along.”

Rapport With Union

Block draws the same accolades from directors of the department’s largest union, the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. Pitchess refused to recognize the union, let alone negotiate with it.

“The difference between Peter Pitchess and Sherman Block is like night and day,” said Les Robbins, a 12-year department veteran and president of the union. “When Pitchess left, it was as if a nuclear cloud had been lifted from the department. People were afraid of Pitchess. He’d lop your head off and transfer you to (the jail in) Mira Loma.”

Other deputies tell stories of how Pitchess would quickly grow angry if they failed to jump to attention when he visited their stations unannounced. Block, they say, could not care less whether they slouch or stand.

“Block is very people-oriented,” Robbins said. “I think all he wants is for his people to be happy and to be the best sheriff he can.”

There’s so much trouble, so much sorrow

So little hope left for tomorrow

Where oh where in the world is love?

There’s so much hating, so much dying

So little after, so much crying

Where oh where in the world is love?

The lyrics are from an untitled song that Sherman Block wrote and paid to have recorded by a pianist and singer at a Hollywood sound studio back in the 1950s.

He wrote the song and a handful of others, not with any hope of making it big on the charts, he says, but simply to have fun, to fulfill some artistic need while toiling behind the deli counter.

Thirty years later, glancing at his office ceiling, he recites the mournful lines with ease, as if he had memorized them yesterday.

Always ‘Up to Speed’

Instant recall of the obscure as well as the important is one of Block’s greatest strengths as a manager, say those who have worked for him. With his ability to mentally catalogue arrest statistics, budget figures, suspects’ names and the like, he is immediately “up to speed” on virtually any subject concerning his department.

That, in itself, is no mean feat.

Block oversees 20 sheriff’s stations that cover 3,172 square miles of the greater Los Angeles area. Nearly 2.1 million people live in his jurisdiction, which includes the county’s unincorporated areas as well as 36 contract cities that pay for Sheriff’s Department protection.

With one exception, that of housing prisoners, Block’s is a law enforcement agency whose size and scope are little different than that of the better known Los Angeles Police Department. But the exception is a large one.

More than $182 million, one-third of the Sheriff’s Department’s annual budget, goes to running the county’s eight jails and to paying for court-related services. Jail overcrowding--the overall inmate population in the last five years has skyrocketed from 8,000 to nearly 23,000--has become Block’s biggest headache.

To alleviate the crush, he has advocated opening the criminal courts at night while utilizing early release programs for nonviolent prisoners--proposals that other law enforcement officials hail as innovative.

Not a Hollywood Hit

But such issues are not the stuff of television shows and major movies, which invariably feature Los Angeles’ police force, not the Sheriff’s Department. From “Dragnet” to “Lethal Weapon,” Hollywood would have the public believe that the LAPD is the only law enforcement agency in Los Angeles.

How many television viewers can remember “240-Robert”? The series, one of only two ever to depict the Sheriff’s Department, was canceled in 1981 after two seasons.

That kind of thing--the sheriff’s image as the Avis of local law enforcement--doesn’t matter to Block, he insists.

“I’m not looking for any ego satisfactions or aggrandizements,” he said. “I believe the department does a very good job and that I personally do a very good job. And that’s enough. You know, the flip side of exposure is that you can easily gain a broad identity by screwing up, too.”

Unlike the Police Department, which has been plagued in recent years by scandals including police spying and officer-involved burglaries, the Sheriff’s Department has remained relatively free from public embarrassment. The incident that came closest to disrupting that track record occurred last June, when a sheriff’s sharpshooter killed a civilian hostage after a 13 1/2-hour stand-off with an armed robber at the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry store in Beverly Hills.

Two days later, Block openly admitted that the sharpshooter had intentionally fired at the hostage. The marksman’s spotter had incorrectly identified the hostage as the gunman. With Block’s straightforward admission, the controversy eventually died.

“What he was telling the public was, ‘We made a tragic mistake, we’re human,’ ” said a ranking sheriff’s administrator. “When you speak from the heart like that, which I think he pretty much always does, I don’t think the public is going to stay mad at you very long.”

Block was born in Chicago on July 19, 1924, the second son of a milkman named Peter and his wife, Mattie.

Six days a week, Peter Block guided his horse-drawn dairy wagon through the streets to lug milk crates up the steps of one apartment building after another. Every Wednesday, he would pack Sherman and Melvyn into the El and they would head for the cheap seats at Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs.

At home, the Blocks ate well and young Sherman was not shy about camping out at the table. One of his uncles took to calling him “Tubby,” his brother remembers.

“He was always a fat little kid and I was always the skinny one,” said Melvyn Block, now 67. “My mother used to fight with him not to eat and she’d beg me, ‘Eat, eat, eat!’ ”

Even now, friends tease Sherman Block about his 5-foot, 10-inch, 210-pound form. Except for mowing the lawn of his well-appointed tract home in Woodland Hills, or participating in occasional golf tournaments, he does not exercise.

“If you do a profile on Sherman Block, you’d better turn the paper sideways,” joked Cmdr. William Booth, the LAPD’s chief spokesman.

Back in high school, though, Block was enough of an athlete to earn a varsity letter in soccer. He graduated in the top 10% of his class, and without the faintest idea of what he would do with his life.

With the onset of World War II, Block organized neighborhood air raid drills. On his 18th birthday, Block announced his intent to fight the Nazis. When his parents refused to sign his Army enlistment papers (the draft age was then 20), he forged their signatures and shipped out.

He trained as an Army telephone lineman, and entered combat in March, 1945, under Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

Nazis Not Told

Three months later, as Germany stood on the brink of surrender, Block stood in a tree in Czechoslovakia, stringing loudspeakers that would carry the expected announcement of capitulation. Someone forgot to tell the Nazis that the war was nearly over and a German artillery battery opened fire. Block was blown out of the tree but escaped with only a scratched face. It was his closest brush with death.

He went home to Chicago in 1946, and the Blocks--Pop, Sherm and Mel--bought a combination delicatessen-grocery store.

It was there that Block learned how to shave lox in perfect, pink slices while piling kosher meats on the thick sandwiches that drew a crowd at lunchtime. Business boomed, and the Blocks bought an even bigger deli.

One day, as Block was working the counter, an X-ray technician from the hospital around the corner came in for a corned beef on rye. Block was smitten by the woman, but was too shy to ask her for a date. Mel arranged it for him. Eight months later, Alyce Bemis and Sherman Block were married.

The Block empire continued to grow. The family bought another deli-market and opened a restaurant across the street.

It was an expansion badly timed, however. Jews were moving out of the neighborhood; the demand for blintzes and latkes began to plummet. Finally, in 1953, it was decided: The two brothers and their families would move to Los Angeles, where Mel had in-laws.

The day after he arrived in California, Block landed work as a counter man at what is now Canter’s delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue. The proprietors recognized talent when they saw it: Block could slice a turkey wafer-thin and reassemble the bird as if it had never stopped gobbling.

An Important Diversion

Then came The Stop.

Driving down Venice Boulevard on his way home to Culver City one night, Block spotted a police car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror. He was confident he had done nothing wrong. But, remembering stories in his youth about corruption and the Chicago police, “I figured they were gonna stop me and try to get a few bucks out of me,” he said.

A Los Angeles policeman politely advised the nervous deli man that his tail light was burned out, suggested that he get it fixed soon and bade him good evening.

Block was stunned. No demand for payola! When he arrived home in Culver City, he awakened his wife and told her excitedly what had happened.

“I think the incident rekindled an interest that I guess I always had in law enforcement,” Block says today.

But the next morning, when he sat down with his children to discuss becoming a police officer, “my son, Barry, became somewhat hysterical because he had seen cops killed on television shows.” Block shelved the idea, but never forgot it.

Three years later, he noticed an item in the newspaper that the Sheriff’s Department was accepting applications for deputies. When he raised the subject again with his family, Barry had no objections.

Block filed an application, took a written exam at Fairfax High School and was accepted.

It was 1956. The transition from corned beef to cop had been made.

The sheriff’s academy nearly killed Sherman Block. More specifically, the physical drills nearly killed him.

At 32, he was a victim of his own sandwiches, a couch potato amid fit cadets barely old enough to drink. Every day, he’d wheeze his way through an obstacle course called the “snake pit.” Each night, he’d wonder: Why the hell am I doing this?

“The academy was only six weeks back then, thank God,” Block says today. (It’s now 18 weeks.)

From that inauspicious beginning, he would go on to make sergeant less than four years later, in 1960, lieutenant in 1965 and captain in 1968, the same year he graduated with honors from California State University, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in police science. He would command most of the major divisions of the department before Pitchess elevated him to undersheriff in March, 1975.

“But making it through the academy, that is the personal accomplishment that I am most proud of,” Block said.

Partner’s Recollections

After graduating, he was sent to Lennox station in Inglewood. His first partner was Jerry Blum, a salty New Yorker who had joined the department five years before.

“Sherm’s first day on the job, I remember, we arrested a suspect in a rape and kidnaping,” said Blum, now retired. “Sherm turns to me and he says, ‘Boy, I’ve seen this kind of stuff on TV, but I didn’t think it would be like this!’

“Who knew that he would become sheriff someday?” Blum marveled. “I remember when he made sergeant I told him, ‘You come a long way from the deli.’ ”

Block spent four years assigned to Lennox, much of it as the lone deputy patrolling placid Rolling Hills Estates. He shot more than 50 rattlesnakes one summer, the only times he ever fired his service revolver in the line of duty.

But killing snakes is not what those in the department most remember about Block’s time on patrol. They still chuckle over how he issued traffic tickets to Rolling Hills housewives.

“These woman would (go through) the boulevard stop signs because the kids were late for school and they were in a hurry,” said Walter Howe, a retired division chief and one of Block’s contemporaries.

“Sherman would stop ‘em and then tell ‘em, ‘OK, you go drop the kids off and I’ll wait for you here,’ or he’d let them sign the ticket and then he’d fill it out later and drop it off in their mailbox. Everybody loved him.”

Willing to Work

He worked overtime and never asked to be paid for it, Howe remembers. Block also worked every Christmas and Easter for his Christian friends, and personally catered station picnics. It made an impression on his supervisors.

So did Block’s ingenuity when he was promoted to sergeant in 1960 and transferred to the vice squad.

Through his cousin, movie distributor Berle Adams, Block met famous Hollywood makeup artist George H. (Bud) Westmore and borrowed a salt-and-pepper toupee once worn by Ray Milland. Block hoped the disguise would allow him to more easily convince streetwalkers that he was something other than an undercover cop.

Westmore made two demands before letting the hairpiece go: that Block return it every two weeks for a shampoo and fluffing, and that the vice sergeant tell Westmore about every arrest in which the toupee played a role.

True to his word, rug in hand, Block visited Universal Studios twice a month. It became an event at the studio, with television actors like those from “The Munsters” gathering around to hear Block’s stories of the street while having their makeup done.

“I had to lie a lot because it usually wasn’t all that exciting,” Block said.

In 1962, Block arrested Lenny Bruce after one of the comedian’s performances at the Troubadour nightclub. The district attorney’s office deemed Bruce’s monologue obscene and Block booked him at the West Hollywood station.

An Ovation in Court

During recesses at his trial months later, Bruce and Block would walk the streets of Beverly Hills, discussing current events.

“Lenny was absolutely brilliant,” Block said. “His social commentaries could cut right to the bone of any issue. When I testified against him, I had to repeat what he had said on stage and when I got done, he and his supporters in the courtroom gave me a standing ovation. He said, ‘I’ve been arrested in a lot of cities, but you’re the first cop who ever got my routine right.’ ”

Other vice detectives would shun requests to make presentations before women’s clubs and civic booster groups. Not Sherman Block. He enjoyed talking about the hypes, hookers and crooked carnival games he investigated. Sometimes, he’d record his speeches and listen to them afterward, critiquing his delivery.

Friends say it was his willingness to represent the department before the public that first caught Pitchess’ eye and ultimately led to his promotion as Pitchess’ successor.

As he finished out Pitchess’ term in 1982 and sought election on his own, Block visited drama coach Nina Foch with an introduction from cousin Berle, the film distributor. Block wanted to improve his public-speaking abilities. Foch let him in on Frank Sinatra’s secret of captivating audiences: plenty of eye contact.

As it turned out, Block didn’t need any gimmicks. Eye contact or not, he won handily, with 64% of the vote.

If he remains healthy, Block hopes to seek a third term as sheriff in 1990. He says he’s been casually approached by political organizers to run for mayor of Los Angeles, a job that he insists does not interest him.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve reached the pinnacle,” he said. “This is the best job I could ever have or want.”

Meanwhile, Block plans to devote as much time as he can to his grandson, Matthew, a precocious 8-year-old who lives in Canoga Park with the sheriff’s daughter-in-law, Susan, and son, Barry, an intensive care nurse at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

Block thrills at buying the boy baseball cards and taking him to parades. Occasionally, when there is unfinished paper work, they head for the sheriff’s office in the Hall of Justice.

Matthew is never bored. There are plenty of toys.

THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

Jurisdiction: Nation’s largest sheriff’s department; administers largest municipal jail system in the Free World. Patrols 3,172 square miles, including all unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County and 36 contract cities ranging from Antelope Valley to the north, Rolling Hills to the south, San Dimas to the east and Westlake Village to the west.

Personnel: 6,567 deputies, 2,104 civilians, 1,057 reserve members, 1,200 volunteers, 350 Explorer Scouts.

Current Budget: $538 million.

Facilities: Headquarters in the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles with 20 substations and eight detention facilities scattered throughout Los Angeles County.

Organization of the Department:

Sheriff: Sherman Block

Undersheriff: Theodore H. Von Minden; Responsibilities include overseeing implementation of sheriff’s policies, reviewing reports of investigations against department personnel.

Assistant Sheriff: Robert A. Edmunds; Supervises all detective divisions and patrol units.

Assistant Sheriff: Jerry L. Harper; Oversees county jails, court services and sheriff’s technical units, including records bureau and radio room.