‘All the work you do is acting someone other than who you are.’

Augie de la Rosa has had a lifelong passion for acting. Acting like a gang member. Acting like a drug user. Acting like a run-of-the-mill restaurant patron who just happens to be eavesdropping on the mobster at the next table. For 26 years , De la Rosa, now an investigator for the San Diego County district attorney’s office in Vista, has gleefully thrown himself into situations that would terrify most people. But the veteran lawman says the most frightening role he ever played was that of a private businessman. Times staff writer Leslie Wolf interviewed De la Rosa, and Don Bartletti photographed him.

In 1962 I was attending college and a professor convinced me to take an exam for the state Department of Justice. I took the exam, figuring that I couldn’t possibly get the job because I’d just gotten out of the Army and I didn’t have a law enforcement background. I was hired.

Within days, I was working cases. Soon I was in Pismo Beach transacting a marijuana purchase and I met these fellows who were in a big, black Cadillac. My car was wired, but something happened with the monitor and my cover officer didn’t hear when these gentlemen politely but firmly instructed me to get into their car. What happened was that someone had seen my car during an earlier narcotics raid.

So, for the next four hours, I’m sitting between these two gentlemen in the back of this Cadillac. They kept me there all those hours waiting for someone to come and identify me as one of those raid officers. The only thing I had was a knife because, at that time, if you had a gun it was a dead giveaway that you were a police officer. All during this time I was trying to keep my cool, but I had my alternate plan. If need be, I was going to utilize that knife and then run like hell. I ultimately convinced them that they were totally wrong, that I wasn’t an undercover officer. But the deal still went sour.

In 1972 I opened a small Mexican restaurant in Ontario named Dirty Harry’s Cantina. It was very scary. It wasn’t supposed to be a success. It was supposed to be a place where I could cook up a couple of tacos and sell a couple of beers and, you know, just survive. It caught on, and from a one-man operation all of a sudden I had five employees. I was in a dire panic. I was rescued from retail business by a new organized-crime unit that had formed in the Los Angeles area.

There’s certainly a glamorous side to working organized crime. My first target was Frank Bompensiero, the Italian Mafia head in San Diego, and I spent many an evening in places where he and his associates used to dine and drink. A lot of people would go to this one restaurant to watch organized-crime figures, but a lot of times they were probably just watching some car salesman talking out of the side of his mouth. Sometimes there were more law enforcement officers there than anything else.

I’ve done a good share of undercover work. All the work you do is acting someone other than who you are. The key thing that you do in most undercover situations is to portray yourself as just the average type of person, the type of person that doesn’t necessarily stand out. The key is to be a good listener and a good actor.

I’m anticipating retiring next year. In my years of experience, I’ve learned that a new market has opened up. For whatever reason, there are a lot of people out there who don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth for their law enforcement. That’s not to say that the police aren’t doing their job, but there are a lot of situations that don’t fall under the criminal code. Yet people still feel victimized and they want help.

To fill that need, I’m going to be starting a business called De la Rosa Associates International. There are a lot of private investigators out in the world, but very few are qualified to do the work that’s asked of them . . . the type of client who requires personal attention, confidentiality and discretion. It could be an internal problem within a business or it could be a personal problem. My business will apply the Nordstrom’s philosophy: your customer, your client, requires the best service, both courteous and professional.