Gangs Become First Target for New FBI Boss for L.A. Region

Shortly after learning he was going to be the new head of the FBI in Los Angeles, Lawrence G. Lawler made a phone call to talk about the growing drug problem posed by the city’s gangs.

Lawler, head of the FBI’s Minneapolis office for three years, had begun to see Los Angeles-based Crips and Bloods selling the cocaine derivative known as “crack” in the black community of St. Paul in Minnesota.

Convinced that the spread of the gangs qualified as a national problem, he called James Moody, assistant special agent in charge of all criminal investigations in Los Angeles, to find out what the FBI was doing.

“I called out: What are we doing? The answer was nothing,” Lawler disclosed in an interview last week. “I told . . . (Moody): ‘Well, when I get out there, we’re going to do something about it.’ ”

Street Gang Squad

In less than two months as agent in charge of the 475-agent Los Angeles office, Lawler has already made good on his first major change by adding a new street gang squad to the FBI’s 64-agent local narcotics force.

The FBI’s new unit, which will target major cocaine suppliers of the gangs operating in South-Central Los Angeles, is composed of agents pulled from other jobs in the Los Angeles area.

Lawler downplays the significance of his first key decision in his new job, saying it is just one of many steps needed for the FBI to play a strong role in drug enforcement.

But others were openly impressed by his determination in putting the 15-agent squad together and his swiftness in doing it.

“I see it as a very positive development,” said U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner. “I’m encouraged the FBI has decided to join in the battle against street gangs. Until recently, FBI headquarters was saying they didn’t have the manpower.”

While Bonner knew of Lawler’s plans, the creation of the new FBI squad came too late to include the unit in a joint federal and local gang task force announced by Bonner Aug. 2, which includes 8 U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and about 20 local police officers.

“I don’t know exactly where it fits in, although it certainly could,” Bonner said. “We’re obviously going to have to have some coordination.”

Less Dramatic Moves

Within the FBI’s Los Angeles office, which was riddled with morale problems during the five-year tenure of Lawler’s predecessor, Richard T. Bretzing, other less dramatic moves by Lawler have left some veteran agents equally impressed with their new boss.

Lawler, 48, who was born in Oakland, started his career in law enforcement as a patrolman with the Oakland Police Department. He came to Los Angeles with the reputation of being a “street agent’s” administrator, and has so far lived up to expectations.

“The bank robbery squads tend to get overlooked around here. The other day, just as an example, he sent out a memo praising them for some good busts they made,” one agent said. “That just hasn’t been done around here for a long time, and people notice it.”

Lawler says Bretzing told him that most of the morale problems left over from Bretzing’s reign would probably disappear with the arrival of a new agent in charge.

Bretzing, a bishop in the Mormon Church who resigned July 1 to become head of security for the Mormon Church, was accused of running a “Mormon Mafia” that discriminated against Latino agents in the local office.

Minimizing past and current problems with Latino agents in Los Angeles, Lawler said he believes the biggest morale problem in the FBI today is “pay disparity between us and private industry and other public agencies.”

FBI agents, many of them lawyers and accountants, now start at about $25,000 a year and typically earn about $50,000 by the time they retire, Lawler said. His own salary is $72,500, far below that of many local police officials.

Noting that Congress is considering a $13,000-a-year cost-of-living increase for FBI agents in New York, Lawler suggested that a similar increase might be in line for agents in Los Angeles.

“I’m interested in the agents. I’m interested in what they are doing. I enjoy what the agents are doing on the street, but I haven’t done anything specifically to improve morale. That wouldn’t be me,” Lawler said. “The worse thing for me would be to have the agents perceive me as a phony. They’d read that in a minute.”

Lawler has spent much of the summer visiting the FBI’s field offices in the seven-county area that makes up the U.S. Central District of California. His next step, he said, will be to start sitting in on squad conferences.

Lawler joined the FBI in 1965. He worked in El Paso, Seattle, Olympia, Wash., and at FBI headquarters in Washington before being named assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office in 1975.

During a four-year period there, Lawler headed the investigations into the kidnaping of Patty Hearst and the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. In 1979, he moved back to Washington in an administrative job, then was named head of the FBI’s Jacksonville, Fla., office, where he spent five years before his transfer to Minneapolis.

“This is without a doubt the most active office I’ve ever seen,” Lawler said.

“I have enough today to put 55 additional agents to work on. In white-collar crime alone, I could keep everybody busy for the next six months without taking any new cases.”