COLUMN ONE : Federal Cops Plead Poverty : Low pay squeezes FBI, DEA and other U.S. law enforcement agents. Many earn far less than a local patrol officer.

The talk was about money at the downtown Los Angeles offices of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, but not the latest millions seized from cocaine cartels.

The hot topic was “the supermarket checker.”

She was a new recruit who said matter-of-factly that becoming a federal agent would mean a $4,000 pay cut from her current job.

“Where do you work?” the local DEA recruiter asked.

“At Vons,” replied the woman, who would earn $24,366 a year as a starting DEA agent, including overtime.

As at most federal law enforcement agencies, DEA personnel have been complaining for years about how their pay has fallen behind that of both local police and the private sector. But the news of the grocery clerk was something special.

The recruiter quickly told the special agent in charge of the office, John M. Zienter. He called national DEA Director John C. Lawn.

“It’s a sad scenario,” Zienter said--but good ammunition to use with Congress.

Indeed, a national commission now is studying the pay of 56,000 federal law enforcement employees and is scheduled to report back to Congress in January.

The commission staff already has surveyed 700 state and local law enforcement agencies and found that 92% offer starting pay higher than that at which the federal government hires most of its criminal investigators. As a consequence, the government is having a difficult time attracting and retaining agents, particularly in high-cost cities such as Los Angeles, Boston and New York.

“It’s a disgrace what we’re doing,” said Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), a former FBI agent himself and a member of the National Commission on Law Enforcement. “We’re going to suffer unless we do something about it.”

Federal agents recently received a partial victory when Congress passed a bill that will modify the way they are paid overtime. But it still will take an estimated $200 million a year to bring their salaries up to competitive levels at a time of huge budget deficits, Gramm-Rudman spending limits and competing claims of hardship from every level of the bureaucracy--claims sure to intensify in the wake of last week’s approval of raises for members of Congress, judges and top Administration officials.

Meanwhile, throughout the federal law enforcement system--33 agencies including the DEA, FBI, Secret Service and Customs Service--everyone has a favorite story to illustrate the “pay gap.”

In New York, they tell how bridge toll collectors earn more than some of the Russian-speaking FBI agents counted on to protect the nation from espionage. An FBI agent transferred from Oklahoma to San Francisco tells how a housing relocation expert laughed and said, “You can’t afford to live here,” and how he wound up buying a “trashed bank repo” 43 miles from the office. Another investigator declares: “I find myself calling home and having my parents sending me down money.”

Usually, the grumbling stays in-house. But sometimes it bubbles over into public view:

* In March, 1987, 100 uniformed Secret Service officers picketed in front of the White House gates they usually guard. The off-duty officers, who are in a different division of the Secret Service than the better-known plainclothes presidential bodyguards, complained that they earned only $29,600 after 20 years service and carried placards reading, “I’m a target every day, why can’t I get better pay?”

* Last year, the newsletter of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Assn. accused Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) of causing an internal investigation of four Los Angeles-based FBI agents who lobbied him for support of a bill to increase their overtime. The congressman, who complained the bill covered too many federal workers and would be a “budget buster,” said he merely called an FBI official “to learn if the agents were speaking for the bureau.”

* Extreme staff shortages in the New York FBI office--where there were 300 job vacancies--prompted Congress last year to approve a five-year “demonstration project” giving agents there 25% raises.

But perhaps nothing better illustrates the pay discrepancy than the Los Angeles Gang Task Force, in which a dozen DEA agents work alongside an equal number of narcotics detectives on loan from various state and local agencies that offer among the highest salaries in the nation. Some of the “feds” find themselves earning half as much as the local cops, who can make $60,000 or more with overtime.

“My neighbors think I make a million dollars a year and have a great time,” said one DEA agent. “They would not believe the truth.”

The talk about pay pervades the long work days--a mix of harmless ribbing, gallows humor and open bitterness.

On a recent Friday, task force members gathered in the officers’ lounge of the Hawthorne Police Station at 6:30 a.m., preparing for a raid nearby. While some put on bulletproof vests and others checked automatic weapons, Detective Mike McBride, who is on loan from the Inglewood Police Department, noticed a recruiting advertisement in a police magazine.

“Beverly Hills Police Department is offering $3,718,” he called out to several task force members seated nearby, indicating an eventual monthly salary for patrol officers with experience. “And they pay you 27% bonus,” extras for college degrees, physical agility skills and special assignments.

“Yeah,” replied a burly DEA agent, “but you have to be slapped by Zsa Zsa.”

In his second year with the DEA, the agent earns less than $30,000, including overtime. His take-home pay every two weeks: $729.

“Some of my bar tabs are bigger than that,” joked McBride, a 10-year veteran of the Inglewood force for whom the $60,000 figure is a reality.

Journeymen DEA agents, in contrast, earn about $41,000.

“What was in your mind when you signed up?” asked Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Larry Swanson, teasing one of the federal agents. “You didn’t know you would be eligible for food stamps?”

This day they will storm an apartment looking for a member of the Five Deuce Hoovers gang. In a pre-raid briefing, Hawthorne Detective Dennis Barberic says the suspect is known to carry an Uzi. “At this hour of the morning, we shouldn’t have any problems,” he adds, “but be ready for anything.”

It is another reminder that they have one of the most dangerous law enforcement assignments imaginable, identifying and arresting prominent gang drug traffickers. Task force members can work 80-hour weeks with their tedious stakeouts and tense undercover drug buys.

Like other local cops on the task force, for whom overtime can mean a small bonanza, Barberic was astounded to learn that overtime for most federal agents is capped at $6,565 a year. And while Barberic is free to pursue an off-duty business with a Vietnam vet buddy, selling T-shirts with military designs, DEA agents are prohibited from moonlighting.

“My first reaction was, ‘No way! You’re not working all these hours and not being paid for it.’ I couldn’t understand the mentality,” he said, shaking his head. “If you get killed, you get killed. But if you get killed and aren’t getting any money. . . .”

“You get a flag, though,” said the burly DEA agent, meaning the one atop a casket.

But many are leaving the DEA still on their feet.

The Los Angeles office, where about 100 agents are stationed, has had more than 20 resignations in the last three years, according to agency spokesman Ralph B. Lochridge. Particularly painful was the loss of a young agent who had finished first in his class at the DEA academy. He went to work for the Los Angeles Police Department, where starting pay is more than $13,000 higher.

The local DEA recruiter has calculated that of 355 police departments in California, 304 pay more than the federal agency can offer.

Of course, the federal work offers unique attractions. The recruiter reminds potential applicants, who must have college degrees, that they will never have to wear a uniform, will have the opportunity to work elsewhere in the country--or even overseas--and will immediately be assigned to far bigger cases than those handled by a street cop.

“You’ll get to go after the really bad guys,” she promises them.

Although DEA officials worry that the salary scales will bring them poorer quality recruits, they refuse to link low pay to another problem: corruption.

No official blames meager paychecks for the case of three former Los Angeles-based DEA agents under indictment for allegedly stealing drugs and laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars through Swiss bank accounts.

No matter what a cop is paid, they note, it would seem piddling when contrasted with the $50 million in cash seized by Los Angeles DEA agents last year.

“You’ve just got to find the people who can get through the human temptation,” said Los Angeles DEA chief Zienter. “Who can look at that and say, ‘That’s evidence, not money.’ ”

Federal employees blame “bureaucrat bashing,” by the Ronald Reagan Administration among others, for allowing the pay gap to develop over the past two decades.

“I left a Los Angeles County (welfare investigator’s) job in 1966 because the federal government pay and benefits were attractive,” said Boyle Heights native Sterling B. Epps, a retired Customs agent who serves as legislative chairman of the 7,000-member Federal Law Enforcement Officers Assn.

“Today, Los Angeles County pays $35,000 a year,” Epps said. “The federal government is going to pay that same individual $17,000. . . . Why would they go work for the federal government?”

Epps answers his own question by saying that the financial sacrifices were worth it in his case because he got to “achieve something at more than a state and local level”--serving as a senior investigator for the national Commission on Pornography.

Epps has been among those pushing for several years for the overtime bill that finally passed the House and Senate last Monday and was sent to the President for his signature.

The measure, which would take effect next September, would eliminate the $6,565 yearly cap, enabling federal agents to earn overtime equal to 25% of their salaries. The revised formula will mean several thousand dollars a year to veteran agents.

To pay for the additional overtime, Congress still will have to approve a special appropriation for the next fiscal year, perhaps as high as $80 million.

It will require an estimated $150 million to $215 million per year, however, to enact the broader remedies expected to be recommended by the National Commission on Law Enforcement.

The panel has studied pay and benefits in the wide range of federal law enforcement jobs, from the FBI to diplomatic security, game law enforcement and park police. The lowest starting pay, $12,531 before overtime, is paid to Bureau of Indian Affairs police, while Postal Inspectors start at $31,006.

The only places where local law enforcement pays less than the federal government are “in low-cost areas in the South, Southwest or rural areas in the Midwest,” according to the panel’s 57-page staff report.

Starting pay is a pressing issue because of the “graying” of many federal agencies. By 1995, 40% of the current FBI agents will be eligible to retire and will have to be replaced.

The staff report said a survey of 13 federal law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles found that 11 “reported major problems in the area of recruitment,” the worst of any area in the country.

The staff last month proposed a separate federal pay system for law enforcement personnel to take into account such factors as hazardous and unusual demands; upgrading entry-level salaries by about $2,000 across the board; providing extra pay in high-cost cities, and raising the maximum overtime to 40% of the employee’s base salary.

Even though crime fighting is a popular rallying point for politicians, the cost of the proposals makes them not an automatic sell.

“I think Congress has been hesitant because they view it as a slippery-slope issue,” said Epps, the retired Customs Service agent. “The next thing you know, someone else will come forward and say, ‘We’ve been mistreated, too.’ ”

In fact, Congressman Edwards has asked for a separate study of the cost of giving similar raises to “the support people” at federal law enforcement agencies. The raises for New York-based FBI agents “made the employees who can’t benefit pretty outraged,” he said.

Indeed, a federal report covering the Los Angeles area complained that government jobs suffered from an overall 37% pay gap here and told how one Orange County agency had an employee living in her car with her child.

Although agents have recounted their own harrowing experiences to lawmakers in letters and Capitol Hill testimony, there are limits as to how they can push their case for more money.

They are not allowed to have a formal union and any talk of “blue flu” walkouts, occasionally used by local police departments, would likely get them fired--as happened with air traffic controllers in 1981.

In addition, a select few have to resist the temptation to use their positions close to the nation’s top leaders to do some special lobbying.

“Nobody as far as I know would be so silly as to whisper in the ear of the President,” said Secret Service Agent Tom Doyle, vice president of the Law Enforcement Officers Assn.

“But certainly, the association has written letters to the President and Vice President.”

STARTING PAY: FEDERAL vs. LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT A college graduate will earn 56% more in starting pay with the Los Angeles Police Department than with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Moreover, the following pay scales for federal agents already include their overtime pay--while LAPD officers and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies can earn thousands of dollars in overtime in addition to the base sums listed.

High School Degree 4-Year College Degree Secret Service not eligible $19,672 DEA not eligible $24,366 FBI not eligible $32,826 LAPD $32,400 $38,000 LASD $31,944 $35,544