Capizzi’s Ascension Long Foreseen

He’s never had another job. From the time he passed his bar exams in 1965, Michael R. Capizzi has been a prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s office. And for more than half of those 25 years, he has been the heir apparent to the top post.

When Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks announced last August that he would not seek reelection after 23 years in office, almost everyone expected that Capizzi, his chief assistant and hand-picked favorite, would eventually replace him.

“When I came to the office in the 1970s it was just assumed Mike Capizzi would be the next district attorney,” said one former deputy.

Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors made it official. After lavishing praise on the 50-year-old prosecutor, board members unaniimously selected him to replace Hicks, who was appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian to a Superior Court judgeship on Dec. 22.

Capizzi, who serves until the end of the year, will run for the 1991-1995 term in June against Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas Avdeef and Assistant Dist. Atty. Edgar A. Freeman. Avdeef has already filed legal action challenging the board’s right to appoint anyone before the election. But neither is considered a threat to Capizzi in June, especially with Capizzi running as the incumbent.

Most believe that Capizzi will be the county’s chief prosecutor throughout the 1990s. That brings a few groans from some deputies within the office, and from a few former prosecutors. They find Capizzi cold or sometimes insensitive in dealing with promotions.

But generally, Capizzi commands respect within the ranks, and many who say they were bothered at first by his cool demeanor have become his strongest supporters.

“He is an extremely aggressive prosecutor,” said one former colleague. “If you liked Cecil Hicks, you will love Mike Capizzi. If you didn’t like Cecil Hicks, you will hate Mike Capizzi.”

That former prosecutor and many others now within the office revere Capizzi for his brilliance as a lawyer and what one called his “impeccable honesty.”

“I used to cringe when he would come to me with a legal question,” one prosecutor said. “Because you knew that Capizzi had already done the research and already knew the answer. He was just trying to see if he had overlooked anything.”

One prosecutor exuberant about the Capizzi appointment is Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, a longtime friend Capizzi met through the state district attorneys’ association.

“I told Mike Capizzi 10 years ago that someday he would be district attorney,” Bradbury said. “He is an outstanding choice; Orange County should consider itself very lucky.”

But however bright he may be, no one is certain, even Capizzi himself, how he managed to stand out among the other deputies in Cecil Hicks’ eyes at such an early age.

“Perhaps it’s because Cecil and I think very much alike,” Capizzi said.

Neither denies his strong affection for the other. When Capizzi took the oath of office an hour after the board appointment, he asked Hicks if he would administer it. It was fitting, since Hicks was there at the beginning of Capizzi’s career too.

Capizzi got his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1964 and soon headed west. The cold winters helped him give up thoughts of a career in Detroit, he said.

The prosecutor who interviewed him for his first job was Cecil Hicks, then a chief deputy in the office.

At age 32, after just six years in the office, Capizzi was elevated by Hicks, then district attorney, to one of just five assistant positions--a rank above deputy. Capizzi was placed in charge of special operations. Many believe that it was in the late 1970s that Hicks and Capizzi cemented their relationship.

Capizzi became what Supervisor Roger R. Stanton has called Hicks’ “field general” in a series of investigations into political corruption in the county. More than 40 political figures, including three county supervisors and a congressman, were indicted, many of them winding up in jail.

According to one former prosecutor, “Cecil believed very much in these political cases, and he found that Capizzi deeply believed in them too.”

After those prosecutions, the former prosecutor theorized, Hicks found himself increasingly confiding in Capizzi as he spent less time sharing his views with other supervisors within the office.

Capizzi said he believes that their relationship is more broadly based than that. But he remembers those years as exciting times.

“There was much criticism because these people we were after had many friends within the county,” Capizzi said. “But we did it because it was the right thing to do.”