Montoya Case: How Many Other Rotten Apples Exist? : NEWS ANALYSIS

If Sen. Joseph Montoya is a rotten apple, as a jury of 12 ordinary citizens has decided, then the next question is: How many other rotten apples are there in the barrel of Capitol politicians?

Do the keepers of the barrel-- California’s voters--consider it so spoiled that they will want to throw out the whole bunch this election year? Will they try to douse the rotten odor with a major dose of political reform?

And to what extent is the Legislature capable of reforming itself?

The preliminary answers to these questions varied widely among politicians and academicians Saturday, ranging from those who believe the whole Sacramento barrel is rotten, to those who say it does no good to regulate politics. It’s human nature, they say; crooks will be crooks. Why should Sacramento be different?

The Montoya jury, described by one academic as “the equivalent of a political focus group,” sent a strong message to the Legislature Friday that public corruption will not be tolerated. But afterward, the federal jurors emphasized that this was not their goal; they had concentrated solely, narrowly, on the evidence against Montoya and wound up convicting the Whittier Democrat on seven counts of extortion, racketeering and money-laundering.

Nevertheless, several jurors reported being shocked upon learning during the two-month trial that legislators routinely raise huge amounts of money from special interest groups seeking legislative action. They heard evidence of lawmakers collecting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions and accepting honorariums of up to $10,000 for a single appearance before a lobby group.

“It shook me up,” said juror Rosemary Talamantez, a UC Davis librarian. “I was surprised that there was so much money going back and forth. I had never even thought about honorariums. We elect our officials and have faith that they represent us. And here was Sen. Montoya playing around with people’s money, playing around with people’s lives. I hope not all of them (legislators) are like this.”

Not all legislators are unethical. In fact, the consensus of Capitol politicos--lobbyists, observers and legislators themselves--seems to be that most are basically ethical, given the high-stakes, pricey political arena with the gray-area rules in which they play. Still, most lawmakers find their personal standards of integrity constantly put to the test by the need to raise campaign contributions and live on a $40,800 annual salary without supplementing their incomes with honorariums.

And not everyone around the Capitol believes that even most legislators are ethical. For example, one highly respected, veteran political insider who has held important posts in the Legislature, the executive branch and also among special interest groups recently commented, on the condition he remain anonymous: “In the ‘60s, it was like there was a barrel with a couple of rotten apples. Now, I feel like we’ve got a whole barrel of rotten apples and a few good ones in between.”

The judicial system is in the process of trying to determine just how many rotten apples there are. U.S. Atty. David F. Levi, working off of the same FBI sting operation that snared Montoya, also has been investigating five other elected officials and reportedly is widening his probe to other politicians who have not yet been publicly identified.

Most legislators now expect the U.S. attorney to push aggressively for more indictments, several made clear in interviews after Montoya’s conviction.

Mindful that voters are becoming increasingly cynical about their representatives--a recent Times poll found that a majority of voters think it is commonplace for lawmakers to take bribes--legislators for the past year have been debating various ethics proposals designed to improve their tarnished image.

One plan will go before California voters in June. It would ban honorariums. But it also would pave the way for a pay raise by creating an independent commission with authority to raise lawmakers’ salaries.

“I’ve always said that honoraria is thinly disguised bribery,” said Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia).

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) was among those lawmakers Saturday saying the Legislature should immediately ban all honorariums and not wait for voter approval of an ethics package tied to a potential pay increase.

“The hard thing is to get members (of the Legislature) to understand that they may not be doing what Montoya did, but that’s not the point,” Katz said. “The point is that what the public expects of us has changed, in the same way that 10 years ago we would never have considered banning smoking on airlines. What was acceptable behavior then is not today. The public no longer views honoraria as acceptable behavior.”

For the last year, some legislators also have advocated other sweeping ethical reforms, including limits on gifts and outside income and restrictions on lobbying once legislators leave office. Such proposals, however, have been bottled up in the Legislature.

State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, as part of his race for governor, is pushing a November ballot measure that would provide for public financing of campaigns and impose California’s first-ever limits on the number of years elected state officials could remain in office. He calls Sacramento a “swamp.”

But some experts question whether any of these “reforms” can clean up the political mess. “You can’t regulate politics,” said Larry L. Berg, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “What Montoya did already was against the law. If people are crooks, they’re crooks.”

Another academician, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior associate at the Center for Politics and Policy at Claremont Graduate School, said “one message is that the public is not going to tolerate the kind of behavior that the jury perceived.”

“This was a jury of peers--the public,” she said. “I looked at it as the equivalent of a political focus group. I think you could have taken a group of 12 people anywhere and they would have come to the same conclusion. They showed the skepticism that the public generally feels about legislators. When it was Montoya’s word against anybody else’s, it was anybody else they believed.”

For the most part, jurors came to the trial with little experience in the world of politics. The seven-woman, five-man jury included two mechanics, a utility crew foreman, a former accountant for the state, a secretary, a student and a postal worker. In fact, federal prosecutors and Montoya’s attorneys had sought to keep off the jury anyone who had personal knowledge of the legislative process.

Some members of the jury, which included two Latinas, one black and one Asian, said the prospect of convicting Montoya was emotionally traumatic, and at times gave them headaches or left them unable to sleep or eat.

Talamantez said she was proud to have served on the jury and now has a better sense of her duty as a citizen--and the duty of public officials to conduct their affairs honestly.

“We as citizens have a responsibility,” she said. “The legislators have a responsibility to us. I think it taught us a lesson: We should all read the papers and watch the news.”

Times staff writers Carl Ingram, Jerry Gillam and Ralph Frammolino contributed to this story.