PROFILE JOHN GILLESPIE : Sheriff Unopposed, Even by Detractors

Ventura County Sheriff John Gillespie has a toy gallows on his desk labeled “Executive Problem Solver.” The black-humor touch provides a clue to both his personality and his crime-fighting philosophy.

One moment, Gillespie cracks a smile, remembering himself as a young Claremont policeman assigned as a bodyguard to Jane Fonda during her frequent visits to Tom Hayden at anti-war demonstrations in the Claremont area.

“I think I was there when love was born,” he said.

Then Gillespie’s face clouds over. He declares his fierce belief in the death penalty, booming, “For some crimes, the only thing fitting . . . is to dispose of that piece of garbage and do it as soon as you can.”

Gillespie, 50, is running unopposed for reelection June 5, entering what would be his seventh year as sheriff.

Gillespie’s colleagues say he is a mix of old values and new projects, a skilled administrator whose personal experience helped him to understand police work from the bottom up.

Even his detractors express respect for him.

John Hatcher, the president of the Ventura County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, has criticized Gillespie’s administration over allegations of rough treatment of prisoners by guards at the County Jail. But Hatcher said Gillespie’s office always answers those complaints quickly.

Hatcher said, “Maybe sometimes in a position of being at the top, you don’t always know what’s going on beneath you.”

Ventura County Public Defender Kenneth Clayman has criticized Gillespie’s plan to house drug users in a “tent city” as “a very expensive undertaking.” Clayman has heard a few complaints about deputies using excessive force during arrests but said the Sheriff’s Department never whitewashes such cases.

Clayman called Gillespie a “prototype” lawman--”He’s very, very tough but very progressive.”

“He’s clearly a 21st-Century law enforcement person,” said county Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg. “He’s a very strong believer in education. Nine or 10 of his top 12 people have master’s degrees. . . . He understands there are other things outside of law enforcement.”

But John Gillespie might never have become a cop if he hadn’t been so bored with school.

In 1957, he ignored a drama scholarship to the University of Wyoming and a baseball scholarship to Pepperdine University and instead joined the Marines.

After serving in coastal stations in California, he emerged three years later, married Carol, now his wife of 30 years, and began their family of four sons.

Then he went to work in Hollywood as a public relations man for Western Union.

One day, the company sent the 21-year-old Gillespie to collect a facsimile machine from a famous director who had not used it in three years.

“I had the personal honor of being thrown out of Sam Goldwyn Studios by Sam Goldwyn himself--I mean, physically thrown out--and he was a pretty old man at the time,” Gillespie said.

“He called me something like a whippersnapper and then something obscene, and he grabbed me by the back and picked me up and threw me out.”

Gillespie also worked at Capitol Records, shipping the latest singles out to disc jockeys with telegraphed press releases--his idea.

But that idea’s novelty wore thin after a while, and so did the entertainment business, Gillespie said.

“The caricature of the Hollywood agent with his feet on the table, ‘I’ll take care of ya, baby’ --it was a world of absolute phoniness, and I hated it.”

Looking for more worthwhile work, he passed the Civil Service exam and joined the Claremont Police Department as a desk officer and dispatcher.

The early years were grueling. Gillespie worked 48-hour weeks on the graveyard shift, while moonlighting at Sears loading trucks and taking day classes for his bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly Pomona.

The late ‘60s also was a chaotic time to be a policeman in Claremont, a city of seven colleges.

Gillespie recalls a night when the 35-man police force was sent out to maintain order during an anti-war protest by 5,000 students who marched 10 abreast down Claremont’s main street. “We had no training in these things and we were scared,” he said. “Hell, we were no older than the students at the time.”

He eventually was promoted to lieutenant, served briefly as acting chief and decided he liked being in charge.

After nine years, Gillespie moved to Ojai to take the vacant position of police chief and get his children out of Claremont, which he calls “the smoggiest place in the world.”

He stayed two years in Ojai, “a great little town, a little arty,” but “one of those strange places that doesn’t change.”

Then in 1974, Port Hueneme Police Chief Al Jalaty, a former sheriff’s lieutenant, decided to run for Ventura County sheriff.

“John had just come into Ojai,” Jalaty said. “So I wanted to help him, new man in town. I went up and talked to him a few times and I thought he was a pretty sharp person. And the longer I talked to him, the more I thought of him.”

Jalaty was elected and took Gillespie on as undersheriff. Together, they ran the Sheriff’s Department for a decade.

The earliest years of their administration were rough, the two say.

The County Jail, which had been bought secondhand from Texas and reassembled behind the San Buenaventura City Hall, was a constant source of complaints from officers and inmates--a cramped, overcrowded hole with poor ventilation.

And the previous administration of Sheriff Bill Hill had left the department with a $1-million deficit.

After a year of reorganization and cutting positions, the department was still “$600,000 in the hole,” Gillespie said.

The new jail took four years to plan and build, including numerous 5 a.m. meetings with the architects to iron out details.

But other changes came more quickly.

Jalaty and Gillespie began the Community-Oriented Police Enforcement program. COPE put sheriff’s deputies in field offices in every Ventura County town, enabling the department to book suspects all over the county instead of only at the County Jail.

“You’d spend half the day just running back and forth to the sheriff’s office,” Jalaty said. “We cut the time in half.”

Gillespie also reorganized the department brass in 1976, cutting the positions of four chief deputies and eight captains, replacing them with five commanders and saving the county $300,000 a year. In 1980, he merged the sheriff’s and marshal’s departments, saving another $800,000 a year.

While Gillespie ran the department’s day-to-day operations, keeping his hand in the streets on major drug busts and murder cases, Jalaty made the executive command decisions--and the public appearances required of the sheriff.

“Al Jalaty was Mr. Outside and I was Mr. Inside,” Gillespie said.

When Jalaty retired in 1984 because of poor health, the Board of Supervisors appointed Gillespie to replace him--on April 1, “which was a very appropriate day,” he said. Gillespie was subsequently elected sheriff in 1986.

“He’s a good administrator, but he’s got grease on his hands, you know what I mean?” Undersheriff Larry Carpenter said. “And in that sense he’s a good adviser. You can actually sit down with him with a problem. He’s innovative too, which surprises a lot of people.”

Gillespie hired a staff psychiatrist to help cut down on stress-related absences.

He started a canine unit in 1986 to track suspects and missing persons and to provide special event security and riot control.

He oversaw formation of the sheriff’s search-and-rescue team, complete with a mounted division for high-country searches, and trained helicopter crews staffed with doctors.

Then there is Rose Valley Work Camp, which Carpenter calls “The jewel in the crown.” The year-old military-style camp functions as a minimum-security jail and vocational training school and has drawn good reviews from its own inmates.

“He brought some sophistication to a small department and a lot of new and innovative ideas,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said. “It’s probably one of the few departments in the state that has expertise in major frauds and white-collar crime,” which Bradbury said other departments “kiss off” by “telling the victim that this is a civil matter.”

Gillespie applies the same tough approach to his own employees.

“If I have a philosophy, it is this: We are in the honesty business here, and if you violate any ethics or any honesty, I’ll not only fire you, but I’ll see that you’re prosecuted,” he said.

In his spare time, Gillespie works with charities and community groups, including United Way, the American Cancer Society and the Boy Scouts. He is a voracious moviegoer and trivia buff and takes long camping trips with his wife in their motor home, traveling from state beach to state beach.

“I’m dabbling in writing,” he said. “That’s what I intend to do when I retire, write the great American novel. I even have a working title. I’m thinking of calling it ‘The Funny Side of the Badge.’ ”