Slow Start, Fast Pace for New U.S. Atty. Baird : Appointment: She came late to the legal profession. Now she’ll head the biggest federal judicial district in the country.

In the fall of 1966, Lourdes Baird, a church-going Hancock Park mother of three, enrolled in night classes at Los Angeles City College, hoping to better herself but fearing that “my Blue Chip stamps would fall out of my purse and I’d be discovered for what I was.”

That calamity never occurred, as Baird marched through LACC, UCLA and UCLA Law School over the next decade and, at the age of 41, passed the California Bar examination on her first attempt.

She then became, in succession, a federal prosecutor, a private attorney and a highly lauded Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. For the last year, she has served in Juvenile Court, handling complicated, often wrenching custody cases.

Now, at 55, the silver-haired Baird is poised to take office as the new U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, based in Los Angeles, making her one of the most powerful federal prosecutors in the country.

Baird, who will be sworn in Friday by U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real, will be the chief federal prosecutor for seven Southern California counties, spanning an area from San Bernardino to San Luis Obispo and, with about 12 million residents, the most populous federal judicial district in the country.

She assumes her post at a time when the area is considered one of the major national centers of drug crime, money laundering, savings and loan scams and defense contracting fraud, four principal areas of concern to federal prosecutors.

Additionally, she will be faced with deciding whether charges should be lodged against Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, the subject of a federal grand jury investigation for some months stemming, in part, from his relationship with a local bank and questions about whether he was the beneficiary of insider knowledge on stocks.

Baird will become one of only five female U.S. attorneys in the country and one of the few who speaks Spanish fluently. She also is the first grandmother ever selected for the post.

Baird said she does not look at herself “as a woman U.S. attorney,” but rather as a U.S. attorney who happens to be a woman.

She also is one of few Democrats appointed to such a plum position in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Though Baird was rated “very well qualified” by a screening committee for Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), more than a few cynics said his decision to recommend her to President Bush for nomination was a canny political move in his gubernatorial campaign.

As a woman, a native of Ecuador and a Democrat, Baird stood out from the competition--three well-qualified Republican white males--to succeed Robert Bonner as U.S. attorney when he was elevated to a federal judgeship 13 months ago.

Baird said she was “flabbergasted” when first asked a year ago by a member of the screening committee to submit an application, even though she had passed conservative muster previously, having been appointed a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge in 1986 by Gov. George Deukmejian and then elevated by him to the Superior Court in 1988.

Wilson formally sent her name to Bush last Nov. 29. Even though no problems arose, it took almost six more months for Bush to formally nominate her and a month-and-a-half for Baird to clear the Senate. During the last 13 months, there have been two interim U.S. attorneys and Bonner, after serving a year as a federal judge, has been nominated to head the U.S. Drug Enforcement Adminstration.

Baird said she is looking forward to taking on what she called “the best legal job in Los Angeles,” a position where she hopes she can make an impact on crime. And she made it clear that she feels this is a task of considerable importance.

“Crime is rampant,” she declared, specifically citing drug-related crimes. “My experience on the bench has indicated to me the horror of drugs--the main problem in the United States.”

She said that about 80% of the custody cases that she has heard as a Juvenile Court judge also have involved narcotics problems.

“Drugs pervade the society,” she said. “I’m not a prophet of doom, but I can’t tell you how it’s going to be overcome.”

Baird believes in tough sentences for drug offenders. On the other hand, she said that even though a lot of her hopes about rehabilitating drug users have been dashed by what she had seen in recent years, Baird also maintains that “there clearly is a need for more treatment facilities.”

As U.S. attorney, she will be taking over an office of about 140 attorneys, more than twice as many as when she was an assistant U.S. attorney from 1977 to 1983. The office also handles a larger percentage of more complex cases now than it did then, according to veteran attorneys there.

“Lourdes will have a major job just determining the structure of the office with all the new attorneys we’re getting to handle drug and S&L; fraud cases,” said Leon Weidman, who heads the asset forfeiture unit of the U.S. attorney’s office and worked on a major movie tax shelter fraud case with her in the early 1980s.

Baird is widely praised in legal circles for her judgment, fairness, administrative skills, her sense of humor and her ability to relate to a wide variety of individuals and groups.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Paul Boland, who as the presiding Juvenile Court judge has been Baird’s boss for the last year, said she is regarded as “among the finest judges ever to hear dependency cases in Los Angeles County.”

The only negative comments about her were made by Lew Gurwitz of Cambridge, Mass., one of the lawyers who opposed Baird in what she described as perhaps the most interesting case she handled as a federal prosecutor--the 1979 trial of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, who faced multiple charges stemming from his escape from Lompoc federal prison.

Baird was lead prosecutor in a stormy trial in which Peltier and his supporters contended he was trying to escape because there was a government conspiracy to kill him.

She said it seemed like the monthlong trial lasted “an eternity.” Baird still vividly remembers the sound of drums being beaten outside the courthouse by Peltier’s supporters.

Peltier had been transferred to Lompoc earlier that year from the federal maximum-security prison in Marion, Ill., where he was serving two consecutive life sentences after a 1977 conviction for killing two FBI agents during a gun battle on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

Peltier’s lawyers said their client had learned from another inmate that “there was a conspiracy on the part of the government” to kill him. U.S. District Judge Lawrence T. Lydick prohibited an attempt to present a defense based on such a conspiracy.

Nonetheless, Peltier’s lawyers attempted in various ways to get the issue before the jury, precipitating repeated objections from Baird and co-counsel Robert Biniaz that were sustained by Lydick.

The jury convicted Peltier of escape and being a felon in possession of a gun but acquitted him on other charges.

Baird made it clear that she is proud of the work she did on that case, and her co-counsel Biniaz, now a vice president at MCA Entertainment, described her performance as “grace under pressure.”

But defense lawyer Gurwitz called Baird’s demeanor “mean-spirited” and said he was disturbed to hear she had been appointed U.S. attorney.

Baird said she has no second thoughts about any case she handled as a prosecutor, adding that she could not say that about every case she handled in private practice.

“I think the government wears the white hat,” she said.

That is the sort of stance one would expect of a prosecutor, as is her stand favoring the death penalty in certain cases. But some of Baird’s other views might surprise the White House.

She said she favors passage of the equal rights amendment, explaining, “I always have been interested in what have been described as women’s issues.”

Baird said she had been a Republican until the 1970s when she switched to the Democratic Party because of its advocacy of some of those issues, including expanded availability of child care.

Baird declined comment on abortion. She said it is conceivable, but not likely, that she might at some point have to enforce a federal law relating to abortion.

“My duty is to enforce federal law and it’s not up to me to judge what I like and don’t like,” she said.

Los Angeles lawyer Molly Munger, who became Baird’s friend shortly after she graduated from law school, said Baird’s colleagues assumed early on that she would become a judge or attain some other significant public position. “She was perfect for some higher office,” Munger said in a recent interview.

During an interview at a downtown Mexican restaurant, Baird put down her fork and laughed vigorously when told about these expectations. She said that, given her late start in college, she did not expect to grab the brass ring.

“I was a homemaker; I was doing Toll House cookies,” said Baird, recalling her decision to resume her formal education after an 11-year hiatus once the youngest of her children was enrolled in school.

Born in Quito, Ecuador, she quickly reminded a reporter that she had had “a rather Spanish colonial upbringing,” being the youngest of seven children of a devoutly Catholic woman. When she was a year old, her family moved to Los Angeles in 1936 because of her father’s career. They settled on Van Ness Avenue in the shadow of St. Brendan’s Catholic Church.

She spent her youth in Catholic schools and graduated from Immaculate Heart High School. Baird said those experiences served her well in several respects.

“There’s something in retrospect that was great about going to an all-girls high school,” she said. The school was run by a highly independent order of nuns, who later clashed with the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

“Those nuns were so independent, even in the 1950s.”

Having their own sports teams gave students at Immaculate Heart physical skills as well as insights into what then was the male-dominated sports world, said Baird, who is an avid jogger, hiker and cross-country skier.

After leaving Immaculate Heart, Baird briefly attended secretarial school. Within a couple of years, she was married to William T. Baird, a businessman. The year John F. Kennedy was elected President, the Bairds had their first child, William Jr., who now works in television in Los Angeles.

Two other children--Maria, the self-described “full-time mom” of a 2-year-old in Berkeley, and John, a UC Santa Cruz student--came along within six years.

Attending LACC part time, it took Baird five years to get her associate in arts degree. But after that, her academic pace quickened. She transferred to UCLA, earned a BA in sociology in 1973, then moved on to law school.

She did well, particularly in a trial advocacy course where Boland was one of her professors. Baird was divorced in 1975. The following year, after graduating from law school, she was hired by then-U.S. Atty. William D. Keller as an assistant prosecutor.

Keller, now a federal judge in Los Angeles, had high praise for Baird, as did his successor, Andrea Ordin, who was the U.S. attorney from 1977 to 1980 and is now California’s chief assistant attorney general. Ordin, the first woman ever to serve as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, praised Baird’s work on complex white-collar crime cases, experience she is likely to utilize immediately in the new post.

Baird indicated some regret that her late parents, particularly her mother, would not be able to see her in her new job.

“I think my mother would be very surprised that I was about to be, as someone described me, ‘Top Cop.’ But I don’t think she would be disappointed.”