The D.A.’s Little-Known Crime-Fighters : Law enforcement: The 36 investigators track missing children, gather evidence for prosecutors and investigate political wrongdoing.

Oxnard narcotics detectives burst through the doorway of a clean, ranch-style house on South L Street recently, searching for drugs.

Close on their heels came five investigators from the Ventura County district attorney’s office searching for cash and documents that they hoped would show that the owners bought their house and two cars with profits from selling cocaine.

Wearing bulletproof vests, the two teams carried semiautomatic pistols, sledgehammers, a battering ram and the hook from a tow truck that stood ready to rip the steel security gate out of its jamb.

The door was unlocked and the shouts of “Police!” fell only on the ears of two children watching a videotape of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

But the searchers found cocaine, cash and triple-beam scales under a bed--enough for police to make arrests and for investigators to invoke the state law that allows authorities to seize property bought with drug profits.

The assets forfeiture unit is but one arm of the district attorney’s Bureau of Investigation, a police force that occupies the gray area between the street cop and the courtroom prosecutor.

District attorney’s investigators are sworn peace officers under California law, with the same authority as uniformed police to carry weapons, execute search warrants and make arrests.

The bureau’s 36 investigators help gather evidence to bring murder and sexual assault cases to trial. They investigate major fraud and political corruption cases, which police have little time for. And they chase the county’s welfare cheats and child-support neglecters.

Last year they gathered intelligence on gang members and racists, ran a sting operation on illegal hauling of toxic waste and looked into possible Brown Act violations by city governments.

In the past fiscal year, the bureau’s child abduction unit helped retrieve 138 children who were spirited away by parents violating court-ordered custody arrangements, and the bad-check unit filed 1,536 warrants for people who passed bad checks.

The fraud unit helped win the conviction of the Rev. Robert J. Brancato, an Ojai minister who bilked investors out of $1.4 million, and it helped win a civil judgment against the Big 5 Sporting Goods chain, which had been selling counterfeit running shoes.

The team that might be considered the most profitable is the six-member assets forfeiture unit that actually makes money for the county and municipal government by confiscating cash, houses, cars and other assets reaped from drug sales. From January through November of 1990, the unit seized $2.2 million in cash and property, delivering about $1.2 million to the county and municipal governments, Senior Investigator Steven Hendrick said.

“We’re not in the business of making a profit, we’re in the business of completing the job,” Hendrick said. The object of seizing drug dealers’ assets is to “put them out of business, and maybe put the hurts to them. Make them think about it,” he said.

Hendrick is a former Oxnard narcotics detective, hired as a district attorney’s investigator midway through a police career, as were most of his colleagues there.

“The one thing that people don’t realize is that district attorney investigators are all peace officers,” said Braden B. McKinley, chief investigator of the division and a 26-year police veteran.

Initially the district attorney’s office hired investigators primarily for major criminal cases, such as murders, McKinley said.

Now investigators look into everything from child abduction to political corruption.

“When I first came here it was the epitome of law enforcement in the county, and still is. It was the place everyone aspired to,” Senior Investigator Edward J. Vasquez said.

“I think the district attorney’s office has always had an allure because the district attorney’s office is where everything ends,” said Vasquez, dean of the office’s investigators with 26 years in the bureau.

“In the police department you’re all so overburdened you don’t have time to develop a case,” Vasquez said. “We take the case and fine-tune it and make sure we can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Vasquez and partner David R. Stone work together as the special investigations unit, preparing cases for review by Special Assistant Dist. Atty. Donald D. Coleman.

Some of their time is spent investigating shootings involving police officers, organized crimes and alleged violations of the Brown Act, such as the numerous closed meetings held last year by the Oxnard City Council.

But most of the time the unit conducts special investigations at the direction of Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury. Last spring it aided the grand jury investigation into allegations that billionaire developer David H. Murdoch had improper relationships with county officials and reneged on promises to the Lake Sherwood community.

And in 1988 it investigated allegations that state Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) improperly asked judges for lenient treatment for her daughter on 27 traffic violations.

Now it is investigating whether former state Employment Training Panel member Robert Munoz violated conflict of interest laws in August when he voted for a $2-million contract to train Ventura County farm workers.

“To a great degree, our workload is impacted by the district attorney himself,” Stone said. “He’s a very energetic man, he’s concerned with his constituents’ needs and when he sees something that needs to get looked into, it gets looked into.”

Meanwhile, investigators in the major crimes unit are preparing cases for trials next year, such as the case of Gregory Scott Smith, 23, of Canoga Park, who is accused of kidnaping and murdering an 8-year-old Northridge boy and setting the body afire near Simi Valley last March.

Senior Investigator Jose Pulido said the major crimes investigators solidify evidence that will help bring cases to conviction.

Pulido and the other felony investigators often help manage the case to the end, sitting in the courtroom alongside prosecutors at trial, handling witnesses, taking elaborate notes and cataloguing physical evidence.

“You’ll find that we’re pretty intimate with a case,” Pulido said. “We have to learn it forward and backward.”

As peace officers, the district attorney’s investigators have good relations with other law enforcement officers, a rapport that can help get evidence from crime labs on time and minimize snafus.

Investigators work with arresting officers “normally up to and through the preliminary hearing,” McKinley said. “If the sheriffs are working with informants, they’ll stay with the investigators through trial. . . . It’s rare, but some cases come in so complete that there isn’t anything further to be done.”

The district attorney’s 36 investigators have 10 counterparts in the public defender’s office, Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman said.

“Our investigators, they have a really tough job. They’re working the wrong side,” Clayman said. “Investigation is such an integral part of the case. Essentially when we get a case we know nothing about it.”

Public defender’s investigators often re-interview prosecution witnesses and scrutinize information gathered by the prosecution, looking for holes in the evidence, Clayman said.

“The investigators share in our sorrows and our joys,” he said. “They’ve met the clients, met the client’s witnesses, the families. Their problem is they have heavy loads and the district attorney’s more fortunate to have a large staff.”

Outside the courtroom, district attorney’s investigators cover another facet of the law--family law--by helping to enforce court-ordered custody and child-support arrangements.

These investigators have trailed children taken as far away as Florida and Yellowknife, Canada, by parents violating custody agreements, McKinley said.

“It’s kind of a heart-wrenching assignment, actually,” McKinley said. “Usually the child’s a product of a couple that loved each other deeply, and then the child becomes a weapon.”

The investigators handled 6,673 inquiries and recovered 138 children in fiscal 1989, Senior Investigator Joseph Kershaw said. They are working with Interpol to retrieve a 16-year-old boy from France, where his father took him eight years ago.

“Essentially we just try and go out and find stolen kids and get them back to their rightful parents,” Kershaw said.

The investigators also keep track of up to 1,000 cases of parents who chronically fail to pay child support, Investigator Joseph Parrino said.

In December, Parrino and his partner, Gregory Askay, arrested a father who failed to make $31,000 in child-support payments over six years. “The kid just turned 18 in August,” Parrino said, shaking his head. The father “has never made a payment,” he said.

Parrino and Askay spent one day recently tracking child-support scofflaws around Santa Paula and learned that one father had returned home to live with his wife, who was still collecting welfare.

The woman stood in the apartment complex courtyard and railed at them, “You guys shouldn’t be looking in my windows, you got no business doing that!”

Parrino calmly told her that they had a warrant for her husband’s arrest, and left her his phone number in case the man returned.

Several hours later, the investigators returned on a tip from a neighbor who saw the husband come home. Along with Santa Paula police, they caught the man climbing out his back window.

As one would expect, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s Bureau of Investigation is far larger than Ventura County’s, said Timothy Coomes, supervising investigator of the Los Angeles bureau.

The Los Angeles County bureau employs 207 investigators to cover the same types of crimes as Ventura County’s, plus special units for gang-related crimes, crimes among people of Asian descent and nursing home abuses, Coomes said.

“Some of our investigators have left and went to Ventura, and they really like it up there,” he said.

One such transplant is Ventura County major fraud investigator Thomas Kitchens, who has worked here for five years after earlier stints in the Los Angeles and Riverside county bureaus and two years as a public defender’s investigator in Santa Clara County.

“I think the D.A.’s office here is more concerned about victims’ rights and advancing justice for victims than advancing political careers,” Kitchens said.