Lawler Calms Stormy FBI Seas : Law enforcement: Special agent in charge of L.A. bureau boosts morale. He is leaving to open a private investigating firm.

When Larry Lawler arrived from Minneapolis in April, 1988, to take over the FBI’s Los Angeles office, he found the nation’s third largest bureau battered by an espionage scandal, discrimination allegations and agents despondent over low pay.

“Morale was pretty low,” Lawler said in an interview last week in his office in the Federal Building in Westwood.

What’s more, things got worse.

Before Lawler was here a month, California magazine carried a cover story on Bernardo Matias Perez, a former assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office and the lead litigant in a lawsuit claiming racial and religious discrimination within the FBI.

It was culture shock, even to a veteran cop. And it certainly was different from Minneapolis, where a $15,000 bank fraud was considered a big case.

Lawler was reflecting on his tumultuous Los Angeles years after stunning his boss, FBI Director William S. Sessions, by turning in his resignation two weeks ago. The 50-year-old agent is leaving the FBI toward the end of summer to start Lawrence G. Lawler & Associates, a Los Angeles-based investigative consulting firm.

Although Lawler’s tenure has been barely three years, he has led the Los Angeles bureau through one of its most difficult periods.

There was the scandal of Richard W. Miller, the first FBI agent ever accused of espionage. Miller was convicted last October and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Intertwined with the espionage disaster were the accusations of discrimination.

Perez filed his lawsuit in 1983, alleging discrimination against Latinos, largely because of disagreements with Richard T. Bretzing, the special agent then in charge. Bretzing viewed Perez as unqualified for a top job in the FBI. Perez saw Bretzing, a Mormon bishop, as a bigot committed to boosting the careers of fellow Mormons over non-Mormons.

One major disagreement they had was over Miller. Perez viewed Miller, also a Mormon, as an incompetent agent and recommended in 1983 that he be fired. Bretzing overruled him.

Then Miller was arrested in 1984. Perez amended his complaint to charge religious as well as racial discrimination. He claimed a “Mormon Mafia” within the FBI’s Los Angeles office discriminated against Roman Catholics.

Lawler vividly remembers all the chaos he inherited when he moved to Los Angeles to take over after Bretzing retired to become security chief for the Mormon Church.

Shortly after the magazine article on Perez appeared, Lawler called his staff together in the “bullpen,” a cavernous room on the Federal Building’s 15th floor, where many of the agents work.

“I basically told them that’s not what the office was about,” he said. “The office is about a lot of responsibility being handled properly.”

From Lawler’s perspective, the biggest headache was the poor federal pay scale for his agents who had to endure Los Angeles’ soaring cost of living.

“We had agents having to use their credit cards to survive,” he said.

Lawler lobbied hard for a pay hike, spending time with government and private sector experts, who helped him prepare economic data he forwarded to Washington. Next January, FBI agents in three cities, including Los Angeles, will finally receive a 16% pay increase, he said.

A former Oakland cop who has been with the FBI for 26 years, which included a stint as special agent in charge of the Jacksonville, Fla., bureau as well as Minneapolis, Lawler arrived here knowing something about local law enforcement. “I had an instant rapport” with local police, he said.

Still, the change of scenery from Minneapolis to Los Angeles was traumatic.

“I’ve never seen an FBI so overwhelmed with work as it is in Los Angeles,” he said. “We worked cases in Minneapolis we wouldn’t even open here,” recalling the $15,000 bank fraud investigation that was significant there but which would not raise an eyebrow in Los Angeles.

“White-collar crime, narcotics trafficking, foreign counterintelligence, the severity of the crime problem is much greater here than I’ve seen anywhere in the U.S.”

Lawler’s law enforcement background--walking a beat in Oakland, a street agent for the FBI--has a lot to do with his popularity with the bureau’s more than 500 agents.

“He has a reputation of really caring about the troops,” said one agent.

Now, Lawler feels he has completed his mission. “The time has come” to leave, he said.

Lawler said he considered leaving the agency at least six months ago when he got a private investigator’s license. The FBI’s mandatory retirement age is 57.

“It will be fun to work for myself,” he said.

If Lawler has his way, it will be more lucrative even though he is leaving a $106,000-a-year job, a salary that will rise to $130,000 next January.

“If the government wants to pay me this much money to do what I’m doing for them, then I must be worth probably more to myself (in the private sector) than to the government,” he said.

Lawler does not contemplate having trouble finding modern-day Sam Spades to work for him, he said, because “there is a whole plethora of former FBI agents out there who are private investigators.”

As for Perez, he and the other Latinos won their lawsuit three years ago and major institutional changes were put in place by the FBI in its personnel practices involving minorities.

Perez, 51, who just became the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque office, called Lawler “an outstanding leader, an upfront person who went to bat for his agents.”

Lawler is proud of that legacy.