Home of the Law : FBI’s New L.A. Chief Chooses to Live in Thousand Oaks

The first thing Charlie J. Parsons did when he got the news last summer that he was moving from Washington to be the FBI’s new Los Angeles area boss was to check out the local schools.

Then he asked fellow agents where they liked to hang their hats after a hard day on the bricks chasing bank robbers, drug dealers and con artists.

In the end, Parsons reflected, it was no contest.

Thousand Oaks won hands-down.

To be sure, he said in an interview this week during a visit to the FBI’s Ventura office, “it’s a little bit of a clannish thing out there.”

This was a reference to the fact that of the about 550 agents who work in the FBI’s Los Angeles region, including its headquarters in Westwood, almost half live in the cities of Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

And that doesn’t count a sizable number of other law enforcement types who also reside in these burgeoning neighborhoods, including contingents from the Los Angeles Police and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s departments.

“I was surprised how many agents live out there,” said Parsons, 48, who grew up in Longview, Tex., and who still speaks with a soft Texas drawl.

For the FBI spokesman in Los Angeles, John Hoos, who himself lives in the same area as his new boss, the answer is easy.

“The decent living, the schools, the mountains, the weather,” he said, add up to a desirable lifestyle. “For a family, there’s no other place to live.”

Parsons and his wife, Christina, have two sons, Chad, 12, who is attending Los Cerritos Intermediate School, and Christopher, 14, a student at Westlake High School.

“I read the (school test) scores before I ever go on a house-hunting trip,” Parsons said. “Then, the other eliminator is (housing) cost.

“I asked a relative what houses went for in San Marino (the upper-crust community next to Pasadena) and she started laughing, so I eliminated San Marino.”

Still, he said, the relatively high cost of Southern California housing didn’t turn into an economic nightmare.

“I heard horror stories about commuting and the cost of housing, and I found most of them to be greatly exaggerated,” Parsons said. “I have a bigger house here than I had in Washington.” Actually his house was in Herndon, Va., near Dulles International Airport.

“And it took me 60 minutes yesterday morning to get from our house to Westwood. That’s about what it used to take me in Washington.”

Parsons’ area of expertise is organized crime. His related knowledge of the gambling industry was imparted to agents at the FBI’s academy in Quantico, Va., where he taught for five years.

With this background, it was no surprise that he was ultimately transferred to Las Vegas in 1979, where he was the FBI’s point person for mob investigations in Nevada. While there, he investigated alleged organized crime infiltration of the casino industry and several gang-style slayings.

From Las Vegas, Parsons moved to Kansas City in 1984 as assistant special agent-in-charge of that field office. Two years later, he was working in FBI headquarters in Washington as an inspector, and then, between 1987 and 1989, he was special agent-in-charge of the FBI’s San Antonio regional field office.

In 1989, Parsons was named head of the FBI’s Office of Inspections in Washington, responsible for the effectiveness and efficiency of the agency’s far-flung bureaus. That was his most recent position before moving to Los Angeles.

It was while he was in Las Vegas that Parsons said he became familiar with Los Angeles’ crime problems.

Los Angeles, he said, is becoming the nation’s third “open city,” along with Las Vegas and Miami, where any of the nation’s traditional crime families--or gangsters without Mafia-type allegiance--can “operate without getting someone’s permission.”

“I want to be out front on that,” he said, in terms of focusing his agents on the personalities and types of criminals attempting to make an illicit buck in Southern California.

Although he has been running the Los Angeles operation for only a couple of months, Parsons said he already has made some changes in the bureau’s priorities.

“There is more emphasis on white-collar crime,” he said, such as political and defense industry corruption.

“We’re investigating most major bank failures because they are federally insured,” Parsons said.

And if white-collar crime is his No. 1 priority, he said that squashing organized crime and drug trafficking is not far behind.

Like his predecessor, Larry Lawler, who retired, the new Los Angeles special agent-in-charge sees himself as a street agent’s friend.

As the top agent in San Antonio, he said, “I was very supportive of street agents.

“I’m very visible. I get around a lot. I believe in MBWA--Management By Wandering Around.”

To be named the top agent in Los Angeles--the third largest FBI bureau, which is responsible for a vast seven-county area that includes Ventura County--is a plum assignment.

Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fact that Parsons, a 22-year FBI veteran, insists that he does not harbor a driving ambition to be a top FBI official in Washington, Los Angeles would appear to be an ideal career steppingstone.

But Parsons said he has a commitment from Washington that he will remain for at least four years in Los Angeles, his fifth transfer in seven years.

“There’s so much happening in the Los Angeles area, it’s a real challenge professionally,” he said. “There’re great cases going on. It was an easy decision.”

Parsons sees his new job as the pinnacle of his career.

“My ambition with the FBI has always been to be a special agent-in-charge, and I achieved that when I was in San Antonio. I do not want to go back to headquarters. I don’t want to rise above this level.

“The reason I came to the FBI was the excitement of the cases and that’s what I love. This is more fun, and this is what I want to do.”