Official Who Backed Reiner Foe Reassigned : Government: A spokesman for the district attorney denies any political motivation in the transfer of the prosecutor, who says the new assignment is less prestigious.

A veteran prosecutor who openly backed an opponent of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner during the June primary has been transferred out of his plum assignment prosecuting white-collar crime, prompting questions about whether the move is political retaliation.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Al MacKenzie, who has spent 13 years in the district attorney’s major fraud unit and won at least two celebrated cases, is being moved to the office’s central trials division, which handles routine criminal matters.

A spokesman for Reiner denied that the move was politically motivated. But while the transfer is not a demotion in terms of rank or salary, both MacKenzie and the candidate he supported, Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling (Ernie) Norris, say major frauds is the more prestigious assignment. Both say the transfer smacks of political pay-back.

“It’s something that can at least be interpreted as retribution,” said Norris, who finished fourth in the primary. “It is certainly unprofessional.”

MacKenzie, who contributed money to the Norris campaign and helped the candidate craft a platform in which he attacked Reiner’s record on prosecuting insurance fraud, is fighting the move. In a letter to Reiner, he calls the transfer “petty politics” and asks the district attorney to meet with him and rescind the decision. He said Monday he has not yet received a reply.

“I feel devastated,” MacKenzie said. “We don’t make the big bucks that you make in the private practice of law. We have a lot of dedicated men and women that work for a fraction of what they could be making in private practice, and I think just because we work for less doesn’t mean we’re entitled to less dignity.”

While the district attorney was not available for comment Monday, his spokesman said the move is part of a “routine rearrangement of personnel.” In addition, the official who supervises all specialized units said that he, not Reiner, made the decision to transfer MacKenzie.

Special Operations Director Phil Wynn said MacKenzie was moved in part because he “did not easily accept supervision” and in part because new prosecutors are needed to fill in while MacKenzie spends the next six months prosecuting several lengthy fraud cases. MacKenzie will finish those cases before starting in the central operations division.

“The timing was right,” Wynn said, adding that MacKenzie had been told repeatedly that he needed to keep his bosses better informed of his casework.

Replied MacKenzie: “He’s lying. These people know everything that I’m doing.”

The MacKenzie transfer is not the first time that Reiner--who faces a tough reelection battle in November against Deputy Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti--has been accused of moving prosecutors from choice assignments for political reasons.

A deputy district attorney who ran against Reiner in 1988 was moved from the downtown office to Van Nuys, and the prosecutor who won the “Night Stalker” case was reassigned to the San Fernando Valley last year after being openly critical of the district attorney’s overtime policy. Four years ago, when Garcetti was ousted as Reiner’s chief deputy, some observers accused the district attorney of punishing him for attracting too much positive publicity.

Said one veteran prosecutor, who asked not to be named: “There’s a history of this being done, but I don’t know anybody that could say it was done by (Reiner). . . . It smacks of something. The timing sure is bad.”

At 48, MacKenzie has spent 19 years in the district attorney’s office. In a highly publicized 1987 case, he helped convict three executives of Suma Properties of real estate fraud involving 343 homes worth $41 million. In 1990, he successfully prosecuted Glendale physician Richard P. Boggs, who was found guilty of first-degree murder in an elaborate scheme that involved killing a stranger and misidentifying the body to collect on life insurance policies.

Wynn and other district attorney officials say most prosecutors spend no more than four or five years in special units; MacKenzie is one of three senior deputy district attorneys who have spent more than a decade in the major fraud unit. The others--Richard Lowenstein and Robert Youngdahl--are not being transferred.

“Nobody’s happy about it,” Lowenstein said of MacKenzie’s move. “Al is a very, very good prosecutor and, frankly, these cases are very complicated . . . It’s difficult to replace him.”

The move also is causing consternation in some quarters of the real estate industry, which works closely with the district attorney’s office in prosecuting fraud. An executive of First American Title Co. of Los Angeles has written to Reiner telling him that MacKenzie is “one of the few leading expert prosecutors knowledgeable in real estate fraud” and that his transfer would jeopardize an investigation.

Bill Chase, a private investigator who is working with First American Title, said he is “very upset” about the transfer. He said MacKenzie often speaks at fraud investigators’ seminars, and has gained a reputation as “a qualified expert in his field.”

Exactly what MacKenzie’s new duties will be remained unclear on Monday. MacKenzie said his new boss, John Lynch, told him that he would work in East Los Angeles as a so-called “filing deputy”--a prosecutor who decides whether to file criminal charges in a case.

Lynch, however, said the assignment as a filing deputy would last only until MacKenzie finished trying his remaining fraud cases. After that, Lynch said, he intends to employ MacKenzie as “calendar deputy”--a prosecutor assigned to a courtroom and handling all cases on that court’s calendar.

“People get rotated back to become calendar deputies all the time,” Lynch said. “Al had an extraordinarily long run over at major fraud. I don’t know whether he felt he was going to be there for his entire career, but you don’t get a deed to the office.”