POLITICAL AFTER REINER : NEWS ANALYSIS : Riot-Related Incidents Hastened Reiner’s Downfall : Career: The former golden boy of L.A. Democratic politics wounded himself with years of political and prosecutorial missteps. The Soon Ja Du, King and Denny cases sealed his fate.

Ira Reiner has become the first political casualty of the Los Angeles riots.

First he lost two courtroom battles that helped trigger the riots--the effort to send Korean-born grocer Soon Ja Du to jail for killing a black teen-ager and, against all expectations, the effort to convict police officers in the videotaped beating of African-American motorist Rodney G. King.

Then, in the wake of the riots, Reiner alienated his core constituency--Los Angeles’s black community--by disqualifying the black judge who had been assigned to try the case of four young African-Americans charged in the beating of a white truck driver.

“That was the coup de grace,” said prominent black lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran, a friend of Reiner’s for more than two decades. “He (Reiner) knew it. Ira had support in the black community. Then (the disqualified judge) said from the pulpit of the First AME church, ‘I’m not telling you who to vote for, but Ira Reiner must go.’ ”

Although the riots finished off Reiner, the flamboyant former golden boy of Los Angeles Democratic politics wounded himself repeatedly with years of political and prosecutorial missteps.

Political professionals had expected great things from the maverick liberal who was one of the first Democrats in the state to come out in favor of Proposition 13 and later the death penalty. He was one of those gifted politicians who seemed to sense the public’s mood before his party did and who knew how to connect with voters.

“I thought he was going to at least (become state) attorney general and use that as a steppingstone to governor, as Earl Warren, Pat Brown and George Deukmejian did,” said Los Angeles political consultant Joseph Cerrell, who has known Reiner for 20 years.

But Reiner lost his bid for attorney general in 1990. In a stunning upset, he was eliminated in the Democratic primary by San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith, a plodding opponent whom Reiner’s then-campaign manager had derided as a “Mr. Potato-Head.”

About the same time, Reiner began to look vulnerable locally. His opponent and former chief deputy, Gilbert Garcetti, had a poll taken in the summer of 1991 that found only 20% of those surveyed favored Reiner’s reelection.

Reiner sealed his doom by deciding not to campaign vigorously before the June primary, which pitted him against Garcetti and two others. He was preoccupied with the riots and their aftermath, his aides said. Beyond that, his reluctance to campaign betrayed a side of him that doesn’t fit the image of the consummate politician.

“Ira never was your normal politician, slowly but surely building up blocks of support,” longtime adviser William Wardlaw said. “Reiner is a loner. He would rather be with friends and family than at a political dinner, even his own.”

In the best of times, his shyness didn’t hurt him politically. Reiner could depend on his ability to speak effectively to voters via the news media and on his knack for sharing the public’s outrage.

But his catchy quotes wore thin as his office racked up loss after loss in high-profile cases, which seemed to become personal crusades. Among them were the McMartin Pre-School molestation and “Twilight Zone” cases and the prosecution of Rep. Bobbi Fiedler for an alleged election law violation.

As the losses mounted, people forgot his victories, among them the successful prosecutions of financier Charles H. Keating Jr. and Richard Ramirez, the so-called “Night Stalker.”

Reiner began to be considered “a very ordinary politician, not very effective, more interested in politicking than in being a law enforcement officer,” said Garcetti’s pollster, Richard Maullin.

By the time of the riots, Reiner was losing key elements of his traditional constituencies on the Westside and in organized labor, which rejected his campaign’s request for a $500,000 loan.

“My analysis is that he believed he would be forced into a runoff, so why bother (to campaign in the primary),” said Robert Philibosian, the Republican district attorney whom Reiner beat in 1984. “I think he said, ‘I’ll save my money and use it in the general election.’

“He probably expected to get something like 40% or 45% of the vote and be forced into a runoff against somebody who got a quarter of the vote,” Philibosian said. “Instead he got a quarter of the vote. For an incumbent, that’s terrible.”

In the ensuing weeks, few fund-raisers were scheduled. Reiner always hated to raise money, friends said. But in this case, he may have decided that there was no point.

His campaign was $60,000 in debt, according to the latest finance reports filed this summer.

Key advisers had left, including one who went to work for Barbara Boxer’s Senate campaign and others who went to work for Bill Clinton.

Some believed Reiner and some scoffed when he said Thursday that he did not want to run again for district attorney because it might prove necessary to wage a negative campaign against Garcetti.

Political professionals gave him little chance to win anyway.

“He knew he couldn’t win,” consultant Joseph Cerrell said. “I haven’t found a single person who thought he could win.”

If he had waged a vicious campaign and lost--as even some of his own advisers felt he would--he risked being branded as not only a loser but a destroyer, traits not likely to win him a good job with a politically connected law firm or in a Democratic administration at the state or local level.

Reiner, who is not independently wealthy, will need a job, and he may be well-positioned to get a good one. Mickey Kantor, one of his longtime advisers, has taken up residence in Little Rock, Ark., as Clinton’s campaign chairman.

“A gracious exit always bodes well for the future,” said Reiner’s chief deputy, Greg Thompson. “When you reach into the mud, you get a lot on yourself.”

On the night of his primary loss, Reiner promised to sling some mud by revealing the undisclosed reason he demoted Garcetti in 1988.

A career prosecutor now on leave from his job as head deputy in the district attorney’s Torrance office, Garcetti countered by saying he had 173 notebooks documenting every move Reiner made while they worked together.

Although it is not known who could be more destructive, one of Reiner’s main advisers urged him to back off from a “scorched earth strategy” against Garcetti.

Reiner’s revelations “wouldn’t have had strong enough legs. . . . At the end of the day, even though you would have cut him deep, it wouldn’t be enough,” this adviser said.

Until he became district attorney eight years ago, Reiner had been rapidly accumulating political capital. As a populist city controller, he had grabbed headlines by exposing officials for abusing their expense accounts. Then, as an activist Los Angeles city attorney, he basked in the media limelight with a succession of innovative efforts to prosecute gangs for graffiti, businesses for pollution and slumlords for failing to bring their properties up to code.

Even when his own remarks cost the city $3 million in legal fees, he seemed to come out unscathed. Reiner had publicly called a group of police intelligence officers, being defended by his office, irresponsible zealots. The city had to pay for private attorneys for the officers. But Reiner said he didn’t regret speaking out because his true client was the public.

That kind of brashness didn’t play as well when he became district attorney, where he managed the largest local prosecutor’s office in the world--more than 900 career attorneys.

To many of them, Reiner seemed to speak and act first and think later.

He was too quick to condemn remarks by a Glendale court commissioner as racist when it turned out that the commissioner had been condemning a racist remark.

Against the advice of professional prosecutors, he called a news conference to announce filing unprecedented attempted-murder charges against an AIDS patient who donated tainted blood because he needed the money. The professionals pointed out that there was no evidence the AIDS patient intended to kill anyone. But Reiner was undeterred.

His action got him a slot on the television show “Nightline.”

But a judge threw out the case.

William Wardlaw, a Los Angeles attorney who has been one of Reiner’s principal advisers, mused Friday that maybe the district attorney’s office has been a bad fit for Reiner’s populist style and temperament.

“When you are controller you can really pop off at bureaucrats,” Wardlaw said. “As city attorney, he went after slumlords and liquor stores. . . . But when you are D.A., what can you do to identify with the little people?

“Your whole job is to prosecute criminals. You can’t talk about liquor stores in South-Central or the environment. It’s just not an office suited for where he was coming from.”