Garcetti--Verdict May Be In, but Jury Is Still Out : D.A.: He promises a ‘larger vision,’ but Reiner’s withdrawal from the race leaves charges unanswered.

Gilbert Garcetti--career prosecutor, budding politician and now heir apparent to the job of Los Angeles County district attorney--was on the verge of a confession. “I haven’t really shared this with too many people,” he said in quiet, tentative tones, “but I almost felt a little cheated by what Reiner did.”

He was referring to incumbent Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s surprise decision last month to drop out of what would have been a nasty mudslinging battle to keep the office that Reiner has occupied for eight years. Garcetti, ever the trial lawyer, likened the move to a criminal case in which the defendant switches his plea to guilty before the prosecutor can deliver his closing argument.

“It’s not the same,” he said, “as the jury coming back and saying, ‘You’re guilty.’ ”

The analogy is an apt one. Garcetti, in all likelihood, will win the district attorney’s election next month by default. But winning alone is not enough for him. He worries that the biggest jury of all--the electorate--might not give him the hands-down victory he would like.

Reiner’s name remains on the ballot, and Garcetti’s polling shows that 40% of county voters do not realize that the well-known district attorney has pulled out of the race. Not one to take chances, Garcetti is waging a $400,000 television advertising campaign. Yet his donors, believing victory is assured, are no longer eager to give him money. And, he complains, the press is ignoring him.

Moreover, the absence of a genuine contest leaves Garcetti with a cloud hanging over him: unspecified charges of character flaws levied by Reiner in the wake of the bruising June primary. Garcetti was gearing up an aggressive campaign to counter those charges during a series of seven debates that had been scheduled to begin last month. But Reiner has never elaborated, and Garcetti is ignoring the innuendo as he attempts to educate voters about who he is and what he stands for.

“I still haven’t been elected,” he says. “I still have to raise money. I still have to go out there and get the message across.”

Garcetti’s message, often obscured during the rollicking primary battle, is that the district attorney ought to do more than just put criminals away. Garcetti has vowed to bring a “larger vision” to the job by creating crime prevention programs that will focus on keeping young people in school and out of gangs. “We have got to start thinking long term,” he says.

But Garcetti fails to offer a detailed explanation of how he will do so at a time when the county has slashed $7.3 million--the equivalent of 83 jobs--from the district attorney’s budget. Although he says he can accomplish his goals by streamlining the bureaucracy and spurring private efforts, some are skeptical.

“I think it will be very hard,” says former Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who served as district attorney a decade ago. “At this point, he is going to have to worry about manning the basic functions of the office. He might be able to stimulate some volunteer programs, but it’s a difficult time to grow.”

If Garcetti is elected, he will lead the nation’s largest office of prosecutors--more than 900 lawyers who work in a Peyton Place of political infighting and gossip.

At the same time, Garcetti will be forced to turn his attentions outward, toward a public that is reeling from a year of riots and strained race relations. He is well aware that these tensions stem largely from dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system, particularly the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case and the case of a Korean-born grocer who received probation in the killing of a black girl.

One of Garcetti’s first tests will be how he manages an equally volatile case--that of the three men charged with attacking truck driver Reginald O. Denny during last spring’s riots. Already, Garcetti has demonstrated a different tack than Reiner. Whereas Reiner has played the role of the hard-hitting prosecutor out to get the maximum sentence, Garcetti has been low-key in his approach, recently suggesting that he would consider a plea-bargain in the Denny case.

Unlike Reiner, who became district attorney after stints as city attorney and city controller, Garcetti is an insider. He has spent his entire 24-year legal career as a deputy district attorney, working his way up from a courtroom prosecutor to Reiner’s second-in-command.

The two had a falling out in 1988 when Reiner, in a move that left Garcetti feeling publicly humiliated, removed Garcetti from that job without explaining why. Garcetti now heads the office’s Torrance branch, although he is on leave during the campaign.

He is an intensely disciplined and driven man, generally the first at work and the last to leave. A decade ago, as he was battling lymphoma, Garcetti did not take time off. As the cancer stripped him of his strength and chemotherapy caused his hair to fall out, the only concession he made to the disease was to quit walking up the 18 flights of stairs to his office in the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Garcetti’s story has often been told. The son of immigrants from Mexico--a barber and a meatpacker--he grew up in a working-class neighborhood in South-Central Los Angeles. He went to USC on an academic scholarship and later attended law school at UCLA. He married a woman whose family owned a successful clothing manufacturing business, and when the firm was sold, he and his wife, Sukey, came into an inheritance.

Five years ago, the couple built a 4,500-square-foot multimillion-dollar home in Brentwood--an ultra-contemporary designer’s dream, decorated in black, white and gray with a hint of red. The house generated controversy when the neighborhood association sued the couple, claiming that they had violated zoning regulations. But the Garcettis won the case.

A friend of Garcetti’s tells the story of how, while playing tennis at a country club near Palm Springs, he met a woman who had graduated from Washington High School, as did Garcetti. As they chatted, he asked the woman if she knew Garcetti.

“Yes,” she replied. “Is he still perfect?”

The remark says much about Garcetti. He was quarterback of his high school football team and president of the student body. A natty dresser, he is meticulous to a fault--the kind of man who, just as you are about to set a glass down on a table, slips a coaster underneath.

He is incredibly organized; his habit of taking notes during meetings is legendary within the district attorney’s office. Indeed, when Reiner was taking swipes at him after the primary, Garcetti was quick to note that he had “173 spiral notebooks” documenting his tenure as Reiner’s top aide. Nobody who knows him doubted it.

He is polished and charming. “He reeks class,” said one colleague. But what troubles some co-workers is that he sometimes uses this smoothness to work the system to his advantage.

Shortly after he was demoted as Reiner’s chief deputy, Garcetti sought back-to-back pay raises that boosted his salary by 17%, to $121,000--$13,000 more per year than Reiner was earning at the time. Reiner approved Garcetti’s so-called “pay-for-performance” raise to take effect Sept. 1, 1988, as well as a second raise that took effect a day later. Because of the one-day delay, which Garcetti acknowledges arranging, the second raise was based on a salary that had just been hiked and was therefore worth more to him.

Although they were within county policy, Reiner confidantes have said the district attorney did not realize he was approving two separate raises and “was livid” when he found out. While Reiner has declined to discuss the matter, Garcetti says the district attorney knew what he was doing.

“I felt that I deserved it,” Garcetti said. “He obviously agreed.”

Reiner has described Garcetti as “secretive” and “not to be trusted in a position of power,” and has said he removed him from the chief deputy’s post for “very serious personal reasons.” But he has never elaborated, except to accuse Garcetti of authorizing excessive overtime payments for himself when overtime was being denied to other deputies.

Garcetti has acknowledged approving $62,000 in overtime for himself and the former director of management and budget--who processed the paperwork--but says the pay was justified and office policy permitted him to accept it. “If that’s the worst that has been said, I’ll live by it,” Garcetti said.

Reiner’s partisans have been quick to criticize Garcetti over these issues. But even some office insiders who dislike Reiner say the pay and overtime issues have left them with questions about Garcetti’s integrity.

“Anybody who’s been around for 10 minutes in this office would tell you he has many fine qualities,” said one veteran prosecutor, a Reiner foe, who did not want to be named. “But he has also made some colossal blunders. His dealing with overtime, and his pay-for-performance was less than admirable--not the moral thing to do.”

Garcetti’s friends and supporters paint a vastly different picture. They sing his praises as though he were some kind of adult Boy Scout--honest, trustworthy, loyal, caring and attuned to the problems of those less fortunate than he.

“When he says during his campaign that he thinks he can help the city, he’s honest,” said Los Angeles lawyer John Stillman, who has advised Garcetti during his run for office. “He is a truly decent, nice person. In (Yiddish), you would call him a mensch , and that’s really Gil. He’s a real good person.”

Garcetti also gets high marks from many co-workers and subordinates, who praise his limitless energy for the job.

“I’ve never run into anybody with more enthusiasm for their job, just a joie de vivre that kind of defied grown-up understanding,” said Christine Patterson, a deputy city attorney who spent a year working for Garcetti when he was Reiner’s chief deputy.

As is typical for him, Garcetti consulted a wide range of people--politicians, law enforcement officials, citizen activists--before deciding to run. In September, 1991, he conducted a poll that showed only 19% of voters favored putting Reiner back into office--a finding that led Garcetti to believe the race could be won. Still, he said, many people advised him against it.

“The warnings came,” he said. “They said: ‘You just can’t think of yourself on this, you’ve got to think of your family. Whether it is true or not, things are going to be said and they are going to be hurtful.’ ”

With Reiner’s withdrawal from the race, Garcetti has been spared such slings and arrows. Now, it is up to him to define himself for the voters. Still, he insists, he would have relished a good campaign fight.

“I knew,” he said resolutely, “that I could have stopped them dead in their tracks.”