Reno Gets High Marks for Her Drive, Integrity

WASHINGTON — For 18 months, Janet Reno--the Dade County, Fla., state attorney--arrived at her office at 6 a.m. so she could teach herself Spanish with tapes and books, a colleague recalled.

Reno, nominated Thursday to be the nation’s first woman attorney general, undertook the crash course in recognition of Miami’s mushrooming Latino population. “Now she can go out and meet with and talk to groups in the community,” said Abraham Laeser, the senior trial assistant state attorney in the prosecutor’s office.

Laeser and other associates relate such anecdotes to illustrate Reno’s drive.

Friends and foes tell other stories to emphasize Reno’s integrity and ethics. She insists on paying the sticker price when buying a new car, they said. “Nobody pays the sticker price, but she doesn’t want anyone to think she got a deal because she is a prosecutor,” a longtime colleague noted.

And she turned down a discount offer on a large pizza order from a deliveryman who wanted to join in an office celebration of her 10th year in the job.

“She’s synonymous with integrity in this community,” said Dan Gelber, special counsel to the U.S. attorney in Miami. “She enjoys a very good reputation down here in a tri-ethnic community where not everyone gets along.”

At the same time, she has drawn criticism for losing some high-profile cases and from a citizens’ committee that investigated a 1980 riot in Miami. It concluded that, while she was not a racist, she ran her office “in such a way as to support the black community’s perception of the office as racist.”

The criticism focused on the acquittal of four policemen charged with beating to death a black insurance man during a traffic stop. Critics claimed that her office bungled the prosecution.

Reno, 54, whose 6-foot, 2-inch height in stocking feet made her taller than both President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore at Thursday’s nomination announcement in the White House Rose Garden, is the daughter of Miami newspaper reporters who did not relish the notion of her becoming a lawyer.

But in explaining her defiance of their wishes, she said: “I didn’t like people bossing me around.”

Speaking at her mother’s funeral last December, Reno supported her reputation for directness. Her mother, Jane, was known as a feisty beer-drinking reporter for the now-defunct Miami News.

“I take some small comfort today in knowing that mother will not insult anyone or embarrass the family,” Reno said at the funeral, according to an account in the Miami Herald.

As Clinton noted Thursday, she lives in the house her mother built with her own hands--a wood-and-stone structure without air-conditioning, where peacocks wander about the grounds.

After graduating with a degree in chemistry from Cornell University, Reno was one of a small number of women to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1963.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who was at Harvard at the same time, recalled that Reno “was one of the few in the class who really had this idealism about public service.” While classmates concentrated on how to get in the fanciest New York or Boston law firms, “I remember her talking about being from Miami and how she was going back to Miami,” Schroeder said.

Writing of her career in the book, “Women Lawyers,” Reno recalled that on returning to Miami from law school, “a distinguished downtown firm would not give me a job because I was a woman. Fourteen years later that same firm made me a partner.”

In 1972, she became an assistant state attorney in Dade County. In 1977 at age 39 she was named the first woman state attorney. A lifelong Democrat, she has been reelected four times.

When she took over the office, it had a staff of 286, including 91 lawyers. Today, it employs 900 people, 230 of them attorneys. Her personal opposition to capital punishment has not prevented her office from obtaining 80 death sentence convictions, Clinton, who supports the death penalty, noted Thursday.

In Dade County, where drug use and racial tension run high, controversy is virtually impossible for a prosecutor to avoid.

One reason a citizens commission claimed that Reno ran the office in such a way as to feed the “perception” of racism was the 1980 acquittal of four Miami police officers charged with beating to death Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance man, after he was stopped for a traffic violation.

The acquittals in the case set off three days of rioting in downtown Miami. The U.S. Justice Department later tried unsuccessfully to prosecute the case for civil rights violations, and prosecutors laid some of the blame for the failure of that case on Reno’s office, saying it had moved too slowly to take depositions and bring charges, allowing defendants to square their stories.

The accusations of racism “hurt deeply,” Reno later wrote, noting that “even as a teen-ager I had cheered Brown vs. Board of Education,” the 1954 Supreme Court ruling declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.

But Reno also has won plaudits from an unusual source. In the rap album “Respect,” by a young female artist named Anquette, a track titled “Janet Reno” praises the prosecutor because she “locks brothers up for not paying their child support.”

Janet Reno comes to town, collecting all the money.

You stayed one day then ran away and started acting funny.

She caught you down on 15th Avenue, trying to hide your trail.

She fined your ass and locked you up. Now who can’t post no bail?”

Times staff writers Douglas Frantz, Karen Tumulty and Elizabeth Shogren in Washington and special correspondent Mike Clary in Miami contributed to this story.