Reno Forged Unique Style as High-Profile Prosecutor

It looked like an ordinary homicide, the bodies of three drowned drug dealers--bearing marks of a beating--floating in the Miami River.

But as Janet Reno’s state prosecutors examined the case over the next several months, it grew more complex. Evidence accumulated that several policemen had robbed the dopers of $35 million worth of cocaine before the trio was found in the river.

Reno’s investigators found that the police suspects in the “River Cops” case had shown signs of sudden wealth, buying new cars and expensive clothes. But this case, as likely as it seemed to produce a conviction, was not to remain with Reno’s state attorney’s office.

She passed the headline-capturing case over to the Justice Department eight years ago instead of prosecuting it herself.

The move sends mixed signals about the woman who is poised to become the nation’s first female attorney general.

To her supporters, relinquishing control of the River Cops case was a brilliant stroke that kept it from being jeopardized by state rules of evidence that were less than favorable to the prosecution. It is a sign, they say, that she cares more about ultimate justice than her own ego.

To her critics, the case, coupled with others she turned over to federal prosecutors, suggest she is reluctant to prosecute public corruption cases and to take on the Dade County power structure. Those same critics, most of them Dade County criminal defense lawyers who refused to be named, also question whether it shows fear of losing a big case in court.

For others, Reno’s willingness to let a big case go raises doubts about whether she is tenacious enough to tackle the complex turf battles in the U.S. Department of Justice that she will head.

The next attorney general will have to settle rising tensions between the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration--both agencies of the Justice Department--over who will control the new drug intelligence center, which now has many more FBI posts than DEA.

There are battles with other Cabinet agencies as well, typified by the rivalry between the FBI and the Treasury’s Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms over who collects and disseminates intelligence on gangs.

One thing is clear, even before Reno answers questions at her Senate confirmation hearings, expected to begin next month: She is not an ordinary prosecutor focused solely on winning cases.

During her first nine years as a lawyer, Reno, 54, recalled: “I swore I would never be a prosecutor because I thought they were more interested in securing convictions than in seeking justice.”

Instead, she has broader concerns. With one breath, Reno promises “to ensure that career criminals, dangerous offenders and drug traffickers get strict and certain sentences that put them away and keep them away.” In the next, as she did when Clinton introduced her at a White House Rose Garden ceremony, Reno stresses “diversion (from jail) programs for the nonviolent offenders that will enable them to get off to a fresh . . . new start.”

Regarding her decision to refer corruption cases to federal authorities, Reno said the U.S. attorney in Miami in one such case told her: “ ‘Janet, that’s political suicide. People will think you’re ducking.’ ” She said she told him: “I want to do what’s right for the case and . . . to see that justice is secured.”

And many prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers in the Miami area agree with her.

Florida has one of the most liberal state laws in the nation allowing defense lawyers nearly unlimited discovery prior to trial. Attorneys representing defendants charged with a crime have the right to take sworn statements from major witnesses and others involved in the state’s investigation who may testify against their client at trial.

In the federal system, the rules are more evenly balanced between prosecution and defense with no special advantage for the accused.

In the River Cops case, defense lawyers spent 10 days deposing the lead detective who investigated the case, then announced they had at least two more weeks of questions. “There was no telling what they were going to come up with--Janet decided they were getting away with murder,” a staff member said. At that point, she referred the case to the Justice Department.

More than a dozen Miami policemen eventually were convicted on federal racketeering or conspiracy charges, including several who pleaded guilty.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael P. Sullivan, who prosecuted River Cops, is prosecuting another political corruption case, called Operation Court Broom, with investigative help from lawyers in Reno’s office. Evidence of bribery and extortion against three state judges and a former judge was compiled by an undercover lawyer working with Reno and federal prosecutors.

“State judges and other officials often are so tied into the political system that it’s hard for the public to have confidence in their prosecution by the state,” Sullivan said. “These cases often are better off in the federal courts.”

Myles H. Malman, another federal prosecutor who together with Sullivan won the federal drug conviction last year of former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega, agrees that Reno has been vigorous.

“It’s rubbish for anyone to say she has shied away from pursuing corruption,” said Malman. “She realizes the federal government has greater resources and better tools, including nationwide subpoena power and agencies like the Internal Revenue Service to gather evidence of political corruption.”

In forging a cooperative arrangement with the feds, Reno characteristically has shunned the spotlight. When the indictment of the state judges in Court Broom was announced two years ago, she stood off to one side at a joint news conference while then U.S. Atty. Dexter Lehtinen spoke endlessly. Some of her own prosecutors complained that the project looked like a federal operation.

Seymour Gelber, a former colleague and circuit judge and now the mayor of Miami Beach, said Reno’s idea of prosecutorial teamwork probably comes naturally to someone who never has been interested in self-aggrandizement. “And it’s a very progressive thing for her to combine state and federal prosecutions, to use those larger resources,” he said.

By all accounts, Reno’s lifestyle is as modest as her professional conduct. Never married, she lives alone in a house without air conditioning off a dirt road in the Kendall area southwest of Miami. The stone-and-wood dwelling was built 45 years ago largely by her mother, Jane Wood Reno, a retired newspaperwoman, with whom Janet Reno lived until the older woman’s death last year.

Described by Gelber as “a frontierswoman,” Reno is an avid environmentalist who has hiked through swamplands and navigated all of Florida’s wilderness waterways on brief vacations over the years, mostly in a canoe.

She has pledged she will put special emphasis on enforcing environmental law, and verges on the poetic when talking of her interest in the outdoors. “This is a beautiful country,” she said standing alongside President Clinton after he nominated her. “Each of us has a favorite river, a mountain, just a patch of sky for some of us.”

Known for her frugality, she refused to have a carpet in her office for several years to save money for the state. “If Janet put money in a Coke machine and two cans came out, she’d send one of them back,” Gelber says.

Her latest financial disclosure report, on file in the Florida capital of Tallahassee, lists her net worth as less than $200,000. Her largest asset--excluding her home, which is not included in the listing--is $136,400 in a deferred compensation plan administered by the state. She has no outstanding debts, according to the report.

Reno never has liked the trappings of the office to which she has been elected four times. “She doesn’t want to be bothered by a security detail when she marches every year in the annual Martin Luther King Day parade in Liberty City,” the site of Miami’s worst black rioting, according to Ray Havens, a confidant of Reno’s and her chief investigator.

The first riots were blamed on her when mobs took to the streets shouting, “Reno! Reno!” after the 1980 acquittal of five police officers who were tried for a Rodney King-type beating of a black insurance agent, Arthur McDuffie. Pulled from his motorcycle after leading police on a high-speed chase, McDuffie died from being beaten with police flashlights.

“It was incompetence on the part of her staff,” one defense lawyer said of her unsuccessful prosecution.

Yet, a subsequent effort by federal prosecutors to convict one of the policemen on civil rights charges also failed.

The McDuffie case acquittal came only a month after Reno’s office convicted a black school superintendent, Johnny Jones, of spending thousands of dollars in school funds on gold plumbing fixtures in his home.

Jones’ conviction was overturned on appeal. When some members of the black community criticized her for prosecuting an official for penny ante corruption, she replied, “I’ve tried to do what’s right based on the facts and the law.”

Says well-known Miami defense attorney Richard Sharpstein, “She’s determined to bring the tough cases whether she wins or loses, and the black community has come to respect her.”

Another defense lawyer, Sam Burstyn, whose clients have included defendants in such celebrated cases as the River Cops and Noriega, says Reno “has dealt with criminal law as it pertains to day-to-day local crime in one of the most diverse cities in the world.”

As attorney general-designate, said Burstyn, “this makes her very well-suited to deal with national issues right out of the streets, like Haitian immigration, gang violence, drugs and racial-related crimes. She’s extremely sensitive to all sides of these issues and has tremendous hands-on experience.”

Although both her parents were newspaper reporters, Reno became a lawyer out of admiration and respect for her grandfather, who was an attorney, according to her sister, Maggie Hurchalla. Considering her compassion for others, “it might have been more natural for Janny to become a public defender, but she became a prosecutor when Mr. Gerstein (Richard Gerstein, her predecessor) offered her a job,” Hurchalla explained.

“What she considered most important in the world is taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” the sister added. “But implementing the laws about doing right is also a natural thing for her to do.”

Aside from criminal prosecutions, Reno has been a tireless advocate of children’s rights and juvenile justice reform. She also has helped establish a special court for drug offenders that seeks to steer nonviolent offenders into treatment programs instead of jail.

“She believes in separating people who should be in prison from those that should not,” said chief investigator Havens. “She favors prison terms for hard-core types that cannot be rehabilitated. But Janet Reno tries to find something good in every person.”

Jackson reported from Miami and Ostrow from Washington. Special correspondent Mike Clary in Miami also contributed to this story.