U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A. to Hire 18 More Prosecutors : Justice: Staff shortages have forced the unit not to pursue some major fraud and drug cases. Reno forms task force to provide more objective model for allocating lawyers.

The Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office, which routinely turns away many fraud and drug cases because of staffing shortages, has gotten a boost from Washington: the authority to hire 18 more prosecutors.

The new hires, authorized by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, represent a 9% increase for the 208-lawyer office, which on a per-capita basis runs a far smaller shop than many of its counterparts. There is only one federal prosecutor for every 91,000 people in its seven-county jurisdiction, which stretches from Riverside to San Luis Obispo.

In contrast, there is one federal prosecutor for every 25,000 people in Manhattan and Miami and one for every 31,000 in Wyoming.

As a result, the Los Angeles office has had to decline prosecution of multimillion-dollar fraud cases that are too complex for local authorities, U.S. Atty. Nora M. Manella said. The problem is so severe that it has led to what she called “a prosecution-free zone for large numbers of sophisticated and violent criminals.” Prosecutor shortages also have caused the office to refer major drug cases to local authorities.

Reno’s decision follows strong criticism from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres), both of whom have said Justice Department resource allocations unfairly shortchange Los Angeles and the rest of the state.

Partly because of such criticism, Reno has formed a Justice Department task force to develop a new model for allocating prosecutors based on more objective criteria, according to a department memo.

The staffing boost for Los Angeles, as well as smaller increases for Sacramento and San Diego, were announced in internal Justice Department memos sent out last month and disclosed by Manella in a recent interview.

The increase in prosecutors will enable the Los Angeles office to pursue more health care fraud, financial scams, environmental crime and repeat violent offender cases, Manella said.

She said the “long overdue relief” comes after years of complaints from her predecessors in Los Angeles. “The Central District should have equal enforcement of the law as the rest of the country and that requires more people,” she said.

Even with the shortages, the Los Angeles office is regarded as one of the premier U.S. attorney’s offices in the country, winning high-profile convictions of swindler Charles H. Keating Jr. and two of the Los Angeles Police Department officers involved in the Rodney G. King beating.

But federal prosecutors in Los Angeles say they could do more if they had more people.

After years of such complaints, the issue began to take on momentum at a congressional hearing in October.

The disparities in staffing between Los Angeles and New York raise “very serious questions about the (Justice) Department’s basic management skills while under the control of both Democratic and Republican administrations,” Syracuse University researchers David Burnham and Susan Long told the House subcommittee on information, justice, transportation and agriculture.

“The staffing patterns uncovered by our research indicate the Justice Department managers, going back for many, many years, have failed to follow a logical, consistent and understandable procedure when it came to divvying up federal prosecutors,” said Burnham, a former New York Times reporter, and Long, a computer expert.

They noted that although the aggregate number of federal prosecutors skyrocketed in the Reagan-Bush era, the Los Angeles office was one of the five lowest in terms of growth during that period--a time when massive drug operations and white-collar crime were escalating in the area.

During the October hearing, Anthony C. Moscato, director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys in Washington, said the Los Angeles office had grown significantly from 1988 to 1992. He defended the Justice Department’s allocation decisions as rational and said they were based on a host of factors, including workload--the cases handled by each U.S. attorney in previous years--the department’s national priorities, the number of judges in an area, and the number of federal investigators.

Condit countered that the Los Angeles office had not expanded fast enough to keep up with population growth and burgeoning crime problems.

“During the year 1991,” he said, “the U.S. attorney in L.A. turned down 98% of the non-major and 46% of the major bank and thrift fraud cases referred by the FBI.”

Condit, citing the Syracuse research, also criticized Justice Department officials for failing to take population into account. “For you to dismiss population the way you have is astounding to me.”

When Manella assumed her post in January, she immediately started lobbying for more resources and Feinstein came to her aid.

The senator questioned Reno’s chief assistant, Deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick, about the disparities during Gorelick’s March confirmation hearing and continued to press her on the issue, saying Manella had made “a compelling case for relief.”

A month ago, the Justice Department agreed to allot 24 additional slots to Los Angeles--18 attorneys and six support staffers.

In a memo sent out to all U.S. attorneys July 8, Reno said: “I am taking initial steps to address significant disparities in allocations on the basis of objective criteria.”

She also called for a broad-gauged review to develop a “principled and equitable model to allocate resources based on external objective variables reflecting the number and magnitude of federal crimes in each district.” She named Gorelick to head a task force, which includes several U.S. attorneys from across the country.

“This process will ensure that scarce Department of Justice resources are available where they are most urgently needed,” Reno said in the memo.

Justice Department observers said Reno’s initiatives reflect recognition of a longstanding problem. They added that her short-term actions and long-term plan are signs of how important California is to the Clinton Administration.

U.S. attorneys, including Manella, Charles Stevens in Sacramento and Alan D. Bersin in San Diego, all of whom have been pinched for resources, expect that they eventually will benefit from the change. But others, such as Mary Jo White in Manhattan, are concerned that they will not fare so well, according to Justice Department sources. White, through a representative, declined to comment.

“There is an overlay of 100 years of politics behind the allocation disparities, which are really hard to fathom,” Syracuse researcher Burnham said.

Justice Department sources said New York had traditionally done better because it has historically had many high-profile cases and is close to Washington, making it easier for the U.S. attorney to go to the main Justice Department office to lobby. But Burnham said there is no simple explanation, political or otherwise, for some of the disparities.

The allocation question “is a difficult issue . . . from the perspective of individual U.S. attorneys who can almost always make a case for something additional or worthwhile he or she could do in his or her district if there were more people to do it,” said Michael R. Stiles, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and a member of the Gorelick task force.

“It’s a very difficult process. Some would simply argue population or uniform crime reports. Others would talk about the number of cases the office has brought, the number of judges in the district, the number of agents,” Stiles said.

In San Diego, Bersin said he was heartened by Reno’s decision to examine the allocation question. Although the San Diego office--which encompasses San Diego and Imperial counties--has fared better per capita than Los Angeles, Bersin said his office also lacks sufficient staff.

He said that in allocating prosecutors the department should take more account of the number of people in a district, and in his area should consider more than just the domestic population.

“If you count (nearby cities) Tijuana and Mexicali, there are another 6 million people in the district. This is the largest binational metropolis in the world and there is now recognition at Justice that because of the border there are additional factors in the mix,” Bersin said. “This district is the primary corridor in the nation for both illegal immigration and illicit drug-trafficking activities.”

Manella said the Central District is the most populous--15.7 million people--and the most crime-infested in the nation. She said that by virtually any measure the district is entitled to more prosecutors.

“According to FBI statistics, 30% of all the bank robberies in the United States occur in this district, 25% of all the carjackings, 20% of all major financial institution fraud cases are under investigation in the district, and 40% of all worldwide credit fraud originates here,” she said.

“Our office has to decline prosecution of many potential cases that would be ‘career cases’ in most other districts in the United States,” said Steven E. Zipperstein, chief assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. He declined to provide specific cutoff guidelines, saying that information could aid criminals in structuring illegal acts.

But other sources supported his contention and amplified on it.

“The $1-million to $5-million investor fraud case, where there were 50 to several hundred victims,” frequently could not be pursued because of prosecutor shortages, said James R. Asperger, who was chief of the major frauds section of the Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office from August, 1990, to July, 1993, and is now in private practice.

Tony Adamski, who recently retired as chief of the Los Angeles FBI office’s white-collar crime unit and previously investigated large financial scams in Washington and other cities, said he shared the frustration of Los Angeles prosecutors who had to decline cases because of inadequate staffing.

“From my perspective of being a financial fraud supervisor for 10 years, I’ve long been aware of the need for additional assistant United States attorneys in Los Angeles. They had by far the largest caseload of financial institution fraud cases, the most complex cases, the cases that had the most community impact,” said Adamski, now vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy efforts for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

These sentiments were echoed by a veteran Los Angeles agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agent said that between 1990 and 1993, resource shortages compelled the U.S. attorney’s office to significantly raise the threshold amount of cocaine powder needed for federal prosecution from 500 grams to 5 kilograms, although cases involving 2 kilograms or more would be taken if the cocaine was being imported or exported through Los Angeles International Airport.

The agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there also have been threshold increases for crack cocaine, LSD, marijuana and methamphetamine. A larger U.S. attorney staff might help reverse that trend. “It can only help if we get more bodies,” the agent said.

Legal Comparison

Here is a comparison of the number of federal prosecutors, per million people, in selected districts. The largest city in each district is listed in parentheses. DISTRICT: ATTORNEYS California, Central (Los Angeles): 13 California, East (Sacramento): 8 California, North (San Francisco): 12 California, South (San Diego): 32 Florida, Middle (Tampa): 12 Florida, South (Miami): 41 Illinois, Northern (Chicago): 16 Michigan, East (Detroit): 13 New York, East (Brooklyn): 20 New York, South (Manhattan): 41 Pennsylvania, East (Philadelphia): 20 Texas, North (Dallas): 15 Texas, South (Houston): 19 Vermont, (Burlington): 24 Wyoming, (Cheyenne): 31 Sources: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University, 1993.