Raabe, County Stockpile Documents : Aftermath: Investigators and attorneys sift reams of paper preparing for war in Citron ex-deputy’s trial.

They call it The Bunker.

One floor beneath the Orange County courthouse, a windowless chamber and its bank of computers is the hub of a high-tech hunt for clues in the criminal prosecution of former Assistant Treasurer Matthew Raabe and a much broader probe into the roots of the county’s bankruptcy.

A tower of paperwork--more than 1 million pages--has been scanned, sheet by sheet, into a state-of-the-art computer system that prosecutors share with the county’s outside bankruptcy attorneys. Each day brings new potential evidence, and the job of keeping track of it all is enough to occupy two shifts of data-entry clerks who click away at computers until midnight.

Six miles away, near John Wayne Airport, Raabe has his own war room, a private investigator’s office that is equipped with a $10,000 computer system bought with taxpayer’s money to view some of the same documents.

Raabe, who pleaded innocent to misappropriating funds and falsifying documents, is represented by Santa Ana lawyer Richard L. Schwartzberg and Gary M. Pohlson, a well-known criminal defense lawyer who is the current president of the Orange County Bar Assn. Neither is a stranger to high-profile cases.

Because the former assistant treasurer has been ruled indigent, his attorneys’ bills also are being footed by the public. That tab already has reached nearly $600,000, swallowing up about a fifth of the county funds set aside for defending poor people whose cases, for a variety of reasons, cannot be handled by the public defender’s office.

“This is one of the most complicated cases, because there haven’t been too many municipal bankruptcies,” Schwartzberg said.

The case against Raabe, the only person currently facing criminal charges stemming from the collapse of the county’s investment pool, is the most visible facet of the year-old investigation led by the Orange County district attorney’s office. The overall probe, code-named “Noah’s Ark,” is unprecedented in the county for its size and sweep.

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Prosecutors gained a grand jury indictment against Raabe in May after witnesses testified that he repeatedly misled investors about the soundness of their pooled investments while saddling them with county losses and skimming some of their interest earnings into a county account. Raabe is not accused of trying to profit personally through the alleged offenses. His defense lawyers have suggested he was simply following the orders of his boss, former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron.

Citron, who pleaded guilty last spring to the same felony charges filed against Raabe, awaits sentencing Dec. 29.

Documents related to Raabe’s case account for about half of the estimated 1.5 million pages of investigative material, which fills more than 350 cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling of a storage room below the district attorney’s offices in Orange County Superior Court.

The case already has generated 100 times the paperwork created in a typical murder case, said Ron Shave, a former homicide investigator who is in charge of managing the records.

“I thought those [murder] cases were large. But there’s no comparison,” Shave said. As he spoke, three data-entry workers pecked at computers in the converted conference room that is sometimes called Shave’s Cave. “In this case, we’ll never have a count of how many documents [there are].”

The cost of the overall probe has not been calculated, but already it easily reaches into the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, said Wallace J. Wade, one of two assistant district attorneys directing the investigation. He said a specific tally was elusive because of an ever-changing number of people working on the case.

Wade said in court records that the entire investigation has involved as many as 45 county prosecutors, investigators and others since the county declared bankruptcy Dec. 6, 1994. Other fruits of that effort--possibly in additional criminal indictments or civil complaints against other county officials--are expected to be revealed in coming weeks.

“This is the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on and the biggest thing others have ever worked on,” Wade said. “We won’t work on anything like this again.” He paused. “I hope.”

The stakes are colossal for Raabe.

He has dug in for a legal struggle that will be tough and complex--and fought at taxpayer expense. If convicted, he faces a $10-million fine and up to 14 years in prison.

Raabe could have taken the easy way out. He could have pleaded guilty like Citron, cooperated with investigators and hoped for a lenient sentence.

His lawyers, however, have pursued a novel defense, questioning whether he can get fair treatment from the grand jury, prosecutors and residents who make up the pool of potential jurors because of the bankruptcy. Raabe’s lawyers cite lowered property values, cuts in the classroom and reduced county retirement benefits as some of the possible fallout around the county.

“You have to realize that this is a case where everyone in Orange County is a potential victim,” Schwartzberg said.

The defense lawyers have sought documents not usually requested in criminal cases, including personal financial records from grand jurors and officials in the district attorney’s office--even those not involved in Raabe’s prosecution. A hearing on that matter is scheduled for January.

That strategy is being crafted at the Irvine private investigator’s office and Pohlson’s law firm in Laguna Hills. There, dozens of black three-ring binders--containing documents, and newspaper articles published before and after the county’s bankruptcy--line the walls. The floor is strewn with some of the 500 audiocassettes and videotapes that prosecutors have turned over.

Both Pohlson and Schwartzberg declined to answer specific questions about how they are preparing Raabe’s defense, including how they are using the computer equipment bought by the county.

But court records offer a glimpse inside the defense team’s war room. Raabe’s private investigators--Cardullo, Knowles, Lawhom & Vacca of Irvine--have been meeting regularly with experts, reviewing witnesses’ statements, and making “contact with sources” to “locate/develop information,” according to the records.

From early June to July 12, for example, the investigators billed taxpayers about $5,000 for 148 hours of work and expenses--much of it relating to “change of venue research.” Raabe’s defense has said they plan to ask Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey to move the case out of the county.

Pohlson said Raabe will be exonerated.

“Here is a guy who worked seven days a week to avert damage to this county,” Pohlson said. “It’s a big psychological blow for him to be blamed for this, but he has done nothing wrong.”

It was the investment pool’s stunning $1.69-billion loss and subsequent bankruptcy last year that sparked the biggest district attorney’s investigation in recent memory. Top prosecutors assigned fraud specialists to join investigators from the special-assignments unit, which has probed corruption cases in the past. The group has since grown to include experts on legal issues and computer whizzes.

“We put together a team which was essentially a combination from a bunch of different areas,” Wade said.

Prosecutors also needed someone to manage a fast-growing cascade of documents seized in searches of county offices and Citron’s home.

“We were moving so fast. So much was happening. We had 30 to 40 investigators gathering materials every day,” said Shave, who was assigned last December to put the documents in order. That task has been accomplished largely with the help of a sophisticated software system that allows documents to be entered into a computer, then indexed for retrieval later on.

The door is marked “Noah’s Ark,” which Shave said was inspired by the hard rains that flooded Orange County during the hectic weeks after the bankruptcy. Besides serving as a high-tech storehouse for the district attorney’s office, the Bunker has been a key archive for a host of others involved in the bankruptcy case: the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, state corporations regulators, county auditors, treasurer’s officials and the defense lawyers.

Across the basement parking lot, the documents themselves are stored in row after row of cardboard boxes, most bearing little hint of the high-stakes case their contents may help decide.

On a shelf, someone has propped a framed citation. Awarded by a national public administrator’s group before the county’s collapse and later seized from the treasurer’s office, the citation honors Raabe’s ex-boss--Citron.

It names him “Outstanding Elected Public Official.”

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Raabe’s Defense Bill

Former Assistant Treasurer Matthew Raabe has been declared indigent, leaving the county to foot the bill for his defense in charges stemming from last December’s bankruptcy. Just a partial accounting reveals that costs ran to more than a half-million dollars through the end of October:

Approved fees for attorney Gary M. Pohlson: $350,000.00

Approved fees for attorney Richard L. Schwartzberg: $175,000.00

Private investigator Cardullo, Knowles, Lawhom & Vacca Inc.: $4,859.64

Computer hardware including laptop computer and storage: $9,155.00

Computer software, including information storage disks: $300.00

20,315 documents (three sets): $5,029.48

Document scanning: $1,625.00

Pacific Clippings for news articles in June: $88.36

Office Depot: $60.22

Total: $546,117.70

Source: Orange County Superior Court