Dramatic Life, Death of an O.C. Judge

Tucked into her bed in Fullerton, Oretta Ferri Sears died 15 years ago today, more quietly than she had lived, but no less dramatically.

Born to an aristocratic line of Italians that dates to the Crusades, she was one of Orange County’s most colorful public figures--and its first female Superior Court judge.

And she was, undoubtedly, the only countess to work for the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Passionate, fair, charming, dogged, intense--abrasive, some said--Sears was driven to magnificent achievements for a woman of her upbringing and time. Yet her dark streak, say many who knew her, was probably what led to her tragic death at age 52.

After cutting her legal teeth under U.S. Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, Sears in 1968 came to Orange County, where she helped prosecute the biggest campaign donor in California at the time. She then worked to prosecute a Mafia porn distributor, for which the Italian government personally thanked her. That case led to a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing communities to set their own obscenity standards.

Then, she ran for Superior Court judge, unseating an incumbent.

Most who knew her, however, believe she was happiest making a case before the bench rather than sitting behind it.

Her gift, colleagues say, was legal research and sculpting it into written arguments that other prosecutors would use.

“She was quite an incredible woman,” said Loren DuChesne, chief investigator for the district attorney’s office and a close colleague.

“She had a real skill for . . . developing legal theories and putting them down on paper [to submit] to court,” said Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi, who worked with Sears and admired her. “She did the pretrial motions, sometimes during the trial, and appellate work; she did very few trials themselves.

“I think that with her, we developed a reputation of being the leaders of trying to get a grip on the proliferation of the pornography that was spreading then,” Capizzi added.

“It has had some lasting impact on the county. We’ve never had a return to the type of activity that was going on or that we were approaching when we were finally able to put an end to it. There were actual sex acts taking place on the stage.”

Quite a battle to be fought by a woman christened Oretta Giovanna Laura Maria Ferri, Contessa della Fiorita, Marchesa di Montecalvo. “So many names,” she had once mused, “for a 6-pound baby.” She was born Feb. 1, 1928, in Carrara, Italy.

Despite her heritage of wealth as heir to the Carrara marble fortune, her life had all the tragedy of a Puccini opera.

On the night of Dec. 15, 1980, her poet husband, Donald Sears, found her dead in their bed, overdosed on barbiturates and booze.

At least one friend--an investigator who worked with Sears on the Mafia case--still wonders if it was a mob hit, and her family initially thought it an accidental overdose, although the Orange County coroner’s office ruled the death a suicide.

Four times the lethal dose of sleeping pills was found in her bloodstream, and her blood alcohol content indicated she had drunk about three glasses of wine. There were a dozen partially dissolved sleeping pills in her stomach.

*

Sears’ mother, Andreina Ferri-Nardi, was the only child of a count made rich by the marble quarry. She was born to one of the count’s chambermaids, who returned to her poor family in the hills to deliver her out-of-wedlock child. But the count pursued her and married her.

Ferri-Nardi was reared to inherit the operation of the family marble business, but she eschewed it. Her father arranged a marriage for her with a well-off friend. That friend, also a count, was Oretta’s father, who proved to be a tormented alcoholic.

They had two children, a son and Oretta--siblings who were very close.

*

By the time she turned 18, Oretta’s parents were long divorced, her father had killed himself, and her only sibling, a brother she adored, was killed fighting in the Italian Resistance movement.

Always dramatic, she worked as a stage and radio actress. She was performing the day Florence was taken by the Allies in World War II.

Fleeing a mother described by some as overbearing and demanding, Oretta became a war bride and went to America with her new husband, a soldier from New Jersey.

But her dreams of a happy life in her new country and being educated at an American university were not quickly realized.

Oretta’s mother-in-law made no secret of her disapproval--openly calling Oretta derogatory ethnic names.

She became pregnant and, according to her late husband’s writings, the birth of her daughter left her unable to have more children.

Nearly a decade later, Oretta enrolled in Upsala College in New Jersey, and her life began to change dramatically.

She fell in love with her English professor in a story straight out of a movie plot.

She had traded barbs often with the professor, Donald Sears. One day a snowstorm hit while they were on campus, and he insisted on walking her home. By the time they got there, a blizzard was in full force and the two were snowbound in the house for a weekend--their respective spouses trapped elsewhere and livid.

Eventually, Oretta and her husband moved to the West Coast, where she earned her law degree at UCLA. After she graduated, she was one of an elite few who went to work as part of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department in the early 1960s. She handled mostly water rights cases involving the West.

It took three years from that first snowstorm tryst before the lovers completed the divorces of their spouses and were free to marry, in Washington, D.C.

By later in the decade--after both Kennedys had been assassinated--Sears was disillusioned with her work and struggling with a personal dilemma. Her relationship with her mother--who had followed her to her new home--had become very stressful.

The couple decided to make a fresh start away from all they had known, and moved to Africa.

They accepted posts in Nigeria, where Donald Sears was dean of two large campuses and Oretta taught law. They arrived amid civil war and remained for less than a year of their three-year contract.

Back in the states, the couple settled in Orange County. Oretta Sears accepted a job with the district attorney, and Donald Sears became a popular professor at Cal State Fullerton and a published poet.

Former colleagues like Capizzi and Loren W. DuChesne, the district attorney and his chief investigator, say Sears was strident and enigmatic, irritating, a tad egotistical, unabashedly patriotic about being a naturalized American, and a crusader when it came to cases or issues important to her.

Her expertise, DuChesne said, was in writing the department’s writs and appeals--more of a scholarly writing job than being a courtroom soldier. But Oretta, DuChesne says with admiration, was a tireless fighter.

One of her first battles as an Orange County prosecutor was arresting the chief aide to a New York crime family boss. The aide, Ettore Zappi, was accused of interstate distribution of pornographic material, said Jack Marwin, a former investigator who now has a private practice in Newport Beach.

“It was probably the best case I ever worked on. There was a bunch of wise guys involved. And it was the first time, to my knowledge, and I worked enforcement since 1959, that a true Mafia chief was ever arrested in Orange County. . . . Zappi was Carlo Gambino’s top guy at the time, and Gambino, you didn’t get any bigger.

“Oretta,” he added, “had the courage to take it on, and she was the most devoted on it.”

The New York Daily News splashed the story across its front pages for weeks.

Sears helped make big news back home, too, in what was surely the county’s most sweeping political scandal until Orange County Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron’s risky investments triggered the largest municipal bankruptcy in the U.S. a year ago this month.

Sears wrote search warrants, and answers to appeals, in a political corruption case involving Dr. Louis Cella, an influential hospital administrator who was then the biggest campaign donor in the state.

Cella was accused of billing Medi-Cal for nonexistent patients, then funneling the money into the campaigns of numerous candidates for whom he would play kingmaker.

Capizzi and others prosecuted a bevy of politicians.

At one point, Sears was called to testify in the case as a witness and broke into tears on the stand, her emotional outburst a source of chagrin, she later said.

After Sears spent nine months writing legal briefs arguing against Cella’s motion to dismiss the case, Cella eventually pleaded guilty.

There were other painful times. Her health was not good, and, friends say now, she was sometimes almost unable to function outside work without her husband’s assistance.

During her very public legal battles, her daughter was dancing nude at strip clubs in Los Angeles, Sears’ friends say, more than an embarrassment as she fought pornography issues.

It was one of the many contradictory elements in her life.

She was a woman with a commanding presence who could not drive a car.

She was heir to considerable wealth from the valued marble quarry in Italy, but spent a modest $3,205 on her judicial campaign.

She was a highly moralistic woman who helped shape national definitions of obscenity. But she also had an affair and won the heart of a married man with four children.

She left the father of her only child for a professor with poetry in his heart, and a custody dispute ensued.

She was no-nonsense at work, and so driven that she sometimes called Capizzi at home to talk about a case for a couple of hours in the dead of night. But with her husky Italian accent and romantic streak, she inspired lusty prose by her husband about jumping nude on hotel beds and ordering Italian love salads from room service, among other capers.

She drank too much, at least later in life. And it appears to have contributed to her death. A few days before she died, it was later learned, Sears rewrote her will and said that she was “so tired.”

Capizzi, for one, thinks that she may not have been happy as a judge, that winning the election was more gratifying than actually performing the job.

“I’m not sure how happy she was on the bench,” he said. “She was a real competitor and she liked the personal satisfaction of getting into a competitive setting and prevailing, and I don’t think the role of judge permitted her that.”

Her death left an air of mystery because there were unanswered questions as to why she had taken her own life. But her husband seemed to understand the contrast between her dark and light sides, and her public versus private persona.

Large portions of his 1983 poetry book, “The Magellan Heart,” are either about or dedicated to Oretta Sears.

Oretta, toward the end of her life, had become a serious-seeming woman to much of the public she served. Her husband wrote:

Public eyes perceive:

Middle-aged

Hair boyish short and tinged with gray

Snapping questions from the bench

Wearing dignity with grace

Certain of respect

She sits as judge of the appellate court

My eye reflects:

Mediterranean sky

The flowing sun-flecked mane of hair

The racing down the beach

Alive, I’m alive

Don’t saddle me

They didn’t fence you in.