A Legal Player With an Inside Edge : Ronald Brower Works His Connections for Clients, Both in and out of Court

When folks zip up the elevator to attorney Ronald G. Brower’s spacious penthouse office, where the heads of big-horned Alaskan sheep and deer he’s killed stare down from a wall near the wet bar, they’re not always there just because he’s a good attorney.

They’re also there, often facing a mountain of damning evidence, because the tall, dapper defense attorney with the tailor-made suits and flashy cars is a Player.

In Orange County’s tight-knit legal community, Brower, a Democrat, chairs the election campaigns of judges, and raises money for Republican Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi.

He knows which prosecutors will deal, which judges will cut a break and, he says with a deep-throated chuckle, lots of secrets.

For this access, Brower, 55, has become the attorney of choice for some of the county’s highest-profile clients, including Dr. Ricardo H. Asch, the famed UC Irvine fertility specialist accused of stealing the embryos of his patients, and, most recently, newly elected Assemblyman Scott Baugh, under investigation by the district attorney for campaign finance irregularities.

“The most important thing that a client pays a criminal lawyer to know is the personality and the predispositions of the district attorneys and the judges,” Brower said. “That’s way more important than the law in my business.”

Brower’s insider’s view fetches him top dollar, paid in full upfront. In lieu of cash, Brower recently accepted Asch’s white Ferrari as partial payment, parking it in the garage of his Lemon Heights home next to his 1980 Ferrari and convertible Porsche.

“He has a very good understanding of how the system works,” said Orange County Superior Court Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary. “He doesn’t try to sell something to a judge that he considers a plus, if he thinks the judge won’t think it’s a plus.”

O’Leary said Brower’s assessment of her allowed him to take a gamble last year for one of his clients, Mun Bong Kang, one of five teenagers charged in the 1992 murder of honors student Stuart Tay.

Kang, facing a first-degree murder charge with a special circumstance that meant he could receive the death penalty, pleaded guilty to murder before his trial started, saying he wanted to spare Tay’s parents the ordeal of another trial.

O’Leary said Brower correctly judged that she would find Kang’s early admittance of wrongdoing a mitigating factor to remove the special circumstance involving the death penalty.

“He sort of assesses the judge,” O’Leary said. “I could have just discounted it.”

Brower and his colleagues say high-profile clients, from judges to police officers to prosecutors, also seek him out because of his skill at keeping their cases out of court.

“He’s very good at damage control,” said John Barnett, a top Orange County defense attorney. “I think he settles a lot of cases and I mean that in a positive way. He’s got a very good thermometer for taking the temperature of people around him.”

Brower currently represents Orange County Municipal Judge Claude E. Whitney, under state investigation for accusations that he denied hundreds of poor defendants their constitutional rights. He said he also has represented four other local judges, accused in recent years of such things as sexual or judicial misconduct and substance abuse.

“The reason you don’t know about them is because I do such a good job,” said Brower, who averages five jury trials a year while juggling 60 to 100 felony and misdemeanor cases at a time.

Around the Santa Ana Courthouse, the smooth, easygoing style of the always impeccably turned-out Brower draws mixed reviews. Some of his peers complain that the snowy-haired Brower is “a good ol’ boy,” more concerned with connections and fat fees than representing his clients.

Irvine attorney Steve Corris said Brower is part of a “good old boy system in this county that should be looked at and changed. They get cases appointed to them by judges that other competent attorneys do not get or have a chance to get.”

Corris is running for Municipal Judge in Laguna Niguel against Deputy Dist. Atty. Carl Biggs, whose campaign committee is chaired by Brower.

Brower said he knows some have taken a jaundiced view of his style. Deputy Public Defender Lewis Clapp, his co-counsel on a recent murder case, turned to him during the trial, Brower said, and said with surprise that Brower had done a good job.

“I asked him if he thought I was all glitz and he said, ‘Yes,’ ” Brower said, laughing.

Clapp concedes he did have a negative image of Brower before the trial.

“My image of him was that people probably think he’s really good because, ‘Look how nicely he dresses, look how he knows everyone,’ ” Clapp said. “You got the feeling he would just rather deal the case, get his money and move on.”

But Clapp said Brower proved him wrong, getting crucial information into the jury instructions and keeping grisly crime scene photographs of the 16-year-old victim out of evidence. “He persuaded the court to do things in the case that I wasn’t able to,” Clapp said. “He’s a good lawyer. He’s not argumentative as much as persuasive.”

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Brower said part of his success through the years lies in his willingness to take risks other lawyers wouldn’t take.

“There’s never a knee-jerk reaction that we don’t talk to police or law enforcement,” he said. “I believe that’s a disservice to your clients not to allow them to disabuse [prosecutors] of certain opinions filed against your client.”

He’s offered to let both Asch and Baugh talk to authorities at various times.

Brower said Asch was referred to him by “three different civil law firms.” Brower said he took the job, despite the overwhelming nature of the charges, because Asch “could afford to pay [my] fees and it had a unique subject matter . . . that’s an easy decision.” He won’t say who is paying Baugh’s legal tab.

Brower said he does not charge by the hour, but generally requests a flat fee from clients in hopes of grossing about $1,000 a hour. His minimum fee, for the most minor misdemeanor, is $3,500, he said.

But while his reputation has drawn wealthy, headline-grabbing clients, Brower said the cases that stick with him are those where he defended court-appointed clients who could never afford him.

“Saving a person with your skills who doesn’t have the means to hire someone like you is more satisfying than it is to have the same result for someone who is wealthy,” he said.

Brower said his toughest case was defending a 20-year-old Santa Ana man accused of stabbing another man at a party. The mid-1980s case went on for three years and the prosecutor finally offered a deal that would allow Brower’s client to plead guilty and receive probation, Brower said.

“My client turned it down,” said Brower, who believed his client was innocent. “I sweated bullets on that trial. He was found not guilty. But it was the most difficult time of my professional career.”

Brower also was forced to testify in 1988 against a client he saved from receiving a life-without-parole sentence, when the client, a former Saddleback College assistant dean convicted of killing his wife in front of nine eyewitnesses, accused Brower of incompetence and demanded a new trial.

Compelled by the court, Brower testified that Donald E. Dawson had told him he had lain in wait to kill his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

Brower’s reputation recently took a battering when a federal judge overturned the rape conviction of a Long Beach man sentenced to death for the murder and rape of a Mission Viejo women in 1981. The March ruling said Thomas Martin Thompson received poor assistance from Brower in his original trial and the special-circumstance finding that led to the death sentence should be overturned.

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Both Brower and the prosecutor in the case disputed the judge’s findings and blamed the loss of the case on the behavior of Thompson, who insisted on testifying.

“Ron did an outstanding job,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Jacobs, who has referred close friends to Brower. “It was a real war, that trial, and Ron tried that case as well as he could.”

Brower said it’s tough to measure success when defending people that arrive on his doorstep accused of heinous crimes. “You have to get used to measuring victory in increments, rather than black-and-white guilty and not-guilty terms,” said Brower, who said he believes his clients “less than 10% of the time.”

For Brower, much of his drive--and his taste for the good life--started with his impoverished beginnings growing up in the Compton-North Long Beach area. He had paper routes, just like any other kid, albeit three at a time. But Brower’s most proud of his “gambling board,” a wooden board he fashioned after a game at an old Long Beach amusement park. Every two weeks, the 11-year-old would go door to door, getting people to toss coins at the squares on the board. If they hit a square, they won the amount of money in the square. If they hit a line, Brower won the cash.

“I would go out for a few hours and I could make $20 to $25,” said Brower, who said he also ran a lawn-mowing business at 11 and clerked at a liquor store and reset bowling pins for $10 a game as a teenager.

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After an aborted college stint, Brower spent five years working as a cook and host for $1.90 an hour at a Knott’s Berry Farm restaurant, where he met his wife, Stacy, while she worked as a summer waitress.

Brower returned to Cal State Long Beach to become a doctor, but decided along the way that he wanted to “become the television image of a lawyer. I wanted to be a courtroom lawyer.” After graduation, he attended UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and returned to Orange County. He and his wife have three sons, including one who recently joined the district attorney’s office as a prosecutor.

To colleagues and clients who see Brower pacing in county courtrooms, it’s clear Brower has achieved his college career dreams.

“He is this very well-dressed, dapper sort of guy. . . . When you look up the word lawyer in the dictionary, that’s what he’d look like,” said Christopher Evans, head of the district attorney’s homicide unit. But “with Brower, you don’t make the mistake of underestimating him.”

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Profile: Ronald G. Brower

Age: 55

Hometown: Compton

Residence: Lemon Heights

Family: Wife, Stacy, a vice president of marketing for a women’s career development center; three sons

Education: Bachelor’s degree in psychology, Cal State Long Beach; law degree, UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law

Professional background: Prosecutor in Orange and San Luis Obispo counties for four years; criminal defense attorney for 19 years

Outlook: “It’s much easier to defend a person that’s guilty than a person that’s innocent. . . . The thought of having to live with the fact that you’ve failed professionally and an innocent man went to jail is tough to live with.”

Source: Ronald G. Brower; Researched by TRACY WEBER / Los Angeles Times