Simpson Could Overshadow Garcetti’s Pursuit of Vision

When he was sworn in four years ago as district attorney, Gil Garcetti said his job was not just to prosecute bad guys.

Signaling a fundamental shift in priorities, he said he also was obliged to try to prevent crime.

And then came the O.J. Simpson murder case.

With election day nearing, the key for Garcetti is whether voters reward him for pursuing his vision--or whether the loss of the Simpson prosecution overshadows his accomplishments.

During his term, Garcetti has overseen a 93% overall conviction rate, instituted specialized prosecution units and championed crime prevention programs. He has done these things while coping with an enormous caseload, owing to the onset of the three-strikes law, as well as with county budget woes that have frozen deputy district attorneys’ pay and sunk office morale.

Garcetti backers say he has persevered because he is a man of character and compassion--at the core, a son still agonizing over the three times his late father was mugged, a 28-year prosecutor who has used the authority of elected office to punish and prevent thuggery.

It is precisely the issue of character, however, that so infuriates Garcetti critics.

Challenger John Lynch, for instance, says the hundreds of thousands of dollars Garcetti has accepted in campaign donations have created at least an appearance of impropriety. In particular, Lynch and his supporters hammer on the propriety of a case in which the grandson of a campaign donor received a plea bargain and a lenient sentence.

And they criticize Garcetti for a management style that they term imperious and that clearly has alienated a faction among the 1,000 prosecutors who staff the nation’s largest public law office.

As Nov. 5 draws near, with both the incumbent and the challenger casting the election as a referendum on Garcetti’s term, it’s unclear whether any of these issues will matter to voters--or whether Garcetti’s place in local lore turns on the Simpson case.

“If Gil loses, it clearly will be because voters are rejecting him,” said Robert Bonner, a former federal judge and U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. “Not personally rejecting him. But holding him accountable for the O.J. Simpson not guilty verdict and, to a lesser degree, a perception that the D.A.’s office has not been able to win the big cases.”

If not for the Simpson case, political observers said, Garcetti would have sailed into the election season able to focus his campaign on the notion that he is one public official who actually has delivered on the bulk of his promises.

The day he was sworn in, Garcetti offered a specific agenda:

* His “first priority,” he said, was the prosecution of violent street crime. Other priorities included cases involving gangs, domestic violence, hate crimes and a variety of frauds.

* The enforcement of child support orders had “special enormous import.”

* And in what he called a “fundamental departure” from the traditional role of district attorney, he pledged to “find and create programs to keep kids away from gangs, off of drugs and in school.”

This last issue has been a defining distinction between Garcetti and Lynch.

At a debate this summer, Lynch said certain crime prevention programs were “at the margins” of the district attorney’s job. In a recent interview, he said he would use different words if he had the debate to do over again and is not opposed to deputies’ “personal commitment to being good citizens.” But he stressed: “The public wants the prosecutor in the courtroom, winning in the courtroom.”

Throughout the campaign, Garcetti has sought to highlight this difference between the two men, contending that Lynch is a visionless bureaucrat and that the gut issue of the election is plain: Who will make Los Angeles safer?

Lynch, he says, has been a “Johnny One-Note” candidate, focusing on Simpson. Take a look, Garcetti urges voters, at his record:

In the past four years, the district attorney’s office filed a total of about 350,000 felony cases--and attained that 93% conviction rate.

Lynch has said the rate would stay at 93% under him or anyone else. It comes with the territory, he says, because most cases end in plea bargains.

Garcetti, however, noted that he has had to cope with a 25% rise in jury trials prompted by the three-strikes law. The 1994 law mandates a sentence of 25 years to life for a third felony conviction if the earlier convictions were for violent or serious crimes--offering the defendant little incentive for a plea bargain that would do away with the need for a trial.

Although he supported a different version of the law, Garcetti, like most prosecutors in the state, has adopted a straightforward policy of enforcing what voters approved: Every case that qualifies as a third strike is filed that way.

Meanwhile, Garcetti’s “hard-core” division of four dozen prosecutors has achieved a conviction rate of about 90% in gang-related cases, mostly murders and notoriously difficult to prove. That division has also pioneered the use of civil injunctions to target gang-related activity in Norwalk, Pasadena, Long Beach, Inglewood and elsewhere.

In 1993 and 1994, Garcetti created units to prosecute domestic violence, hate crimes, workers’ compensation fraud and auto insurance fraud.

“This man is responsible for saving women’s lives,” said women’s rights advocate Tammy Bruce, who lavished praise at a Garcetti campaign rally for “a commitment [to domestic violence prosecutions] that is unparalleled in any county in this country.”

During his term, Garcetti has sharply increased staffing levels in the unit that collects child support, from 50 prosecutors to 100 and from 734 support staff to 917.

Collections improved to $195 million in fiscal 1996, up from $124 million in fiscal 1992--thanks also to a computer system that finally went online and not surprisingly has proved more effective than pushing paper to track some 660,000 cases.

Parents still teem with complaints--in particular, that it sometimes seems impossible to get anyone at the D.A.’s office to answer the phone or provide the correct information. The unit still has “a very long way to go,” said Donna Hershkowitz, staff attorney for the Harriet Buhai Center for Family Law, which assists low-income parents, but Garcetti “has definitely made some improvements.”

In the area of crime prevention, Garcetti has been instrumental in implementing mentoring programs as well as a novel anti-truancy program that includes letters to parents and follow-up meetings involving parents, prosecutors and school officials.

“Gil Garcetti is the first district attorney in my lifetime who has invested the [same] amount of time and resources on the prevention side as he has on the enforcement side,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

At a campaign rally, Yaroslavsky also noted that Garcetti has earned a reputation at the county board as an activist manager dedicated to fending off any cuts to his budget.

When Garcetti was sworn in, the D.A.’s office was facing the prospect of layoffs. Although the county has since teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, Garcetti has not only avoided layoffs--he presided over a 13% budget increase from $144.4 million in fiscal 1993 to $163.2 million in 1996.

The budget hike has essentially enabled his department to stay afloat; occasionally, a few dozen new prosecutors have been hired. There has not, however, been a pay raise for the past four years.

That fact alone has generated immense ill will among the deputy district attorneys scattered in about two dozen courthouses around Los Angeles County. In some quarters, the ill will turned to outright hostility when the news broke that Garcetti had awarded $43,000 in bonuses to three of the prosecutors in the Simpson case.

When Herb Lapin, the president of the nonunion Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys, resigned the presidency a few weeks ago so he could openly support Lynch, the first reason he cited was the bonuses.

Garcetti says now that he would never have awarded the bonuses if he had known that prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden were going to get multimillion-dollar book deals. “If I had the information then that I have today, it would have been different, obviously,” he said.

Garcetti’s critics assert that the flap over the bonuses crystallizes their two main complaints about him. They say he rewards favorites but exiles or punishes challengers to his authority. And when it comes to money and the appearance of propriety, they say, he just doesn’t get it.

“He seems to be morally obtuse,” said defense attorney Harland Braun, who recruited Garcetti in 1968 for the district attorney’s office but now supports Lynch.

For instance, ire in the office runs deep over Garcetti’s treatment of Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn, who won the Menendez brothers’ retrial with a verdict that came in just a few days before the March 26 primary election, muting criticism that the district attorney’s office couldn’t win the big cases. The brothers’ first trial had ended two years before with hung juries.

Conn then happened to mention to a reporter that he might one day be interested in being D.A.

A short time later, Conn was denied promotion to a coveted position as a head deputy. He was told he lacked management experience.

“Here’s a guy who won a big case,” said a former prosecutor who asked to remain unnamed. “In some ways, he saved Gil’s bacon. Why not promote the guy?”

“That’s a management position,” Garcetti said. “End of story.”

In many ways, meanwhile, the central issue in this year’s race has been the amount of money Garcetti has raised--$714,460 on hand as of Sept. 30, according to county disclosure forms, an amount unheard of in prior races for the position.

Lynch, by contrast, had $47,462.

Woodland Hills-based Zenith Insurance gave Garcetti more than that in one lump sum, $50,000 on Aug. 14; since 1992, it has donated at least $132,500. Hollywood investor A. Jerrold Perenchio also gave $50,000, on Sept. 4.

Overall, Garcetti’s disclosure forms read like a list of the wealthy, the powerful and the politically connected: $25,000 last year from the Southern California District Council of Carpenters’ political action committee; $20,428 this year from oil giant Arco; $10,000 on March 25 from W.M. Keck, president of the philanthropic Keck Foundation; two $5,000 checks from the Walt Disney Co., one on May 7, another on Aug. 14.

Garcetti makes no apologies for being good at raising money, claiming that doing it is proof of community support where it really counts--in the wallet.

Lynch won’t take more than $5,000 from a single donor, saying he doesn’t want to create the appearance that he’s selling access to the office. Garcetti says any suggestion that he’s for sale is an election-season charge with no basis in fact.

Lynch says Garcetti should return $170,000 donated in 1992 by Guess? Inc. and another $50,000 contributed last year by company co-founder Georges Marciano, asserting that such sums create the appearance of impropriety because the district attorney’s office sometimes prosecutes cases involving the theft of Guess? jeans or other products.

Garcetti has said many times that the contributions were properly reported on campaign disclosure forms. He also insists that Guess? has no undue influence in the office and that he does not meddle in cases involving the company.

The district attorney also has said many times that he did not meddle in a case involving Brian John McMorrow, the grandson of a Westside businessman who donated $13,000 to Garcetti’s 1992 campaign.

The younger McMorrow, a two-time robber accused last year of attempted arson, a felony that would have been his third strike, ultimately pleaded no contest last Nov. 22 to a lesser count of attempted vandalism. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

While the case was pending, the elder McMorrow called Garcetti to inquire about it. Garcetti has said he took the call, had a staffer check on it, then told the elder McMorrow there was nothing he could do.

After the case ended, the elder McMorrow donated another $1,000 to Garcetti. In June, the state attorney general’s office--which the Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys had asked to check into the case--announced that it would take no action.

Garcetti said he often gets such calls from contributors--as well as from clergymen and others. An internal memo, written by Robert Schirn, the deputy who approved the plea agreement, says Garcetti did not pressure his deputies to strike a plea bargain.

Yet the issue will not go away. “It’s the kind of act that destroys people’s faith in the justice system, because it’s obvious that someone with access and money gets incredibly better treatment than 99.9% of the people similarly situated,” charged Steve Cooley, who heads the district attorney’s San Fernando branch.

Garcetti acknowledges the anger in the office. But he also is quick to note that when the deputies conducted a straw poll on Oct. 2, he defeated Lynch, 303-269.

Garcetti also acknowledges the anger among voters over the Simpson case. He earned only 37% of the primary vote in March.

But, he pointed out, in recent weeks he has gained the endorsements of dozens of elected local, state and federal officials as well as major labor, political and law enforcement groups--all of whom, he makes clear, were willing to look beyond the Simpson case.

Just this week, the Los Angeles Police Protective League announced that it was endorsing Garcetti after interviewing both men. Heading into the election, Garcetti said, he feels confident.

“It seems like every time Mr. Lynch and I have gone toe to toe, I’ve come out on top,” he said.

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Profile: Gil Garcetti

In 1992, then-Deputy Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti defeated his boss, Ira Reiner, to become the county’s chief prosecutor. Now Garcetti is being challenged by one of his deputies, John Lynch, who heads the Norwalk branch office.

* Born: Aug. 5, 1941, in a house at 41st and Figueroa streets.

* Residence: Brentwood

* Education: USC, graduated 1963. UCLA Law School, graduated 1967.

* Career highlights: Joined the D.A.’s office in 1967. Served four years as trial deputy in Van Nuys. Helped form office’s Consumer Protection Division. In 1978 became head of Special Investigations Division, which supervises all cases of official misconduct. Chief deputy to Ira Reiner, 1984-88. Head deputy, Torrance branch, 1988-92.

* Interests: Gardening, Japanese folk art, photography, bike riding, travel, opera.

* Family: Married 33 years to Sukey. Two children, Dana, 27, a deputy district attorney, and Eric, 25, a Rhodes scholar.

* Quote: “I like to believe that I have been righteously ambitious and a very hard worker all my entire life. No one has given me anything on a silver platter.”