Short of Funds, Lynch Puts Race’s Focus on Garcetti

Personally speaking, he is a committed family man, a dedicated early morning jogger, a Shakespeare buff and the owner of a 185-pound Irish wolfhound named Seamus. He also has loads of disarming charm and a ready wit.

Professionally, he is a 19-year veteran of the district attorney’s office respected by his peers for his sober-minded analysis, integrity and a sense of humanity.

Politically, he is a novice running an underfunded campaign who is taking on an incumbent with extraordinary name recognition and ample cash.

Above all, however, John Lynch is not Gil Garcetti.

And, with election day drawing near, the question lingers: Is that all that really matters?

Lynch, the head of the district attorney’s Norwalk office, emerged from the March primary with 21% of the vote, forcing a November runoff with Garcetti, who got 37%.

Throughout the campaign, Lynch’s strategy has been straightforward and blunt. He has emphasized the prosecution defeat in the O.J. Simpson murder case.

The reason, Lynch said, is that the trial provided a window into what he sees as Garcetti’s penchant for self-promotion and illuminated what he calls a flawed management style.

Lynch’s strategy is partly the product of design. It is also partly attributable to financial constraints.

The design is to keep the focus on Garcetti--in recent weeks a task more easily done because of the release of new books about the Simpson case and the onset of the wrongful-death civil trial against the former football star.

It also has given Lynch--who had $47,462 in the bank as of Sept. 30, according to campaign disclosure forms--the opportunity to tap voter anger over the Simpson case while spending little or no money.

When, for instance, women’s rights lawyer and talk show host Gloria Allred announced Sept. 19 that she was endorsing Lynch, she did so at the Santa Monica courthouse, site of the civil case. Fourteen TV cameras were on hand to record the event for the nightly news, at no cost to Lynch.

Only this week--when Lynch’s black, green and white billboards sprouted along some local freeways--did the challenger take a classic step toward raising his own name recognition.

Again, said campaign manager Rick Taylor, all by design. “We’ve saved our money till the end,” he said Thursday.

Garcetti calls the challenger “Johnny One-Note” because of his focus on the Simpson case. He also describes Lynch as a bureaucrat unprepared for the challenge of elected office.

Lynch, for instance, does not share Garcetti’s view that the elected district attorney must be an activist in the area of crime prevention, an approach that has led Garcetti to charge that Lynch has no vision. In fact, Lynch does have ideas. But his focus is on specific, unglamorous steps he believes would make the office more effective in filing and prosecuting cases.

Asked in a recent interview what his plans would be if elected, Lynch said he would take a fresh look at the office’s policy on three-strikes cases. Both Lynch and Garcetti support the law, but Lynch believes Garcetti has enforced it in a way that allows too much variation from courthouse to courthouse. “Got to have uniformity,” Lynch said.

He also said Garcetti has surrounded himself with redundant layers of senior management and that his top staff would be leaner.

He vowed to pick experienced prosecutors for big cases, provide them with the tools to do the job and then step out of their way--not question their professional judgment. On the other hand, he said he would seek the input of the office’s “accomplished trial lawyers” on “major decisions.”

Meanwhile, Lynch’s strategy, with its pointed emphasis on the Simpson case, has divided political observers.

Some said Lynch can’t win because he’s so unknown on the political stage and because he has not articulated a clear message about himself.

These observers added that Lynch seemingly squandered the fund-raising momentum he had coming out of the March primary and said the best thing he has going for him is that his name may seem familiar at the ballot box. A former county assessor also was named John Lynch.

“He has no money, and I would bet that if I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, 99.6% of Angelenos can’t either,” said Susan Estrich, a law professor at USC and a politics junkie who managed Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign.

“And they won’t learn it from him on $47,462. That’s brutal but true,” she said. “And it’s a reflection of the importance of money in politics. If this guy were a millionaire in his own right challenging Gil Garcetti, we’d all be taking him seriously. And he’d be serious. But he’s not. So he isn’t.”

Others insist that Lynch is a good bet to win because it doesn’t matter who he is. Simply, he’s not Garcetti.

“My question for the average person is, do you really want Garcetti to be handling the most important cases for the public?” asked defense attorney Harland Braun, who recruited Garcetti for the district attorney’s office but now supports Lynch.

“My answer is no,” Braun said. “And I think he’s going to lose because most people are going to vote against him. Most people don’t know who Lynch is.”

Lynch, 50, was born and raised near Boston, the fifth of seven children. His father was a bus driver, his mother a homemaker.

“He was just brought up the old-fashioned way,” said his mother, Alice Lynch. “Education, family, church, things like that.”

Though he has been in California for nearly 35 years, Lynch still retains his Boston accent. He also, according to former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, has a “marvelous, marvelous Irish charm.”

“You tend on first meeting with him to think he’s a very funny guy,” Reiner said. And Lynch is witty. A few weeks back, speaking of his efforts to raise campaign funds, he said, “I’m spending every available minute with my finance director sitting across the desk from me blocking all escape.”

When Lynch came to California, the idea of being a prosecutor was nowhere on the horizon. He was an enlisted man in the Air Force assigned to the base in El Segundo. When he left the service at age 21, he caught on with TRW nearby, doing computer work.

But he said, “The people at TRW were telling me I was not going to be 21 forever,” and urged him to go to college.

After getting an associate’s degree from El Camino College, he enrolled at USC, fascinated with Shakespeare and intending someday to teach college-level English.

He remains a huge Shakespeare fan, saying he has read parts of Hamlet probably 200 times. The play, he said, has “virtually every human component. Love, hate, jealousy, envy, power, all the human foibles, the best in humanity--it’s all there. And written like no one else.”

At USC, however, “I saw what it meant to be a college professor. I mean, I was really horrified. I thought that at some point in the education process you actually got students that cared about the class content and really wanted to know what Lear was thinking.

“And I saw everybody reading Cliffs Notes, do anything to get an A, just so that they could get to grad school and make some money. There were a couple of nice professors there that sort of urged me to take a look at law.”

At the time, Loyola law school allowed exceptional students to enroll with only three years’ college credit. Lynch got into the program, into the school and graduated in 1976. The next year he joined the district attorney’s office.

His rise to management was rapid. By 1983, he was the office’s legislative advocate in Sacramento and special assistant to Dick Hecht, who remains something of a legend among local prosecutors.

Hecht, who retired in 1993 after serving 32 years as a deputy district attorney, said of Lynch: “John’s the most credible, ethical guy I ever met.”

In 1985, with Reiner the district attorney, Lynch was made head deputy of the environmental crimes unit. Lynch said he was chosen for the post by Reiner’s chief deputy, “a guy named Garcetti.” Three years after that, Reiner made him chief of prosecutions at the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

In that assignment, Lynch served on the district attorney’s committee that decides whether to pursue the death penalty in first-degree murder cases.

He oversaw the prosecution of Charles Keating, the former Lincoln Savings & Loan operator, who was convicted in December 1991 of 17 counts of securities fraud. That conviction was reversed six months ago by a federal judge, who said that Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito--who would go on to preside over the Simpson murder trial--delivered “erroneous” jury instructions.

In 1992, Lynch supervised the filing of all cases stemming from the riots that erupted after the four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with beating Rodney King were found not guilty in state court.

A year after the riots, a Times review found that about 1,600 adults had been convicted of felonies. Though Reiner had called for minimum one-year prison terms for looters, only 19%, invariably veteran criminals, received sentences of a year or longer. The median sentence was 62 days.

Lynch made it plain in 1993 that those results seemed just, saying that the riot defendants looked pretty much like the people found in Municipal Court, where petty thefts and misdemeanor drug cases prevail.

In 1993, shortly after Garcetti became district attorney, Lynch was sent to head the Santa Monica branch. According to recently retired Superior Court Judge David Rothman, then the supervising judge in Santa Monica, Lynch was not only professional but, in something of a twist for a prosecutor, unusually cooperative.

“He would tell you what his thoughts were, strongly and forcefully,” Rothman said. “Then if I wanted to go ahead with some policy or amended it to deal with his concerns, it was like a collaborative effort. When we put something in motion, he said, ‘OK, let’s see how it works.’ ”

Since the fall of 1994, Lynch has headed the district attorney’s Norwalk branch.

That June, Simpson was arrested. In the days after the arrest, Garcetti made several appearances on television to discuss the case--appearances that Lynch still considers inappropriate and unseemly.

So did some other senior deputies in the office. They were offended that this was the same Garcetti who was quoted during the 1992 election campaign against Reiner as saying, “I believe that we must take the politics and the politician out of the district attorney’s office.”

“I don’t disagree with what Gil says,” Lynch said recently. “It’s what he does.”

As the Simpson case lurched forward, a quiet campaign began within the district attorney’s office to find someone to challenge Garcetti.

“We had a talk about it,” said one of Lynch’s closest advisors, Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, who heads the Compton branch. “It wasn’t just enough to want to unseat Gil. He had to want to be the D.A. [Lynch] felt he wanted to be the D.A., felt he could do the job.”

As last autumn ticked away, however, Lynch “was procrastinating,” Bozanich said. Finally, “I said, ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll do it, because somebody’s got to do it.’ ”

Last November, on his mother’s birthday, Lynch called her to say he was in the race. “Once I told Ma, everything was OK,” he said. The next month, just barely meeting the filing deadline, he announced formally that he was in.

In March, capitalizing on key endorsements and what political analysts have come to call the “ABG” vote--”Anyone But Gil”--Lynch beat four other challengers and finished second in the primary.

It wasn’t until June, however, that Lynch hired veteran consultant Rick Taylor to manage the fall campaign. Until then, Taylor said, speaking of the Lynch campaign, “it needed direction.”

It wasn’t until about Labor Day, meanwhile, that Lynch brought fund-raiser Charlie Sena on board and took a leave from the Norwalk office to become a full-time candidate.

Lynch has said many times this year that he is not willing to dip into his pension plan or take out a second mortgage to help fund the campaign. In an interview, he said wryly, “No, I haven’t traded in my kids.”

In all, it’s been enough for some observers--including Garcetti--to question whether Lynch really wants to win.

Lynch dismisses such talk. “I will do everything that I can to become D.A.,” he said. “But it isn’t a monomaniacal fixation.”

At Lynch headquarters, the fixation in recent weeks has been whether the campaign will indeed have enough money to buy TV time. Garcetti, who had $714,460 in the bank as of Sept. 30, is expected to unleash a flurry of ads in the two weeks before election day.

Asked this week how much had been raised to add to the $47,462 the Lynch campaign had in the bank as of last month, Taylor declined to say. But he declared, “We will be on TV the final week.”

Lynch also professed not to be worried about Garcetti’s ad blitz. Once again alluding to the Simpson case, he said, “Garcetti is going to spend his money reminding people that he didn’t--he doesn’t--get it.”

Profile: John Lynch

Political newcomer John Lynch, a prosecutor for 19 years who currently heads the Norwalk branch of the district attorney’s office, is challenging first-term incumbent Gil Garcetti.

* Born: Dec. 12, 1945

* Residence: Manhattan Beach

* Education: USC; Loyola Law School, graduated 1976.

* Career highlights: 1977, joined the D.A.’s office and served as trial deputy in Whittier and Compton branches; 1980, assigned to the Consumer Protection Division; 1983, appointed office’s legislative advocate and made special assistant in Special Operations Division; 1985, named head deputy of Environmental Crimes Division; 1988-92, supervised all prosecutions in downtown courts; 1993-94, head deputy, Santa Monica branch; 1994-present, head deputy, Norwalk branch.

* Interests: Jogging, body surfing, beach volleyball, reading Shakespeare.

* Family: Married to Carol. Two daughters, Heather, 25, and Jennifer, 23.

* Quote: When a prosecutor tries a case, “it sends the wrong message to everybody that you’re out there battling for a break on the 5 o’clock news.”