In D.A.’s Office, Battles Aren’t Confined to Court

Call them malcontents or dismiss them as cranks. Cling hard to the notion their complaints are groundless. Even insist that everything they have to say is motivated by petty politics.

Do all of those things and you’ve still got to wonder what is going on in the district attorney’s office these days.

One veteran prosecutor recently won a partial judgment in her personnel complaint against the office; all that remains is for a jury to decide how much money she should receive.

Another deputy district attorney, who successfully prosecuted the Menendez brothers for murder, also is waging war against the office, angered that his claim for overtime was denied after Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti authorized comp time--and bonuses--to the prosecutors who lost the murder case against O.J. Simpson.

And another prosecutor, who publicly criticized Garcetti for allowing bonuses in the Simpson case, also is locked in a legal battle with his employer. That deputy district attorney’s claim may not only involve a settlement but could cost the county thousands of dollars, because private attorneys have been hired to defend the office.

What is going on here?

Although Garcetti would not comment, a top official in his office dismissed the confluence of cases as insignificant. Steven Sowders, head deputy district attorney for the employee relations division, suggested that the cases were probably linked to two factors: last year’s contentious election for district attorney, when Garcetti fended off a challenge from veteran administrator John Lynch, and a growing trend statewide toward public employees suing their employers.

“Yeah, it is unusual,” Sowders said of the complaints. “But it seems increasingly common, not just in L.A. County but throughout the state.”

Others in the office dispute Sowders’ conclusion.

“Right now, there are a large group of deputy D.A.’s who absolutely despise the district attorney, who have no respect for him, who do not think he is honest, do not think he has integrity,” said James Bozajian, a Garcetti critic and vice president of the Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys.

If you are in favor with Garcetti, so the allegations go, you have nothing to fear. If not, watch out.

Consider, critics say, the case of Kevin Greber.

Two years ago, the 30-year-old prosecutor publicly chided Garcetti over bonuses paid to the Simpson prosecutors. How, he asked at a downtown seminar for prosecutors, could the office justify paying a total of $43,000 to Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden and William Hodgman?

After Greber made his remarks, one of the office’s veteran--and most outspoken--deputy district attorneys, Peter Bozanich, came over to his young colleague with a warning: Watch yourself.

Greber laughed off the remark, but not for long.

Two weeks after the seminar, the office launched an internal affairs investigation into an incident that others, including Bozanich, say had already been considered not worth an inquiry--Greber’s two disputes with police over speeding tickets.

“They behaved like they were detectives browbeating a confession out of a murderer,” Greber said recently of the January 1996 internal affairs interview that opened the investigation.

The inquiry was later used by the district attorney’s office as grounds for denying Greber a promotion. And after he, in turn, filed a Civil Service claim over that promotion, Garcetti’s office not only decided to fight the matter but the county counsel hired a Century City law firm to represent the office in suing Greber and veteran Deputy Dist. Atty. Dinko Bozanich. (Bozanich’s involvement stemmed from his effort to serve as Greber’s counsel in the Civil Service proceedings.)

“Obviously, Garcetti is not going to back down,” said Bozanich, brother of Peter and one of Garcetti’s biggest critics.

Sowders says there is no reason to second-guess the office’s treatment of Greber.

“We consider this serious,” Sowders said of allegations that Greber twice sought to avoid speeding tickets by reminding police he was a deputy district attorney. “They were appropriately upset with Greber’s [actions],” Sowders said.

Sowders acknowledged that the internal affairs investigation of Greber began months later than it should have but not for the reasons Greber and others claim. Although critics insist that the probe was triggered by Greber’s public questioning of Garcetti, Sowders said it was his own error that caused the investigation to begin several months after the incidents.

“It was a mistake on my part,” said Sowders, who added that he simply forgot about the case after deciding in August that it should be investigated by internal affairs. “I should have given it a higher priority . . . [and] I feel bad about it. It has caused unnecessary speculation” about the timing of the investigation, Sowders said.

Greber and others do not buy Sowders’ explanation.

Maintaining that he only asked police for a warning “like any motorist would do,” Greber said his case was initially viewed by the district attorney’s office as insignificant. “It was so trivial I wasn’t even called in or admonished,” he said.

But after he publicly confronted Garcetti, Greber said, the case was suddenly viewed as significant.

“Garcetti has a reputation as being intimidating . . . [and] vindictive. And I don’t know why I felt like I had to [question him about the bonuses] that morning. I was just fed up with it, and I wanted to see what he had to say,” Greber said.

“Here I am . . . five years in the office, kind of a pipsqueak in the scheme of things, having the audacity and temerity to put it to the boss in front of hundreds of colleagues. And it opened him up to . . . 45 minutes of brutal cross-examination by a roomful of prosecutors.

“I honestly felt what would happen is I would get [a reassignment],” Greber said, referring to the practice, long predating Garcetti, of assigning outspoken prosecutors to outlying offices, allegedly as punishment.

“What he elected to do,” Greber said, “was . . . outrageous.”

The Greber case, said Bozajian of the deputy district attorneys association, seems to validate a common--and damaging--perception of the office.

“I think the administration, whenever there is any note of dissent, feels that the best way to deal with it is squelch out the opinion and punish the perpetrator,” Bozajian said.

And that approach, he said, has created unnecessary animosity.

“While I do not think [former Dist. Atty.] Ira Reiner was popular in this office, I don’t think he had the polarization against him that Garcetti has,” Bozajian said.

That tension, he added, was clear at the hearing where Greber confronted Garcetti. “It snowballed into a series of slams, catcalls, jeering,” Bozajian said. “Maybe if [Greber] hadn’t asked that question, the subsequent confrontation may not have gone as it did. I think [Garcetti] blamed Kevin for throwing the first punch.”

Still, many, including Bozajian, argue that Garcetti has no one but himself to blame for the discontent.

On the matter of overtime, they point out, then-Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Garcetti years ago created a well-publicized uproar in the office by authorizing $62,000 in overtime for two people: himself and the office’s former management and budget director.

More recent, Garcetti has come under fire for running an office where even the dispensation of comp time is handled unevenly.

For example, county records show that over the course of the Simpson case, the district attorney’s office authorized a total of 16,587 hours in comp time for the attorneys, law clerks and others involved in the prosecution. Put another way, the total was the equivalent of more than eight years work for one employee.

But while authorizing such compensation for attorneys in that case, the office twice denied paid overtime for prosecutors involved in the other highest profile murder case of the time: the trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez in the shooting deaths of their parents.

After the first trial, which ended in a hung jury, prosecutor Pamela Bozanich filed a grievance after being denied 160 hours of overtime.

Similarly, Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn, who won a 1996 retrial conviction against the Menendez brothers, was denied his request for 470 hours of overtime--worth about $20,000.

When her grievance was denied by the office, Bozanich (whose husband is Peter, and brother-in-law is Dinko) dropped her claim for the overtime. But Conn took his demand to the county’s Civil Service Commission, insisting that Garcetti denied him overtime for reasons of politics.

Noting that his paychecks continued to reflect overtime owed long after a new year began, Conn has argued that Garcetti first must have feared that denying Conn overtime during the Menendez trial could lead to a letdown by the prosecutor in the case--one that the district attorney could not afford to lose during an election year. Then after the case was won, Conn has argued, Garcetti could not allow the unusual grant of overtime because of the criticism that the Simpson team bonuses had generated. So, Conn contends, Garcetti allowed the overtime to remain on the books until the Menendez case was over and then made sure it disappeared.

Conn’s theory is flatly denied by Sowders.

“It is a clever argument,” Sowders said. “But [Conn] knows . . . clerical errors are made.”

A hearing officer also has concluded that Conn’s “sinister scenario” was not only unproved but irrelevant because the denial of his overtime was the rule--not the exception--in the district attorney’s office.

Conn has vowed to appeal the hearing officer’s recommendation when the case comes before the Civil Service Commission on Wednesday.

The case has resonated in an office where many still bristle at Garcetti’s decision to reward the team that lost the Simpson case.

“That was a travesty,” said longtime prosecutor Herb Lapin, another official with the deputy district attorneys association.

And while that case continues to rankle some in the office, another bitter dispute promises to again make news.

Three years ago, Deputy Dist. Atty. Monika Blodgett filed a grievance against the district attorney’s office after being passed over as chief deputy in the Torrance branch--a job she had held on an interim basis before being turned down for the permanent job.

Although the Civil Service Commission did not uphold Blodgett’s complaint of discrimination, it did rule that her 1st Amendment rights were violated when the district attorney’s office transferred her from an administrative job in Torrance to a non-supervisory post in Santa Monica after she had publicly criticized the office.

Now, a jury is scheduled to decide in September on monetary damages for Blodgett.

To date, both Blodgett and the district attorney’s office have claimed victory--she for the pending award and the office for prevailing on other allegations, including discrimination.

But Blodgett and her attorney seem determined to press a bigger issue: Did Garcetti, angry over Blodgett’s criticism, have her reassigned to a nonsupervisory job?

The answer, Sowders says, is no.

“I can look anybody in the eye and say this office does not engage in retaliation. In fact, sometimes we have not responded enough” to acts of potential misconduct or insubordination, he said.

“Our managers tend to let the attorneys speak out. And it is disruptive, but they tend to approach it . . . as fair play,” Sowders said.

But the decision reached in Blodgett’s case, lawyer Meier Westreich says, shows that the district attorney’s office “is a highly personalized office and that decisions are based on how well you get along with one person.

“And that one person is Gil Garcetti.”