Prominent Latino Nominated as U.S. Attorney in San Diego

A veteran federal prosecutor who is the president of the Hispanic National Bar Assn. was recommended Friday by Sen. Barbara Boxer to be named U.S. attorney for the high-profile border region of San Diego and Imperial counties.

In asking President Clinton to nominate 44-year-old Gregory Vega, Boxer passed over interim U.S. Atty. Charles G. La Bella, who headed the attorney general’s campaign financing task force. La Bella urged the naming of an independent prosecutor to investigate fund-raising abuses during the 1996 presidential campaign.

Boxer said Vega’s successful stint as a federal prosecutor, the last 11 years of which he spent in San Diego, qualified him to head the busy Southern District. The U.S. attorney’s office, with about 100 prosecutors in San Diego, handles federal prosecutions, including border crimes, and civil cases.

“He is well grounded in the region, having served there for many years. He knows the people and the problems of the Southern District through years of personal involvement. He is a career prosecutor with outstanding performance evaluations who is highly regarded by colleagues and by federal judges in San Diego,” Boxer said in a statement.

Vega would take the place of Alan Bersin, who recently became superintendent of San Diego public schools. Bersin served as the nation’s first “border czar,” but it is unclear whether Vega would inherit that quasi-official mantle.

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Bersin was named Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s point man on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1995, helping coordinate a host of federal agencies with overlapping duties and serving as the most visible representative of the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration.

Vega, an assistant U.S. attorney who in recent years has specialized in white-collar fraud cases, said he was “pleased and honored” to be chosen for the coveted job.

“I just look forward to working hard on behalf of the people of San Diego and Imperial counties to provide them with a hard-working office,” Vega said.

The announcement caught many in the San Diego office by surprise.

La Bella, who took over as interim U.S. attorney after Bersin’s departure in June, said he learned of the decision when a reporter called. He had told acquaintances that his probe of fund-raising irregularities in Clinton’s reelection campaign made it highly unlikely that Democrat Boxer, who is running for reelection, would recommend that Clinton nominate him.

La Bella, formerly the No. 2 prosecutor in the San Diego office, declined to comment on whether his recommendations in the fund-raising matter, which put him at odds with the Clinton administration, were a factor in not getting the U.S. attorney’s post.

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LaBella, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and James V. DeSarno, the senior FBI official on the campaign finance task force, are scheduled to testify Tuesday before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

That panel, headed by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), is seeking to explore their reasons for recommending to Reno that an independent counsel be named to take over that investigation.

Reno last year rejected that proposal, but it has taken on new life since La Bella made the same recommendation in a recent report.

Reno has said she is still reviewing the report.

A Boxer spokesman declined to comment on La Bella’s candidacy, saying the names of applicants were confidential. It has been reported that the field also included two other federal prosecutors and a longtime San Diego defense lawyer. A 12-member advisory committee helped Boxer screen the applicant pool, said Sam Chapman, Boxer’s chief of staff.

After nomination by Clinton, Vega would have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Vega, president of the 22,000-member Latino bar association, is well regarded by colleagues and considered a seasoned prosecutor.

“Greg Vega is an exceptionally well-liked prosecutor over here,” said a fellow prosecutor. “He’s paid his dues. He’s been in a variety of units.”

Vega said it was too early to discuss his plans for the office, whose location on the border with Mexico means a steady diet of complex international cases, from drug smuggling to cross-border pollution, along with more conventional criminal and civil matters.

Vega, a 1980 graduate of Valparaiso University Law School in Indiana, worked as a lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service before being hired as a federal prosecutor in Indiana in 1983.

He took the job in the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego four years later. Since then, he has prosecuted cases involving pension theft, kickbacks for government contracts and tax fraud.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story from Washington, D.C.