Agent Investigating New Job as Ventura FBI Chief

On the job full time for only a day, David Nesbitt was trying Tuesday to settle into his role as the top FBI agent in Ventura County.

But after 28 years as a specialist in white-collar crime, the 52-year-old said his broad new assignment is a bit unsettling.

“What I’ve learned so far is that this is completely different than the job I had,” said Nesbitt, a college-trained accountant who has tracked nonviolent criminals as diverse as Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and savings and loan executives.

“In Ventura, we work the whole spectrum of what the FBI does--bank robberies, defense industry fraud, environmental crimes, political corruption, organized crime and drugs and financial institution fraud,” he said. “So I’ll be working some things I haven’t worked for 25 years. And that’s really exciting.”

Not that Nesbitt doesn’t already know Ventura County on a personal level. He has lived in Thousand Oaks or Newbury Park since 1970, commuting each day to the FBI regional headquarters in west Los Angeles.

But as that drive south grew over the decades from 30 minutes each way into 75, a career-closing transfer north to Ventura looked ever more attractive.

“I love Ventura County,” Nesbitt said. “Having lived here all these years, I’ve been able to bask in the fact that this county is always listed as one of those with the least crime, and that’s mainly due to local law enforcement.”

Now the West Virginia-born Nesbitt, the son of an FBI agent, wants to do his part here professionally.

He officially took charge of 17 agents assigned to offices in Ventura and the Antelope Valley on Aug. 1, but only moved into his duties here full time on Monday. High on his list of things to do right away is getting to know the top cops in Ventura County.

So far, he has spoken with newly elected Sheriff Bob Brooks and checked in with a top assistant in Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury’s office.

Nesbitt is aware that his predecessor, longtime supervising agent Gary Auer, was known for cooperating with local police and prosecutors before he retired three months ago.

“Our interaction with the FBI has been on bank robberies and investigations like the murder of [bank teller] Monica Leech,” Brooks said. “We’re looking for the same level of cooperation and sharing of information that we’ve had historically. And I hear good things [about Nesbitt].”

Auer also persuaded local newspapers to run hidden-camera photos of bank robbers caught in the act.

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Nesbitt said he has already seen how effective that can be, since a citizen tip resulting from a newspaper photo led to the arrest last week of two men suspected of robbing an Oxnard bank early this month.

“That just cemented my belief that we had to have a great relationship with the locals,” he said.

Most FBI investigations here in recent years have focused on white-collar crime--corruption at banks and savings and loans, environmental destruction and fraud by giant defense contractors that ended up paying tens of millions of dollars in fines.

Ongoing high-profile probes cover the 1997 murder of bank teller Leech, the 1994 explosion deaths of two Rocketdyne engineers near Simi Valley and the Thousand Oaks pipeline break that dumped 86 million gallons of sewer water into a creek last winter.

Nesbitt said locals should expect more of the same. But with plenty of new twists.

“One thing about white-collar crime--it does not stand still,” he said.

Fraud at banks and savings and loans--such as phony loan applications--has prompted more FBI cases than any other type of crime in Southern California, he said. But ranking second are crimes in the health-care industry, Nesbitt said.

“In Ventura County, we’re probably going to launch into health-care fraud,” he said.

Scams include phony injury claims from auto accidents and writing prescriptions for unneeded drugs. “And HMOs are becoming a problem area,” he said.

For example, some managed-care plans offer services to lure customers but do not produce that care when patients need it, he said.

“There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with what’s going on with HMOs,” Nesbitt said. “And the losses in the entire health-care industry as the result of fraud are just astronomical.”

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Computer-related crimes--fraud, child pornography and hacking into private files--are also on the rise and will be investigated locally, Nesbitt said.

Nesbitt suits his new role here, Auer maintains, not only because of his experience with white-collar crime but because of his long association with top lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

“He’s probably the expert in Southern California in financial fraud investigations,” said Auer, who now works for an international investigative firm in Westlake. “But the biggest thing he brings is his outstanding reputation with the U.S. attorney’s office. That will be important to the effectiveness of the Ventura office.”

David C. Scheper, chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said Nesbitt is a top agent.

“He works extremely well with us,” Scheper said. “He’s smart, imaginative, thoughtful and fair. When someone like Gary Auer leaves a job, there’s a risk there’s going to be some falloff. But there’s no risk of that with Dave Nesbitt.”