Rifts in D.A.’s Office Described

In sworn testimony Tuesday, a veteran member of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office portrayed the largest prosecutorial agency in the country as a vindictive and politically riven department where shifting personal allegiances determine assignments to plum jobs and important cases.

Lea Purwin D’Agostino, who has worked for the office more than 20 years and tried some of its most notable cases, charged that she was removed from a high-profile murder trial in 1997 because she had urged City Atty. James Hahn to challenge Gil Garcetti in his bid for reelection. Garcetti has denied that claim, and his office is contesting her accusations at a Civil Service hearing, which will culminate in a recommendation to the county’s Civil Service Board of Commissioners.

Although D’Agostino said the attempt to lure Hahn into the race was orchestrated in secret by her and leaders of the Los Angeles Police Protective League--most notably league Director Ted Hunt--Garcetti somehow got wind of it and confronted her about it at a dinner party on March 16, 1996.

“He turned to me and said, ‘I understand that you were instrumental, along with the Police Protective League, in trying to get James Hahn to run against me for D.A.,’ ” D’Agostino testified at a hearing Tuesday morning. Asked to describe Garcetti’s tone, she replied: “He was not amused.”

Although it is her claim of retaliation that is being heard by a Civil Service officer, D’Agostino also described other moments of unflattering political intrigue within the district attorney’s office.

After she ran for district attorney in 1988, D’Agostino said, her relationship with Garcetti, then the second-ranking official in the office, was “noticeably chillier.” It only improved, she added, after then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner demoted Garcetti and shipped him to the Torrance office.

D’Agostino’s take on office politics in her agency: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

The prosecutor’s claims of politically motivated transfers have become a source of embarrassment for the district attorney’s office, and the tension in the case was evident at Tuesday’s hearing. Even the casual and easygoing hearing officer, Culver City lawyer Robert Steinberg, could not keep tempers from flaring.

At one point, D’Agostino’s lawyer, Diane Marchant, grew so exasperated by the repeated objections of her adversary, Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Sowders, that she threw up her hands and suggested that they call the whole hearing off. Sowders sarcastically responded that if that was a motion to dismiss the case, he would accept.

During a break in the hearing, Sowders said the characterization of the district attorney’s office as a caldron of political turmoil was inaccurate.

“We have a very, very politically active office,” Sowders said. “I think we handle it very well. . . . We don’t have retaliation.”

D’Agostino sharply disagreed and spent much of the day Tuesday trying to persuade the hearing officer that such retaliation not only exists but was inflicted upon her. As a witness, she proved every bit as sharp spoken as she is as a prosecutor. Time and again, she turned questions back on Sowders--when she was particularly angry, she would call him “Mr. Sowders.”

She gave a vivid description of the meeting in which the case in question, the expected murder trial of Glen Rogers, was taken from her by a top official in the district attorney’s office, Roger Gunson.

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According to D’Agostino, who said she had always enjoyed a good relationship with Gunson, the senior official showed up at her office on July 24, 1997, and told her to turn over her files on the case. She said that she refused, and that Gunson demanded the file “again and again.”

“By now,” she added, “he was turning red. . . . I said: ‘You’re harassing me.’ ” And with that, D’Agostino said she ordered Gunson, her superior, to leave her office.

Sowders countered by attempting to get D’Agostino to admit that her refusal that day was an act of insubordination--an effort that she deflected by saying that she believed she responded naturally to an unreasonable request. Sowders also suggested that she was too attached to the case, that she habitually avoided office rules, and that she deliberately courted media attention to air her grievance against Garcetti by holding a news conference with her lawyer, Gloria Allred.

At one point, Sowders may have deepened his office’s image problems by noting that a supporter of D’Agostino had solicited contributions from other deputy district attorneys, including Sowders himself, when D’Agostino considered a run for the City Council in 1995. Sowders introduced a copy of the government code and said the solicitation violated it.

But when Sowders asked whether D’Agostino was aware that she had broken the law with that solicitation, she countered icily: “I wish Mr. Garcetti had told me that when I sent solicitations to other deputy district attorneys for him, because, no, I was not aware of it.”

Although Sowders steadfastly defended his office and Garcetti, he said the swirl of political activity, with challengers inside the office periodically challenging the sitting district attorney--their boss--creates its share of headaches.

“It is a disruption,” he said. “It creates tensions within the office, but it seems to be the L.A. system. We absorb it.”

The hearing continues next week, and could go for three or four more sessions before the hearing officer makes a final recommendation.