Courage and Compassion--a Legacy for Others to Build Upon

When I moved to Ventura County nine years ago, one of my first calls was to an old friend at the FBI. Gary Auer had beaten me by a few years in escaping the traumas of Los Angeles, and he was already hard at work shifting the FBI’s Ventura office into a higher gear.

We had first met in the mid-1980s at the spy trial of former FBI Agent Richard Miller. As spy trials go, the Miller trial played itself out as half tragedy, half comedy. But since Auer was Miller’s boss on the Soviet counterintelligence squad, he didn’t ever seem to see the humor in it.

Miller was a bumbling, 300-pound agent who had constantly been on the verge of getting bounced out of the FBI, but somehow managed to hold on to his job. The joke among agents at the time was that the Russians had gotten to him by offering him food.

But black humor was never one of Auer’s strengths. The first time I encountered him, in fact, he was fuming over a story I had written while covering the case, accusing me of totally distorting his testimony the previous day.

Lo and behold, Auer came up to me again the very next day and said something reporters rarely hear from people they upset. He was sorry, he said. He had read his testimony in court transcripts and it turned out he had said something he didn’t mean to say. And I had quoted him accurately.

I had to love the guy from that point on. It made life a whole lot easier over the next year we spent pacing the same corridor as the Miller case dragged on. And it was my first insight into the basic integrity of the man.

Over the years, we came into more frequent contact. When Auer moved to Ventura County, he could have viewed the assignment as a retirement job. Instead, he turned a rather sleepy, backwater office into a model of what the FBI can do in setting the standards for law enforcement in a small county.

You name it, Auer has investigated it. From the Somis slave case in 1990 to numerous defense fraud investigations to the Thousand Oaks sewage spill to this week’s civil rights indictment of an Oxnard cop accused of police brutality.

And along the way, he was busily building strong relationships with every law enforcement agency in the county. Whenever anybody needed the additional resources that the FBI can bring to any local investigation, Auer was ready to help.

When we learned earlier this month that Auer was about to retire, it seemed fitting to write about his contributions here. Reporter Daryl Kelley drew the assignment.

The toughest question for Auer was what he felt he had accomplished in his years here, a deceivingly tricky question for anybody who hasn’t happened to have invented the computer chip recently.

Auer had to think about it. And he was still thinking about it over a farewell lunch a few days later.

His answer to us and to himself, finally, was that he had run an FBI office that had both the courage to go after the county’s most powerful institutions, such as Rocketdyne, and the compassion to fight for the rights of the powerless--from the Mexican farm workers in the Somis slave case to the heroin addict allegedly victimized by police abuse.

That was the legacy Auer left for Ventura County, not a bad legacy for any man. The FBI and local law enforcement agencies owe him a lot for that. And so do the rest of us. With any luck, his successor can build on it.