Love Him or Not, O.C. Sheriff Made a Mark

He’s been one tough hombre and the most powerful Orange County politician in a generation. Charmer, tyrant, cowboy at heart.

Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates has worn many labels in 24 years as he led the county’s largest police agency from Mayberry to state of the art.

Through triumph and scandal and showdowns with bureaucrats, the county’s top lawman almost always emerged riding high in the saddle.

But as he retires Monday at age 59, one goal has eluded the leader of California’s second-largest sheriff’s department: handpicking a replacement to continue his legacy.

Instead, he passes his badge over to County Marshal Michael S. Carona, a successor he has called a glorified bailiff ill-trained to run a 2,700-person department. Carona, 43, has called Gates a lame-duck sheriff resistant to change.

“I feel like anyone who’s leaving an organization where they’ve worked for 38 years,” said an emotional Gates on Thursday as he fingered a yellow note pad in his office, where the walls have been stripped of his trademark Western art.

He said he was proud of the department, sad about leaving friends, relieved to be stepping off the public stage. He has no job lined up, though he’s been approached, and expects to find a position in an industry that serves law enforcement.

“I honestly don’t know what I will do,” Gates said. “It’s a little scary to walk out of a work environment and not know what comes next.”

Though he led a high-tech department, Gates was perhaps best known as a tall and lanky sheriff with folksy Wild West metaphors about his crusades against crime and drugs. He deftly made the everyman’s concern his own.

“There was a sense of time passing Brad Gates by,” said retiring Orange County Supervisor Bill Steiner, a fan who has known Gates 20 years. “But there is some comfort in having a sheriff who really looks like a sheriff and acts like a sheriff, and pretty much making everybody feel safe. And that’s how I always felt with Brad Gates.”

‘A Guy Who Doesn’t Mind Doing the Work’

Assistant Sheriff Doug S. Storm, who withdrew early from last year’s race to succeed Gates despite the sheriff’s endorsement, said his boss is “a guy who likes the limelight, but more importantly, he’s a guy who doesn’t mind doing the work. One of the things he always says is you have to do the work. You can’t leave it up to someone else.”

Santa Ana attorney John Hanna, a county activist who backed Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters’ failed campaign against Carona last year, views the transition in historical terms.

“What we’re seeing,” Hanna said, “is not only the passing of an individual torch but the passing of one age to another.”

Cowboy imagery seems appropriate as Gates rides into retirement.

John Wayne is his hero, and the Duke’s portrait hung in the sheriff’s office at Santa Ana headquarters. Wild West motifs seep into Gates’ decor and his speech. He thrills to cowboy poetry. In his hometown, San Juan Capistrano, he owns a riding stable. Down the road at the rowdy Swallows Inn, a younger Brad was known to shove back his cowboy hat and tip a few brews.

Like Wayne, he stood head and shoulders above the blur of bureaucrats ruling small communities that dot the county landscape.

“He has taken this law enforcement agency from the dark ages,” said Assistant Sheriff Storm, “to a leader in so many arenas.”

In a sprawling county of 2.7 million people and 31 cities, Gates has had a higher profile than any other government figure. His department is responsible for policing unincorporated county communities and nine contract cities, constituting about one-fifth of the county populace. In the twin job of coroner, he also has a role in all death investigations in the county.

His dynasty-building skills emerged in the growth of his personnel and budget even while his turf shrank as communities incorporated into new cities.

Over the years he took over airport, harbor patrol and jail operations from other departments and made a play to absorb the marshal’s office. He created a central county morgue that shifted control of autopsies from far-flung mortuaries to a facility under his control. Gates deflected attempts to take the coroner’s operation from the sheriff in the 1980s.

Too often, said Costa Mesa Police Chief Dave Snowden, Gates is viewed exclusively in a political context--understandable given that he has held office longer than any other sitting Orange County official. But Gates’ contribution rests in his law enforcement legacy, Snowden and other police officials said.

He launched a nationally praised anti-drug task force and created an advisory council of influential private donors who contributed millions of dollars for programs and equipment in his DNA crime lab. His pet campaign, the Drug Abuse Is Life Abuse program in many county schools, earned national praise and has been copied elsewhere.

“He created a communications system, a bomb squad that is the envy of anyone anywhere,” said Bob MacLeod, general manager of the Orange County Assn. of Deputy Sheriffs. “He’s built a magnificent department.”

Said Gates: “It’s a department I am proud of, and I get much more credit than I deserve, because the people who work here make the department what it is.”

Faced with shrinking budgets in the early 1990s, Gates tapped his statewide political base as president of the California Sheriffs Assn. to push a sales tax measure guaranteeing future funding for law enforcement agencies.

“Brad is the guy people seem to gravitate toward when they’re looking for a leader, and very few people have that,” said Undersheriff Raul Ramos. “The reason he’s been in office so long is because he’s believable. He’s a man of his word.”

Hit With a Series of Civil Rights Lawsuits

As a larger-than-life presence who sometimes has led by sheer force of personality, Gates has made some enemies.

Some political opponents sued him on grounds that his department spied on and tried to intimidate them, or denied them gun permits while granting permits to political supporters. Those accusers included a judge, a college professor and a police chief who ran against him. Others, including the American Civil Liberties Union, sued him over inmate deaths and jail crowding.

And the taxpayers paid the price of resolving those court cases. By the end of the 1980s, the county had spent nearly $1.3 million in settlements and jury verdicts as a result of a string of civil rights lawsuits against the sheriff, who never conceded any wrongdoing.

Among more recent legal problems is an unresolved 1997 lawsuit by a now-retired lieutenant and two other female employees that charged former Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer, a onetime heir apparent, with sexual harassment. Gates fired LaDucer, his longtime friend, after an internal investigation of the charges.

But Gates seemed politically bulletproof, many police and government officials say. He was admired--if not always liked--for his formidable leadership. He held his own too in the clinking-glass circles where titans of law enforcement, politics and industry schmooze.

Yet he perplexed allies, his own political consultant and even close friends when he announced his retirement in October 1997--and then played no role in the tight race to succeed him once his own favored heir to the throne bowed out.

Gates said Thursday that he endorsed the one candidate he believed in and, after that fizzled, he felt that “it was up to the voters of the county to decide, not for me.”

Did Gates bow out because of lessening political support? He had been abandoned by several of the Republican heavyweights who had long contributed to his campaigns but vehemently opposed three sales-tax measures that Gates advocated.

The sheriff dismissed speculation that a loss of political support spurred his retirement. He decided to hang it up with an undefeated record because his family tired of the public spotlight, he said.

“Deedee and I had made our decision before any of that,” Gates said. “After 38 years and a lot of high visibility . . . you realize you want to enjoy your life a little. You can never get back that time, but it’s time to give back to the family.”

Helped Steer County Out of Bankruptcy

County Clerk-Recorder Gary Granville has known Gates for 20 years, but he best remembers the sheriff for the dark hours of the county’s 1993 financial collapse. After the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Gates stepped into a power vacuum of political disarray and ran the county’s vast operations.

“I have high, high regard for Brad,” Granville said. The fact that the sheriff’s skills extend beyond law enforcement “was particularly apparent in the early days of the bankruptcy, when darkness fell and everyone ducked under their desk. And Brad stepped forward and did the things that had to be done.”

Helping steer the county out of bankruptcy may have been his most notable role. Along with two other top officials, he was appointed by the Board of Supervisors to run the county’s paralyzed bureaucracy during the crisis.

Hundreds of workers were laid off and $40 million in costs were cut in just the first round of crisis management. Granville had just become recorder and his two departments were merging, and Gates met his budget appeals with firm ‘nos.’

“I remember those days very well, and it was his shining hour,” Granville said. Gates’ strength “doesn’t always endear him to everybody, but he does the honorable thing. . . . When the fifth floor [Board of Supervisors] were diving under desks, [the sheriff] was standing tall, taking the blows. And I really admired that.”