Cooley Says He’ll Retool D.A.’s Office

Los Angeles County’s newly elected district attorney said Wednesday that he will reexamine a plea bargain with disgraced former LAPD officer Rafael Perez to determine whether it can be scrapped if Perez has violated its terms.

Steve Cooley, who called the Perez plea bargain the “worst of the century,” also announced plans for a sweeping reorganization of the prosecutor’s office. He said former Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp will lead his transition team.

Incumbent Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti conceded defeat Wednesday, acknowledging the obvious: Voters want a change. Final unofficial returns showed Cooley with 63.7% of the vote in Tuesday’s runoff to Garcetti’s 36.3%.

Garcetti’s slice of the vote was 1% lower than his share in a three-way March primary, suggesting that his million-dollar campaign had done little, if anything, to change the minds of voters who wanted him out.

Cooley said Garcetti called him Wednesday morning to offer his congratulations and to promise his help in ensuring a smooth transition despite the deep personal animus that divides the men.

A short time later, Cooley appeared at a news conference at the hotel in Universal City where he had spent a long night with hundreds of jubilant supporters celebrating his victory. He promised to set aside the intense rancor of the campaign and set a new course for the nation’s largest local prosecutorial agency.

“I love the office of district attorney,” said Cooley, who has been a prosecutor for 26 years. “Bitterness and recriminations--that’s not going to be part of it.”

Cooley will inherit an office now facing one of its greatest challenges: the prosecution of anti-gang police officers accused of corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division. As he did during the campaign, Cooley refused to discuss the case now underway against four officers, saying it would be improper for him to comment about active prosecutions. But, in response to questions, he did touch on the subject of the plea bargain under which Perez received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony about a wide range of alleged crimes by LAPD officers.

The value of that testimony was called into question recently when Perez was implicated--although he has not been charged--in multiple homicides. Without directly mentioning the murder investigation, Cooley hinted that Perez might have violated his agreement with prosecutors.

“If someone doesn’t fulfill his end of the bargain, the other party gets to sue for breach,” he said. However, he pointedly declined to say whether he thought Perez had breached his agreement, saying, “We’ll take another look at it.”

Perez’s attorney, Winston Kevin McKesson, said Cooley’s suggestion that his client might have violated the plea deal is baseless.

“Rafael Perez has not breached a contract. It’s not null and void,” McKesson said. “Rafael Perez has fully complied, made every scheduled meeting and has been honest and forthright.”

The plea agreement, McKesson said, has a provision in which Perez can be prosecuted for perjury in the event it is proven that he has lied.

McKesson said Cooley’s concerns about Perez’s plea deal are misplaced.

“I would think that Mr. Cooley would want to know about corruption in the Police Department,” he said. “I would think that an agreement that results in 100 innocent people being freed from their unjust incarceration should be something that he, in the interest of justice, would see as a positive thing.”

Cooley said one of his first acts as district attorney will be to give defense lawyers access to all files that might raise questions about prosecutions involving testimony by Rampart officers. He said 2,000 or more cases might have been tainted by suspect testimony.

Some defense lawyers have complained that Garcetti was slow to open his office’s files on Rampart-related cases.

“We’ll be very open, very forthright,” Cooley promised. “We represent the people. I’ve said all along, Mr. Garcetti’s approach in this area was upside-down.”

Cooley will take office Dec. 4, and said he will begin assembling his transition team under Van de Kamp on Monday, after a short vacation with his family.

He spoke at length about his plans in an interview in his hotel suite, surrounded by the detritus of his victory night--champagne bottles, half-full coffee carafes, Cooley lawn signs and a couple of Garcetti signs taken on a capture-the-flag impulse.

Among his first acts, Cooley said, will be issuance of a new policy to enforce California’s three-strikes law, under which three-time felons can receive sentences of 25 years to life in prison. He has criticized Garcetti for applying the law even when the third felony is nonviolent and relatively minor. Under his policy, Cooley said, most nonviolent, nonserious third felonies will be handled as second strikes--eligible for double the sentence usually imposed for the crime, but not a 25-to-life term.

“We are not going to be putting someone in prison for 25 to life for stealing food,” he said, apparently referring to a 1995 case in which a man received the maximum three-strikes sentence for grabbing a slice of pizza from some children on the Redondo Beach pier. A judge later overturned that sentence.

Cooley said he will reorganize several key departments in the district attorney’s office as promised in his campaign.

In place of the current Special Investigations Division, which handles police and public corruption cases, he will create two divisions. A Public Integrity Division will handle public corruption cases, which Cooley says have been a low priority under Garcetti. A Criminal Justice Integrity Division will prosecute police abuse cases.

He said he also will create a new Criminal Syndicates Division to prosecute organized crime. Currently, he said, the district attorney’s office has just one attorney working half-time on organized crime cases.

“We’ve been nonplayers,” he said. “It’s the U.S. attorney’s office that’s been doing this job. We’ve not been in the game.”

Cooley also said he will revamp the office’s Central Trials Division, which has jurisdiction over major crimes in central Los Angeles. Currently, it is divided into three sections, according to which floor of the courthouse prosecutors try their cases. Cooley said it should be divided geographically, so that prosecutors forge stronger ties with specific police divisions and gain a greater understanding of the communities from which their cases arise.

One result, he said, should be that prosecutors are better able to spot problems in particular police divisions. “That will probably be the longest-term plank of the Rampart reforms,” he said.

Cooley said he will evaluate the various crime prevention programs instituted under Garcetti to determine their effectiveness, and get rid of the ones that don’t appear to be working. Garcetti made the programs a major part of his campaign, warning that Cooley would turn his back on what the incumbent considered his greatest accomplishment.

“If they’re effective and working, and I think that’s the best way to go--mazel tov, we’ll keep them,” Cooley said. “I’m not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

Garcetti brought up the programs during a brief concession statement delivered at his office Wednesday morning. “I am passionately behind the part of the D.A. job where I worked with the community to prevent crime, not just prosecute crime,” he said. The 59-year-old career prosecutor said his plans are uncertain.

Cooley also promised not to abandon the ethnic and gender diversity that Garcetti had promoted within the office. He said he will form a management team that reflects the diversity of Los Angeles County, made up of “intellectually honest, ethical, experienced, dedicated prosecutors. And there are plenty of people in that office who fit that bill. . . . It will be meritorious and diverse.”

However, he made it clear that there will be few, if any, holdovers from Garcetti’s executive staff in his top leadership positions. He plans a “pretty clean sweep,” he said. “It’s time for a change.”

He said he will not punish Garcetti loyalists, and will try to “play to their strengths” in reassignments.

Cooley’s choice of a transition chief seemed designed in part to reassure those who had feared that the Republican challenger would be a highly partisan, archconservative district attorney. Van de Kamp, a Democrat, was a highly respected and relatively popular district attorney who went on to become state attorney general.

Cooley declined to name any of the people who might play key roles in his office.

But Herb Lapin, a deputy district attorney in Pasadena who publishes an irreverent in-house newsletter, said he had some thoughts about who they might be.

Among those in Cooley’s inner circle who might wind up in top management positions, he said, are John Lynch, who lost to Garcetti four years ago, and prosecutors Peter Bozanich, Jacqueline Lacey, Janice Maurizi and Robert Foltz.

Lapin said that some deputies are worried about the changes Cooley might make, but that the overall mood in the Pasadena office Wednesday was one of euphoria. “The morale around here . . . has just been terrific,” he said.

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Times staff writer Noaki Schwartz contributed to this story.