After Losing a Big One, Garcetti Wins a Bigger One

How many times did we see it happen, over how many years?

The courtroom tableau, burned into our collective eye: the men’s broad backs, knotted up beneath polyester or tweed or camel’s hair, hunched at the defense table, bracing for the hammer blow of the word to come, the word “guilty.”

And most of the time--or so it seemed--it was never spoken, that word “guilty.” Not for O.J. Not for the Menendez boys’ first trial. Not for the heaviest charges in the Reginald Denny beating. And then we began to believe we’d never heard that word when it really mattered, not for years, not for the cops in the first Rodney King trial, nor in the McMartin matter or the “Twilight Zone” case.

On Wednesday, our ears did a double take. Seven times we heard “guilty,” and three LAPD cops stood convicted in the first trial to stagger out of the mire of the Rampart scandal and into a courtroom.

Nine floors above that courtroom, the man tagged with the reputation for losing “the big ones”--even some of the big ones before his time--was watching on TV as his deputies bagged maybe the biggest one of all.

It was a week and a day since one of his own lieutenants had beaten Gil Garcetti in an election as rancorous as a Palm Beach picket line. Steve Cooley had draped the Rampart scandal around his boss like a raincoat on a coat hanger. And in 18 days, Cooley will be arranging his family photos in the office where Garcetti watched his deputies’ triumph on TV.

I spoke to Garcetti after a luncheon honoring two D.A. office staffers. “They were fabulous verdicts--sweet, too, because the media had portrayed how we had [already] lost this case. I hope it shows we were doing the right thing when people were yelling and screaming at us to move quicker, move quicker.”

“Bittersweet . . . vindication . . . irony”--the words had been floating about all day like cartoon balloons. Earlier that morning Garcetti had demurred, talking instead about how these convictions were good for the justice system, for the D.A.’s office, for the community and the LAPD. For himself? “I don’t feel personally vindicated.”

So I put it another way: Does this take the sting out of the election?

“Oh, I’m not sure it takes the sting out. It occurred to me a couple of days before the election, ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were to lose the election but come back with significant guilty verdicts?’ And the media--and I guess the public because of the media--had bought into, ‘Here’s another loser.’ ”

Garcetti wouldn’t go in for what-ifs, try as I did to nudge him to it. But he did allow himself this valedictory: “The media was saying I was trying to postpone the case until after the election so I wouldn’t lose it before the election. The irony is that we won it after the election.” After he lost.

*

*

Wednesday’s first press conference was in the 12th-floor lobby, where defense attorneys held forth about the injustice of the verdicts and the anti-police mood in the city. Lawyers have been holding news conferences here since the O.J. Simpson trial. The irony this time was the big sign on the wall behind them, welcoming people to the D.A.’s welfare fraud division--head deputy district attorney Steve Cooley, supervisor.

At the second press conference, six floors up, the reporters arrived first, then the TV cameramen, with their clattering, lumberjack-sized gear and loud lumberjack shirts. From the other side of the conference room wall, we press folk could hear cheering--but no popping of champagne corks. For one thing, the building is supposed to be liquor-free. For another--well, as Garcetti put it primly: “This is not a thing to celebrate. Officers you had faith and trust in did not meet their obligations.”

OK, so it’s not an occasion for ticker tape. But what a twist: A new and overdue era of justice in L.A. may have been ushered in on the departing coattails of the man blamed in part for justice’s dismal image.

Yet one Rampart conviction would not have altered last Tuesday’s elections. I’ve come to think the D.A.’s job has acquired a natural life span, a built-in set of term limits, and Garcetti agreed:

“I think so. This is at times such a thankless job. There’s the understanding that any time there’s a controversial case you’re going to be severely criticized, either by the media or different factions or different communities. Over a period of time you just make some enemies, and they’re going to remember that.”

In the week after Thanksgiving, the packing on the 18th floor will begin in earnest. A man spends 32 years in a place--spends eight of those years running the show--there’s a lot to box up and cart away. Now, the last things to go in the box will be the headlines about the election that got away, and the “big one” that didn’t.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com