Polluters have settled criminal cases by donating money to a charity started by Gil Garcetti. It has paid for an anti-pollution video featuring Garcetti. But . . .

One charity in Los Angeles has had a powerful ally to squeeze contributions from prospective donors.

That charity is the District Attorney Crime Prevention Foundation, started by Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

From 1994 to 1998, according to foundation and court records, deputy district attorneys under Garcetti negotiated with 51 defendants who made contributions to the foundation as a condition of settling their criminal and, in a few instances, civil cases before trials.

Those contributions netted the foundation $506,000--or about two-thirds of all of the money it has ever raised. Garcetti, an elected official, benefited in some ways. For example, the foundation featured him in an educational film paid for with the funds.

Some of the same deputy district attorneys who negotiated contributions to the foundation as parts of plea bargains settled another nine cases by getting defendants to contribute $500,000 to the district attorney’s office itself. According to their immediate superior, they did so to show Garcetti that it made financial sense to keep them in their specialized jobs. Those contributions were negotiated in 1993 and 1994, at a time when Los Angeles County government and the district attorney’s office were struggling financially and Garcetti said he might have to lay off or transfer prosecutors from specialized functions to work on street crime.

Experts in criminal sentencing criticized such practices because they appear to have involved prosecutors’ mixing self-interest with the public interest in deciding how cases should be settled.

Garcetti, who is up for reelection in November, refused to comment.

“The danger here is that you create the prospect of a kind of legalized extortion,” said Columbia University law professor John C. Coffee Jr., who helped draft the American Bar Assn. standards on sentencing alternatives.

Coffee said he was reminded of a police officer who stops a motorist for speeding, then declares: “ ‘Here is a tin can for the L.A. police welfare fund. How would you like to make a contribution?’ It begins to suggest that you better make that contribution or you’re running the chance of having those charges enhanced.”

The defendants, all of whom were accused of violating anti-pollution laws, could have refused to agree to the plea bargains calling for the contributions, but at some risk. They might have had to stand trial, pay more in fines or, in some cases, be sent to jail.

The risks remained abstract, however, since no defendant objected to making contributions, either to the district attorney’s office or to its foundation, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors involved in making the deals said they typically negotiated a dollar amount for the overall settlement first, then negotiated which portions would go to the public treasury, which to harmed parties, and which to the district attorney’s office or the District Attorney Crime Prevention Foundation. In many cases, other charities also got shares.

Some defendants felt it was none of their business where the money went. “It was the responsibility of McDonnell Douglas to pay, but it wasn’t up to us to decide where we should pay,” said spokesman John Thom, referring to settlement of a civil suit over a jet fuel spill that sent $50,000 to the district attorney foundation. “That was up to the prosecutor’s side.”

Some defendants, however, specified charities they wanted included and prosecutors, such as former Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony Patchett, said they included those charities as long as they were “looking to help the environment.”

Defendants Would Ask to Make Contributions

Another prosecutor who negotiated some of the contributions, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert S. Miller, said that a defendant’s refusal to accept a deal calling for a donation to the district attorney’s foundation would not have been “a deal breaker.” A dispute over the settlement’s “total amount is going to be a deal breaker,” he said.

Prosecutors who negotiated many of the settlements said that the opportunity to make some sort of charitable contribution became sought after by defense attorneys, a half-dozen of whom were contacted for comment but did not return calls.

Corporate defendants in particular embraced the opportunity to pay a portion of their penalties in the form of charitable contributions because they found it less embarrassing than being ordered to pay bigger fines, prosecutors said. They may have also concluded there were tax advantages.

Prosecutors said they believed--and discussed the possibility with defense attorneys--that defendants could deduct contributions from their income taxes. That was incorrect. The Internal Revenue Service ruled in 1979 that charitable contributions made to avoid fines were not deductible.

Judges approved the contributions in every case. Larry P. Fidler, the supervising judge for criminal matters in Los Angeles Superior Court, declined interview requests.

Some sentencing and ethics experts said the prosecutors and judges involved acted unwisely but not unlawfully. Getting defendants to contribute to a charity run out of a prosecutor’s office can create an impression that the prosecutor is wielding public power to help himself or a charity he favors, said Bruce A. Green, director of the center for law and ethics at New York’s Fordham University. It may be lawful, he said, and even ethical, “but one can always ask the question, ‘Is it stupid?’ ”

With that in mind, U.S. Courts of Appeal in five circuits, including the one governing federal courts in California, have ruled that federal judges cannot impose monetary charitable contributions as a condition of probation. The federal appellate courts acted, in part, because of a concern that judges were favoring pet charities or that it might appear that they were, said Richard Gruner, a professor at Whittier Law School who has written extensively about white-collar sentencing.

Garcetti Aide Defends Practice

California appellate courts apparently have not ruled on the question in criminal cases but have suggested that it might be permissible under some circumstances in civil cases.

One of Garcetti’s top executives, Assistant Dist. Atty. Michael Tranbarger, defended the practice as appropriate. He could cite no specific authority for the practice, but said, “As far as I know, it’s perfectly acceptable in California.” He disputed the characterization that it could be extortionate, saying defendants are free to reject possible deals.

Garcetti’s director of communications, Victoria B. Pipkin, added that the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office did something similar in two criminal cases it brought against a corporate defendant, who was required to make contributions to be determined by the district attorney’s office and to create a fund for the use of the district attorney’s office.

Garcetti has said the crime prevention foundation’s main purposes are to support district attorneys’ efforts to intervene in young people’s lives before they turn to crime and to assist the district attorney’s office in enforcing the law. The foundation is administered from within the district attorney’s office but is governed by an outside board of directors.

Its records show that it has spent only a little more than half of the $506,000 it received from the settlements, which were conveyed to it along with court orders negotiated by prosecutors, requiring that it spend the money on projects related to the environment.

The largest expenditure, of about $101,000, went to finance a board game and a 23-minute video--an anti-pollution horror film parody--for fifth-graders called “Night of the Living Sludge.” Garcetti introduces the video, which was sent by the county Office of Education to more than 1,000 elementary schools in the county. He appears on camera with a baby giraffe at the Los Angeles Zoo.

The foundation also used $45,000 in defendants’ contributions to help pay for trips for several hundred elementary students to an outdoor science school run by the Los Angeles County Department of Education. It paid $30,000 to support the L.A. County Science Fair and spent another $29,000 for training environmental law enforcement officials, including attorneys in its own environmental crimes section, its records show.

Among its other projects: The foundation used money raised from other sources to pay for a domestic violence hotline and emergency aid to crime victims. It also spent $70,000 on a photographic mural, to be unveiled this fall, that will tell the 150-year history of the district attorney’s office. A draft of the mural portrays Garcetti as a district attorney who has emphasized crime prevention. The foundation is also financing a coffee table book on the history of the district attorney’s office.

Deputy district attorneys said they stopped asking for contributions to the foundation in 1998, when they became concerned that the foundation was not spending the money in ways they thought were wise.

Prosecutors Questioned Use of Money

The foundation’s recently named co-chairman, Robert A. Cook, executive vice president of CBS Enterprises and King World Productions, said he hopes book sales will become a new source of money for the foundation and perhaps lead to a television series.

Defendant-donors who gave to the foundation were prosecuted in every instance by the district attorney’s environmental crimes section. That section, founded in 1985 by Garcetti’s immediate predecessor, Ira Reiner, had a history of securing court-ordered contributions from defendants for other charities.

Then in 1993, with the county in a fiscal crunch and the district attorney’s office facing hard times, prosecutors in the section began securing contributions for the district attorney’s office itself.

Records suggest it was done with a certain awkwardness. Michael J. Delaney, then the deputy district attorney in charge of the section, filed a proposed sentencing memorandum in a criminal case against Mobil Oil Corp. in 1993, calling for Mobil to pay $100,000 in “monetary relief . . . to the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, to be used exclusively for enforcement of environmental laws.” Delaney’s memorandum made it clear that the money was for the district attorney’s use, rather than for reimbursement of past expenses. Apparently uncomfortable with that, Municipal Judge Jon Mayeda relabeled the award in a sentencing order of his own as restitution--which the Legislature has permitted courts to impose in certain circumstances to reimburse parties that have been harmed for their expenses. Mayeda said in an interview that he did not remember the case.

The Mobil case was one of about nine that were settled over a period of 18 months in which deputies in the environmental crimes unit negotiated deals calling for defendants to pay a total of $500,000 to what became known informally as the district attorney environmental enforcement fund, said one of Delaney’s successors, Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Sullivan.

Sullivan said he looked into what became of that money several years later at the behest of subordinates who were suspicious because they had never seen it used. He said he was told by superiors that it had never been spent--that it was gathering interest in a county trust account. He said they did not tell him why.

Also unspent, according to the district’s attorney’s top budget official, are proceeds from another unusual settlement: $375,000 that the environmental crimes section secured from McDonnell Douglas Corp. in 1995. That was part of a nearly $1-million settlement of a civil lawsuit that prosecutors filed against the firm over jet fuel spills. The terms of the settlement called for the district attorney’s office to decide how to use the $375,000 for “environmental projects which shall enhance or protect public health, safety or the environment within Los Angeles County.” Sullivan and another prosecutor said they made several proposals for such projects but were turned down by higher-ups.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Tranbarger said the long-unspent funds have not been forgotten. “We’re working on appropriate places to spend that money,” he said.

Delaney, who headed the environmental crimes section when deputies began their practice of soliciting contributions, both to the district attorney’s office and to the crime prevention foundation, said he did not remember whose idea the solicitations were.

He acknowledged, however, that in negotiating contributions to the district attorney’s office, his deputies were trying to make an argument to Garcetti that their unit could effectively pay for itself. Garcetti had declared that, unless the county gave him more money to run the office, he might have to lay off some prosecutors and shut down specialized units, such as environmental crimes, to concentrate on more pressing street crime.

Giving to the D.A.’s Office Was Stopped

By the time Sullivan took over the unit in 1996, the practice of prosecutors’ negotiating contributions to the district attorney’s office had stopped. But prosecutors were still negotiating contributions to the foundation.

Sullivan said he had no instructions from higher-ups to continue the practice. He said he thought the practice had begun because individual prosecutors were in the habit of using settlements as opportunities to arrange charitable contributions and, “at one point, I don’t know when, it was probably presented to them that this [district attorney foundation] is another legitimate charity.”