Garcetti’s Stubborn Optimism Pulls Him Past Many Troubles

In the spring of 1980, Gil Garcetti underwent a routine physical examination. By all rights, he should have aced it.

He was 38 years old and in terrific physical shape, although he had lately been bothered by a nagging pain in his side that he took to be a muscle pull. The exam began with a chest X-ray. Then Garcetti was ushered into a glassed-in, soundproof booth for an ear test.

Sitting there, in a room so quiet he could hear himself breathe, he watched the X-ray technician approach a doctor, a dark sheet of film in his hand. Garcetti strained to read the technician’s lips:

“He’s in trouble.”

As Garcetti repeats this story today, the words have an odd resonance. They are precisely the words many people have been using to describe his effort to win a third term as district attorney of Los Angeles County. Early polls have put him well behind his challenger, Steve Cooley, a top deputy in his office, and some leading political figures have been whispering that Garcetti may be through.

But Gil Garcetti is a man who knows better than most the difference between trouble and trouble. By his count, he has had at least two near-death experiences--the first being the cancer that was diagnosed after that physical exam in 1980, the second, a terrifying encounter with a runaway tire on a freeway last year.

As the Nov. 7 election draws nearer, he seems to be a man increasingly at ease, at times almost serene. Other people may talk of doom, but he appears to be enjoying one of the fiercest battles for countywide office in recent memory.

He insists that he remains entirely confident of victory. In fact, he says, he has never for a moment doubted that he would win.

This stubborn optimism, says Garcetti’s son, Eric, is his father’s best attribute, one that has carried him through all kinds of trials, personal as well as legal.

“He’s an always-confident person,” the younger Garcetti said. “That’s his great strength.”

The son acknowledged, however, a downside: “It’s also made the falls very hard falls.”

Some of Biggest Cases in U.S. History

Few jobs are more demanding than being district attorney of Los Angeles County. The D.A. runs the second-largest public law office in the United States, with a staff of about 1,100 attorneys. The only prosecutorial agency larger is the U.S. Department of Justice.

The office handles about 1 million cases a year, including 70,000 felonies. In the time that Garcetti has worked there, beginning as a bottom-rung deputy in 1968, the office’s prosecutors have been at the center of some of the biggest criminal cases in U.S. history.

Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi--all were convicted by Los Angeles County prosecutors.

Just as notorious were the cases that got away.

Several of these came on the watch of Garcetti’s predecessor, Ira Reiner, under whom Garcetti served as a powerful No. 2. There was the manslaughter acquittal of “Twilight Zone” director John Landis; the acquittal of the teachers in the McMartin Pre-School child abuse case; the acquittals of the police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King.

Then, of course, there was the case that made Garcetti the most famous local prosecutor in America and nearly undid his career: the failed prosecution of O.J. Simpson.

Garcetti has taken a lot of heat for that, and came close to losing his first bid for reelection in 1996, on the heels of the Simpson verdict.

In the course of a three-hour interview, Garcetti came close to exhibiting annoyance only once--when he was asked if he had been depressed after Simpson was set free.

“Well, it wasn’t an uplifting experience,” he snapped. But he added, more softly: “I’m not one to get depressed. I’d say I was disappointed. I’m a pretty resilient person, physically and personally. You’re going to have disappointments in life. I mean, that’s just part of life, and some of them are going to be incredibly disappointing. You have to deal with them.”

Not that Garcetti hasn’t known triumph too.

His has been a stellar career. His climb within the district attorney’s office was fast and sure. From the start, he was identified as a young man on the rise--bright, perceptive, charismatic, with vision and a tireless work ethic.

As district attorney, Garcetti has won some big cases and has had far fewer high-profile flops than Reiner, the Simpson case notwithstanding.

Garcetti has been widely praised for increasing diversity in hiring and promotions--in terms of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. He says he is proudest of the numerous crime prevention programs he has launched, most of them aimed at steering young people from lives of crime. He says his efforts to fight domestic violence have helped reduce domestic violence homicides in Los Angeles County by 60%.

But from the start, he has also had more than his share of adversity.

No professional setback was greater than when Reiner demoted him unexpectedly in September 1988 from the No. 2 position in the office, ultimately assigning him to a field job in Torrance.

To this day, Reiner will not say why he did it, and Garcetti says he was never told. The most common theory is that Garcetti was growing too prominent and becoming a threat to Reiner politically. Garcetti has a counter-theory: that Reiner wanted someone in the No. 2 job who would do more to help him politically.

Garcetti, a proud man, said he was “more embarrassed than bitter” about it. He got his revenge in 1992, when Reiner dropped out of the race against his onetime deputy rather than subject himself to the humiliation of a lopsided loss at the polls.

But under Garcetti, as under Reiner, the district attorney’s office has been rife with dissension.

Some of the most experienced trial lawyers in the office have accused Garcetti of lax ethics and of vindictively punishing those who challenge him. One deputy, Herb Lapin, produces a regular in-house newsletter that is primarily dedicated to trashing the boss. Another, Pat Connolly, has created a Web site--www.gilgarcetti.com--devoted entirely to attacks on Garcetti.

“This is symptomatic of a very sick office,” said Richard Hecht, a retired top deputy district attorney who worked in the office more than 30 years.

And just as the Simpson case nearly defeated Garcetti in the last election, the Rampart scandal threatens to do the same this year, especially because the case against four allegedly corrupt cops now on trial seems to face significant obstacles.

But some who know the district attorney well, such as political consultant Joe Cerrell, insist that it would be a mistake to write Garcetti off. This is a man who has been knocked down repeatedly throughout his career--in fact, throughout his life--and has shown an astonishing ability to bounce back, over and over and over again.

John Stillman said he was in the desert once when he ran into a woman who said she had been a high school classmate of Garcetti. She had one question, Stillman recalled: “Is he still perfect?”

The Quintessential Big Man on Campus

Garcetti, now 59, was that kind of kid. At Los Angeles’ Washington High, near Western Avenue and Imperial Highway, he was the star quarterback and student body president, the quintessential Big Man on Campus. “Gil was a very smart quarterback and continually kept the defensive teams in a daze,” the 1959 Washington yearbook said.

People who knew him later, at USC, describe him in glowing terms--”honest,” “hard-working,” “straightforward.” He was also handsome, in a square-faced, Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of way. Once again, he ran for student body president.

This time, he faced a candidate whose supporters included classmates Donald Segretti and Dwight Chapin, later to gain notoriety for their “dirty tricks” on behalf of President Richard Nixon.

It’s not entirely clear how many tricks took place during the campaign against Garcetti. But at one point, the Segretti-Chapin candidate, Bart Leddel, was put on “election probation” for stuffing the Daily Trojan newspaper with bogus campaign fliers. Hal Drake, then editor of the Daily Trojan and now a professor of ancient history at UC Santa Barbara, recalled covering that campaign.

“Gil,” he said, “was just a very nice person inside this den of thieves.”

He lost by 10 votes.

Garcetti said he had no business running in that election: His heart was never in it. In fact, he said, he always felt like an outsider at USC.

Then, more than now, the campus was overwhelmingly white and affluent, the place where Southern California’s power elite sent the region’s future leaders. Garcetti’s classmates were the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, captains of industry. This was the late 1950s, early ‘60s, the ultimate sis-boom-bah years.

Ozzie and Harriet would have sent their children to USC. Juanita and Salvadore Garcetti were another story.

Much has been made of Garcetti’s family background. The district attorney, with an eye on the county’s burgeoning Latino vote, has flaunted his Mexican American roots in this year’s campaign, boasting about his tough upbringing, how he grew up in gang territory and lost friends to the streets.

At one point, before a predominantly African American audience, Garcetti actually drew a contrast between himself and Cooley by saying that, unlike the incumbent, “this man has never lived in the ‘hood.”

Privately, Cooley and his supporters have scoffed at what they see as Garcetti’s playing the Latino card and have suggested that the environment he grew up in was far from the gang-banging image he paints. Some Latino supporters of Cooley have gone so far as to charge that Garcetti isn’t a “real” Latino.

The district attorney acknowledges that, although he went to a rough junior high school in South Los Angeles, Washington High was a safe, middle-class school. He did witness gang fights as a youth, he said, but never was involved in gangs himself.

As for his Latino credentials, it’s true that Garcetti assimilated into white culture as he grew--but the same could be said for many people of his generation. He forgot most of the Spanish he knew as a child; he married a wealthy non-Latina; he embraced the goals and style of the majority culture.

But if it weren’t for his Italian name, it seems unlikely that he would be accused of being a “phony” Latino.

Garcetti was raised in an unmistakably Mexican American household. Three of his four grandparents were Mexican; the fourth, Massimo Garcetti, immigrated to Mexico from Italy about 1890.

Family legend has it that Massimo became a judge in the state of Chihuahua and was hanged in the Mexican Revolution. Eric Garcetti, a professor of international relations at Occidental College, said he assumes by those scant facts and legends that his great-grandfather was on the “wrong side” of the revolution.

The district attorney’s mother was one of 19 children born to Mexican immigrants in Arizona. She is remembered as a strong, sweet, loving woman who worked hard and married poorly. His father, who ran a barbershop, was also a small-time gambler and numbers runner who, Garcetti says, claimed to have known Mickey Cohen and to have worked briefly for Bugsy Siegel.

His father, Garcetti recalls, hit him once after catching the boy playing with a forbidden stash of loaded dice. “Don’t you ever get involved in this stuff or touch this stuff!” Salvadore raged.

The elder Garcetti--a heavy drinker who slid into alcoholism in his later years--also used to give young Gil a glass of wine every morning, plus a glass of water with a couple drops of arsenic--good for the skin, he’d say. Garcetti said that he quietly put up with his father’s abuses and eccentricities for years, but that by the time he was college age, he’d had it.

“I finally started fighting back,” he said, adding that he told his father, “Stop being so nutty with your family and the people who love you.”

Armchair psychologists could mine rich ore from Garcetti’s relationship with his father and his decision to become a prosecutor. Garcetti himself doesn’t think much about it; he doesn’t see a link between his father’s lawlessness and his career in law enforcement.

Actually, he says, he had planned to become a defense attorney, but switched sides when a friend told him that prosecutors make the important decisions, while defense attorneys only react.

His own children haven’t strayed far from their father’s path. His daughter, Dana, is a highly regarded deputy district attorney in her father’s office; his son, in addition to being a professor, is launching his own political career next year with a run for the Los Angeles City Council.

Fight Against Cancer Shows His Mettle

Of all the challenges Garcetti has faced, none was more difficult than his fight against cancer--and none, his admirers say, tells more about his mettle.

What the X-ray technician had seen that day at Garcetti’s exam was a tumor so large and vigorous that it had split one of his ribs, hence the stabbing pain he felt in his side. Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Garcetti was given 40% odds of survival. He underwent months of grueling chemotherapy and radiation. His hair fell out--even his eyebrows and eyelashes. He lost weight. He looked, he says, “cadaverous.”

Eric Garcetti, just 9 years old at the time, said his dad was frank about his cancer but never seemed beaten by it.

“It wasn’t a very somber time,” he said. “My dad’s hair would be falling out, and he’d be joking about it. . . . I think it showed me a lot about bravery and a lot about having some perspective in life.”

Then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp, Garcetti’s boss at the time, recalled: “He never felt sorry for himself. He just went at it, took his treatment and got back to things.”

Garcetti himself recalls being initially angry, thinking, “Why me?” He had never smoked, never been a drinker, had always exercised fanatically, rising at 4 a.m. every day to stretch and take long bicycle rides (he maintains a similar regimen today, but has substituted a stationary bike, rowing machine and weights for the bike rides).

He had played by the rules and then some.

But once the initial anger subsided, he went on with his life toa degree that suggests either blind denial or immense inner strength.

The district attorney’s close friend Stillman, a former prosecutor now in private practice, recalls going on a ski trip with Garcetti not long after he’d begun his cancer treatment.

Garcetti hit the slopes with vigor. “At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, after skiing all day, he was tired and he’d say, ‘Gee, I’m not supposed to be tired.’ Everybody else was tired without chemotherapy.”

Eric Garcetti has often thought that if his dad had died of cancer, “those two, 2 1/2 years that he was being treated would have been incredible years . . . just as joyous and full as the years before.”

Typically, Garcetti says he didn’t really gain any lessons from his cancer. He already knew the importance of living each day as if it were his last. He was left with just one reminder, one indelible scar: His hair, jet black before the cancer, grew back silver gray.

It is the mark of a survivor.

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* D.A.’S RACE

Challenger Steve Cooley accuses Dist. Atty. Garcetti of racial profiling. B3