Crowded Field Seeks U.S. Attorney Post

A state assemblyman from Riverside, the district attorney of Ventura County, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge and several former federal prosecutors are vying to become the next U.S. attorney in Los Angeles--the top federal law enforcement official for seven California counties.

A screening committee selected by a California lawyer with close ties to President Bush is reviewing applications and is set to begin interviewing candidates this week, according to legal and political sources.

The sources said the committee hoped to recommend one or more candidates to the White House in August so Bush can expeditiously send a nominee to the Senate for approval.

The candidates include Assemblyman Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside), Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Debra Yang and six attorneys in private practice in Los Angeles: Uttam S. Dhillon, Gordon A. Greenberg, Thomas E. Holliday, Mark C. Holscher, Stephen A. Mansfield and Vincent J. Marella.

They are all Republicans except for Greenberg, who is registered as an independent. U.S. attorneys overwhelmingly, but not always, come from the same political party as the president. There also may be other candidates, but their names could not be learned.

Eric George, a West Los Angeles attorney who is serving as deputy to the selection committee chairman, Los Angeles attorney and investment banker Gerald L. Parsky, declined to comment on the selection process other than to say applications are being reviewed.

In addition to Parsky and George, the candidates will be screened by Elwood Lui, a former state Court of Appeal judge who is now a partner at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, one of the nation’s largest law firms; and Thomas R. Malcolm, a partner in Jones Day’s Irvine office, who advised Pete Wilson on the selection of federal judges when Wilson was in the U.S. Senate.

Robert C. Bonner, who served as a federal judge and U.S. attorney in Los Angeles and has been nominated by Bush to head the U.S. Customs Service, was named earlier to be on the screening committee but is recusing himself because one of the candidates, Holliday, is Bonner’s partner at a large Los Angeles law firm.

Serving as the chief federal prosecutor in Los Angeles--known as the Central District of California--has long been considered a prestigious position and frequently proved a steppingstone to a federal judgeship. Seven of the federal district court judges now on the bench in Los Angeles previously served in the position.

The U.S. attorney supervises about 255 lawyers and interacts with several federal agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Marshal’s Service, as well as hundreds of local law enforcement departments, particularly in joint drug task forces.

The office serves the largest population of any federal prosecutor’s office in the nation--15.4 million people spread over Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties.

Career prosecutor John S. Gordon is serving as the interim U.S. attorney following the April resignation of Alejandro Mayorkas, a Democrat.

Clemency Request Tarnished Office

The appointment comes at an important time for the office, “which went through a lot of upheaval” in recent years, said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, who worked in the office for eight years in the 1980s and is still in close contact with its attorneys.

“They lost a lot of senior people,” she said. “They have to rebuild that experience level. They are being looked at to deal with investigations that affect Los Angeles a great deal, such as the Rampart [LAPD scandal],” Levenson said.

In addition, the leadership of the office was tarnished when it came to light earlier this year that Mayorkas had called the White House counsel’s office, said he was a friend of the family of Carlos Vignali, who was convicted of narcotics charges in Minnesota in 1994, and that his release would not present a problem to the community. Former officials of President Bill Clinton’s White House said Mayorkas’ call had been a key factor in Clinton’s decision to commute Vignali’s 15-year sentence on his last day in office in January.

Los Angeles defense attorney Jan L. Handzlik, a former federal prosecutor, said the goal of the new U.S. attorney should be “to inspire a sense of direction and purpose in the other lawyers in the office.”

Neither Handzlik nor Levenson would express a preference among the candidates. However, both said it would be highly beneficial for the office to be led by someone who has experience in federal criminal law.

“It’s a different world” than state criminal law,” Levenson said, citing differences in grand jury procedures and complicated sentencing guidelines. “It would be a steep learning curve for someone coming from outside,” she said. All but two of the leading candidates--Bradbury and Pacheco--have experience with federal criminal cases.

Levenson also said the office needs to be led by someone “who is not only a very capable attorney but someone who really is in tune with the needs of the community.” She said the new U.S. attorney also has to have the ability to fight for resources because the Los Angeles office has been perennially understaffed.

Syracuse University-based researcher David Burnham, a former New York Times reporter who has studied the Justice Department in detail for more than a decade, concurred in that assessment.

Government figures obtained by Burnham and his colleagues at Syracuse under the Freedom of Information Act show the Los Angeles office has 14 federal prosecutors per million people. On a per capita basis, the office is spread far thinner than many U.S. attorney’s offices, including New York, which has 42 prosecutors per million people; Miami, 40 per million; New Orleans, 29 per million; and Philadelphia, 22 per million.

Burnham said the figures show that two of the other U.S. attorney’s offices in California are also understaffed. San Francisco has 13 prosecutors per million people and Sacramento has 10 per million. San Diego has 35 per million because of significant staffing increases awarded to the office in recent years to handle immigration cases.

The under-staffing in Los Angeles has had consequences for the office’s workload, said Burnham, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a foundation-funded project at Syracuse. Justice Department figures show, for example, that in 1998--the latest year for which figures were available--the office filed considerably fewer narcotics, organized crime or weapons cases than the national average for U.S. attorney’s offices.

On the other hand, the number of organized crime cases filed by the office tripled between 1992 and 1998, and white-collar crime cases nearly doubled, as did immigration prosecutions. Narcotics cases filed by the office stayed fairly constant, figures show.

“At TRAC, we are struck by how much variation there is around the country” in the number of cases lodged per capita by U.S. attorney’s offices on various types of crimes, Burnham said. “These variations are not explained by obvious factors,” such as differences in demographics or the nature of economic activity in a particular region.

“It seems to be influenced by the energy and direction of a particular U.S. attorney,” he said, meaning there are strong consequences over who gets the job.

Los Angeles has never had an African American or an Asian American U.S. attorney, though the office has been led by people of Spanish, Mexican, Ecuadorean and Cuban lineage. None of the leading candidates this time is black.

Thumbnail Sketches of Leading Candidates

Here are thumbnail sketches of the leading candidates:

* Bradbury, 59, is a graduate of Hastings College of the Law. He has been district attorney in Ventura County since 1979 and is highly regarded in Republican circles as a hard-nosed prosecutor. Rep. Elton L. Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) has been vigorously pushing Bradbury’s candidacy.

* Dhillon, 40, graduated from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles from 1990 to 1997 and then served as counsel to Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach). He is now an attorney in the Los Angeles office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.

* Greenberg, 47, is a graduate of Chicago-Kent College of Law. He was a state prosecutor in Illinois and then assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989, serving as co-lead prosecutor in the ZZZZ Best Corp. securities fraud case, which led to a 25-year sentence for the company’s chief executive, Barry Minkow. Greenberg is a partner at McDermott, Will & Emery’s Los Angeles office.

* Holliday, 53, is a graduate of USC Law Center. He was named criminal defense trial lawyer of the year by the Century City Bar Assn. in 1997. Holliday has spent most of his career at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a large Los Angeles firm, where he specializes in white-collar criminal defense and complex civil litigation. He served pro bono as deputy general counsel to the Christopher Commission, which examined the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beating.

* Holscher, 38, is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. After serving as a law clerk to a federal judge in Los Angeles, he spent five years in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, specializing in white-collar crime, including the prosecution of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. Holscher came to national prominence last year as one of the lead defense lawyers for Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee against charges that he mishandled classified information with the intent to aid a foreign power. Holscher is a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles.

* Mansfield, 45, is a graduate of the University of Maine Law School. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles for 11 years, serving as deputy chief of the financial crimes unit. One of his most noteworthy cases was the successful prosecution of a scientist for illegally exporting military technology to five large Japanese corporations. Mansfield later served as the head of a United Nations war crimes investigation unit, supervising probes in Rwanda. He is a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.

* Marella, 55, is a graduate of Temple University Law School. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles from 1972 to 1977, serving as assistant chief of the office’s criminal division. Since then, he has been a partner at Bird, Marella, Boxer & Wolpert, a Century City firm that specializes in white-collar criminal defense and complex civil litigation. He has represented a number of large companies, including Rockwell International, and served pro bono on the special commission that investigated the Rampart scandal.

* Pacheco, 43, is a graduate of UC San Diego Law School. He served in the Riverside County district attorney’s office for more than a decade and received a number of awards, particularly for his work on juvenile cases. He was elected in 1996 to the state Assembly, where he served on the Judiciary Committee and briefly was the Republican leader.

* Yang, 41, is a graduate of Boston College Law School. She spent a few years in private practice, then clerked for a federal judge in Los Angeles for a year. She served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1990 to 1997. Her most noteworthy case was the successful prosecution of a Glendale Fire Department captain charged with setting three fires. He was tried in federal court because the buildings he was accused of setting ablaze included businesses that involved interstate commerce. Yang was appointed to Los Angeles Municipal Court by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1997 and became a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last year as the result of unification of the trial courts.