D.A. Insider Is From Family of Outlaws

Meet Curt Livesay, a.k.a. the Revenuer, Dr. Death, the Juiceman.

No, he’s not the latest thug on the FBI’s most wanted list, as one might expect with such a list of aliases.

In fact, he’s quite the opposite. The amiable, onetime cowboy is the recently named chief deputy to Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, which means Livesay is second in command to the top prosecutor in Los Angeles County.

Livesay has been tagged with the nicknames during his 26-year career on the right side of the law.

But he doesn’t mind telling you he comes from a family of outlaws, on his daddy’s side, that is.

The outlawry goes back to two of his father’s uncles.

They were simultaneously hanged for train robbery in the late 1800s in Illinois.

One of his own uncles was a bank robber and a bootlegger in the Ozarks of Oklahoma. He got killed in the 1950s because, Livesay suspects, he ran afoul of somebody in the moonshine business.

And Livesay’s father, Leonard, spent five months on a Texarkana, Texas, federal prison farm for making illegal whiskey.

“He was convicted of a tax violation for not having appropriate tax stamps for the sugar,” Livesay says in his pronounced Southern drawl.

His father didn’t need to run whiskey stills to support his wife and three children. He owned the Lone Star Ranch, a 1,000-acre spread where he pastured more than 400 cows.

In those days, bootlegging was sort of a way of life in the Ozarks, and nobody liked revenuers.

Livesay was 5 when his father was arrested. It happened at a family get-together, and Livesay watched officers handcuff him and take him away.

After getting out of prison, his father quit bootlegging, and that little piece of family history was relegated to the proverbial closet. His mother, who was half Irish and half Choctaw Indian, would never mention it, Livesay recalls.

Later, thanks to a judge and a congressmen, a pardon was granted by President Harry Truman, Livesay says.

As the years of his youth passed, Livesay learned to work hard. He helped deliver calves, kept the branding irons hot, gathered in the hay during the summer and fed it out in the winter.

“On the ranch, from the time you are able to walk, you have to learn to take responsibility,” he says. “Nothing else since then has seemed like work.”

Livesay headed west after high school--at the urging of a sister in Los Angeles and her husband--to enroll at UCLA, where he studied business and accounting. Livesay’s plan was to become a tax lawyer and join his brother-in-law’s firm.

The ranching work ethic got him through college a semester early in 1962, and he took a job with the Internal Revenue Service as a field audit agent, figuring the experience might come in handy later.

When Livesay returned home carrying a U.S. Treasury Department badge, friends and relatives didn’t take too kindly to his new job.

“They called me the Revenuer,” he says.

Livesay didn’t keep the Treasury credential very long. In less than a year, he was back at UCLA, enrolled in law school. But by the time he got his law degree, he had dropped his plan to become a tax lawyer.

Instead, he applied for jobs in the offices of the public defender and the district attorney, accepting a prosecutor’s post only because it was offered four hours earlier than a job in the defender’s office, he says.

Livesay started prosecuting criminals in the D.A.’s Long Beach office in 1965, and in quick order, rose to head deputy of the D.A.’s juvenile division, and then to head of central operations. In 1979, then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp appointed him chief deputy for the first time. During the administrations of Robert Philibosian and Ira Reiner, Livesay was assistant district attorney, the No. 3 position in the office.

Throughout that tenure, he earned high marks from colleagues for his administrative skills.

Among his responsibilities was deciding when the district attorney’s office would seek the death penalty in murder cases. It wouldn’t be long before people started calling him Dr. Death.

The name was gallows humor, he says, bestowed as a joke by defense lawyers, who by most accounts respected the fairness and openness by which he arrived at his decisions.

“He demonstrated solid judgment repeatedly when he was handling the final decisions on death penalty cases,” says Los Angeles County Public Defender Mike Judge.

Such evenhandedness probably reflects Livesay’s views about the death penalty, which are a bit murky, in that he’s not opposed to it, nor does he advocate it. He has prosecuted people facing the death penalty, and he defended them during a 10-year stint as a defense attorney.

The origin of his ambivalence is not entirely clear, though he ties it in large part to his family’s colored past.

“I’ve found a division in my family on some of the outlaws and their fates, with my mother telling me they got what they deserved, and other people in the family being opposed to the death penalty. So I didn’t come in with a view of whether I’m for it or against it.”

But he was decidedly against being known as Dr. Death.

He despised that sobriquet almost as much as he disliked his next one--the Juiceman.

He got pegged with that one by career criminal Leslie Vernon White, a clever snitch who was the focus of a major scandal over the misuse of jailhouse informants by the district attorney’s office.

White demonstrated how he could fake a confession by another inmate and trade that information to prosecutors and police in return for favors. Other informants did the same thing. It prompted a grand jury report in 1990.

“We had no idea an inmate could do that,” Livesay says. His role was to review trial prosecutors’ requests to use jailhouse informants in major cases.

When inmates learned that he had the “juice” to make things happen for them, White dubbed him “the Juiceman,” Livesay recalls. “It was an awful, awful name.”

He says the scandal prompted reforms. And it was the only major controversy that enveloped him during the 25 years he had been in the district attorney’s office.

Livesay left in 1991 to enter private practice. White and the informant scandal faded from his life, but only until he returned to the district attorney’s office shortly after Cooley was elected.

A year later Cooley appointed him chief deputy. Livesay had held that post on a temporary basis to help Cooley organize the office.

“I hadn’t been at that desk more than three days before White calls me from Mule Creek State Prison,” Livesay says. Somehow, he had heard Livesay was back with the district attorney and had called, ostensibly, to congratulate him.

It soon became clear--White was back to his old tricks.

“He says, ‘I’d like to tell you about something,’ and ‘I think you can help me out some too,’” Livesay says, recounting the conversation.

This time, the Juiceman was wise to White’s scam.

“That’s Les,” Livesay says. “He’s untrustworthy and a liar, and I wasn’t about to act on anything he had to say.”