Cooley Brings Own Style to D.A.’s Job

If you come upon a new James Ellroy novel one of these days, and there’s a big-city D.A. in it who’s no oil painting, a character with slouchy posture and upright reputation, and you think, wait, I know this guy--yeah, you do.

That character would be modeled on Los Angeles County’s D.A., Steve Cooley, who thinks James Ellroy is pretty cool--”L.A. Confidential” is his favorite book--and Ellroy has returned the regard publicly.

Over the summer, in a GQ magazine piece, Ellroy sized Cooley up so: “I expect he’ll go down in history as one of the great American crime-fighters.”

For Cooley, whose father was a G-man for J. Edgar Hoover and who keeps his dad’s FBI badge cuff links behind glass in his office, this is sweet, sweet stuff.

That quote is Cooley’s favorite clipping about him personally in the nearly two years since he became D.A., but just when he wanted a copy of it, nobody could find it. It wasn’t hanging on his office wall--almost nothing is, except his father’s Eagle Scout honors and some political caricatures of Cooley himself. What, I teased him, no pictures of you posing with politicians?

“We don’t photograph politicians,” he said in his best Ellroy delivery. “We prosecute ‘em.”

This is classic Cooley, the plain old call-me-Steve guy who moved into this 18th-floor office on a Monday morning in December 2000, less than a month after beating his old boss Gil Garcetti nearly 2-to-1.

Style being a peculiar local L.A. currency, the switch in D.A. style was immediate. Garcetti was the camera-ready, urbane sophisticate who could and did go face-time to face-time on TV with defense attorneys almost as famous as their clients. Cooley has limited his TV appearances to big announcements like the Angel of Death and Symbionese Liberation Army prosecutions; his distaste for the “press-conference prosecution” is unmistakable. “We’re going to do our talking in court rather than on the courthouse steps,” he says.

For me, this defined the post-Garcetti style: In praising his investigators, Cooley the Cal State L.A. grad told me, “We get the cream de la cream, put that down, the cream de la cream of investigators.” Garcetti the USC grad would have pronounced it in correct French, “creme de la creme.” James Ellroy, put that down.

Cooley’s new office is squarely above where his old desk was, the same view but six floors up, and if there’s a high-flying metaphor dangling there about vision and scope, Cooley isn’t biting. The closest he gets is when I ask him about the praiseworthy public integrity and corruption investigations he’s launched that have jerked the chain of elected and appointed officials even in under-the-radar cities like South Gate and Bell Gardens.

“Let me phrase it this way: If I leave a legacy of whatever time I’m here, I am now convinced it will be this, because it was such a void, such a prosecutorial void.”

He’d sit six floors below and read newspaper stories about Carlos Vignali and such, and think, if the newspapers can find this stuff, why can’t prosecutors?

“Historically, I think there was an aversion” to going after such cases, a sense that “if you go after X, you’re going to upset X’s constituency, and we wouldn’t want to do that”--those constituencies being “sometimes ethnic, sometimes business or regional” whose perfidies besmirched not only on-the-level politicians but “all the hard-working honest taxpaying people out there who want their government honest.”

Cooley was speaking at a Palm Springs convention about public integrity when South Gate Treasurer Albert Robles--out on bail after Cooley’s squad nailed him for alleged death threats against state legislators--ostentatiously got up and walked out. Cooley loved it: “Having someone like Albert Robles walk out on you in the middle of a speech about public integrity is a badge of honor.”

He’s put the Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law, into his investigators’ vocabulary--”This office never enforced it before.” Yet there was understandable snarky comment when his office announced that his bosses, the Board of Supervisors, hadn’t violated the Brown Act by acting in closed session last year--the same week Cooley went to the board in person, asking it not to cut $8 million from his budget.

And what of those two notorious instances of official bad faith, Rampart and Belmont? Cooley belayed Garcetti on them in the campaign. Then he inherited months of work already done on them. Nearly two years later, we’re still looking at our watches, or rather, our calendars, for results.

He’ll rail about delays in getting Winona Ryder to court, but on Belmont and Rampart, Cooley leans on lawyer-speak. Rampart--on which he once prematurely said he was closing the books--is being “reviewed extensively by high levels of this office,” still, and the results will be released en masse. “We don’t want to do it piecemeal.” Ditto Belmont, which, like Rampart, has been reviewed and assessed, and “we’ll share the results of that with a public report .... We’re going to do it all in one point in time.”

That point in time, Mr. D.A., will be worth your spending a few minutes on the courthouse steps. Lights we got. Camera we got. It’s the “action” we’ll be waiting to hear.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com