The Odd Payoff of a Crime

The presentations are already underway by the time Mike Carona, wearing his signature green sheriff’s uniform with four silver stars on each collar, strides through the restaurant and past the sign-in table. A young volunteer does a double take, then scoops a gold-ribboned name tag from the table and catches up with Carona just before he reaches the meeting room. They speak quietly and flash smiles as she presses the name tag into his hand. When she walks back to her post, Carona glances at the tag, then rolls the ribbon around the card and slips it into his pants pocket. No need for an ID in this crowd.

Carona, a compact man with a vaguely military bearing, hovers at the back of the room, trying not to disrupt. Heads turn anyway. Another young woman appears and escorts him out of one side door and back in another to a table near the lectern, where the publisher of OC Metro, a local business magazine, is talking about how great it is to live and work in Orange County. Everyone in this Costa Mesa restaurant seems to agree. The event feels like a Rotary Club meeting-turned-fund-raiser, where women in fashionable black order wine by the color and tanned men in dark power suits hold bottles of light beer. The publisher finishes his spiel; two editors prepare to announce OC Metro’s “Hottest 25,” the biggest movers and shakers in this well-heeled corner of the world. They call each of the honorees’ names and present them with plaques and handshakes as the audience claps respectfully.

Then comes Carona.

As he is introduced--”Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona”--the 48-year-old Santa Monica native bounds from his table, most of the audience rising with him. Energy charges the room as Little League suddenly becomes the Majors, and the star pitcher is on the mound. Carona accepts the plaque and handshake, and faces the cheering crowd, self-consciously bobbing his balding head as he waves, his face locked in an open-mouthed smile. Then he swims back through the electrifying din to his table, a bit sheepish, not uncomfortable but not at ease either, an aw-shucks deer in the headlights.

This is the odd payoff of murder. Last summer, Carona became the national face of intrepid police work when he took to the airwaves to denounce the killing of Samantha Runnion, a 5-year-old girl who was kidnapped as she played with a friend outside her family’s condominium in Stanton, a small working-class city of an estimated 38,000 people squeezed in south of the Santa Ana Freeway between Garden Grove and Anaheim. In press conferences, Carona promised the unknown killer that he and his deputies would not rest until they had run him to ground. It was a bravura performance, Carona slipping between the sometimes conflicting roles of detached law enforcement professional and emotional Everyman, never shorting either. The police would get their man, he vowed. A little girl’s death would be avenged.

The public promises were a roll of the dice. What if the crime wasn’t solved? What if no arrests were made? But within days, police identified Alejandro Avila, 28, of Lake Elsinore as their man. Prosecutors say DNA evidence, credit card and cell phone records, tire tracks and footprints point to Avila, who awaits trial on murder, kidnapping and other charges.

Law and order has always played well in Orange County, where the local airport carries John Wayne’s name and the guiding political ethos is that of the laissez-faire entrepreneur. Carona plays well here, too, coming across as a mix of common-sense administrator and tireless cop. It also helps that he touts his “personal relationship with Jesus,” and has said his faith is the most important thing in his life, followed by his family and the Sheriff’s Department--priorities that are noticed in this church-heavy county. But his role in solving the Runnion case shifted the rookie sheriff’s profile several notches upward, from local figure to home-grown national hero. And everybody wants to be close to a hero.

As the last plaque is handed out, the emcee thanks the crowd for coming. Most drift back to the bar, but 30 or so people fall into a receiving line, some angling for a handshake and a word in the sheriff’s ear, while others pass cameras to spouses or friends for a snapshot with the star. Carona graciously accepts every request, allowing the room to work him instead of the other way around. Small talk dominates--about Runnion and mutual acquaintances--until someone finally breaks the ice and the past yields to the future.

“When you run for governor,” one admirer says, clasping Carona’s hand, “you let me know.”

Not governor, Carona says later. That’s aiming too high, too soon. But he is clearly ambitious--an attribute apparent as far back as high school, when his then-stepmother recalls that “he just wanted to be somebody big, big, big.” So for now, Carona bides his time by collecting supporters, burnishing his image as the cop who publicly went after a child killer. He may even be learning the power of myth making--as the kid who overcomes his own family tragedy and rises to the top.

lthough he can’t define when his ambitions first gelled, Carona says he has always been driven to be the best at whatever he was doing. He went out for high school football and, despite his relatively small size, became an integral part of the team. He joined the wrestling team and was made captain. Raised in a household that did not emphasize academics, he finished near the top of his class. “There is no doubt I was ambitious,” Carona says. “I just know I wanted to make more than minimum wage, and wanted to have a college degree.”

Carona’s interest in politics stems from his early days in the Orange County Marshal’s Department, when he worked on the campaigns of friends who were running for office. For now he couches his political motivations in platitudes--”I like that concept of getting things done”--while he mulls his next move.

He flirted for a time with running for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat in 2005, but that idea fizzled. Fame fuels politics in our celebrity culture, and name recognition is everything. Larry King might have dubbed Carona “America’s sheriff,” but he’s still largely unknown outside of Orange and Los Angeles counties. And two years isn’t enough time to build the kind of statewide political organization it would take to win.

So a race for lieutenant governor in 2006 is more likely, according to Carona and his advisors, though if the burgeoning recall drive against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis is successful, Carona might be forced to decide his next move sooner. The sheriff worked last fall with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger on the passage of Proposition 49, a statewide funding plan for after-school programs. If the Austrian-born actor runs for governor, maybe the sheriff will team up with him--a conservative dream team of the action hero and the cop. But it’s too soon to say, too soon to commit--though not too soon to plan. Just having the conversations is heady stuff. Trips to the White House. Private sessions with Karl Rove, President Bush’s political strategist, and other advisors.

“It’s humbling,” Carona says. “These are guys you read about in the newspaper, and suddenly you’re having one-on-one conversations with them. You realize this is more than just sitting around with people over a beer and wondering if you have a future at [politics]. These people do it for a living.”

Another wild card in the deck: rumblings that the Bush administration might be considering Carona for a national post. For now, Carona says, he intends to keep doing his job and working to help Bush get reelected in 2004. “For the rest of it, we’ll just wait and see what happens,” Carona says.

About the only decision Carona has made is that he won’t seek reelection as Orange County sheriff in 2006, fulfilling a 1998 campaign pledge that he would limit himself to two terms. The promise carries an asterisk, though. While he wouldn’t be the first elected official to break such a promise, Carona says he won’t run again unless a transition would imperil the department--a situation he sees arising only if there’s another large-scale terrorist attack or similar critical event in which the public’s interest would be served by stability. He loves the work, he says, but it’s dangerous for one man to keep the job for too long. He doesn’t mention his predecessor by name, but the shadow of Brad Gates, whose autocratic rule over the Orange County Sheriff’s Department lasted nearly a quarter-century, lurks in the corners.

“This office, there’s so much power given to whoever holds it,” Carona says. “It needs to turn over so you don’t feel like you own the place. It’s healthy to have that kind of turnover.”

The power comes in the size. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department, despite covering a fraction of the L.A. area’s famously sprawling suburbs, is second only to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department within California. It has an annual budget of about $500 million, some 3,000 employees and oversees the nation’s eighth largest jail. Overcrowding has been such a problem that the department has been under a federal court order since 1978 to limit the number of inmates, even if it means early release for mostly misdemeanor offenders.

One of the solutions Carona has embraced is to move drug abusers from jail to therapeutic programs, under his belief that treatment is better for addicts, and for society, than incarceration. It’s a liberal position for a conservative Republican, and Carona defends it in both human and cost-benefit terms. “Treatment does work,” Carona says. “What isn’t the answer is just wholesale locking them up and throwing away the key.” Furthermore, he says, addiction is a self-destructive illness, and it’s cheaper to treat an addict than to incarcerate a prisoner.

The treatment programs began in 2000, and although it was designed with a five-year window for gathering results, Carona says the early indications are good. Recidivism has dropped from roughly 70% to 20%, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

Carona’s approach to drug abuse draws from personal experience. He often tells a childhood story that, he says, humanized addiction for him: finding his alcoholic mother dead in bed. “She had all kinds of problems, and drinking was definitely one of them,” says Carona from his corner office in the heart of the Orange County government complex in Santa Ana. “She’d drink a fifth of Scotch and a six-pack of Hamm’s beer every single day. She’d go into convulsions three or four times a week. Dad worked nights. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, and there I’d stay until Dad came home.”

The morning she died, the sheriff recalls, the house was filled with the smell of coffee as Carona’s father cooked breakfast. Carona’s mother had been drinking heavily the night before, and when Carona, then 11, went to wake her, he couldn’t. “The fear that my mother’s alcoholism was going to kill her had finally become a reality. . . . As traumatic as it was, I wasn’t surprised,” Carona wrote in “Save My Son,” a pro-treatment book he co-authored three years ago with Maralys Wills, whose son has bounced in and out of jail on drug convictions. In the book Carona described the unfolding scene at his house, the emergency crews arriving with “their sirens blaring” and the uncomfortable attention heaped on the suddenly motherless child. “And yet there was still the anger. I recall how mad I was that she was dead, that she drank herself to death--and that she chose her love of alcohol over her love for me.”

While it’s a compelling story, public records describe a different scene. An autopsy conducted by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office found that Mathilda Carona died of cancer that had begun as a tumor in a sinus cavity, then spread inside the skull, where it compressed the front of the brain. She also suffered from emphysema, and bronchopneumonia was listed as a contributing factor in her death. The report said that the day before she died, her doctor had found an abscess in her throat and told her she needed to be hospitalized, but she refused. Although the report said that Carona’s father told authorities his wife drank heavily the night before she died (Carona wrote that she ingested her usual fifth of liquor and six-pack of beer), a blood test found no presence of alcohol. The report also said that Carona’s father found the body.

“It was just ugly,” Carona says when asked about the discrepancies. To his mind, his mother’s alcoholism was so acute that she couldn’t tell she was gravely ill. “She was never sober enough to get herself in for treatment because she was afraid the doctor would tell her to stop drinking. The lady destroyed herself with alcohol.”

Yet the sheriff’s first wife, Janna Johnson of Savage, Minn., says that during their marriage she was told by Carona family members that the mother had died of a brain tumor, and that Carona neither mentioned his mother’s drinking nor that he had found her dead. “I never heard that,” says Johnson, noting, in retrospect, the curiosity that Carona didn’t discuss such a seminal part of his life with her. “I would think he would need a little help with that.”

They met while working at the Sunrise Market, a Covina grocery store, and they married after he landed a better job as an overnight warehouseman at a Vons grocery distribution center. “It was just one of those things,” Carona recalls. “You get making more money, you think this is the way things are going to be.” Their marriage ended in 1978, and Carona has since remarried.

There was a time in his life when Carona wasn’t sure where he’d end up or how he’d turn out. He was bright and athletic as a kid, playing football and wrestling in high school, but had no game plan for himself. Part of that was a function of class, he says, and part a function of circumstance.

Carona’s father, Nunzio, the son of Sicilian immigrants, was a mechanic who had his own repair shop for a time before going to work as garage foreman for a telephone company. Carona was born in Santa Monica, but the family moved around a lot in his early years. They eventually settled in the San Gabriel Valley, first in San Dimas, where his mother died, and then Glendora. Carona remembers his father working long, hard hours and, once he got home, disciplining in the “old school” way--with slaps and punches. “He didn’t put up with a lot,” Carona says. “It was not an Ozzie and Harriet family.”

After the mother’s death, Carona’s father had trouble managing the house--and his son--alone. Within a few weeks, he struck a deal with a waitress at a local restaurant. In return for a free room, 20-year-old Carol Barton would both keep house and watch over the boy. Six months later, Barton and the elder Carona married.

“I didn’t know anything about the world,” says Barton, who now lives in Northern California. Raised in a protective Mennonite family in Colorado, she had moved to Southern California to help her sister, a single mother, less than a year before meeting Nunzio. “He treated me like I was gold to begin with. He told me I was the best thing that ever happened to him. I was too naive to know what was going on.”

She says the physical abuse began quickly. “You could set a pair of shoes on the table and get whupped halfway across the room. He’d tear my clothes off if I came in the door and he didn’t know where I’d been.”

The father went after the son, too. “Michael wouldn’t maybe answer him fast enough, or if he told him to get something for him and it didn’t get there in time. It was just a control thing. A lot of times when his father would be abusive, [Michael would] say, ‘Call the cops! Call the cops!’ and I wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t do any good. [Nunzio] would only be twice as bad.”

Barton eventually left and moved to Redding. By then, the younger Carona was out of the house. The father died of heart disease in 1996.

Carona says the violence, in retrospect, was abuse, but at the time he just rolled with it as part of his father’s personality. It was a complex relationship. They played ball together and were close at times. “I used to work on cars with him,” Carona says. “He always had side jobs--laying brick walls or pouring cement.” At other times the father and son squared off in volatile confrontations.

“Dad was opinionated,” Carona says. “Sometimes the old man would pop me in the face. Dad was a unique guy. There are parts of his past that I just don’t know about, and he just never talked about.”

That relationship hovers over Carona’s dealings with his only child, 12-year-old son Matt. “He wouldn’t know what a spanking is,” Carona says. “I don’t yell and scream. You get things done by logic, and by dealing with things quietly.”

He believes he learned the right lessons from the wrong experiences.

“It’s helped me be a better person, and in dealing with individuals and to check the anger I have,” Carona says. “It’s the same with alcoholism. I’m sure I have the same tendencies my mother had, and I have to check myself.”

Carona says he placed high in his 1973 graduating class from Charter Oak High School in Covina, but had no plan after leaving school. “My father was taught you finish high school and you go to work,” Carona says. “There was no college savings plan, no preparation process for me.”

As a high school senior, Carona considered going into law enforcement. “He said he was going to be a colonel or something like that,” Barton says. While working nights at the Vons warehouse, Carona took undergraduate courses at Mt. San Antonio Community College in Walnut. “There were cops in the class,” Carona says. “During breaks I would talk to the guys.” Their enthusiasm for their work was infectious, and in 1976 Carona filled out applications for a number of regional law enforcement agencies. The Orange County Marshal’s Department was the first to come through.

After graduating from the Orange County police academy, Carona did basic marshal’s work--courtroom bailiff, serving warrants--but quickly moved behind a desk while earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in management and public administration from the University of Redlands and a second master’s degree in management from Cal Poly Pomona. He also involved himself in politics, working as a foot soldier for John Lewis, Ed Royce and Curt Pringle--all politicians who moved upward into state or federal legislative seats.

“I was never one of the guys at the macro level in the process,” Carona says. “I was more the grass-roots type. But when these people got into office, they actually got things done. I love the opportunity to make change. And it’s pretty tough to do unless you’re engaged in the process.”

Carona played departmental politics well, too. He made marshal’s lieutenant at age 29, ran the department at age 33, and a decade later was elected sheriff in a bar fight of an election in which he overcame significant opposition from both Gates, the outgoing sheriff, and rank-and-file deputies, who backed Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters.

Carona quickly won over the deputies. He dismantled the autocratic, top-down structure that Gates had created, while keeping most of the existing command staff. He also involved the deputies in departmental decisions on working conditions and other related issues, a classic labor-management gambit that showed Carona’s administrative skills. And Carona played public and sympathetic roles when two deputies--Brad Riches and Steven Parsons--were killed in the line of duty in separate incidents within Carona’s first 18 months on the job.

Any politician--and any sheriff--will create enemies, and Carona has his. Some former Gates backers grumble that Carona has promoted his supporters ahead of them; some of Carona’s supporters complain that he turned his back on them to curry favor with Gates’ people. His staff developed plans aimed at maximizing the sheriff’s exposure nationally while building local networks, which some critics view as the cold and calculated stratagem of the ambitious. Some of those plans were drawn upon in the Runnion case, when Carona was quickly able to overcome traditional jurisdictional chauvinism among neighboring police departments to press the investigation while the crime was still fresh.

It’s a devil’s bargain, in a way. Since the sheriff is elected, he has to be cognizant of the political ramifications of nearly everything he does. But as the head of a police agency, he has a special responsibility to justice, and must be wary of seeming opportunistic. With that in mind, Carona’s handlers have rejected a number of requests for television appearances, even though the exposure would be of political use. Once the Runnion investigation ended, Carona largely stopped talking about it with the media. And when network producers approached him during the Washington, D.C.-area sniper case, asking him to weigh in on how Maryland police were handling things, Carona demurred. “He didn’t want to be seen as second-guessing,” one aide says.

Detractors describe Carona as manipulative and ambitious--hardly a rare trait among politicians. And they complain that he’s prone to making promises he doesn’t keep, something Carona’s own aides say has some merit--a function of a man of whom too much is demanded.

“He’s getting 300 to 400 e-mails a day relating to what’s going on in the nation. In the juggling, some balls get dropped,” says George Jaramillo, a potential 1997 sheriff candidate who mothballed his own ambitions after meeting Carona at a fund-raiser. Jaramillo eventually ran Carona’s campaign, and has since become an assistant sheriff and one of Carona’s closest advisors. “He has a charismatic, disarming manner about him,” Jaramillo says. “He’s one of the smartest cops I’ve ever met.”

Still, some also have criticized Carona’s close relationship with Donald G. Haidl, a key financial backer and millionaire businessman who draws no county salary as assistant sheriff in charge of the volunteer Protective Services Reserve. The Reserve puts community members through training to carry both a badge and a gun. They are used primarily in roles that call for unusual manpower, such as the stakeouts of Orange County parks last year to catch the person who was leaving razor blades in the play areas.

Haidl, however, was once accused of skimming proceeds from the sale of government vehicles through his City of Industry-based Nationwide Auction Systems. Although Haidl paid $104,000 to settle a civil complaint, he has denied any wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime. His troubles expanded late last year when his 17-year-old son and two friends were charged with rape after they allegedly engaged in videotaped sex with an unconscious 16-year-old girl at Haidl’s Corona del Mar home. The boys are awaiting trial.

Carona defends Haidl, saying that he has been a loyal and able supporter and volunteer. Yet Carona also says that he would not hesitate to cut ties and initiate an investigation into an advisor or underling if there was evidence of a crime. When criticism of Haidl’s financial dealings arose early in the sheriff’s first term, Carona said he demanded an accounting from Haidl and warned him that he planned to turn loose departmental investigators. But Carona also promised that he would stand by Haidl unless problems were found. The investigation turned up nothing, and Haidl is still there. “The guy is not a liability for me,” Carona now says.

Carona also made room on his communications staff for Jon Fleischman, a longtime friend whose wife served as Carona’s campaign finance manager. Fleischman, former executive director of the state Republican Party, hails from the conservative wing of the GOP. Political observers say they believe Fleischman’s presence appeases party right-wingers who are upset over Carona’s drifts to the political center and his occasional endorsements of registered Democrats in nonpartisan races.

But to get elected statewide, a politician needs to stand for more than his friends. In Carona’s case, it’s still unclear exactly what he stands for. He describes himself as a conservative Republican, a political outlook that he says evolved when he was in his 20s. “I don’t think government has all the answers to people’s problems,” he says. He’s pro-gun. But he has not developed positions on many specific issues, saying that he wants to focus time and energy on his current job, not on whatever the next job might be. And the current job deals primarily with administrative matters, not policy.

Still, Carona is making plans. One of his biggest political hurdles will be to build a network among the state’s party faithful, the worker bees who do the heavy lifting in any campaign. Few people outside the reach of the local Los Angeles television market know Carona. In late February, he began trying to change his anonymity by traveling to Butte County, north of Sacramento, to speak before the local Republican Lincoln Club. He envisions making more such trips, getting to know the state and letting the state get to know him.

“There’s a lot of excitement,” says Kevin Spillane, a Republican strategist in Sacramento and onetime political advisor to former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. “People in the White House are impressed by him, and that extends down to the grass-roots [level]. He’s seen as having a bright future.”

But the act of wooing the party faithful carries its own risks, says Democratic strategist Bill Carrick of Los Angeles. Carona, he says, starts off with a political blessing: The voting public loves a sheriff, the quintessential good guy who seems to be above party politics. But it will be hard for Carona to keep that white hat if he has to fight for a Republican nomination. That could force Carona to reveal stances on such volatile--and politically defining--issues as gun control, abortion, gay rights and the environment.

“That has a tendency to polarize people’s views of candidates and turn a nonpartisan, independent guy into a partisan, ideological figure,” says Carrick, adding that in recent campaigns, Republican candidates have often come from the conservative wing of the party, which makes for a hard sell to a state electorate that is closer to the political center. “It is much better to be the nonpartisan sheriff who’s offering himself for public service. It’s always an interesting challenge to run a state campaign. Can you put together the money? The organization?”

Orange County’s “hottest 25” have reconvened at the restaurant’s bar, and the line of people wanting a word with the sheriff has finally exhausted itself. Carona starts to head out of the room, still all smiles after two hours of meeting and greeting and small talk.

It’s an odd event for a law enforcement official, with its overtones of a People magazine-style list of the photogenically endowed. But the award recognizes power and influence. And it brings the sheriff yet again within elbow reach of the kinds of people--business leaders and innovators--who can inject both money and energy into a political campaign. The evening embraces the sometimes conflicting roles that come with the job: The constituents like to see their elected sheriff out and about, where they can both take his measure and push their own issues. And the elected sheriff needs to be out and about, because that is where the political interactions count the most.

“Going out into the community, I like that part of politics,” Carona says. “I like it a lot. I’m not uncomfortable in a crowd. But I much prefer smaller groups. I learn a lot with that interaction with people.”

Carona has no illusions about the nature of politics beyond the romantic vision of serving the people’s will and being the catalyst for change. It’s a rough-and-tumble business. “Politics is a full-contact sport,” he says. “For me it’s like tae kwon do. I like sparring; it’s part of the sport of it. I don’t like getting kicked in the head. But I’m real impressed when someone can do it.”

Most of Carona’s evenings and weekends are filled with public events. “There’s no typical day in my life,” he says. He’s up early, usually before dawn, and exercises whenever he gets a chance. His busy schedule eats into family time, but Carona fights to save space for his wife and son. They sit down often to map out upcoming events that require a father’s presence--school programs, sports matches--and he tries to bend the public part of his schedule to fit. He wears his love for his son as a badge, and at times seems surprised at its depth. With an eye on his own childhood, he swore for years that he’d never have a family of his own, but relented “after some pretty heated discussions with my wife, and I didn’t have a valid argument. She was 100% right--this is probably the single best experience of my life.”

Carona’s son knew about the award, and he had seen the magazine with the pictures of all 25 of Orange County’s “hottest.” “He said, ‘These people aren’t even good looking.’ I told him that’s not what it’s about, it’s about affecting the community,” Carona says. “He was disappointed. He’d been telling all his pals at school his Dad was hot.”

The sheriff laughs at his own expense, bouncing slightly in place, then glances around the room. There is still schmoozing to be done, so he turns and heads for the bar, a green blur slicing through the black-clad crowd, alone. For the moment.