A Timely Victory for Cooley

The felony conviction this week of former Compton Mayor Omar Bradley for misusing public money gave Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley a high-profile victory in his campaign to clean up local corruption -- and win reelection.

With less than three weeks before the March 2 election, Cooley said the guilty verdicts in the Bradley case prove his ability to prosecute public officials who commit crimes.

“I think there are people out there that are going, ‘Am I next?’ ” Cooley said in an interview. “This conviction and many others will go a long way in hopefully deterring individuals from committing criminal acts.”

Cooley’s challengers in the race for district attorney accuse him of failing to root out corrupt city officials.

“It isn’t enough to pluck a bad apple,” said Nick Pacheco, a former prosecutor and Los Angeles city councilman who is running against Cooley. “Cooley doesn’t have a plan to bring good government to these cities.”

The Compton case was a significant win for the D.A.’s public integrity division, which Cooley created in 2001 to prosecute corruption within governments and public agencies.

Prosecutors have filed 70 cases and won 59 convictions against public officials, ranging from embezzlement to voter fraud. There are also 108 active investigations.

Bradley, along with former Compton City Councilman Amen Rahh and former City Manager John Johnson, were taken away in handcuffs Tuesday after a jury found them guilty of misappropriating public funds. Each faces a possible five-year prison term. Former City Councilwoman Delores Zurita and Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux were acquitted.

Political consultants said the success in the Compton corruption case could help Cooley by adding a win to his record and showing the public that, despite criticism to the contrary, he was willing to take on a tough case.

“In more ways than one, it was a good conviction,” said consultant Joe Cerrell.

Consultants said they believed it would be difficult for Cooley’s opponents to push him into a runoff on March 2, in part because the district attorney has raised more than $940,000. As of Jan. 17, his five opponents combined had raised roughly $60,000, according to the county registrar’s office.

The challengers for the nonpartisan office besides Pacheco are, Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Higgins, Deputy Dist. Atty. Denise Moehlman, former Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony Patchett and public law attorney Roger Carrick.

“This is a very large and expensive county to communicate in,” said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, a consultant to Gil Garcetti in Garcetti’s losing 2000 campaign against Cooley. “The voters are left with essentially a referendum on the incumbent district attorney.”

Cooley has begun his advertising, sending out glossy mailers, planning television spots and making calls with recorded messages from supporters, including Sheriff Lee Baca. And although his opponents have received some endorsements, Cooley has received backing from many labor and law enforcement organizations throughout the county.

Cooley is not as well known as past district attorneys, but Republican political analyst Allan Hoffenblum says that could help him.

Garcetti, Cooley’s predecessor, was well known, but for the wrong reasons, Hoffenblum said. Cooley has drawn some favorable publicity for prosecuting public corruption. “It would be a major upset for him to be defeated,” he said. “People don’t fire incumbents without cause.”

If Cooley doesn’t receive the 50% plus one needed to avoid a runoff, however, Hoffenblum said he will become vulnerable and may be in “big trouble.”

In the Compton case, Deputy Dist. Atty. David Demerjian, head of the public integrity unit, rejected arguments that Bradley and the others didn’t deserve prison time because they had misspent relatively small sums of money. “They shouldn’t have been lining their pockets with public funds,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”

In a similar case, prosecutors are probing possible misuse of public funds in Lynwood, where council members have used city credit cards for expensive dinners and luxury resort trips to Rio de Janeiro. Lynwood activists said the council members might be losing sleep these days.

“The credit-card purchases in Lynwood were much more extravagant than Compton,” said Eddy Hernandez, a local activist.

Civic leaders are not the only targets of the public integrity division. Cody Cluff, former head of the agency that promotes film production in the county, has been charged with embezzling public funds. In another case, a vice president of Alan Casden’s development firm and 13 subcontractors have been indicted on charges of conspiring to hand out illegal donations in city campaigns.

Though the D.A.’s unit has had its successes, it got off to a rough start when a judge dismissed the case against former South Gate Treasurer Albert Robles, who had been accused of threatening to kill two legislators. Robles now faces trial on new charges that he conspired to violate election laws and misuse public funds.

Cooley’s opponents accuse him of being reluctant to target corporations and complain that he has failed to thoroughly investigate police misconduct. They cite his handling of the Belmont Learning Complex and the Rampart police scandal. They also say Cooley should have continued to investigate lobbyist Art M. Gastelum for possible misconduct and that he should not have dropped a criminal investigation of Newhall Land & Farming Co. when the firm agreed to create a preserve for an endangered plant.

Pacheco said he thought Cooley should have been investigating Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center after the deaths of several patients in the past year.

Higgins said Cooley carefully picks the cases he believes he can win. “In the whole scheme of the cases that the D.A.’s office prosecutes, the Bradley case is on the smaller end,” Higgins said. “Where has Steve been on Newhall, Rampart, Gastelum?”

Roger Carrick said Cooley takes on officials of small cities, mostly African Americans and Latinos. “I think Mr. Cooley is afraid to take on big cases. I think Mr. Cooley is afraid of losing a big case,” Carrick said.

But campaign consultant Harvey Englander said the challengers were “trying to roll a boulder up a hill” in their attempt to force Cooley into a runoff. He is “not Mr. Personality all the time,” but he is what many residents want, he said.

“They didn’t want a TV D.A.,” Englander said. “They wanted somebody who will convict criminals.”

Cooley’s campaign consultant, John Shallman, said each of the challengers had a “personal grudge” against Cooley that had prompted them to run.

Cooley, a Republican, confounded some liberal critics when he halted prosecution of most nonviolent third-strikers. In three years in office, he has increased the conviction rate in gang cases and extracted guilty pleas from high-profile defendants such as Symbionese Liberation Army associate Sara Jane Olson and Glendale respiratory therapist Efren Saldivar, who killed six older patients.

But he was criticized for botching the brutality case against former Inglewood Officer Jeremy Morse and for refusing to drop the murder case against Thomas Lee Goldstein, even after a state judge dismissed the 1980 conviction because of prosecutors’ use of an unreliable jailhouse informant.

Cooley said he wasn’t pursuing public corruption to get reelected.

“It’s a promise I made when I ran last time,” he said. “It’s a promise I’ve fulfilled. We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do.”

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Times staff writer Richard Marosi contributed to this report.