Hundreds mourn Cecil Hicks

Cecil Hicks, the long-serving former Orange County district attorney legendary for successfully prosecuting dozens of politicians and their associates for corruption, was remembered Monday by family and colleagues for a solemn commitment to justice that somehow easily co-existed with an irreverent wit.

Hundreds of well-wishers packed Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana to pay respects to Hicks, who died March 30 after contracting pneumonia. He was 80.

Hicks led the district attorney’s office for 23 years, from 1966 to 1989, an era one well-wisher recalled Monday as a “golden age of prosecution.” The office won convictions of at least 44 elected officials, fundraisers and other political figures, including a congressman and three members of the Board of Supervisors.

The office also grew tremendously under his leadership and was among the first to launch specialized units to handle particular types of crime. Some of the bright young lawyers he hired went on to become top judges and star prosecutors in their own right.

They called him “Coach” or “Boss.” He called them his “Fighter pilots.”

Hicks’ prosecution of political figures earned him their enmity, and several people warned him it could cost him his job. One of Hicks’ sons, Randy, recalled Monday that he was awed by seeing his father tell his mother: “I was elected to prosecute crime. And if I’m run out of office for doing the right thing, so be it.”

Another son, Stewart, recalled his father’s advice when Stewart himself joined the district attorney’s office. As a prosecutor, Hicks told his son, he would decide hundreds of times each year whether to file criminal charges against suspects. And every time, he said, “you change the lives of every person associated with that case forever. Don’t ever forget that. When you do forget that, when it just becomes business as usual, get another job.”

That from the same man who once remarked about a skydiving photographer who died after forgetting his parachute: “He didn’t forget his parachute to go skydiving. He remembered his camera to go filming.”

A diminutive man, Hicks took ribbing about his height in stride. Several recalled how people would yell “Stand up!” at him while he was giving presentations to the office, to which he would retort: “I am standing up!”

His crusading nature was displayed early. Stewart Hicks read a letter written by his father at age 11, in which he said he wanted to be one of the best lawyers of his time and “convict men that a majority of people feel are guilty.”

In another letter, written 10 days after the Pearl Harbor bombing and when Cecil Hicks was 15, he told his family he had joined the Navy -- he used his older sister’s altered birth certificate -- despite an earlier bout with polio. “I have to do something for the people and ideals I love,” he wrote.

Alicemarie Stotler, chief judge of the Los Angeles federal court district, was hired by Hicks as the first female prosecutor in Orange County.

“He knew how to make sure our white hats stayed white,” she said.

“He was fearless. Cecil had an inborn aversion to corruption, no matter where or how high.”

Michael Capizzi, a deputy under Hicks who succeeded him as district attorney, said: “In the history of Orange County, Cecil was certainly an icon.” Without him, “Orange County would be a different place today, and not a better place.”

christian.berthelsen@latimes.com