In refusing a plea bargain, Carona took a baffling risk

Friends from Chicago are in town this week, and for once I didn’t have to stand mute while they talked about public corruption cases.

Sure, they’ve got Illinois Gov. Rod “Big Hair” Blagojevich (they always seem to have somebody), but Orange County has former Sheriff Mike “Bald Is Beautiful” Carona. In their separate ways, federal prosecutors have portrayed both gentlemen as eager to use their offices to enrich themselves. And in both cases, secret recordings are part of the government’s case.

Blagojevich says he’s not guilty of anything and hasn’t resigned the governorship.

Carona, on the other hand, is fast approaching his day of reckoning.

Next Tuesday, after a two-week holiday recess, jurors will hear closing arguments and begin deliberating.

Thirteen months ago, I predicted that Carona would accept a plea bargain before New Year’s Day 2008. Lesson learned: no more predictions.

But here’s something I still don’t get as New Year’s Day 2009 looms: Why didn’t he take the plea? Especially because, despite all his plaintive and defiant remarks in the last year about being eager to prove his innocence, Carona didn’t take the witness stand.

Who knows, maybe he was straining at the bit to testify and his lawyers held him back. He’s certainly not obliged to testify, and jurors aren’t supposed to hold it against defendants who don’t.

But this is a case largely built around the testimony of former Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, a onetime Carona confidant who became the government’s chief witness. Haidl’s testimony, combined with the secretly recorded conversations involving him and Carona, are the guts of the case.

Only Haidl testified about cash payments he allegedly made to Carona over a four-year period ending in 2002.

He even testified that Carona refused the last payment because he felt bad about the legal trouble then enveloping Haidl’s son.

If Haidl made up the cash-payment story, you’ve got to give him credit for adding a creative flourish.

But with no other witnesses testifying about the alleged exchanges, it comes down to Haidl’s word. Had he been the world’s worst witness, there’d be no need for Carona to testify.

He wasn’t.

Still, if jurors were looking for reasons to reject Haidl’s testimony, wouldn’t a few well-chosen words from the charismatic former sheriff have finished the job? Why not pit Carona’s credibility against that of Haidl, who jurors knew had taken a deal to avoid harsher punishment?

Those stinkin’ tapes.

That’s most likely why Carona never took the stand. He might well have convinced jurors in head-to-head testimony that he never took an illegal dime from Haidl. But when you’ve got audiotapes of Carona talking about, among other things, illegal cash that is “on my end of it, completely untraceable,” you can see the potential for an uncomfortable cross-examination by federal prosecutors.

So Carona stayed in his seat, hoping for . . . what?

That jurors would dismiss Haidl as a self-serving liar? Or, perhaps, that even if he gave Carona money, it wouldn’t strike jurors as having a corrupting effect?

A former prosecutor I interviewed earlier in the trial talked about the “no harm, no foul” defense, in which jurors come to accept that the public was not wronged by alleged misdeeds.

Maybe jurors will sign off on some or all of that.

More realistically, Carona needs only one juror to hold fast to that position -- enough to create a hung jury and no conviction.

But what a risk.

And that’s what I don’t get. Not so much that Carona didn’t testify, but that if he knew he wasn’t going to -- leaving Haidl and the tapes largely unchallenged -- why not settle this case long ago and presumably get a better deal than a conviction would land him?

The government is always willing to barter. It’s pretty standard that defendants who reject plea deals get tougher sentences if convicted.

And just as it was more than a year ago, not taking one may prove the biggest mistake Mike Carona ever made.

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dana.parsons@latimes.com