D.A. candidates seem to contrast but have much in common

The two candidates vying to head the largest local prosecutorial office in the nation as Los Angeles County’s next district attorney are in many ways a study in opposites.

Alan Jackson, 47, assistant head of the district attorney’s major crimes unit, is a white, male Republican and a Texas-raised Air Force veteran who once dreamed of being a fighter pilot. He has a penchant for sports cars and a flair for the limelight.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, 55, is a Democrat and would be the first woman and first African American to hold the office. Soft-spoken and low-key, she once planned to be a grade school teacher.

Yet the two sprang from similar backgrounds, raised by hardworking, blue collar parents with little formal education.

Jackson was born into a military family in Indiana and bounced from one Air Force base to another before his parents divorced. His mother, armed only with “a high school education and the grit of a Southern woman,” as Jackson put it, took her two sons and moved to Austin, where she went to work at a Catholic church and later for Xerox. Her income left little for luxuries.

“Anything I or my brother wanted, we worked for,” Jackson said. “There were no handouts.”

Among the things he worked for — as a bus boy at a local restaurant and as a Coca-Cola delivery route helper — was his first car, a beat-up 1974 Pontiac Grand Prix that cost about $500. It was a far cry from the cars he would own later in life — Corvettes, a Porsche, a Nissan 350z convertible and a 1969 Oldsmobile 442.

The Grand Prix “might very well be the top front-runner for the ugliest car ever made, but it was all mine,” Jackson said.

After high school, he joined the Air Force, where he worked on jet engines. But his less-than-perfect vision made being a pilot impossible, so, rather than reenlist, he went to college and then to law school at Pepperdine University.

There, he was accepted into the elite trial advocacy course taught by former prosecutor Harry Caldwell.

“He had a lot of charisma and stage presence,” Caldwell said. “… I think he wanted to be the very best prosecutor he could possibly be.”

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Lacey grew up in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. Her mother, Addie Phillips, was the oldest of 14 children in a poor family in Georgia. At 17, she moved to Los Angeles.

Lacey’s mother worked in the garment district and later for the school district, eventually becoming a teacher’s assistant. Lacey’s father, who died four years ago, worked for the city’s lot cleaning division.

The icons of the civil rights era loomed large in Lacey childhood home. She and her sister grew up surrounded by pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

“We instilled those Martin Luther King values in her,” Addie Phillips said.

Church was mandatory. Lacey met her future husband, David Lacey, singing in the Trinity Baptist Church choir while she was in high school.

The Phillipses were determined that their children would go to college and saved enough money to send Lacey to UC Irvine. She planned to become a teacher, but a stint in a preschool one summer changed her mind. In search of another offering to fill out her course load, she enrolled in a law class.

She was inspired by guest speaker Irma Brown, a young black attorney who would later become a judge in Inglewood.

“Listening to her talk … I thought, ‘I could be a lawyer, I could do what this woman does,’ ” Lacey said.

She won a scholarship to USC’s law school, married and gave birth to her first child, returning to class two weeks later to graduate on time.

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Jackson went to work for the district attorney’s office soon after law school and moved through several assignments before landing in the hard-core gang unit in Compton.

The prosecutors there often put in 12- to 14-hour days, sometimes juggling as many as a dozen murder cases each.

In one case, a home invasion robber had fired a shotgun through a bathroom door at a terrified teenage girl — the blast so powerful it knocked her back through the glass shower. The girl died while on the line with a 911 operator. That recording was later played in court.

Her killer, Eugene Penesa, was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Jackson said it was one of the cases that left him with a sense of the deep impacts violent crime has on communities.

“It’s not just philosophical for me, it’s personal,” he said.

In 2004, Jackson went to the major crimes unit. His first high-profile case was the cold case murder of race car driver Mickey Thompson, who was gunned down along with his wife by two hooded gunmen in 1988. The prosecution won a conviction against Thompson’s former business partner, Michael Goodwin, despite no crime scene evidence tying him to the killings.

Jackson went on to try other heavily publicized cases, including the two murder trials of music producer Phil Spector. John C. Taylor, an attorney for the family of victim Lana Clarkson, recalled Jackson’s grace under pressure.

“Your day in court is being analyzed by lots of people, so you have to have tremendous focus and a mind-set to be able to shut all that out,” he said.

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By the time Lacey arrived in the district attorney’s office -- after working for a private firm and the Santa Monica city attorney’s office -- she had two children and was caring for a young nephew. She volunteered for code enforcement, which allowed her some flexibility.

The assignment turned out to be fortuitous in another way.

“One day I walked into the Antelope Valley office, and there was this guy with a beard and a mustache and shaggy hair and … his shirttail half out and half in, and I went up to him, and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Steve Cooley. I’m the head deputy,’ ” Lacey said.

Lacey later worked with Cooley in San Fernando, where she won convictions in prominent cases including the trial of Robert Lee Donaldson, a serial rapist who was sentenced to 122 years for the kidnapping and rape of three young girls, and the trials of three skinheads who beat a homeless black man to death in Lancaster.

People who know Lacey as a prosecutor said her ability to put people at ease served her well with jurors, as well as with judges, defense attorneys and other courtroom players.

After Cooley became district attorney in 2000, Lacey was the first person he appointed to management.

Over the next decade, she rose through the ranks. She helped implement initiatives including alternative sentencing courts for women, veterans and the mentally ill. She took over as chief deputy — Cooley’s second in command — in April 2011.

“She’s a great collaborator, which in my view is key to being a successful district attorney,” said Cooley, who has endorsed her.

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Within the district attorney’s office, both candidates are respected and well-liked, said Phillip Stirling, a deputy district attorney who contributed to both Jackson and Lacey campaigns before the primary.

“They both have their hearts in the right place and are motivated by the right things,” he said.

They also have largely similar positions on the issues — both support the death penalty, for instance, but favor expanding prevention programs and alternative sentencing.

Since edging out four other candidates, including presumed front-runner Carmen Trutanich, Lacey and Jackson have striven to put distance between themselves.

They have taken different positions on a ballot measure that would soften California’s three-strikes law and one that would raise taxes in part to provide counties with funding to cope with housing state prison inmates in local lockups. Lacey supports and Jackson opposes both.

Lacey has pointed to Jackson’s lack of management experience, and Jackson has painted Lacey as a bureaucrat out of touch with the courtroom.

The Jackson campaign capitalized on Lacey’s entanglement in a public spat between Cooley and the prosecutors’ union. In a television spot Jackson calls Lacey a “political appointee who was dishonest under oath to protect her boss,” referring to conflicting testimony Lacey gave at two union grievance hearings. (The union announced Tuesday that the prosecutors it represents had voted to support Lacey over Jackson by a 127-73 margin, but the union did not officially endorse either candidate).

Jackson suffered an embarrassment of his own when it turned out that a major campaign supporter was a convicted felon who had been involved in a multimillion-dollar mortgage loan scheme in the late 1990s.

Jaime Regalado, former executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said that with both candidates’ formidable track records and similar positions on the issues, the election may come down to subtler differences.

“Some voters will weigh in on behalf of Jackson, because they like a prosecutor who’s prosecuted successfully high-profile people like Phil Spector,” he said. “But we also have voters who like the fact that Lacey is bringing with her a kind of vast experience, not only being a tough cop, but also having a softer side.”

abby.sewell@latimes.com