INTERVIEW—Heating Up The D.A.’s Office

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Steve Cooley


Title:

District Attorney


Organization:

County of Los Angeles


Born:

Los Angeles, 1947


Education:

B.A., California State University, Los Angeles; J.D., USC


Career Turning Point:

Deciding to pursue a career in criminal law after finishing at top of criminal law class at USC


Most Admired People:

Former California governors Pat Brown and George Deukmejian and former L.A. District Attorney John Van de Kamp


Hobbies:

Water skiing, golf, reading


Personal:

Married; two grown children


Steve Cooley’s Moves Since Taking Office Have Sparked Controversy As He Restructures Agency, Takes on Public Officials and Rejuvenates Old Cases

Steve Cooley has wasted little time making headlines and restructuring the massive L.A. District Attorney’s Office, the largest local prosecutorial agency in the nation.

In just four months, Cooley has reopened a criminal investigation into the L.A. Unified School District’s Belmont Learning Center fiasco, he’s clamped down on enforcing the state’s open meeting law, changed the way L.A. County deals with the state’s “three strikes” law, and he recently said he is going to investigate suspicious phone calls made in the closing days of the city’s primary election.

On the organizational side, Cooley is in the midst of totally restructuring the District Attorney’s Office, the nation’s largest with 1,118 prosecutors, 260 investigators and a budget of about $200 million. He has opened up three new divisions to investigate public corruption, wrongdoing in the criminal justice system and organized crime. He’s shuffled other divisions around and boosted staffing in some, including the hate crime unit.

Cooley, a 27-year veteran of the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, took the helm of the agency after unseating embattled incumbent D.A. Gil Garcetti in an often-contentious campaign last year. He is one of the few high-ranking Republicans in a county increasingly leaning towards Democrats, although he himself points out that the D.A.’s post is non-partisan.


Question:

You have said you intend to get to the bottom of the offensive phone calls made in the closing days of the primary campaign, regardless of whether there is criminal wrongdoing. Why?

Answer: We’ve already made an initial determination there may not be any direct breaking of any law with respect to pre-recorded telephonic messages. There is such a law governing television ads and radio ads and mailers. It looks like someone walked right up to the line, knew exactly where that line was and leaned way over. This is obviously a loophole and we’re talking with legislators to see what can be done to close it.

In the meantime, we are going ahead with our investigation to find out who was behind the phone calls. If we can successfully trace these phone calls, even if there is no direct law, it might still have a deterrent effect.

Q: You’ve reopened the criminal investigation into the Belmont Learning Center, and your office recently sent a letter to L.A. Unified School District chief Roy Romer reminding him not to disturb the monitoring wells on the site, declaring the site a “crime scene.” What’s going on here?

A: First, I must say there has been a tremendous overreaction to the letter that my assistant Anthony Patchett sent. The only purpose of that letter was to remind the district that we are investigating the site. The bidding process (to possibly sell the site to an outside buyer) can still go on, as long as the monitoring wells are not disturbed. And their response made it sound like this was going to derail the whole process. We intend to be done with our on-site investigation within 40 to 60 days. Surely that’s not too much to ask.

As for the investigation as a whole, I made the decision right after I took office to reopen it. My predecessor’s efforts fell short of what I would term a complete investigation. He didn’t even see fit to interview Don Mullinax, the district’s own special investigator.

Q: What were the biggest surprises and the most serious problems you found in the District Attorney’s Office when you took over last December?

A: Well, the “Angel of Death” case comes to mind immediately. (Glendale Adventist Medical Center respiratory therapist Efren Saldivar, who confessed to poisoning up to 50 patients but later retracted his confession.) I started working on that December 5 as the D.A.; I had heard absolutely nothing about it during the campaign. I was a little surprised at how that case had not moved forward, given what I believe to be the quality and the quantity of evidence. Based upon (Saldivar’s) own admissions, some people have suggested he could be the most prolific mass-murderer in L.A. County’s 150-year history. You’d think that would be a priority under the previous administration, but it was so bogged down and going nowhere.

Q: What about the structure of the D.A.’s Office? You’ve certainly undertaken a massive reorganization.

A: The place needed to be totally reorganized, and I knew this even during the campaign. We have undertaken the most comprehensive reorganization in anyone’s memory. We broke up the Special Investigations Unit into two divisions: the Justice System Integrity Division and the Public Integrity Division, putting more accountability into these two areas that are so essential. The public needs to have confidence in the justice system in all of its aspects, not just departmental law enforcement, but judges, defense attorneys and those that work within the system. If any one of them engages in criminal behavior that affects the integrity of the criminal justice system, the Justice Integrity Division will get involved.

Q: On the public integrity side, you made a splash recently by telling the L.A. Unified School District that it had violated the Brown Act the state’s open meeting law when the school board voted to reopen the Belmont project last December. What was behind that move?

A: We got the word of the Brown Act violation on Dec. 12, one week after I took office. We immediately wrote a letter to LAUSD saying we have possible evidence of a Brown Act violation and told them that, unless they put that Belmont decision up to a public vote, we will investigate and prosecute. Prior to that letter, there had never been an enforcement of the Brown Act on any public agency anywhere in Los Angeles County. When I went down there to the public integrity section of the Special Investigations Division to look into this complaint, I found we had no history or institutional memory or experience in enforcing the Brown Act.

We took a major step forward and the message is resonating over all of L.A. County. We’ve got 88 cities, probably hundreds of districts and unknown boards and entities subject to the law and the District Attorney’s responsibility is to enforce that law. We’re basically saying, “You do the public’s business in public.”

Q: Turning to another area you’ve reorganized, can you explain why you created an organized crime division?

A: Organized crime is a huge problem in this county. The county’s District Attorney Office has been out of that battle for decades and we better get back into it because if we don’t, the quality of life in Los Angeles County will suffer markedly.

Q: So organized crime is out of control in the county?

A: These problems are being totally unaddressed. They tell me we are the world’s largest prosecutorial agency, with 1,118 prosecutors give or take. And under my predecessor there was one-half of one deputy D.A. assigned to organized crime. That’s a misplaced priority. I’m seeking from the Board of Supervisors authorization to hire an appropriate number of prosecutors and investigators so that we can join this law enforcement battle. We’re also going to consolidate our fraud investigation units in various divisions so that they share information with each other something that’s not going on now.

Now, when I refer to organized crime, it’s not “Sopranos” or La Cosa Nostra, although you can find some of that here. It’s basically individuals that join together, sometimes along some sort of line sometimes a criminal enterprise, sometimes based on ethnicity and use sophisticated techniques to accomplish their criminal ends. This is white-collar crime: auto insurance fraud, some workers’ comp fraud, certainly defrauding public entities that hand out public benefit monies like the Medi-Cal vendor provider fraud that made headlines at the state level a couple of years ago.

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