Uncommon Sense
The string of broken promises that dog onetime reformer District Attorney Steve Cooley
It's been three years since Steve Cooley stunned the political establishment by trouncing incumbent District Attorney Gil Garcetti. Now it's Cooley who's the incumbent, with $700,000 in his campaign chest and no prominent opponents when he runs for reelection next March. Cooley looks like a winner, until you look at his record.
Cooley campaigned as a reformer, and in his first weeks on the job he acted that way, targeting just the sort of prosecutions he demanded of Garcetti. He created separate task forces to investigate the city's two biggest scandals: police misconduct at the Rampart division and malfeasance at the school board's disastrous Belmont development. But after the press conferences and all the hoopla, both task forces were disbanded with no charges being filed.
Now a Los Angeles Times investigation reveals just how far Cooley will go to avoid bringing a tough case. At the height of the DA's investigation into Belmont, prosecutors turned up a raft of allegations of bribery and influence-peddling against Art Gastelum, a longtime City Hall insider with a reputation for shady dealings. Among the informants were a former county sheriff's deputy and a detective at the LAPD. Both offered detailed information and leads to key participants, yet the DA ignored them.
The obvious question is how the county's top prosecutor let such a promising case get away. But the answers are obvious as well: Cooley simply doesn't have the stomach for cases that might shake up powerful political interests. He's happy to file against political hacks in places like Bell Gardens and South Gate and Compton, but he quails when it comes to the heavy hitters downtown.
I'm trying to figure out how I got the guy so wrong. From the moment he announced his candidacy, Cooley seemed the perfect antidote to the cozy, go-along tenor of relations between the district attorney and the city's political and law-enforcement elite. After 27 years as a deputy district attorney, Cooley said he was outraged over his boss's failure to exercise "independent prosecutorial oversight," lapses that allowed police misconduct and public corruption to flourish.
I had my reservations. Cooley was a Republican and a USC grad, a lifelong prosecutor who liked to don a police uniform as a part-time reserve cop. But I thought perhaps Cooley could turn that law & order résumé to his advantage, capitalizing on his straight-talking reputation to dispense a fair and impartial brand of justice.
He had the looks and demeanor to fit the bill. Where Gil Garcetti was suave and movie-star handsome, Cooley looked more humble, with a lightbulb nose, a receding chin, and a comfortable belly. His manner was self-deprecating. He walked with a round-shouldered shuffle and peered out at the world in a squint. With so little flash, it seemed there must be some substance in there.
Besides, Cooley kept hammering on the issues that mattered most to Los Angeles. The city enjoys a reputation for clean, if sometimes bumbling politicians, but beneath the surface, corruption has taken a greater toll on public life here than perhaps even Proposition 13. Sick of traffic? It was corruption, not earthquakes, that killed rail in L.A., leaving us with a truncated, gold-plated subway that goes nowhere. Pissed off at our miserable schools? It's not the lack of funds that dooms our kids to substandard education, but the crowd of grifters that carve up the annual budget. Scared of the cops? They might lose some of their swagger if prosecutors forced them to abide by the law.
Cooley understood all this, and he promised to make "public integrity" the top priority of his new regime. That struck me as a non-denominational agenda, a natural for an obscure prosecutor with nothing to lose, no political debts, and a commitment to the law. It seemed the time had come to give the slogger a shot.
For the first year or so, Cooley looked like he would deliver. His first move was to establish all those task forces. And in the spring of 2001, he announced major advances in the Rampart investigation. That March, Nino Durden, partner to rogue cop Rafael Perez and a central figure in the scandal, agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with authorities. Then in April, Cooley's office indicted Ethan Cohan, another notorious Rampart cop, on charges of assaulting a gang member and kicking him down a flight of stairs.
With Durden talking and other cops taking deals, it seemed that prosecutors might finally start bringing cases from the hundreds of allegations of misconduct against scores of officers. Cooley intimated as much when he declared, "This is a continuing investigation."
But all that followed was silence. The Durden plea agreement was the end, not the beginning, as Cooley's investigators ignored the new leads proffered by the disgraced officer. By November, Cooley inexplicably announced that no charges would be filed against Rampart cops, despite the release of investigative files that detailed at least a dozen likely cases. More disappointing, Cooley issued new rules for his deputies that made it even harder for defense attorneys to learn about problem officers - just the sort of procedural obstacles that allowed the Rampart cops to operate with impunity. The crusading reformer was looking more and more like a career prosecutor who couldn't get past his habitual love of cops.
Still, Cooley seemed game to prosecute more garden-variety strains of public corruption: elected officials on the take, bribery, false statements to voters. He brought cases against officials in several small cities, and in September 2002 raided the offices of the Entertainment Industry Development Council, a city-county hybrid that appeared to be used as a slush fund.
But still no big fish. Then, last March, the DA folded his Belmont task force as well, announcing again that no charges would be filed. Cooley sounded like his old self, describing his "visceral anger" at "a public works disaster of biblical proportions," but all that indignation was starting to ring hollow.
By then, Cooley was facing his own charges of caving to political influence. In January, the DA transferred two lawyers from his environmental crimes unit after they proposed bringing charges against developers at Newhall Ranch, a huge project that stalled when state officials found endangered plants on the property. Newhall was a major contributor to County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, and Antonovich was an early backer of Cooley's.
Antonovich cropped up again in the Gastelum imbroglio, calling the DA to vouch for the lobbyist and promise his full cooperation. Not long after, the investigating attorney on the case hooked up with the former sheriff's deputy and the current LAPD detective, each alleging they had evidence of Gastelum offering bribes to win government contracts. Once again, the lawyer investigating the charges found himself muzzled by his supervisor. Once again, Cooley could only offer a belated vow to review the performance of his deputies.
What happened to Cooley? It may be that our DA is simply in over his head, that he wasn't ready for the pressure and should never have stepped up to bid for the top job. Or it may be that, having tasted the perquisites of high office, he's decided he wants to stay there, and that rocking the boat with politically charged prosecutions could only lead to trouble.
Either way, I can't help feeling like a sucker. Cooley's collapse seems perfectly in character, the performance you might expect of someone who spent most of his career toiling in the mid-level purgatory of a vast bureaucracy. I wonder now why I ever believed all his homilies about public integrity and following the letter of the law. And I wonder where we'll find a new upstart who can knock a comfortable incumbent off his perch.Published: 10/29/2003
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