With a Simple Style, Cooley Inspires Enduring Loyalties

Steve Cooley can come across sometimes as the Dudley Do-Right of L.A. politics.

He turns stump speeches into civics lessons. He talks about the Constitution the way Joe Lieberman talks about God. He puts his faith in the “free media,” and never tires of describing the job of a prosecutor thus: “We’re in the truth business!”

Cooley’s opponent in the race for Los Angeles County district attorney, incumbent Gil Garcetti, has tried to cast him as a Republican reactionary who would take the prosecutor’s office back to the 1950s, to a “Just-the-facts-ma’am” era of law enforcement.

There is more than a grain of truth to this. Although the race is nonpartisan, Cooley is a registered Republican. He does talk about returning the district attorney’s office to its “core mission”--putting crooks behind bars. He has little use for some of the crime prevention programs that Garcetti has made the centerpiece of his administration.

He and Joe Friday of the ‘50s “Dragnet” television show could spend a fine evening bending elbows in some North Hollywood dive.

But then, you get the impression that Cooley could spend a fine evening with just about anybody, Garcetti and a few others excepted. One of his most striking qualities is his ability to connect with people of widely varying styles and backgrounds.

With a kind of hangdog charisma, he commands fanatical devotion from friends--Democrats and Republicans; blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos; gays and straights--who have known him for weeks, months, years or decades.

At Cal State L.A., where he was student body president for 1 1/2 years in the late ‘60s and belonged to one of the few multiracial fraternities, he struck up enduring friendships with a rainbow cast of characters, including Felix Gutierrez, a young faculty advisor who was nurturing the nascent Chicano movement. Gutierrez remembers Cooley as a rarity in that polarized time: a bridge builder.

“It was a period when people were choosing up sides--either you’re for us or against us,” recalled Gutierrez, now executive director of the Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center, a journalism think tank. “Steve was the classic man in the middle.”

There it is, the Tao of Steve: taking the middle path.

One Job, One House in 25-Year Marriage

Cooley, 53, is a man of unnerving stability. He has had one job his entire professional life: deputy district attorney. He has been married to one woman, Jana Cooley, a court reporter who was a close friend of his sister. They have lived in one house, in Toluca Lake, for the entire 25 years of their marriage. They were married, and their two children baptized, in a church a few blocks away.

He is less the irresistible force than the immovable object--stolid rather then mercurial, his graying brown hair framing a potato-shaped face often lit by a sly, impish smile. For much of his career, he had a bushy brown beard and was known to wear jeans to the office on days when he wasn’t making any official appearances.

He is, in many ways, the stereotypical Valley Guy, a family man of simple tastes who called a reporter the day after an interview to say his wife had reminded him of a glaring omission. When he’d been asked about his favorite forms of recreation, he’d mentioned softball, water skiing and snow skiing, but he’d forgotten something.

What was that?

“Yard work,” he said.

Yard work? That’s his idea of recreation?

“Not gardening,” he replied, not to be taken as effete. “Gardening requires a certain level of sophistication. Just yard work.”

That deadpan humor, delivered in a near monotone, is typical of Cooley. Another characteristic is a temper so even that some of his closest friends say they have never seen him display anger. His explanation comes close to mimicking the Vulcan rationality of “Star Trek’s” Spock.

“Anger,” he said, “is extremely consuming of limited energy.”

If Cooley has an Achilles’ heel, it lies in his poisonous relationship with the man he is now pursuing so doggedly in the race for district attorney.

The race has been driven by one dynamic: Cooley’s contempt for Garcetti, which crystallizes the feelings of dozens of senior prosecutors who have rallied behind the challenger’s campaign. Audiences at debates have gasped on occasion at the raw force of the venom discharged by Cooley, who has accused Garcetti in the bluntest possible terms of corruption, lying and mismanagement.

“Under Gil Garcetti,” he said at one news conference early in the campaign, “money talks and felons walk, and that’s going to stop when I’m D.A. of L.A. County.”

While Cooley speaks of being in the “truth business,” and colleagues say he is known for his scrupulous ethics and straightforward manner, he has stumbled at times in his zeal to discredit his foe.

For months, he accused Garcetti of an apparent conflict of interest: taking a campaign contribution from a defense lawyer for convicted killer Robert Rosenkrantz just a few days before meeting with the lawyer and agreeing to support parole for Rosenkrantz. But Cooley later had to concede that he had his dates wrong; the contribution was not remotely close to the meeting date. And Garcetti hadn’t supported parole; he had merely agreed not to oppose it.

On another occasion, Cooley accused Garcetti of hiring “political operatives” with taxpayers’ money to work on his reelection campaign. Cooley added that the practice was “perhaps criminal”--a stunning accusation to make in a political campaign.

But although it is true that Garcetti hired some people with political backgrounds to work in his Community Outreach office, Cooley provided no hard evidence to prove they were campaign workers and Garcetti hotly denied the charge.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he admonished Cooley.

All this animosity is the more remarkable--or, perhaps, the more understandable--when you consider that Cooley once supported Garcetti. In 1992, when Garcetti challenged then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Cooley helped raise money and support for Garcetti in the Antelope Valley, where he was assigned as head deputy district attorney.

At that point, Cooley had been a prosecutor for nearly 20 years. He was hired straight out of USC law school, and spent about a decade in the trenches as a trial deputy before being put in charge of the Narcotics Section in 1983.

Methamphetamine use was booming in L.A. County, and Cooley spent much of his time going after clandestine meth labs and at least one large chemical company that supplied them. He was “a cop’s prosecutor,” said Walt Allen, who was then an investigator for the Narcotics Bureau and now is an agent with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement.

“He’s one of the best criminal prosecutors I’ve ever seen,” Allen added. “When it came to narcotics cases, there was none better. He was The Man.”

In 1984, the swiftly rising Cooley became the first head deputy in charge of the district attorney’s office in Lancaster, covering the Antelope Valley.

Once home to a relatively homogeneous population of aerospace workers and desert rats, the Antelope Valley was evolving into an ethnically diverse bedroom community with all the problems of an urban area. It was a conservative place with a chummy criminal justice system. It was perfect for Steve Cooley.

It was there that Cooley began to acquire a reputation as one of the better bosses in the district attorney’s office. A remarkable number of people who worked for him there and, later, in the San Fernando Valley and the downtown Welfare Fraud Division, describe him as the best boss they have ever had.

“The best boss I ever expect to have,” said John Portillo, a deputy district attorney who still works in the Antelope Valley. “He’s like a natural-born leader. You follow sports? You follow basketball? To me, he’s like the Phil Jackson of managers.”

While in the Antelope Valley, Cooley forged an unusually close relationship with the local bench, especially with Superior Court Judge Margaret Grignon.

She was a stern conservative who would later become a state appellate court justice. She and Cooley struck up a friendship that eventually drew in their spouses and children; the two families spent many weekends together, water skiing at Lake Arrowhead.

Cooley’s ties to the bench later would become a campaign issue. Garcetti has charged that Cooley’s many campaign contributions from judges are improper, that prosecutors and judges should keep an arm’s-length relationship. But Cooley is unrepentant.

“I don’t think you can be in the system without forming bonds with those with whom you work,” he said. He specifically defended his friendship with Grignon, saying he never personally tried cases in her court after they became friends. He did supervise many trials held before her, but says there was nothing wrong with that.

“You don’t have to give up your life because of your status,” he said.

One Case Soured the Deputy’s Loyalty

Cooley can recite the date that marked the beginning of the end of his support for Garcetti. It was Sept. 17, 1995. He was at a pool party at a colleague’s house when, he said, he was told about the case of the People vs. Brian John McMorrow.

At the time, he said, he was told of concerns that Garcetti might go easy on McMorrow, a convicted arsonist, because the suspect’s grandfather was wealthy Westside businessman B.J. McMorrow, a Garcetti campaign contributor.

“I kind of pooh-poohed it,” Cooley said.

But two months later, the younger McMorrow--who was eligible for a 25-years-to-life sentence under the three-strikes law--agreed to a plea bargain under which he would serve 16 months. The elder McMorrow--who had contributed $13,000 to Garcetti’s 1992 campaign--gave an additional $1,000 the February after the plea bargain. The younger McMorrow served less than a year before being freed on parole.

Garcetti has maintained that the McMorrow plea bargain was arranged by a deputy, that he had nothing to with it and that B.J. McMorrow’s contributions had no influence on his grandson’s case. But Cooley insists otherwise, and says he felt deeply betrayed by it.

“You’re sitting there in the L.A. County D.A.’s office as a head deputy, and they’re putting pressure on you to put more and more petty thieves and drug possessors in for 25 to life, and at the same time, you have personal knowledge from credible witnesses that a special deal is being orchestrated for the grandson of a campaign contributor who committed one of the most serious crimes you can commit,” he said.

“You say, ‘Enough is enough here.’ That was like an epiphany.”

Since then, Cooley’s approach to Garcetti has been more like that of prosecutor to suspect than deputy to boss. He has attacked Garcetti at every turn, using every tool in a prosecutor’s rhetorical arsenal. His loathing approaches the obsessional; he is almost incapable of holding a conversation without attacking Garcetti.

Perhaps it’s the legacy of his father, the G-man.

Francis Cooley was a certified public accountant who worked as an FBI agent for about 13 years until the financial stresses of a young family forced him to quit and go into private practice. According to Steve Cooley, his father spent much of his time in the FBI on the “R-team,” investigating Russian communists in Los Angeles. He quit when Steve was 8.

But Cooley and his closest friends say his mother, Mary Jean Cooley, now a retired real estate agent, may have been the greater influence on him. “The underlying values in Steve are the same things,” said one of Cooley’s oldest friends, Deputy Dist. Atty. Curt Hazell. “Commitment, dedication, intense loyalty, pride.”

Cooley spent his formative years in a comfortable, Spanish-style house overlooking the Silver Lake reservoir. He attended Catholic schools and, from a relatively early age, dreamed of becoming a lawyer.

His path led him to Cal State L.A. during its most chaotic period, 1966-70. The Los Angeles campus may have lacked the front-page drama of a Berkeley or San Francisco State in those rebellious years, but it still seethed in its own, commuter-school way.

Ethnically diverse, politically polarized, it was a blue-collar school where most students were the first in their families to attend college.

It was a place where Richard Nixon could handily win a straw poll for president, yet the student government could earnestly debate a resolution demanding the release of Black Panther Huey Newton, being held for murder by “occupation troops” of the white colonial oppressor in Oakland.

Cooley, his face leaner then, his hair flopping over his forehead surfer-style, was student body vice president when the Newton resolution was introduced, and he fought it like the lawyer he would become.

Cooley offered a counter-resolution declaring that Newton’s “rights to a fair, speedy and just trial as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution . . . should be upheld as they would for any citizen of the United States.”

The resolution Cooley proposed lost resoundingly. One student leftist, the author of the original measure, dismissed it as “the most meaningless piece of literature I have ever seen.”

But it was pure Cooley.

Sitting behind the wheel of his wife’s Volvo station wagon one day recently, Cooley paused at the top of a steep hill in Silver Lake, not far from his boyhood home. As a kid, he said, he often rode his bike this way on his way home from St. Teresa of Avila grammar school.

It looked even steeper then, he said, but he would pause, swallow his fear and plunge down the half-vertical asphalt, down past houses bravely gripping the hillside, down toward the traffic streaming by on Silver Lake Boulevard.

“You were lucky that skateboards weren’t popular when you were a kid,” he was told.

Cooley considered this, barely cracking a smile. “If I’d had a skateboard,” he said finally, “I wouldn’t have gone down the hill.”

Hazell, who may know Cooley as well as anyone outside his family, said the man he knows is anything but a risk taker--”Quite the opposite.” But he is, he conceded, taking an enormous risk right now.

Of course, it’s a calculated risk. He has sized up the hill, taken measure of his vehicle, taken a deep breath and sped off.

Uphill.

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COOLEY SURPRISE AT DEBATE

Challenger Steve Cooley ambushed Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti by reading a Garcetti ad. B6