Casden’s Attorneys File Complaint Against Cooley

Attorneys for developer Alan Casden said they filed a complaint against Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley with the State Bar of California on Friday, contending that the prosecutor violated professional and legal codes when he identified Casden as the target of a criminal investigation.

Last month, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury indicted one of Casden’s senior vice presidents and 13 subcontractors on charges of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to four politicians. Some donors were allegedly reimbursed.

On the day of the indictment, Cooley identified Casden as a target of his office’s investigation and called the developer and longtime figure in Los Angeles’ political landscape “a person used to manipulating the system.... What he’s not used to is a tough D.A. enforcing the laws.”

Casden’s attorneys, who had sought a statement from the district attorney’s office that Casden was not the focus of their investigation, said Cooley violated rules against disclosing grand jury investigations.

“I want Steve Cooley to stop using his elected position as a bully pulpit and to allow the process to work the way it’s designed,” attorney Tom Nolan said. “I don’t think he should use campaign rhetoric to impugn the integrity of a successful businessperson in the Los Angeles community.”

In a statement, Cooley said his disclosure violated no rules or canons of ethics.

“This unfounded complaint is merely an attempt to divert this office from its ongoing investigation and pending criminal prosecution,” he said through a spokeswoman. “It will not succeed.”

News of the investigation initially broke in late August, as Casden, a real estate developer who is on the Forbes 400 list of the country’s richest people, was seeking to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. Prosecutors served search warrants at the offices of Casden subcontractors and the office of a Casden senior vice president.

Nolan said that a district attorney’s investigator had mentioned during the search that Casden was in fact not a target, but subsequent publicity said that he was. He said that, wary of what he called the sensitivity of the negotiations over the Dodgers, he asked for a public statement that the developer was not the focus of the investigation.

Nolan said the prosecutors refused, citing grand jury secrecy.

Cooley’s office eventually sent Nolan a letter stating it could not declare that Casden was not a target of its inquiry. Casden said in an interview at the time that he was not the subject of the investigation.

Three months later, the grand jury returned indictments, and though the developer was not charged, Cooley identified Casden as a target of a continuing investigation and accused the developer of manipulating the system.

A spokeswoman for Cooley said that since an indictment had been returned, it was appropriate to discuss the contours of the investigation.

USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky said he supports Cooley’s efforts to step up prosecution of municipal corruption but that the district attorney should not have made the statements about Casden.

“To clearly imply that someone who has not been indicted engaged in a crime is inappropriate prosecutorial behavior,” he said.