Courting Trouble

By Edward Humes

From Los Angeles Magazine
October 2001

STEVE COOLEY PROMISED TO LEAVE THE POLITICKING BEHIND ONCE ELECTED L.A. COUNTY’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY. TEN MONTHS LATER, HE IS DOGGED BY CHARGES OF FAVORITISM, QUESTIONABLE ETHICS, AND POOR JUDGMENT — AND THOSE ARE FROM HIS SUPPORTERS

THE CALLS BEGAN SHORTLY AFTER KIMBERLY ARCIERI Flores reported a fraudulent prescription to her insurance company. Someone had been scoring hundreds of caps of the narcotic painkiller Vicodin, along with large quantities of Valium, using Flores’s name and forged signature. And that someone grew furious when the drug pipeline dried up and the insurer began questioning the local Sav-On.

“You and your children will be dead!” the woman’s voice on the other end of the line promised Flores, a 31-year, old mother of four. “Don’t ever leave your house, bitch!”

Dozens of increasingly violent calls followed over a nine-day period last year. The caller taunted Flores, claiming to be having sex with her husband even as they spoke. She promised to slice the Flores family to pieces, invoking as inspiration the serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (“I taught him everything he ever knew....”). After identifying each of Flores’s children by name, she vowed, “They are all going to die.”

There were no specific demands, just some contradictory references to unpaid debts, threats of lawsuits, and promises of revenge. The caller tried to disguise her voice, captured on an answering machine tape as a hoarse, basso whisper interspersed with shouts, heavy breathing, gasps of pain, and several simulated orgasms. The recording rattled even the seasoned judge who would later preside over the suspect’s bail hearing: He found the tape so disturbing, he relied on a transcript instead.

Flores summoned the police to her modest Long Beach home and installed a caller-ID box on her phone. At least 15 calls came in the space of a few hours as an officer listened, their point of origin traced to a most unlikely source: a highly respected cardiology practice affiliated with Long Beach Memorial Medical Center.

“Oh my God,” Flores said when she recognized the voice at last. “She used to be my doctor!”

On March 2, 2000, Long Beach police arrested a 35-year-old cardiologist, Dr. Dawn Parveen Atwal, on four felony counts of making terrorist threats and two related misdemeanors. Bail was set at $50,000. The state medical board launched a separate administrative investigation, accusing Atwal of drug abuse, issuance of improper prescriptions, and gross negligence and incompetence. The deference and leniency typically accorded M.D.s by the justice system evaporated when prosecutors heard the victim’s background: Flores had long struggled with severe anxiety problems — something Atwal knew — making her particularly vulnerable. Worse, she was seven months into a high-risk pregnancy, with plans to deliver her fourth child in the same hospital where Atwal worked. The threats included a promise that Flores’s unborn child would suffer and die as well.

“They told me there would be no slap on the wrist,” Flores says of her initial talks with prosecutors in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s bustling Long Beach Branch. “Which was good, because these were not crank calls, though Dr. Atwal has tried to paint them that way. All you have to do is listen to that tape: We were in fear for our lives. It was a relief when the D.A. took it so seriously.”

But that relief vanished after District Attorney Steve Cooley took office in December. Then the prosecutorial agency that had wanted Atwal in prison extended a warm welcome at the highest levels to the cardiologist’s defense attorney, Henry Salcido, who happened to be a major Cooley campaign donor and fund-raiser as well as a close friend. The lawyer was granted a one-on-one meeting with Cooley’s second in command, Chief Deputy Lawrence E. Mason. Afterward, Mason asked the Long Beach prosecutors to plea-bargain the case down to a simple misdemeanor, something they adamantly opposed, according to numerous sources in the D.A.’s office.

When Flores was informed of this behind-the-scenes maneuvering, she wrote and repeatedly called Mason, assuming he would want to hear her point of view. She received no reply to her letter and could never get through to him by phone. She later learned just how deep the connections between the Atwal defense team and the D.A. ran: The private investigator Salcido hired to discredit Flores had taken a new job as chauffeur and bodyguard for mutual friend Steve Cooley.

Cooley and Mason say nothing untoward happened in the office’s handling of the case, that no political favors were dispensed, and that to avoid a possible conflict of interest the office handed the case to the state attorney general seven months after Cooley took over as D.A. When asked if he had made the misdemeanor request, however, Mason replied, “I don’t think so.” When asked for a more definitive response, he declined to provide one.

“We did the right thing,” Cooley says.

Others in the office say they did the right thing only because Long Beach prosecutors threatened to go public. As a result, this little case in a distant branch court has emerged as the first serious challenge to the new D.A., incensing the rank and file who looked to Cooley to set a new standard of integrity. Cooley’s signature issue in his bruising campaign against former D.A. Gil Garcetti, after all, was his promise to end what he called the practice of selling prosecutorial favors to political donors. He vowed time and again to “take down the For Sale sign on the D.A.’s door.” Now some are accusing his administration of doing just what he blasted his predecessor for.

“We have not done that,” Cooley’s spokesman, Joe Scott, replies. “We have taken down the For Sale sign. He has done what he said he would do.”

Although support for Cooley appears to remain high in the office, the honeymoon is over. There is mounting discontent over a variety of issues, including charges that Cooley chose some top managers for their political support and friendship rather than their ability or experience, that he has retaliated against Garcetti supporters in the office, and that he decided to pursue several splashy criminal cases that had more publicity value than legal merit. But it is the Atwal case that has become the talk of the office.

“This is what he campaigned on — integrity in government,” says veteran prosecutor Dinko Bozanich, an outspoken Garcetti critic and Cooley campaign supporter who works in the D.A.’s Compton Branch. He is the only prosecutor willing to describe for the record the events surrounding the Atwal case (though other knowledgeable sources gave identical accounts). “Steve Cooley wants to go after corruption in government, and that’s great. But he needs to get his own house in order first.”

Another prosecutor, who asked not to be identified for fear his career could be damaged, says he would like to give Cooley the benefit of the doubt but that appearances are crucial in matters of integrity and public trust. He sums up feelings about the Atwal case this way: “Imagine it was a poor kid from South-Central who used fraudulent prescriptions to obtain narcotics with a street value in the tens of thousands of dollars. Then when it looks like he’s about to get busted, he threatens to kill not only the chief witness in the case but the witness’s entire family and her unborn child. He threatens them repeatedly, and the threats are on tape. It’s a cold case — you can’t lose. Is anyone in the office going to talk misdemeanor for that defendant? Does Larry Mason take a meeting with that kid’s public defender? I don’t think so. What happened here seems obvious to a lot of us. It appears money and politics bought access, and maybe more. And it’s very disappointing that Steve can’t see that.”

* * *

THERE ARE THREE MEANS of mass communication in Los Angeles,” says Assistant District Attorney John Allen, who, as director of line operations, is seen as Cooley’s third in command. “Television. Telephone. And tell a D.D.A.” Which is another way of saying that it took all of one day for word about the Atwal case to spread through the 1,035-attorney office, from Long Beach to downtown to the Valley and just about every other place where deputy district attorneys, D.D.A.s, work in Los Angeles.

Understanding why prosecutors would be this upset by a case so far out of the public eye — and why so many supported Cooley’s campaign in the first place, throwing in with a guy who had essentially no name recognition beyond the fact his name was not Gil Garcetti — requires an understanding of the culture and personality of the Los Angeles D.A.’s office. A massive and dysfunctional bureaucracy, larger than any prosecuting agency in the nation outside of the U.S. Department of Justice, it is rich in history and mystique. Alexander Pantages, Robert Mitchum, Charles Manson, the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker, O.J. Simpson — the office has prosecuted them all.

Even so, and despite the average prosecutor’s basic self-view as a force for good, as the one bright line between public safety and societal chaos, being a career D.A. in Los Angeles is a mostly stressful, messy and utterly thankless job. You’re expected to win all the time, whereas defense attorneys are considered successful for winning only a handful of their cases. Lose a big one like O.J., and your career is over (except, of course, for the book contracts and movie options that may dangle briefly while your fifteen minutes last). If the case you bomb is big enough, you might even bring down the boss while you’re at it.

Winning the big one is not always the best career move, either: You don’t get the big bucks like top drawer defense lawyers, nor are you necessarily rewarded with plum assignments from the boss. Too much success, too much press, and you become a threat, a potential rival — and you find out what working in a branch court two hours’ commute from your home is like.

Mostly, though, the workload is numbing, routine, and far out of the public eye. There are rewarding moments of course, the ones that keep you going — the lives you improve or even save, the bad guys you put away, the mom or dad or wife or husband who embraces you as a savior. Maybe after twenty or thirty years of these infrequent moments there’s a judgeship waiting for you. But the fact is, a lot of the cases suck: You have reluctant witnesses, reluctant victims, witnesses who lie or forget or change there stories and make you look like an idiot, or who just don’t show up. Just try and prosecute a domestic violence case some time: You meet the bruised and battered victim at the start of the case, she wants the bastard who broke her jaw in jail, thank you, and throw away the key while you’re at it, but by the time of trial months later, her money’s running short and she wants her husband and his paycheck back, and suddenly you’re the enemy, her sweetheart didn’t mean it and why, oh why, are you trying to destroy this family? It takes a level of commitment few people possess to slog it out in these trenches and to champion The People’s point of view in such cases — which is to say, the 99.9 percent of criminal actions that never make the eleven o’clock news or the newspaper columns or Court TV.

And so, even in the best of times, morale in a large and unwieldy office like L.A.’s is an uncertain thing. And the last decade has not been the best of times. Not even close.

The slide in image and morale began in the 1980s with D.A. Ira Reiner and the McMartin Preschool debacle. Under his successor, Gil Garcetti, the bad press came in an avalanche. Not since a grand jury indicted D.A. Asa Keyes in 1928 for bribery had the office’s image sunk so low. Garcetti watched the O.J. and Rodney King and Charles Keating cases fall apart; even though only O.J. could be fairly blamed on his decisions, he became the silver-haired icon of the office that, in the public’s estimation, couldn’t win the big one.

Adding to the loser image was the growing issue of integrity, epitomized by the McMorrow case, a major arson that was pleaded down to a 16-month sentence after the defendant’s grandfather, a Garcetti backer, called the D.A. The staff was furious. Most prosecutors believe they occupy the higher moral ground in the justice system, a balm for the stress and thankless battles; having that stripped away, having the agency’s integrity sullied, made it unbearable. In 1996 a group of prosecutors critical of Garcetti got the state attorney general to investigate, but the allegations went nowhere: The two D.D.A.s who had offered the plea bargain were exonerated. They had been unaware of the politicking and presented convincing evidence that the plea was eminently appropriate. Those same veteran prosecutors, Bob Schirn and Jim Falco, nevertheless criticized their boss for creating the appearance of a conflict of interest by, as Schirn said recently, “breaching the wall ... that should exist between the campaign and the prosecution of cases.” In other words, the case wasn’t fixed, but it sure smelled.

Leading the charge for the investigation into the McMorrow case was none other than Steve Cooley, then head deputy in the office’s San Fernando Branch. Garcetti transferred him to welfare fraud, a move Cooley considered retaliatory and that many in the office saw as a dead-end job. Cooley, however, earned the admiration of fellow prosecutors, not only for having the courage to speak out on McMorrow but for refusing to sulk over his reassignment. Instead he revamped the welfare-fraud unit, winning national recognition for his innovations. He was head of welfare fraud when he unseated Garcetti last year with nearly 64 percent of the popular vote.

The differences between Cooley and Garcetti couldn’t be more striking. Though they share similarly humble origins, Garcetti, 59, long ago became the consummate politician, always on, always ready with a sound bite, invariably guarded in his comments. No matter the hour or crisis, the tall and angular D.A. remained unruffled and perfectly groomed, as if he were in a constant state of readiness for the TV cameras to pop up at his door.

Cooley, on the other hand, strikes prosecutors as one of their own. He’s 54 and looks it, an ex-cop who joined the office in 1973 and whose career track was anything but political before he began running in 1999. He, too, is tall, but rounder and more casual in bearing than Garcetti — no one will ever accuse him of being coiffed — and he seems personable, accessible, and plainspoken, the kind of guy you might visit for a backyard barbecue and a beer or two. At day’s end he is as rumpled as every other working stiff in the office.

His campaign promise to make integrity a number-one priority resonated with prosecutors. He is not a great orator — not nearly as smooth or articulate as his predecessor — but when he talked of restoring public confidence in the office, of resurrecting the pride prosecutors once felt in standing up in court and announcing they were appearing on behalf of the Los Angeles County District Attorney, the rank and file could almost taste it, they wanted it so bad. The way he vowed to accomplish this goal sounded best of all: He said they’d do it the old-fashioned way, trying cases, being honest and direct inhouse and out, leaving politics behind after Election Day. This emphasis on integrity is the key to his success, Cooley says, and to how smoothly he has sailed through his first nine months on the job.

“The reaction has been very widespread, very positive, and very encouraging,” he says. His now-departed interim chief deputy, Curt Livesay, witnessed six administrations come and go, Cooley notes, and “he told me this was the smoothest transition he has ever seen.”

* * *

ON A STIFLING SUMMER MORNING downtown, Cooley sits back in his chair, a sweeping view of downtown’s smoggy skyline behind him, and ticks off the changes he has instituted since taking office.

The most dramatic is his revision of the “Three Strikes” policy, which he set in motion with letters to the defense bar, the bench, and prosecutors even before his swearing-in. In the past, nonviolent, nonserious third offenses that triggered a life sentence were presumed proper. Eliminating a strike, thereby eliminating the life sentence — a process known as “striking a strike” — was the exception to the rule, requiring upper-management approval. Cooley’s new policy reverses the presumption: Now it is assumed that a nonviolent offense will not be used as a third strike, and pursuing one beyond the initial filing stage of a case requires approval from on high.

“There were horror stories out there,” says Cooley of the old policy. In one notorious example, a man faced life in prison for stealing bread from a church pantry. “That was a case I found deeply offensive.... People don’t like that. They don’t want draconian justice. They want fair and evenhanded justice.”

Newspaper editorials have praised the new policy as reasonable and long overdue. Making such a campaign promise — then carrying it out — was a gutsy move in an era when conventional wisdom holds it is political suicide for a candidate to suggest lighter prison sentences. Cooley says Garcetti attacked him on just that point as part of a $900,000 advertising blitz.

The new D.A. next restructured the office’s Special Investigations Division, which handled prosecutions of police officers and other corruption cases but lacked a clear identity and mission. He divided it into a Justice System Integrity Division and a Public Integrity Division, then beefed up the staffs and made them responsible for tackling official corruption at all levels, inside the courts and out.

In addition, Cooley charged the public-integrity prosecutors with enforcing the state’s Brown Act rules, which require government meetings to be open to the public. Although this is a D.A. responsibility by statute, it has long been ignored. After hearing from a Daily News reporter that the Los Angeles Unified School District board had met in secret on the multimillion-dollar toxic mess known as the Belmont Learning Center, he asked his subordinates to contact the L.A. school board for a little chat about open-meeting laws. A short time later the board rescinded a vote cast in secret and held a public meeting instead. “What better way to ensure public integrity than to let a little sunshine in?” Cooley says, knowing a can’t-go-wrong issue when he sees one.

Cooley adds that he has made a point of applying a similar standard of openness in-house by barring his prosecutors from seeking gag orders in court — a popular tactic during the Garcetti years. Cooley calls them wrongheaded and ineffective. “We will not seek them. Period. End of conversation.”

(Cooley’s desire for openness aside, his office denied this magazine’s request for access to his and Mason’s official appointment calendars, citing a decade-old California Supreme Court decision that allows the governor to keep his appointments secret.)

Several of Cooley’s policy initiatives, while garnering scant publicity, have been greeted with strong criticism in the office. His decision to abolish special units for sex crimes and domestic violence in the branch courts throughout L.A. has outraged many who had specialized in such prosecutions. They say victims of sex crimes are being shortchanged by having their cases assigned to prosecutors who have less experience in handling sexual assaults and domestic violence and who spend half their time performing other duties.

Cooley has also taken hits for removing four of 14 prosecutors from the Abolish Chronic Truancy (ACT) juvenile court program. Developed during Garcetti’s tenure, it established a team of prosecutors devoted solely to pursuing chronically truant kids — and their parents, if they fail to take some basic steps to get their children in school. Tom Higgins, one of two head deputies in the office’s juvenile division and founder of ACT, considers the program a key crime-prevention tool, because it addresses one of the characteristics most common among youthful repeat offenders: educational failure. “It’s a model program,” he says, adding that other jurisdictions, including San Diego and Syracuse, New York, have expressed interest in replicating ACT “It’s a shame that it seems to be on the cutting block here.”

The recent cuts mean this school year about 100 fewer schools with truancy problems will be in the program than had been projected (and there will be 56 fewer schools than were covered last year). The remaining prosecutors are paid through grants and so cannot be transferred to other duties — Cooley cut as deep as he could. He seems to be backtracking, however. County Supervisor Gloria Molina has complained that schools in her district would be hardest hit, and Cooley, who hopes to win a $9.6 million supplement to his budget from the Board of Supervisors, now says the cuts may be temporary, that he wants a “fresh look” at ACT and may even expand it.

Cooley’s resurrection of various closed cases has raised eyebrows as well. With great fanfare his office announced the reopening of the investigation of the Belmont scandal and declared the site a crime scene that must be preserved for further testing. He says the original investigation fell far short, but sources in the office note that the current task force has yet to find criminal violations.

After six of Garcetti’s prosecutors rejected the five-year-old “Balcony Murder” case for lack of evidence, Cooley put good friend and campaign adviser Deputy D.A. Robert Foltz in command. Foltz moved forward against Robert Lee Salazar of Texas, who was charged this year with throwing coworker Sandra Orellana to her death from an 11th-floor balcony of the Industry Hills Sheraton in 1996. Jailed only briefly, Salazar said at the time that Orellana toppled off the balcony while the two were having sex against the railing. Despite the misgivings of some of the office’s toughest and most respected prosecutors, Foltz recently brought Salazar back from Texas for trial.

Foltz says the previous administration, burned by O.J. and fearful of losing other big trials, became timid about filing tough, high-profile cases that were not sure winners — like the Balcony case. Now prosecutors don’t have to worry about ruining their careers should they take on a difficult case, one of several masons why morale has improved under Cooley, Foltz explains. “Things have changed.”

Foltz, and Cooley’s relationship with him, has been the subject of numerous complaints from the rank and file. In 1991 the state bar Foltz on five years’ probation for abandoning clients when he was in private practice in the 1980s. Cooley became something of a savior to him, supervising him in the D.A.’s office and writing to the bar on his behalf. The two have been close ever since. After taking office, Cooley promoted Foltz to work in the prestigious major crimes unit before putting him in charge of the soon-to-expand arson unit. The two are being sued for malicious prosecution by attorney Leonard Milstein, whom they charged ten years ago with bribing a witness in a murder case Milstein had successfully defended. (Milstein was convicted in a jury trial, but the case was thrown out on appeal for lack of evidence.) Foltz says Milstein has no case.

In a child-murder case currently the subject of a death-row appeal, two prosecution witnesses have filed sworn affidavits accusing Foltz of coercing them into giving false testimony. One witness is the victim’s mother. Foltz says the woman is lying, possibly because she has had a romantic relationship with the defendant.

Foltz also just participated in the high-profile “Limousine Rapist” case, in which nine women accused a wealthy computer-company owner, John Gordon Jones of Beverly Glen, of drugging and date-raping them after whisking them from nightclubs in a limousine. Fellow prosecutors were stunned when jurors acquitted Jones on all 29 counts, since nine victims identifying the same defendant would seem to be a pretty strong case. But the jury found their accounts riddled with inconsistencies, says jury foreman Henry Fischer, adding that all but one had been recruited by police and prosecutors rather than coming forward on their own.

There were two prosecutors on the case, but Fischer singles out Foltz for “unprofessional behavior” — which he describes as pretending to be asleep while defense attorney Milton Grimes asked questions, launching needless objections, calling Grimes “a clown” within earshot of jurors, and disappearing for a week during the two-month trial. Foltz had gone on a fishing trip.

“It’s unheard of in the middle of trial,” Grimes says.

Foltz agrees the trial was acrimonious but denies pretending to be asleep. He argues that Grimes’s tedious, “ridiculous” motions and cross-examination turned what should have been a three week trial into a two-month debacle. As for the fishing trip, he says the $2,000 vacation had been paid a year in advance, and that the trial should have been over long before he had to leave.

While Foltz continues to draw plum assignments, others complain of receiving unfavorable ones because they are viewed as either Garcetti supporters or Cooley foes. A week after questions about Abolish Chronic Truancy were raised for this article, program founder Tom Higgins was told he was being transferred out of the juvenile, head, deputy position to do “lifer hearings.” Some consider the job a form of punishment, as it requires constant traveling to attend parole hearings statewide — the ultimate in “freeway therapy,” as D.D.A.s refer to transfers that entail long commutes.

Word spread quickly. Higgins is a popular and respected head deputy, and many prosecutors felt he was being disciplined for criticizing the cuts to ACT. By ten that night, Cooley had had second thoughts and called Higgins at home to rescind the transfer — though ACT would still be taken from its strongest advocate. “I was sorry about losing ACT ... but I very much appreciated the district attorney’s call,” says Higgins, who considered the original transfer order retaliatory. (Despite Cooley’s openness policy, Higgins was later barred from speaking on behalf of ACT and could provide no additional comments.)

Prosecutors concerned about favoritism also point to Alan Yochelson. He has second-chaired such prominent cases as the “Night Stalker” and Rodney King cop trials and was deputy in charge of the Sylmar Juvenile Court office. After the election he was shipped to the trial-support department, where he is responsible for making trial props for other lawyers. Many in the office mistook him for an ardent Garcetti supporter because there was a major campaign donor with a similar name. Yochelson’s pleas to get reassigned have been denied, yet a Cooley booster had his own transfer quickly approved.

Elsewhere, Lauren Weis, a former head of the sex crimes unit and most recently head of the new Airport Branch court, was shipped by Cooley to workers’ compensation fraud, a type of case she has never tried in 22 years as a prosecutor. She believes her transfer came in retaliation for vigorously supporting Garcetti and for feuding with Cooley’s friend Foltz. Weis has filed an official grievance.

Cooley calls his appointments and transfers fair, his management choices among the best of any D.A. He says there have been fewer claims of punitive transfers than in previous administrations, though he allows some grumbling is inevitable in any change of leadership. He cites a number of former Garcetti managers who have retained desirable management posts, among them Assistant D.A. Sharon Matsumoto, who oversees budget, systems, and personnel; Curt Hazell, director of specialized prosecutions; and Allen Field, the head deputy in Long Beach and principal player in the Atwal case.

But Bozanich, Higgins, and other sources in the office, including Cooley fans, point out that some of the new D.A.’s choices for top managers are more notable for their substantial campaign contributions or volunteer work than for their management experience. Assistant District Attorney John Allen has only a few months’ experience as a low-level manager in the office. Chief Deputy Mason had worked in the office for 22 years but had no supervisory experience at all before becoming Cooley’s second in command. Mason left the office in 1997 to take a municipal court appointment in Inglewood, then lost his first election bid the following year. “He has the least management experience of any chief deputy in decades,” says Bozanich.

* * *

KIM FLORES IS A NERVOUS WOMAN, her hands constantly in motion when she talks about her case. She is trim and youthful-looking, doggedly staying in shape after four kids, ages one to 13. “They keep me thin,” she jokes. “They never let me sit down.”

Her husband drives a delivery truck for Coors while she cares for their children and works part-time providing herbal body wraps to a small number of clients; they live on a tight budget. When she went several years ago to see Dr. Atwal for a suspected heart condition, she was pleased by the personal attention she received, and she says they became friendly. One day, Flores alleges, Atwal suggested she could write a painkiller prescription in Flores’s name that they could share. Flores says she refused. Some time later an apparently intoxicated Atwal called her to the hospital to ask for a ride, Flores says. (Hospital security officers confirmed to the state medical board that an incident occurred in which Atwal acted as if she were drunk on the job; they were summoned to an acute-care unit by nurses alarmed by Atwal’s allegedly abusive and erratic behavior.) Flores says she severed her relationship with Atwal after that.

Eventually, Flores discovered the prescriptions being filled in her name at a Long Beach Sav-On, and the phone calls began.

The investigator from the state medical board accused Atwal of fraudulently obtaining nearly 2,000 doses of Vicodin and 570 doses of Valium on 17 different occasions between March 1998 and November 1999. According to the investigator’s report, Atwal admitted making the calls while intoxicated but said that Flores had harassed her first and that she was merely responding in kind. However, the recorded messages contain only threats, no references to any calls from Flores.

“Thank God I have that tape,” Flores says. “I’m just a little mother of four with no money. Without the tape it would have been my word against a respected cardiologist. And who do you think they would have believed?”

Atwal has since been required by the medical board to undergo psychiatric treatment as well as drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and she is barred from practicing medicine unsupervised, records show. She has left Long Beach Memorial Medical Center for another cardiology practice and recently came to court smiling and relaxed, looking not the least bit like the woman who made those recordings.

Her attorney, Henry Salcido, is known as one of the top criminal defense lawyers practicing in southern L.A. County. He once played on the Washington Generals, the team the Harlem Globetrotters always beat. His ties to the D.A.’s office go back to Evelle Younger, who was D.A. for six years until he became attorney general in 1971 and whose family is close to Cooley. Salcido has known Cooley and Mason for years, and he has held at least three fund-raisers for Cooley at his Long Beach home, two before the election and one to retire campaign debt — all of them with Cooley present. Salcido and his wife also contributed the maximum allowed individual donors in 2000: $1,000 a year each, with Salcido kicking in another $1,000 for 1999.

Salcido’s efforts to secure a misdemeanor plea bargain for Atwal were rebuffed initially — before the election. Indeed, Flores was told by prosecutors that they wanted state prison time as part of any plea bargain. But then the change in administration came, and Salcido went to see Mason.

“If all the stories you’ve heard about my influence with the district attorney were true,” says Salcido, “this case would have been over long ago.”

“I have an open- door policy,” explains Mason, who recalls seeing three or four other defense attorneys to discuss possible pleas since taking office. “It is not unusual.” Then he adds, “I’m talking to you, aren’t I? If you’re ever arrested and charged with something criminally, come up and see me again. My door is always open.”

However, it appears Salcido did get unusual access, not because he had the meeting, but because of who was — and wasn’t — present. In past administrations it was not rare for a chief deputy and a defense attorney to discuss a plea bargain (nor was it common). But the trial deputy assigned to the case and his boss would also take part, because they would be intimately familiar with the case and could often rebut a defense argument. Mason met with Salcido without such backup, allowing the defense attorney to give him his first impression of the case. Afterward, he began to urge a misdemeanor disposition, according to Bozanich and other sources.

The Long Beach prosecutors had to request a meeting with Mason in order to argue their own offices position, since Mason’s only knowledge of The People v. Atwal came from Salcido and a glossy binder of documents he provided. Much of the information in that binder had been written up by Ernest Halcon, a former San Fernando detective who had run his own private investigation firm until Cooley hired him as chauffeur and bodyguard after taking office. Mason says he did not know of Halcon’s role in the case until much later.

During the meeting between Mason and the Long Beach prosecutors, insiders say, the chief deputy turned first to the trial prosecutor, Vivian Davidson, then to the assistant head deputy for Long Beach, Scott Carbaugh, and finally to head deputy Allen Field and asked them one by one if they would take the misdemeanor plea. All argued against it, according to Bozanich and others, but Field finally agreed to take the plea — on the condition that he could announce in open court that the plea was made at Chief Deputy Larry Mason’s direction.

“I don’t recall that,” says Mason. “I don’t believe we had that conversation.” The three Long Beach prosecutors would not comment for this article, but numerous sources in the office who spoke with the trio after the meeting insist the conversation took place.

Some days after the meeting, Mason says, he learned of the role of Cooley’s chauffeur and discussed the matter with Field. Mason then wrote to the head of the Los Angeles office of the state attorney general, asking that he take over the case because there was an appearance of a conflict of interest.

The sequence of events leading up to this decision remains unclear and the official story somewhat contradictory. Mason says he discovered the possible conflict of interest when Salcido called him at home on a Sunday to say he had forgotten to mention Halcon’s role during their meeting. Yet in his letter to the attorney general dated May 30, a Wednesday, Mason states he had just found out that morning about the problem through documents received from the defense as part of the legal “discovery” process. When asked about the contradiction between the letter and his account, Mason said he did not have a copy of the letter in hand and so could not explain it.

Complicating matters is Cooley’s account: The D.A. says he — not Salcido — alerted Mason to the possible conflict of interest. Cooley, who says he stayed away from the case and knows none of its details, intervened only when Halcon happened to mention his involvement. In a follow-up interview Mason said there was no contradiction between Cooley’s account and his own — he heard about Halcon from both Salcido and Cooley, though he had not mentioned this during his first interview for this article.

Cooley says he was concerned about being dragged into the case as a witness. His chauffeur’s main job was, in essence, to find dirt on Kim Flores; Halcon’s reports include witness statements suggesting that Flores was obsessed with Atwal, thereby provoking the angry phone calls. But the Long Beach prosecutors planned to challenge the accuracy of Halcon and his reports, which raised the possibility that Cooley could be called to testify about his chauffeur’s reputation for truthfulness. Halcon, he adds, is one of his best friends. “How could we allow that? The conflict of interest is obvious.”

Not so obvious, it turns out. Cooley’s inhouse ethics expert, Rod Leonard, says legally there was no conflict of interest that required the D.A. to beg off the Atwal case. Recusal is required only when a defendant’s right to a fair trial is in jeopardy, Leonard says, which was not the case here: Having one of the office’s investigators working for the other side adds to the defense’s credibility. Having Cooley called to bolster the defense might embarrass him, says Leonard, but it is not an actual conflict of interest.

Furthermore, if Cooley and Mason believe Halcon’s role as a private eye creates such problems for the office, this concern should apply to every criminal case he worked on as a defense investigator, not just Atwal. Yet, according to Mason, there has been no inquiry about which other defendants, if any, hired Halcon in the past.

Although Leonard does not believe there was a legal conflict of interest, he says that, given appearances in the Atwal case — not just Halcon’s relationship to the D.A. but also Salcido’s — sending it to the attorney general was probably a good idea. Most prosecutors interviewed for this story were pleased with the decision, though some suggested the switch in prosecuting agencies could be viewed as a win for the defense, as the attorney general takes far fewer cases to trial than the D.A. In the Atwal case, however, talk of a misdemeanor plea bargain to settle the case was scuttled early on by the attorney general. At press time, Atwal’s attorney had been granted another postponement; the trial was expected to begin in early fall.

The case has resurrected some of the old partisan factions that nearly tore the office apart under Garcetti, says John Lynch, a veteran prosecutor who runs the Airport Branch court and who almost unseated Garcetti when he ran for D.A. in 1996. “The office has been at war with itself for so long, people here don’t know how to put the guns down ... and to say the war is over.” Lynch says he has cautioned angry prosecutors not to “raise the noose” too quickly for Cooley, arguing that the Atwal saga may simply be a function of Mason’s lack of experience. If it were political cronyism at work, “there would be more,” Lynch says. “These things never happen only once. And I’ve seen no evidence that it has happened more than once.”

Other Cooley supporters agree, but only to a point. They argue Mason should not have agreed to meet Salcido. “All he had to do was say no,” one prosecutor says, “and none of this would be an issue. And even now, all they have to say is ‘We made a mistake and it won’t happen again.’ But we haven’t heard that. And that worries me.”

Flores, meanwhile, says the human impact of all this has been forgotten, and she can barely contain her fury over what nearly happened in the Atwal case. “The way they have handled it, it’s like being victimized all over again,” she says. “They tried to treat us like a case number. But I want them to know we’re people, not case numbers. And that someone threatened to slice us up.”

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