Rocky in a Hard Place

At one time, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo seemed a shoo-in to become our next State Attorney General. So why is L.A.’s native son now running in the shadow of Mayor Moonbeam?
by Marc B. Haefele
photos by Simon Bowler

It wasn’t exactly like being mathematically eliminated from the league playoffs halfway through the season, but it was close. Rocky Delgadillo, the mayor’s office bureaucrat who astonished local political wonks by grabbing the L.A. City Attorney’s Office from favored contender Mike Feuer in the 2001 election, was running 41 points behind in the Field Poll in his current down-ballot bid to be California’s Attorney General, six weeks before the June primary.

“How is this possible?” asked one venerable L.A. editor. “Someone right off the street couldn’t have done worse.” But Delgadillo—a decent guy with no surplus of magnetism—is running against the most famous democrat in California, Oakland Mayor and former governor Jerry Brown, one of the most articulate people alive. Brown’s name is the top brand. And, unlike other former governors (Wilson, Deukmejian, Davis), Jerry doesn’t just have fans—he has True Believers. As journalist A.J. Liebling said of another 20th Century charismatic: “Far better to have a few thousand people who think you are God than millions who approve of you in a general sort of way.” Jerry’s thousands of ex-Brownies are out there in all walks of life, in appointed and elected offices all over the state, spreading the word. Hence, Rocky’s rough road. He’s the local boy who just can’t get un-local.

For weeks, Rocky seemed paralyzed. It wasn’t until late April that Delgadillo unrolled a TV hit ad that slammed Brown for having called abortion “killing” and, in the ’80s, seeking release of a far-out abortion opponent jailed in Florida. This spot gained Delgadillo the support of Little House on the Prairie actress and former SAG President Melissa Gilbert at a Boyle Heights press conference to launch “Women for Rocky.” Gilbert spoke of Delgadillo’s commitment against spousal abuse.

But Brown has long shown a strong pro-choice streak and scored high among woman voters. His campaign people termed the ad “desperate,” but otherwise ignored it, which was easy since Delgadillo only spent a reported $30,000 to air it. And Brown’s campaign continued to pull in major endorsements such as the United Auto Workers and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the three major environmental groups: Sierra Club, California League of Conservation Voters and Vote the Coast.

Delgadillo showed some strength in Southern California democratic clubs and unions, but this was not enough. Even Delgadillo’s best shot at nailing Brown on his own turf backfired. Delgadillo caught a sunriser to Oakland to castigate Brown for approving a Wal-Mart there; but Brown’s campaign staff flaunted Delgadillo’s own support for a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles nine years ago, when he worked with Dick Riordan. Score: 0-0.

If Brown wins, it isn’t that far a fall for Rocky. He has another three years left in his last term as Los Angeles City Attorney: he can always continue his career as a major downtown lawyer. But you have to wonder where he could go as an office holder. So far, his statewide fundraising isn’t promising. Brown has a reported $4.2 million in the bank, and—having raised $2.5 million last year—Delgadillo had $3.8 million, the L.A. Times reported. This includes some money he raised for his 2005 City Attorney campaign for his unopposed reelection. In other words, he’s behind in bringing in new money. “A lot of people have said I was crazy to take on Jerry Brown in my first [statewide] election,” Delgadillo told the Daily News. They are probably still telling him that.

Rising Star, Setting Son

It was not always so chancy for “bleeding heart moderate” Rockard J. Delgadillo—Harvard football scholarship recipient, Columbia Law School grad. One of four children from a middle-class family (his Latino father was an assistant engineer at JPL) who lived on the sunny side of Highland Park, Delgadillo is a craggy fellow over six-feet tall who claims athletics kept him out of trouble. “I was in after school programs,” he says—programs he now promotes and assists. He well remembers the coaches who encouraged him. After graduating from Franklin High, he got a rare football scholarship to Harvard and went on to Columbia Law School; but he kept coming back, he likes to point out, to coach and student-teach in Los Angeles schools. A friend of that time recalls: “Here was this guy from Harvard, assistant coaching at Franklin High.” But even then, whistle in hand, a law career was in his sights.

By 1992, Rocky was a promising five-year member of the L.A. law megafirm O’Melveny & Myers, where he was a protégé of former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Delgadillo’s specialty was entertainment law, which could have easily led him to discrete wealth and power. But something else happened that year—to both Rocky and to the city of Los Angeles.

The official story is this: Delgadillo’s in a Century City office when Los Angeles’ 1992 riots begin. He watches smoke spread over the city, and worries that the riots will spread to Highland Park. He wonders what makes a city like this catch fire, start destroying itself? He wonders about his future as a “lawyer who helps make movies.” It was then, with the flames of a great city before him, that Rocky Delgadillo decided to change his track to public service.

So, he went to work for 1984 Olympics organizer Peter Ueberroth on a Bradley Administration project called “Rebuild L.A.” With time off for good behavior—so to speak—from his law firm, he pitched in to reconstruct the city of Los Angeles. The following year, new mayor Dick Riordan made him Deputy Mayor in charge of business development. Delgadillo says this experience persuaded him that local business development is the most reliable way to build healthy communities. He was one of the very few of Riordan’s original staff still around at the end of the entrepreneur-mayor’s terms in office.

Then he beat favored candidate, City Councilman (and fellow Harvard grad) Mike Feuer to head the law wing of America’s second-largest city—with its 500 attorneys, the third largest public law office in the state—where he earns, at $180,000 per year, about two-thirds as much as he did at O’Melveny over a decade ago.

In the past, city attorney was one of the top lawyer jobs in town. But Rocky’s predecessors could hold office for much longer than eight years in their pre-term-limited days. Jim Hahn and Bert Pines each served over 15 years. As the first city attorney to enter office since the limits were passed, and the first Latino to be elected to citywide office since the 1800s, Delgadillo was widely expected to move up fast and far. “Around City Hall, they half-jokingly called him ‘The President,’” recalls one former staffer who declined to be named due to a confidentiality separation agreement. “They whistled ‘Hail to the Chief’ and saw him as having infinite prospects: as vice president on Obama’s ticket, say.”

But that was then. “[Now] it is a different ballgame,” says Jaime A. Regalado of the Edmund “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Calstate L.A. “People wonder what his track record has been. It’s not so much the positive that he’s done that people identify with; it’s the number of problems that have surfaced in his office in such a short time. He was elected with a great coalition of black, white and brown voters. He used to look unbeatable. He doesn’t look unbeatable now.” There are problems in his organization that churn out employees: by one count, seven press people alone in under five years. He’s even replaced his own 2006 campaign staff: “He showed up at the campaign starting line with four flat tires,” said Brown campaign chief Ace Smith.

Rocky’s enemies gloat at his luckless press. “He’s got enough problems running against what’s been in the L.A. Times for the past six months,” says Smith, “let alone the older stuff.”

Of course, Jerry Brown is mostly running against his older “stuff” too: His 1982 Medfly infestation mishandling. His controversial appointment of Rose Bird as Supreme Court chief justice. His embrace of the Flat Tax panacea years before extreme conservative presidential candidate Steve Forbes. Plus, Oakland’s total of 32 murders so far this year.

But here is an odd thing: today, you can say “Governor Moonbeam” to a roomful of young voters and they won’t know who you are talking about. In a crazy way, in his 68th year, Brown’s charisma and moderate success as mayor have eclipsed his lurid past.

Roger Salazar, a Delgadillo representative, says that as Rocky moves around the state, he’s going to pick up votes. “He’s been the underdog before,” notes Salazar. “There is a whole generation of young voters out there who are unfamiliar with the Brown legend. Rocky performs well with younger voters.”

He will also have to appeal to the more conservative California inland areas, where old pickups still bear faded bumper stickers (from the great 1970s drought) that say: “If it’s Brown, flush it.” But many of those voters are republicans who will go for the GOP candidate, State Sen. Chuck Poochigian of Fresno. Yet, “Delgadillo is the only prosecutor in the race,” says Salazar, “and the fact is that the homicide rate is up in Oakland and way down in Los Angeles.

“It’s an uphill battle,” says Salazar, “but we are ready for it.”

One Latino veteran of City Hall, who wished to remain unnamed, suggested that the 41-point lag doesn’t really reflect Delgadillo’s appeal to Latino voters. “With immigration issues, we’re going to see a lot of Latinos voting this year. State attorney general is a down-ballot race. Most people don’t know who’s running. But when Latino voters see a choice between Brown and Delgadillo, I think I know which way they’ll go.”

Perhaps, but if so, how does Delgadillo’s new, pro-choice campaign agenda fit in the overwhelmingly Catholic Barrio?

Despite the fact that Rocky is 22 years the younger of the two democrats, the former staffer asserts that “in some strange ways, the two of them are not that different.” Both are liberal-moderate democrats with a strong belief in the market economy. Both have strong law-and-order credentials. Both, in their separate venues, brag about fighting street crime. But, says Salazar, “To a lot of people, Jerry has been turning into a post-democratic republican,” with what head-shaking Bay Area democrats call his pro-development politics.

This accusation has also emerged against Delgadillo, having more to do with individual developers’ donations than with his role in development policy as such. It may be that—unless you unilaterally decline such donations the way Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg once did—developer money is the IV in the modern political vein. But voters may fairly question why they should choose a candidate who is too dependent on it.

Such a question of conflict was raised regarding a cantankerous land swap engineered with the help of Councilman Bernard Parks, that would turn over land condemned by the city for a long-absent and much needed South Central animal shelter to furniture entrepreneurs who had contributed to Delgadillo’s campaigns. The swap would cost the city an extra $3 million needed to buy a similar property for the shelter and the construction of the shelter, would take much longer. Animal lovers and local residents called this abuse of eminent domain powers. Delgadillo said he thought the entrepreneurs “ought to be rewarded” for bringing their business to the inner city. But at such a cost to that city?

Rocky has also cut himself some slapstick notoriety by going after the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This game, via an online hack, allowed video gamers to depict their characters making whoopee with digital prostitutes instead of murdering them for their money. Some have suggested this lawsuit against Take Two Interactive’s Rockstar Games was the silliest L.A. City Attorney prosecution since Jim Hahn went after the Dead Kennedys for obscenity 20 years ago.

Delgadillo insists it’s really not like that at all. “I’m not after content. This city is all about content. We are the greatest content-creating city in the world. Content is sacred. But this was about false representation, not content.” In other words, there was no warning on the label that the splatter-oriented game could be tweaked to offer porn. Maybe so, but the suit got statewide headlines early in his race against Brown for going after the parentally objectionable software. Editorially, however, he was accused of piling on the anti-GTA bandwagon.

Take Two never made a campaign contribution to Delgadillo. Many others, however, couldn’t make this claim. The contribution conflict is one of the most burdensome controversies of his elected career—the other being his disputatious hiring of outside counsel. Part of the problem is that (until just now) he’s been a phenomenal fundraiser, and part of it is how candid he is about how little the idea of possible interest conflict means to him.

“You have to be able to say ‘no’ to campaign contributors,” he says. “I’ve done that time and time again.” However, Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the world’s largest communications and billboard firms, did a $425,000 “independent” billboard campaign operation for Delgadillo. As it happened, Clear Channel forgot to inform the City Ethics Commission about this little project and, as it also happened, opponent Mike Feuer seemed to many observers to be talking a lot tougher about billboards than Delgadillo was. It is illegal for independent expenditures to be connected with a candidate’s official campaign—which seems not to have been the case here. But it was clearly a no-no for this ploy not to be run by the Ethics Commission first, which gives the friends of the other guy a chance to respond with his own indy op.

In this case, the billboard lords also neglected to show they were part of an independent operation like they are supposed to and the huge propaganda dump may have killed Feuer’s chances to win (Feuer declined to respond for this article). Four years later, Clear Channel paid a moderately stiff $30,000 fine. Originally, it was to be a $9,500 fine, but it was raised after a Times editorial called the Ethics Commission “blind, deaf and lame.” The company called the oversight “inadvertent.”

Despite that big, wrongful expenditure, says Delgadillo, “We ended up writing one of the toughest billboard laws in the country.” Indeed, this ordinance passed muster in federal court, but whether Mike Feuer’s law would have been even tougher, none can say.

Maybe Delgadillo’s biggest negative issue has been regarding use of private attorney firms for city work. This problem, disclosed in a special state audit, is prime grist for the Brown campaign mill. The audit, released late last year, said: “Overall, we found that the attorney’s office could not provide documents to demonstrate that it had followed the policies and procedures it has in place.” News reports suggested that some of the firms chosen had been—guess what?—campaign contributors.

Delgadillo said he was pleased that the auditors at least recognized progress by his office in approving such accounting. He said that he never would have been able to clear enough standing cases without outside legal help, and consequently that the city’s liability payouts have declined in recent years. But the audit found that oversight of the outside work was weak, and questioned the lack of any apparent system for attorney selection. A 2004 Times report found that some law firms which gave Delgadillo contributions tended to get the office’s outside work, payouts for which doubled over Delgadillo’s first term of office.

Delgadillo denied any connection between contributions and contracting decisions. Investigations found patterns of underbilling and overbilling by the city on these contract expenditures, and that many of the contracts included no budgets. City Controller Laura Chick also questioned the city attorney’s billings, although her office had earlier discharged an employee, Daniel Carvin, who made allegations about them. Carvin later collected a $490,000 settlement from the city over his firing. Through a spokesman, Chick declined to comment.

Delgadillo blames some problems on his predecessor. He also asserts that his department is innately understaffed. “We have about 240 civil attorneys. That is about the same number the San Francisco City Attorney has, but we’re six times the size of that city.” He points to major cases where a temporary team of specialized outsiders resolved matters in the city’s favor for much less than it would have cost the city to litigate the matter with its own staff. But here he’s defending the use of outside attorneys itself, more than the specific, alleged problems of budgeting and possible favoritism in their use, which cloud over the reputation of his department.

Doing the Job?

But shouldn’t the real criterion for whether to vote for Rocky be how good a job he’s done overall as city attorney? On that basis, which is also the basis of the Delgadillo campaign, you can make a decent case. Which was also made b y the Sacramento Bee—Jerry’s not quite hometown paper—in its May 1 endorsement of Rocky.

“Democratic voters may be tempted to go with the familiar choice in this race. But Rocky Delgadillo’s experience running the legal affairs of California’s largest city, his energy and potential make him a better choice for Democrats with an eye on the future.”

So what’s that all about?

There are the 24 separate gang injunctions that his office has put in place all over Los Angeles, covering 60 square miles of territory all over the city. Brought against such notorious operations as the South L.A. Grape Street Crips to Westlake’s Mara Salvatrucha to the Avenues in Highland Park, the program has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and others as affecting many not involved in serious gang activity. But others, including Police Chief Bill Bratton and the County Grand Jury, call it an effective tool for making neighborhoods safer. “Seldom do outcomes of public initiatives produce results of this clarity,” stated the 2004 Grand Jury report. Delgadillo also cites a UCI-UCLA report that shows the injunctions working.

“He’s done a fine job. I particularly credit the neighborhood prosecutor program, which has had a great success,” says City Councilman Jack Weiss, who has already announced his plans to run as Delgadillo’s successor, whether the latter wins against Brown or terms out in 2009. “The basic job of city attorney is to be the advocate for the public. And here is a perfect example of exactly that,” says Weiss.

Then there’s Delgadillo’s 2002 Operation Bright Future program, which partners with the LAUSD. The method here is to make parents of 30,000 6th to 8th graders responsible, as they legally are, for keeping their kids in school. The truancy rate has dropped from over 11,000 to around 2,000, Delgadillo said, “And we’ve only had to actually bring legal action against about seven parents.” A side benefit of the program is that, with higher attendance, the LAUSD gets more state funding, and the school-wide dropout rate, he asserts, has stabilized.

The city attorney’s establishment is, by its very nature, a conflicted organization. It represents the citizens and it represents the city, which is often not the same thing. It tells the City Council what it can’t do so often that, as one new council member complained, “it acts like it’s the 16th council member.” It can represent the city against errant employees and it can represent the same employees against outside litigation. It is probably not the first place to go for “innovative solutions,” as many have been demanding for contentious, deeply human predicaments such as that of the troubled tenants of Venice’s Lincoln Place.

But whatever it does do, there is a feeling in some quarters that it does those things better under Delgadillo. Take Terree Bowers, for instance, the former high-profile federal attorney who was Delgadillo’s chief deputy. “I thought it would be an exciting opportunity and I was right,” he recalls now, having recently left—without the least rancor—for a prestigious international private firm: “I had to put my children through college after all.” But it was also a welcome change from the US Attorney’s office.

“I was managing programs that had a direct impact on neighborhoods, yet we were prosecuting big cases in areas like child abuse.” Bowers also praised Delgadillo’s ability to get businesses to work with neighborhoods, to provide incentives. This is something he said that previous city attorneys simply had not tried to do. He cites the American Dream program, “where you get [firms] to renovate crack houses and similar abandoned buildings into quality, low-cost housing.”

All of this is commendable, suggesting that, on the micro level, Rocky might well be a good attorney general. But this is a macro job. California has a population the size of Argentina’s, and an economy bigger than all of South America’s. It’s like a mighty nation within its own borders. Is it maybe because Californians sense this that, in the polling at least, they show a preference for Jerry Brown’s larger vision—even if that vision has often shown itself to be misty round the edges?

Look at the issues outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s faced lately—challenging federal fuel standards for failing to curb global warming; subpoenaing oil refiners to see if they’re gouging consumers; defending the constitutionality of the state’s stem-cell initiative. These are issues larger than any city attorney has ever faced. With the US Department of Justice in thrall to the Bush Administration, California’s attorney general may now be the most progressive, important people’s advocate in the country.

So the question isn’t so much whether Rocky’s a good city attorney: it’s whether he’s big enough to fill Lockyer’s huge shoes. A month from the June election, he hasn’t got much time left to show us that he is. LAA