Reiner Determined to Remain Political Force : Politics: After his stunning primary defeat, he has re-emerged with media-grabbing programs and fence-mending measures.

By PAUL FELDMAN

Aug. 19, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With lowered expectations but a fierce will to remain one of Los Angeles’ leading political forces, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner has begun to re-emerge after his stunning June defeat in the Democratic state attorney general race.

In recent weeks, Reiner, whose loss dropped him from a serious mid-1990s contender for governor or U.S. senator to a potential political has-been, has gone public with a series of media-grabbing programs and political fence-mending measures.

During one six-day period, Reiner held joint press conferences with Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who in the past has called him a liar, and with feminist attorney Gloria Allred, who has periodically staged sit-ins outside his office.

Reiner has also moved quickly to cut his losses in the case that served as his election year albatross--the McMartin Pre-School child molestation prosecution. Meeting the press minutes after a hung jury was announced in the retrial of McMartin defendant Ray Buckey, Reiner declared that the notorious case was over, once and for all. He would not seek a third trial, he said. Case closed.

In a series of interviews with The Times, Reiner, 54, said that he will definitely seek reelection in 1992, but will just as surely remain out of the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race.

Reiner--making his first extensive public comment on the June vote and his future--also acknowledged having committed serious errors during the campaign against an opponent he once casually dismissed, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith. Regardless, he was doomed from the start, he asserted, because of his association with the ill-fated McMartin prosecution.

Normally reticent to reveal his private thoughts, Reiner also conceded that the loss stung him deeply. But, he added, his strong home life and a swift return to work helped the pain diminish quickly.

“The day after the election, I was a little sleepy of course. But I was in the office by 9 o’clock,” said Reiner, in his rumbling bass monotone. “Obviously, the first few days are rough. You know, I’d be kidding to suggest they weren’t.

“But that passes and it passes in a hurry. And one way of it passing is getting back to work. Within a week or two at the most, it pretty much receded into ancient history and right now, it really is ancient history.”

Reiner spoke while seated behind the desk of his spacious but spartan Criminal Courts Building office. Rather than musty law books, the office is graced with photos of Reiner’s two children and a souvenir brick from San Quentin State Prison.

Below his office are more than 50 courtrooms, where members of his 900-attorney staff help decide the fate of tens of thousands of defendants yearly. From his 18th-floor window, Reiner, who runs the nation’s largest local prosecutorial agency, looks south beyond downtown Los Angeles--a view frequently obscured by dull, gray smog.

Because of his loss in the primary, Reiner’s once boundless future has receded into a thick haze: a startling turn of events for an inveterate political player who had almost effortlessly leapfrogged during the last decade from Los Angeles city controller to city attorney to district attorney.

Critics brand Reiner a habitual job-hopper, but the two-term prosecutor insists that he loves his current post.

“Obviously, I tried to become the attorney general,” Reiner said. “It didn’t work out. A funny thing happened on the way to Sacramento, as the old joke goes. But I enjoy this job immensely, and I mean immensely. I think I’ve done a good job and I’ll try to do a better job.”

The morning after the primary, Reiner was back at work even earlier than his chief deputy, Greg Thompson.

“I said, ‘Are you planning to take some time off?’ ” Thompson recalled. “And his response was, ‘Listen, I’m not going to go off and walk on the beach. I want to go back to work.’ ”

Reiner has since held only one full-blown meeting with his top management, but said he has focused significant time on high-profile cases, including McMartin, the Beverly Hills murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez and the Lincoln Savings & Loan grand jury investigation.

“Things seem pretty much like what they were,” Director of Central Operations John Lynch said. “He sits there and fires questions at you. . . . He’s not sitting staring at the ceiling.”

However, several leading trial deputies say they can’t be certain, since Reiner rarely mixes with his troops.

“He hasn’t been in my face,” one senior deputy noted. “Then again, he doesn’t know what my face looks like.”

Throughout his career, Reiner has been a lightning rod for strong opinions. To critics, he is an arrogant, politically expedient media hound, a man who never met a TV camera he didn’t like. Supporters call him a frank, free-thinking populist.

One of few things that all agree on is that Reiner, unlike many leading politicians, is a true family man.

Since the election, Reiner has helped take his mind off the loss the same way he usually takes his mind off work--by spending prodigious amounts of time at his Sunset Strip house with his wife, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Diane Wayne, and their two children, Anne, 14, and Tommy, 12.

A committed homebody and the family chef, Reiner concludes his daily work routine by having his driver, a district attorney’s investigator, chauffeur him to trendy Westside supermarkets where he shops for groceries.

Accompanied by a reporter one recent evening, Reiner, who has initiated highly publicized bad-check enforcement programs, was asked for his driver’s license and phone number when he pulled out a check at the Irvine Ranch Farmers Market. Then, faced with that quintessential question of American life, he remained resolutely political: He had his groceries bagged in paper and plastic.

Reiner’s reluctance to leave home overnight proved a sticking point during the campaign, as he repeatedly rejected the advice of his campaign manager, Sam Singer, to spend more time in Northern California. By Election Day, the duo’s relationship had deteriorated to the point that Singer handed in his resignation hours before the polls opened.

Reiner said that until his children grow older, he does not intend to change.

“When I got into politics the same time my first child was born,” he said, “I made a self-imposed rule that was I would never go out at night on a political event more than one time a week.

“I don’t believe for one second that had I been on the road campaigning constantly, that that would have turned it around,” he added. “There were other factors over which one had no control, i.e., the McMartin case.”

Until the initial McMartin verdict last January, Reiner had been a clear-cut favorite for the attorney general’s post.

But the acquittal of Buckey and his mother on most charges, after the longest and most expensive criminal case in American history, radically altered the equation. Almost overnight, Smith, who had registered as a mere blip in previous public opinion polls, had pulled even.

“I did not campaign as effectively as I could and should have,” Reiner said. “But the dominant factor in the campaign was the McMartin case. . . . Any person who was in office at the time that it came to something of a conclusion was going to be tagged with it.”

Rather than face the challenge head-on, Reiner, after announcing that he would retry Buckey, decided to severely limit his exposure to the press and public. He did so, he says, because of his impression that the media was concentrating almost exclusively on McMartin.

To communicate with voters, Reiner decided instead to lay out $500,000 for TV and radio advertising--more than double that spent by Smith, who aggressively campaigned throughout the state and is now facing Republican Dan Lungren in the November general election.

On primary election night, buoyed by early exit polls, Reiner exuded confidence. Entering the Biltmore Hotel ballroom just after the polls closed, he proclaimed victory before every TV news camera in sight.

However, as the night wore on, the returns told a different story. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Reiner was being walloped 70% to 30%, far too large a margin to make up in Los Angeles, where he was winning 58% of the vote.

By midnight, when it was clear that he was about to lose by almost 100,000 votes, Reiner’s complexion had turned nearly as chalky as his familiar white locks.

But several former aides and ostensible political allies, turned off over the years by what they saw as Reiner’s naked ambition, seemed somewhat less dejected.

“There weren’t any tears being shed,” said one insider at the Westside headquarters of the influential Democratic organization headed by Michael Berman and Rep. Henry Waxman. “There were secret smiles on many faces.”

Political observers say that Reiner has now begun to methodically stake out his turf for the 1992 district attorney’s election, putting potential challengers on notice that he does not intend to wallow in defeat or fade silently into the night.

Most surprising was his press conference with longtime adversary Allred, who had been trying for six years to persuade Reiner to implement a child-support amnesty program. “Here’s a snapshot for your scrapbooks,” Reiner joked to news photographers as he posed with Allred after announcing that he would finally institute the program.

No longer viewed as invulnerable, Reiner could be in for a tough fight to win a third four-year term. Since 1850, only three Los Angeles County district attorneys have served more than eight years, the last being Buron Fitts. He left office in 1940.

One potential challenger is Beverly Hills City Councilman Robert K. Tanenbaum, a former New York City prosecutor who runs a solo law practice. Tanenbaum said he is seriously considering running because Reiner “hasn’t been a professional D.A.” Another possible contender is City Atty. James K. Hahn, who had been viewed as Reiner’s natural heir if Reiner became attorney general.

Reiner said he will fight to the finish to retain his post.

“I like being a lawyer and I like politics, and as district attorney I hold public office and I’m a lawyer at the same time,” he said. “That’s obviously why I would have liked being attorney general. But that’s why I like being district attorney.”

As for future plans, Reiner was emphatic when asked if he would run for mayor in 1993.

“No,” he said. “I’m not interested in mayor, period.”

Pressed further, Reiner said, “I have absolutely no long-range goals beyond district attorney, because there’s no point in that. . . . I mean I don’t even bother thinking about it.”

Reiner political confidantes, such as Democratic political operative Mickey Kantor, insist that he is still young enough, and savvy enough, to eventually make another stab at statewide office. By 1992, some of these Reiner partisans say, the McMartin case, which hurt Reiner this time, is likely to diminish as a factor.

“Politician after politician, including the President of the United States, have lost races,” Kantor said. “In case after case after case, you can cite people who have lost one along the way and continued their career.

“The most important aspects are luck and timing.”