Raabe’s Attorneys Send Bill to County: $1 Million

SANTA ANA — Attorneys for former Assistant Orange County Treasurer Matthew R. Raabe, who was convicted of five felonies, have billed local taxpayers for more than $1 million, swallowing up almost a quarter of the funds for defending the poor.

In all, Raabe’s attorneys have asked for $1,045,935.72, including $750,000 in attorney fees, according to records obtained Wednesday from Orange County Superior Court.

The bill for attorney fees alone is more than double the $350,000 approved to defend Raabe when he was indicted two years ago for lying to outside investors about the safety of their deposits in a county-run investment pool, and illegally skimming nearly $90 million of their earnings into a county account.

The charges were brought after the county suffered a $1.64-billion loss in its investment pool, triggering the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history and a massive criminal investigation.

Raabe’s defense tab will be paid from the Alternate Defense Services, a $4.7-million court fund set aside to pay private attorneys to represent poor people whose cases cannot be handled by the public defender’s office. About 300 such cases currently are pending.

Gary L. Pohlson, Raabe’s attorney before his indictment, was appointed in the case after Raabe said he was destitute and the public defender’s office cited a conflict of interest, saying the office was hit hard by the bankruptcy.

At Raabe’s trial, his attorneys presented their case in one day, and Raabe did not testify. He was convicted two weeks ago and faces up to 13 years in prison and $10 million in fines.

On Wednesday, local activists expressed outrage at Raabe’s defense bill, noting that county taxpayers were paying to prosecute and defend the charges at the same time.

“I’m stunned,” said Shirley Grindle, a local activist. “I consider that unusually high.”

William Mitchell of Orange County Common Cause, a local watchdog group, said taxpayers “paid for the whole party and they got warm beer and cheap hors d’oeuvres. . . . They got nothing for this million-dollar-a-day defense.”

But Pohlson defended the defense costs, saying taxpayers got their money’s worth in an “incredibly unique and complex” case.

“The amount sounds huge, but when you realize that we basically had two lawyers and four staff members devoting two years of almost all of their time to this case, it was a bargain,” Pohlson said. “I can hold up my head to any taxpayer and say, ‘You got your money’s worth.’ ”

Among Raabe’s defense costs are $241,000 for private investigators and another $55,000 for “other expert and ancillary cost,” according to court records.

Superior Court Judge David O. Carter, who supervises the criminal court calendar, said Raabe’s bill represented a large percentage of the Alternate Defense Services fund, but that it would not affect services to other indigent defendants because court officials anticipated it and budgeted for it.

Carter said he understood why Raabe’s costs might have piled up.

“The defendant is always in a reactive mode,” said Carter, who is a former homicide prosecutor. “The [defense] lawyers cannot ignore millions of pages of documents that have come to [them] through the district attorney’s office by way of discovery.”

Carter said the prosecution probably spent “at least as much or more” than the defense in the Raabe case.

Pohlson, the defense attorney, said the case “grew” after he was appointed, noting that the grand jury’s later accusations against four other county officials caused him to review 1 1/2 million pages of documents in the case.

Pohlson said he believed prosecutors spent “four or five times what we did. They had much more people involved,” the defense attorney said.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Jan J. Nolan denied that the prosecution incurred heavy costs to prosecute Raabe.

The entire bankruptcy prosecution cost the district attorney’s office $2.5 million, Nolan maintained, adding that “we never asked [the Board of Supervisors] for an extra penny to prosecute these cases.”

“The money we used came out of our normal budget,” Nolan said Wednesday, adding that she was “shocked” to hear that more than a $1 million was spent on Raabe’s defense.

Addressing criticism that he put on a one-day defense, Pohlson said he and co-attorney Richard Schwartzberg were simply responding to the evidence presented by the prosecution. “We were prepared to be in trial for months,” Pohlson said.

“I’m really proud of the effort we put in, but we got the best results we could provide.”