Garcetti Aide Announces Campaign to Unseat Boss

Steve Cooley, a career prosecutor whose fight against welfare fraud was featured on national TV, declared his candidacy Wednesday in the race to unseat his boss, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whom he called a “passive prosecutor.�

Cooley, 52, is the first to announce a challenge to Garcetti--who has been in the post since 1992--in the March 7, 2000, primary election.

Surrounded by about 50 supporters, Cooley, deputy in charge of the district attorney’s welfare fraud unit, used a news conference in Studio City to criticize Garcetti for what he called his failure, among other things, to aggressively investigate the Belmont Learning Complex fiasco and for disbanding for a time a special unit to promptly examine officer-involved shootings.

“It is time we had a D.A. more comfortable in a courtroom than in a fancy ballroom raising millions of dollars for his next campaign,� Cooley said. “The district attorney’s office will not be for sale--not to the rich and powerful, not to political cronies.�

He was referring to disclosures over the summer that Garcetti’s reelection campaign in 1996 received $15,000 from 21 Lockheed Martin IMS employees about a month after the district attorney’s office recommended to county supervisors that they pay an extra $2.5 million to the company for running the child support computer system.

Lockheed and Garcetti’s campaign denied any connection between the donations and the pay increase, saying the contract was discussed long before the donations were made.

Cooley said he has so far raised about $160,000 for the race. Garcetti has garnered more than $430,000 for his anticipated reelection campaign, and one prospective candidate, former district attorney’s official Barry Groveman, has raised an estimated $120,000.

A native of Silver Lake, Cooley was student body president at Cal State L.A. in 1969 before entering law school at USC.

During his 26 years on the district attorney’s staff, he has been chief deputy in charge of the Antelope Valley and San Fernando branch offices and founded the major narcotics unit. Since January 1997 the former Los Angeles reserve police officer has been the chief deputy in charge of the welfare fraud division.

Earlier this year, Cooley was profiled on ABC News’ “20/20� about welfare fraud, partly because of a campaign he initiated to go after welfare cheats.

Garcetti, like several of his predecessors, has been challenged before by his staffers. In 1996, the head of the branch office in Norwalk, John Lynch, came within 5,000 votes of 2.2 million cast of defeating the incumbent. Indeed, Garcetti himself ran against his own boss, then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who dropped out of the race before the 1992 election.

An acknowledged underdog, Cooley has established a Web site to help bolster his candidacy. One feature of the site, dubbed “Cooley Tidbits,� says that at age 37, he was the youngest head deputy in the history of the district attorney’s office when he was put in charge of the Antelope Valley branch in 1984.

Cooley said he has the endorsements of former California Supreme Court Justice Armand Arabian, former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

Cooley and his wife, Jana, live in Toluca Lake and have two children, Michael, a senior at UC San Diego, and Shannon, a freshman at UC Berkeley.

Consultant Bill Carrick, speaking for Garcetti, called Cooley a “traditional disgruntled employee candidate.� Such people “always make a mistake of thinking the public wants to hear their laundry list of exaggerated attacks,� Carrick said.