A prosecutor can get away with a lot if he picks the right enemies. Trutanich has drafted off public anger against Wall Street in cases against Deutsche Bank, for failing to maintain foreclosed homes, and Northern Trust, for investing pension funds in risky securities.
Neither lawsuit has been tested in court. But he keeps framed news clippings about the Deutsche Bank case in his office lobby, and has already used the lawsuit in his campaign for DA. In a campaign video, Trutanich drives past blighted homes, and says, "We're going after these banks, to force them to become accountable for what they're doing in these neighborhoods."
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Carmen Trutanich pledged to serve eight years as city attorney before running for Congress or the district attorney's office. Three years later, he's running for DA.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Trutanich has slapped 50 Occupy L.A. protesters with criminal charges.
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But Trutanich also can pick the wrong enemies. His worst miscalculation was his fight against nonviolent political demonstrators. In the wake of several protests in 2010, Trutanich initially sought yearlong jail sentences against what he called "professional protesters" for failure to disperse. When the protesters fought back in the L.A. Times, Trutanich quickly reversed course. Most protesters were given deferred sentences.
When the Occupy L.A. movement seized control of the City Hall lawn last fall, Trutanich's initial response was more muted, at least in public. All he would say was that protesters should "follow the law."
After the camp was cleared, however, Trutanich threatened to sue Occupy L.A. to recover the city's costs. He also charged 50 demonstrators criminally and offered others lighter sentences if they agreed to sit through a class on the First Amendment.
"The goals of Trutanich have stayed the same," says Garrick Ruiz, a protestor charged by the city attorney in 2010, "which is to figure out how he can punish people as strongly as he can for any kind of political activity."
The powers of the city attorney are limited. But even before his election, Carmen Trutanich sought to expand those powers, with an eye toward higher-profile cases and investigations of his fellow politicians.
In 2005, he took a break from private practice to work as an adviser to Rocky Delgadillo. His main accomplishment was to create a proposal for a Bureau of Investigation within the City Attorney's Office.
The city attorney has investigators who perform tasks such as tracking down witnesses and serving subpoenas. But Trutanich wanted something more than that: an investigative agency that would pursue cases LAPD either couldn't or wouldn't.
In a document presented to the City Council in 2005, the City Attorney's Office argued, "The need is especially critical in the areas of elder abuse, fraud and corruption cases."
The idea went nowhere. But then, in 2009, Trutanich campaigned for the office on a promise to pursue corruption.
"We're going to prosecute misdemeanor ethics violations by politicians," Trutanich told the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, as journalist Ron Kaye reported on his blog. "We're going to change the way politics is played in the City of Los Angeles." (To date, Trutanich has not prosecuted an ethics case.)
Upon his election, Trutanich immediately revived the Bureau of Investigation. But he was never able to fund it fully, and it has done relatively little.
In 2010, he tried a different tack. He asked the Legislature to give him authority over a criminal grand jury. Under the proposal, Trutanich would be able to launch investigations and subpoena both records and witnesses — without getting a judge's blessing first. In essence, it would have allowed him to fish for information instead of waiting for instances of wrongdoing in which he had probable cause.
The effort failed. After it was widely interpreted as an attempt to pursue an investigation of Councilwoman Jan Perry and AEG, Trutanich agreed to delete "corruption" from the list of powers he could pursue, only to see the bill die anyway.
After that defeat, Trutanich came back the next year. He sponsored a bill that gave his investigators the power to wear wires and record phone conversations without the other party's knowledge.
City attorneys could already do that, so long as they first got permission from the district attorney. But Trutanich wanted to eliminate that check on his power. The bill, which garnered little attention, sailed through and was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last October.
Assemblyman Warren Furutani, who carried the bill despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union, calls it "another tool in his toolbox."
For Ignacio Hernandez, a lobbyist for the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, which opposed the bill, it was further evidence of the city attorney's "inferiority complex."
"They want to have as many powers and tools as DA's, even though they're not," Hernandez says.
The last city attorney in Los Angeles who didn't chase headlines was Jim Hahn. Before he was mayor, Hahn served 16 years as city attorney — something that, thanks to term limits, would be impossible today.
The deputies who are old enough to remember those days recall them fondly, especially in light of what came next.
"I believe the entire problem with the politicization of these offices is due to term limits," says Phil Sugar, the veteran deputy city attorney. "What's happened to our office is it's become a stepping stone."
Trutanich has occasionally tried to downplay his tough-guy image. In an interview with the Weekly last year, he maintained, "I'm not a thug."
