‘Mr. Intense’ to Review Fund-Raising

When U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno was looking for a prosecutor to kick-start the federal review into fund-raising by the Clinton-Gore campaign of 1996, she reached across the country to pluck the No. 2 man in her San Diego office.

Although well known in prosecutorial circles, Charles G. LaBella is somewhat short of being a household name, which provoked one headline writer to ask: “Who Is Charles LaBella?”

That’s a fair question, because LaBella is suddenly the U.S. Department of Justice’s point man in what could be the political scandal of the decade, reaching directly into the White House. His job--for the next 90 days at least--is to find out who asked for money and where, and who gave money and why, and whether any laws were broken.

Reno retains final authority over whether to ask for a special prosecutor or whether to escalate the look-see into a full-blown, in-house criminal investigation. But it is a good bet that Reno will rely heavily on the judgment of Charles G. LaBella.

The man on whose judgment the near-term future of the president and the vice president may reside is a 46-year-old career federal prosecutor, a registered nonpartisan, a Jesuit-educated workaholic with an abiding interest in big-ticket cases of political corruption and in unraveling the secrets within secrets of such cases.

He is blunt-spoken and not clubby at all. His idea of fun is lifting weights or playing the drums. He makes decisions and does not suffer regrets.

The word most often used to describe him is intense. Second place goes to street fighter.

“I am intense,” LaBella said from his temporary office in Washington. “When I’m working, I drive people hard. I step on toes. I get the job done. Defense attorneys get peeved at me. Prosecutors get peeved at me. A lot of people get annoyed at me, but my entire focus is getting to the merits of the case and finding out, one way or another, what the truth is.”

He has prosecuted a load of drug and organized crime cases, but the two biggest cases of his career were political corruption cases: the racketeering trial of Imelda Marcos and arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi in New York, and the bribery trial in San Diego of three former judges and a highflying civil litigator.

The link between the two cases is that LaBella sought to push the legal envelope in both, to pursue a theory that broadened the definition of illegality. He is not a play-it-safe prosecutor.

“If Chuck sees someone he believes has violated the law and ought to be prosecuted, but there are technical obstacles in the law or how it has been applied in the past, he is not afraid to rely on his own analysis,” said Richard Kendall, a Los Angeles attorney who met LaBella while representing the Philippine government in trying to recover assets looted by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos when they were that nation’s president and first lady.

Robert Fellmeth, a law professor at the University of San Diego, said that LaBella’s reputation for aggressiveness and expansiveness in his use of the law may serve him, and Reno, well in the event he decides there is not enough evidence in the fund-raising scandal to proceed to the next level of investigation.

“LaBella is a stereotypical New Yorker: He’s aggressive, he’s an outsider, and he doesn’t care what you think about him,” Fellmeth said. “If he says it [criminality in the fund-raising case] is not there, you have to believe him, because he is one of those prosecutors who likes to find something to prosecute.”

LaBella is blunt about the prospect of taking political flak regardless of what kind of recommendation he gives to Reno.

“Whatever I do, I’m a schmuck,” he says, invoking a New York colloquialism. “I can handle it. It’s my job.”

In the Marcos case, LaBella--and his boss, then-New York U.S. Atty. Rudolph Giuliani--argued that even though the alleged theft took place in the Philippines, it could be charged as a crime in New York because some of the money was invested there in real estate and artworks.

In the San Diego case, LaBella argued that even though there was no evidence of quid pro quo between the judges and the lawyer, the very presence of unreported gifts and favors was inherently corruptive and thus illegal.

When U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie of Los Angeles--hearing the case because all 11 San Diego federal judges recused themselves--rejected the use of a bribery statute, LaBella’s team reshaped the indictment to a different legal theory and pushed on. One judge pleaded guilty; two other judges and the lawyer were convicted in October.

LaBella lost the 1990 Marcos case rather badly. The defense, confident that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, did not present a single witness. The defendants were acquitted.

Nearly a decade later, LaBella is unshakable in his view that the facts were solid and the legal theories viable. He believes that the case flopped because key witnesses were in hiding overseas and because the most culpable defendant, Ferdinand Marcos, died on the eve of trial.

James Linn, a defense counsel from Oklahoma City who defended Kashoggi, remembers that LaBella refused to shake his hand on the opening day of trial.

LaBella makes no apologies: “I was trying to set a tone. We are not friends. We are adversaries. Don’t try to schmooze me.”

Still, the courtly Linn has high regard for LaBella.

“He doesn’t belong to anyone,” Linn said. “He’s his own man. He’ll look at this case quickly and thoroughly. I hate saying nice things about prosecutors, but LaBella is smart, tough and honest.”

Gerry Spence, the Wyoming lawyer who represented Imelda Marcos, is less charitable. Spence is annoyed that LaBella did not respond to a let’s-be-friends letter after the verdict.

“I think he’s one of these fellows that once his neck is bowed, it stays bowed,” Spence said. “He lacks the ability to treat opposing counsel as human beings. He lacks the civilities of a gentleman. He is one of the most discourteous lawyers I’ve ever met.”

In a profession often seen as dominated by Ivy Leaguers, LaBella is a graduate of Fordham Law School in New York, a decidedly non-Ivy League school, and proud of it.

“Fordham lawyers are street fighters,” he said. “Fordham teaches you to be a real lawyer, a practical lawyer.”

He was born in New York and reared in Long Island. His father, who died when LaBella was 10, was an attorney.

He was educated at a Jesuit high school in Brooklyn and graduated with honors in 1973 from LeMoyne College, a Jesuit college in Syracuse, N.Y. He was cum laude, law review and dean’s list at Jesuit-run Fordham, where he graduated in 1978, and he worked in private practice and as a law clerk before joining the U.S. attorney’s office in New York in 1982.

In 1993, he transferred to the San Diego office of the U.S. attorney at the request of newly named U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin. The two had met when Bersin was in private practice in Los Angeles and, with Kendall, seeking to force the return of millions of dollars by the Marcoses.

LaBella’s reputation as a taskmaster preceded him in San Diego. It was enhanced when he refused to let appendicitis deter him from meeting the attorneys in the criminal division whose work he was to supervise.

“Chuck LaBella is the kind of guy who if he is chasing you and you shoot off both of his legs, he’ll crawl after you,” said Phillip L.B. Halpern, a senior federal prosecutor in San Diego.

Bersin and LaBella inherited an investigation that had taken several years and involved a pattern of coziness between judges and trial lawyers. To many local attorneys the practice was just part of San Diego’s lingering folksiness and not sinister at all; Bersin and LaBella thought otherwise.

One parallel between the judges’ case and that of the fund-raising flap in Washington could be allegations of buying access.

In the judges’ case, LaBella argued that attorney Patrick Frega was enjoying unfair access to Judges Michael Greer, James Malkus and G. Dennis Adams because of his largess to them and their families and that such access was illegal even if it could not be proved that the judges made particular rulings in favor of Frega in exchange for a gift or favor. Applied to the world of Washington fund-raising, that theory could be highly controversial.

To bolster his investigation of Clinton-Gore campaign fund-raising, LaBella has taken four assistant U.S. attorneys from San Diego to Washington: Tom McNamara, Stephen Clark, Dabney Langhorne and David Hackney. McNamara and Clark worked on the judges’ case.

Harold Rosenthal of San Francisco, one of the defense attorneys for Frega, ended that high-voltage trial with admiration for LaBella’s hard work and resourcefulness as an adversary. He has doubts, though, about LaBella’s intellectual flexibility and breadth of vision.

“He’s got that prosecutorial tunnel vision,” Rosenthal said. “He can get very emotional at times, very angry when witnesses don’t tell him what he wants to hear. I’m not sure he can step back and say, ‘OK, maybe my version of events isn’t correct.’ ”

One litigant’s tunnel vision and anger, of course, is another’s deeply felt sense of morality. Severina Rivera, a Washington attorney who sued to force the Marcoses to return money to the Philippines, was impressed with LaBella’s passion in the criminal case and in assisting with the civil case.

“Part of his fervor, his strong sense of morality, must come from his Catholic background,” Rivera said. “He seemed to share a cultural affinity with the Filipinos.”

Rivera remembers telling LaBella that Imelda Marcos, in an apparent bid for sympathy, kept fiddling with her rosary beads during a deposition. “Chuck was outraged,” she said.

LaBella disagrees that his religion shapes his legal thinking but concedes the impact of being educated by Jesuits--an order known for rigorous scholarship, skeptical thinking and a commitment to the betterment of society as they see it.

“I am Jesuitical,” he said. “You never shake that stuff. It’s kind of like being in the Marine Corps.”