Mike Jacobs’ phone rang a couple months ago, in early February – it was Todd Spitzer on the line. And why was the embattled DA calling Mike, the former longtime OC prosecutor who was the second challenger to toss his hat in the race against Todd, running as the conservative “tough-on-crime” alternative to progressive reformer Pete Hardin? Todd had called Mike to convince him to drop out of the race, and he really thought he had a good argument.

And why did Todd think he could convince Mike to drop out? Because a piece by Tony Saavedra had just appeared in the Register, which quoted Todd thusly: “Mike Jacobs was linked to the snitch scandal in 2016 and the last thing we need is to reopen that horrible chapter of Orange County history.”

“You’re BRANDED now, Mike,” exulted our DA to his challenger Mike Jacobs, “We branded you with the Snitch Scandal.” “Todd, you know I had nothing to do with the Snitch Scandal, I was gone ten years before that, and you KNOW VERY WELL who was responsible for that.” “Yeah well it doesn’t matter,” responded our DA, just like a kid playing tag on the playground, “We branded you with it and you might as well give up and drop out.”

As surely as Todd sees nightmare visions of Los Angeles, its crime and liberal DA, as a magic bullet he can use against Hardin, he also sees Rackauckas’ famed jailhouse snitch scandal as a magic bullet to “brand” Jacobs. Indeed, the nationally notorious Snitch Scandal helped Spitzer beat Rackauckas four years ago, and it’s one of the few changes Todd can boast of – that he stopped the illegal use of devious, paid-off jailhouse informants.

Except… except Jacobs had left Rackauckas’ crooked department in 2006, long before DA Rackauckas and Sheriffs Hutchens and Barnes had begun making a regular pattern of paying off inmates to spy and snitch on their fellow inmates, and then hiding that fact, as well as the snitches’ past records of dishonesty, from defenses and juries. And Mike’s use of informants, which he says he did exactly TWICE – in 1981 and 1983 – in his 29 years of over 140 jury trials, was always above-board, the informants had volunteered the information on their own, and the defense was told about it.

“This was MANY YEARS before the Sheriffs began the SHU program where they’d CULTIVATE INFORMANTS – these were legitimate informants I dealt with, they contacted the agency on their own, I vetted them and they were good witnesses. Todd knows all that. It makes you wonder, Vern, when a politician feels like they have to lie like he does.” Not to mention that, thanks to the obstruction and non-cooperation of Todd and Sheriff Barnes, there has been no investigation into or consequences for that Scandal – all things considered, I’d be quiet about the Snitch Scandal if I were Todd. But he won’t.

Did I mention?

Did I mention, Donna and I drove down to Irvine the other day, at the invitation of Orange Juice blogger Love Cameron, to attend Mike Jacobs’ campaign launch party, and we had a few good conversations with him that night. I was kind of expecting and hoping to see some of those old Rackauckas people who’ve turned against Spitzer there – Baytieh, Tracy Miller, etc. – but no. Jacobs never was a T-Racker, as much as Spitzer would like to “brand” him that way – he quit in 2006 because he couldn’t stand working for the guy, and that was a few years after Tony fired him and Mike won his job back in court… but we’ll tell that story later.

Mike has nothing but respect for Pete Hardin (right) – he looked into the allegations Spitzer makes about him and found nothing to be concerned about, “and that thing Todd likes to say, that Pete shouldn’t be allowed near parks and schools, I think that’s borderline ACTIONABLE.” He firmly disagrees with Pete on POLICIES, and looks forward to having respectful debates about real issues.

But get him started on Todd Spitzer, and he can really go on. Some excerpts:

“I don’t think Todd really has any guidelines or policies; like Rackauckas before him, his only guideline is to ‘keep the conviction rate high.’ And get myself good publicity.”

“All this stuff about, him saying improper things and then walling off of deputies, that’s all just craziness, Vern.  I’ve never heard of that. The ethics rules are really easy.  I mean, you don’t prosecute on the basis of race or your own prejudice, and the things that he’s done, like in the BUGGS case, and the … and ROBICHAUX bothers me a lot too. The way he went after that, he took that case apart like it was his own project, you know… and it really bothers me that he got rid of the original trial attorney and investigator, and he was just looking for people who would agree with him.  And he humiliated the victims.”

“I hear from people who are working there that he’s worse than Rackauckas.  And he seems to have a problem with women, Vern.  He’s just had three MORE lawsuits filed against him for sexual harassment.  And weird ideas about black people, which he’ll bring up at the most inappropriate times.  And he has such an ego, Vern, that you get into a case discussion and he’ll wanna pontificate all his knowledge, you know what I mean.  And it’s absolutely irrelevant and unnecessary, but he doesn’t think so.”

“The old joke is the most dangerous place to be in OC is between Todd and a TV camera.  Or between him and the KFI guys.  And one thing he does is he’ll go to court and sit in on cases – he likes to think that intimidates judges – I’ve never heard of a DA doing that.  Or, the way he and his spokeswoman put it, he ‘goes there to see that justice prevails and there’s an appropriate sentence.’  He’s just supposed to set the policies and stay in his office and send his deputies to do the work – if he doesn’t have deputies that can do that work then he’s in trouble.”

But enough about Todd…

Did I also mention: Mike Jacobs has written a book, a non-fiction autobiographical crime thriller entitled “TRACKRS: On the Cold Trail of a Serial Killer.” It just came out, says Mike, right before he decided he had to run against Spitzer. And it’s been getting good reviews. “TRACKRS” is an acronym for “Taskforce Review Aimed at Catching Killers, Rapists and Serial offenders” – that was the name of the OCDA’s unsolved homicide project, back when Mike was working there.

Mike’s book tells the story of one of his achievements he’s most proud of – the Parker-Green case in which, in the early 80’s, he helped solve six unsolved murders from the 70’s – murders committed by Gerald Parker – and in the process exonerated a wrongly convicted and imprisoned man, Kevin Lee Green. You can read a short version of that case on Wikipedia. And from Mike’s book:

This Parker-Green case also inspired Mike to create the Innocence Project, another thing he’s real proud of.  “What we did is, we created these forms, they were for the inmates at all the state prisons, and without an attorney they could fill out the form if they thought they were innocent and wrongly convicted, and especially if there was physical evidence they knew of that had not been examined, like DNA or something like that.  And I know that program continued for a while at least under Rackauckas, but I don’t know if it still exists.” [I pretty much don’t think it does, or several innocent prisoners I know would know about it.  But of course I’ve heard of “Project Innocence,” a team of pro-bono lawyers on the outside.] “Oh yeah, back in 2000, 2001, when I was still in the office, I talked to the guy who started that, Barry Scheck, and he was so impressed with our Innocence Project that he said he “wasn’t coming to Orange County.” He thought we were handling it pretty well.  [Wow!  That’s sure not happening any more, I can tell you.]

Another thing Mike’s proud of was during the short time he was doing defense, from 2001-3 when he was fired by Rackauckas.  “There was a gang murder case in Riverside, and the guy, I really believed him that he was wasted on meth after some party and fell asleep in the back of the car, and the driver parked the car and went and shot somebody in the crosswalk.  And he had nothing to do with it.  The police said they had a confession from him, but it’d been ‘accidentally erased.’  Sometimes police lie like that.  Well, I got re-instated with the DA before the case was heard, and Doug Myers ended up trying it, and he convinced the jury there was a reasonable doubt that the police were telling the truth, and the guy was released – Myers was a terrific attorney, but I did the initial work.”   

One thing Mike says a lot is “The job of DA isn’t all that hard or complicated. It’s SIMPLE, just hire the right people, and most importantly, FOLLOW THE RULES! They are commonsense and easy to follow.” I couldn’t help but contrast that with how DIFFICULT, COMPLICATED and CHALLENGING Todd makes it sound when he talks about it – I think the problem is Todd’s brain making it complicated – all the bees in his bonnet. But Mike says, “When I was there under Hicks and Capizzi, they ran the place as a LAW FIRM, a high-echelon law firm. Everybody was respectful, none of these issues came up during the 30 years I worked there.”

“Cecil Hicks was a real hands-off manager.  He had really good people, you know we had a head of Municipal Courts, Superior Courts, Special Assignments, and he just entrusted the office to those people, and he’d just come in a couple of nights a week and read the two-week reports.  But here’s what he was known for, and he talked about it and practiced it: There wasn’t gonna be any corruption, or any deals, or anything off the record, in that office, or you’re gonna be fired. 

“You either stuck to the rules or you were gone, and Mike Capizzi was the same way.  I had some issues with Capizzi’s management style, but you had to say, both of them were INCORRUPTIBLE.  I can’t say the same thing about Rackauckas.  It’s funny that Spitzer tries to tie me to Rackauckas – maybe he forgets that Rackauckas fired me, early on in his tenure (2001.)”

[Republican Rackauckas, by the way, beat took the place of his fellow Republican Capizzi in 1998/9 – Capizzi had pissed off his own Party by prosecuting corrupt Republican politicians, but Rackauckas promised not to spend any time or effort going after political corruption in this sleazy county – and that promise was kept by both Rackauckas and Spitzer after him.]

It didn’t take long for Tony Rackauckas to fire Mike Jacobs, and T-Rack gave such lame-ass reasons as Mike “didn’t work well with others” and was “rarely punctual.”  But nobody was fooled – Mike was really fired for reporting Tony to the Attorney General for stopping an investigation into his own misbehavior. 

That investigation was into the supposed nonprofit “Tony Rackauckas Foundation” which was never formally organized with the state and hence illegal.  “Anybody could donate $500 to Tony’s foundation, be given a Commissioner’s badge which looked just like a cop’s or investigator’s badge, and then go over to Sheriff Mike Carona and get a concealed weapon permit. While he did all this, Tony was using County personnel and County facilities in a violation of the government code.  When Tony found out this whole scheme was being investigated, he tossed the two investigators out on the street and accused THEM of misconduct – and, when you’re a special-assignment, undercover, organized crime investigator, that pretty much ends your career.” So Mike blew the whistle on all this, Tony fired him in revenge, and Mike sued to get his job back.

T-Rack’s position was that Mike had no first amendment rights since he was “in management.” Well, the judge strongly begged to differ, holding that it’s even MORE important for management to be able to report misconduct.  And Mike won his job back with back-pay and benefits, but eventually retired in 2006 anyway because he couldn’t stand working for Rackauckas.  And since then he’s had a private practice.

Is Mike Jacobs The TERMINATOR?

R. Scott Moxley’s 2016 pieces about Mike referred to him as “The Terminator,” giving the impression that was the nickname given him by colleagues because of his alleged zeal to pursue the death penalty whenever possible.  Mike says nobody in the office called him that, he never called himself that, it was a joke that happened ONE TIME when “I walked into the courtroom and Dave Carter cracked, ‘Ah, here comes the Terminator, Mike Jacobs.”  Dave Carter?  Judge David Carter?  Yes, they were old friends, they used to work together as prosecutors.

“And all this nonsense about I like doing capital cases, I like the death penalty, it’s all garbage, Vern, it’s all made up.  In fact, when one of the guys I prosecuted was executed, I didn’t want to go, Capizzi made me go.”  That was Tommy Thomspon, who’d murdered Ginger Fleischi in 1981 – the only one of the five men sent to death row by Jacobs who was actually executed before California stopped the practice in 2006.

“He was killed by lethal injection, and it was a terrible thing to watch.  I think that any human being who sees that would have trouble seeing someone else die.  I had never seen someone die right in front of me.  It was difficult, Vern, it was difficult. 

“And I was there with Ginger’s brother, and he didn’t feel any better either.  This stuff about ‘CLOSURE’ is just psychological garbage.  His sister was gone, you know, and nothing’s gonna bring her back.  And seeing the killer die doesn’t help – he was just as unhappy as he was before.”

.

THREE CHANGES MIKE WOULD MAKE.

Well, Mike talks a lot about following the existing rules, guidelines, policies, but are there any of those he would change? These are three:

1 – “Get back to concentration on prosecuting these very serious violent cases and doing it BY THE RULES.  Part of that is, we need to bring back TRACKRS unit for unsolved homicides. Those cases aren’t being worked the way they should be.” 

2 – “I want to put a focus on human trafficking and fentanyl.”  [Of course Todd TALKS about those things but it’s just talk, no action.]  “And the way to do that is, you don’t just get the guy on the street, you go up a rung or two and get the SUPPLIERS.  And you need to have the knowledge of HOW TO FILE CONSPIRACY CASES.  I don’t think Todd’s office right now is that sophisticated.  I’ve done that sort of case.  Conspiracies are sort of intricate, but if you know how to use them, they’re terrific prosecution tools.” 

3 – “Re-organize staff, get new people top to bottom, new management, recruit new people, LATERAL HIRES; from what I hear there has been a real “brain drain,” we’re really low on experienced deputies, and see if we can’t get some more from other jurisdictions.”

What about gang injunctions & gang databases? 

“The police gang units are really good at what they do, at keeping track of these kids as they grow up and unfortunately sometimes commit more serious crimes. [hmmm…] I don’t think it’s necessary to keep a real sophisticated database.  When I was involved in gang prosecutions we just relied upon the data and the records kept by the local police departments and that seemed to be sufficient.  As far as gang injunctions, I’ve been out of this for a while, but I would take a really good look at it – if there’s no good basis for someone to remain covered by an injunction then just kick ‘em off!  And if it’s the way I’m hearing, it shouldn’t just be two or three people removed [as Todd has], it should be something that’s looked at regularly.”

The Rackauckas/Spitzer DNA database, and their “spit & acquit” policy? 

“I never liked that, Vern, I would get rid of it. ” “Yeah, that’s what Todd said four years ago.” “Well, that’s Todd for you.  With Rackauckas, that idea came off of our TRACKRS project, which was supposed to be an unsolved homicide project, not a spitting collection, you know.  And he kinda morphed it into his little pet project, but … one, I think it’s wrong to ask for DNA in exchange for a plea, there’s something that really bothers me about that.  And the other thing is that, if it’s not specified in the code, those databases can’t go into [Berkeley or into Codex?] so they’re just sitting there and you’re creating your own little database and they don’t go into the nationwide database.  So I question whether it’s worth it.“

In the entire 22 years of Rackauckas and Spitzer no cops or sheriffs have been convicted of killings or brutality – does this seem right to you?  Could they all be justified? 

“I have a real problem with… there’s one case in particular, I can’t get into it with you right now but it’s gonna come out… Here’s what I think, I think last election, the Sheriffs’ association contributed around $400,000 to Rackauckas’ campaign, so he was well paid for.  And what I’m getting at is, both Rackauckas and Spitzer have shown a real favoritism to and protection of police, and I think it’s wrong, and I think it should be reviewed.  And you’re right, there is very minimal filing, and most of the time, if you noticed even in the evidence-booking scandal, Spitzer was very reluctant to file anything even though the Sheriffs were requesting it.  And I think that’s something that Spitzer and Rackauckas both did, they really cut back on filing against the police.  And you can’t do that.  You can’t do that.”

Political corruption? Does he think that’s a big problem in OC?  We live in ANAHEIM, for Christ’s sake! What would he do about political corruption? 

“Well, I think that there is, I don’t have all the proof that I need but I do hear a lot about questionable things happening in this County.  One of the things Rackauckas did when he came to power was he did away with the Special Assignments Organized Crime unit that dealt into political corruption.  This used to be its own unit with specialized investigators.  If I’m elected, I’ll re-create that unit.”

[I thought it would be a cheeky thing to wear my “Brady Evidence” tee-shirt to Mike’s party, since he’d been accused in some old Moxley pieces of withholding exculpatory evidence from defenses. This shirt was as good as asking a question about the matter.]

“Yes, Brady was the law when I was a prosecutor, and it’s still the law now. I never withheld evidence from the defense, despite what Moxley has written.  You ask enough attorneys I tried cases against, and this is what I did – I had a TRIAL NOTEBOOK, I wasn’t a “files guy,” and I would have a separate notebook of photographs and charts.  And I would give the defense investigator both of them.  And if I was holding back anything – and that would just be my own work notes and outlines – I would tell them about it. 

“I know Moxley printed a letter I wrote to the AG during Kenneth Clair’s appeal, to try to prove I was hiding something from the defense.  Essentially what happened was there was an AG who just decided he’d give them my whole file.  And the problem with that, Vern, they get my notes, they get everything in the file.  And I said you’re supposed to protect “work product,” you’re not supposed to give that away.  And I’d offered to do the actual hearing, but I couldn’t do it because they’d given away all my notes.  So that was a non-issue, Vern.  I respect the Brady law.

“The Kenneth Clair case got all screwed up, and guess who was responsible for that, it was Tony Rackauckas.  There was a female deputy who had another murder case out of Huntington Beach, and she thought it looked very similar to Clair.  So on her own, with Tony’s approval, they agreed to do some DNA testing.  Judge Goethals said the DNA wasn’t sufficient quality to prove anything, he didn’t even allow it in discovery. But they went nuts and claimed it was evidence of another perpetrator, but let me tell you something Vern, anyone who knew that case, all I had to do was play this tape, of Clair telling his girlfriend, “Nobody saw me go in, nobody saw me come out, there ain’t no fucking fingerprints there, just keep your fucking mouth shut and we’ll get out of this.”  Easy case.  It wasn’t a difficult case to win. But Moxley… Moxley would follow [crusading public defender] Scott Sanders.  I understand Moxley wrote 70 stories following Sanders’ briefs.” 

Here is Mike Jacobs’ ballot statement for your perusal. It includes concern for “not infringing on defendants’ rights,” a concern which seemed to be contradicted when he recently expressed to the Register an enthusiasm for Rudy Giulani’s 90s-era “Broken Windows Theory.” In any case, Mike seems like the right DA choice for folks who think Pete Hardin’s ideas are too liberal for the OC, but you still don’t want to back a mega-bumbling megalomaniac!