www.newtimesla.com/issues/2002-01-24/faultlines.html/pr -
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Published on: 6/6/2002
Last Visited: 6/6/2002
After 32 years in the L.A. County District Attorney's Office under seven different administrations, Tom Higgins was at the apex of his career.
He was one of two deputy district attorneys in charge of the mammoth juvenile division, which handles about 30,000 cases a year, and he supervised 40 prosecutors.Higgins, 60, had helped draft numerous laws related to minors and was a nationally known expert in his field.
But Higgins' career took a nosedive in August after he criticized cuts his new boss, District Attorney Steve Cooley, was making in a much-celebrated antitruancy program known as ACT.Higgins expressed his displeasure to a reporter from Los Angeles magazine who was working on a story about Cooley.
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The new position would require Higgins, a father of eight, to be on the road constantly, travelling to various state prisons to represent the D.A.'s office in parole hearings for inmates with life sentences.Many fellow prosecutors considered the lifer assignment punitive.
"I don't know Mr. Cooley's heart or mind, but it surely appears that Tom was retaliated against for speaking out in defense of ACT," says Deputy District Attorney Marc Debbaudt, a hard-core gang prosecutor who used to be in charge of the program Higgins defended."I don't know Mr. Cooley's heart or mind, but it surely appears that Tom was retaliated against for speaking out in defense of ACT," says Deputy District Attorney Marc Debbaudt, a hard-core gang prosecutor who used to be in charge of the program Higgins defended.
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"I think the administration perceived that Tom, who was trying to explain why the program worked a certain way, was resisting them."
Launched by Higgins in the early '90s, ACT (which stands for Abolish Chronic Truancy) is designed to nip juvenile delinquency in the bud.Since chronic truancy is the No. 1 predictor of later delinquency, Higgins figured that prosecutors could be assigned to schools to work with administrators, parents of chronic truants, and the kids themselves to get them back in class.Parents who refuse to comply are, as a last resort, prosecuted.
As of last year, there were a dozen ACT prosecutors working with 400 schools in L.A. County.Higgins' program was so successful in preventing truancy and delinquency that it became a model for district attorneys around the country and received numerous honors, including being named one of the top 74 government programs in the country by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1994.
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Cooley cut four ACT positions last summer, eliminating dozens of schools from the program -- and prompting Higgins to speak out about it.
Higgins' defense of ACT was hardly incendiary.He told Humes, "It's a shame that it seems to be on the cutting block here" after he learned that Cooley was eliminating four of ACT's 12 positions.
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As word of his transfer spread, supporters flooded Higgins' office with calls; several hours later, Cooley himself called and rescinded the transfer.
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During the same call, Cooley told Higgins that he'd no longer be in charge of ACT.
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Still fuming about the attempt to transfer him and his loss of the ACT program, Higgins spoke out again in September to an L.A. Daily Journal reporter who was profiling him for the newspaper, which covers the legal community.Higgins told the reporter his short-lived transfer and removal from ACT "was retaliation and I still feel that way."
After that article was published, Higgins again was contacted by a top Cooley lieutenant.It was déjà vu all over again.Now he was being transferred to head the worker's compensation fraud unit downtown.This new assignment, although much farther from his La Verne home than his juvenile assignment in Pomona, was not anywhere near as loathsome as the lifer hearing job, but Higgins says he got the point loud and clear.
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Unrepentant, Higgins gave an impassioned speech about the importance of ACT at a goodbye luncheon for him on October 12 that drew more than 200 people.He couldn't resist tossing a few barbs at Cooley, telling the standing-room-only crowd, "It seems like this administration is going in the wrong direction."
Shortly after he took his new job in the worker's comp unit in mid-October, Higgins' college-age son, a part-time worker in the juvenile division in Pomona, got a call.He, too, was being transferred downtown.
Some fellow prosecutors just shook their heads."It is retaliation, absolutely, no doubt about it," says one who works in the juvenile division."In the history of this office we know about one student worker who has ever been transferred."
A top Cooley aide, who like several people interviewed for this article did not want to be identified, told New Times that the son's transfer was initiated primarily because student workers were needed downtown.The source also said the son's position in Pomona raised concerns among the administration that his hiring violated office nepotism rules, since Higgins senior headed the juvenile division. (Higgins' son is a victim witness coordinator who works about 10 hours a week.)
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Higgins initially refused to talk about his son's transfer.But when he heard what New Times was told about the matter, he went ballistic."I was already working in worker's compensation when they transferred him," Higgins says of the nepotism charge.He says there were two other supervisors between him and his son in the Pomona office for the last three years."Was I his ultimate supervisor?Yes...But I had a total hands-off on my son's hiring and activities."
As was Higgins' first transfer, his son's new assignment was also quickly rescinded, reportedly because of an office uproar.
"We abandoned the idea of transferring his son because we knew Higgins would scream like a stuck pig," says Cooley's aide.
Higgins is hardly the first deputy D.A. to cry foul after being pushed out of a prestigious job by his boss.The first rule of politics is to reward your friends and punish your enemies, and Higgins is clearly no friend of Steve Cooley.
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The challenger, John Lynch, who narrowly lost that election, isn't surprised by the conflict over Higgins.
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Higgins refuses to discuss his plans but readily offers that numerous fellow deputy prosecutors at his goodbye lunch pledged to raise money if he decides he wants to be L.A.'s next district attorney.
"I am not at this time a candidate," he says, not closing any political doors."I'm not going to say any more about that."
D.A. spokeswoman Gibbons rejects the notion that anything political is going on.
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It has a chilling effect on those with less fortitude than someone like Tom."
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