Boy, the Sacramento Bee reporter sure had the wool pulled over his eyes. Writing about Paul Gallegos as if he is a dedicated, hard working DA - time has shown just how wrong he got it in this story.
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Humboldt DA: Lumber firm's out to get me
But foes say they're pushing a recall because he's soft on crime
By Sam Stanton, Bee Staff Writer
Sacramento Bee
EUREKA - The Humboldt County Courthouse is closed for the Lincoln's Birthday holiday, but District Attorney Paul Gallegos is there before 9 a.m., putting in another day on the job he loves.
He's dressed neatly: dark pants and suit coat over a knit sweater, shined shoes. And he's very polite as he prepares to return 48 phone messages that undoubtedly will include vitriolic crank calls.
Miles away, in a makeshift office filled with files aimed at destroying his year-old political career, there is another Gallegos on display.
This one comes in the form of a life-size photo cutout of the 41-year-old Democrat. He's dressed casually and is in bare feet. Someone has placed a dreadlock-style wig on his head, and topped it with a floppy hat.
On the wall is a white board where someone has written, "20 days to go. URGENT."
The 20 days are up March 2, when voters will decide whether the district attorney they elected just over a year ago should be recalled from office.
His opponents say the issue is simple: He's soft on crime.
Gallegos says that's hogwash, that there's only one issue at play, a sinister one: The biggest private employer in town, Pacific Lumber Co., wants him out because he had the temerity to sue the company for fraud just after taking office.
"It's an affront to this community," Gallegos said during an interview in his fourth-floor office last week. "It's a national corporation that is immensely wealthy - wealthier than this entire county - and they think that because of their wealth they can come here and either rule the community or ruin it. And they don't care which."
PALCO, which the timber giant now prefers to be called, has an entirely different point of view, insisting that although it has helped move the recall forward, it has done so to help the community, not to get out from under the $20 million lawsuit Gallegos' office filed.
"It has nothing to do with the lawsuit," spokeswoman Erin Dunn said. "We have said that from the beginning. ... It's about safety issues, our community's safety."
The dispute has split Humboldt County, where the timber company employs 800 people and logging has been a way of life for decades.
As the county expands its economic base and Eureka enjoys a renaissance of sorts in its waterfront old town section, there are two distinct camps evolving: those who support PALCO and the economic engine it represents, and those who say the company has had too much power in town for too long.
Gallegos stepped into the middle of the fight in 2002, when he defeated five-term incumbent Terry Farmer after pumping $25,000 of his own money into the campaign.
Initially, he wasn't given much of a chance. He had never been a prosecutor and had lived in Humboldt County only since 1994, when he moved his successful defense attorney practice to Eureka.
His campaign promised "to make Humboldt County a safe place," and to insist "that the limitations of governmental power imposed by the Constitution are honored."
It was hardly a traditional law-and-order theme, but Gallegos won 52 percent of the vote and took office in January 2003.
Six weeks later, he took the step that some believe was political suicide. His office sued Pacific Lumber, charging that PALCO had submitted phony information in 1999 for environmental impact studies that resulted in state approval of a deal that gave the company expanded logging rights in its Headwaters Forest Preserve.
The reaction was instantaneous.
"Sonic boom," Gallegos said. "It's tough to describe to someone who wasn't here."
Talk of a recall began immediately, even though the law required that he serve in his post 90 days before a recall drive could start.
When he showed up at a Board of Supervisors meeting to ask the county to hire an outside attorney to handle the PALCO case, he found the building surrounded by logging trucks and the chamber filled with angry citizens.
"They came before the board and said, 'We're going to recall this DA, and if you appoint this civil attorney, we're going to recall you, too,' " Gallegos said.
Since then, he says, he has heard from other elected officials in the county telling him he should never have filed the suit. "They're afraid," he said. "This is too ugly, too divisive."
Gallegos, the father of three young children, said he has been confronted by citizens at the grocery store while with his kids and has had to ask school officials to ensure that the children aren't harassed because of the controversy.
Meanwhile, television commercials ridicule as lenient his treatment of the tree-sitters who regularly try to keep Pacific Lumber trees from being cut down.
All of this, he says, is the product of PALCO, which pumped $69,347 into the recall committee's bank account between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31. That accounted for about 93 percent of the total the group had raised, a proportion that spurred Gallegos' supporters to ask the state Fair Political Practices Commission last week to require that PALCO's name be included in pro-recall commercials.
Gallegos and his supporters say the massive infusion of cash allowed recall organizers to gather the necessary signatures to force a new vote.
They also claim the money allowed out-of-town petition circulators who were paid as much as $8 a signature to ensure Gallegos would face a recall; and they say PALCO's denial that its support for the recall stems from the lawsuit is laughable.
"What are they going to do, be honest?" Gallegos asked. "Are they going to say, 'We've got to recall this guy because he's suing us' ?"
The situation he faces is reminiscent of the one former Gov. Gray Davis faced last year. Voters will be asked in two weeks whether to retain him in his job, and will be asked in a second part of the ballot which of three other candidates should replace him.
He appears to be in an uphill fight. PALCO won't say how much more it plans to pump into the effort, although one recall consultant vows they will spend heavily on TV ads.
"I'm going to take him out," said Rob Flanigan, a Sacramento-based consultant who arrived in Humboldt County last week to try to finish the job recall organizers began.
Flanigan and others insist the lumber company is not trying to get out from under the lawsuit by getting Gallegos dumped. PALCO did not contribute any money until the recall committee had gathered 12,000 signatures, they note, nearly enough to have forced the election.
And the company has said that, even if Gallegos is recalled, they expect whichever candidate wins to follow through on the lawsuit.
"We want our day in court," said company spokeswoman Dunn, adding that PALCO corrected the documents in question as soon as it realized there was a problem.
Despite Gallegos' insistence that the recall is all about timber, there are other issues being raised in the race.
Recall supporters have seized upon the fact that Gallegos' chief deputy, Tim Stoen, who filed the PALCO suit, once was a principal aide to the Rev. Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple cult that perished in Guyana. Stoen's 6-year-old son died in the Jonestown massacre.
Stoen says he was Jones' political adviser and business manager in the early days of the cult, when he and others believed it was simply a group bent on helping the needy. He broke from Jones when he realized how dangerous he was, Stoen said, and tried to shut the group down before the massacre.
"I told Paul when I filed the case this was going to happen, that the Peoples Temple stuff was going to come up again," Stoen said.
But Gallegos told Stoen, who has worked under six different district attorneys in California, that such history was irrelevant to the case.
Recall supporters say Gallegos' association with someone like Stoen bolsters their argument that he is too soft to be the county's top prosecutor.
He has been criticized for increasing the number of marijuana plants the county allows under the state's medical marijuana law, a move Gallegos said simply mirrors policies in other counties.
Opponents also have raised questions about his treatment of some of the criminals who have passed through his office.
The most controversial involves Pedro Martinez-Hernandez, who early this month was sentenced to 16 years in prison for molesting his daughter over a period of more than six years.
Critics say there was evidence of 1,900 acts of molestation involving the girl, and that the district attorney should have filed a mountain of charges to ensure Martinez-Hernandez stayed in prison for life.
"To us, he's almost on the side of the defendant," said Bob Martinez, president of the Eureka Police Officers Association, which voted unanimously to support the recall.
Gallegos said he agreed to the 16-year sentence to protect the girl from having to make repeated court appearances that could harm her further emotionally.
But Martinez said there were avenues available that could have spared the girl and allowed tougher charges.
Gallegos is reflective about the recall battle, saying that if he loses he can leave the $109,000-a-year job and make much more by returning to his life as a defense attorney.
But he'd prefer to stay, he says, because he feels a duty to do the job right - and that included filing the lawsuit even though he says he knew he would be attacked for the move.
"They clearly live by the philosophy that the best defense is a strong offense, so I had a pretty fair idea they'd be coming after me," Gallegos said. "It's like standing on the edge of a cliff.
"You know if you step off, you're going to get hurt. You just don't know the particulars."
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