Impersonating an officer?

Nancy Mayer says she's qualified to be attorney general, even though she has never prosecuted a criminal in her life. She could be right

by Jody Ericson

It's no wonder General Treasurer Nancy Mayer and Attorney General Jeff Pine are still so popular these days. Running as political outsiders six years ago, the two Republicans took on Rhode Island's Democratic establishment the only way they could -- by casting themselves as crusaders against the corrupt and inefficient state government the Dems had built. And in many ways, the pair have stuck to the script ever since, pounding away at business-as-usual in Rhode Island.

Mayer, for instance, has shown true vision and guts in her fight against legislative pension abuses and in favor of term limits and campaign-finance reform. Pine, on the other hand, has gone after one of his own, former Republican governor Ed DiPrete, in one of the biggest public-corruption cases in Rhode Island history.

Still, are the two offices as interchangeable as Mayer, who hopes to fill the seat Pine will vacate in January, suggests? A prim, elfin woman who is known as a goody-two-shoes of local government, Mayer wouldn't exactly cut an imposing figure as the head sheriff in town -- or even know how to file a motion for a wiretap or try a B&E, for that matter. After all, she has no prosecutorial experience and little in civil trial work.

And for this reason, her three Democratic opponents, former state prosecutors Eva Mancuso and William Guglietta and former US attorney Sheldon Whitehouse, cast a wary eye on her candidacy, even though only one of them will be running against Mayer after September's Democratic primary.

"The attorney general needs to know how the system works," says Guglietta, who was once in charge of the AG's narcotics unit. "Let's say you need open-heart surgery -- would you want to be operated on by a doctor who only has read about the procedure in a manual?"

Indeed, says Whitehouse, in criminal investigations in particular, only an experienced attorney general will understand the subtle art of timing, "when to pull the trigger and switch from the investigating mode to the charging mode," he says. Not one to hold anything back, Mancuso calls Mayer's campaign an out-and-out "insult to the profession."

Of course, the three Democratic candidates would emphasize the criminal part of the job, for which they are more qualified than their Republican opponent. But there are larger, less tangible aspects to being attorney general that would better suit Mayer, a known advocate for everyday taxpayers who also served as chief legal counsel to the state Department of Business Regulation from 1986 to 1992.

As Pine says, "the criminal division, from a resource and public-attention point of view, is overwhelmingly dominant" in the AG's office, particularly since Rhode Island does not have elected county or district attorneys to handle criminal prosecutions. Still, the attorney general is also the state's chief consumer protector and civil lawyer, enforcing open-meetings laws and air, water-pollution, and hazardous-waste regulations; representing state agencies; and defending and/or challenging the constitutionality of legislative or administrative actions.

According to Mayer, the AG's office is more fluid than people might think, so the most important qualification for the job is vision -- the drive to use the office as a

bully pulpit and the courage to prioritize its duties in terms of what's best for the state. "As attorney general, you are the general of an army of more than 200. You need to provide administrative leadership that makes the army function. You need to motivate people by example," she says. And if an attorney general is too bogged

down in the thousands of individual cases the office files (6000 felonies and 5000 juvenile cases last year alone in Rhode Island), he or she will lose sight of these larger goals.

Not surprisingly, one of Mayer's top priorities as AG would be to set up a public-corruption task force. Although she says that local corruption is not so widespread a problem anymore, Mayer emphasizes the "symbolism" of such a task force. "If there's one thing any of us as politicians can do, it's change the public's opinion about us," she says. "You have to send a message that is so loud and clear that public corruption will not be tolerated."

As a result, says Mayer, an attorney general "needs to show a great deal of bravery [and] a fierce independence to fight reform no matter what the political fallout." And as general treasurer, of course, Mayer says she has done both -- more so than her opponents, who all have strong ties to the state Democratic Party and have never held an elective office.

Whatever its outcome in November, the race for attorney general promises to bring the office into sharper focus as Mayer's opponents attack her lack of experience and puff up their own prosecutorial feathers in the process. By the end, the candidates could actually redefine the job they are campaigning for, a job whose only prerequisite, according to the National Association of Attorneys General, is a degree in law.

Jeff Pine was 37 years old -- the same age as Guglietta and Mancuso -- when he stepped up to a microphone at the Providence Marriott and first announced his bid for attorney general in 1992. He couldn't have picked a better time -- the state's credit-union crisis had hit, and then-Attorney General Jim O'Neil had been swept up in the scandal.

Pine, a career prosecutor who prided himself on his high conviction rate, had a simple platform then: he was "a prosecutor and not a politician." And he accused O'Neil of being a hands-off attorney general -- or, worse, one who looked the other way -- while kickbacks and patronage poisoned the state.

Given his campaign spiel, Pine, who announced in March that he would not run for reelection for personal financial reasons, sounds almost hypocritical now in supporting fellow Republican Nancy Mayer as his replacement. "If you're just fixed on being a former prosecutor, you won't be effective," he says. "I can't minimize the impact the attorney general can have in directing the policy of the office."

As for the nuts-and-bolts criminal work, Mayer has the common sense and managerial skills to surround herself with good people, he says, to hire the right prosecutors to run the various divisions of the AG's office. "There are so many good people here already," says Pine. "She could use that expertise and knowledge and that relationship with the law-enforcement community. She'd benefit from that as much as anyone else."

So is this the political Pine talking, the Pine loyal to the party that so skillfully launched his political career? Not necessarily. Six years have passed since Pine first ran for office, six years that have turned him from a bright-eyed prosecutor into a battle-weary general. In that time, Pine has learned that bringing down the Joe Mollicones and Christopher Hightowers of Rhode Island is only part of the job -- and much of its glory.

But today, much more is expected of attorneys general outside the criminal realm. In Rhode Island, electricity deregulation and for-profit hospital takeovers have taken center stage in recent years, while public corruption, mercifully, has faded into the background. Under the state's recent Hospital Conversions Act, Pine acts as the chief regulator in all hospital takeovers and mergers, both for-profit and nonprofit. And the task has proved formidable, he says.

"These reviews have taken up an enormous amount of both my staff's and my time," says Pine. "Three years ago, we had one or two people working on health-related issues. Now we have four."

What's more, attorneys general across the nation are taking on bigger targets than ever these days, collaborating on cases against such corporate icons as Microsoft and the tobacco industry. So more and more, says Pine, he must tap into the financial expertise of people like Mayer. "Nancy and I are protecting public dollars in different arenas," says Pine.

While this may be true, Mayer's opponents still say the public would be taking a big chance in electing her to office. To say that Mayer could hire people to help steer her through unfamiliar territory is a "cop-out,"says Whitehouse, who also served as chief of the AG unit regulating utilities. "That's like saying we don't need an attorney general, that the office can run by itself. There will be close calls and disagreements between lead prosecutors. Sometimes the buck will stop with her."

"You can rely on your people much to your detriment," adds Guglietta. And as an example, he and Mancuso point to the DiPrete case and Pine's ill-fated Strike Force.

Last year, prosecutors were accused of withholding discovery material in the case against the former governor, while the drug force became the target of a federal investigation for, among other things, fabricating arrest and search warrants. When Pine's administration almost collapsed under the pressure of these allegations (the DiPrete case came within a Supreme Court reversal of being thrown out), the press accused the attorney general of the very negligence he'd pinned on O'Neil in 1992.

But the truth is that whoever wins the race for attorney general in November will need to delegate, just as Pine has. Because it is impossible to review every case the office files, he or she will need to trust the staff at times to make the right call. Did Pine cross the fine line between micro-managing and over-delegating in one of the most important cases of his career? Pine doesn't seem to regret his actions.

"Part of being a good public official is knowing how to make good decisions and having good people around you that you can trust," he says.

Despite the DiPrete case, Pine, overall, has been a popular attorney general, a true crime fighter who has remained outside political circles. In this respect, it was probably no accident that he and Mayer chose to run for the offices they did, says Darrell West, a pollster and political science professor at Brown University. The targets couldn't have been larger for both of these Republican crusaders.

In the early '90s, the treasurer's office, for instance, had become so bloated with patronage that Mayer claimed reform as easily as eliminating some of the jobs there. At the same time, she and Pine could hammer away at local corruption with few repercussions. "Neither position -- the general treasurer's nor the attorney general's -- requires cutting deals with the General Assembly or Congress," says West.

Indeed, Pine and Mayer have acted more like political desperados than executive officers, ducking the bullets as they wreak havoc on the system. "Nancy and I both know that if we do our jobs right, the rest of it will follow and that we wouldn't be doing our jobs right if some people weren't upset with us," says Pine.

More important, Mayer, in some ways, would be even more of an outsider attorney general than Pine. And her inexperience could work in her favor. A woman who rarely goes along to get along, Mayer, say her critics, would have a hard time bonding with the tough bunch of cops she'd oversee as the state's top law-enforcement officer. "The attorney general needs to have credibility within the law-enforcement community and the courts," says Whitehouse. "Without that, it diminishes the office, and if there's a close call, a judge might not rule your way."

But then again, maybe it's time someone without those ties gave the office a try. With nothing but her own moral compass to guide her, Mayer would have no choice but to play it straight as attorney general -- to pick the best prosecutors for the job and to stop playing games in the DiPrete case and try it fair and square. Nancy Mayer could be just the shove Rhode Island needs to clean up its act once and for all.