Down the Coast with Dana Parsons

I watched with relish last Thursday as Mike Carona defense attorney Jeffrey Rawitz hit the ground running in his cross-examination of Don Haidl, Carona’s former friend and assistant sheriff who’d agreed to secretly tape-record conversations with the former Orange County sheriff.

Rawitz was alternately probing, biting and even a bit sarcastic as he opened with some quick-hitters in his first chance at Haidl, the government’s star witness in Carona’s corruption trial in federal court in Santa Ana. How long ago last Thursday now seems.

Rawitz’s cross-examination since then has settled into a much more pedestrian mode, which may be needed to get the job done but does nothing to sell tickets.

I know, I know, this isn’t the circus. It’s just that Rawitz has the lawyer’s gift to play hardball, and the spectator in me was hoping for some of it. Even Judge Andrew Guilford weighed in. At the end of court today, he politely suggested that anything Rawitz could do to keep things moving "helps the defense and keeps the jury interested."

Rawitz has a great chance Wednesday. In what he told the judge likely will be his final day of cross-examination, Rawitz has yet to confront Haidl in depth on at least two critical aspects of the trial: his alleged $1,000-a-month payoffs to Carona, pictured here, over a four-year period ending in mid-2002 and the secretly recorded conversations, which have been played for the jury and which the government hopes provide the smoking gun to convict Carona.

Haidl is proving a stoic and largely unflappable witness. Rawitz quite possibly has scored some points with the jury, but he needs to deflate Haidl on the alleged payments. Whether he does it Wednesday with a surgical knife or a hammer is the overnight teaser.

Photo: Los Angeles Times