Charles La Bella, who was interim U.S. attorney in San Diego under President Clinton in the late 1990s and who squared off against Lam in a high-profile case involving allegations of kickbacks by hospital officials, said he sensed that she was not paying attention to the border.
He said that when he headed the U.S. attorney's office, he learned the importance of border and immigration issues.
"But there she was in court with me all the time" at the kickback trial, which went on for months, he said.
'Very, very formal'
Lam, 45, has always followed her own compass.
The daughter of parents who came from Shanghai before the communists overran China, she grew up in New Jersey, was educated at Yale University and moved to California to attend law school at Stanford University.
She signed on as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego in 1986 and worked for 14 years, winning a name for herself not on border cases, where many of her peers started out, but for landing bigger fish.
In 1990, she helped put away an accused mobster for money laundering.
In 1992, she won a guilty plea from the president of a La Jolla-based laboratory in a billing fraud case.
Some former prosecutors remember Lam acting as if she were too good to be bothered by border cases.
Nor is she remembered for her camaraderie.
"She was not an outgoing person," recalled one prosecutor who now works in another border city. "You could stop her in the hall and chat, but it was always very, very formal."
In 2000, Lam became a Superior Court judge in San Diego. Two years later, when she emerged as a compromise candidate for the U.S. attorney job, she told the San Diego Union-Tribune that one of the most important lessons she learned as a judge was that hard sentences deterred criminals. She once sentenced a notorious bank robber to 175 years.
The big cases came her way as the top federal prosecutor.
The largest prize was Cunningham, a longtime congressman and a Vietnam War hero caught up in a bribery and tax-evasion scandal. He pleaded guilty and was given an eight-year sentence.
The day before she left office Feb. 15, she announced the indictments of two of Cunningham's alleged co-conspirators.
"High government positions and powerful connections should not be tickets to corrupt self-enrichment," she said. "The public trust is not for sale."
Border questions
