After his first job, which involved routinely breaking the sound barrier in an F-14, and once tangling with a Soviet MIG off the coast of Vietnam, Tom O'Brien was looking for a new challenge.
And somehow, working as a stockbroker just wasn't cutting it.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, February 16, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 83 words Type of Material: Correction
U.S. attorney: An article in Sunday's A section about U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien said Los Angeles civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman was convicted of bankruptcy fraud and tax evasion while O'Brien was U.S. attorney. Yagman was convicted before O'Brien's tenure began and sentenced after O'Brien took charge of the office. The story also referred to the MIG-23 as the former Soviet Union's "most menacing fighter plane" in 1984. A year earlier, an aircraft considered a superior tactical fighter, the MIG-29, entered service.
So O'Brien -- already a law school graduate -- landed a job as a prosecutor, embarking on a path that eventually led to his appointment last year as the Justice Department's top lawyer in Los Angeles.
For years, the job of U.S. attorney in Los Angeles has been overshadowed by other top law enforcement jobs in the region, such as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and county sheriff. Recently, however, the profile of the office -- the nation's second-largest -- has been raised considerably because of prosecutions O'Brien was personally involved in or helped supervise.
Since he took the helm last fall, his prosecutors have indicted Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona on corruption charges; secured guilty pleas against a group of "homegrown" Muslim terrorists who planned to blow up military and religious sites across Southern California; and won a bankruptcy-fraud and tax-evasion case that was noteworthy not for the magnitude of the crime but because the defendant was Venice Beach civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, whose penchant for suing police made him a thorn in the side of local law enforcement.
Just last month, prosecutors won a big police corruption case that O'Brien had spearheaded before being tapped to lead the office. And -- in what some legal experts have deemed a stretch -- O'Brien's office has initiated a grand jury investigation into the widely publicized suicide of a Missouri teenager who hanged herself after being duped and jilted by a made-up friend on the Internet social networking site MySpace.
O'Brien's prosecutors believe they have jurisdiction in the case, arguing that the Beverly Hills-based MySpace was defrauded by the person who set up the false account to perpetrate the hoax.
Most of O'Brien's priorities for the office -- terrorism, public corruption, gangs, child exploitation and white-collar crime -- trickle down from the Justice Department and mirror those of other U.S. attorney's offices across the country.
But his own imprint, he hopes, will be shedding the "ivory tower" perception of the feds held by many local cops and prosecutors.
