by Dan Morain
If police inspectors and prosecutors and defense lawyers all played the angles for and against one another, they also shared the common misery of working in a building that was falling apart. Famous as a set in the Dirty Harry movies and other major and minor cinematic efforts, the Hall of Justice was infamous for toilets that backed up and electrical outages. Lights flickered and elevators stalled, and criminals and cops alike feared the next Big One.
From downtown to South Beach, massive residential towers, new condos, high-rises occupied by lawyers and financiers, and maybe the most scenic baseball park in America occupied block after formerly gritty block. But not Bryant Street and the streetscape around the Hall. To this day, it is a collection of auto body shops, bail bond offices, and graffiti-covered walls, though a shared work space and strategically located cannabis dispensary have slipped into the layout.
Richard Iglehart recruited Harris to be a supervisor and to help right the whole judicial operation. It was a tall order. The man at the helm, District Attorney Terence Hallinan, was having a tough time, even if he had spent a lifetime proving that he could win a fight.
In 1995, the year Willie Brown was elected San Francisco mayor, Hallinan, a termed-out San Francisco supervisor, unseated four-term incumbent district attorney Arlo Smith and beat a former prosecutor, Bill Fazio, who had spent twenty years in the DA’s office. To win, Hallinan had to overcome opposition from the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, which suggested he was a “political hack,” and a late revelation that a paternity suit had been filed against him a decade earlier by a flight attendant who had been a law client. Once the child was proven to be his, he took responsibility.
Hallinan was the radical son of Vincent Hallinan, an iconic figure of the Left in the Bay Area who ran for U.S. president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. A Black woman, newspaper publisher Charlotta Bass, was his running mate. The old man took the view that if his kids were going to hold radical opinions, they’d need to be able to fight. Terence Hallinan learned at his father’s knee, or maybe his clenched fist, and gained the nickname “Kayo,” a tribute to his ability and willingness to fight. Hallinan also inherited his father’s sense of justice. In 1963, the year before Harris was born, Hallinan was arrested for loitering and littering while registering Black voters in Mississippi. The charges didn’t stick. He would be arrested many more times protesting against racial injustice.
Hallinan graduated from the UC Hastings College of the Law and passed the bar exam. But the California State Bar, citing his criminal history and pugilistic tendencies, refused to grant him a license to practice law in 1966, even though two young assemblymen, Willie Brown and John Burton, testified to his good character. The California Supreme Court overruled the bar, and Hallinan built a practice representing people busted for drugs (business was very good in San Francisco in the late ’60s and ’70s), leftists, and serial murderer Juan Corona.
The Washington Post, detailing Hallinan’s rocky transition from defense attorney to DA, reported that Hallinan “vehemently denies almost dying from a heroin overdose administered by rock singer Janis Joplin, as claimed in her biography, ‘Pearl.’ ” A deft non-denial denial.
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Although he was the city’s top prosecutor, Hallinan stayed true to his past. He refused to seek the death penalty in murder cases, tried to block the execution of a man prosecuted by his predecessor, supported the use of medical marijuana before it was legal, and refused to seek life sentences under California’s three-strikes sentencing law. None of that was a problem in San Francisco. Voters knew what they were getting when they elected him. But the turmoil he caused in his own office did become an issue.
First, there was the story about two prosecutors caught in flagrante delicto in the office. He fired the man, not the woman, and later was sued for wrongful termination.
Shortly after taking office, Hallinan gave tersely worded notes to fourteen prosecutors thanking them for their service and firing them. One of them was a twenty-six-year-old rookie lawyer named Kimberly Guilfoyle. Several others who received pink slips had donated to Fazio, his opponent, though Hallinan claimed that had nothing to do with his decision. He merely wanted to install his own team.
A fight broke out between Hallinan and a friend of one of the dismissed lawyers at a birthday bash for Willie Brown’s political adviser Jack Davis. San Francisco Chronicle political affairs columnists Phil Matier and Andy Ross quoted Hallinan’s explanation for why he had no choice but to deploy his fists: “I didn’t choose it, but I can’t back down. I’m the DA.” Matier and Ross added a tongue-in-cheek “Tale of the Tape” to their account, listing the men’s ages, weight, height, and reach. Of Hallinan, they wrote, “Leads with his left, but can go with a right if it means a few extra votes.”
Realizing he needed help, Hallinan turned to the Alameda County DA’s Office and hired Richard Iglehart to be his third chief of staff. Iglehart was a top-flight prosecutor who provided expert testimony that helped pass California’s assault weapons ban and was a widely respected expert on the three-strikes sentencing law. Iglehart, in turn, hired Harris.
“She’s a terrific prosecutor and has a great reputation,” Hallinan told the Chronicle.
From Day One in San Francisco, Harris laid down a marker that nobody would outwork her. Fazio, who quit the district attorney’s office after losing to Hallinan in 1995 and was working as a defense attorney, knew Harris from her days in Oakland, having shared dinner on occasion with her and other friends in the criminal justice business. A buddy on the San Francisco murder-prosecution team told him in the earliest days of the new assistant who had just come over from the other side of the bay:
“This friend of mine, he was working a big murder case, and he went into the office one weekend to work on it, before it went to trial,” Fazio said. “He goes into the office, and he sees that she’s there, too, working on some kind of felony case. He’d never met her, and he introduced himself, and she told him she’d just gotten hired and came in to work on some pretrial motions.”
Not long into her San Francisco tenure, Hallinan promoted Harris to the chief assistant position in charge of the career criminal division. Fazio was representing a client facing a long stretch in prison for robbery and thought his client, a drug user, was a candidate for diversion to Delancey Street, San Francisco’s well-regarded therapeutic community for ex-offenders.
“So I set up a meeting with the two of them, Kamala and Hallinan. Kamala, she was a DA. She wasn’t a probation officer. She wasn’t a social worker. She was a prosecutor who prosecuted people and put them in jail.”
Hallinan turned to Harris and asked what she thought, “and she said, ‘I don’t think this guy should go to Delancey Street. He did a violent robbery, and he belongs in state prison.” Fazio’s client accepted the offer of six years in prison.
Harris supported Hallinan’s 1999 reelection. But in January 2000, Governor Gray Davis appointed Harris’s boss, Iglehart, to a superior court judgeship. Rather than promote Harris to be his second in command, Hallinan turned to a lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, Darrell Salomon. Harris led an office protest against the selection, without success.
In one of his first acts, Salomon rehired Kimberly Guilfoyle. A San Francisco native and the daughter of an influential figure in the city’s Democratic politics, Guilfoyle had become San Francisco supervisor Gavin Newsom’s girlfriend. She later became Mayor Newsom’s wife, then a Fox News commentator, and then Newsom’s ex-wife. In a weird twist of political fate years later, Guilfoyle became Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and one of President Trump’s chief surrogates and fund-raisers. With Salomon entrenched, Harris decided it was time to move on.
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In San Francisco, the city attorney’s office oversees family issues, including child abuse and foster care. Deputies in the office derisively called it the “kiddie law section.” City Attorney Louise Renne wanted to elevate the Family and Children’s Services sectio
n and hired Harris to run it.
No part of the law is more personal or emotional. It takes a special sort of lawyer to handle family law cases, one who is part therapist, part social worker, and one who understands the law. Renne said she saw in Harris “an intelligent lawyer who had a heart and had compassion.” One day, Harris burst into Renne’s office with teddy bears and asked Renne to come with her to the courtroom where children were about to be adopted. There, the two women passed out teddy bears as mementos of the children’s momentous day.
Matthew D. Davis, a friend from Hastings, had stayed in touch with Harris off and on. They reconnected when Harris went to work for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office in 2000. Harris’s demeanor surprised Davis.
“Suddenly, she had become this glamorous person,” Davis, who is among her political supporters, said. “She continued to grow at a remarkable pace after law school. She had become more cosmopolitan and very focused.”
Harris would not stay long in the city attorney’s office. She had set her sights on running for elective office.
6 Becoming a Boldface
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kamala Harris’s name was far more common in the society pages than it was in stories about her day job prosecuting criminals.
Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Harris had become a trustee of the prestigious San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1996, part of a larger plan. In his autobiography, Basic Brown, Willie Brown dispenses counsel for aspiring politicians: “Being able to cross over into the white community is essential for any black, female or male, to succeed as a political figure.” He had specific advice for Black women: they should “lay the groundwork by looking to become active on the boards of social, cultural, and charitable institutions like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.”
Harris undoubtedly used her position as trustee to make contacts with influential people. But she also used the opportunity to do good. She visited Libby Schaaf, now mayor of Oakland, who was then running the Marcus Foster Education Institute from a small office in a Victorian house in West Oakland. The institute is named for the Oakland school superintendent who was mindlessly assassinated by members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army on November 6, 1973. Its mission is to improve the education of Oakland public school kids. Harris asked Schaaf to help her create a mentoring program for Oakland high school students at the Museum of Modern Art.
“She was very determined that this elite institution not just host a field trip, but that it become a deeper part of Oakland,” Schaaf said.
Toward that end, Harris also visited Jackie Phillips, who was principal of Cole School, a performing and visual arts magnet program in Oakland. Phillips had known Harris as a bright-eyed high school kid who traveled between Montreal and Oakland and would pull up at Phillips’s house in a white Chrysler convertible to pick up Phillips’s daughter, Terry. The two were always ready to have fun. But Phillips also could see that Harris had a strong will to excel. As a museum trustee, Harris asked Phillips to help her recruit kids. Phillips did. On one occasion, they met actor Danny Glover. On another, they met director and actor Robert Redford.
“And they were treated like little kings and queens,” Phillips said. Several Cole School students went on to pursue the arts in college. The mentoring program continues, introducing the arts to kids who might not otherwise have access.
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Harris arrived in San Francisco in 1998 without money or pedigree, but she was becoming a boldface name. She was photographed in an elegant gown, drink in hand, at the 1999 wedding of Vanessa Jarman and oil heir Billy Getty in Napa Valley. The bride rode up on a horse, sidesaddle, and William Newsom, the retired state court of appeal justice and father of California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, officiated.
A piece in Harper’s Bazaar about the style of San Francisco featured Harris in 2001, along with other women, such as Kimberly Guilfoyle. A society columnist noted her attendance at a February 2002 staging of The Vagina Monologues, starring Rita Moreno. The occasion was V-Day, to raise money for programs to stop violence against women. She also showed up at an American Jewish Committee dinner in September honoring Walter and Douglas Shorenstein, large downtown San Francisco property owners and political patrons. She attended an October 2002 gala at which Elton John was raising money to combat AIDS; guests included producer George Lucas, actress Sharon Stone, and other Bay Area luminaries. She was also at the retirement party for a police lieutenant at an Italian restaurant in North Beach attended by cops and many of the city’s political and social elite. Her cultivation of the police came at a crucial time and sent an important message.
That North Beach send-off occurred as Hallinan’s relations with San Francisco police, which were never good, had unraveled over an episode the San Francisco press dubbed “Fajita-Gate.” A few off-duty officers had demanded a man give them his fajita. He refused and a fight ensued. Hallinan prosecuted the officers and police department brass, alleging a cover-up. The case collapsed, as did Hallinan’s political support.
None of the gossip items mentioned Harris with a date. She had become private about her personal life, though Jet magazine ran a photo of her at a Hollywood event with television talk show host Montel Williams. Harris, shutting down speculative chatter about her private life, told the Chronicle, “I was at that event. And his arms were around my waist.” Nothing more was written or said publicly about any relationship, though Williams has occasionally contributed to Harris’s campaigns.
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By 2000, there was public speculation that Harris would run for office, perhaps city attorney when the incumbent, Louise Renne, stepped down or, more likely, district attorney. Hallinan was increasingly vulnerable. For one thing, Mayor Brown was publicly feuding with him, accusing him of failing to prosecute street corner drug dealers. The Chronicle editorial page described Hallinan in August 2000 as “hardly a figure of respect” and that he “continues to compile a record of baffling and outrageous judgments.” That same editorial cited the uproar caused when Hallinan selected Darrell Salomon as his chief deputy, noting that it led to the departure of “respected veterans” and “the best and brightest legal minds,” Kamala Harris included. So it was not surprising that Harris saw an opening to make her first run for office.
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High society and Democratic politics blend in San Francisco, and Harris was getting close to the people who have given the Bay Area its well-deserved reputation for being a cash machine for Democratic candidates. Harris had joined the board of WomenCount in 2000. Then a fledgling organization based in San Francisco that was devoted to increasing voting among women, WomenCount has grown into a national fund-raising force for women running for every office, from school board and city council to governor and vice president of the United States. In 2002, Harris got involved in another organization, Emerge California, a sort of boot camp for women who want to learn how to run for office. Andrea Dew Steele, a political organizer who helped create both WomenCount and Emerge California, got a call from Harris in the fall of 2002.
“Okay. I am ready to run. What do I do?”
Steele invited her to come to her apartment on Ashbury, near the corner of Haight, up four flights of stairs. Over wine and cheese, they typed out Harris’s biography, and Steele asked Harris for her contacts, the people who would form the foundation of her base of volunteers and donors. She stored them in a Filofax planner, which in 2002 was basically a notebook. As time went by, the notebook had to be replaced by a PalmPilot.
To show she was a serious candidate, Harris needed to raise money. Steele knew people who could help with that. She worked as a political adviser to Susie Tompkins Buell, a woman who is a quintessential California success story. She was twenty-one and working in a Lake Tahoe casino when she picked up a hitchhiker, Doug Tompkins. They married in 1964, created the iconic North Face and Esprit clothing lines, and split up in 1989. Susie Tompkins had not been particularly interested in politics but had h
eard talk about a young presidential candidate named Bill Clinton. On a drive from Tahoe to San Francisco, she decided to stop at the halfway point, in Sacramento, and attend a fund-raiser for the Arkansas governor hosted by real estate developer Angelo Tsakopoulos. As retold by the Los Angeles Times, she was so moved by Clinton’s description of the crushing poverty he saw on the campaign trail, and his vision of how maybe, after twelve years of having Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the White House, an enlightened Democratic administration could help, that she wrote a $100,000 check the next day. Through Bill Clinton, Susie Tompkins met Hillary Clinton and the two became dear friends. Susie Tompkins and Mark Buell, friends from high school, reconnected and got married in 1996. Susie Tompkins Buell founded WomenCount and gave the first $10,000 to Emerge California.
Steele’s first order of business as a fund-raiser was to arrange for Harris to talk to Mark Buell, a real estate executive who had long been involved in San Francisco politics and was no fan of Hallinan’s. Buell had viewed Harris as a “socialite with a law degree,” he once told a reporter. But over a burger at the Balboa Cafe, one of the restaurants owned by Gavin Newsom, Harris convinced him that she was a serious prosecutor with a vision.
“Once I was convinced that Kamala was real, I told her, ‘Not only will I be on your finance committee, I will chair it,’ ” he said.
Mark Buell convened a meeting at his wife’s and his apartment in Pacific Heights in February 2003. Harris, Steele, and a few others were there, including her sister, Maya Harris, and Maya’s husband, Tony West. The setting was spectacular even by San Francisco standards. Out one bay window, guests could see the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and the Pacific Ocean. From other windows, they saw the San Francisco skyline, the Bay Bridge, Sather Tower at UC Berkeley, and south past San Francisco International Airport. The Buells and their apartment occupy a singular space in Democratic politics. Senators, governors, and others—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons, and Barack Obama before he was elected to the U.S. Senate—have all made the pilgrimage to the Buells’ twelfth-floor penthouse.