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LAMONICA FILE

Birth date: June 19, 1944

Birthplace: Baton Rouge

Education: Bachelor’s [government], LSU, 1966; master’s [government], LSU, 1967; juris doctor [LSU, 1970]

Significant court appointments: Special master, reapportionment case [St. Helena Parish]; trustee and co-counsel to trustee, complex bankruptcy [Middle District]; special master, reinsurance rehabilitation [19th Judicial District]; special master, construction litigation [19th Judicial District]; panelist, 1995 judicial conference of U.S. Fifth Judicial Circuit

Ray Lamonica scoffs at the notion, as some people believe, that he’s the most powerful person at LSU.

“It’s laughable,” he says. “If I have any authority, it emanates from the board’s and the president’s commitment to follow the law, to follow the bylaws, to try to improve the bylaws and to develop policies to have an appropriately, orderly and diligently run organization.”

Lamonica undoubtedly has a degree of sway over policy in his role as general counsel—a position that didn’t exist within the system until Lamonica stepped into it. But it might be a stretch to say he’s calling the shots, given the powerful presence of LSU System President John Lombardi, who was hired last summer from the University of Massachusetts. Lombardi is not known for his reticence or an inclination to defer decision-making to others when he has an opinion of his own.

Still, given Lamonica’s character traits and work habits as detailed by those who know him well, any power vacuum at the system office likely wouldn’t remain a vacuum for long. Lamonica—who as U.S. attorney during the 1980s and ’90s and made a name for himself as a tenacious prosecutor of white-collar crime and public corruption—plays a role implementing those policies and bylaws and that’s it, he says.

But it’s a pretty big role. Winston Day, a former chancellor of LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center who’s known Lamonica for decades, says it’s not accurate to think of Lamonica as the power-broker.

“The proper way to say it is Ray sits at the right hand of, and has the ear of, the most powerful man in the LSU System,” Day says. “That’s a new phenomenon. Here’s how I would describe it: Lombardi for the first time is the most powerful man in the LSU System since LSU became a system.”

Equal-opportunity prosecutor

The system began asserting itself under former President Bill Jenkins, Day says, with the trend accelerating under Lombardi and with Lamonica in the middle of everything. So what manner of man is this Lamonica?

As U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana during the savings and loan meltdown of the 1980s and 1990s—which in the end wound up costing taxpayers around $160 billion—Lamonica was an equal-opportunity prosecutor. The savings and loan crisis turned up all kinds of slimy conduct on the part of financial executives. Those were the most complex cases to prosecute, though it didn’t matter to Lamonica.

“Here’s my basic philosophy: equal justice under law,” he says. “You don’t use the U.S. attorney’s office to beat up on bank tellers. It is unjust to only hit the weakest the hardest and not deal with the rich and the powerful.”

Brad Myers, an LSU law graduate and attorney with Kean Miller who served as assistant U.S. attorney under Lamonica for about a year in the late 1980s, says he had a good relationship with his former boss, even though Lamonica was “a taskmaster.”

“He was demanding, just like any successful lawyer,” Myers says. “He demanded that you work hard and that you were a careful lawyer and that you considered all angles of any issue, and he wanted you to be prepared.

“Some people just don’t deal well with that kind of pressure, I guess. I found him to be very fair. I will tell you he is a black-and-white-type of person. There is the right answer, and there is the wrong answer. There’s no gray in between with him. I think that’s where some people have difficulty dealing with him.”

Lamonica says building a solid case involving complex business transactions, a case that won’t be overturned on appeal, is difficult because the truth is so hard to get—though necessary if a case is to be tried fairly and ethically. Myers says Lamonica’s attention to detail in building federal cases may have him a touch too hands-on for some of the people working for him.

“He’s a very detail-oriented person,” Myers says. “Very hands on. Ray wanted to know everything. Depending on your ability to deal with somebody like that, some people didn’t like that. My theory was he was the boss so he could do whatever he wanted. If he told me to carry his briefcase, I would carry his briefcase.”

Myers, who admits he steered clear of Lamonica’s classes while at LSU because of their grueling reputation, says the traits Lamonica displayed as U.S. attorney and his sharp legal mind probably make him a very effective legal adviser for LSU.

“They have [a general counsel] who is very smart,” Myers says. “They have one who will zealously represent his client. He is going to protect the interests of LSU to his best ability and to the utmost.”

He says the system’s move to rein in its campuses is in keeping with what he saw of Lamonica’s management style in the U.S. attorney’s office.

“It’s certainly consistent with my description of him as being a hands-on administrator and wanting to know the details and having a clear vision of what’s right and what’s wrong—not that anybody’s doing anything wrong,” Myers says. But what’s the mission of the university and sticking to that, as opposed to straying from that. If that’s what Lombardi wants, Ray is a perfect fit to accomplish that mission.”

Lamonica, who also served as counsel to former Gov. Dave Treen, was teaching law at LSU when former board chairman Bernie Boudreaux asked him to look over a couple of legal matters. The workload grew to a part-time job. Lamonica finally had to give up his teaching load and become a full-time, in-house legal adviser.

“I admit I was wrong in believing at one point that [the system] didn’t need a general counsel,” Lamonica says.

Now that he’s there, Lamonica is working as vigorously to protect the interests of the system as he once did pursuing crooked bank executives and public servants.

A system evolves

Lamonica is at the heart of what he calls an evolutionary stage in LSU System history, moving in the direction of more central oversight by the system office of LSU’s various campuses. In the past, it was easy for chancellors of those campuses to ram deals through the board without, in Lamonica’s view, proper scrutiny.

After a report from the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities [AGB] that found a lack of oversight of the LSU System office over its component campuses, Lamonica crafted amendments to system bylaws that, among other things, required system approval of any project costing $100,000 or more.

The system also set up a central audit committee. In the past, auditors at individual campuses answered to individual chancellors. Now all auditing runs through the system board’s audit committee. Former chancellor Sean O’Keefe lost some of his political capital arguing—unsuccessfully—that LSU A&M’s auditor should answer only to him, not the system.

“An audit committee is incredibly important because that’s where board members get to see all our warts and address them,” Lamonica says. “We have them. There’s no doubt about it. You deal with fraud, abuse, waste and incompetence in an audit committee.”

Also, certain intellectual property and personnel decisions have to run through the system office. That will change—such duties will be delegated back to individual campuses—once standards are in place, Lamonica says. And while to campus chancellors the whole thing may seem like a power grab by the central office, Lamonica insists it’s just good business sense.

“There was the notion that the branch office ought not to be controlled by the central office basically,” he says. “No business person would say anything like that.”

The AGB report noted that the “traditional freedom of LSU campuses to do as they please” created a pattern of management and conduct that weren’t always in line with “highly policy-oriented and strategic authority” on the system level. Lamonica says the bylaw changes are meant to transform what has been a loose federation of campuses into a “more tightly formed, efficient and effective system.”

A lot of it is making sure public-private partnership between campuses and outside organizations furthers the fundamental academic and research missions of the university and not detracts from them. If a deal between a campus and outside entity ends up not working to the university’s advantage as advertised, it’s not the campus that’s responsible, Lamonica says. It’s the system’s responsibility.

That’s why chancellors now have to present major proposals—erecting a museum through a public-private partnership, for instance—to the board for scrutiny to make sure it’s a good deal for the university. A co-generation plant agreement LSU entered into with a private entity during Mark Emmert’s administration is an example of a deal that hasn’t worked out as well as advertised. The co-gen project is the subject of major litigation Lamonica is handling.

“We believe we are not getting what we bargained for, and that is saving money on electricity,” he says. “We believe the electricity is costing us more, and so we’ve challenged the whole foundation of the contract.”

The University of New Orleans’ Ogden Museum is another public-private undertaking that might not have been allowed to proceed if made the focus of due diligence on the system level. As it was, a commitment was made before any agreement about how the museum would be run and who would control it. As a result, money was diverted from the academic mission, Lamonica says.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that before you make a commitment to that sort of thing, you review the details,” he says. “You don’t make the commitment and then try to make it work.”

Even the Shaw Center for the Arts, another public-private project launched during Emmert’s tenure—would have come under much more scrutiny had the new order been in place then, Lamonica says.

“It would require a lot more detail,” he says. “We have a lot of entities involved in the Shaw Center, which are essentially shell entities with no assets—with responsibilities, but without assets. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have had a Shaw Center; I think it just would have been structured more carefully.”

Back to the basics

This tightening of control at the central office has earned Lamonica and others at the system level the tag of micromanager, though he takes issue with that characterization. It’s not micromanagement, Lamonica says. It’s basic management.

“We should not be managing campuses,” he says. “We should be in a role to make sure campuses are appropriately managed. They’re not held accountable. They’re not responsible. The only entity that’s responsible for all these debts and all these obligations as a legal entity is the board of supervisors. I am sure some would like it to just be rubber-stamped, like it has been in the past.”

Hank Gowan, who’s known Lamonica since their student days at the LSU law school in the late 1960s, has been chairman of the board’s audit committee for the past two years. Lamonica is influential within the system, Gowan says, “because he’s earned it.”

“When it comes to lawyers, I’m very, very critical of lawyers,” Gowan says. “I happen to be one myself. Ray is as good a lawyer as I know about. Competent. I can’t say enough good things about Ray. If I were the president of the LSU System, I’d want Ray Lamonica.”

That’s despite their disagreements. Gowan was a vocal critic of the way O’Keefe’s departure from LSU was engineered. It turned into a messy spectacle when word leaked of O’Keefe’s impending exit, which angered some prominent LSU donors who staged a public protest.

System officials initially refused to shed any light on the back story to O’Keefe’s departure, though public pressure finally convinced Lamonica to release a partial list of items from the former chancellor’s employee evaluation that might or might not have had anything to do with O’Keefe leaving the university.

Lamonica says there are good reasons O’Keefe is no longer chancellor. Gowan didn’t buy the rationale put forward at the time and still isn’t happy about how things went down. An audit that was reported to be pending into O’Keefe’s dealings with the Forever LSU fundraising campaign never took place, Gowan says. None of this colors Gowan’s opinion of Lamonica, however.

“Ray has a job to do, and his client is the LSU System,” he says. “As far as doing that job, he does it very well. I may not like some of his decisions. I may disagree with them, but he does a good job for the LSU System.”

Gowan says he sees “very little politics” or partisanship creep into Lamonica’s decision-making. To be a good general counsel for such a sprawling organization as the LSU System is a very tough balancing act, Gowan says. Although surrounded by people within the system who all have their own interests and agendas, whatever Lamonica does has to be in the interests of the institution itself, not the people.

“Until you work with him or someone like him in that position, it’s really difficult to grasp,” Gowan says. “This person has got to have this overall view of the LSU System and not how it affects one person.”

John George, a Shreveport physician LSU board member, says Lamonica does an outstanding job getting the system the best leverage possible in any legal matter. At the same time, that the system encompasses a $3 billion-a-year higher ed system and statewide health care system means there’s more legal work than one person can do, factoring in personnel issues, litigation, defense and health care law.

Ideally, the system will hire more staff to handle the loan, with Lamonica acting more as a manager, George says. As for how large a shadow Lamonica casts over system policy, George says it’s a function of how much influence the board defers to him. Lamonica provides the leverage. It’s up to the board to decide what to do with it.

“If some people think there’s too much leeway given to the legal office, it’s because the board leadership allows it,” George says. “Given the resources and manpower he’s got, Ray’s doing a fantastic job and it’s up to board leadership to make these decisions. If there’s criticism, it’s got to be pointed at the board. He’s staff.”