She Went From Playing on the Courts to a Courthouse Career : Professions: Colleagues questioned whether Assistant D.A. Colleen Toy White jumped through enough hoops to get her job, but few criticize her today.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Colleen Toy White grew up on the dusty plains of Oklahoma, a gangly high school basketball player with no higher ambition than to coach the team.

Then she started a family, moved to the mountains and orange groves of Ventura County, and discovered she loved working in the courts more than playing on them.

In seven years, White rose from law clerk to the $90,000-a-year job she has held since late 1983 as second in command of Ventura County’s prosecutors, right-hand woman to Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury.

Now 46, she oversees fraud and environmental prosecutions, supervises the child support division and victim-witness support unit, and acts as district attorney in Bradbury’s absence, overseeing more than 80 attorneys and nearly 400 staff members.

The fraud unit is responsible for prosecuting major cases such as the trial of Ojai minister Robert J. Brancato, accused of bilking investors out of $1.6 million, and the grand jury investigation into allegations that billionaire developer David H. Murdoch had improper relationships with county officials and reneged on promises to the Lake Sherwood community.

As assistant district attorney, White finalizes all her prosecutors’ charging decisions and sits on the committee that decides whether to seek the death penalty in capital cases.

She also serves as spokeswoman for the office and oversees recruitment, budgeting, personnel and the office’s other administrative functions.

She co-founded a program to help victims of domestic violence get restraining orders against their attackers without having to pay legal fees, and she serves on committees dealing with rape, domestic violence and child abuse.

In what spare time she has, she enjoys playing tennis, shopping, and fixing up the house she bought in Camarillo last year.

Few people are willing to criticize White--not, they say, for fear of her clout, but for lack of cause. What criticism there is has little to do with White herself, but with her swift rise to power.

Some deputy district attorneys were resentful when Bradbury appointed her because they had far more trial experience than the two years she had at the time.

But Municipal Judge Barry Klopfer, who worked with White as a prosecutor in the late 1970s, said, “Even if you’re the sourest of sour grapes, it’s hard to remain sour when somebody’s doing such a fine job.”

James M. Farley, an attorney who has defended clients against charges from White’s deputies and considers himself her friend, said he recalls prosecutors asking, “Why did she get the job when other people, more experienced people, wanted it?”

“But since she’s been out there, I think she’s been doing a good job,” Farley said.

Bradbury said he appointed White “25% for her experience, 25% for her abilities, 40% for her interpersonal skills as a manager and 10% for our friendship.” He added that he appointed Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. in 1984 for many of the same reasons.

“I had friends in the office who said, ‘We think you’re making a mistake. You’re passing up people with experience for people who don’t have that much experience,’ ” said Bradbury, who also had only two years of experience as a prosecutor when he was appointed assistant district attorney.

He added, “Toy has never disappointed me in her ability to manage.”

White said she had never heard the complaints, “but I’d be naive to say that it surprises me. . . . If people had those feelings, I never felt they manifested themselves.”

Assistant Dist. Atty. Toy White is a far cry from the little girl who grew up in Wetumka, Okla., a town of about 1,000 people. People have been calling her Toy since she was a day old and her brother suggested naming her after a friend whose name her mother liked.

“My older brother looked at me and said, ‘She looks just like a toy,’ ” she said. “I got a lot of rhymes growing up, like ‘Toy, Toy, big tall skinny boy,’ and around Christmastime it causes me some grief. But I’ve been called it all my life.”

Her father was a Wetumka policeman. She remembers chauffeuring him to the jail in the back seat of the family car, with his prisoners in the passenger seat next to her.

“These were not hardened criminals,” she recalled. “We’d get to the door of the jail and my dad would pat ‘em on the back, shake their hands and give them a dollar for a pack of cigarettes on the inside. The kids, when they got in trouble, he’d talk to them. He was a real gentle guy.”

But White did not yearn to be a cop. Her only ambition was to coach her school’s basketball team.

The summer after her junior year, the 16-year-old White married a 23-year-old customer of the restaurant where she worked. By the end of her senior year, they had their first child, Misty Dawn.

The family moved to Ventura County in 1968, when Misty was 6 and the couple’s son, Kevin Blaine, was 3. White said, “We really came to California for the classic story--better opportunities,” but she also was glad to be closer to her family, which was and still is scattered around Southern California. White and her husband divorced during her third year in law school in Ventura County, but they remain friendly today, she said.

The seed for law school was planted during her sister’s divorce by the ineptitude of a family lawyer whom White remembers as “a real incompetent bozo.”

“I was there just to support her and I ended up doing some of the strategy and legal research,” she said.

She found she liked the work. So she enrolled in the Ventura College of Law, feeling confident she could learn the law, but still needing to overcome her innate shyness--a trait that is all but invisible today.

White wanted to be a public defender, but she needed to scout the enemy camp by working briefly for the district attorney’s office. After a few months of assisting prosecutors, she knew she had found her calling.

“I was politically a liberal and socially I still am,” said White, who is registered as a Republican. But after talking to crime victims in the district attorney’s office, “I thought, ‘This is really who you need to be protecting.’ You think that a certain number of the populace ought to be in jail.”

White remembers doing legal research for prosecutors in a room over the old jail on Poli Street where, even late at night, the curses and screams of prisoners rose through her office window “like some old Jimmy Cagney movie.”

Bradbury recalls White being assigned to escort a 6-foot prostitute throughout the trial of a local attorney accused of shooting off one of her fingers.

Before court every day, district attorney’s investigators brought the woman straight from the Los Angeles streets to the courtroom without letting her change out of her working clothes.

White begins to smile, remembering the defendant’s toughest day in court, when “we had the prostitute, his wife, and the girlfriend in the courtroom.”

She chuckled. “See why we love this job? Most people have to go out and buy magazines. We don’t have to do that. We just come to work every day.”

White worked as a legal researcher for the district attorney’s office during the summers of l976 and l977, at the end of which she received her law degree and passed the bar exam.

In early 1978, she began working as a prosecutor in the misdemeanor division.

“To say I was green was really the understatement of the year,” White recalls.

The first people she prosecuted were a man accused of harvesting undersized clams and a girl whose crowing rooster was disturbing the neighbors.

The rooster case was resolved peacefully through negotiation. The clam case got a little messier.

The clam digger acted as though he were threatened with the death penalty, White recalled. On the day of trial he walked into the courtroom and dumped a load of frozen clams onto the counsel table, where they began to melt--and stink.

When White won the case a few hours later, the man “gave me a look that is reserved only for vermin and prosecutors who have just convicted you of taking undersized clams off the beaches of Ventura County.”

In mid-1978, Bradbury asked White to help run his campaign for district attorney. “We were both political novices,” White remembers. “He’d never run for office and I’d never been involved with a campaign.”

But Bradbury won the runoff and the final election, and he has held the office ever since. By early 1979, White had moved into the consumer fraud division to prosecute the swindlers, chiselers and snake oil sellers of Ventura County.

In 1982, White helped start the office’s consumer mediation unit, which uses laymen as mediators to settle small-claims disputes and free the courts to focus on more serious cases.

And in 1984, when then-Assistant Dist. Atty. Ray Sinatar resigned, Bradbury appointed her to replace Sinatar.

White said she and Bradbury are a close match. “It’s very comfortable working for someone who wants to protect the environment, wants to protect the people in the community.”

She has considered seeking a judgeship or, if Bradbury leaves office, running for district attorney. But she is quite content for now.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got the best job in the world as assistant D.A.”