LOS ANGELES — Robert L. Brosio, a retired federal prosecutor who supervised high-profile cases that included those against bank swindler Charles Keating Jr. and Los Angeles police officers who were involved in the beating of Rodney King, has died. He was 77.
Brosio, who for 28 years led the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, had a massive pulmonary embolism in February, his daughter Serena Brosio said. He died Friday at a Pasadena hospital.
While he seldom argued cases in court himself, Brosio was in charge of more than 100 prosecutors and set a standard of “ramrod integrity,” said Nora Manella, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal in Los Angeles.
Manella worked under Brosio before she was appointed U.S. attorney in 1994 and went on to serve as a trial judge at the state and federal levels.
While on the federal bench, she kept Brosio in mind when she occasionally saw prosecutors doing things that wouldn’t have met his approval.
“I never said, ‘Why, when I was a U.S. attorney, we never would have done that,’” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I’d say, ‘Bob Brosio never would have let us do that.’”
Born on July 19, 1936, Robert Louis Brosio grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Stanford and Stanford Law School before serving in the Pentagon with the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
In addition to his daughter Serena, his is survived by son Hilaire Brosio and a grandson.