BLOCK MADE MOVE FROM DELI SANDWICH MAKER TO SHERIFF.

Byline: Lee Condon and Douglas Haberman Daily News Staff Writers

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, who died Thursday night with his wife by his side, was a former delicatessen counterman who rose through the ranks to become the county's top lawman for 16 years. He was 74.

Block, who insisted on seeking a fifth term despite his age and serious health problems, slipped and hit his head Saturday at his West Hills home in a fall that doctors say was caused by a massive blood clot in his brain. After four hours of surgery Monday, he never regained consciousness.

During 16 years in charge, Block guided the modernization and expansion of the Sheriff's Department, now the nation's largest. He also faced allegations of mismanagement and of wrongdoing by deputies, which he used as catalysts for reform, establishing community policing, random drug testing for employees and extensive cultural sensitivity training.

Elected 4 times

Block was elected four times, including in 1986, when he took 84 percent of the vote. This year, however, Lee Baca, a 32-year department veteran, forced Block into his first-ever runoff by finishing a close second in the June primary.

Block twice overcame cancer, undergoing surgery in 1991 for prostate cancer and in 1993 having chemotherapy to combat lymphoma. More recently, he suffered kidney failure, requiring him to undergo dialysis three days a week.

```I believe I will know better than anyone else when it's time for me to say, Adios,'' Block said in an interview a few years ago. ``I don't want to ever be remembered as a guy who stayed around too long.''

A Chicago transplant, Block loved to tell the story of how he became a Los Angeles lawman.

``To be a cop, you have to want to be a cop,'' he said. ``You don't go into law enforcement because you're looking for a job. It not only involves you, it involves your entire family.''

As he told the story, he was working at a Fairfax Avenue deli in the 1950s when a police officer stopped him for a traffic offense - and didn't ask for a bribe, unlike some Chicago officers.

``I was so impressed by his demeanor and that contact (that) when I got home I woke my wife up to tell her, because it was really a new experience,'' Block said. ``And I began talking about going into law enforcement.''

Gave up sandwiches

Block was 32 in 1956 when he passed a written test at Fairfax High School and completed six weeks of academy training. Married and a father of two, he gave up making sandwiches at the deli, which he had been doing for three years.

Block did not have a college education upon his entry into the department, but while on the job he earned a bachelor's degree in police science and administration from California State University, Los Angeles.

After working in the records, vice and intelligence bureaus, Block was made chief of corrections. From there, he was promoted to assistant sheriff and supervised the patrol, detective and administrative operations of the department. When Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess prepared for retirement in 1981, he said he would step aside only if Block, then the undersheriff, was appointed as his successor by the county Board of Supervisors.

In January 1982, Block was sworn in as sheriff. He easily won his first election later that year, and re-election four years later.

Remained popular

In 1990, the Sheriff's Department was rocked by revelations of corruption involving 10 deputies in the narcotics unit, yet Block's personal popularity remained strong, getting him two-thirds of the vote.

After a series of controversial shootings by deputies early in his third term, Block agreed under pressure to allow an outside commission of experts led by retired Judge James Kolts to look at ways to reduce brutality complaints, litigation and other problems in the department.

The resulting report that came out in 1992 found ``deeply disturbing evidence of excessive force and lax discipline'' within the Sheriff's Department.

The report praised Block personally for his ``openness to change and flexibility,'' but it questioned his claim of direct accountability to the public and the weak leadership shown by the Board of Supervisors in overseeing the department.

``The sheriff has no real boss,'' the report stated. ``The truth is that the sheriff runs his own department as he alone sees fit.''

Critics also pointed to a number of lawsuits alleging that deputies at the Lynwood station engaged in brutality against minorities and were affiliated with a white-supremacist gang.

Block defended his agency, but acknowledged problems. ``It would be highly unlikely that in an organization of this size . . . that we don't have any people who harbor racial prejudices and other kinds of bigoted tendencies,'' he said.

Tenacious as always, Block won his fourth term in 1994, and it was only because of his age and ill health that he appeared politically vulnerable this year.

Despite the problems, he had a strong record of progress in running the 14,000-member department: service-oriented policing, random drug testing, cultural awareness training, three additional weeks of academy training and an Office of Professional and Ethical Standards.

Most recently, the department established new guidelines that require every deputy who is present when force is used to report the incident. A months-long disciplinary process has been discarded, and unit commanders have the authority to administer discipline up to and including 15-day suspensions.

Tough decision

More than a year before community-based policing was introduced within the Los Angeles Police Department, Block had instituted his own version of it by combining the concerns of the community with traditional law enforcement tactics.

A tougher decision for the sheriff was bringing random drug testing to his department more than a year ago.

``For years, I have been an opponent of random drug testing, and my people knew it,'' Block said recently. ``I then went 180 degrees. I felt the community needed to be reassured that the men and women of this department who are out there providing their law enforcement services are in fact drug-free.''

He was among the first to be tested.

Block took pride in his own rise through the ranks and the step-by-step progress made in the department over the years.

``It's always been my philosophy that you go for that which is realistically attainable,'' he said recently. ``That way, you have the confidence to go to the next step.''

Block is survived by his wife, Alyce; a son, Barry, who is a nurse; a daughter, Barbara, a Los Angeles County sheriff's lieutenant; and a grandson, Matthew, 12.