New Coroner in Middle Ground : Politics: Pennsylvania colleagues say he’s scientifically oriented and a listener, but is no stranger to controversy.

The new Los Angeles County chief medical examiner-coroner is not likely to be a “clam,” as tight-lipped former Coroner Ronald Kornblum was once described, nor a limelight-loving “coroner to the stars,” as another predecessor, Thomas T. Noguchi, liked to call himself.

“I hope I am the middle ground,” said Joshua Perper, the Allegheny County, Pa., coroner named to the $150,000-a-year post in Los Angeles.

In fact, his associates say he is a scientifically oriented man who prefers microscopes and slides to interviews, but is no stranger to controversy.

Colleagues in Pittsburgh say Perper has presided over inquests and even taken the lead in high-profile investigations, such as the case of the partial head of a male prostitute found in a trash bin three years ago.

Perper, 58, nonetheless is portrayed as a private man with a formal, sometimes stiff demeanor, not given to small talk, and more inclined to listen than to speak.

That may be his appeal to Los Angeles County supervisors, who appointed Kornblum three years ago in part because he was more likely to be “seen, not heard,” as Supervisor Ed Edelman said at the time.

The new coroner comes from a Pennsylvania county with a population roughly the size of the San Fernando Valley and 67 homicides last year. Los Angeles County, with the nation’s second-largest coroner’s office, investigated 1,880 homicides in 1990.

Perper also will be the first Los Angeles County coroner to take over half the post held by his predecessors, because the supervisors voted last summer to split the office tasks between a pathologist and a professional manager.

The coroner’s office faced heavy criticism last year when an audit showed a lack of management, failure to maintain sanitary standards and inadequate protection of personal property.

“I look forward to responding to the challenge of a larger office which has the potential of becoming the best in the country,” Perper said in a telephone interview Thursday. His office is heavily computerized, he added, and he expects to study improvements in that area within the Los Angeles coroner’s office, located near the County-USC Medical Center.

But Perper is not likely to receive any more money to run the office because of the county’s tight budget, said county Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon.

Perper won the job over about two dozen applicants after a nationwide search, said Dixon. One finalist, Dr. Harry J. Bonnell, Cincinnati’s chief deputy coroner, said he withdrew because “they refused to give me permission to look at the office.. . . That . . . worried me.”

Dixon said the Board of Supervisors chose Perper unanimously because he “came across as a guy who is really interested in looking for innovation and creativity” in running an overtaxed, under-budgeted office.

Perper was elected to the $64,000-a-year Allegheny post in 1981, and has been reelected twice. Each time he had the support of the local Democratic Party. The last time, he was unopposed.

He has shown signs of maneuvering over tough political terrain--at one point, he publicly refused to support a former boss and another time, got into a televised shoving match with a man named by the governor to a post Perper felt he should have had.

Perper was hired by the Allegheny County coroner’s office in 1972 as chief forensic pathologist, but had a falling out with his boss, Coroner Cyril Wecht, a once politically powerful local figure. Wecht was accused of using county facilities for personal gain, and Perper did not support him after civil and criminal charges were filed.

Wecht left his position and Perper for a time was acting coroner. But then-Gov. Richard Thornburgh appointed a fellow Republican, Sanford Edberg, to finish the term until the next election.

“I was sworn in, but when I went to the office, he was sitting there and he refused to vacate,” Edberg recalled, “and there was a lot of pushing and shoving and fighting.”

“I didn’t believe he had the legal right to enter,” Perper said.

Edberg won that battle, but Perper won the next election.

“If the man has a fault, it’s that he’s a workaholic,” said F. James Gregris, chief deputy coroner in Allegheny County. “He’ll work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and never sleep.”

Perper was born in Romania. He received his medical training and earned a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before immigrating to the United States. He earned his postgraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University. He is married and has three grown children.

Perper is an associate editor of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology and has written six medical books.

He is highly regarded in his field, according John Butt, chief medical examiner for the province of Alberta, Canada, and president of the U.S.-based National Assn. of Medical Examiners.

“He is a very astute forensic pathologist, academically inclined and bright, with a keen mind,” Butt said of Perper, whom he has known personally for several years.