What Is Hip-hop's View Of The Rampart Scandal... I Mean Rampart Is Hip Hop
damn ALL THIS TALK IN HIP HOP ABOUT FUKK THE POLICE AND BLAH BLAH YET WHEN PEOPLE FROM THAT GANGSTA HOOD ACTAULLY BECOME COPS THEN SH1T LIKE THIS COULD HAPPEN
RAMPART HAD COPS STEALING DRUGS, FUKKING UP GANGSTAS, FRAMING GANGSTAS, SELLING DRUGS, KILLING FAMOUS RAP ARTISTS( BIGGIE) AND PRETTY MUCH TROWIN UP GANGS SIGNS...
JUST FOUND A BUNCH OF INTERSETING STUFF ON FRONTLINE WEB PAGE ON PBS...
March 18, 1997 - Road Rage Shootout
Undercover L.A.P.D. officer Frank Lyga shot and killed off-duty L.A.P.D. officer Kevin Gaines in a case of apparent road rage. The shooting of a black officer -- Gaines -- by a white cop -- Lyga -- created a highly publicized police controversy. Lyga told FRONTLINE that Gaines threatened him with a gun and that he responded in self-defense, adding, "In my training experience this guy had 'I'm a gang member' written all over him." Investigators on the case discovered that Gaines had allegedly been involved in similar road rage incidents, threatening drivers and brandishing his gun. They also discovered troubling connections between Gaines and Death Row Records, a rap recording label owned by Marion "Suge" Knight that, investigators came to find, was hiring off-duty police officers as security guards.
Lyga, who had been reassigned to desk duty while the L.A.P.D. reviewed the circumstances of the shooting, including whether his actions had been racially motivated, was ultimately exonerated a year later. Three separate internal investigations determined that the shooting was "in policy."
After the shooting, the Gaines family, represented by attorney Johnnie Cochran, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles for $25 million. The city later settled the suit for $250,000.
November 6, 1997 - Bank Robbery
Robbers targeted a Los Angeles branch of Bank of America, making off with $722,000. Investigating officers were immediately suspicious of assistant bank manager Errolyn Romero, who had had more cash than was necessary delivered just ten minutes before the robbery. One month later Romero confessed to her role in the crime and implicated her boyfriend, L.A.P.D. officer David Mack, as the mastermind. A former track star, Mack was arrested and later convicted of the bank robbery. He was sentenced to 14 years and three months in federal prison. He has refused to reveal the whereabouts of the money, and while in prison has reportedly associated himself with the Mob Piru Bloods, a gang with ties to Death Row Records. Detectives investigating Mack discovered that two days after the robbery, Mack and two other police officers -- including a former partner, Rafael Perez -- spent the weekend gambling in Las Vegas, spending thousands of dollars.
February 26, 1998 -- Station-House Beating
L.A.P.D. Officer Brian Hewitt, a member of L.A.P.D.'s elite anti--gang unit CRASH [Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums] in the Rampart division, brought 18th Street gang member Ismael Jimenez to the Rampart police station for questioning. Hewitt allegedly beat the hand-cuffed Jimenez in the chest and stomach, causing him to vomit blood. After being released, Jimenez went to the hospital, where officials notified the L.A.P.D. of his injuries and complaints. Subsequent internal investigations resulted in the firing of Hewitt and another officer, Ethan Cohan, who, the Department determined, knew about but failed to report the beating. Jimenez, who was awarded $231,000 in a civil settlement with the city, is currently in federal custody pending a multiple count indictment for the distribution of drugs and conspiracy to commit murder.
March 27, 1998 -- Missing Cocaine
Officials in the L.A.P.D. property room discovered that six pounds of cocaine evidence are missing. Within a week, detectives focused their investigation on L.A.P.D. officer Rafael Perez, a member of the Rampart CRASH unit.
May 1998 -- Task Force Created
Concerned about a possible clique of officers involved in criminal misconduct -- working off-duty for Death Row Records, robbing banks and stealing cocaine -- L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks established an internal investigative task force. The investigative team, later named the Rampart Corruption Task Force, focused primarily on the prosecution of Rafael Perez. Further audit of the L.A.P.D. property room identified another pound of missing cocaine -- evidence that had been booked on a prior arrest made by Det. Frank Lyga, the officer who had shot Kevin Gaines. At the time, investigators speculated that Perez may have stolen the cocaine booked by Lyga in retaliation for the shooting of Gaines.
August 25, 1998 -- Perez Arrested
When first stopped and arrested by detectives, Perez asked, "Is this about the bank robbery?" It wasn't. It was about the 6 pounds of missing cocaine, which investigators believed had been checked out by Perez, under another officer's name, and sold on the streets of Rampart through a girlfriend.
In December, Perez was brought to trial on charges of possession of cocaine with intent to sell, grand theft and forgery. After five days of deliberations, the jury announced that it was hopelessly deadlocked, with a final vote of 8-4 favoring conviction.
In preparing to bolster their case for a retrial, investigators discovered an additional eleven instances of suspicious cocaine transfers. Detectives were able to identify dope "switches," where Perez had ordered the cocaine evidence out of property and replaced it with Bisquick.
September 8, 1999 -- Perez Cuts a Deal
Rafael Perez made a deal with prosecutors under which he pled guilty to cocaine theft and agreed to provide prosecutors with information about two "bad" shootings and three other Rampart CRASH officers involved in illegal activity. In exchange, Perez received a five-year prison sentence and immunity from further prosecution of misconduct short of murder.
Among his first revelations, Perez told investigators of how he and his partner Nino Durden had shot, framed, and testified against Javier Ovando, an unarmed gang member who was left paralyzed as a result of the incident. At the time of Perez's admission, Ovando was in jail, serving the 23 year sentence he had received for allegedly assaulting the two officers.
Thus began a nine-month confessional during which time Perez met with investigators more than 50 times and provided more than 4,000 pages in sworn testimony. Before he was done, Perez implicated about 70 officers in misconduct, from bad shootings to drinking beer on the job.
September 16, 1999 -- Ovando Released
With Perez recanting his 1996 testimony about the shooting of Javier Ovando, the District Attorney's Office filed a writ of habeus corpus seeking to overturn his conviction. Ovando was released from prison after serving two and a half years.
Based upon Perez's allegations of wrongful arrests, and investigations by the Task Force, nearly 100 more convictions were eventually overturned.
September 21, 1999 -- Board of Inquiry
L.A.P.D. chief Bernard Parks formed a Board of Inquiry comprised of L.A.P.D. command staff to analyze management failures and investigate the depth of the corruption scandal. The Board's report, released in March 2000, blames, in large measure, lax departmental management for allowing misconduct within the Rampart Division to occur. The report offers 108 recommendations, including the improvement of hiring practices, supervisory oversight and police training.
March 3, 2000 -- CRASH Disbanded
L.A.P.D. chief Bernard Parks announced that he was disbanding the department's CRASH units and creating new anti-gang details that that would include more rigorous requirements for membership, stressing the officers' level of experience.
April 2000 -- Police Commission Review
The Police Commission formed the Rampart Independent Review Panel, comprised of citizens including attorneys, educators, and business executives. The panel issued a report in November 2000 with 72 findings and 86 recommendations. It concluded that officers need better and more supervision; that the department compromises criminal investigations of officer-involved shootings and major use-of-force incidents; and that the L.A.P.D. is viewed by the community as excessively hostile and confrontational.
July 28, 2000 -- Perez's Partner Arrested for Ovando Shooting
Perez's partner Nino Durden was arrested and charged with attempted murder for the shooting of Javier Ovando. He was also charged with perjury, filing false police reports and robbery. He pleaded innocent to all charges in November 2000.
September 11, 2000 -- Independent Report Critical of L.A.P.D.'s Handling of Scandal
Professor Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California, released an analysis of the L.A.P.D.'s Board of Inquiry report which he prepared at the request of the Police Protective League. He concluded that the L.A.P.D. minimized the magnitude of the Rampart scandal and failed to acknowledge the extent to which its internal culture allowed corruption to fester. Chemerinsky's report recommends more aggressive independent reviews and a permanent special prosecutor to investigate police misconduct.
September 19, 2000 -- Feds Take Over L.A.P.D.
The Los Angeles City Council voted 10 to 2 to accept a consent decree allowing a federal judge acting on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee and monitor reforms within the L.A.P.D. for a period of five years. In agreeing to the consent decree, the Justice Department -- which had been investigating the L.A.P.D. since 1996 for excessive force violations -- agreed not to pursue a civil rights lawsuit against the city. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks initially opposed the consent decree, but backed down when it became clear that it was supported by the city council. Riordan signed the consent decree in November 2000.
September 26, 2000 -- Whistleblower Files Lawsuit Charging Cover Up
Former L.A.P.D. detective Russell Poole filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks. Poole, a detective with the Robbery/Homicide Division, was a lead investigator on the Lyga-Gaines shooting and was later assigned to the Rampart Corruption Task Force, where he investigated the station-house beating of Ismael Jimenez. Poole resigned from the Department after 18 years and claims in his civil suit that Chief Parks shut down his efforts to fully investigate the extent of corruption within the Department, including possible criminal activities of Kevin Gaines and David Mack, as well as the breadth of officer misconduct within Rampart. Chief Parks has denied Poole's allegations in the lawsuit, calling them "totally false."
October 4, 2000 -- Three CRASH Cops Convicted
In the first criminal case stemming from Perez's allegations, Sgt. Edward Ortiz, Brian Liddy, Paul Harper and Michael Buchanan, all of the Rampart CRASH unit, were tried on charges of perjury, fabricating arrests and filing false police reports. Perez did not testify at the trial, due to concerns about his credibility. All four officers pleaded not guilty. On November 15, 2000, Ortiz, Liddy and Buchanan were convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and filing false police reports, while Harper was acquitted of all charges.
November 21, 2000 -- Record Settlement Reached
In the largest police misconduct settlement in city history, Javier Ovando was awarded $15 million. An additional 29 civil suits were settled for nearly $11 million. The city, faced with more than 140 civil suits stemming from the corruption scandal, estimates that total settlement costs will be about $125 million.
Four months after his settlement, Ovando was arrested in Nevada and charged with the possession and trafficking of drugs.
December 22, 2000 -- CRASH Cop Convictions Overturned
After a series of hearings investigating allegations of juror misconduct, Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor overturned the convictions of Rampart CRASH cops Ortiz, Liddy and Buchanan. Judge Connor called the verdict unfair because in post-trial interviews the jurors disclosed that they had determined guilt based on a reporting issue not raised in the trial. In January 2001, the new D.A., Steve Cooley, announced that he would appeal Judge Connor's decision.
March 23, 2001 -- Three More CRASH Cops Indicted; Two Plead Out
The District Attorney's office brought felony indictments against three former Rampart CRASH officers: Ethan Cohan, Manuel Chavez and Shawn Gomez. The complaints charge the officers with assaulting two gang members and filing false police reports. Chavez and Gomez have reached plea agreements, including cooperation with prosecutors. Cohan has pleaded innocent and awaits trial.
March 30, 2001 -- Perez's Partner Pleads Guilty
Perez's former partner Nino Durden cut a deal with state and federal prosecutors in which he agreed to plead guilty to ten state and federal charges, including fabricating evidence, false arrest and presenting false testimony. Durden is expected to receive a prison sentence of 7-8 years, and the deal requires that he fully cooperate with federal prosecutors, who, using Durden's testimony, may bring additional indictments against Rafael Perez.
July 24, 2001 -- Perez Released
After serving three years of his five-year sentence, Rafael Perez was released from prison and placed on parole. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry ruled that due to safety concerns, Perez could serve his parole outside the state of California.
December 17, 2001 -- Perez Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges
Perez pled guilty to federal civil rights and firearms violations resulting from the shooting of Javier Ovando. He admitted to one count of conspiracy to violate Ovando's civil rights, and one count of possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. He is scheduled for sentencing in March 2002, and is expected to serve two years in federal prison under the plea agreement.
DAMN SUGE HAD SH1T ON LOCK IF HE HAD THESE GUYS ON THE PAYROLL ... THATS WHEN THE WEST WAS REALLY BANGING...
GOOD FUKKIN TIMES...
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Born in Los Angeles, Ruben Rojas joined the Temple Street Gang in Rampart at the age of 10. To a young kid hanging out on the streets, the gang was a place to be and something to belong to. "A lot of people have misconceptions on gangs, but, I mean, my friends, all we'd ever do was just have a good time. Party and stay to ourselves," he says. "We were young. And we never planned on hurting anybody. In the course of time, of course it happened, you know, but it was never our intention to harm anyone."
If community residents felt beseiged by warring gangs, the gangs felt beseiged by the cops. "CRASH was basically an organization that was created like a gang. Their method was to get us off the street. Put as many gang members, you know, arrest as many gang members as possible and lock them up. That's what the CRASH unit was based on," explains Rojas.
Being targeted by CRASH cops might have had its risks, Rojas recalls, but it also had its rewards. "Waking up in the morning and you're a young man . . . and you know that at any moment a police can just come up to you and just shoot you, man. Because that's what Rampart was really based on anyway . . . it was exciting."
Rojas says that Rafael Perez and his partner, Nino Durden, controlled the streets, shaking down gang members for drugs and money. "They would go into the neighborhood, arrest a few of my partners, and make them turn snitch," explained Rojas. "Or make some of them sell the narcotics that they were taking off other gang members and putting it on the street."
One day in March, 1997, Rojas, who had previously served time for robbery, was pulled from his apartment by Perez, Durden and several other CRASH cops. Perez told investigators that he decided to take Rojas off the streets. At the Rampart station, Rojas learned how it would be done. "That's when Perez and Durden walked up to me and told me, you know what, you're going to jail," recalls Rojas. "I told them for what? And they told me for this. And they pulled out a baggie with rock and powder cocaine. I go that ain't mine. They go, we know that." Rojas was sentenced to three years. After Perez admitted to the false arrest, Rojas was released from prison. He subsequently received a $1 million settlement from the city. Though still angry about what happened to him and other gang members, Rojas believes he understands how it happened. "It's like giving a gang member a badge and telling them, you know what, you're a police officer now. Go and battle crime. Sure, I mean, I'm a gang member. Hell, yeah, you know. I'll battle crime for you, no problem, you know. Next time I pull over somebody and they have two, three kilos of cocaine, damn right I'm going to feed my family with that. So I mean, that's the Perez-- I mean, he was just like us."
It's like giving a gang member a badge and telling them, you know what, you're a police officer now. Go and battle crime. Sure, I mean, I'm a gang member. Hell, yeah, you know. I'll battle crime for you, no problem, you know. Next time I pull over somebody and they have two, three kilos of cocaine, damn right I'm going to feed my family with that. So I mean, that's the Perez-- I mean, he was just like us."
^^^^THIS PART IS CRAZY AND SO TRUE^^^^^^
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BAD COPS
Rafael Perez's testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. Is it the real story?
by PETER J. BOYER
Issue of 2001-05-21
Posted 2001-05-14
Peter J. Boyer's investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department is also the subject of a special report on "Frontline," PBS's news magazine. Boyer's "Frontline" piece has a companion www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/ that includes streaming audio of Rafael Perez's confession and a pictorial map of the trail of evidence and key players.
On September 8, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named Rafael Perez, who had been caught stealing a million dollars' worth of cocaine from police evidence-storage facilities, signed a plea bargain in which he promised to help uncover corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department. Perez hinted at a scandal that could involve perhaps five other officers, including a sergeant. Later, Perez began to talk about a different magnitude of corruption—wrongdoing that he claimed was endemic to special police units such as the one on which he worked, combatting gangs in the city's dangerous Rampart district. Perez declared that bogus arrests, perjured testimony, and the planting of "drop guns" on unarmed civilians were commonplace. Perez's story unfolded over a period of months, and ignited what came to be known as the Rampart scandal, which the Los Angeles Times called "the worst corruption scandal in L.A.P.D. history."
Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the questions he raised about police procedure cast the city's criminal-justice system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney's office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it "may well be the worst man-made disaster this city has ever faced." The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had not, forcing the city to accept a federal role in overseeing the police department's operation. Yet in the view of the lead investigator, Detective Brian Tyndall, members of the task-force team investigating Rampart have come to believe that Rafael Perez is not just a rogue cop who had decided to come clean but a brilliant manipulator who may have misdirected their inquiry. "He's a convict," Tyndall says. "He's a perjurer. He's a dope dealer. So we don't believe a word he says."
One of the early signals of coming trouble for the L.A.P.D. arose from the palm-lined boulevards below Universal Studios, where an officer named Frank Lyga worked undercover narcotics in the Hollywood division. Lyga became the central figure in an episode that exposed deep ruptures within the L.A.P.D., and within the city it polices—dynamics that would, in large measure, define and propel the developing Rampart scandal.
In 1986, when Lyga joined the department, he was already an old-timer, a twenty-nine-year-old transplant from an Adirondack valley that his family had farmed for generations. He'd been on a local sheriff's force upstate, but he hated the cold, and he believed what he'd heard about the L.A.P.D. "It was professional . . . the best police department in the world," he says now. "I'm used to the East Coast police—not to knock the East Coast . . . a big fat cop sitting in a car eating doughnuts, drinking coffee. They couldn't get their gun out if their life depended on it."
Lyga embraced the ethos of the L.A. street cop, a breed distinguished not so much by race, or even by gender, as by distinctness from the "insiders," or "bun boys"—officers who make their way to command positions through desk jobs and adjutancy. Street cops haven't necessarily read the police novels of Joseph Wambaugh, but they've seen the movies, and they believe that in "The New Centurions" Wambaugh got it just about right. Officers of the L.A.P.D. may become cynics, depressives, drunks, or bad husbands, but they believe that they form the outer membrane of civilization, and that chaos lies just the other side of the "thin blue line"—a term, as it happens, that was coined by the towering William H. Parker, an Eisenhower-era police chief whose distant memory is still revered.
The street cops' language is something like the voice of arrested adolescence. The suspects they engage ("jam") are "knuckleheads" and "assholes," and their encounters are "capers." They refer to themselves as "coppers." Frank Lyga's description of a good day at work is "rockin' and rollin', putting people in jail."
For Lyga, March 18, 1997, was not a good day at work. He and other members of his team were staking out a suspected methamphetamine dealer, and Lyga was the point man, which meant sitting in his unmarked 1991 Buick Regal and waiting for a drug deal to happen, so that he could follow the suspects back to their source. He'd sat there for three hours trying to look like an inconspicuous badass—with a Fu Manchu mustache and a ponytail, and dressed in jeans, a tank top, and a baseball cap adorned with a marijuana-leaf logo—when the deal was called off and the team agreed to reconvene at the Hollywood station.
Lyga pulled his car onto Ventura Boulevard. While he was stopped at a red light, he heard the thumping beat of rap music at high volume emanating from a green S.U.V. that had pulled up next to him. Lyga says he glanced at the driver, a black man with a shaved head. The driver stared back. When Lyga rolled down his window and asked, "Can I help you?,'' the man made a menacing gesture and said, according to Lyga, "Ain't nobody looking at you, punk." Lyga, who prided himself on his Aryan Brotherhood cover—"All I lacked was the lightning bolts on my neck''—was surprised by the confrontation. He assumed that the other driver was a gang member, especially when, he says, the driver of the S.U.V. shouted, "Punk, I'll put a cap in your ass."
"He was a stone gangster," Lyga recalls. "In my opinion, in my training experience, this guy had 'I'm a gang member' written all over him. He had a shaved head, he had a goatee, wearing a nylon jumpsuit, driving a sport-utility vehicle." Lyga mentioned the "hand motions" the man had given him.
Lyga says he accepted a challenge from the other driver, suggesting that they pull over and have it out it right there. The driver of the S.U.V. did pull over, but Lyga bolted into traffic and drove off, chuckling as he glanced at his infuriated adversary in the rearview mirror. "I'm thinking, What an idiot, thinking I'm going to stop," Lyga recalls. "And I'm laughing, and I'm watching him in the mirror and he looked like he was going to rip the steering wheel off."
But the other driver pulled back into traffic, and a slow-motion chase ensued, with the S.U.V. edging through heavy traffic until it neared Lyga's car. Hoping that his partners were just a few blocks behind, Lyga radioed for help: "Hey, I got a problem. I've got a black guy in a green Jeep coming up here! He may have a gun."
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Soon, Lyga was at another stoplight, and the S.U.V. started to pull up beside him on the left. Lyga swore, then unfastened his seat belt, anticipating a street fight. He again called for help—using a hidden radio microphone, activated by a foot pedal—and took out his gun, placing it on his lap facing the S.U.V. Lyga could plainly see the other driver now, and saw his arm extend across the passenger seat toward Lyga's car, his hand clutching what looked to Lyga like a steel-cased .45-calibre handgun. Lyga leaned forward, out of the line of fire, and radioed again: "He's got a gun!"
Lyga says he again heard "I'll cap you," then he raised his weapon, a 9-millimetre Beretta, and fired into the S.U.V., missing the driver. Two seconds later, Lyga fired again, and this time, he says, "I almost could hear the impact, the thud of the round hitting him, and I definitely saw it in his face." The S.U.V. wheeled away in a U-turn, then rolled into a gas station, and stopped. Lyga radioed a last transmission: "I just shot this guy! I need help! Get up here!"
Lyga pulled into the gas station and, holding his badge in his hand, yelled to a customer coming out of the station's minimart to call 911. Soon, a California Highway Patrol unit arrived, followed by Lyga's boss and the others on his stakeout team. Lyga had been right about his second shot—the bullet had struck the driver on his right side, puncturing his heart before stopping in his lung. Lyga had been right about the gun, too; the highway patrolmen found a stainless-steel 9-millimetre pistol on the floorboard of the S.U.V.
The other officers, following standard procedure, took control of the scene. A few minutes later, one of Lyga's partners approached him, and Lyga asked, "Is he dead?"
"Oh, yeah," his partner replied, "he's dead."
Good, Lyga thought. In eleven years on the force, he'd fired only two rounds, and had never before hit anybody; he was a brawler, not a shooter. But he figured that the guy in the S.U.V. had left him no choice.
Lyga returned to the station and awaited instruction—there would be paperwork, and investigators would want a reënactment of the shooting. A little over two hours later, Lyga's boss, Dennis Zeuner, told him about the man he'd shot, whose name was Kevin Gaines. "The guy was a policeman," Zeuner said. "One of ours."
The next day, Lyga found media trucks parked near his home, in Ventura County. A group of African-Americans, led by Gaines's former partner, Derwin Henderson, showed up at the scene of the incident and began conducting an unofficial investigation. It was a provocative move, challenging the L.A.P.D.'s fairness in dealing with racial incidents—which is what the Lyga-Gaines shooting had now become.
Three days after the shooting, Johnnie Cochran, Jr., stepped into the case, having been hired by Gaines's family to investigate a potential claim against Lyga and the city. Cochran's first act was to commission a private autopsy of Gaines's body, which revealed, a Cochran aide suggested, that there might be problems with the official version of Gaines's death.
Headquarters instructed that Lyga's "package" be pulled, meaning that the records of his job performance were being examined. On Lyga's second day back on the job, he was assigned to a desk by the narcotics-division commander, and was told that he had a bad package—some forty use-of-force incidents. The department, in one attempt at reform, had defined "use of force" to include, in some situations, even the use of a "firm grip" to apprehend a suspect; in eleven years, Lyga had arrested many drug suspects who required more than a firm grip. Of those use-of-force incidents, however, four had prompted complaints of unnecessary force, but in each case Lyga was exonerated or the charges were classified as "unfounded" or "not resolved." Now, however, every use-of-force incident was examined demographically, and tested for signs of racial bias. No apparent indications were found.
A week after the shooting, Kevin Gaines was buried, and his funeral was itself the cause of discord. The biggest association of black officers, the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation (named after a policeman killed in 1968), requested an official police funeral with full honors, a ceremony reserved for policemen killed in the line of duty. The demand posed a dilemma for the chief, Willie Williams, a black outsider who had been brought in from Philadelphia to head the L.A.P.D. in 1992, after the Rodney King riots. If Lyga's account was accurate, Kevin Gaines had brandished a weapon at someone he thought was a civilian motorist, and he hardly warranted an honors funeral. On the other hand, the black officers were an important constituency for the besieged Williams, who was widely disliked by the L.A.P.D.'s Old Guard. In the end, Gaines received a semi-official police funeral, attended by both Williams and Deputy Chief Bernard Parks.
Two months later, Cochran filed a twenty-five-million-dollar claim against the city, charging that Lyga was "an aggressive and dangerous police officer" who had failed to summon immediate medical assistance for Gaines, contributing to his death, and that he had conspired to "hide and distort the true facts concerning the incident." District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose office had lost the O. J. Simpson case, opened a criminal investigation into the shooting. Lyga noticed the stares now directed his way from black cops. "I was labelled an out-of-control, racist white cop with a history," he recalls. There was talk of an official coverup, and rumors that Gaines had been the victim of an L.A.P.D. "hit.''
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Witnesses to various moments of the event confirmed Lyga's account, as did a surveillance camera at the minimart, which recorded the sound of Lyga firing two shots, 1.8 seconds apart. Three months after the incident, the unit investigating the shooting found that Lyga had acted according to department policy. The department's shooting board recommended no disciplinary action. But that ruling was postponed, pending results of a three-dimensional digital re-creation of the shooting.
In November, 1997, Lyga appeared again before the shooting board, which reviewed the evidence and the 3-D re-creation, and in December Bernard Parks, who had succeeded Williams as chief of police, reported that the shooting was within department policy; no action would be taken against him. The District Attorney's inquiry also eventually ruled that Lyga "acted lawfully in self-defense."
Meanwhile, Cochran's case against Lyga and the city on behalf of Gaines's family was drawing closer to a trial. Lyga, who was represented by the office of the city attorney, James Hahn, could hardly wait. "My only hope was to go to trial. I wanted to go to trial, win, lose, or draw," he says. "I wanted the facts to come out—I did not do anything wrong."
But it was not Lyga's call. Even though the re-creation of the shooting supported his story, the city and Cochran agreed to a settlement conference the following October, mediated by retired Judge R. William Schoettler, who first met separately with both sides. Cochran had reduced his request from twenty-five million dollars to eight hundred thousand; Lyga didn't want to settle at all. Cochran dropped his figure to two hundred and fifty thousand—and the city accepted.
Lyga felt betrayed. "My career, my life, is over," he recalls thinking. "I'm labelled a racist killer who was protected and covered up by the department."
Judge Schoettler wrote a letter to Parks telling him that he thought Lyga and the city would have won the case had it gone to trial. "Had the matter been submitted to me for a determination, I would have found in favor of the City of Los Angeles," Schoettler wrote. He added that a settlement had been proposed primarily to avoid adverse publicity, and said, "As you are aware, the settlement can be termed 'political' and neither the fact of the settlement nor the amount involved should in any way reflect upon the conduct of Detective Lyga." The "political" reason for settling the case seemed obvious: City Attorney Hahn was preparing to run for mayor, and black voters made up his principal base.
Lyga had been allowed to return to undercover work in June of 1997, and he did so harboring a measure of bitterness. He knew well why the shooting had become such an inflammatory episode. "Four little words—'No justice, no peace,' " he says now. "Bottom line, four words. That's the political environment in the City of Los Angeles."
If the L.A.P.D. seems perpetually vexed by racial politics, it is not without historic cause. In the nineteen-twenties, the department had a chief, Louis Oaks, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern L.A.P.D. was created in the image of William Parker, whose sixteen-year reign (1950-66) was driven by two overriding priorities, neither of which was the building of a racially sensitive police force.
In coming up through the ranks of the L.A.P.D., Parker had been a clean cop in a department so dirty that even the fictional treatments of police corruption, from Raymond Chandler to Hollywood's gangster pictures, did not defame it. The department's vice unit protected whores, its exams for promotion and hiring were sold by the mayor and his brother out of City Hall, and one head of the L.A.P.D.'s intelligence squad was sent to San Quentin for bombing the car of an investigator working for civic reformers.
Parker's first imperative was to create a police force that was impeccably clean. He was compulsive about police honesty; the everyday transgressions winked at in some East Coast police departments were often grounds for instant dismissal in the L.A.P.D. In Los Angeles, police officers even bought their own coffee.
The department was, and is, startlingly small, reflecting a political culture disinclined to spend tax money on its civic structure. For much of the last half-century, the city's police force averaged about seven thousand officers, meaning that it could deploy only fifteen officers per square mile (New York's forty-thousand-strong force deploys a hundred and twenty-nine officers per square mile). By necessity, Parker's L.A.P.D. became a highly mobile strike force, whose operational signature was aggressiveness. Its officers intervened first, and asked questions later.
"I will admit, we were a very aggressive police department," says Daryl Gates, who was once Chief Parker's driver and protégé, and who became one of his successors. "We went after crime before it occurred. We didn't sit back. . . . Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime."
The force had a distinctly militaristic character, inculcated at an academy styled after a Marine Corps boot camp, and reflected in a department whose SWAT team was so proficient in urban-warfare tactics that it helped train American troops who snatched Manuel Noriega from Panama.
But the L.A.P.D. was not necessarily perceived as a benign presence in the city it policed. Its mission to "stop crime before it happened" felt to some like racial profiling before that term had currency, the more so because the force was for so long glaringly white. The L.A.P.D. didn't integrate its patrol force until 1961. As the demographic profile of Los Angeles changed—the black population quadrupled between 1940 and 1960—certain sections of the city began to view the police force as an occupying army. The illusion of a dreamy, well-ordered, monochromatic Los Angeles, as projected by the L.A.P.D.approved "Dragnet" series, was pretty well shattered by the Watts riot, in 1965.
That year, Johnnie Cochran filed his first claim against the L.A.P.D. By the time of the Rodney King incident, twenty-six years later, Cochran had become the dean of a flourishing "police-brutality bar," which portrayed the department as a congenitally brutal force given to victimizing minority citizens. There was a saying that the New York Police Department was corrupt but not violent, and the L.A.P.D. was violent but not corrupt. Critics of the L.A.P.D. coined a term to describe the type of malfeasance they discerned in the department—"force corruption."
As the criticism increased, the department found itself defending even its fundamental tactics, such as the upper-body control hold that was drilled into every recruit at the academy. This technique, used to subdue a resistant suspect, was also known as a choke hold, and became controversial in the early eighties with the revelation that fatalities occurred disproportionately among black arrest subjects. Chief Gates suggested in 1982 that the hold was killing blacks because their "veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people." That statement, along with a couple of publicized choke-hold deaths that year, produced a ban on the technique. Gates, who complains that the ban left cops with only a gun and a club, predicted that the number of injuries would rise, and they did.
Racial issues upset the department from within, as well. In 1980, the city settled two discrimination lawsuits against the L.A.P.D., one private and one federal, by signing consent decrees mandating minority and female hiring quotas. Women, blacks, and Hispanics joined the department in sizable numbers, but the hiring program seemed only to heighten racial tensions on the force. In 1986, the Los Angeles Times published the results of a three-month study showing that women and minorities felt they were being denied promotion and assignment opportunities, and that some white male officers felt the department had degraded its standards.
When a plumbing-supplies store manager named George Holliday videotaped the arrest of Rodney King, in 1991, he captured a scene that only confirmed a view of the L.A.P.D. that some in Los Angeles already held. A year later, a jury without blacks acquitted the officers who had beaten King, and the city burned for three days. By 1995, black disaffection had reached such a point that Cochran and the rest of O. J. Simpson's defense team correctly guessed that it could be exploited to contest a murder rap. Their cause was helped immeasurably by Detective Mark Fuhrman, whose serial utterances of the word "******" fortified the defense theory that Simpson was framed in a racist police conspiracy.
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Such was the atmosphere in Los Angeles when Frank Lyga and Kevin Gaines crossed paths—an atmosphere that perhaps obscured some troubling information that arose from that incident. While Frank Lyga's background was being examined, investigators also pieced together a profile of the cop he had killed, and what they found startled them. Off duty, Kevin Gaines was apparently given to violent outbursts, causing his wife to file several domestic-abuse complaints. Investigators learned that he had been involved in other road-rage incidents, and in at least one case he had allegedly threatened to "cap" a motorist who had annoyed him.
The most bizarre event in Gaines's recent past had occurred the summer before his run-in with Lyga, when cops responded to a 911 report of a shooting on the grounds of a Hollywood Hills mansion. Gaines, off duty, pulled up to the scene and got involved in an altercation with the responding officers. Their account was that Gaines became verbally abusive and provocative, and had to be handcuffed. "Tell these mother****in' assholes to take the cuffs off of me, mother****er!" Gaines shouted. He taunted the officers, saying that he hated "****ing cops." Gaines's account was that he'd been mistreated by the police. He hired an attorney and filed a notice of claim against the city. When the incident was investigated by the L.A.P.D.'s Internal Affairs division, it was discovered that the 911 call had been made by Kevin Gaines himself. "The evidence suggests that he did that to engage L.A.P.D. in a confrontation and basically wanted to secure a pension or whatever by filing a lawsuit," Russell Poole, a former L.A.P.D. detective, says.
Poole, a robbery-homicide detective who was assigned to investigate possible criminality in the Lyga-Gaines shooting, later wondered why that 911 incident had not been more thoroughly pursued by Internal Affairs, which was at the time directed by Deputy Chief Parks. Falsely reporting a crime was against the law, and would likely have warranted Gaines's removal from the force. Even more significant was the identity of the person who owned the Hollywood Hills home: Sharitha Knight, the estranged wife of the jailed gangsta-rap impresario Marion (Suge) Knight, who founded Death Row Records. In the course of investigating the road-rage incident, Detective Poole discovered that the S.U.V. Gaines was driving—a green Mitsubishi Montero—was registered to Sharitha Knight. It was soon learned that Sharitha had been romantically involved with Gaines for some time, and that he was living with her at the time of his death.
Investigators had been struck by the life style that Gaines had somehow managed on his salary of about fifty-five thousand dollars a year—he wore expensive suits and designer shirts, and drove a Mercedes—and the connection to Knight and Death Row began to explain it. Detectives found that Gaines had nine credit cards, and among the receipts they found in his belongings was one for a nine-hundred-and-fifty-two-dollar tab at Monty's, a Westwood steak house that was a hangout for people who worked for Death Row Records.
Poole had heard talk around the force that cops earned big money off-duty working security for Death Row; their badges and gun permits made them especially valuable. But to many cops the gangsta-rap scene as epitomized by Death Row was, on the face of it, a crime scene. Gangsta cool glorified street violence, and Suge Knight's legend as a rap kingpin was notoriously colorful; the three-hundred-and-fifteen-pound record executive had, in building and maintaining a hundred-million-dollar enterprise, supposedly dealt with business associates by dangling one man by his ankles from a hotel balcony, smashing another's face with a telephone, and forcing another to drink urine from a champagne glass.
More troubling to law enforcement were the apparent connections between Death Row and violent street gangs. The F.B.I. had been investigating Death Row since 1993, and Knight, who had grown up in Compton, was said to be a member of the Mob Piru Bloods gang, associates of which were among the permanent crowd around Death Row.
Within the L.A.P.D., the Lyga-Gaines shooting took on a new dimension. "All those things begin to reflect on his off-duty associations, how he's conducted himself," Parks says of Gaines. "We hold our people accountable for their off-duty and on-duty behavior. It's very difficult to have a life outside of the L.A.P.D. that deals in the criminal element and then come back to work and put on your badge and your uniform and say, 'I'm now protecting the community and enforcing the law.' "
On the morning of November 6, 1997, two black men entered a Bank of America branch near the University of Southern California campus, and one of them, dressed in a jacket and tie and wearing sunglasses and a beret, made his way behind the bank's security shield and, showing a 9-millimetre handgun, demanded money. The robber and his associate—a "layoff man," whose task was to serve as lookout—walked out of the bank and joined their getaway driver in a white van that had been stolen near the airport the day before. They escaped with more than seven hundred thousand dollars in two bags.
Detective Brian Tyndall, who was then working the robbery-homicide division, concluded that the bank heist had been an inside job. The stolen money was freshly "shrunk"—compressed to fit an automated teller machine—and had just been delivered by armored car that morning. The money had been ordered by the assistant manager, a young woman named Errolyn Romero. Under questioning several weeks after the robbery, Romero, who was visibly nervous, told Tyndall, "You know who it is." When Tyndall pressed her for a name, she was so nervous that she could not say it. "I suggested that it might be easier for her to write the name down on a piece of paper," Tyndall recalls. "And she tried to do that and her hand shook, and she couldn't complete the signature." Instead, Romero reached into her purse and produced a business card bearing the shield of the Los Angeles Police Department. The name on the card was David Mack.
Mack had grown up in the same Compton neighborhood as Suge Knight, and, like Knight, he'd escaped to find success in the world beyond the old neighborhood. He was a brilliant athlete, and had won a scholarship to the University of Oregon, where he ran track and made the United States national team running the eight hundred metres. He joined the L.A.P.D. in 1988. He was married, had two kids, and, by all accounts, was a good cop. But investigators discovered that, like Kevin Gaines, David Mack had a secret life off duty. He was a club crawler, a gambler, and a womanizer. After one of the women he was involved with, Errolyn Romero, became an assistant manager at the bank, Mack saw his chance at the big score.
When Mack was arrested, in December, 1997, he refused to coöperate with police. He didn't tell them who his accomplices were, or what had happened to the money. "Take your best shot," he told Tyndall. He was apparently content to serve out his term—fourteen years in federal prison—and have the money to look forward to upon his release. When Mack was in custody, his jailers began to notice a gradual transformation in him. He started using a red toothbrush, then wearing a pair of red socks, and soon he was adorned by as much red as could be obtained, given his circumstances. David Mack renounced the L.A.P.D. and aligned himself with the Bloods. "It appears he has completely divested himself of all relationships of his life as a police officer," Parks says, "and he is basically a gang member. He has taken on the role of being a gang member in jail."
During their investigation, Detective Tyndall and his colleagues found that, on the force, Mack had kept to a tight circle of friends, mostly African-Americans. They also discovered that, two days after the bank robbery, two of those friends had accompanied Mack to a weekend blowout in Las Vegas, and that one of them was Mack's ex-partner from the narcotics beat, a former marine named Rafael (Ray) Perez.
Three months after Mack's arrest, on March 2, 1998, six and a half pounds of cocaine were checked out from the property room at L.A.P.D. headquarters downtown and not returned. The coke, evidence in a drug-seizure investigation, had been stored in case it was needed as an exhibit in trial, but there was no trial and thus no legitimate reason for the evidence to have been checked out.
The evidence had been checked out under the name Joel Perez, and there was an officer with that name on the force, but investigators determined that someone else had signed his name. When a clerk at the police property room recollected that Rafael Perez had once checked out a large amount of cocaine, investigators began zeroing in on him. The cocaine theft, on top of what had been discovered about Kevin Gaines and the David Mack bank robbery, suggested a picture of corruption more ominous than any of the misdeeds alone. In any case, it was a possibility that had to be put before Chief Parks.
Unlike his predecessor, Willie Williams, Parks had spent his entire career on the force; he was a straight arrow who managed to avoid being ensnared by the department's political controversies without ignoring them. He was a founding member of the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, the black officers' organization, but he wasn't a group activist. He rose steadily in a department that had quelled the aspirations of many black officers. "Bernie Parks is L.A.P.D., and he's a cop through and through," Daryl Gates says.
Parks had been Gates's driver (as Gates had been Parker's), but, as he rose to command level, he had sometimes been said to be a cautious critic of Gates's style, and even of the L.A.P.D. culture. After Gates was eased out of the job, in 1992, and it became obvious that the next chief would be black, Parks was a natural choice. When the job went to the Philadelphian Williams, Parks did not go out of his way to help the new chief to succeed, and when Williams failed to win reappointment, in 1997, Parks finally got his chance.
Gates reflexively defended the force whenever controversy arose, and an important lesson Parks took from the decade preceding his appointment was that Gates had done the department a disservice by failing unequivocally to condemn the Rodney King cops. Parks bristled whenever he heard cops argue that the King beating had been, strictly speaking, within policy. "When we did not have the ability to send a message to the community that we were going to be objective in evaluating the set of circumstances, it caused the community to have less trust in us," Parks says. "And I think that's the real issue; how we addressed it is as important as what occurred."
Now, faced with a budding scandal on his own watch, Parks was determined to act decisively in exposing and eliminating what he and his investigators believed might be a crew of gangsta cops.
"Perez is a good friend of David Mack's, both were good friends of Gaines's," Parks says. "I think the picture reflected that we had some people on this department that were, in a coördinated effort, involved in some very serious criminal misconduct."
Parks ordered the formation of an investigative task force to solve the cocaine theft, and to see if it was connected to the bank robbery or to other criminal activity. The task force decided to focus its investigation on Rafael Perez.
When Perez was a boy and was living near Philadelphia, where he and his mother settled after leaving Puerto Rico, he would watch the cop shows on TV and imagine himself one day having a badge and a gun. He went from high school to the Marines, and from the Marines to the police academy in Los Angeles, where he breezed through and, in 1989, joined the force. After his rookie tour on patrol, Perez was assigned to a special narcotics unit, where he teamed up with a veteran cop whom he came to idolize, David Mack.
Perez and Mack were on a "buy and bust" team, which meant that they travelled undercover throughout the city buying dope on the streets, working with the narcotics squads in different divisions to make arrests. Frank Lyga remembers working with them several times in the Hollywood division, and being struck by the fealty that Perez accorded to Mack. "Ray Perez was the underling and a wanna-be David Mack," Lyga recalls. "David Mack was the supreme leader, and Ray Perez was the supreme follower. Where one was, the other one was, always."
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Perez later cast his loyalty to Mack as a case of combat bonding, citing an incident in 1993, when Perez says he found himself staring down the barrel of a drug dealer's gun, pleading for his life, and Mack shot the assailant. (This account has since been disputed by eyewitnesses.)
In 1995, Perez was transferred to the department's élite anti-gang team, CRASH (for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), in the Rampart division. The custom at special units such as CRASH was that a prospective member needed to have a sponsor on the team. Perez's sponsor was an officer named Sammy Martin, a close friend of David Mack's. (Mack is a godfather to Martin's son.) It was Sammy Martin who accompanied Perez and Mack on their Las Vegas spree.
Based on those connections, and the statement from the property-room clerk, the task force put Perez under surveillance and began to profile him. It found a pattern in his off-duty life style that was strikingly similar to Mack's. "Again, a very outgoing, charismatic type person, likes the finer things in life, liked to party a lot," Detective Tyndall, who was assigned to the task force, says. "Both were womanizers, had a very active social life. . . . On a policeman's salary, you can do that as long as you're single. But Ray was married and has a child, so we're starting to put together the picture now that his extracurricular activities are going to have to be supplemented in some way."
Investigators subpoenaed Perez's telephone records, and were surprised to find that he sometimes made more than a hundred phone calls in a day. On the day that the cocaine was checked out, Perez called an unidentified person in the Rampart neighborhood just after the transaction. Detectives traced the number to a Bella Rios, one of several aliases used by a Honduran woman more commonly known as Veronica Quesada. She was a sometime night-club singer with a drug record, and when detectives called on her they got lucky. Inside Quesada's apartment were the accoutrements of the drug trade—a razor-marked table, and chemicals for converting powder cocaine into rock. As the detectives were interviewing Quesada, the front door opened and in walked Quesada's brother, Carlos Romero, who was the subject of two outstanding felony-arrest warrants for drug dealing. The officers frisked Romero, and found in his right-front trouser pocket a quarter pound of cocaine, freshly cut from a brick.
Romero was arrested, and while the cops were questioning Quesada she said that she needed to fetch something from a side table. When she opened the drawer, one of the detectives, Mike Hohan, noticed a startling photograph. "Sitting on top of everything," Hohan recalls, "is a picture of Rafael Perez in what we call in policeman's parlance a 'two-eleven suit.' " In the California Penal Code, two-eleven is the section for robbery, a crime that seemed to be committed by an inordinate number of people partial to nylon running suits. There was something else about the photograph that struck Hohan, something about Perez's pose. Perez was "throwing gang signs," Hohan says.
It was possible that Perez had been clowning around with the hand signs, engaging in some cop humor, but, at the least, detectives could now connect Perez to both ends of the cocaine theft—the witness at the evidence room, and a dealer who could put the dope on the street. Richard Rosenthal, a deputy district attorney, who was now assigned to the task force, became even more convinced of Perez's guilt when he discovered that Perez had intervened in drug cases against Quesada and Romero, telling prosecutors that they functioned as his informants. "That evidence on top of everything else conclusively made me believe we had the right guy, and we had a provable case," Rosenthal says.
Perez was served with a search warrant on August 6, 1998, as he was reporting to the Rampart captain's office. When he was confronted with the news, he asked, "This is about the bank robbery, isn't it?" He was arrested three weeks later.
Rosenthal believed in the case he had against Perez, but as the trial began, in December, he knew that getting a conviction would not be easy. Perez was something of a courtroom legend, a witness who could sway jurors with an air of utter credibility—even, as it turned out, in those cases when he was baldly lying. "What we had with Perez was somebody you would look at and feel that, if I were in his position and I were innocent . . . that's the way I'd act, that's when I would cry, that's when I would stammer. And that was the kind of defendant we were against," Rosenthal says.
Rosenthal got an early hint of how formidable a presence Perez was when, during the jury-selection process, one prospective juror stood up and commented on how handsome Perez was. She was excused. During the trial, Perez admitted that he'd had an affair with Quesada, that he'd even been at the property room the day the cocaine was taken—but denied that he was the one who had taken it. The jury was unable to reach a verdict—the vote was eightto-four for conviction—and on December 23rd the judge declared a hung jury.
The prosecution team immediately went back to work, trying to build a stronger case against Perez, who remained in custody. Rosenthal, who had spent most of his career prosecuting fraud cases, had a study of Perez's financial records drawn up, with charts and graphs showing Perez's unexplained income. Meanwhile, Quesada, who was now in prison, indicated that the missing six and a half pounds wasn't all that Perez had stolen. Investigators followed up on another pound of cocaine that had gone missing the previous year—dope that had been seized in an arrest made by Frank Lyga. For a time, the investigators theorized that Perez had targeted Lyga's evidence in retaliation for Gaines's death. Then Detective Hohan had an idea: What if Perez had been stealing cocaine by checking dope out of the evidence locker, replacing it with another substance, and then returning the package?
The detectives went through hundreds of pieces of evidence in the storage rooms, eventually finding eleven transfers with suspicious paperwork. They had one package of cocaine analyzed. The department chemist found Bisquick instead of cocaine. Six of the other suspicious packages had been destroyed, according to routine department procedure, but four more proved to contain "bunk"—more Bisquick. Handwriting analysis and the recollections of another property clerk showed that some of the swapped evidence had been ordered by Perez.
The task force now had Perez connected to eight pounds of cocaine, which made him what the cops call a major dealer. "I had him," Rosenthal says. "I had him nailed to the wall." On April 6, 1999, Rosenthal got a grand jury to indict Perez on the missing pound, and, increasing the pressure, added more complaints as he accumulated new evidence. Rosenthal kept hearing that Chief Parks and the department desperately wanted to deal with Perez, to "flip" him and gain his coöperation in exposing other dirty cops, and in May Rosenthal approached Perez's attorney with an offer.
Perez was represented by Winston Kevin McKesson, a lawyer who knew his way around police cases, but not from the orientation of defending cops. McKesson, who is in his forties, was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood where violent crime and a fear of police were the hammer and anvil of daily life. His younger brother was killed in a fight outside their parents' home; McKesson's first college research paper was on the subject of police misconduct. After graduating from U.C.L.A. law school, he became a protégé of Johnnie Cochran's, and a notable figure in the police-brutality bar. The only cops he had previously represented were plaintiffs in discrimination suits filed against police departments.
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On September 8th, during jury selection, McKesson approached Rosenthal, put an arm around his shoulder, and suggested that they talk. He had Perez give Rosenthal the barest sketch of a crime that he would confess to: the shooting of an unarmed suspect, and the planting of a gun on him. McKesson said that Perez wanted immunity on that charge and a reduced five-year term on the drug charges in exchange for exposing bad cops in the Rampart division. Gil Garcetti, the district attorney, approved the deal.
On the morning of September 10, 1999, Perez was secretly transported in handcuffs and shackles to a room in a downtown Los Angeles office tower. The unlikely meeting place, headquarters of the county transit system, had been chosen partly for security reasons, as there were concerns for Perez's life. Everyone on the law-enforcement side of the case, from Rosenthal to Chief Parks to District Attorney Garcetti, had high expectations. Within a week, David Mack would be sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and he was being investigated in connection with the 1997 killing of Biggie Smalls, the rap singer managed by Sean (Puffy) Combs, Death Row Records' East Coast rival. The hope now was that Perez might shed light on that and other unsolved crimes, including the whereabouts of the bank-robbery money and the identities of Mack's accomplices. "We didn't know if he was going to talk about Biggie Smalls's murder, the bank robbery involving David Mack, home-invasion robberies, other additional narcotics, maybe rip-offs," Detective Tyndall says. "We just weren't sure."
Rosenthal reminded Perez that if he failed to tell the complete truth the plea deal was off. "Yes, sir," Perez said, and he began to tell a story that would stun everyone in the room, except for his own attorney. Kevin McKesson knew what Perez was going to tell, and he knew that it wasn't a story about a criminal cadre of black cops. He knew that Perez, who by now had become a personal friend, was going to tell a story that confirmed what Johnnie Cochran, the brutality bar, and McKesson had been proclaiming for years about the L.A.P.D. "It hurts me to say it, but there's a lot of crooked stuff going in with L.A.P.D., especially L.A.P.D. specialized units," Perez told the investigators.
Perez said that he had gone bad while making his first drug bust on the CRASH team. He said that he and his partner, Nino Durden, had seized money from a drug dealer, and decided to keep some for themselves. Perez also described the botched police shooting, a 1996 confrontation with a nineteen-year-old gang member who'd surprised Perez and Durden during a stakeout. The two officers shot the man, Javier Francisco Ovando, hitting him in the head and chest before they realized that he was not carrying a weapon. As Ovando lay bleeding, Perez recounted, Durden wiped clean a "drop" gun they carried with them for just such an event, and placed it near the body. Then Perez and Durden began to concoct their cover story—that Ovando was a cop killer who had burst in on their observation post, intent on assassination.
Ovando had survived the shooting, only to find himself facing trial on felony-assault charges for trying to kill the two police officers. Ovando, a Honduran who speaks little English, was partially paralyzed in the incident and confined to a wheelchair; he protested that he had no gun, but in the trial Perez took the stand and calmly testified otherwise, convincing the jury of Ovando's guilt. The judge rebuked Ovando for lacking remorse, and sentenced him to twenty-three years in state prison.
Rosenthal and the officers were horrified by what Perez was telling them, but there was more. Perez said that the practice of keeping a drop gun for framing suspects was quite common in CRASH. "Everybody . . . kept one," he said. "Everybody." Bogus arrests and the writing of false police reports, he said, were the rule. "I would say that ninety per cent of the officers that work CRASH, and not just Rampart CRASH, falsify a lot of information," Perez said. "They put cases on people."
Rosenthal was hearing a prosecutor's nightmare. He had to find out one thing: Was there anyone else sitting in jail for a crime he did not commit? Perez didn't quite answer the question, saying that he would first need to see the CRASH "recap books"—logs of all activities undertaken by the unit.
"Did it happen that frequently that you can't remember?" Rosenthal asked Perez.
"I am really going to need to see those books," Perez replied.
Perez talked for three hours in that first session, and he was eager to keep going ("There's still a lot of things that we have not talked about," he told them), but Rosenthal cut the session short. He was now desperate to get Javier Ovando out of prison, and he took the unprecedented step of filing a writ of habeas corpus (usually the work of a defense lawyer), asking for Ovando's immediate release. Ovando was freed from prison within a week.
Ovando was only the first. Rosenthal had once thought that the debriefing sessions with Perez would be completed in a few weeks; they went on for more than a year, thirty-five sessions, which fill forty-five hundred pages of transcript. As Perez's story continued to unfold, the circle of alleged wrongdoers steadily widened. Perez spoke of some officers as being "in the loop"—countenancing, if not necessarily participating in, wrongdoing—so the task force compiled a list of every cop who'd been in the Rampart CRASH and narcotics divisions during Perez's time there, and had him "go through and identify who are the potential suspects," Rosenthal recalls.
Perez was also allowed to peruse fifteen hundred cases, including those in the CRASH recap books he had asked for. Detectives would deliver packages to the county jailhouse of a hundred cases at a time for Perez to go through, selecting cases to discuss at his next debriefing. Sometimes during the debriefings, Perez would volunteer a new memory that had come to him in jail. Rosenthal says that occasionally "we'd start off on an interview and he'd say, 'You know what? I was laying around last night, and I remembered that there was something we need to discuss.' " Other times, Perez would fill in the blanks on incidents that he hadn't witnessed himself, "but he knew what was going on," Rosenthal says.
"If we were to believe Officer Perez," Garcetti says, "we had a rogue group of cops who were totally out of control, who were unsupervised, who were their own little enforcement group." Indeed, Perez portrayed Rampart CRASH as a secret gang in blue, with its own logo (a white skull with a cowboy hat, flanked by playing cards arranged in the "dead man's hand"—aces and eights) and an awards system for shoot-outs with gangsters.
Investigators found that at least some of what Perez said about the Rampart CRASH culture was true. For example, at the time Perez was under investigation the department was also looking into a complaint against a Rampart CRASH officer named Brian Hewitt, who was accused of beating a handcuffed gang member while he was in custody at the station. Hewitt and another policeman, Ethan Cohan, who saw the beaten gang member but did not report the incident promptly, were fired by the department. Both officers were also accused by Perez of other wrongdoing. But how much of Perez's story was hype? Perez's eventual catalogue of misdeeds ranged from his own shooting and frameup of Javier Ovando to allegations of guns being routinely planted on suspects, cops drinking beer on the job, and cops allowing a suspect to lie bleeding rather than calling for medical attention.
The investigation was a messy process, because it had no precedent. Perez would tell the task force about a bad case, and the detectives would fan out to prisons or to a village in Central America or to wherever the wronged party could be found, trying to corroborate Perez's story. Rarely was Perez's account of an event fully verified—even Ovando's version of the shooting incident differed significantly from Perez's—but Chief Parks had declared early on, "We take Rafael Perez at his word," and so, for the most part, the detectives did. In a way, they had no choice, because Perez's word was by itself enough to undermine confidence in any case in which he had made the arrest, written the report, or testified in court.
"At that point, no one was seriously questioning the allegations that he was making," Judge Larry Paul Fidler, of the Los Angeles Superior Court, says. "It rocked everybody back on their heels." As supervising judge of the Superior Court's criminal division, Fidler was responsible for deciding whether or not to grant the writs and overturn the cases that Perez was identifying. Fidler held Rosenthal in high regard, and he felt that the court had no choice but to grant the writs—more than a hundred of them so far.
Inevitably, when transcripts of Perez's debriefings were leaked, his untested allegations became fixed in the public mind. Defense attorneys began to employ the "Perez defense," claiming that Perez's picture of what happened in Rampart might well have happened in the case of their client, and therefore the jury should acquit. "That was the standard, if you will, the battle cry in almost every case," Judge Fidler says.
When Javier Ovando was released from prison, on September 16, 1999, he was flown home to Los Angeles by the L.A.P.D. But, before he even boarded the plane, he was approached by Gregory Moreno, a lawyer in the Los Angeles police-brutality bar, who a few days later landed Ovando as a client. In October, Moreno filed suit against the city, and the only real question was how much the settlement would be. "When this came out, it was the opportunity that many of us had waited for," Moreno says, "and we were blessed to be able to be at the forefront." Rodney King had received a settlement of $3.8 million, and Moreno had recently won a settlement of $5.3 million against the county sheriff's office. For Ovando, he says, "fifteen million dollars was the right figure."
In February, 2000, Johnnie Cochran convened a Saturday summit meeting of the city's leading police critics and brutality-bar attorneys, to see how they might respond to what one lawyer called "a situation that is tailor-made for reform." Among those who spoke to the gathering was Cochran's protégé Kevin McKesson.
As more convictions were overturned, more lawsuits were filed. Ruben Rojas, a gang member whom Perez acknowledged having framed on a dope charge, won a settlement for a million dollars. His attorney, Gregory Yates, eventually ended up with sixty Rampart clients. He bundled twenty-nine of those cases together for an eleven-million-dollar settlement last December, and the Beverly Hills branch of the Wells Fargo Bank stayed open late one Friday night just to handle all the deposits. Forty-three settlements have been made already, ranging from twenty-five thousand dollars to Ovando's fifteen million.
Some have accused plaintiffs' lawyers of rank opportunism, and Yates has heard the charge of "police-car chasing." He is unmoved. "Who else is going to do it?" he asks. "Who else is going to seek redress for these people?"
In the wake of the Rodney King beating, Congress passed a law allowing federal oversight of local police departments that had been found guilty of a pattern of depriving citizens of their rights. The law has been used by the Justice Department to establish federal oversight of police forces in Pittsburgh, in New Jersey, and in Steubenville, Ohio, and was cited by those (such as the New York City mayoral candidate Mark Green) proposing federal oversight of the New York Police Department after the 1997 brutalizing of Abner Louima. The Justice Department opened a civil inquiry into the L.A.P.D. in 1996; it had no discernible result until the Rampart scandal lent it new impetus. In the waning days of the Clinton Administration, the acting head of Justice's civil-rights division, Bill Lann Lee, threatened to sue Los Angeles to prove a "pattern or practice" of excessive force and rights abuses unless the city consented to federal oversight. Chief Parks and the city's mayor, Richard Riordan, opposed the agreement, but Rampart sapped their political capital on the issue, and the city council relented to the feds.
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urged after the Rodney King incident, including a computerized "early warning" system for tracking problem officers. There is now also a mandate to maintain a running tally of all police stops, categorized by the subject's ethnicity and gender—an intended guard against racial profiling.
There were some topics on which Rafael Perez had very little to say, and they happened to be the subjects that the task force had hoped he might illuminate when he was given his immunity deal. He said he had not known Kevin Gaines, and that, contrary to Frank Lyga's assertion, he had never met Lyga while working narcotics, or anywhere else.
On the subject of his friend David Mack, Perez was similarly unhelpful. "I considered him a very good friend who saved my life," Perez said when the subject first came up. "Was I involved in that bank robbery? No. Was this a big coincidence that we both end up in this kind of trouble, or he ends up in that type of trouble, and I—" He stopped himself, then concluded, "It's a very big coincidence." Perez said he knew nothing about Mack's accomplices, or about what Mack had done with the stolen money.
"He seems to have a very strong relationship—I don't know if that's fear, or an affection—with Mr. Mack," Gil Garcetti says. "I'm absolutely convinced he knows something he has never told us."
That opinion is shared by police and prosecutors who have dealt with Perez. Suspicion grew among some of them that he had directed—or possibly misdirected—the course of the scandal investigation. "He's deflecting us everywhere else but where we should be," says one officer who is deeply involved in the case, and believes that he gave Perez too much credence. "The task force just went wherever he took them. He's counting on getting out in June."
Detective Tyndall says that he came to sense that Perez was almost taunting the investigators. "He was eating this up," Tyndall says. "He knew that, this whole production, he was the center, he was the star. And he was going to take advantage of it to the utmost."
When Perez directed the investigation toward other cops in Rampart CRASH, Garcetti hoped that at least some implicated officers would turn, and coöperate in exposing others. But that didn't happen. Instead, cops fought the charges in police Board of Rights hearings—proceedings argued before a panel comprising two command officers and a citizen. Most of the hearings found in favor of the officers. Still, there was enormous political and media pressure for a definitive outcome, and the District Attorney's office felt most of it. Gil Garcetti had won another term after his team lost the O. J. Simpson case, but his standing with voters was precarious as he faced the November, 2000, election. Chief Parks, determined to be seen as leading the fight against police corruption, criticized Garcetti publicly and often for not bringing criminal cases against Rampart officers, and Garcetti countered that there was no case yet to bring.
"My position is, all we have is Rafael Perez pointing the finger," he says. "That's all I have. A convicted perjurer, a liar, a thief. We get to a court, it will never even get to a jury. The judge will have to dismiss the case."
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to go with what he had despite his own misgivings. "Once we could see we were not going to get any police officers from within the department, that's almost the end of the case," Garcetti recalls. "You take the little bits and pieces that are left, and you go forward with that prosecution."
The criminal accusations that Garcetti's office chose to prosecute came to trial last October 4th, in the courtroom of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jacqueline A. Connor. To the extent that the Rampart scandal had become a stain on the character of the L.A.P.D., the case could not have been more fitting. One defendant, a thirty-nine-year-old cop named Brian Liddy, was the perfect embodiment of the department of Daryl Gates and Joseph Wambaugh, for better and worse.
Like Perez, Liddy had always wanted to be a cop. His father kept bar at a tavern in the Bronx which was a hangout for off-duty cops. He joined his first civilian force in Norwalk, Connecticut, and quickly became a star. Dana McIndoe, his first captain in Norwalk, says, "He had a nose for finding the bad guys. . . . I don't know how to put it—he was just born to be a police officer, I guess."
Liddy, a burly man with a sardonic air, was an aggressive cop who "had his rough edges," McIndoe says, and a number of complaints were filed against him. "I talked to him a few times about minor indiscretions," McIndoe says, "and one thing I'll say about Brian, if he messed up, he said he did. He'd come out and say, 'Yeah, I did it. I lost my cool and yelled at the guy, called him a coupla names.' "
Like Frank Lyga, Liddy believed that the L.A.P.D. was the best force in the world, and after visiting a friend in California he determined to try to join the department he called "the varsity." But the L.A.P.D. first wanted to know about an incident in Liddy's private life, in which a woman he knew had accused him of sexual assault. Liddy had protested his innocence, and a jury acquitted him in a matter of minutes. The L.A.P.D. looked into the matter, and admitted Liddy into its ranks.
On April 29, 1992, when Liddy arrived for roll call at the Seventy-seventh Street station, in the heart of the city's South Central district, cops were congregating around a TV set watching a news report that a Simi Valley jury without any black members had just acquitted the L.A. cops accused in the Rodney King beating. A few blocks from the station, near Seventy-first Street, a young black man named Mark Jackson was changing the brakes on a friend's car when a neighbor came by and said she'd just heard the verdict reported. Jackson and his friends started grousing about the verdict, and soon other people came into the streets, shouting "Rodney King! Rodney King!"
A short while later, Liddy and his partner, Terry Keenan, along with a third officer, were riding in their patrol car when, over the radio, they heard a call for help, signalling that officers were in trouble. They drove to the corner of Seventy-first Street and Normandie, where a boisterous crowd had encircled two cops who were in the middle of arresting a teen-ager after their patrol car was showered with rocks and bottles. The young man had tried to escape by climbing a fence. When the cops pulled him back down, the crowd began jeering, and chanted, "**** the police!" Liddy, Keenan, and the other officer singled out two of the instigators, Mark Jackson and his friend Cerman Cunningham, and arrested them, but only after a struggle in which Jackson was slammed against the patrol car before finally being pushed inside.
The arrests further excited the crowd, and, as Liddy was getting ready to drive away, Jackson's younger brother, Damian Williams, turned his back to the police and dropped his trousers, mooning the officers, to great cheers. About then, Liddy's lieutenant, Michael Moulin, arrived and ordered all the officers at the scene to retreat, leaving a vacuum in the streets that was quickly filled by the mob.
The crowd, Damian Williams among them, moved a block south, to the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Tom's Liquor Store was soon overrun by looters. With booze flowing, people started throwing bottles at passing cars. Motorists were dragged out of their cars and beaten. Then a truck driver named Reginald Denny, en route to Inglewood with a load of sand and gravel, rolled into the intersection. A group of black youths pulled him from the truck, stomped him, hit him on the back with an oxygenator, clubbed him with a crowbar, and smashed him in the face with a concrete block. As Denny lay on the street, bleeding and unconscious, one of the young men spat on him, and another rolled him over and picked his pocket. The man who hit Denny with the concrete block, and then spun into a dance over his body while flashing gang signs, was Damian Williams.
Two days later, the fires were still burning. As Liddy drove to work, a car pulled up next to his on an off-ramp near the station and one of its occupants fired at him. Liddy returned fire, and at the end of the gun battle one of the car's occupants was dead. Liddy survived the incident unhurt, and was awarded the department's highest honor, the Medal of Valor.
Brian Liddy had made the arrest that sparked the worst Los Angeles riot in a century, and won the Medal of Valor, but what made him really famous inside the force occurred a month after the riot, when Liddy was vacationing in New York. He was showing the city to his future wife, a fellow L.A. cop named Sandra Garcia (whom Liddy had met while standing over a corpse at a crime scene), when they heard a bank alarm go off near East Twenty-third Street by Third Avenue. Three men ran from the bank into a getaway car, smashed into another motorist, then fled on foot, in the direction of Liddy. He tackled one of the men, flipped him over into the "proned out" position, then held him with his arms pinned back until a New York cop arrived and handcuffed the suspect. Half a block away, Sandra Garcia had nabbed another of the suspects. Liddy and Garcia received a letter of commendation from the commander of the N.Y.P.D.'s Thirteenth Precinct.
Unlike Rafael Perez, Liddy was not a compelling presence in a courtroom. His recitation of events was coldly professional, and he didn't bother to mask his "coppers vs. assholes" attitude. This had been evident several months after the riot, in the joint trial of Mark Jackson and Cerman Cunningham. The racially mixed jury acquitted them, and jurors said afterward that they didn't like the demeanor of the husky cop. "Downtown jury" was Liddy's explanation.
Liddy and Rafael Perez came to Rampart CRASH on the same day in 1995. They weren't partners, or even friends, and, when Perez left the unit for a time, Liddy argued against allowing his return. On the job, they tolerated one another.
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Later, when Perez was going over lists of CRASH cops with Richard Rosenthal and the task force, rating officers as good or bad, he first mentioned Liddy as a pretty good cop with a nose for the bad guys. "I categorize him as a very good officer," Perez said. "A lot of good, uh . . . uh, Obs arrests. 'Obs' meaning observations arrests. . . . The most I've seen him do was fabricate some P.C."— probable cause for an arrest. "But could he be trusted? He could be trusted that if we told him the worst of the worst, he's gonna go, 'O.K. I'm gonna go along with the story.' Uh, but he, himself, wouldn't, uh, really be involved in doing things."
Perez made that statement in one of his first sessions, in September, 1999. By November, as his list of wrongdoers was growing, he had changed his mind about Liddy, accusing him of falsely arresting two members of the violent Temple Street gang after a raid. Perez later told Rosenthal that he'd heard that Liddy had spoken against him at CRASH, and said he thought Liddy (whom he described as "a very heavy officer who couldn't run half a block to save his life") was just jealous of him. Perez went on to implicate Liddy directly in other misdeeds, ranging from making a bad gun-possession arrest to fabricating a report in a spray-painting incident.
By the time Perez was making those allegations, Liddy had been promoted out of Rampart CRASH, and was a sergeant in the Pacific division, near the beach. He held the dual ranks of detective and sergeant, and was pleased with his career status as he began to plot the next twenty years toward his pension.
Sandra was nine months pregnant, and on the morning she went into labor Liddy's badge, I.D. card, and gun were taken from him by police authorities in the delivery room when his son was being born. He was charged, with his CRASH partner, Michael Buchanan; his sergeant, Edward Ortiz; and another CRASH officer, Paul Harper, with various acts of perverting justice in the arrests that Perez had cited.
The most important allegation arose from a July, 1996, CRASH raid on a meeting of the Temple Street gang, which was involved in a dispute with the Mexican Mafia. One of the gangsters the CRASH cops hoped to run into that night was Anthony (Stymie) Adams, who was believed to have been the trigger man in the killing of a Mexican Mafia man called Lizard in a dispute over "taxes" paid on the gang's street trade.
When the cops, including Liddy, Buchanan, and Ortiz, arrived at the meeting place, the gang was all there—Stymie, Ghost, Diablo, Wicked, Speedy among them. A police helicopter illuminated the scene, and the gang members fled. Two of them jumped into a pickup truck and sped past Liddy and Buchanan, and down the alley. Liddy and Buchanan claimed they were struck by the escaping vehicle before the driver, Raúl (Prieto) Muñoz, was captured, in possession of a .357-magnum handgun, along with his passenger, Cesar (Joker) Natividad.
Liddy and Buchanan briefly went to the hospital, then filled out the paperwork on the arrest, charging Muñoz and Natividad with assault with a deadly weapon—the pickup truck. Both gangsters pleaded guilty, Muñoz was imprisoned and then deported to El Salvador, and, in a plea deal, Natividad was released.
The issue in question was whether or not Muñoz had actually struck Liddy and Buchanan with the truck as they drove down the alley. Perez, who had been nearby at the scene, said the officers had fabricated that part of the story, even though they both had shown injuries at the time, and had gone for treatment at the hospital. As the trial began, the talk around the courthouse was that the case seemed laughably insignificant, given the magnitude that the Rampart scandal had assumed.
Liddy gave his usual charmless witness-box performance. One of the Los Angeles Times reporters covering the trial wrote, "Liddy was so calm and deliberate that it appeared he had no stake in how he was perceived."
Even so, Judge Connor didn't seem to believe that the prosecution had much of a case—she consistently granted defense motions, and overruled the prosecution—and neither did anyone else. For one thing, Liddy and Buchanan hadn't needed to fabricate a charge in order to arrest Muñoz, who was illegally in possession of a gun and was violating parole. Technically, they could have charged him with assault with a deadly weapon for simply coming at the two officers in the truck, even if the truck hadn't struck them.
Not only had Muñoz pleaded guilty after the incident but, when the task-force detectives visited him in El Salvador to test Perez's allegations, he told them that he didn't know whether he had struck the officers that night, and that his passenger, Natividad, might well have opened the door of the truck, striking Liddy while trying to escape. But Muñoz's conviction was overturned, mostly on the word of Perez. From El Salvador, Muñoz had hired a lawyer—Gregory Moreno, who also represented Javier Ovando—and filed a claim against the city.
Now Muñoz claimed that he'd pleaded guilty only because he didn't think anyone would believe a protest of innocence. He said that he hadn't struck the officers with his truck that night, and that the gang meeting was really just a "reunion." Indeed, he claimed that he was not really an active member of a gang (which Moreno likened to a social club for economically disadvantaged minority youths), and that he had never been involved in any criminal activity. Under cross-examination, he was obliged to admit to a 1989 shooting outside a high school when he was a juvenile.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty against Liddy, Ortiz, and Buchanan. The jurors had focussed not on the question of whether Liddy and Buchanan had been struck by Muñoz's truck but on a computerized report about the incident on which the letters "GBI"—great bodily injury—had been marked. The jurors said that Liddy and Buchanan didn't look greatly injured to them.
Judge Connor overturned the decision, and, in an eighteen-page opinion, wrote that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence to warrant a conviction and that the jury had ruled on the wrong point of law. "While recognizing the enormous pressure on the community, on the police force, on the district attorney's office, and on the courts to 'fix' the Rampart scandal," she said, "this court is only interested in evaluating the fairness of the proceedings in this court and determining whether justice was done in this case."
A week before the jury rendered its verdict, the voters of Los Angeles County turned Gil Garcetti out of office; his successor, Steve Cooley, has appealed Judge Connor's ruling.
Rafael Perez, who has spent his entire incarceration in the Los Angeles County Jail rather than in prison, had hoped to be freed in June. But that hope was cast into doubt in March, when Perez's former partner, Nino Durden, reached a plea agreement with federal and state prosecutors, promising to coöperate in an investigation of civil-rights abuses in the Rampart case. Sources indicate that the thrust of the federal effort is aimed at Rafael Perez.
Chief Parks's future at the L.A.P.D. is uncertain. Because of term-limit reform passed after the Rodney King episode, Parks must seek reappointment to a second term next year, and low morale within the force, as well as the Rampart developments, may become an obstacle.
Defense attorneys are still scrutinizing thousands of convictions that might have been tainted by Rampart wrongdoing, and plaintiffs' attorneys are awaiting settlement decisions in a hundred and fifty lawsuits and claims against the city.
Of the gang members who received settlements from the city, at least two have been shot by rival gang members, and three others are known to be back in prison. On March 13th, Javier Ovando, on his way to Las Vegas with friends from his old neighborhood, was arrested and charged with four felony counts of drug possession.
Brian Liddy is in personal and professional limbo, awaiting a ruling on the District Attorney's appeal and possible federal charges related to Perez's accusations. He has been working at a private security firm, and has plans to start his own business when the Rampart case is resolved. "My new company is gonna be called Centurion Security and Investigations," he says.
Looking back, the people directly involved in uncovering and assessing the Rampart scandal now find themselves unable to take its measure—and that is mostly because of Rafael Perez. "I just think when you deal with the case as it appeared when it first broke, and what you have today, it is not what people thought would happen," Judge Fidler says. "Basically, it came down to Perez. What the prosecutor has is Perez and nothing else. And when you have all your eggs in one basket and the basket's starting to come apart at the seams . . . the case just doesn't have as much strength." Chief Parks contends that the Rampart case was exploited by the news media and police critics, and in the process became distorted beyond all proportion. "The media tried to make this the crime of the century," he says. "They began to talk about 'This is the worst corruption scandal in the history of L.A.P.D.' When it's all resolved, we'll have one-tenth of one per cent of our officers involved in this issue."
In creating and, to some degree, directing the course of the Rampart scandal, Rafael Perez may have overtly lied or withheld the whole truth, and he may have protected his friends and settled old scores by implicating his enemies. Few now believe that the wrongdoing was as widespread as Perez once suggested—of the seventy officers eventually implicated by Perez, five were fired by the department and eight more resigned. What has been verified in Perez's allegations is nowhere near as serious as the crimes that he himself confessed to. Meanwhile, investigators find themselves no closer to answers about possible police involvement in the bank robbery, Death Row activities, or the death of Biggie Smalls.
Yet there was in Perez's story a compelling element of truth—the revelation of a culture within the L.A.P.D. that, at the least, countenanced a strain of rough justice in the street. In that regard, the lasting significance of the Rampart scandal, perhaps, is the opportunity that it has afforded critics of the L.A.P.D. who have long been frustrated in their efforts to reform the department. "To the critics of the system," Judge Fidler says, "this gave them the ammunition they needed to say, 'See, we've always told you the system is corrupt, it only favors the prosecution or the police—we've proved it because Officer Perez has made these allegations.' "
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Carney is a contributing writer for Los Angeles Magazine
In keeping with its iconic logo of a hooded figure strapped to an electric chair, Death Row Records, apart from being the prime purveyor of gangsta rap, has also allegedly been the shadowy, hooded presence behind an extensive catalogue of criminal activity, up to and including murder. Recently in Los Angeles, a brick couldn't be thrown in a police investigation without hitting the notorious but highly profitable rap label, or its kingpin, Marion Hugh "Suge" Knight. Tracks of dirty cops reportedly working for the company led even from the bubbling, bottomless tarpit of the Rampart scandal.
Out of L.A.'s Ruthless Records--which in 1988 produced the kick-off gangsta album, "Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A. (*****z With Attitude)--came Death Row Records, by virtue of a visit from Suge Knight and baseball-bat-wielding thugs to the management at Ruthless which resulted in the release from his contract of rap artist, Andre Young (Doctor Dre).
Backed by Interscope Records, which funded the new label and distributed its product, Dre and Knight proved to be a potent combination: the gifted performer and producer, generally credited with introducing melody to rap; and the 6'4, 330-pound ex-defensive lineman for the former Los Angeles Rams who had an eye for talent and the get-it-done attitude of a born businessman.
This August Suge Knight will be released from a federal correctional facility after serving the second of two sentences for assault and conspiracy to possess a weapon. When I visited him in Mule Creek State Prison this winter, the rap czar seemed to feel as though a cosmic vengeance had been wreaked upon him for all the Death Row rappers his mob of lawyers had managed to keep out of jail. On his fingers, Knight enumerated them: "Nate Dogg, three Taco Bell robberies, and he's ID'd in two of 'em--he should have been in for 15. Snoop Dogg, 25-to-life on murder; we got him off scott free. And Dre should have done about eight on battery and vehicle stuff." And then there was the experience of paying off the parents of an 11-year-old girl raped by another of his former rappers. "This stuff has come home on me," the 34-year-old admitted.
According to the Soundscan tracking system, Death Row Records, since its inception in 1992, has sold 40 million units. In the mid-90s, capitalizing on the popularity of gangsta rap, each of the label's first six releases produced double-platinum-selling albums--an unheard of feat in the record business. Rap, which had originated on the East Coast as an element of the 1970s hip-hop culture that included break-dancing and graffitti, has since become a major component of the worldwide recording industry. This year, lumped into the urban music sector, which also includes rhythmn and blues, rap is expected to rank second only to pop in global record sales, accounting for 20% of revenues in a $40 billion a year business.
Gangsta rap emerged from LA's Compton, a small incorporated city in South Central Los Angeles, in the late 1980s. In Compton, young men fought with each other and fought with the cops. Songs glorifying gunpoint "street" fascism, cop-killing and the physical abuse of women begged the chicken/egg question about the relationship between violent lyrics and violence itself. In racially enclaved Los Angeles where the L.A.P.D. was considered an occupying army by the underclass, rap dirges explicitly avowing murder and drug dealing, like "**** Tha Police," and "Cop Killer," became anthemic. Tensions, already high between gangsters and law enforcement, increased.
Suge Knight grew up in Compton, which was controlled by the red-bandanna'd Bloods gang. Because he was a high school and college football star, Knight had had a free pass from the neighborhood gangbangers whose own limited horizons made them happy to associate with anyone successful at anything. When he first struck it rich, the Death Row CEO bought his way into a sort of honorary Blood-hood, and soon local Bloods began hanging around the label offices.
"Some of these people were hard-core dudes, real murderers," says an L.A. Sherriff's Department gang specialist. According to former Death Row employees, the atmosphere at the label became toxic with dread of gangster-administered pistol-whippings, ass-kickings and beat-downs which often resulted in ambulances being called. "We heard that when the rough stuff started, the beatings and such, Suge was not hands on, but then he got real with the attitude problem and started doing it himself," adds the detective.
Furthermore, rap, especially gangsta--termed "legalized drugs" by artists like Ice Cube (one of the original N.W.A. members)--has always had ties to drugs of the illegal kind. According to Sherriff's Department gang specialists, almost every rap label in the country was started by drug dealers: Master P in New Orleans, Jermaine Dupri in Atlanta, James "L'il J" Smith in Houston and Eric "Eazy E" Wright of Ruthless Records in L.A. Supposedly even Larry Hoover of Chicago's ultra-violent Black Gangster Disciples is launching a record company from federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Death Row itself came into being under cloudy circumstances that may have included $1.5 million in seed money from the flamboyant drug-dealer, Michael (Harry-O) Harris, currently serving a 28-year term for conspiracy to murder.
Public awareness of the label was ramped-up by the declaration in 1995 of an East Coast-West Coast rap war, a violent feud attributed to artistic and financial jealousies. The opening shot was fired by Knight at the New York based Bad Boy Entertainment's Sean "Puffy" Combs in a disrespectful aside uttered from the podium at a Source Awards ceremony in Manhattan. Over the next few years, the conflict would result in the deaths of not only chart-busting rappers like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.) but half a dozen bodyguards and gangmembers.
"These are businessmen living by gang rules," says a long-time Los Angeles Sherriff's Department prison-gang intelligence expert.
In 1995 a Rolling 60s Crip, Kelly Jamerson, was stomped to death at a Death Row party at the El Rey theatre in Los Angeles. Then, during the Christmas holidays, a New York record promoter, Mark Anthony Bell, was allegedly beaten with champagne bottles by Death Row artists and hangers-on and forced by Knight to drink urine from a glass--all in an attempt to get Bell to reveal the addresses of Puffy Combs and his mother. The label settled with the promoter for $600,000 and he declined to press charges. (Knight later denied that the incident occured, telling Newsweek, "I don't piss in champagne glasses.")
In 1996, David Kenner, a well-connected defense attorney in Knight's employ, won Snoop Dogg, the seminal Long Beach rapper, an acquittal in a murder case. He also popped open a legal log-jam keeping Tupac Shakur in prison on a sexual abuse conviction. In gratitude, the star-crossed rapper signed a recording deal with Death Row. Within months however, Shakur was dead--in a car-to-car shooting on the Las Vegas Strip--and Knight himself, who had joined in a brawl caught on videotape in the MGM Grand the night of the murder, was in prison for violating probationary conditions on his 1992 no-contest plea to pistol-whipping two aspiring rappers. Seven other criminal charges against the music executive, mostly on assault, battery and gun counts, had been previously pled out to, nolo contendere'd or otherwise juiced out of the justice system by Kenner.
With this much smoke swirling around the label, joint task forces from an alphabet of law enforcement agencies began directing probes at Death Row in hopes of finding fire. In 1996, a few weeks after the death of Tupac Shakur, the FBI revealed it was trying to determine whether the company was involved in money laundering, drug trafficking and racketeering. The probe was part of a larger investigation of Southern California street gangs. In 1997, after alerting Interscope Records of his intention to sue for profits, Michael Harris testified before a federal grand jury looking into the alleged drug-trade roots of the label. (Interscope would sever its ties with Death Row a year later.) No indictments arose from the grand jury proceeding, however, and the FBI probe was discontinued.
In March of 1997, East Coast rapper Biggie Smalls was fatally wounded by four shots fired through the door of the green GMC Suburban in which he was departing a music industry party in L.A.'s Wilshire District. To observers, one of them an off-duty Inglewood cop handling security for Smalls, the hit had seemed professional: a lone gunman using a .9mm semi-automatic who seemed to know in exactly which tinted-window vehicle Smalls was riding before pulling up alongside in a dark Chevy Impala and firing a nice tight pattern of shots through the SUV's door.
"We kept hearing rogue cops were involved in this," says Russ Poole, a Robbery/Homicide detective who recently retired just short of a 20-year pension in protest of how he and Rampart-related evidence he uncovered in the Smalls investigation were treated by the L.A.P.D..
Before the Smalls murder, Poole had led an investigation into a road rage incident that resulted in the shooting death of Kevin Gaines, an off duty L.A.P.D. officer. Poole had discovered that Gaines, besides living way beyond his police-salary means, was also living with Suge Knight's ex-wife, Sharitha. Poole believes Gaines, along with David Mack, an L.A.P.D. officer who is now serving time on bank robbery charges, and future Rampart-scandal bellwether, Rafael Perez, provided security for Death Row during various criminal enterprises--advising gangbangers associated with the label on police tactics, and serving as lookouts on drug deals.
In April of 1999, Robbery/Homicide detectives led by Poole seized Death Row cars and financial records, searching for evidence linking Knight to the Smalls slaying. And then in the fall of 2000, with the imprisoned executive scheduled to be released in the spring, rumors surfaced that a joint federal and state task force was examining Knight's connection not only to the Smalls murder but to several other killings in South Central. All of these probes, however, have gone inactive.
"If Suge Knight was some low-profile gangster he would have been prosecuted for three or four murders," says one criminal courts insider. "As it is, he won't be touched." And so the Smalls homicide continues to languish, running through its third set of L.A.P.D. investigators and second set of FBI in four years. And neither the feds nor the Las Vegas PD are nailing any scalps to the wall on behalf of Tupac Shakur, whose murder is still unsolved.
Though Suge Knight is scheduled to be released this summer, 2001, there are L.A.P.D. and Sherriffs Department detectives who will keep trying to put him, deservedly or not, back in jail. In the tightly circumscribed worlds of ghetto and gangsta, rumor sits next door to truth, and in the absence of hard facts, a tendency exists in Los Angeles law enforcement to imagine all kings in this land of milk and honey to be seated on thrones of blood. Then again, the Darwinian wilds of the entertainment industry can seem to claim more casualties than the criminal justice system, which is why the local law enforcement often appears content to let the big fish swim away. Suge Knight is one of those big fish. Having paid his debt to society he is simply, for now at least, too big to touch.
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CD Cooley, Joe / Rodney O : F__K New York Usually ships in 1-2 days(Only 1 available) $14.79
In "L.A.P.D. Blues," the recurring rhythm of L.A.'s west-side rap presents a political perspective of a racist and oppressive L.A.P.D.--a viewpoint rooted in the Department's history of racial relations and policing practices.
Chief William H. Parker (1950-1966) molded L.A.P.D.'s modern day doctrine and image, hiring Marines as drill instructors and embracing a para-military police model that would earn the force both fame and infamy. Under Parker, the police force became "professional" and, within law enforcement, "the finest in the world." But that was not a view shared by many in L.A., particularly the minority communities of South Central L.A. who were often on the receiving end of the L.A.P.D.'s aggressive tactics.
In 1965, a year before Parker died, the Watts riots offered bloody testimony-- 34 dead--to the widening gulf between the L.A.P.D. and the minority communities it policed. Like most big cities, L.A. had undergone a dramatic demographic shift (the African-American population quadrupled in 20 years); the civil rights movement was emerging on the national stage. Parker's explanation of the Watts riots underscored just how disconnected the Department seemed from the moment. "One person," Parker is reported to have said, "had thrown a rock, and then like monkeys in a zoo, others had started throwing rocks."
"****in with me cuz I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin my car, lookin for the product
Thinkin every ***** is sellin narcotics"
-- "**** the Police," N.W.A.
By the 1980s, Parker's protégé, Daryl Gates, was at the helm, proudly embracing, indeed promoting, the L.A.P.D. policing philosophy. "We went after crime before it occurred," Gates says. "Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime. And that made us a very aggressive, proactive police department."
When, in 1992, a nearly all-white suburban jury acquitted four white officers of criminality in the beating of Rodney King, the inner-city again erupted in violent protest. The costly and bloody rioting was, for some, the inevitable reaction of a community that viewed itself in an ongoing war with the L.A.P.D. - a war that increasingly found artistic expression in the lyrics of L.A. rap scene.
"Kickin up dust is a must,
I can't trust a cracker in a blue uniform,
Stick a ***** like a unicorn."
-- "We Had To Tear This Mutha****a Up," Ice Cube
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CD Cooley, Joe / Rodney O : F__K New York Usually ships in 1-2 days(Only 1 available) $14.79
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What Is Hip-hop's View Of The Rampart Scandal... I Mean Rampart Is Hip Hop
