LAbyrinth

by Randall Sullivan

  Lyga, like Russell Poole, was furious when he learned that Kevin Gaines’s friend Derwin Henderson had gotten off with a slap on the wrist. “Henderson should have at least been fired, and could easily have been charged with interfering with an investigation,” Poole said. “Instead he gets a five-day suspension for ‘inappropriate conduct.’ If the races were reversed in this case, and a bunch of white officers had gone out to question witnesses like he and his friends did, all hell would have broken loose. Heads would have rolled.”

  Whatever role race played in it, Poole remained convinced that the LAPD brass was intentionally covering up for the officers who had been involved with Death Row Records. “Each time I pushed to go down that road in the Biggie Smalls investigation,” Poole recalled, “the brass told me, ‘We’re not going to get involved in that.’ Their attitude was, ‘Gaines is dead. Mack has already gone down for bank robbery. Let’s not get involved in more controversy.’”

  Poole believed more controversy was inevitable, however. Each time he reviewed his notes of the interview with Kevin Hackie, Poole would pause at the answer Hackie had given when asked to identify any members of the Los Angeles Police Department who were close to Suge Knight. All he knew, Hackie said, was that three LAPD officers had shown up regularly at the “private parties” Suge Knight threw for his inner circle. Kevin Gaines was the only one whose name he knew, Hackie said. The second man the bodyguard would identify a few months later as David Mack. Hackie did not identify the third officer until more than two years later, when he was shown a photograph of Ray Perez.

  PART FOUR

  INVENTING THE SCANDAL

  Poole has performed his duties in an outstanding manner. He is a dependable, hard-working and loyal employee. His investigations are always thorough and related reports are well-written … Poole maintains a good attitude in the midst of the present turmoil with the Department. He is extremely loyal to the LAPD and proud to be part of this organization. He works diligently to instill this attitude in those he works with and strives to achieve the Department goals.

  —From the “Performance Evaluation Report” filed on Detective Trainee Russell Poole for the period 9/1/91 to 2/29/92

  CHAPTER NINE

  Poole had first heard of Ray Perez on February 6, 1998, when he was given a list of LAPD officers who were closest to David Mack. At the top were Sammy Martin, a detective trainee in the Rampart Division who was the godfather to one of Mack’s children, and Perez, an anti-gang detective assigned to Rampart who once had been partnered with Mack as an undercover narcotics officer. Perez had been involved in an officer involved shooting, Poole was advised early on, in which Mack killed a drug dealer.

  When he looked at Mack’s personnel file and read the official account of Jose Vincencio’s shooting, Poole was struck by a statement from Perez to the effect that he owed his life to David Mack and would do anything for the man. The lead detectives in the bank robbery, Tyndall and Grant, had called Perez in for questioning within forty-eight hours of Mack’s arrest. A short time later, the detectives learned that Perez and Sammy Martin had left with Mack for Las Vegas two days after the bank robbery, staying in a $1,500 a night suite at Caesar’s Palace, and blowing through $21,000 in a single weekend. On a similar excursion to Lake Tahoe, the three had posed together for a photograph, Mack in his blood-red suit, flanked by Martin and Perez, each of them holding unlit cigars. Like Kevin Gaines and David Mack, Poole soon discovered, Perez had for some time enjoyed a lifestyle that was impossible to support on the $58,000 annual salary he earned as a police officer. He drove expensive cars, took Caribbean cruises, lost thousands at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, and apparently thought nothing of spending four or five thousand dollars in an evening to entertain one young girlfriend after another.

  During April of 1998, Perez realized that he was under surveillance by officers from the Internal Affairs and Robbery-Homicide divisions. He assumed this was because the department suspected he had been involved in the bank robbery with David Mack. Perez responded by marching straight in to tell his commanding officer that he had nothing to do with it. His fellow cops, however, weren’t tailing Ray Perez on account of his possible involvement in the bank robbery (although they strongly suspected he had been one of Mack’s accomplices), but because they believed he had stolen a large quantity of pure cocaine from the LAPD’s Property Division.

  The investigation began on March 27, 1998, when a property officer at the LAPD’s Evidence Control Unit realized that more than six pounds of cocaine checked out on March 2 still had not been returned. In early April, LAPD Officer Joel Perez was startled by an Overdue Property Notice reminding him to return three kilos of cocaine he had checked out more than a month earlier. He hadn’t checked out any three kilos of coke, Joel Perez replied. Shown a sign-out sheet bearing his name and badge number, the officer insisted it was a forgery.

  LAPD Property Officer Laura Castellano said she couldn’t specifically recall the transaction in which she had released the three kilos, and didn’t recognize the photograph of Joel Perez she was shown. She did remember handing over a carton of narcotics to another Officer Perez, however, Castellano said. Rafael was his first name, Castellano told detectives. She remembered the man mainly because he had been so “rude and arrogant,” and she had remarked upon his obnoxious attitude to another property officer, who said he was always that way. Castellano also recalled the name of the supervising officer who released the coke to her. A check of LAPD records soon revealed that the three property officers had worked together on only one day in their entire careers—March 2, 1998. “If Rafael Perez had picked up the cocaine on any other day he never would have been detected,” admitted Richard Rosenthal, the assistant district attorney who was eventually chosen to prosecute the detective. “It was just bad luck.”

  On April 16, LAPD detectives discovered that a second carton of cocaine was missing from the Property Division, this one containing a pound of coke that on February 5, 1998, had been sent by courier to Rampart Division, where it was signed for by Officer Armando Coronado. He had made no request for cocaine, said Coronado, who reacted viscerally when detectives asked him about his relationship with Ray Perez. Perez despised him, Coronado said, mainly because of his refusal to cut corners in dealing with informants and when searching suspects. Perez called him a “company man,” Coronado said, and on one occasion had threatened in the presence of several witnesses to “kick my ass.”

  Russell Poole was less intrigued by the enmity between Coronado and Perez than by the identity of the undercover detective who had booked the missing coke into evidence—his name was Frank Lyga. Poole became convinced—as did several other Robbery-Homicide detectives—that Ray Perez had targeted Lyga’s coke as retaliation for the shooting of Kevin Gaines. “We all agreed this was just way too big a coincidence,” Poole recalled.

  Suddenly, the Los Angeles Police Department became very interested in knowing who and what they were dealing with here.

  Born in 1967, in Humacao, Puerto Rico, of African and Hispanic ancestry, Rafael Perez had never known his father. His mother, Luz, moved her three children to Brooklyn in 1972, and quickly relocated to Paterson, New Jersey, where Rafael spent most of his childhood. The family moved again just before Rafael started high school, this time to a very tough neighborhood in North Philadelphia, where they stayed in the home of an uncle who dealt drugs for a living. Despite his difficult background, Rafael Perez was a straight-arrow teenager who joined the Marine Corps immediately after high school. While stationed at the Marine barracks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he met and married (at age eighteen) a young enlisted woman from the nearby Pease Air Force Base. Lorri Charles was black and assumed, based upon his features and complexion, that Rafael was also. It was an early example of Perez’s remarkable capacity for shape shifting, especially along racial and ethnic lines. When his bride was discharged from the Air Force, her husband moved her to the Marine Air Corps Station in Tustin, California, Lorri�
��s home state. The couple broke up only three years into their marriage, when Lorri discovered Rafael’s infidelity.

  In June of 1989, shortly after his wife had left him, twenty-one-year-old Rafael Perez was accepted into the Los Angeles Police Academy. He did his probationary stint in the LAPD’s Harbor Division, then was transferred to patrol duty in Wilshire Division, where he first began to introduce himself as Ray. Driven and intense, Perez had a lithe body and a face that was remarkably handsome, except for eyebrows that grew in an almost solid line across the bridge of his nose. He advanced quickly within the LAPD, taking advantage of his fluency in Spanish to win an assignment as an undercover narcotics cop after only a year of patrol duty.

  The West Bureau Buy Team was made up of eight to ten younger officers who could convincingly pose as drug buyers in neighborhoods all over the city. While other members of the unit worked the beaches and busted Rastafarians, Ray Perez and David Mack accepted the most dangerous of duties, purchasing narcotics almost exclusively in notorious gang neighborhoods and housing projects. Like most members of the buy team, Perez loved the work. “Just by its nature there is constant danger, a constant go, go, go, a constant rush,” the detective who ran the buy team, Bobby Lutz, would explain to the Los Angeles Times. “Those guys were on the edge all the time … they lap it up, they relish it.”

  Russell Poole, like a lot of LAPD officers in more mainstream positions, regarded undercover narcotics officers as freelancers who made their own rules and regularly became untethered from such niceties as due process and probable cause. The worst of them were the best examples of how the War on Drugs had ravaged law enforcement in the United States. There was a distinctly ends-justify-the-means attitude that tended to blur the line between cops and criminals. Most undercover officers remained honest, but a lot didn’t, believed Poole, who was convinced that both Ray Perez and David Mack had gone bad as members of the West Bureau Buy Team. “During the first briefing I received on Mack,” Poole recalled, “I was told that he allegedly had been involved in several rip-offs of drug dealers. And since Perez was his partner, it seemed pretty likely that he had been involved also.”

  In 1994, soon after David Mack left the Buy Team to transfer to West L.A., Ray Perez applied for a job with the Chino Police Department. Everyone who knew about this was astonished when Perez didn’t land the position. Ray’s boss Bobby Lutz, figuring the yokels out in Chino should consider themselves lucky to land a top LAPD officer, phoned the smaller police department to ask what was going on. When the Chino cops said they couldn’t talk about it, Lutz surmised that Perez had failed a test—either a polygraph or a psychological exam. It was a red flag that no one chose to wave, and only a few months later Ray Perez moved onward and upward to the Rampart Division’s CRASH unit.

  CRASH (which stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) was the LAPD’s elite anti-gang unit, and Perez joined it at a time when the department estimated that Los Angeles was home to 403 distinct gangs claiming nearly 60,000 members. In 1994, the year Perez joined CRASH, gang members committed almost 11,000 crimes in the city, by the LAPD’s accounting, including 408 homicides. Gang violence had become the number one problem in most citywide citizen polls, and about 10 percent of all Los Angeles’s gang crimes were occurring in the Rampart Division, turf of the notorious 18th Street Gang.

  Rampart was eight square miles of decaying apartment buildings and scabrous storefronts between Hollywood and downtown, encompassing the Pico-Union and Westlake districts. These neighborhoods were the most densely populated in Los Angeles, and home to perhaps the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in the state. Vendors who peddled big sacks of oranges and dealers who sold small bags of cocaine worked the sidewalks side by side. Nannies and gardeners who sent half their minimum-wage paychecks back across the border waited for buses all along the perimeter of McArthur Park, which had become the largest open-air drug market in the United States. And most of that drug trade was controlled by the 18th Street Gang.

  The 18th Streeters were by far the biggest gang in a city that had become the nation’s capital of gang activity, claiming as many as 20,000 members who were scattered in subgroups, or “cliques,” up and down the West Coast from Tijuana to Portland, Oregon. The gang wove together layers of criminal enterprise that deployed a system of “tax” collection to link drug trafficking all the way from the powerful, prison-based Mexican Mafia at the top to the smalltime independent dealers at the bottom. More than 150 murders were linked to the 18th Street Gang between 1985 and 1995. Citizens all across the city, and especially in the neighborhoods most affected, wanted the gang dealt with, and the members of Rampart’s CRASH unit were on point in the LAPD’s battle against the 18th Streeters, an engagement that would come to a climax in August of 1997, when the Los Angeles City Council won a court injunction against the gang that made it illegal for members to associate.

  In this context, joining CRASH during the mid-1990s was more like becoming a special forces fighter in a wartime army than anything resembling traditional police work. CRASH unit members were there to “take back the streets” and an officer’s performance was judged almost exclusively by how many gangsters he could put behind bars. Rampart’s CRASH team had not only its own logo—the Aces and Eights of Wild Bill Hickok’s “dead man’s hand”—but even its own headquarters in a detective substation a mile from the main division station. “We Intimidate Those Who Intimidate Others,” read the motto above the main entrance. Officers worked mostly at night and without any real supervision. If an officer made arrests that led to convictions, he was doing a good job; if not, he was considered to lack the “initiative” that anti-gang work required.

  Ray Perez had been a top “producer” as an undercover narcotics cop, and he continued to make a high number of arrests when he joined Rampart’s CRASH unit. And perhaps no other detective on the LAPD could match his effectiveness as a witness in court. Public Defender Tamar Toister would recall her feeling of helplessness as she watched Perez testify against her client Javier Ovando in early 1997. It was a case where Toister figured that both judge and jury might feel a certain sympathy for her client. Perez and his partner Nino Durden had shot Ovando three times in the process of arresting him, and the nineteen-year-old was left paralyzed from the waist down. Ovando had to be wheeled into court on a gurney at his preliminary hearing, and would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. After Perez described how Ovando (whose gang nickname was “Sniper”) had attempted to ambush him and his partner with an assault rifle though, the 18th Streeter’s fate was sealed. “Perez was unbelievably good on the witness stand,” Toister recalled. “He was better than any police officer I’ve ever cross-examined, smooth, sincere, articulate, with just the right amount of emotion. You couldn’t bait him, you couldn’t trip him up, you couldn’t get him to react.” Duly impressed, Judge Stephen Czuleger sentenced Ovando to twenty-three years in state prison, even more time than the prosecutor had asked for. “That was entirely due to how good Perez had been on the stand,” Toister recalled. “I have to admit, I believed him myself.”

  By June of 1998, Ray Perez was the target of a special LAPD unit. Though later made famous in the local media as the Rampart Task Force, back then it was known simply as the Robbery-Homicide Task Force, and its creation was largely a response to the detective work of Russell Poole. “The connections that Russ Poole had made between the David Mack bank robbery and the Biggie Smalls murder, including the possibility that an LAPD officer, or officers, might be involved, were the origin of the task force,” agreed Richard Rosenthal. The assistant district attorney’s recollection was ironic, since by the time Rosenthal came aboard, Det. Poole viewed the task force more as the vehicle for a continuing cover-up rather than as a means for arriving at truth.

  During the last two weeks of May, Poole had engaged in a series of public confrontations over the handling of the Biggie Smalls case, first with Fred Miller, then with Lieutenant Pat Conmay, and finally
with Captain Jim Tatreau. “I told Captain Tatreau, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’” Poole recalls. “‘If you want the Biggie Smalls case solved, you’ve got to give it to me alone.’” Several days later, Poole found a hand-drawn cartoon on his desk showing a toilet and the plumbing pipes connected to it. The words “You Are Here” were connected by an arrow to a turd lodged in the pipes. Poole recognized the handwriting as his partner’s.

  Two days later, Poole flew to Chicago to interview Kevin Lewis. While he was gone, another senior detective filed a complaint against him, alleging that Poole had been derelict in monitoring the autopsy of a Los Angeles Unified School District police officer who had been killed by a shotgun blast to the face. Poole’s lieutenant ordered him transferred out of Robbery-Homicide, then reversed himself when the complainant’s partner backed Poole. “For the first time in months I sort of had an upper hand,” Poole recalled. “The lieutenant had made all these accusations against me without waiting to hear my side of the story, and now he was afraid I’d file a complaint against him.”

  Poole had been under an administrative cloud since the previous December, when the department had brought charges against him for the first time in his career as an LAPD detective. The incident seemed so inconsequential at the time that Poole hadn’t realized how it might be used against him later. He and his wife had separated for five months at the end of 1997, mainly because Megan was fed up with her husband’s devotion to his duties as a police officer. “Living with a homicide detective is tough,” Poole admitted. “Getting calls in the middle of the night, working long hours and only coming home to catch a few hours of sleep, being so absorbed in a case that you don’t see what’s happening in your personal life. I felt, ‘Look, it’s a major responsibility to be a homicide detective. There’s killers on the loose and it’s my job to find them.’ My wife wanted me to put my family first, and she was right, but I didn’t see it at the time.” While separated from Megan, Poole began dating a secretary who worked for the Los Angeles Police Commmission. Ten days before Christmas, the pair attended a Robbery-Homicide Division holiday party at Little Pedro’s, a downtown restaurant favored by the LAPD. “All of us coppers drove our take-home cars,” recalled Poole. “The woman I was dating and I only stayed about forty-five minutes. I was exhausted. I had been up for almost two days, with maybe three hours sleep in that time, and I had to get up early the next morning to fly back east. I didn’t even have a drink. All I could think about was getting up at four the next morning.” When they left the restaurant, Poole asked the young woman to drive while he took a nap. When she said yes, he kissed her on the cheek, then rolled over against the passenger-side door and fell asleep. What Poole didn’t realize was that his car was being tailed by an LAPD commander who would file a complaint against him for taking a department-owned car to the restaurant, permitting a civilian employee to drive it, and kissing her on the cheek in public.