“When I went on vacation the week before Christmas, I figured I was facing the lightest slap on the wrist they could give me,” Poole recalled. “For one thing, there were at least two dozen other police vehicles in the parking lot of that restaurant, most of them driven by people of higher rank.” Over the holidays, Poole reconciled with his wife and moved back into the family home. He came back to work in January feeling rejuvenated and was startled to learn that he faced a disciplinary hearing. “I expected the captain and lieutenant to go to bat for me and say this is chickenshit,” Poole recalled. “All the RHD detectives drove their take-home cars to places they shouldn’t—bars, golf courses, whatever. I didn’t even know what the rules were, because they were so loose. My supervisors were aware the parking lot of that restaurant had been filled with cop cars. I wasn’t going to roll over on anybody, but they all knew.” The investigation continued, however, and Poole knew by March that he would receive suspension days. “I couldn’t comprehend that they were spending so much time and effort to make a case against me for such a trivial thing, when they had all these guys working for Death Row who were walking time-bombs in terms of bad publicity for the LAPD. I felt like it was the ultimate disrespect to me and all the other honest cops in the department.”
Poole eventually concluded that his supervisors wanted leverage. “What the LAPD brass does to detectives working downtown is wait for you to make a mistake, then let you know that they’ve got you by the balls,” Poole explained. “The message is, ‘You will do as we say, or we’ll use this against you.’ When they think they have you under control, they put you in a position where you can be helpful.” The detectives assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Task Force in the spring of 1998, Poole would observe, included one who had been caught using the word “nigger” over the radio and another who had been accused of beating his wife. Poole’s lieutenant, meanwhile, had attempted for months to bait him into filing a complaint against Fred Miller for dereliction of duty. “Conmay would come to me and ask where Fred was,” Poole recalled. “My answer was always the same: ‘I don’t know where he is now, lieutenant, but I can page him for you.’ I could see the frustration in Conmay’s eyes. He was hoping I would tell him Fred was on the golf course. But I wasn’t going down that road. I knew the veterans would crucify a snitch.” When the LAPD brought him up on charges for misuse of his take-home car, “they thought they had me,” Poole recalled. “It really pissed them off when I admitted what I did, signed the papers, and took my suspension days. I wasn’t going to let them hold it over me.”
Poole’s colleagues in RHD were sympathetic at first, but as word spread that he was trying to make a case against cops in the Biggie Smalls murder investigation, many of his fellow detectives began to observe that Mr. Goody Two-shoes had feet of clay. “There were a lot of innuendos of a sexual nature, because the woman I’d been dating was in the car with me,” Poole recalled. “And that was painful, because I was back with my wife and wanted to put that whole period in my personal life behind me. And the guys who were still on my side were keeping quiet, waiting to see how this whole thing would play out. So I felt more and more isolated.”
After the first attempt to oust him from the Robbery-Homicide failed, Poole’s supervisors realized that having him around put them at risk. “So they got me out of RHD by offering me a more prestigious assignment,” Poole recalled. “Captain Tatreau came to me and said, ‘Russ, how would you like to join the task force and be in charge of Biggie Smalls and the connections to Mack and the bank robbery?’ I said, ‘I’d love to. But am I going to have some power and leeway to do this right?’ I told [the brass] that time was of the essence, because once Suge Knight went to jail, it was a perfect cover for the cops involved to get out of the organization. They promised I would have the power to get all the subpoenas I needed, but almost as soon as I joined the task force, they told me I was off the Smalls case.”
Fred Miller was embarrassed and had insisted that the Biggie Smalls murder investigation belonged to him, Poole was informed. “So now the brass wants me to concentrate on Perez,” Poole recalled. “When we were first forming the task force, the main targets were supposed to be David Mack and any other police officers who might be involved in either the bank robbery or the Biggie Smalls case. And Perez was sort of an afterthought. That’s what they said and that’s what they wrote, but it was all bogus. They wanted that on the record as the official intent, but once we started they completely abandoned David Mack and Kevin Gaines and Biggie Smalls and the whole Death Row Records investigation. We didn’t work on anything else but Perez. It was like the whole thing got transformed overnight. I knew it was coming down from the top, but nobody ever told me why we were doing what we were doing. I had to figure it out on my own.”
The other members of the task force also seemed uncertain about the parameters of their investigation. Just how large a criminal conspiracy were they dealing with? detectives wondered. “Perez and Durden and Sam Martin were meeting for lunch every day,” Poole recalled. “Then they’d reconnoiter in the middle of the night in Griffith Park behind a urinal stall. We didn’t know if they were talking about the bank robbery, the stolen coke, the Biggie Smalls murder, or all three.”
By the time Poole joined the task force, detectives working the coke-theft case realized that Perez had for some time been taking advantage of the LAPD’s absurdly loose system for checking out drugs as court evidence, especially when the amounts involved were a pound or less. Essentially, all an officer had to do was make a phone call to the Property Division, give his last name and badge number, then ask that the dope be sent to him by courier. The drugs had to be returned, of course, but no one at Property Division ever checked to find out if what they got back was pure cocaine or a bag of baking powder. How much coke Perez had stolen remained in question, but there was little doubt he was supplying a significant number of street dealers.
During July of 1998, while still under surveillance, Perez was photographed in a “romantic embrace” with a juicy-looking Honduran nightclub singer he knew as Bella Rios. Her real name was Veronica Quesada. Poole and another task force detective were assigned to watch the woman’s apartment, wait until she was alone, then ambush her with a request for an interview. “Veronica Quesada knows English, but she wouldn’t speak to us,” Poole recalled. “She kept saying, ‘no comprende.’ She hung tough during questioning. She’s no easy mark, I can tell you that.” Quesada’s composure dissolved, however, when her brother Carlos Romero walked into the apartment carrying a quarter-pound of cocaine. “The brother was so dumbfounded that he just stood there,” Poole remembered. “It might have been the easiest coke bust in history.”
During a subsequent search of the apartment, the detectives opened a drawer in the living room console and discovered a framed photograph of Ray Perez wearing a blood-red sweatsuit and flashing the West Coast gang sign. “I remember thinking, ‘I knew it,’ Poole recalled.
Within a couple of weeks, detectives from the task force had established numerous links between Perez, Quesada, and Romero. The most significant of these was that both Quesada and Romero had been convicted of felonies during the past year for dealing cocaine, yet each had received a suspended sentence. In both instances this was because the judges who heard the cases received requests for leniency from the estimable Det. Ray Perez. At the time of her arrest in April of 1997, detectives learned, Quesada was in possession of “pay/owe” sheets bearing the initials “RP” and the phone number for the Rampart Division. And on the date that the two kilos of cocaine were checked out of the LAPD’s Property Division, supposedly by Officer Joel Perez, Ray Perez had made a total of eight phone calls to Veronica Quesada and Carlos Romero. The detective made more than 160 calls to the same numbers between November of 1997 and June of 1998.
When questioned, Perez explained both his requests for leniency and the phone calls by claiming that Quesada was a “former informant” with whom he had, unfortunately, become sexually i
nvolved. “The guy was cool under questioning,” Poole recalled, “but when I saw him one afternoon soon after that at the Police Academy, you could tell he was scared shitless. He was looking around all the time, over his shoulders, behind his back. He knew we were closing in on him.”
By the time of the drug bust in Veronica Quesada’s apartment, Russell Poole had become convinced that the main intent of the task force created by LAPD Chief Bernard Parks was not to expand the investigation, but to limit it as completely as possible. “First, Chief Parks wanted us—me—to drop everything pertaining to Biggie Smalls, Kevin Gaines, David Mack, and Death Row Records, and to concentrate on Perez,” Poole recalled. “But then it turns out that we’re not supposed to look very deep into Perez’s background, either. I was starting to get the feeling that this entire investigation was going to end up as nothing more than a coke bust.”
On his own initiative, Poole read through more than a hundred reports written by Ray Perez in connection to drug arrests the detective had made. “It’s like this guy is superman,” Poole recalled, “like he has X-ray vision or something, because he’s making all these fantastic busts and dope seizures where he seems to see through walls.” Again and again, Poole noted, Perez would report that suspects had signed “Consent to Search” forms. “He had all these dope dealers telling him where their stash was even before they confessed,” Poole recalled. “That never happens. You bust a dealer, they figure, ‘Fuck you, find the shit yourself.’ And every one of these reports was the same. They were like boilerplates where you just fill in a new name and date. Any veteran cop would look at them and know they were fake, because any veteran cop knows that no case is identical to any other.” Poole took the reports directly to LAPD Commander Dan Schatz. “He called them ‘suspect,’ but wouldn’t add falsifying police reports to the charges against Perez,” Poole recalls. “That was when I first began to realize that the main objective of the task force was to protect the higher-ups, starting with Chief Parks.”
At almost the moment he began to think in this vein, Poole’s supervisors reduced his role in the Perez investigation so that he could concentrate on an incident involving another member of the Rampart CRASH unit. This was Brian Hewitt, who had been accused of viciously beating 18th Street Gang member Ismael Jimanez during an interrogation. On February 26, 1998, Hewitt and his partner Daniel Lujan had picked up Jimanez and his friend Eduardo Hernandez in front of a tattoo parlor and “detained” the pair on suspicion of grand theft auto. The real reason the two were transported to the Rampart detectives’ office, though, was the complaint of excessive force filed by Hernandez’s mother against two other Rampart officers. Both Jimanez and Hernandez said they were taunted and threatened by Hewitt, who, after separating the pair, demanded that Jimanez “find me a gun”—lead him to an 18th Street Gang member he could arrest for illegal possession of a firearm. When he refused, Jimanez said, Hewitt grabbed him by the throat and forced him backward until his head struck a wall. “You’re not fucking hearing me,” Hewitt told him, according to Jimanez, whose hands were cuffed behind his back. “I will book you for anything. You had better tell me tonight where I could find a gun.” When Jimanez didn’t answer, the powerfully built Hewitt punched him with a clenched fist several times in the chest and once in the kidneys. “All I want is one little gun,” Hewitt said, then turned and walked out of the room. A few seconds later Jimanez vomited blood on the carpeted floor and nearly passed out.
When Rampart officer Ethan Cohan walked into the interview room a few moments later, Jimanez told him he couldn’t breathe and had vomited blood, then pleaded with Cohan to remove his handcuffs. Cohan looked at the bloodstain on the floor, said, “Oh shit,” then quickly turned and left. Cohan came and went twice more, Jimanez said, before finally removing the cuffs and telling him he was free to leave. He vomited repeatedly during the mile-and-a-half walk back to the tattoo parlor, Jimanez said, where friends told him he looked really bad and drove him to Good Samaritan Hospital. Doctors in the hospital’s emergency room reported the alleged assault to Rampart Division’s Watch Commander, who sent a sergeant to take Jimanez’s statement. A scrap of carpet was collected as evidence and the case was turned over to Internal Affairs, “which basically did nothing for the next five months,” said Poole. The detective was startled to discover that the IA investigators had not even ordered DNA testing of the blood on the carpet. “All that takes is one phone call,” Poole explained. “I made that call as soon as I found out that they hadn’t checked to make sure the blood belonged to Jimanez. And it turned out, of course, that it was Jimanez’s blood.”
One claim after another made by the gangbanger and his friends checked out. At the same time, Poole heard troubling descriptions of Officer Hewitt’s violent disposition. “It became clear pretty fast that Hewitt was a sadist,” Poole recalled. “He really liked beating people up. He got off on it, almost in a sexual way.”
Though he didn’t quite comprehend it at the time, Poole’s investigation of Hewitt would mark a major turning point in the task force’s mission. Up to that point, all of the officers under investigation for criminal conduct were black, except for Perez, who was half black. Hewitt, however, was a blue-eyed blond. And the case against him was not for murder, robbery, or drug dealing but for brutality.
“It seemed very strange and mysterious when they moved me over to the Hewitt case,” Poole recalled. “First, I was gonna go after Mack and Gaines and all the cops who were suspect in the Biggie Smalls case, then I was supposed to work the dope case against Perez, and the next thing I know they have me on the Jimanez beating. I kept wondering, ‘What is this about?’ Then they partnered me with an investigator from Internal Affairs. I asked the lieutenant, ‘Isn’t this a conflict of interest?’ I mean, I was supposed to be investigating criminal charges and she was supposed to be investigating administrative ones. But the lieutenant said, ‘No, you’re both members of the task force.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ but then they assigned the very detective who had tried to run me out of RHD with those bullshit charges about the autopsy to supervise the investigation. And right away he accuses me of trying to fabricate a case against Hewitt.”
Poole went to the task force leader, Lt. Emmanuel Hernandez, and asked him to assign a new supervisor to the case. Hernandez, however, refused, “even after I told him that the guy’s attitude was going to screw the case up if it ever went to court,” Poole recalled. “What I didn’t realize then was that Hernandez and Chief Parks didn’t want this case to go to court, because they were still trying to cover up an earlier investigation involving Hewitt and Perez that they should have used to clean up Rampart Division way back in September of 1995.”
In that case, Hewitt, Perez, and a female officer named Stephanie Barr were accused of criminal retaliation against three 18th Street Gang members suspected of slashing the tires on Hewitt’s vehicle. After an entire squad of cops beat the three gangbangers senseless, Hewitt, Perez, and Barr stripped them down to their boxer shorts, the 18th Streeters said, and made them walk nearly naked through a crowd made up largely of young women their own age. Actually, only two of them walked. The third, nineteen-year-old Carlos Oliva, was in a wheel-chair, paralyzed from the waist down by a shooting four years earlier.
Thoroughly humiliated and feeling he had nothing left to lose, Oliva filed a complaint the next day. The man who took that report was Lt. Emmanuel Hernandez, then a Rampart supervisor. Nothing much happened until December, when Oliva was arrested (by Stephanie Barr’s partner, Walter McMahon, for allegedly driving a stolen car. Though released after five days on that charge, Oliva was rearrested a month later by Barr, McMahon, and Hewitt, charged this time with possessing fifty-five rocks of crack cocaine for sale. He had found the dope on Oliva when he arrested him on the auto theft charge that had been dismissed back in December, McMahon said.
Mainly due to the good work of his public defender, the case against Oliva was shown to be badly flawed and probably dirty. His arrest kept O
liva behind bars for three months, however, until the district attorney’s office reduced the charges against him from a felony carrying a sentence of five years in state prison to a simple possession misdemeanor that allowed Oliva to avoid prison by entering a drug diversion program.
Oliva’s complaint against Officers Hewitt, Barr, and Perez, meanwhile, still was being handled by Lt. Hernandez, who had moved on to the Internal Affairs Division, where he worked directly under his mentor, then Deputy Chief Bernard Parks. Internal Affairs moved the Oliva investigation along as slowly as was humanly possible, not even bothering to interview the alleged victim until eight months after he had filed his complaint. In the meantime, the young man who had joined Oliva in the complaint was turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service by a group of LAPD officers that included Hewitt and Perez, then deported to Honduras. Not until late 1997, almost two years after the original incident, did Lt. Hernandez file a report recommending that several officers, including Brian Hewitt and Stephanie Barr, be given letters of reprimand, a slap on the wrist that did not even delay Barr’s promotion to homicide detective. Ray Perez was not disciplined at all for his part in the incident.
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