“That whole quote, investigation, unquote was about letting the statute of limitations run out so that no charges could be filed and the thing could be kept from the public,” Poole said. “And that’s how they wanted the Jimanez beating handled. It came to the task force so Hernandez could stay on top of it and protect Parks from any connection to the Oliva thing. The IA investigator they partnered me with and I were supposed to put together a case that would let them fire Hewitt from the department and bury the whole thing internally. Only I thought criminal charges should be filed. So pressure was constantly being applied to back off. But I wasn’t going to back off. And when they saw that I hadn’t learned my lesson, they thought, ‘Oh, no, we have a real problem here.’ I figured, ‘Yes, you do.’”
CHAPTER TEN
Russell Poole wasn’t the LAPD’s choice to be the officer who arrested Ray Perez, but the department continued to place the detective in the right place at the wrong time.
Poole and a female narcotics investigator named Diana Smith were assigned to perform surveillance on Perez’s house in Ladera Heights on the morning of August, 25, 1998, shortly after the department’s brass decided it was time finally to charge the CRASH detective with grand theft. “We were sitting out front when we saw the garage door come up,” Poole recalled. “Denise Perez backs her BMW out and leaves for work. SWAT is supposed to make the arrest, and an hour later they’re working their way toward us, but on the radio we hear that our cover may have been blown. One of the chiefs had ordered that Denise Perez be pulled aside at work and asked if her husband is at home. That tips her off. She goes back to her cubbyhole and calls home.
“Ray Perez comes out a few minutes later, climbs into his red Ford Expedition, and takes off. We catch up and follow. Diana is driving. I call in a request for an air unit and backup, because we are gonna pull him over. We’re going north on La Brea by now. We pull up next to the Expedition, I point and hold up my badge. Perez gets this wild look in his eyes for a moment, and I think maybe this is going to turn into a pursuit or even a shoot-out, but then he pulls over to the curb, just as the air unit and a black-and-white show up. I take Perez over to my car and put my cuffs on him. I can see his heart literally pounding through his shirt, but he won’t make a sound. That’s when I notice the briefcase in his vehicle and ask what it’s for. He says, ‘That’s for my lawyer. I was on my way to my lawyer’s office.’ He’s a cop, so he knows he has at least a legal argument to suppress if we open the briefcase and find evidence against him. I wanted to open it anyway, but when I phone the D.A., Rosenthal, he says no. It was a stupid mistake, but Rosenthal ended up making a lot of stupid mistakes. And Perez wouldn’t say another word.”
For Poole, his arrest of Ray Perez was considerably less significant than his role as evidence coordinator during the search of Perez’s home nineteen days earlier. The search had produced a trove of 228 “suspicious items” stashed in nooks and crannies all over the house. In terms of the drug theft, perhaps the strongest evidence was a carton of papers that included receipts for thousands of dollars in cash deposits to a Wells Fargo Bank account, records of large purchases on an array of credit cards, documents related to the purchase of real estate in Puerto Rico and California, eight pages of cellular phone records, plus assorted phone and address books. Poole was most interested, however, in the fifty-nine items recovered from cardboard boxes in the basement of the house. These included not only hundreds of rounds of live ammunition that ranged from 12-gauge shotgun shells to .22 caliber rifle bullets, but a large assortment of folding knives and a perplexing collection of “replica” firearms that included an Uzi air gun, a .357 Colt Python with a plugged barrel, several realistic-looking cap guns (one with a screw-in silencer), as well as 9mm and .38 caliber models. These plastic weapons were stage props and children’s toys, but they looked convincing in photographs, and Poole believed, correctly, that this was their purpose. “It turned out that Perez and his buddies were planting them on suspects,” Poole explained, “taking photographs at the scene, and using those as evidence in court.” Perez had cached a huge quantity of stuff stolen from the LAPD, including nearly two dozen keys to police vehicles, several “raid jackets,” and three crowd control helmets. What caught Poole’s attention, though, were the police scanners Perez kept concealed in his basement. “Since starting on the Biggie Smalls case, I had kept coming across these crime reports in which the perpetrators used police radios and scanners,” Poole recalled. “Mark Anthony Bell said Suge Knight and his thugs had used them to monitor the cops while they had him locked in that room upstairs, and the USC student said he had heard Mack and the other two bank robbers listening to police scanners. There were all these reports of the Death Row people using them in and around their studios in Tarzana. Perez certainly didn’t need them for framing suspects, and there was no evidence he used them in his dope dealing. For me, this was a possible link to Mack and to Death Row, but once again I couldn’t get anyone interested in pursuing it.”
Shortly before the search of the Perez residence, Fred Miller had responded to increased pressure to make something happen in the Biggie Smalls murder investigation (and silence Poole) by orchestrating a series of raids on the offices of Death Row Records production companies, and on assorted homes and businesses owned by Suge Knight. “A fishing expedition,” Suge Knight’s latest attorney, Robin Yanes, called it, and Russell Poole agreed. “I warned everyone that was the wrong way to go,” Poole recalled. “To get to a guy like Knight you have to go from the bottom up, and the cops who worked for him were the best way to do that. Those guys were the weak link and I think a lot of them would have rolled over if they’d been brought up on charges, criminal charges especially. I’ve seen it before—once these guys are in the court system and know they’re facing prison time, they will talk. Cops understand better than anybody that once arrests are made it becomes a race to see who can cut a deal first. But all those raids accomplished was to make everyone scatter.” The LAPD trumpeted its seizure of an Impala SS owned by Suge Knight, and let the news media know that forensics tests had turned up gunshot residue around the driver’s-side door. But that SS was red, not black, and the gunshot residue had been found nearly a year and a half after the Biggie Smalls shooting.
Poole’s refusal to abandon his interest in the Biggie Smalls murder was making his position on the task force, and his assignment to the Robbery-Homicide Division as well, increasingly untenable. “I was complaining that we had had a series of incomplete investigations and that it was orchestrated to be that way,” Poole explained. “I had become convinced that LAPD officers affiliated with Death Row Records had been involved in the conspiracy to kill Biggie Smalls and none of the brass wanted to hear that.”
It didn’t help that Poole persisted in pushing the investigation toward even more untested theories of police involvement. When he learned that the bloody clothing and shell casings that the prosecution considered its most important physical evidence in the murder case against Snoop Dogg had been either lost, stolen, or discarded while in LAPD custody, Poole inquired as to where those items had been held. He was informed that they had gone from West LA to Pacific Division before disappearing. “David Mack was at West LA and Kevin Gaines was at Pacific,” Poole observed. “I know from my own experience that virtually any police officer can gain access to evidence held in the property room at an LAPD station, and that they have access to the computers that can be used to authorize destruction of evidence, also. I thought it should be looked into, but no one would even talk to me about it.”
Poole also was intrigued when Brian Tyndall told him that one of the first people to communicate with David Mack after he was arrested for the bank robbery was the flamboyant racing and rock concert promoter Mike Goodwin. The note Goodwin sent to Mack at the Montebello City Jail read simply, “If you need anything, give us a jingle.” What made those words interesting was that Goodwin for years had been the prime suspect in one of L.A.’s most famous unsolved
murders, the 1989 slaying of the legendary race driver and former world land-speed record holder Mickey Thompson. Thompson had been shot to death in his driveway in what LAPD detectives described as “an assassination” by “professional hit men.” A number of witnesses had seen the suspects fleeing on bicycles from Thompson’s secluded home in the hillside community of Bradbury, and identified the pair as black males in their mid- to late twenties. When Poole ordered up the composite drawings that had been made of the suspects, he decided that they looked a lot like David Mack and Amir Muhammed, who were twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old at the time. Descriptions of the suspects’ heights and weights also matched Mack and Muhammed.
“I was reaching, obviously,” Poole conceded, “but then that’s how cases get solved.” Again, he could not initiate an investigation. “I heard one more time that I didn’t have sufficient probable cause,” Poole recalled. “But how could I get that probable cause without authorization to investigate? It was the same catch-22 logic they had been using to block me all the way back to the Kevin Gaines investigation. Of course I couldn’t demonstrate that Mack and Billups [Muhammed] had been Mickey Thompson’s killers, but I felt certain there was a legitimate basis for looking into that possibility. Nobody in the upper echelons of the LAPD wanted to hear it, though.”
Poole also was making a pest of himself in his pursuit of criminal charges against Brian Hewitt for the beating of Ismael Jimanez. As he pursued this investigation, Poole heard more and more reports of abuse involving Rampart officers, including claims that CRASH detectives were beating suspects with impunity, planting guns or knives on the gangbangers they rousted, having sex with prostitutes, and ripping off drug dealers. “You hear this stuff all the time, but it sounded a lot more credible than it usually does,” Poole recalled. “These gangbangers could tell you names, dates, and times.” He became convinced that, at a minimum, the Rampart CRASH officers “had their own retaliation group” to handle citizen complaints of police abuse. “If somebody reported one of them, they’d send out different officers to bring in the gangbangers who filed the complaint on false charges,” Poole said.
Poole warned the LAPD brass that many of the marginal 18th Street Gang members were being mishandled by the Rampart CRASH team. “Fair and firm is what works with gangbangers,” he explained. “Because not all of them are hard-core, and the ones who aren’t will talk, if they know you’re a decent cop.” The 18th Streeters, Poole warned, were being “beaten down to the point where they didn’t have anything to lose and might retaliate against cops.” The detective looked like a prophet in August of 1998, shortly before the arrest of Ray Perez, when a CRASH officer from the Southwest Division, Filbert Cuesta Jr., the father of two young children, was shot dead in what police described as an “ambush” outside an apartment building. A note found at the scene stated that the 18th Street Gang was tired of being “disrespected” by the LAPD.
The climax of Poole’s tenure with the task force came one month later, when he was summoned to a September meeting attended by Lt. Hernadez and Chief Parks, then was asked to give them an update on the Hewitt investigation. “I told Parks, ‘It’s much more than this case, chief,’” Poole recalled. “‘You’ve got a bunch of vigilante cops at Rampart.’ And everybody went silent all at once. The chief didn’t ask me a single question. He just sat there, and so did everybody else.”
The most uncomfortable moment in that meeting, however, came when Brian Tyndall brought up the Biggie Smalls case. “I had been told by Hernandez in advance not to say a word about Biggie Smalls, or Mack and Gaines,” Poole recalled. “But near the end of the meeting Tyndall says, ‘Chief, Russ still believes Mack had something to do with the Biggie Smalls case.’ Tyndall didn’t have to do that, and it took some balls. But he really believed deep in his heart in what I had to say, and he’s a very good cop, so he spoke up. But Parks just clammed up. He wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even look at anybody. It was like Tyndall hadn’t spoken. It was very bizarre. And then a few minutes later the meeting was over. When Parks finally spoke to me, all he said was, ‘I don’t want you to investigate any more. Give me a report in two weeks.’”
The report Poole turned in was on time, but hardly what Chief Parks had hoped for. Only a short time earlier, Poole had submitted his “Chronology” of the Biggie Smalls murder investigation. Thirty-one pages long and extremely detailed, it made a persuasive case that the LAPD had failed to pursue its best leads, dating all the way back to the implication of Kevin Gaines. Poole argued strenuously that David Mack should be considered a prime suspect in the murder, and that Mack’s relationship with Ray Perez was perhaps the most important unexplored territory touched upon by the investigation.
The involvement of LAPD officers with both Suge Knight and the Bloods gang was not speculation, Poole insisted, but a fact that had been demonstrated overwhelmingly by evidence that the department had been sitting on for more than three years. Even though he had been listed for fifteen months as the lead investigator of Biggie Smalls’s slaying, Poole’s “Chronology” was rejected by his superiors and never included in the Murder Book that was the LAPD’s official record of the investigation. The report he delivered to Chief Parks in early October of 1998—forty pages long, single-spaced, and barely margined—picked up right where his “Chronology” had left off, however. Combined, the two documents laid out an investigation that began with the Gaines-Lyga shooting, passed through the Biggie Smalls’s murder and the Ray Perez dope bust, and culminated in his investigation of the Ismael Jimanez beating. What they described was a contamination of the LAPD that had spread from a crew of black cops affiliated with Death Row Records into the Rampart CRASH unit, which had become “basically a police gang.”
“Hernandez was furious,” Poole recalled. “He tells me, ‘We can’t use this. The chief doesn’t want this stuff in there.’” Poole’s forty-page report was edited to two pages by Hernandez, who put his own name on it before sending it to the district attorney’s office. “They also purged most of the supporting documents I had given them,” Poole recalled. “The D.A.’s office still doesn’t know what was kept from them.”
The Los Angeles Times published the first substantial media account of Ray Perez’s arrest on August 29, 1998. OFFICER’S ARREST TRIGGERS CORRUPTION PROBE, read the headline. From Poole’s perspective, that sounded promising. It soon became obvious to the detective, though, that the Times knew only what Chief Parks wanted it to know, and that the rest of the media in Los Angeles either followed the city’s one daily newspaper or reacted to it. LAPD detectives were “focusing on several” officers who worked with Perez, according to the Times’s unnamed source, and were interviewing both “former and recent partners” of the accused detective “in an effort to determine whether there are other ‘dirty cops’ on the force,” the newspaper reported. The only other suspects named in the article, however, were Veronica Quesada and Carlos Romero, while a careful reading of the story made it clear that the “probe” would be focused on alleged drug dealing by officers assigned to the Rampart Division. Also evident upon careful inspection was that the Times had depended upon a single source, identified in the article as “a police official close to the investigation.” Although it could never be confirmed, rumors spread among both members of the news media and local government officials that the Times source was Bernard Parks.
Little of substance was added during the next several months of news coverage. There was no mention in the Times of David Mack or of Ray Perez’s alleged involvement with Death Row Records. Perez was “Rafael Antonio Perez” in newspaper accounts of his arrest, and none of the city’s media informed their readers, viewers, or listeners that the officers who were the focus of the investigation—David Mack, Sammy Martin, and Nino Durden—were all black. The Times did not report either that, prior to the theft of two kilos of cocaine he was charged with, Perez had stolen a pound of coke that had been checked into evidence by Frank Lyga. And while Det. Lyga claimed to hav
e been told by Brian Tyndall that the wiretap placed on Perez’s residence between August 2 and August 11 strongly suggested that the pound of cocaine had been targeted as payback for the death of Kevin Gaines, no mention even that the wiretaps existed was made by the Los Angeles media. In November, Deputy District Attorney Richard Rosenthal filed court papers explaining that he would not introduce the wiretap tapes as evidence at trial, meaning that they would never become public information.
Chief Parks described the arrest of Perez as “sad and tragic,” while the accused officer’s own attorney, Johnnie Cochran protégé Winston K. McKesson, told reporters his client was “shattered” by the charges against him. The story soon faded to such insignificance that when Perez’s first trial ended on December 23, 1998, with the jury hung, the Times story ran on the fourth page of an inside section.
The case had been rushed to trial over the assistant D.A.’s objections, according to Richard Rosenthal. “I wanted to wait for the financials on Perez,” the prosecutor explained, “but LAPD was anxious to get things over.” Chief Parks and virtually everyone associated with the Robbery-Homicide Task Force understood what a disaster it would be for the department if the investigation that had led to the arrest of Ray Perez was closely examined by the local media. And Winston McKesson had at least an inkling. “This case has made everybody in the LAPD nervous,” Perez’s attorney remarked to the Times. “Nobody wants to be associated with this.”
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