LAbyrinth

by Randall Sullivan

  McKesson, born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, cut quite a contrast in court as compared to Rosenthal, a UC Berkeley grad in his mid-thirties who was best known in the D.A.’s office as a whip-smart wonk skilled at crunching numbers and making cases out of circumstantial evidence. “Rosenthal had absolutely no street smarts, though,” Russell Poole would observe, “and that’s what made him so wrong for this case.” The media later would accuse him of botching the prosecution of Perez, but Rosenthal insisted, “Our case went well.” Still, the prosecutor allowed, “it was a downtown jury, and Perez was a good-looking, likable guy of mixed ancestry. And he testified very well. I believed he was lying through his teeth, but he did it very convincingly.”

  Perez lied so convincingly that four members of the jury, all black or Hispanic women, voted to acquit him. “That hung jury changed the whole outlook of the investigation,” Russell Poole recalled. “Parks wanted this thing over by the end of the year, but when they lost that first trial, the chief panicked, thinking, ‘Oh, shit, what are people gonna think now? We gotta do something fast.’ So they started pushing to make a deal with Perez.”

  What pushed Perez was that his potential prison sentence increased each time a new count was added. And new counts were being added on a regular basis after the task force began testing the drug packages returned to Property Division to see if the cocaine inside had been replaced with something else. Almost immediately investigators found several quarter-pound packages that had been switched. “We would have found more,” Rosenthal said, “except that a lot of the smaller drug packages had been destroyed.” Also, Rosenthal now knew that Perez’s bank records showed unexplained deposits of $49,000 in cash during the same period the missing cocaine was checked out.

  Now facing as much as twelve years in state prison, Perez gave McKesson permission to negotiate a deal in May of 1999. Rosenthal’s best offer was a five-year prison sentence in exchange for full disclosure. The prosecutor added the condition that Perez submit to a polygraph examination, and that the results could be admitted in court at his sentencing hearing. The prosecutor also asked for a proffer of Perez’s testimony.

  “We sat down together at the counsel table in the courtroom,” Rosenthal recalled, “and Perez told me, ‘I was involved in a use of force that may or may not have been unlawful, but what was unlawful was that we planted a gun on the guy afterward.’” The next day, Rosenthal and his team went through every shooting case involving Perez, “and we knew right away that it was the Javier Ovando case he had been talking about,” the prosecutor recalled. Rosenthal spent nearly all of that Friday with Perez, who admitted that Ovando had been unarmed when he and his partner Durden shot the gangbanger, and that they had planted the assault rifle on him to cover up their mistake. LAPD detectives interviewed Ovando in state prison over the weekend, and on Monday Rosenthal filed to free Ovando with the first writ of habeas corpus ever obtained by a California prosecutor. The day after that, Rosenthal sat down again with Perez, who this time gave the prosecutor a list of all the Rampart officers who were “in the loop”—that is, willing to frame gangbangers with manufactured evidence and then to perjure themselves in court.

  By the time Perez finished talking, his confession was fifty hours and two thousand transcript pages long. More than seventy of his fellow officers had been implicated in crimes that included shooting unarmed suspects, planting guns or drugs on them, and beating gangbangers senseless with clubs, fists, and feet. Perez described how one gangbanger was used as a human battering ram until his head punched through a wall, and how another was hung from a fire escape by his ankles until he talked. He and other Rampart CRASH officers routinely picked up gangbangers they thought might give them a problem and delivered them to the INS for deportation, said Perez.

  Only one incident truly haunted him, though, Perez said, and that was the shooting of Javier Ovando. He and his partner Durden were on stakeout inside a vacant apartment in a building on South Lake Street that was a known hangout for 18th Street Gang members, Perez recalled, looking for a cache of weapons that had been stolen from a residence in Orange County. They had been lying in wait for about three hours when Durden heard footsteps and the two of them turned toward the apartment door just as Ovando opened it and stepped inside. Durden immediately opened fire, hitting Ovando three times. Perez shot the gangbanger once himself, he said, then helped Durden plant a sawed-off rifle on Ovando and concocted the story that the critically wounded man had attempted to ambush the two detectives.

  Perez also accused an East Indian officer named Kulin Patel of accidentally shooting an unarmed man during the raid of an apartment building on Shatto Place, recalling that he and his fellow officers arrived at the building in a commandeered gypsy cab with tinted windows that let them drive right up to the front door without being spotted by the gangbangers inside. When Brian Hewitt and his partner Doyle Stepp planted a gun on the dead man, Perez said, “nobody said a word.”

  Rampart CRASH maintained its own organized system for covering up crimes by police officers, one “quarterbacked” by Sgt. Edward Ortiz, according to Perez, who told Rosenthal that officers could join “the loop” only if they were “sponsored” by someone already inside. Officers who were in the loop received playing-card plaques whenever they shot somebody, a red deuce if the suspect lived and a black deuce if he died, said Perez, who claimed to have been rewarded with a two of hearts for crippling Javier Ovando.

  Though he insisted it was sheer torture to rat out men who had trusted him, no one was more heavily implicated by Perez than his own partner. While Brian Hewitt was brutal, Nino Durden was vicious, Perez said, the kind of guy who thought it was amusing to spray pepper mace into the eyes of a passed-out drunk or shoot a cornered suspect in the mouth with a bean-bag shotgun. Durden once “outed” an informant in front of his fellow gang members, Perez recalled, chuckling later as he imagined what they must have done to the snitch.

  Durden could be slick, though, Perez said; once Nino bought a mailman’s uniform and used it to bluff his way past a group of paranoid crack dealers he wanted to rip off. It was Durden who first talked him into stealing drug money, Perez said. In March of 1997, they made an undercover buy from a dealer at the corner of 2nd and Serrano, Perez recalled, then seized $1,500 from the guy after his arrest; Durden palmed a thousand of that, and gave Perez half. That summer, the two of them busted a bunch of people who were cooking up crack in the Wilshire Division, Perez said. Back at Rampart Station, a pager belonging to one of the dealers went off and he and Nino set up a sale, supposedly to arrest the guy. When they arrived at the meet, though, Durden said, “Screw it. Let’s just sell it to him.” He “totally agreed,” Perez recalled, and eventually went in with Durden on two more coke sales to the same person, all from a stash they kept in an Igloo cooler that sat in a corner of the cot room at Rampart Station. They cleared $5,000 apiece.

  Perez rambled on and on, recalling how one officer chugged a pint of vodka at the Rampart crew’s “crash pad” apartment in the Valley, then vomited off the balcony onto the head of an older woman who lived downstairs, transitioning from that into a description of how Sgt. Ortiz had used a piece of chrome fender to cover for a female officer who fired at an unarmed man. Perez came across as entirely forthcoming about his own career as a drug dealer. Except for the three kilos that had led to his detection, all of the cocaine he stole from Property Division was delivered to him by courier at Rampart Station, Perez said. He had replaced all of that couriered dope with Bisquick, except for the pound checked into evidence by Frank Lyga, said Perez (who claimed that in this one instance he ditched his return package because he thought he was being followed). “The three kilos he was afraid to ask for by courier,” Rosenthal recalled. “Also, they might have tested an amount that large.”

  He neither believed nor disbelieved Perez, Rosenthal said. “I learned from the trial not to judge Perez by his demeanor,” the prosecutor explained. “I don’t know when people are lyi
ng, and Perez is an exceptionally good liar.” He was still waiting to see the results of the polygraph tests, Rosenthal recalled.

  Russell Poole was aghast when he learned that the D.A.’s office had cut a deal with Perez. “My hunch had been proven right, but I was devastated,” Poole said. “Because I knew we could have taken care of it cleanly if they just let me do what was right. We didn’t need to make a deal with Perez, who should have been sent to prison for the rest of his life. The whole investigation was flowing toward some grand conclusion that was going to tie it all together. At least that’s what I believed. But as soon as they made the deal with Perez, it was like he became in charge. He decided what parts of the investigation were going to stay alive and which weren’t.”

  Perez had implicated almost every detective he worked with at Rampart Station, Poole noted, yet insisted Sammy Martin was clean. “The same Martin who was meeting with Perez and Durden in the dead of night once they knew there was an investigation,” Poole observed. Even more dubious was Perez’s insistence that he knew of no criminal activity by David Mack. Chief Parks himself would tell the media that he believed Perez was not telling the whole truth about Mack.

  Because the inquiry into Perez’s activities had become so vast, Rosenthal decided to conduct five separate polygraph examinations of the disgraced detective; the last two would focus on Perez’s relationship with David Mack and on “other shootings not disclosed by Perez.”

  Perez submitted to the series of lie detector tests on separate days between November 30 and December 16, 1999. Rosenthal received the results on December 19, two days before Perez was to face sentencing. The timing was no small problem for the prosecutor, because Perez had failed all five of the polygraph examinations that he took.

  “It was very disturbing news,” Rosenthal admitted. “Frankly, my feeling had been that even if Perez lied, he would pass the polys, because he was such a good liar at trial. And I never dreamed he would fail all five.”

  The prosecutor promptly won a two-month delay of Perez’s sentencing hearing, and spent much of that time searching for a polygrapher who would explain how Perez could fail all five polygraph exams and still be telling the truth. He eventually found a professor in Minnesota who said the polygrapher who administered the five exams had made a crucial mistake during the first session by springing a question on Perez that he wasn’t expecting. “And that could have screwed up the other polys,” Rosenthal explained, “because Perez felt he couldn’t trust the polygrapher.” Rosenthal declined, however, to ask that Perez submit to examination by a different polygrapher. “First, we had spoken to the judge in chambers and he made it clear that he gave no credence to polygraphs,” the prosecutor explained. “Secondly, I felt that Perez would have a built-in excuse if he failed again.

  Perez would have failed again, said Russell Poole, “so it was easier just to say the first polygrapher fucked up and give Perez his deal.” Perez would do five years, less time served, for the cocaine thefts, Judge Robert J. Perry ruled, and receive immunity for all other crimes to which he had confessed. This meant that, with time off for good behavior, Perez could be a free man again before the end of 2002.

  Perez’s statement at his sentencing hearing on February 25, 2000, would be published by newspapers around the world. It was a model of contrition that began with the disgraced cop’s admission that nothing he could say “would be strong enough or genuine enough to warrant my pardon.” The “atrocities” he and other officers in his CRASH unit had committed, Perez told the court, were the result of an “us-against-them ethos” that allowed those in the loop to believe “we were doing the wrong things for the right reasons.” At the end of his statement, Perez quoted the mottoes that were posted above the entrances to the LAPD’s CRASH units, then said he would like to add one of his own: “Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.”

  Most of the spectators in the courtroom looked moved, and a few wept openly. Among those closest to the investigation, however, there was a palpable sense of unease. Perez had been just as convincing, they all knew, and every bit as emotive, when he perjured himself at trial after trial during the past several years. This was the best liar they’d ever seen in a courtroom, both prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed, and yet the vast legal web in which they found themselves caught had been woven with little more than his word. While Perez tearfully apologized for what he had done to Javier Ovando and insisted his guilt about it had driven him to confess, those who had been in court when Ovando was sentenced to state prison recalled that the detective’s immediate response back then was a snicker.

  “No one is ever going to know for sure how much of what Perez said is true and how much is made up,” Russell Poole observed. “Just like we’ll never know how much he revealed, and how much he kept to himself. The guy is like some human two-way mirror; he can see out, but we can’t see in.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Russell Poole’s own police career already had wound down toward its sad conclusion. “My weakness was that I let it all get to me,” Poole said, “this pattern of sabotaging the investigation that I saw again and again. The way it all piled up really affected me emotionally. For the first time in my career I was witnessing a cover-up and an obstruction of justice in the LAPD, and the whole thing was being orchestrated from the highest levels. I knew the chief was behind it, and that Internal Affairs was in on it with him. So who could I go to—the FBI?”

  All through the autumn of 1998, Poole bit his tongue and bided his time, watching as Ray Perez escaped conviction in court and the assorted investigations that had led to the Rampart detective’s arrest languished. “My one hope was that when the criminal case against Hewitt got filed, I would be called as the main witness for the prosecution and finally get a chance to tell the truth,” Poole said. “But it didn’t happen that way.” First, the same senior detective who had attempted to have Poole thrown out of the Robbery-Homicide Division back in May was “slowly worked into position to testify as the authority on the case, even though I was the one who had put it together,” Poole recalled. “Finally I went to Commander Schatz and asked, ‘What’s the status of the criminal case against Hewitt and Cohan?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t think we’re going that route. Having them fired is good enough. I talked to the state attorney general’s office and they agreed.’

  “But neither the state attorney general nor the district attorney had all the information. Important documents were purged from the file that went to the D.A.’s office and that was what the attorney general’s office got. So they deceived both offices.”

  Poole made the audacious move of visiting two deputy district attorneys he had worked with on earlier cases and telling them how frustrated he was by the way his investigation had been thwarted. “They were nervous and didn’t want to put themselves in the middle of this,” he recalled. “They told me, ‘Let’s wait and see how this plays out before you make any more allegations.’”

  “Russ was stressed out and exhausted and very disillusioned,” recalled George Castillo, who had prosecuted several homicide cases with Poole’s assistance. “I knew him to be one of the best LAPD detectives I had ever worked with—probably the best—and one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met. The guy is a total straight shooter, so I never doubted for a second that he was telling the truth. But the whole thing was very complicated and it wasn’t entirely clear where the LAPD was going with all this. So my advice was to wait and see. But I think Russ believed he’d waited long enough. I felt for him.”

  As soon as word got out that he had attempted to circumvent the LAPD’s chain of command, what little support Poole enjoyed in the upper echelons of the department was withdrawn. During November of 1998, he was asked first to leave the task force, then to transfer out of the Robbery-Homicide Division altogether.

  “I knew I would be a marked man for the rest of my career,” Poole said. “‘Disloyalty’ is the one sin th
e LAPD won’t tolerate. But at the same time my record was a real problem for them. I had dozens of commendations and years of rating reports that very few detectives could match, and one of the things I’d been praised for over and over again was my dedication to the department. So getting rid of me wouldn’t be easy, and they knew it. It was a stalemate situation.”

  Poole seriously considered submitting his resignation and taking his case to the media. Instead, he decided to use the enormous backlog of “sick time” he had accumulated to consider his options. “I had taken hardly any sick days in my nineteen years on the LAPD, so I had about 900 hours of time saved up,” he explained. “I talked to my dad about the situation and he agreed I should take a couple of months off to rest and reflect on what I was going to do.” Poole’s doctor provided him with a diagnosis of “job-related stress,” and the LAPD did not challenge it. Poole’s eleven-week leave began shortly after Thanksgiving.

  “I was just trying to recharge my batteries for most of that period,” Poole recalled. “I spent more time with my kids than I had since they were born and my wife and I really got reacquainted. I was working out five days a week. I took some long hikes with my dad in the desert.”

  Poole’s father was dealing with some major stress of his own. Two years ealier, Ralph Poole’s other son, Gary, had disappeared without a trace. It was a complete mystery.

  Police could find no evidence of a violent abduction, yet it did not seem likely that Gary Poole would take off on his own accord. His apartment was intact and his bank accounts were untouched. The only thing Gary owned that was missing was his Ford F-250 pickup, and the vehicle never had been recovered. The thirty-six-year-old man had no criminal record and there was no suggestion that he was involved with dangerous characters. In fact, Gary had been much more introverted than his older brother and their two sisters. “The artist,” everyone in the family called him, because all through school his favorite activities had been painting and drawing. “When I did an inventory of his home, I found many artist’s notebooks filled with his sketches, and they were amazingly good,” Russell Poole recalled. “Somehow that was the hardest moment for me.” Gary had made a good living as a master tile-setter, doing mostly custom jobs on expensive homes—he’d recently been hired to do a bathroom at Bob Hope’s place in Palm Desert, a job he seemed to regard as his Sistine Chapel.