“We’d never had any kind of tragedy in our family or anything that was even close to having a family member disappear,” Russell Poole recalled. “So it hit us all very hard. We’d have these family meetings to try to figure out what might have happened, and everyone was blaming themselves, even though we didn’t know what it was about.
“I did a lot of thinking about my brother during that time I took off. I started thinking that maybe I should use my skills as an investigator to work on finding out what had happened to him. I really didn’t believe in the LAPD anymore. For years I’d been able to tell myself that I might not make a lot of money, but at least I had a job that let me work on the side of truth and justice. Honor and integrity of the case were always what mattered most to me, but once I went downtown I learned that the people who actually ran the department didn’t give two shits about any of that. To them it was all about politics.”
During one of their hikes in the desert, Ralph Poole told his son about his darkest hour as a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. Right after he was promoted to detective, the older man recalled, he had been assigned to the Internal Affairs Division and immediately caught a case in which another deputy, working by himself, had killed a burglary suspect. A preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect had been unarmed, and that the deputy had planted a gun on him to justify the shooting. Homicide investigators quickly realized what had happened, but transferred the case to Internal Affairs so they could avoid filing charges against one of their own. He had no choice but to make the arrest himself, Ralph Poole said, and to testify against the accused officer as the lead witness for the prosecution. The day he arrived at the courthouse to take the stand, he got caught alone near an elevator, the elder Poole recalled, and was immediately surrounded by seven or eight friends of the defendant who told him he was a rat, then began to close a circle around him. He would have taken a beating for sure, Ralph Poole said, if not for his veteran partner, who showed up to stand beside him, and convinced the others that they would be killing their own careers if they didn’t back off right now.
Cops were always going to protect one of their own, Russell Poole’s father told him; it was the real police code of honor, part of the us-against-them mentality that the job produced in almost anybody who did it. The only protection an honest cop could count on was the support of his superiors. And if they were corrupt, too, you were all by yourself.
“I never thought I’d hear him say it,” Russell Poole recalled, “but my dad told me he thought I ought to resign.”
While still on leave, in December of 1998 Poole returned to the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division, armed with signed resignation papers that he presented to Captain Tatreau. “I told him why I wanted to quit,” Poole recalled. “I laid out all the corruption I’d witnessed in detail. And Tatreau made me feel as if he was going to take some action and talked me out of resigning. I remember him telling me, ‘Russ, you’re very intense and that’s okay, I’m very intense, too.’ Like we were sort of cut from the same cloth.” At the same time, however, Tatreau made it clear that Poole would not be returning to the task force. Neither Lt. Hernandez nor any of the other supervisors wanted to work with him, said Tatreau, who advised Poole once again that it would be best if he transferred out of RHD altogether. In the meantime, the captain said, he could join the Bank Robbery Squad.
“So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll go to bank robbery,’” Poole recalled. “But they never assigned me any cases. After a week or so of sitting at my desk and doing nothing, I figured, ‘Okay, I’ll find myself another job.’” Being back with the LAPD, even as a glorified observer, made Poole think of all that he loved about the job. He remembered what it had been like as a trainee officer to stop a car and approach it at night on a side street in South Central, the way a day of total monotony could turn into sheer terror ten minutes before you finished a shift. Easily the most frightening and exhilarating part of the job in those days had been vehicle pursuits, Poole recalled: “The suspect is running red lights, so you have to go through, also. As a probationer you don’t get to drive, so you’re on the radio, but some of the partners I had were a lot more aggressive behind the wheel than others. Just going through an intersection with one of those guys was unbelievably scary, because there were some really close calls. You just can’t understand the adrenaline pump you get when you’re chasing armed felony suspects until you start to do it. It’s indescribable.”
Poole decided to try returning to what he knew, and phoned Lt. John Dunkin at his old unit, South Bureau Homicide. Dunkin said they didn’t have any openings but would take Poole “on loan” from RHD until a spot became available. Poole went to work at South Bureau Homicide in January of 1999, and was permanently assigned to the unit two months later. He continued to follow the investigation of police corruption that now was split between the Robbery-Homicide and Internal Affairs Divisions.
“Brian Tyndall always made me feel there was hope that this all would be made right,” Poole recalled. “Even after I was assigned to South Bureau Homicide, he was trying to get me back on the task force, but Lt. Hernandez and Commander Schatz refused to consider it. They felt that letting me take the witness stand in any criminal case connected to any part of the investigation would result in a major embarrassment for the department.” Tyndall remained a source of information and inspiration for the disaffected, however. The senior detective not only confided to Frank Lyga that the wiretap on the Rafael Perez residence yielded persuasive evidence that Perez and his Blood associates had targeted the undercover cop to punish him for killing Kevin Gaines, but advised Russell Poole that Brian Hewitt had made a bid to blow the task force investigation wide open. This had happened during an interview by Internal Affairs investigators who were looking into allegations that Hewitt had stolen marijuana seized from an 18th Street Gang member. “Tyndall, who had heard the tape, said Hewitt stopped the interview and told the IA guys, ‘Look, if you want a story, I got some things that will blow Rampart out of the water.’ And the IA investigators said, ‘No, we don’t wanna know about that, we just wanna know about this one incident.’ I was stunned when I heard about this. Hewitt knew a lot, and I think he was ready to tell it if he could get a deal. Tyndall and I both couldn’t believe that they never asked Hewitt about this again. Tyndall wasn’t going to challenge the brass, though, and that’s where he and I parted company.”
For Poole, the lawsuit filed by Johnnie Cochran against the City of Los Angeles on behalf of the Gaines family had become his last best hope for a full airing of truths that the LAPD seemed determined to suppress. Even though he was now at South Bureau Homicide, the City Attorney’s office had named Poole as the chief witness for the defense. In May of 1999, the detective was riding in an elevator with Corey Brente, the assistant city attorney who was handling the case, when Brente answered a call on his cell phone and was informed that Cochran, Chief Parks, and City Attorney James Hahn had negotiated a settlement.
It was one of the most cynical deals in the city’s history. Because municipal bylaws required every legal settlement in excess of $100,000 to be approved by the Los Angeles City Council, Hahn had structured the deal so that Gaines’s wife and two daughters each would receive separate settlements of slightly less than that amount, totalling $250,000 in all. Even then the payments were broken into twelve parts, so as to further shield them from the scrutiny of overseers. The retired Superior Court judge who had presided over the settlement negotiations was outraged, however, firing off a letter to Chief Parks stating that he believed the settlement was “political” and intended to avoid significant adverse publicity for the department. City Council members Laura Chick and Joel Wachs almost immediately blasted the deal as “deplorable” and “unconscionable,” but admitted they lacked the power to overturn it.
Hahn, Cochran, and Parks all refused to comment, but each had gotten what he wanted. Hahn was a bland political hack whose only real asset was his last name. Former Los Angeles County Superv
isor Kenneth Hahn was a legendary figure in Los Angeles’s black community, and justifiably so. In 1965, shortly after the Watts riots, the elder Hahn had been the only white politician in L.A. courageous enough to meet Martin Luther King Jr. at the airport when the civil rights leader arrived to survey the damage. His son Jimmy stood for nothing more than the advancement of his own career, but ever since entering politics he had depended upon overwhelming support from the black community to win election. James Hahn now was running for mayor of Los Angeles and understood that preserving his relationship with the city’s black leadership was essential to his chances for success. And no black leader in Los Angeles was more influential at this moment in time than Johnnie Cochran, who not only would pocket a third of the money from the Gaines deal, but also could tell his supporters in South Central that he had stuck it to the mothers one more time. By going along, Bernard Parks had prevented a public airing of Kevin Gaines’s conduct and of the LAPD’s failure to deal with it. The chief also had made sure that Det. Russell Poole would not be on the witness stand telling people about the cross-pollination between the city’s black gangs and its black police officers, and about how Parks had stifled his investigation of the black cops who worked for Suge Knight and Death Row Records.
Poole’s disenchantment with the LAPD now was nearly complete. “Parks goes in with Hahn and Cochran on a deal to pay off Gaines’s family when they know that Gaines is a criminal, a dirty cop, and a maniac, not to mention totally in the wrong in this case,” Poole fumed. “How can he get away with this?”
Corey Brente attempted to set the record straight, telling reporters, “Frank Lyga adamantly opposed a settlement. He wanted a trial. He wanted the truth to come out. Cochran and [cocounsel] Carl Douglas had no evidence against him, despite all their efforts.”
“That was good of Corey Brente, but Frank Lyga still had a cloud hanging over him,” said Poole. “They had been promising him his day in court, then they took it away from him. Of course the guy is going to be bitter.”
That Lyga was. “Parks and Hahn, in concert with Johnnie Cochran,” Lyga said, “laid me out as a racist killer, a reputation I still have to fight every single day.” He did indeed. During the next two years Lyga would be named as a defendant in twenty-two Rampart-related lawsuits, even though he had never worked in that division. Like Poole, Lyga was infuriated to learn that the LAPD’s task force had abandoned the theory that Ray Perez stole his cocaine in retaliation for the Gaines shooting. “We already knew that Perez called up Property Division and gave them the ID numbers for the dope that Lyga booked into evidence,” Poole said. “That tells you he knew what he was after.” It was quite a coincidence, conceded Richard Rosenthal, but Perez insisted he had no idea who Frank Lyga was. Impossible, said Lyga; apart from the enormous publicity that surrounded the Gaines shooting, Lyga once had supervised a narcotics operation that Perez worked on: “There’s no way he doesn’t remember me.”
The same month that the Gaines family settled with the city attorney’s office, May of 1999, Rafael Perez made his deal with the Los Angeles County District Attorney. When Poole learned of it later that summer, he knew that any hope for rectification was officially dead. “Rafael Perez is a pure scumbag,” Poole said. “To see him crying on the stand about all the terrible things he’s done. I bet he laughs all the way back to his cell.”
Almost as soon as news of the deal with Perez was announced, Poole observed, Fred Miller and the other senior detective who was his new partner submitted their resignations to the LAPD. “I think they thought Perez was going to spill on the Biggie Smalls case, and it would come back to them,” Poole said. “But I knew Perez would never betray Mack. Perez knows for certain that if he rolls over on Mack and Knight they will track him down and have him killed.”
David Mack would face sentencing for bank robbery in September, only a few days before the “confessions” of Ray Perez were made public in a series of articles published by the Los Angeles Times. Despite overwhelming evidence, his conviction had been a close call. At one point during their deliberations, eleven of the jurors signed a note sent to the judge in which they complained that the twelfth member of the panel was refusing to discuss the evidence and had decided to vote not guilty before the trial began. To no one’s surprise, this juror was black, and the other members of the panel—Hispanic, Asian, and white—wrote that they were being hung up by “a race issue.” Only after a stern warning from Judge Robert M. Takesuki did the jury deliver a unanimous verdict of guilty.
Mack’s attorney, Donald Re, had offered the court dozens of letters praising his client, including one written by Olympic track great Carl Lewis, in a vain attempt to have him released on bail. His wife and children wrote especially emotional letters that had the odd effect of making Mack seem both more sympathetic and more contemptible. Mack also received letters of support from Sammy Martin, who praised his former partner’s “professional manner,” and from the former Harry Billups, aka Amir Muhammed, who lauded his college friend for remaining “true to his convictions and dedicated to the principle for which they stand,” then signed off as “Harry Muhammed.”
At the sentencing hearing, Re made what is known in the law as a “tragic personal history” argument, citing Mack’s “lack of guidance as a youth” and “disadvantaged upbringing.” The assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case replied by reminding the court that David Mack and his wife had a combined income of six figures at the time he committed his crime. This was a defendant, the prosecutor noted, who “has embraced his offenses, has never apologized for them, and evidently intends to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Before passing sentence, Judge Takesuki gave Mack a chance to tell the government where the money “could be located.” On the advice of his attorney, he declined, said Mack. Takesuki then sentenced the defendant to 171 months in federal prison. Mack’s request to be incarcerated in Southern California was refused, after the Bureau of Prisons reported that it would be unable to meet his “security needs” at any of its West Coast facilities, and placed him at the federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota.
Errolyn Romero, who had been the main witness against Mack at trial, received a sentence of thirty months in prison and would be eligible for parole within sixteen.
Ten days after Mack’s sentencing, LAPD Chief Parks held a news conference to announce that he had formed an internal board of inquiry to examine the quality of the department’s investigations into officer involved shootings. Parks’s announcement coincided exactly with news reports that two civilian witnesses to the shooting in which David Mack allegedly had saved the life of his partner, Ray Perez, were claiming that the victim, Jesse Vincencio, did not have a gun in his hand before Mack killed him. The pair had never been interviewed by the LAPD.
Ray Perez continued to insist that the shooting of Vincencio was justified. “As far as I’m concerned,” he told the Times, “David Mack was a hero that night.” LAPD detectives who had interviewed Perez said they all were impressed by how determined he had been not to implicate Mack in any crimes. They viewed this less as a reflection of Perez’s loyalty to his former partner, however, the detectives said, than as evidence that their informant was “terrified of Mack.” Russell Poole agreed. During his investigation, Poole had been amazed by the level of fear Mack appeared to inspire in those he dealt with. “Mack must be some piece of work,” Poole said, “because rarely do you see people so convinced that crossing a guy will get them killed. It wasn’t at quite Suge Knight levels, but it was close.”
Suge had been removed from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo back in May, right around the time Ray Perez was cutting his deal with the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles. He now was at Mule Creek State Prison, a facility that was somewhat less strict but also a lot farther from Los Angeles. The nearest town was Ione, population 2,667, a former gold-mining camp forty-three miles southwest of Sacramento, where residents could not help but notice the limousines that showed up o
n Thursday and Friday evenings, when inmates were allowed to receive visitors at the prison. Among those dropping by was Michel’le, who continued to identify herself as Suge’s wife. Michel’le’s album was Death Row Records’ biggest release of 1999, heralded by company publicists as evidence that the label was determined to change its image as the home of gangsta rap. Suge also had found God, his spokespersons said.
“If that’s the case, maybe he’ll be moved to confess to the murder of Biggie Smalls,” Russell Poole observed. Knight remained the main suspect of an investigation that was going nowhere. Police in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas reminded reporters that murders went unsolved all the time. “Murders don’t go unsolved when the victim is a celebrity who gets shot dead in the street in front of dozens of witnesses who can identify the killers,” Poole answered. “Remind me of any recent cases where that has happened, other than Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Murders like that only go unsolved if the police don’t want to solve them.”
Poole was feeling free to speak his mind because he knew his career as an LAPD officer was at its end. In August of 1999, the department announced that it was disbanding South Bureau Homicide, in response to a plummeting murder rate in Los Angeles and the rest of the country. “We were given a list of places we could transfer to, and one of them was the Organized Crime Unit,” Poole recalled. “I was all set to go there when a lieutenant who had just transferred in from Robbery-Homicide intervened and said they didn’t want me. I went to Lt. Dunkin to ask what happened, and he told me the lieutentant had told him, ‘We’re not going to accept Poole because of what happened while he was on the task force.’ My complaint that they obstructed justice was considered a betrayal.”
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