A week later, attorneys for Javier Ovando’s two-year-old daughter, Destiny, filed a $20 million claim against the City of Los Angeles. On and on it went, for weeks and then months.
No one watched with more dismay than Russell Poole. Ray Perez, one of the dirtiest cops in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, was playing puppetmaster to the whole city. “The politicians and the media not only didn’t question Perez, they used what he said in every way they could to destroy the LAPD,” Poole lamented.
The public parsing of Perez’s “confessions” had become a kind of cottage industry for the political left in Los Angeles. The LA Weekly and New Times published story after story that attacked both the officers and the administration of the LAPD, while at the same time celebrating the murderers, drug dealers, and thieves who had become the official victims of the police abuse attested to by Rafael Perez. “How many innocent people are imprisoned because of false testimony by Los Angeles police officers?” asked USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky in the first sentence of a “commentary” published by the Los Angeles Times in December 1999. The answer was that there was no way of knowing, since the only LAPD officer proven to have perjured himself in court was Rafael Perez, upon whose allegations Chemerinsky’s question was based. “An independent task force needs to be created immediately to ensure unbiased review of all the possibly tainted cases,” Chemerinsky asserted later in his commentary. This task force should be composed of “prosecutors, defense attorneys and others with experience in the criminal justice system.” In other words, people such as himself.
Ramona Ripston, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, also cited the allegations of Rafael Perez in the commentary she wrote for the Times, asserting that, because of them, “long standing claims that such abuses exist beyond Rampart are increasingly plausible.” Ripston proposed creating the position of “permanent prosecutor” to investigate and prosecute police misconduct, a kind of in-house Kenneth Starr who would not only usurp the authority of the district attorney’s office, but create a new bureaucratic bailiwick as well. One subject Ripston didn’t want to discuss was her close friendship with Nick Salicos, the LAPD captain who had been running the Rampart Division when most of the corruption alleged by Rafael Perez occurred.
Kathleen Spillar, national coordinator of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Penny Harrington, the former Portland, Oregon, police chief who headed the foundation’s National Center for Women and Policing, published a February 18, 2000, op-ed piece in the Times challenging the assertion that reduced hiring standards (in the name of affirmative action) had contributed to the Rampart scandal. “It is not that the men in blue were hired too fast,” the pair wrote. “It’s that the wrong men were hired. And not enough women.” Perhaps Spillar and Harrington hadn’t heard about the allegations against Stephanie Barr and against Melissa New, one of only two Rampart Division officers (other than Nino Durden) accused by Perez of an improper shooting that later was covered up.
No one took better advantage of the Rampart scandal than Tom Hayden, who was regularly using the op-ed pages of the Times (as well as the TV appearances they generated) to become the public face of advocacy on behalf of Javier Ovando and other members of the 18th Street Gang who had been victimized by the LAPD. Hayden was not an opportunist, of course, but an idealist, as he’d been demonstrating ever since he had used his movie star wife’s money to win election to the California State Senate almost two decades earlier. Term limits were about to force Hayden to give up his senate seat, however, and since he had no chance of prevailing in a statewide election his only hope for a continuing political career was to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. Like virtually everyone involved in local politics, Hayden was aware that minorities were becoming a majority both in Los Angeles and all across California. Hispanics had outnumbered “non-Hispanic whites” in L.A. since 1990, and the disparity was mounting day by day. White people now were less than 50 percent of the population statewide, as well, and with skin as pale as Tom Hayden’s or James Hahn’s, a politician needed a very broad ethnic base to win public office.
The Hispanic citizens of the Rampart district, however, didn’t seem to understand that they were supposed to be more afraid of police officers than of gang members. Polls consistently demonstrated the depth of support for the police in Hispanic communities. Almost immediately after Rafael Perez’s allegations were published in the Los Angeles Times, local citizens staged a well-attended and wildly enthusastic pro–Rampart Division rally outside their LAPD station. A rally to protest police abuse that was scheduled to take place the next day fizzled for lack of participation.
The allegations of Rafael Perez, though, were embraced with ferver by the Los Angeles Times. A May 2000 editorial published by the paper began, “The Los Angeles Police Commission and its staff face a task that would have been unimaginable as recently as a year ago—restoring credibility to a department that long rested on its reputation for incorruptibility, a reputation we now know to be hollow.” The Times apparently knew this because Perez had told them so.
It was unlikely anyway that the Los Angeles Police Commission would restore credibility to the LAPD, at least not as long as its president was Gerald Chaleff, a former defense attorney who only a few months earlier had remarked during a news conference that “all cops are liars.”
Chaleff was a major supporter of the “consent decree” proposed by Bill Lann Lee, the chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who in May of 2000 threatened Los Angeles with a “practice and pattern” civil lawsuit unless the city agreed to give control of the LAPD to federal “auditors.” In September of 2000, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12–3 to accept the consent degree. “We all felt we neded all the help we could get, reforming the LAPD,” explained Jackie Goldberg.
City Attorney James Hahn, still the city’s leading candidate for mayor, avoided the subject of the consent decree as long as possible, but was compelled during an appearance before the City Council to answer a question about whether the city could be sued by the federal government if Los Angeles’s powerful employee unions failed to abide by it. “We feel that what we are proposing is something we should be able to reach agreement on, if we roll up our sleeves and really work at it,” was Hahn’s non-answer. Los Angeles apparently was going to get the leader it deserved.
For most of L.A.’s interested parties, the real question had become how much this scandal was going to end up costing. The city’s loosest cannon, civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, had obtained from the LAPD a list of 9,845 cases involving twenty-seven Rampart officers implicated in wrongdoing by Rafael Perez, and by the end of 2000 he had filed nearly two hundred lawsuits in federal court. The Times quoted “legal experts” who warned that the cost of settling the pending lawsuits against the LAPD would be “significantly more” than the $125 million projected by James Hahn. The cost certainly would be more if Johnnie Cochran had anything to say about it. In February of 2000 Cochran had hosted a meeting of more than two dozen civil rights attorneys to discuss coordinating lawsuits, telling reporters afterward, “If we band together, we can get a lot done.” In light of the $15 million settlement paid by the city to Javier Ovando, it looked as if a lot would be “done” whether the lawyers worked together or not.
By the spring of that year, either damage control or exploitation of the scandal had become the tactic of almost every important political figure in Los Angeles. Chief Parks and District Attorney Gil Garcetti, each of whom had been pointing his finger at the other in private for months, let their feud break into the open during March of 2000. Parks took the first swing, issuing an order to his detectives that they were to deny prosecutors access to any information regarding the Rampart investigation. Garcetti had given him bad legal advice, Parks said, was dragging his feet about prosecuting the cases already delivered to his office, and no longer could be trusted. Garcetti struck back two weeks later with
an offer of amnesty to LAPD whistle-blowers, an idea Parks already had rejected when it was proposed by the Police Protective League.
For Russell Poole, the final straw was Parks’s criticism of Garcetti for not filing charges against Brian Hewitt in the beating of Ismael Jimanez. “Parks and the LAPD never wanted Garcetti to file charges in that case and were happy when he didn’t,” a seething Poole said. “Now they want to blame the D.A. for not filing. I know for certain that Garcetti didn’t have all the information he should have had, because Chief Parks kept it from him.”
Poole had spent the past year living in two parallel worlds. On the one hand, he spent more time with his wife and children than he had allowed himself to during his entire career as an LAPD detective. Poole also had launched a successful business that helped high school athletes obtain college scholarships. He was free to visit his parents at their home in Palm Springs, and to coach his children’s baseball and softball teams. “My life was better,” Poole said, “but I couldn’t have peace as long as I thought I had let Chief Parks get away with what he did during that last year and a half I was on the department.”
The more he thought about how the LAPD brass had treated him, the angrier Poole became. He had heard some of what was being whispered about him at Parker Center, suggestions that he was an emotionally unstable troublemaker who had betrayed his loyalty to the LAPD by going over the heads of his supervisors to the district attorney’s office. Brian Tyndall advised Poole that his letter of resignation had circulated in photocopy throughout the Robbery-Homicide Division, even though it was supposed to be a confidential document.
Poole knew that his final Peformance Evaluation Report was being withheld so that the LAPD wouldn’t have to explain what his problems were, especially in the light of an outstanding past record. The last evaluation Poole had received from the Robbery-Homicide Division, in October of 1997, was the most vague and elliptical he had ever seen. He had been been rated “strong” (the LAPD’s highest rating) in each of the seventeen areas in which officers were evaluated, Poole noted, except one—the box labeled “judgment and common sense” had been left blank.
The same commanders and chiefs who suggested he was not right in the head, however, had asked for Poole’s help when it became apparent that the LAPD’s internal prosecution of Brian Hewitt and Ethan Cohan was going to fail. In June 1999, Poole had been subpoenaed at the last minute to appear at the departmental “trial board” hearing, where his testimony resulted in the dismissal of Hewitt and Cohan from the LAPD. “Apparently when they needed me I was no longer a nut case,” he observed.
Ultimately, it was not being able to sleep at night that drove Poole to act. “I decided I had to get the truth out in the one way that was left to me,” he explained. On September 26, 2000, eleven months after resigning from the LAPD, Poole filed a civil lawsuit naming Chief Bernard Parks, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the City of Los Angeles as defendants. The suit specifically accused Parks of violating his First Amendment right to go public after Poole “began to uncover evidence suggesting the involvement of other LAPD officers in criminal activity.”
Chief Parks responded with a press release in which he described Poole’s claims as “totally false.” He could not comment on any specific allegations by former Detective Poole, Parks explained, but then did, chiding Poole for his failure to “make his complaints known at the time they occurred” and asserting that Poole’s forty-page report on a scandal-in-the making had not been discarded or ignored, but rather was “edited of all conjectural materials.” Interestingly, Chief Parks referred repeatedly to Poole’s work on “The Rampart Task Force,” without once mentioning what the group had been called back when Poole was assigned to it. “Chief Parks turned ‘The Robbery-Homicide Task Force’ into ‘The Rampart Task Force’ in order to cover up all that had led up to the arrest of Perez,” Poole said, “and because of my lawsuit, he’s going to have to explain why he did that. That’s what scares him.”
It was a favor of fortune that Poole’s claim against the LAPD had been filed just as a number of people in Los Angeles noticed that the empire of lawsuits, suspensions, and scandals built on the word of Rafael Perez was beginning to crumble all around them. The first crack in the facade of repentance that Perez had constructed around him appeared in February of 2000, when the Los Angeles Times finally reported that “the ex-officer turned informant has failed a polygraph test.” Actually, it was five polygraph tests that Perez had failed, five months earlier. The Times’s understatement was buried deep inside a story that ran under the headline POLICE IN SECRET GROUP BROKE LAW ROUTINELY, TRANSCRIPTS SAYS, but, nevertheless, a lot of readers found it the most significant revelation in weeks.
Gradually, an assortment of other facts began to undermine the ex-officer turned informant’s credibility. Perez’s own admission that he had lied thousands of times under oath in court, and that he had done so quite convincingly, finally began to make at least a few observers wonder why they should believe anything he said now. So did the news that he had cheated on his wife so routinely that he couldn’t remember his girlfriends’ names unless investigators showed him photographs. Perez even had lied on his marriage license, it was discovered, swearing that Denise Perez was his first wife. Perez was essentially a chameleon, an LAPD officer who had worked with him at Rampart Division explained to reporters: “When he wanted to be Latino, he was Rafael. When he wanted to be black, he was Rafe.” The LAPD detectives who had interrogated him all said Perez asked them to address him as “Ray.” Most tellingly, though, a close examination of Perez’s “confessions” revealed that by far the most despicable crimes he described had been committed by himself and by his partner Nino Durden. Much if not most of his other allegations amounted to stuff you could watch Andy Sipowicz doing any Tuesday night on NYPD Blue.
The inconsistencies in Perez’s story emerged slowly. First, an LAPD search for the “crash pad” apartment in the San Fernando Valley that Rampart officers supposedly had used for their debaucheries ended in failure, convincing investigators assigned to the case that Perez had invented the story. He couldn’t recall the address of the apartment, Perez explained, or the street, or even the neighborhood. He did recall attending a drunken party at which Officer Kulin Patel had been present, Perez said, and even was able to provide a date. But when Patel’s attorney produced photographs and documents that utterly refuted Perez’s story, the LAPD’s charges against Patel were withdrawn. “All this proves is that he’s human,” said Winston K. McKesson. What it proved was that he couldn’t be trusted. That became even more evident when Perez apeared at an LAPD trial board to testify against former Rampart Division colleague Lawrence Martinez, whom he had accused of helping to frame two 18th Street Gang members on gun charges in April 1996. Perez testified under oath that the arrest was initiated by his meeting with a police informant on April 2 of that year. When Perez named the informant, Martinez’s attorney, Darryl Mounger, promptly demonstrated that the man had been incarcerated on April 2, 1996, and could not possibly have met with Perez on that date. “I caught him with his pants down,” Mounger said of Perez. “The problem with Perez,” the attorney added, “is that he’s told so many lies that he’s confused. He doesn’t know what the truth is anymore.” Winston McKesson conceded that Perez had “erred,” but once again defended his client’s integrity. “He believes the informant is who he said it was,” McKesson explained. “That’s still who he pictures in his mind. But the identity of the informant is not what he considered important about this case.”
Chief Parks and his right-hand man, Lt. Emmanuel Hernandez, both told reporters that “seventy to eighty percent” of what Perez had claimed in his “confessions” had been verified by LAPD investigators. Neither Parks nor Hernandez would provide any specifics, however, and their claims were hardly backed up by the performance of Perez as a witness against his fellow officers. Far later than it should have, and with considerably less prominence than the news merited,
the Los Angeles Times reported that only three of the fourteen LAPD officers brought before trial boards in connection to the Rampart scandal had been dismissed from the department. What the Times did not mention was that one of those fired was Perez’s former partner Nino Durden, and that the other two were Brian Hewitt and Ethan Cohan, both of whom had been convicted not on the basis of Perez’s allegations against them, but by the testimony of Russell Poole. All eleven of the officers subjected to trial boards in which the main witness against them was Rafael Perez had been exonerated.
Finally, despite knowing it would essentially kill his career, at least as long as Bernard Parks or anyone associated with him ran the LAPD, Captain Roger K. Coombs, who had presided over one of these trial boards, told the Times, “Perez has not shown himself to be a credible witness.” Many LAPD officers could scarcely restrain their cheers. “Coombs may have hurt himself in the short run,” said Police Protective League vice president Bob Baker, “but most of the rank and file consider him a hero.”
Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti described Perez’s problems as a witness in rather less ambiguous terms. “He’s a liar,” Garcetti said. “He tells the truth, too. But can you tell when he’s telling the truth and when he’s not telling the truth?” The short answer was no, and the enormity of the problem this created was just beginning to register with the powers that be.
The Los Angeles media, political establishment, and legal system had all committed themselves to what the Times now called “the admissions and allegations of Rafael Perez.” Dozens of convicts had been released, hundreds of lawsuits had been filed, millions of dollars had been paid, and countless pages of newsprint had been invested in the claims of a man who didn’t deserve to be believed about anything. A large part of the problem was that the media’s coverage from the first had been driven more by ideology that by information. The Times, the LA Weekly, and the New Times all persisted in describing Perez as “Hispanic,” even though he was half black. His own attorney had explained to them that “Puerto Rican culture is much closer to African American than to Hispanic, and that’s why his closest friends were black.” The Times had abandoned the link between Perez and David Mack, and between David Mack and Suge Knight, as soon as the Chuck Philips story on Amir Muhammed was published, while both the Weekly and the New Times had rejected the Mack-Muhammed theory without any investigation of it.
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