He had thought at first that the two LAPD officers who visited him at Calipatria were detectives investigating the Biggie murder, Boagni said, which was why he had been startled when they began making it very clear to him that any testimony he wanted to give about Rafael Perez would not be welcome. “Boagni tells us that the LAPD investigators were telling him, ‘Look you don’t really recall what Perez was saying. You were probably high, weren’t you?’ ” Hermosillo recalled. Then the two began to warn that he would put his life at risk if he went against Perez, Boagni said. “They told him that Perez had friends in prison who would ‘shank’ him if he talked,” Hermosillo remembered. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe these guys would think they could get away with something like this. But I had a gut feeling Boagni was telling the truth. You listen to enough testimony, you get real good at separating the liars from the ones who are telling the truth. And I felt pretty sure Boagni was one of the ones who tell the truth.”
Unfortunately, Boagni was unable to provide the names of the two LAPD officers he said had come to Calipatria to threaten him. “He did give very good physical descriptions of them, though,” Hermosillo recalled. “One was a short, stocky guy with a bushy head of hair, and the other was a tall, slender guy who, Boagni said, looked like he might have been a basketball player.” Armas, listening, decided to wait to present the copy of the visitors’ log he had made at Calipatria that showed Boagni’s visitors had been two Metro officers assigned to the Rampart Task Force, Thomas Wich and Vincent Vicari.
Sanchez followed Boagni to the stand, carrying a small cardboard folder like the ones Hermosillo remembered being sold at Sav-on in the 1960s. “We start to ask him some of the same questions we asked Boagni,” recalled Hermosillo, who noticed that the department reps were looking “real uneasy.” Sergeant Farmer began to object repeatedly, interrupting Sanchez’s testimony again and again. Gradually, though, Sanchez got out a story that included his memories of how Perez had bragged about being on the scene with his friend “Mack Attack” on the night Biggie Smalls was shot to death. “He said Perez bragged that he was part of it,” Hermosillo remembered.
Lieutenant Lizarraga let his sergeant handle the department’s questioning of the witness. “Within seconds Farmer is asking Sanchez, ‘What’s the real reason you flew down here? Did you cut a deal for early parole?’ ” Hermosillo recalled. “And Sanchez says, ‘Fuck you, asshole. I got four months to go. I been a model prisoner. I been on a fire-suppression crew. I’m a good man. I’ll never go back to prison again.’ Then he asks, ‘Are you from the guys who visited me in prison?’ And you could have heard a pin drop. Earl, sitting right next to me, whispers, ‘Oh my.’ ”
The two LAPD “investigators” who had visited him at Susanville had blatantly threatened him, Sanchez said. “He told us they said, ‘Don’t go to L.A., or your life will be short,’ ” Hermosillo remembered. “They told him that same thing about getting ‘shanked’ by Perez’s friends.” Sergeant Farmer began to object so vociferously “that we threatened to have him removed,” Hermosillo recalled. “And Sanchez tells us, ‘When those assholes said if I came and testified I’d get killed, I told them to fuck themselves.’ I asked if he remembered anything about the names of these two officers and Sanchez turns to Farmer, who’s been told to sit there and be quiet, and says, ‘Hey, you know who they were. You tell him.’ ”
When Farmer kept silent, Sanchez opened the cardboard folder on his lap, exposing the slice he had made in the seam to create a small pocket. “He reaches in and pulls out a couple of little papers,” Hermosillo recalled. “He says these are the notes he made when he was locked up with Rafael. He handed them to me and I’d never seen handwriting so small. Sanchez says, ‘Once those guys threatened me, I figured I better hang on to these, and keep ’em hidden.’ Then he pulls out two more pieces of paper from the little pocket he’d made in the notebook. He tells us, ‘After they left, I asked who those two fucks were,’ and that the guard answered by handing him two business cards. When Sanchez showed them to us, I froze. I couldn’t breathe.”
The cards bore the names of Rampart Task Force members Michael Gannon and Bill Brockway.
“Ken Hale could not believe it,” Hermosillo remembered. “He said, ‘I’ve been on this department most of my life and I fucking cannot believe this.’ ”
After conferring, he and captains Hale and Paysinger announced that they were sending formal complaints against the four detectives who had visited Boagni and Sanchez in prison to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, demanding a full investigation. According to Armas, “There was no investigation whatsoever. I kept waiting to be interviewed by IA, but I never was. Eventually I obtain the final report of the ‘investigation,’ and it’s three pages of nothing. The IA investigators hadn’t interviewed so much as a single witness. The complaints against those four guys had been dismissed, no surprise. But what got to me was the rationale they had used for saying the allegations against them were not sustained. It was basically that serving on the Rampart Task Force had been a high honor accorded to the best of the best, who had put in long, grueling hours, and the department needed to show its appreciation and gratitude for their service.”
By the time the Byrnes Board of Rights hearing ended, Xavier Hermosillo said, “I knew I was sitting on something explosive. I just had no idea what I would do with it.”
Incendiary as what he had heard from Boagni and Sanchez was, Hermosillo said, the most shocking moment of the hearing was still to come. It would arrive in the form of an eight-by-ten-inch photograph that was offered as evidence for purposes of showing the relationship between, and the affiliations of, Rafael Perez and David Mack. In the photograph, Mack and Perez were wearing bright red suits, red shirts, red ties, and red bowler hats. “These guys were literally announcing that they were Bloods gang members,” Hermosillo observed. It wasn’t Perez or Mack who riveted his attention, though, Hermosillo said, so much as the woman standing between them, wearing a red dress with a red ribbon in her hair. “There was something kind of familiar about her,” he recalled. “I asked Ken Hale why that was. He takes a look and says, ‘Oh my God, do you know who that is?’ ” Before Hale even said the words, Hermosillo knew the answer. It was LAPD Chief Bernard Parks’s daughter Michelle.
“There’d been rumors going around for a long time that Michelle Parks was a drug mule for the Bloods gang,” Armas recalled.
They were more than rumors.
In late 1997, when he took a call from his closest contact in the Las Vegas Police Department’s Narcotics Division, Shelby Braverman, an undercover detective in the LAPD’s Harbor Division, had not the faintest idea that what he was about to hear would destroy his career and shatter his life.
According to the Vegas detective, he and his colleagues in Narcotics Division had developed information that a considerable quantity of heroin and cocaine was being brought into the city from L.A. in automobiles driven by a woman named Michelle Lynette Parks, whom he described as a major drug mule for the Bloods street gang. He and the other narco guys in Vegas had been startled to discover, Braverman’s friend said, that, first, this Michelle Parks was a “clerk/typist” in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division and that, second and even more astounding, she was the daughter of LAPD chief Bernard Parks.
Braverman had agreed to do some “nosing around” into the nature of Michelle Parks’s position at the LAPD. “I hadn’t even known Parks had a daughter, let alone that she worked for the department,” Braverman recalled. “After I did some investigating, I became concerned that she was working in a part of the LAPD that gave her access to a lot of confidential files. She could get information about who was under investigation, what the evidence was, who the witnesses were, and so on.” If she was working for the Bloods, Braverman realized, Michelle Parks was in a position to provide them with information that could not only protect gang members from apprehension, but endanger the lives of those
prepared to testify against them.
Braverman took his concerns to his senior supervisor, Richard Ginelli, a storied veteran cop who had been working narcotics for nearly a quarter century. “I was his number one boy, because I was the best-producing undercover in the department for heroin,” Braverman explained. “We were close, I thought.”
When he told Ginelli what he had learned, Braverman said, his boss’s reaction took him aback. “He told me that this was over my head and way too hot for me to handle,” Braverman remembered. “He said he’d go directly to Chief Parks himself.” What Braverman didn’t know was that Ginelli was Parks’s former patrol partner and one of the chief’s closest allies within the entire LAPD.
Ginelli “told me to keep my mouth shut about what I had learned,” Braverman said. But he wasn’t really troubled by this, because he believed his boss had gone to Chief Parks as promised and that action had been taken: In November 1997, Michelle Parks was placed on medical leave from her LAPD job. She was collecting disability pay, but no longer had access to sensitive police records.
What changed his mind about Ginelli, Braverman said, was hearing from the hooker he considered his best informant. The woman told him that Ginelli had started picking her up on the weekends to share sex and heroin stolen from the Harbor Division evidence locker. “She thought she had Ginelli by the balls and threatened to tell me what he was up to—basically she tried to blackmail him,” Braverman recalled. “She told me he said that if she ever said anything to me, he’d kill her and kill me. She was so terrified that she told me anyway, because she wanted my protection.”
Worried now, Braverman went to another supervisor, the man between himself and Ginelli in the hierarchy of the Harbor Division’s narcotics unit. “He was very unhappy to get this information,” Braverman recalled. “But I wasn’t trying to get Ginelli arrested or anything like that. I thought maybe they could force him to retire and get some help.” The second supervisor, though, went directly to Ginelli with what Braverman had said. And Ginelli took that straight to Chief Parks.
As those above him began to plot the best course for dealing with Braverman, Michelle Parks was making news. On June 25, 1998, she and an accomplice named Reginald Gaithwright had been arrested in Las Vegas while allegedly trying to sell twenty grams of cocaine to an undercover police officer. The two had been stopped because they were the occupants of a “suspect car,” according to narcotics cops in Las Vegas. Michelle Parks, who was at the wheel, had informed them immediately that she was the daughter of the LAPD’s Chief Parks. The Los Angeles Times did not report that arrest until September, right around the time that Braverman began to feel pressure from the LAPD to keep what he knew to himself.
What made Braverman vulnerable was a contentious divorce that was followed by a vicious custody battle. Tensions had escalated to a point where Braverman’s ex-wife filed for a restraining order against him. Braverman elected not to fight it. “For one thing, I didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer, and for another I didn’t give a shit if I had to stay away from her.” The judge handling the custody case helped negotiate an agreement that from this point forward, Braverman and his ex-wife would exchange their son in the lobby of the LAPD’s Harbor Division. “I thought it protected me, so I was fine with it,” Braverman said.
In retrospect, he realized he had been far too sure of himself, and of the LAPD, said Braverman. He didn’t see the handwriting on the wall even when he was advised by his direct supervisor—the same one he had spoken to about Ginelli—that he might be violating the law by carrying a gun while under a restraining order. “I came straight to you when the restraining order was filed, and you told me not to worry about it,” Braverman retorted; there was a record of the conversation.
A short time later, Cliff Ruff, president of the LAPD officers’ union, the Police Protective League, informed Braverman that he had been approached at a departmental function by Chief Parks himself, who asked what he knew about “this Braverman guy.” The chief had opined that Braverman knew things he shouldn’t know and wasn’t being as careful as he should with the information, then had proposed a solution to “the problem,” Ruff said: Braverman could go on inactive duty for the next six months, until he reached the twenty-year mark as a police officer and qualified for his pension. All he had to do in exchange was keep his mouth shut.
“I told Cliff Ruff to tell Parks to go fuck himself,” Braverman recalled. “I was still a police officer, and proud of it. Ruff told me, ‘I won’t tell him to go fuck himself, but I will say you refused his offer.’ ”
A week later, Braverman walked into the lobby of the LAPD’s Harbor Division to collect his son in the scheduled custody exchange when he was surrounded by “fifteen to twenty guys in SWAT gear, all with guns pointed at me, telling me to get on the ground.”
No one would tell him what he was being arrested for, Braverman recalled, as he was driven to the LAPD jail downtown, where misdemeanor suspects were typically locked up. Placed in a single cell, he was held for two days without food or water, “with no idea why I was there,” Braverman recalled. “They pulled me out only once and told me to strip. I said no. They pulled out a Taser and threatened to use it on me. So I stripped.”
Finally, Braverman was informed that he had been placed under arrest for violating a court order—the restraining order his wife had taken out—by carrying a firearm. Braverman again pointed out that he’d informed his supervisor of the restraining order and had been told not to worry about it. “They told me, ‘Some new information has come to our attention.’ It turned out there were federal ‘consanguinity guidelines’ that covered someone accused of domestic violence, and that a fight I’d had with my ex-brother-in-law placed me under them.”
In short order, Braverman found himself facing 160 felony counts, one for every day he’d carried a gun on the job since the restraining order was filed. Though separated from them, Braverman was locked up in a pod of the jail where criminal suspects with law enforcement backgrounds were held. One of them was Rafael Perez, just about to negotiate the deal that would launch the Rampart Scandal. Perez was of interest to him then, Braverman said, only because of what he had heard from another LAPD narcotics detective: this detective and his colleagues had found evidence that Michelle Parks was both dating Perez and running his stolen drugs; it was Perez, the detective said, who had posted the $100,000 bond that bailed the chief’s daughter out of jail in Las Vegas after her arrest there in June 1998.
Before he ever had the opportunity to speak to Perez and to ask about Michelle Parks, Braverman was moved into an isolation unit—solitary confinement—where he would spend nearly an entire year awaiting trial. During that time, Braverman was advised by fellow LAPD detective Jeff Pailet of just how politicized the Michelle Parks investigation had become. Pailet described how the career of a friend, LAPD Internal Affairs Division investigator Sergeant John Cook, had nearly been ruined by his assignment to investigate the association between Chief Parks’s daughter and Reginald Gaithwright. “He’d found stuff he wasn’t supposed to find,” Pailet would say nearly two decades later. “He never told me what exactly that was.” Cook, still choosing his words carefully nineteen years afterward, would acknowledge only that he had conducted a face-to-face interview of Michelle Parks in which he had challenged her “evasive” replies to his questions. Just days later, Cook said, he was informed that he had been removed from the case. This wasn’t retaliation, Cook remembered being told by his supervisor, but “a matter of your career survival.”
Shelby Braverman would survive as well, though just barely. He agreed to accept conviction on a single felony count, with a promise he would not serve any prison time. The LAPD also agreed to let Braverman retire “in lieu of dismissal” and collect his twenty-year pension.
Two events had saved him from utter ruin. One was the decision by the district attorney in Las Vegas not to prosecute the narcotics case against Michelle Parks. The other was the September 30, 1999, arres
t of Richard Ginelli for pilfering heroin held as evidence at the LAPD’s Harbor Division. In the Los Angeles Times story about Ginelli’s arrest, published the next day, Bernard Parks had emphasized that this “singular event” was in no way connected to the Rampart Scandal that had only recently begun capturing local headlines. Braverman was one of the very few who knew this was not true.
“They broke me,” said Braverman, who by the time he spoke those words had remarried and fathered two more children, “and I never breathed a word about any of this to anyone. I didn’t even tell my wife. For almost twenty years I kept it to myself. I was that afraid of what might happen to my family. Because I know like few others do just what these people are capable of.”
Hermosillo remembered holding the photo of Chief Parks’s daughter with Perez and Mack in his hands and signing his initials on the back of it. He believed Hight and Paysinger had initialed it also, Hermosillo said, but could not say what happened to the photo after it was passed to Lieutenant Lizarraga and Sergeant Farmer. “All I know is that it disappeared,” he said.
Hermosillo, along with Hale and Paysinger, would agree unanimously to find Paul Byrnes not guilty for the fourth time. This provided perhaps some relief, though nothing like comfort, to Sergeant Byrnes. By then Byrnes was a broken man, financially ruined, drinking too much, and addicted to painkillers. He was returned to active duty, but placed on what in the LAPD was called “freeway therapy,” assigned to Devonshire, the departmental division farthest from his home, ensuring that he would spend hours each day commuting to and from work. Byrnes hung on for another four years, until April 29, 2004, when he died of a prescription drug overdose that was officially “accidental.” “The LAPD and Bernie Parks caused the death of Paul Byrnes,” said Hermosillo, who attended the sergeant’s funeral at St. Finbar Catholic Church in Burbank.
Armas was there also. “The department, under Parks, wouldn’t have anything to do with coordinating his funeral,” Armas remembered. “So I made up a death and funeral notice to distribute throughout the rank and file. I was called in and informed that what I’d written made it look like Byrnes had died in the line of duty and that I couldn’t pass it out. So I made up another notice and sent it. When I asked for a motorcycle escort, the LAPD told me no, so I had to go to the Burbank P.D., and they came through.”
Dead Wrong Page 14