Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  The City of Los Angeles would eventually concede how unfairly Byrnes had been treated, agreeing to pay his family $675,000 for the “unreasonable harm” that had been caused to the sergeant by the police department’s backing of the testimony of Rafael Perez. “Paul Byrnes was one of the biggest victims of the whole Rampart mess,” the chief attorney for the Police Protective League would tell the Los Angeles Times. Councilman Dennis Zine, a former police union official, told the Times that Byrnes had been “swept away in that cloud, but the investigation proved he didn’t do anything.”

  Maybe, hopefully, Xavier Hermosillo said, the Byrnes family had found some consolation in reading that. Armas doubted it.

  He had known Xavier Hermosillo for years, Sergio Robleto said. “We were not close, but he was somebody you never forget, very strong-willed and opinionated. If he believes somebody is doing an injustice to somebody else, he can’t keep his mouth shut about it.”

  Hermosillo, though, understood that in this instance keeping his mouth shut was probably the wise course. Hermosillo earned most of his income running a crisis management and communications company that made him privy to a good deal of sensitive information that was shared with him by government and corporate clients. “Trust is everything,” he said. “People have to know I can keep a secret.”

  At the same time, he was concerned about the safety of Kenneth Boagni and Felipe Sanchez, Hermosillo said. “Sanchez tried to act like he wasn’t scared, but Boagni made no secret of it,” Hermosillo recalled. “The last thing he said to me as he left the hearing room that day was, ‘You’re gonna take care of me, right?’ So I was thinking about whether I would put him at risk if I told somebody from outside the department about his testimony. Then again, I wondered if going public might keep him safer. I was weighing it back and forth.”

  Following the progress of the Notorious B.I.G. wrongful death lawsuit in the Los Angeles Times was what finally pushed him forward to a decision, Hermosillo said: “I read that Perry Sanders was asking for evidence that cops had been involved in Biggie’s murder, and that Don Vincent was telling him there was no evidence, and that the judge was telling Perry she might have to dismiss the case if he couldn’t show her some. That pissed me off. I knew Vincent and thought he was a total asshole. The bigger thing, though, is that I’m a father of five, and if something like that happened to one of my kids and somebody out there knew something important about it, I’d want them to step up for the truth.”

  What finally convinced him he needed to go public, Hermosillo said, was seeing Voletta Wallace on television: “I saw her pain in trying to get to the truth of what happened to her son. I was raised by a very strong mother, and all of a sudden I began to realize I might be the only person who had the ability to bring some light to the missing evidence.”

  Before acting, though, Hermosillo paid a visit to the man he called his mentor, someone he would identify only as “a business guru, genius, super-successful entrepreneur.” The mentor arranged for an appointment with what he said was the top criminal defense firm in L.A., Hermosillo recalled. “I explained my concerns to the lawyers there, and they explained to me both my obligations to secrecy and my options to do the right thing. Feeling a little smarter and more comfortable with trying to do the right thing, I made a concerted effort to get as much info and detail about the whereabouts of all the missing evidence as I could.”

  Mostly, Hermosillo said, he called in favors from old friends on the LAPD. “And within a day I pretty much had solid info that where the documents were located was in the locked file cabinet in RHD behind Steve Katz’s desk—[to] which I was told only he had the key—and possibly also in a hidden compartment in his desk.”

  Phil Carson would question whether Hermosillo had accomplished this on his own. Carson, too, knew where Katz had concealed “the Boagni evidence” and had prevailed upon the one person among the LAPD command staff he believed could be trusted to do the right thing. “I asked him to make sure that word of where the stuff was hidden got to Perry Sanders,” Carson said.

  It was a person holding the rank of LAPD sergeant, though, not someone of higher rank, who told him where Katz was keeping the documents locked up, said Hermosillo. He doubted but did not dismiss the possibility that there was a connection to Carson.

  Whoever was involved in arming him with the information, it was Hermosillo who placed the phone call to Perry Sanders’s law office on June 23, 2005.

  Sanders and Hermosillo had actually met face-to-face several months earlier. “For me it was a get-acquainted meeting,” Hermosillo recalled. “I was still trying to decide how much I could or should tell him, because he sounded like one of those Louisiana good-old-boy lawyers, and I needed to know if I could trust him.” Sanders’s main memory of that meeting was the setting, a huge, muraled Mexican restaurant in Lynwood that had just been opened by Hermosillo’s friend Martin Garcia. “I walk in and Xavier is the only one in the place except for the owner,” Sanders recalled. “He’s sitting at a table right in the middle of the place, and he’s a big man. The owner is fawning all over him and bringin’ out special dishes. It was like goin’ to meet a king.” Sanders had owned a number of restaurants, including two Mexican eateries, “so I was mainly interested in the food, which was great. And Xavier didn’t really tell me much. It was more like he was askin’ the questions and I was answerin’ them. He did say somethin’ about that there might be some Internal Affairs investigations I didn’t know about, but there was no detail.”

  Hermosillo was ready to share the details when he phoned Sanders’s law office on June 23. He knew he was about to “unleash the dogs,” Hermosillo said, but even he couldn’t imagine how convulsive the drama of the next fourteen days would be.

  “After he talked to Xavier, Perry phoned me and said, ‘I’m gonna have this guy call you,” Robleto recalled. “Vet him for me.’ ” Hermosillo was startled when the person who answered his call to the number Sanders had given him turned out to be Robleto. The admiration the investigator had expressed for him was mutual, Hermosillo said: “Sergio is one of the brightest, classiest guys I’ve ever been around, and the greatest homicide investigator ever.” Determined to protect his anonymity, though, Hermosillo decided to disguise his voice the moment he realized he was talking to someone who knew him. “An accent, a change in pitch, a little slurring here and there,” Hermosillo said.

  “It worked,” Robleto recalled. “I had no idea it was him. He told me about the Boagni testimony at that Board of Rights hearing and told me that not only he but both of the captains on the panel with him had found Boagni credible.” Robleto decided he needed to speak to Boagni personally and drove four hours southeast through the glimmering desert to Calipatria Prison, literally the lowest place in North America, more than 180 feet below sea level, where the furnace blast of heat sucked the breath out of visitors. By the time Robleto arrived, a full-scale riot had erupted and the prison was locked down. “I knew I had to talk to Boagni that day,” Robleto said, “but I didn’t see how I could. Remember, the trial was still going on, everything was in full swing.” After the rioting inmates were forced back into their cells, he was able to persuade prison officials to let him speak to Boagni by phone, Robleto said, “and he relayed the same story that Xavier had told me. So I get on the phone with Perry and tell him the stories match. He had me fill out a declaration that he presented to the judge. When the judge read it, she was really upset. I mean really upset. If what I had written was true, it would mean that a lot of what the city had claimed was not true.”

  After a plea from Sanders in open court that the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division be searched for any and all documents relating to Kenneth Boagni, Judge Cooper seemed disposed to agree. First, though, she issued a subpoena for Xavier Hermosillo (Robleto had used his phone number to identify Hermosillo) and dispatched two U.S. marshals to serve it at his home in San Pedro, then bring him directly to her chambers.

  “I hear a loud knock, look throug
h the peephole to see who’s banging on my front door, see these two mammoth guys wearing guns and vests,” Hermosillo recalled. “Then I see their U.S. marshals’ badges, so I open the door. The moment I do, they hand me a subpoena. I’m thinking, ‘Nobody said anything about a subpoena.’ Then they tell me I need to come with them to see Judge Florence Cooper.”

  At the federal courthouse, one of the marshals led him to Judge Cooper’s chambers. “No one else was in the room with us after the marshal left,” Hermosillo recalled. “The judge said she was led to believe I knew something about evidence connected to a police discipline case that may have been ‘placed’ somewhere at LAPD and asked me what I knew and why.” After he briefed her on that evidence and how he had come to know about it, the judge, who had been making notes the entire time, asked if Hermosillo knew the precise location of “these missing items.”

  “I told her I had it on good authority that they were hidden in Steve Katz’s personal file cabinet and possibly in a hidden compartment in his office desk at RHD. She asked me how I knew that, and I told her I had a lot of friends in the department who had worked certain cases and certain areas and were in a position to know.”

  Cooper then asked about his interest in the Wallace case, Hermosillo recalled, “and I told her that among the missing documents were the results of an internal investigation that my fellow board members and I had initiated after learning that Rampart Task Force detectives visited two former cellmates of Rafael Perez at state prisons, attempting to dissuade them from testifying by asserting Rafael Perez had friends at those prisons who would ‘shank’ them.

  “I then saw her press a button on her phone and ask a fellow on the other end to come into her office. A marshal walked in, she handed him some documents, which I believed included notes from my statements, and said, ‘Here you go. Go lock down Robbery-Homicide and you should find these documents in “his”—she pointed to something on the paper on top—file cabinet and hidden compartment in his desk.’ ”

  “And of course we all know what they found,” Robleto said, “all the records of the lengthy investigation—attempted suppression would be more like it—of Boagni’s claims that the LAPD had made. All if it right in the drawers of Steve Katz.”

  For him, Robleto said, “this was a really sad day, the saddest moment of the whole case. I’d been an LAPD cop for many years. I had been proud to be a member of the department. But now I was just stunned. The lengths people in the department had been willing to go to keep the evidence hidden that would vindicate Russ Poole—I felt this combination of amazement and sorrow when I realized it. The LAPD had actually spent more time trying to avoid any appearance of this information than they ever did trying to solve the murder case itself.”

  That was apparent to Judge Cooper when she got a look at what had been recovered from the Robbery-Homicide Division. Along with the tape recordings of interviews of Boagni by the LAPD that had been conducted on December 8, 2000, and May 3, 2001, what Katz had secreted away included the message memo that Cliff Armas had sent alerting the detective to Boagni’s information and also his own handwritten notes of his first interview with Boagni, on March 11, 2000 (nine months before Boagni’s appearance at the Byrnes Board of Rights hearing); of his second, on October 11, 2000 (two months before the Byrnes hearing); and of his third, on March 9, 2001. In addition there were two “paraphrased” interviews of Boagni by Katz, three declarations about his conversations with Rafael Perez that Boagni had signed in November 2000, and a raft of other materials that demonstrated how seriously the LAPD had taken the threat Boagni posed both to the Christopher Wallace murder investigation/cover-up and to the Rampart Task Force’s determination to validate Rafael Perez at all costs. The complaints filed against Task Force detectives Wich, Vicari, Gannon, and Brockway were also among Katz’s hidden files, as was the “Intradepartmental Correspondence” describing the methods by which the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division had suppressed its own investigation of those complaints.

  Rob Frank had taken particular pleasure in describing to Judge Cooper how, months earlier, he had conducted “the most important deposition to date” at Detective Katz’s desk in RHD, a deposition in which Katz had assured him he had the complete investigative file of the Wallace case, even as the detective was sitting just inches from the drawers where he had concealed “all these materials from Mr. Boagni indicating that Rafael Perez confessed to [the Biggie] murder and his role and David Mack’s role in the murder.” Judge Cooper, her fury barely contained, granted Frank the immediate right to yet another deposition of Detective Katz.

  For the plaintiffs, that question-and-answer session would improve their position considerably. Katz, it turned out, was a bad liar whose explanation for his failure to turn over the Boagni materials was as pathetic as it was tortured. He had remembered his Boagni file “as I was reviewing my chronological record Friday at court,” said Katz, apparently oblivious to the fact that this had been the very moment when Perry Sanders was informing Judge Cooper of what he had heard from Xavier Hermosillo. Katz had promptly adjourned to his desk in the Robbery-Homicide Division, where he retrieved the file he “forgot was in there” and turned it over not to the U.S. marshals dispatched by the judge but to an investigator from the city attorney’s office.

  Katz first attempted to say that he hadn’t considered Boagni an important witness, but then had to explain why he had interviewed the informant multiple times in prison, and also why he had, for the first and only time in his career, requisitioned an LAPD aircraft to make the trip to question a witness. Best by far, though, from Frank’s point of view, was that Katz had spread the blame across a wide swath of the LAPD, explaining that he had shared the substance of his interviews of Boagni not only with members of the Rampart Task Force and the Internal Affairs Division, but also with his commanding officers. “The wider the net [that] can be thrown around people in the LAPD who knew about this stuff, the better for us, obviously,” Frank said.

  Katz knew he was cooked; within days he was removed from the Christopher Wallace murder investigation. By the end of the deposition the detective was trembling with rage. “He refused to shake my hand,” recalled Frank, who, like Sanders, was certain they would make mincemeat of the detective when they cross-examined him in front of a jury. “I started telling my fiancée that if we won this case I was going to buy a big boat and call it the Detective Katz,” Frank said.

  Before Judge Cooper, Don Vincent would attempt to argue that Katz was guilty of nothing more than a memory lapse, having mislaid some of his files from the Christopher Wallace murder investigation. “But the only stuff in Katz’s drawers was stuff implicating police—Mack and Perez,” Sanders observed. “So no way that was an accident. And Judge Cooper was too smart not to see that.” The city’s attorneys then contended that there had been no actual request from Sanders and Frank for the documents in the Boagni file. The transcript of the Rule 26 conference that Sanders had insisted on back at the beginning of the case defeated that argument: Rob Frank had been meticulous in demanding “the entire universe of material in the LAPD’s possession that related in any way to Biggie’s murder, and any and all information they had where cops were potentially implicated,” as Sanders put it.

  On July 6, the judge declared a mistrial. She also announced before the packed courtroom that the City of Los Angeles would repay the plaintiffs’ side every penny that had been spent preparing and presenting their evidence. The decision seemed to turn the entire case upside down in a single stroke.

  Sanders and Frank were gratified by watching the Los Angeles Times absorb the new reality of the case. The newspaper’s first story ran under the subhead “Three weeks into their civil case, lawyers for Notorious B.I.G.’s family have failed to prove an LAPD link to the star’s 1997 slaying.” That version did not even mention the lockdown of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division and the discovery of the hidden tapes and documents until the fifth paragraph. By the third edition, printed later
that day, however, the lead sentence of the story reflected what was already appearing in the New York Daily News and the Washington Post: “The LAPD deliberately hid witness statements tying corrupt police officers to the slaying of Notorious B.I.G., a federal judge said Thursday in granting a mistrial and potentially lucrative attorney fees to the rapper’s family.”

  Sanders had no doubt the Los Angeles Times would continue to be as much his adversary as were the attorneys representing the city, “and maybe more so. But finally, for the first time, they were swinging at us from their heels and we were on our toes.”

  * Hermosillo described a specific family relationship between the rapist and Parks that was confirmed by two other persons. Only one of the three recalled the name of the rapist; because the Hermosillo complaint and the documents that supported it were turned over to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, and because what is now the Professional Standards Division refuses to release it without a court subpoena, I’ve omitted the name and exact relationship.

  * Baca was elected Los Angeles County sheriff in 1998 and in 2017 was sentenced to three years in state prison for perjury and obstruction of justice while in office.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the immediate aftermath of the mistrial, both the city’s attorneys and the Los Angeles Times had gone silent on the subject of the Christopher Wallace wrongful death lawsuit. In part this was because for most of the next year the only issues before the court were the size of the sanctions against the city and the scope of discovery that would be permitted in a new trial. The plaintiffs would prevail on both.