Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Avrahamy asked that the citizens of Los Angeles consider the Rampart Scandal in light of its final tally: Of the ninety-three officers identified by Perez as having committed crimes while on duty, just eight were criminally charged, and only four were convicted. Of those four convictions, three were cases in which, to avoid going to trial on charges that could have put them in state prison, officers had pleaded guilty to excessive force, not to the corruption charges Perez had made against them. A “media frenzy” had created “the public’s false belief of extensive corruption in the LAPD,” Avrahamy wrote, and this had resulted not only in the overturning of felony convictions of “dangerous gang members who were properly arrested and convicted” but also in the creation of a game known as “Rampart Lotto,” in which dozens of civil rights lawsuits had cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles $70 million.

  Cliff Armas had been part of one Board of Rights hearing after another in which it was obvious that Rafael Perez had falsely accused his fellow officers. He was most haunted and angered, though, Armas said, by what he had learned about how far those assigned to the Rampart Task Force had gone to back Perez. He recalled a case in which Perez had accused Officer Humberto Tovar of having conspired to pin a gun charge on two gang members. According to the arrest report, Perez and Tovar had been part of a CRASH team that was following up on a tip about armed gang members at a Rampart apartment complex. “They stake out the apartment complex, and Perez sees a gang member with a gun walking around the block,” Armas recalled. “He gives the gun to another guy, who also walks around the block. Perez and Tovar call for backup unit. Sergeant Ortiz arrives and they arrest the two guys they had seen with a gun, then go inside and search the apartment, where they find their original suspect but no gun. Perez, though, says this is a bad arrest. He said what really happened is: ‘We take these guys into custody but there’s no gun. So we go inside and search the apartment, where we find a gun inside a heater vent.’ So then what to do? Perez says they huddle around Ortiz, who contrives the story about two gangsters outside with one gun.”

  He had visited the gang member who was substantiating Perez’s account in prison, Armas remembered. “He backs Perez, says he had hidden the gun in a heater vent. So then I listen to the tape of him being interviewed by the task force guys. The first time they ask about the gun, the guy says, ‘What gun?’ Then they go off tape, and when they go back on, he tells the story about the gun in the heater vent. So I go see him again, and this time he admits they turned off the tape and told him the officers were dirty and planting evidence on people. He said the task force guys were tapping their fingers on the heater vent, ‘so I think they want me to say the gun was hidden there.’ And he did. I filed a complaint. All the two task force guys got was a verbal [i.e., unwritten] warning that if you go off tape, you have to announce why before you do.”

  One of those accused along with Tovar had been represented by attorney Darryl Mounger. After Perez testified at a Board of Rights hearing that a tip from an informant he had met on a street corner led him and the other CRASH officers to the building where they found the hidden gun, Mounger asked Perez to name the informant. When Perez did, the attorney was able to show that the man was in jail at the time Perez claimed to have met him on a street corner. “The problem with Perez is that he’s told so many lies that he’s confused,” Mounger said after Tovar was acquitted. “He doesn’t know what the truth is anymore.”

  Armas wondered if the members of the Rampart Task Force didn’t, either. Armas had been assigned as departmental rep when the four officers accused in the Alley Incident case were brought before a trial board. He wanted to interview the gang member accused of driving the car that had struck two of those officers, Armas recalled, “but the guy had been deported to El Salvador. The task force sends two guys down there to interview him, and they come back saying he backs Perez’s story. So I want to interview him, too. I find him in El Salvador and get him to agree to meet me at a hotel. I have my plane tickets and my hotel reservation, but then just as I’m getting ready to leave, Assistant Chief Berkow cancels the trip. Several months later I’m at the scene of an officer-involved shooting and I see Berkow. So I ask him why he canceled my trip to El Salvador. And he asks me, ‘What good would it have done me to let you go?’ Then Berkow tells me straight to my face that if I had gone down there and gotten the guy to recant, it would have ruined a case he and the task force had invested a lot of time and energy in, and that it wouldn’t have been good for any of their careers. This guy and the people working for him all cared more about getting promoted than they did about wrecking the lives of LAPD officers.”

  The entire Rampart Scandal flowed from Rafael Perez, Sanders and Frank understood, so finding the most effective way to present the former detective to a jury, and to explain where he fit into their case, would be central going forward.

  Sanders planned to describe Perez as a calculating fiend who had largely escaped the consequences of his depravity. Certainly, given the magnitude of his crimes, Perez had paid very little for them. Perez had served just three years of his five-year sentence for stealing eight pounds of cocaine from the LAPD evidence locker, and most of that in protective custody. After his release in July 2001, Perez pleaded guilty to the most terrible of the crimes that he had admitted: the shooting of Javier Ovando, which had put the gang member in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, followed by the planting of a gun on Ovando to get him sent to state prison. For this, Perez was sentenced to just five years’ imprisonment and served only two. Not long after his release in 2004, he legally changed his name to Ray Lopez and found a home near the beach in the South Bay, where he was living comfortably.

  His former partner Nino Durden also had been convicted in the Ovando case. Sentenced to five years in state prison, he was released in April 2005 after spending fifty-seven months in custody. As part of his deal with law enforcement, Durden had consented to interviews with federal prosecutors in which he told a story markedly different from the one Perez had sold to the LAPD. While he confirmed that he and Perez had indeed planted guns, fabricated evidence, and perjured themselves, Durden disputed the claims made about widespread misconduct in the Rampart CRASH unit. It had been just him and Rafael, really, Durden said, and mostly Rafael. Since Durden’s arrest in 2000, the LAPD had possessed an alternative account of the Rampart Scandal from a far more credible witness who had not been caught in any false statements. Instead, the department had chosen to stand by a proven liar to prop up the false narrative of the Rampart Scandal and support the task force probe based on it.

  Apart from the complex scheming of Bernard Parks, what motivated the LAPD’s investigation of the Rampart Scandal was very simple, said Cliff Armas: “The guys with a bar wanted a star, and the guys with a star wanted two stars. Career advancement was what it all boiled down to.”

  Finding their way to the best method of deconstructing Perez in front of a jury was not the main problem Sanders and Frank faced in the summer of 2007, however. Simply finding him was. Under the name Ray Lopez, Perez had proved remarkably slippery. “Part of it was the LAPD still protecting him,” said Robleto. “They had helped him keep his exact location and other details secret, and they’d gotten other law enforcement agencies to help, too.”

  Through Chris Brizzolara, Sanders and Frank had eventually turned the task of compelling Perez’s deposition over to the most storied process server and street investigator in Southern California, Thurston Limar Sr. “With him, we figure out that Perez has got some misdemeanor traffic deal in the Torrance court,” Sanders recalled. “Rafael has been ducking us for a long time, so we wanna make sure we get him this time.”

  Perez had been charged with possessing a California driver’s license in a name that was not legally his. On the day of his arraignment, Limar, who suffered from emphysema and sometimes got about aboard a motorized scooter, had hooked up his oxygen tank and stationed himself outside the courtroom where Perez was to appear. When he saw Perez walking
down the hallway toward the courtroom, Limar maneuvered his scooter through the double doors that separated the anteroom from the courtroom, just in front of Perez, then let the papers he was holding slide off his lap onto the floor.

  Unable to get past the scooter, Perez stooped to pick up the papers and extended them to Limar, who smiled and said, “No, those are for you.” According to Limar, Perez became furious when he saw that he was holding a subpoena. Before he could exit the courthouse, Limar (since deceased) said in a sworn statement, “I was confronted by an individual who represented that he was the attorney for Mr. Perez. This individual told me that I ‘was less than a man,’ and that I was ‘a lowdown motherfucker’ and ‘a son of a bitch.’ He went on to state that: ‘I ain’t going to have any pity for you because you are going to be hit by a fucking bus,’ and that he ‘would not have any pity on your ass then.’ ”

  Perez finally testified under oath on August 28, 2007, at Brizzolara’s offices in Santa Monica. It had been agreed that Brizzolara and Gage would ask all the questions for the plaintiffs’ side, with Sanders permitted to speak only when he was instructing the other two attorneys. Perez, who had “come in unbelievably cocky,” Sanders recalled, was accompanied by his own attorney, John Yslas.

  Brizzolara asked Perez if, while serving in West Bureau Narcotics, he had become a close friend of David Mack’s. Yslas immediately began to object. What followed was an almost cartoonish colloquy in which Yslas did more talking than did his client. Yslas was “a veritable fount of what I believed were unmeritorious objections,” recalled Brizzolara, whose frustration was only increased by the fact that when Perez was finally allowed to answer, his most common reply was, “I don’t recall.”

  The point of Yslas’s interruptions, Brizzolara knew, was delay. Federal court trials limited depositions to seven hours maximum, and Perez’s attorney seemed determined to run out the clock before anything substantive was said.

  Perez had to answer at least some questions, though. Brizzolara had gotten Perez to acknowledge that the keys to various LAPD vehicles were found in his home when it was searched after his arrest. Perez said he’d simply forgotten to turn the keys back in after driving the cars, but Sanders and Frank intended to show that Perez had driven one of those vehicles while helping to coordinate the Notorious B.I.G. murder. Perez also admitted that he and Durden were on duty the night of Biggie’s slaying and that they were equipped with LAPD-issued Astro radios. Sanders and Frank would argue that Perez had used his radio to help coordinate the hit on Biggie.

  Most important to the attorneys, however, was getting Perez to deny that he had any connection to Death Row Records. “I have never been into any Death Row Records studio, never ever. Not standing out in front, not going inside; never,” he said. His answer meant that Perez was still unaware of the Kendrick Knox deposition. A jury that knew Perez had lied about ever being at Death Row’s studio would be inclined to believe he was lying about the rest of his denials of association with Suge Knight and the Bloods gang.

  During the deposition, Perez also denied his close relationship with Kenneth Boagni while the two of them were locked up together in the Lynwood jail, something that had been attested to by at least two witnesses who were prisoners there during this same period. Those two had each described seeing Perez and Boagni make pruno wine in a toilet and get drunk on it together. “He was an 11th Street gang member, tatted up, guy I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him,” Perez said of Boagni. “I had no type of—other than we were housed in the same pod—I didn’t have a relationship with him.”

  Perez also played down his friendship with Mack, yet his answers on that subject revealed something never publicly disclosed: Perez and Sammy Martin had visited Mack while he was locked up following his arrest for the Bank of America robbery. Amid serial objections by Yslas, Perez declined to say what the three of them had discussed.

  For Sanders, the signature moment of the deposition had come when Perez was being questioned by Brizzolara about a photograph of him recovered by Russell Poole, in which Perez was shown wearing a red sweat suit and flashing the West Coast gang sign. After Perez said he was merely “joking around” when he made the sign, Brizzolara asked, “Did you think gangs were a joke? Do you think the Bloods gang is a joke?”

  Remembered Sanders, “I’m telling you the guy became a different person in that fraction of a second. He went from being cool and cocky to deathly scared that fast. I mean, the guy was havin’ a fear-of-God experience right in front of my eyes. You couldn’t have driven a needle up his behind. Perez wasn’t afraid of the LAPD, and he wasn’t afraid much of us, either. But he was scared out of his mind of the Bloods.” That was a lever that would move Perez, Sanders knew, if only he could figure out the best way to use it.

  Even though he denied any relationship with Bernard Parks’s daughter Michelle, Perez said a little too much when he was asked about the photograph of Michelle Parks standing between himself and David Mack. “I can’t answer that question because I could have been at a fund-raiser and David Mack is there, and I don’t know who Parks’s daughter is, and she decides to take a picture with Mack and I’m standing there. And if I answered no, unbeknownst to me I actually did [have my picture taken with Parks’s daughter]. So if you have the picture and you can produce it, I can answer the question.”

  Said Sanders, “I figure he probably knew that photograph had been destroyed, but he couldn’t be sure there wasn’t another copy out there somewhere, so he had to play it cagey. And juries don’t like cagey.”

  Perez was cagey again, though, when Brizzolara got him to agree that he had traveled to Las Vegas with Mack and Martin, along with his girlfriend and drug-dealing accomplice Veronica Quesada, on November 8, 1997, two days after the Bank of America robbery. “Had you told Veronica Quesada previously that she should be ready to go to Las Vegas on a day’s notice?” Brizzolara asked. Perez no doubt suspected that Quesada had told this to the authorities while trying to get the drug charges against her reduced—and in fact she had. He thought for a long time before answering, then said, “Not to my knowledge.”

  When Brizzolara turned finally to the night of the Biggie murder, his questions were all based on the activity log Perez and Durden had turned in on the morning of March 9, 1997, just hours after the 12:40 a.m. slaying. There were no entries for any activity later than 11 p.m. on March 8. But he did recall what he was doing at 12:40 a.m. on March 9, Perez said: “Talking to La Mirada gang members” near the corner of Virgil and Normal streets in Rampart, miles from the Petersen Automotive Museum. Which gang members? Brizzolara wanted to know.

  A: Just La Mirada gang members.

  Q: Who in particular?

  A: We didn’t put down—or I didn’t put down which particular gang members.

  Q: How many gang members were there?

  A: I have no idea.

  Q: Was there more than one?

  A: I don’t recall.

  Q: Was there more than fifty?

  A: Don’t recall.

  Q: What were they doing?

  A: Don’t recall.

  “Perez thought he was smart, thought he was makin’ us look stupid,” Sanders recalled. “Gettin’ him to show that cocky grin of his on the witness stand was gonna be easy, I thought. And the jury would only need to see it once.”

  They hadn’t gotten a lot during that seven-hour deposition, Sanders would admit, but it was enough, he figured. “The key to Perez is playing to his overconfidence,” Sanders said. “And we do that by playin’ dumb ourselves. I’m good at that.”

  * Stymie Adams pleaded no contest to manslaughter in the death of a Mexican Mafia member and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. That conviction was overturned by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge on the basis of evidence that Rafael Perez had falsified evidence in the case. After criminal charges were dropped, Adams won $800,000 in a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Les
s than a month before the Rafael Perez deposition, the Los Angeles Police Department had given its first indication of how it intended to shut down the Wallace v. Los Angeles lawsuit and permanently erase the implication of LAPD officers in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Once again, the department had chosen Chuck Philips as its conduit. Sanders and Frank took one look at the headline on the July 31, 2006, Los Angeles Times article “LAPD Renews Search for Rapper’s Killer,” saw Philips’s byline, and immediately recognized that the city’s attorneys were telegraphing their intentions.

  The two attorneys did not have to read far to discover what those were. After reporting that Chief Bratton had “launched a task force of senior homicide detectives to hunt down [Biggie’s] killer,” Philips added, “Whatever new evidence the police turn up could bolster the city’s contention that LAPD officers played no role in the rapper’s death.”

  “So we knew right then that this so-called investigation wasn’t gonna be about solving the case,” Sanders said. “It was gonna be about protecting the city from us.”

  The Wallace Discovery Task Force was the official title of this new unit of detectives dedicated to what Bratton had chosen to call Operation Transparency.

  Philips wrote, “The leading theory being pursued by the LAPD task force involves the possibility that Wallace was killed by a member of Compton’s vicious Southside Crips gang as part of a bicoastal rap feud linked to Shakur’s death.” It was a theory that had been discarded early on by the first team of RHD investigators assigned to the Wallace case, Russell Poole and Fred Miller.