<http://www.latimes.com/news/front/20000210/t000013218.html>
February 10, 2000
Police in Secret Group Broke Law Routinely, Transcripts Say
Rampart: About 30 officers, including supervisors, celebrated their shootings and frame-ups of innocent people, according to informant's statements.
By SCOTT GLOVER, MATT LAIT, Times Staff Writers
Disgraced former officer turned informant Rafael Perez has told investigators that an organized criminal subculture thrived within the Los Angeles Police Department, where a secret fraternity of anti-gang officers and supervisors committed crimes and celebrated shootings by awarding plaques to officers who wounded or killed people.
The more than 30 current and former Rampart Division CRASH officers who were "in the loop," including at least three sergeants, conspired to put innocent people in jail and to cover up unjustified shootings and beatings, according to transcripts of Perez's interviews with LAPD detectives and Los Angeles County deputy district attorneys, copies of which have been obtained by The Times.
The nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts, covering months of interviews with Perez, coupled with hundreds of other official investigative documents obtained by The Times, portray a police scandal far more serious than officials have previously disclosed.
More than 70 LAPD officers are under investigation for either committing crimes or knowing about them and helping to cover them up, according to one document produced by members of a special task force probing the scandal. Perez has told police and prosecutors about a string of potentially unjustified police shootings, including one in which he witnessed an officer place a gun on a dying suspect and listened to a supervisor delay an ambulance so that the officers could concoct a story to justify their shooting of the unarmed 21-year-old man. In another, Perez describes his fellow CRASH officers as sneaking up and opening fire on two New Year's Eve revelers who were shooting guns into the air but posed no direct threat to the police.
Perez said some officers specialized in certain kinds of misconduct. One officer liked "to thump people," he told investigators; another planted guns on suspects, while another--known as the "Candyman"--liked to put rock cocaine on his unsuspecting victims. Sometimes, Perez alleged, officers orchestrated the deportation of illegal immigrants who witnessed police abuses and could have testified on the victims' behalf.
"I'm going to make a very broad statement. And you're not going to like it," Perez told authorities two days after agreeing to a plea bargain on drug theft charges. "I would say that 90% of the officers who work CRASH, and not just Rampart CRASH, falsify a lot of information. They put cases on people . . . it hurts me to say it, but there's a lot of crooked stuff going on in the LAPD."
But although investigators believe they have corroborated many of Perez's admissions and allegations, and though dozens of criminal convictions have been overturned based largely on his word, the ex-officer-turned-informant has failed a polygraph test, The Times has learned.
"I answered every question truthfully. I know I didn't lie," an agitated Perez told investigators on Jan. 26, the same day that LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks told reporters that investigators had no reason to doubt Perez.
"You can blame me for everything else, all of the things that have happened in CRASH. . . . The crimes that I've committed. Those are my fault, and I'm paying every day," Perez told investigators. "But those polygraphs are not my fault."
The former Marine and macho street cop added that he was suffering from a bleeding ulcer, stemming from the stress of informing on corrupt officers, who once were his comrades and accomplices.
"I'm dying from the inside out," Perez said.
Credibility Is an Issue
Perez's failure to pass the lie detector test could jeopardize his plea bargain, in which he is expected to receive a reduced prison sentence for stealing 8 pounds of cocaine from the LAPD in exchange for his cooperation with the corruption investigation. The poor results also could undermine Perez's credibility as a potential witness against other officers.
Many experts, however, say that polygraph tests are an unreliable gauge of a person's truthfulness. And they are not admissible as evidence in court. Nonetheless, officers who have been implicated in the scandal are certain to seize upon the development as evidence that Perez has exaggerated, even made up, stories of police misconduct.
Sources close to the investigation, though troubled by the results, still believe that Perez is telling the truth. One source close to the investigation said Perez, who is anxious and stressed because he fears retaliation, is a poor test subject. A defense expert has suggested that the test was improperly administered, the source said.
In some cases, Perez's statements registered as untruthful even though investigators independently determined that they were accurate.
Moreover, a second officer who has been relieved of duty in connection with the scandal corroborated key elements of Perez's allegations of beatings, evidence planting, false arrests and unjustified shootings in an interview with The Times last month.
LAPD officials are so convinced that illegal activity plagued the Rampart Division, west of downtown, that they believe criminal charges should have been filed weeks ago against two current and one former officer.
That belief has been fueled by the personal story revealed over the weeks of interrogation that Perez has undergone by police detectives and deputy district attorneys assigned to explore the Rampart morass.
During about 50 hours of interviews with investigators, Perez paints a vivid picture of his personal journey from gung-ho rookie to corrupt cop. He talks about the first time he stole money from a suspect, and his first foray into drug dealing. In that 1997 case, Perez said, he and his partner, Nino Durden, found a plastic bag containing a pound of powder cocaine on a suspect and seized it.
"We keep that. We didn't book it," Perez told Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Rosenthal, one of the task force prosecutors.
Back at the station, the suspect's pager--which the officers had confiscated--went off. Perez said he called the number, pretending to be an associate of the dealer--a common police ploy in which officers set up the deal and then arrest the would-be buyer.
In this case, the caller wanted a quarter of a pound of cocaine. Perez said that he made the arrangements and that he and Durden hopped in their undercover black Thunderbird to go make the arrest.
But, according to Perez, "when we first got there, Durden said, 'Screw it. Let's just sell to him.' And I completely agreed."
The partners kept the dealer's pager and executed two more deals, netting about $10,000, Perez said, adding that they hid the drugs in a green Igloo cooler in the cot room at the Rampart station.
What ensued, Perez said, was an orgy of corruption in which the partners seemingly broke the law as frequently as they enforced it. They didn't even trust one another, according to the testimony. When they were shaking down suspects, Perez was suspicious that Durden was keeping more than half the money. "In other words, he was skimming off the top of what we were supposed to skim," Perez told investigators.
Perez said Durden initially did not know that he was stealing kilos of cocaine from department evidence facilities, but that his partner was envious when he found out.
"I want in on it," Perez quoted Durden as saying. "Hook me up."
Lawlessness Is Described
But Perez didn't talk about just himself and his former partner. He described a CRASH unit run amok in which officers shot a suspect repeatedly with a bean bag shotgun for sport and laughed at the resulting injuries. On another occasion, he said, someone slashed the tire of a fellow officer's car. The officer and his partner found a gang member they believed was responsible, stripped him naked and dropped him in rival gang territory.
Perez told investigators that Durden once "outed" a confidential informant in front of his fellow gang members, almost certainly earning the man a beating, if not worse. In one mass frame-up, he alleged, CRASH officers rousted a party and ordered several dozen gang members to their knees. He said Officer Brian Hewitt, who has since been fired from the LAPD for a station house beating for which he may be criminally charged, marched back and forth, randomly pointing at gang members and instructing fellow officers which false charges each would face. After finding a gun on the ground, he told an officer to handcuff Rafael Zambrano, to whom Hewitt allegedly said: "Lil' Man, you're through. . . . I'm gonna violate your probation." Hewitt then allegedly turned to another gang member called "Laughing Boy" and said, "You're lucky that I didn't see you before I saw Lil' Man, otherwise I'd be taking you to jail.' "
These practices were accepted--and protected--by those LAPD officers and supervisors "in the loop," Perez has told investigators. Protecting those secrets, Perez said, meant having a willingness to "take it to the box."
Det. Michael Hohan, a corruption task force investigator, asked Perez in the Sept. 17, 1999, interview, "What's the meaning of 'take it to the box?' "
The officer responded: "Take it to the box is saying that I don't care if Officer Perez gets arrested, he will never get in front of a D.A. and in front of an Internal Affairs [Division] supervisor and say this guy did this and this guy did that.
"And you know why he wouldn't do it? 'Cause he's been right there with us. He's done it all before. He's right there--you see what I'm saying?" Perez asked, seemingly oblivious to the irony of his current situation.
At Rampart CRASH, where the motto was "we intimidate those who intimidate others," Perez said an officer learns very quickly that he is expected to fall in with the rest of his colleagues. In fact, even to join the unit, a person has to be personally "sponsored," or voted in, by the other officers.
"We have a round table and we discuss this person," Perez said. "We talk to people who he's worked with and find out the type of person he is."
Once he is in the unit, all eyes are on the newcomer as the rest of the group determines whether he is trustworthy enough to be "in the loop," Perez said. Female officers, he told investigators, generally could not be trusted. He referred to one partner as a "weaker link" because she was female.
Perez added that CRASH cops who were regarded by colleagues as "solid" or "stand-up" guys were not the ones who were by-the-book officers. Rather, he said, they were officers who would be willing to perjure themselves, plant evidence and fabricate probable cause for searches to put gang members and other presumed criminals in jail.
Several Rampart sergeants condoned, even participated, in the framing of innocent people, Perez told investigators.
"Before I arrived at Rampart CRASH, I never put a gun on a person. Never," Perez told investigators. "When you get to Rampart CRASH, this is something that you're taught. This is how it goes."
That sort of lawless policing produced big results for Rampart CRASH. Officers brought suspects in by the carloads, Perez said.
In one interview with Perez, LAPD Sgt. Luis Segura seemed incredulous that officers would be able to haul in so many arrestees on trumped-up drug charges without supervisors scrutinizing their reports.
"I mean, it seems to me that red flags should be going off," Segura said to Perez.
"I know what you're saying," responded Perez, who lunched on pizzas during interview sessions. "All that was cared about was numbers. All they cared about was that at the end of the month was . . . how much total narcotics was brought in, how much money and how many bodies. That's all, really. That was the only concern."
Even officer-involved shootings seemed to receive relatively little scrutiny by the station's upper management. Some supervisors, Perez alleged, were in on cover-ups.
He said Rampart CRASH officers use a secret radio code that allows them to broadcast information about officer-involved shootings and other matters without alerting fellow patrol officers in the division and command officers.
The clandestine code, Perez said, is particularly useful when an unjustified shooting needed to be covered up.
"Here's how we were trained when I got to CRASH," Perez said. "If there's an officer-involved shooting, no one, but absolutely no one--not the lieutenant, not the captain-- . . . [is allowed to] come into the scene. You create some kind of diversion, something. 'Sir, we still got suspects running. Stay here for a second. We've got officers searching.'
"And what's really going on is they're discussing what's going on. Whoever's involved in the shooting, directly involved shooter-wise, will talk to the supervisor and they will figure everything out. The game plan."
Responded Rosenthal, the prosecutor: "And you're saying you learned this when you joined CRASH?"
Perez said: "This I learned when I joined CRASH.
"If we need to add something to the story to make it look a little bit better, that's what we do," Perez added. "If we need to correct something--then and there before we have the officer-involved shooting team, lieutenants and captains and everybody showing up--we fix it and correct it right there. And we always say that once we come up with a story, that's the story. That is it. You never change it. That's it no matter what."
Details of Cover-Ups
Perez said he helped cover up three unjustified shootings in 1996. The first was a shooting early Jan. 1 in which officers fired at several unsuspecting New Year's Eve revelers who were firing guns into the air about midnight. Perez said he helped collect the officers' expended shell casings so there was no evidence of the shooting, but had to put them back when officers discovered that they had wounded two men. A cover story was quickly conceived, he said, in which officers would say the men were pointing their weapons at police when, in fact, they weren't. In the second alleged cover-up, Perez said he witnessed officers place a gun next to a 21-year-old man whom they shot. As Juan Saldana bled to death, officers intentionally delayed summoning an ambulance as they huddled with a supervisor to concoct a scenario that justified the shooting, Perez alleged. That supervisor was Sgt. Edward Ortiz, the man one LAPD official has said was "quarterbacking" cover-ups in Rampart.
Perez was one of the triggermen in the third and most widely known cover-up since the scandal broke. In that case, Perez alleged that he and Durden shot an unarmed man and planted a gun on him. They then perjured themselves to send Javier Francisco Ovando to prison for 23 years. As a result of Perez's disclosures, Ovando was freed from prison in September.
Such shootings did not trouble Rampart CRASH officers, Perez told investigators. In fact, he said they were celebrated. The officers gathered and drank beer and talked about their misdeeds, he said, even handing out awards.
"Uh, the plaque that you probably saw in my house . . . you know what that plaque is even about? That CRASH plaque with . . . a red heart and two bullets in it?" Perez asked the investigators. "Sgt. [George] Hoopes gave me that plaque for the Ovando shooting. That's what that is. We give plaques [of playing cards] out when you get involved in shootings. Uh, if the guy dies, the card is a black number two. If he stays alive, it's a red number two. "
"Is it more prestigious to get one that is black than red?" asked Det. Mark Thompson.
"Yeah. I mean, you know, the black one signifies that a guy died," Perez said.
Anecdotal Evidence
Although Perez spoke in detail about the alleged crimes and misconduct of his fellow Rampart officers, he offered mostly anecdotal evidence of wrongdoing by officers outside the division.
Perez said he and other cops would trade war stories at the Short Stop bar on Sunset Boulevard or at "the benches" at the police academy across from Dodger Stadium.
"You know, 77th CRASH and Rampart CRASH get into a shooting. . . . We talk about how things went down. How they really went down and how they were fixed up," he said.
Perez told investigators that there were "so many incidents" that he could not remember them all.
"What I'm saying is specialized [LAPD] units need to be looked at, because there is--and believe me when I tell you, if there was 15 officers in CRASH, 13 of them were putting cases on people," Perez said.
"When you say 'putting cases on people' do you mean manufacturing probable cause, or do you mean actually, in essence, framing somebody who did not do something, for a crime?" one task force member asked.
"Both," Perez said. "Both."
Perez said his suspicions about what went on in the 77th Division CRASH unit were heightened upon the arrival of Durden, who transferred from that unit to Rampart a few years ago.
"When he came up to Rampart CRASH, he was talking the talk from the get-go. I mean, he was talking like he knows everything that goes on."
* * *
CRASH Shootings
In excerpts from the transcripts of authorities' interrogation of former Officer Rafael Perez, he describes how improper shootings were covered up and how the CRASH unit rewarded its officers:
Perez, photographed off duty, flashes his version of a gang hand sign.