Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (21 page)

Billy was a businessman whose business was the drug trade. What he lacked was what Lomas had: a propensity for violence. Teaming up in the mid-eighties, their timing was exactly right. The customer base of desperately addicted users was starting to form. And Billy had both close ties within the drug world and a salesman’s get-along affability—which he used to great effect with the then exclusively black wholesale dealers who were the first into L.A.’s crack trade.

The wholesalers’ area of trade was the Newton area of South Central, which turned out to be as good as Billy and Lomas’s timing, conveniently located as it was just a block or two from their home turf of Huntington Park—a great advantage in picking up the product quickly and returning home just as fast. Newton, moreover, was located just a short, quick turn onto the 110 Freeway, a major traffic artery with connections to all of metropolitan L.A.

Newton, moreover, was also situated on the border policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on one side and the LAPD on the other. Neither liked the other. And their close proximity had long ago degenerated into a grudging aversion to cooperate or even communicate. Consequently, neither was patrolling the area in a sharp manner or on regular basis, each agency leaving it to the other.

Within that void Lomas and Billy set up shop and began what would prove a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. Billy got what he lacked and needed from Lomas. And Alfred Lomas got an endless supply of the rock cocaine that was now what gave meaning to his life.

Once they started dealing crack in earnest, their business developed with remarkable smoothness—Billy making the deals, and Lomas supplying muscle, plotting pickup and delivery routes, and then making the runs.

Paradoxically, the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s
indiscriminate war on black and brown young men actually helped in Lomas’s pickup and delivery. Their myopic approach was geared to stopping and arresting
vato locos
; it was what they knew.

Consequently
Lomas always made sure to be clean shaven, to dress like an ordinary citizen or suit-wearing businessman,
to make runs with women, not gang guys—particularly with white girls involved in the dope trade. As a result of his planning, he never got arrested for heavy-duty drug dealing.

**************

By the late 1980s Alfred Lomas was also
freelancing his services to three or four other dealers in addition to Billy. He knew most everyone involved in drug-trade security in his operational area, and tried to keep gun and muscle use to a minimum, negotiating with his counterparts to avoid conflict as they moved their dealers’ drugs around.

“
I liked the action on the streets,” he’d later say, “and I’d learned at an early age that most guys that got involved at a higher level got killed. So I never worked directly for top guys, never knew the direct lines of distribution or how they operated.” In any case that would always be Alfred Lomas’s rap.

**************

In 1988 Alfred Lomas was finally arrested. One night he was supposed to collect a large sum of money from a resident of
a house in Palos Verdes, an ultra-affluent hillside community overlooking the Pacific Ocean. But he started drinking and hitting his crack pipe early that day with his cousin, who had brought the collection deal to him. Sloppy drunk and crack high, they hopped into a car that night and actually made it over to Palos Verdes, a long, circuitous ride from South Central. Then they parked and entered the wrong house. The elderly woman inside quickly called the cops. They were arrested and Lomas was
sentenced to eighteen months in a California state prison in Susanville, one of the northernmost of California’s thirty-plus penitentiaries.

The Golden Rule in prison is this: you do what everybody else does, or you face often brutal consequences from your fellow inmates. California’s
prisons have a further code:
you stay with your own kind. In fact, the state’s prisons are so racially charged that inmates are often officially segregated by race—
blacks, whites, and Latinos all housed separately. Because northern and southern Chicano gangs are sworn enemies, they are further divided and separated by geography. Lomas had the misfortune to be a Southern Californian in a hyper-violent northern prison where southerners were outnumbered three to one by blacks and
Norteños
. The hood writ large had come, in short, to the biggest prison system in the county.

One of the greatest fears of any inmate in California is to have his own race turn on him. Then he’s open to attack by anyone. But Lomas was
Florencia 13, and
that
, along with knowing how to act, kept him protected.

After serving sixteen months, he was released, having earned a stripe and a lot of street cred for being outnumbered in a prison war zone and not just surviving but coming back unscathed.

Then, about a year after the ’92 riots,
Lomas became a father.
His new son’s mother was also a crack addict. Lomas was serving a six-month stint in county jail for battery when the baby was born, and as soon as he was released he made a beeline to visit his child. He was appalled by what he saw:
his son was startlingly thin, with a filthy diaper, surrounded by guys smoking crack and getting drunk. It was too much even for Alfred Lomas, who’d witnessed a lot of depravity in his day. In response, he “
threw a Rambo, and beat the shit out of everybody that was there.” Then he left with the baby and moved out of the hood and in with his father, who had sobered up and remarried and was living in Pasadena.

Soon he was working hard to stay straight. He
landed a salesman’s job with Safety Clean—an environmental company that did solvent and oil recovery—and, using his energetic, street-hustler persona, made good money, acquired a new, smart, nonaddicted girlfriend, and moved in with her to start a new life and actively father his son.

David Mack and Rafael “Ray” Perez, Tuesday, October 26, 1993, Hollywood, California

While Alfred Lomas was living straight, twenty-nine-year-old
Jesse Vicencio was leaning into the driver’s-side window of a beat-up
Datsun B210 parked on a dark Hollywood side street at about nine-fifteen on an October night in 1993. As he did so, he either placed a pistol to the left side of LAPD undercover officer David Mack’s head, or he did not. Whatever the case, Mack shot him dead.

Mack and his partner, Rafael Perez, were then part of the department’s
West Bureau [drug] Buy Team—one of Daryl Gates’s special units that had carte blanche to proceed as they wished, few questions asked, as long as the arrested meat kept rolling in.

The Buy Team was a small unit primarily dedicated to making small crack buys from street-corner dealers. The unit featured two-man teams of youthful-looking undercover cops wired to both a supervising detective and a couple of patrol cars with uniformed officers, who waited to barrel in and make the arrest once the deal went down.

Like Charlie Beck, who’d spend much of his time in CRASH units endlessly raiding crack houses, Mack and Perez’s job was to endlessly arrest street dealers, of which there were so many—particularly in Hollywood—that they often doubled their nightly arrest quotas.

It was a dirty job that involved living a life of deadly deceit, which was bad for the soul as well as devastating for whatever moral compass a young man might possess as he operated under the Buy Team’s laxly enforced rules.

But from 1991 to 1994 David Mack and Rafael Perez would do it, and love it. “
Just by its nature, there’s constant danger,” Mack and Perez’s supervisor, Detective Bobby Lutz, would later explain to the
Los Angeles Times
. “A constant go, go, go . . . Those guys were on the edge all the time. . . . Every time you make a buy, it’s a rush. They[’d] lap it up . . . relish it.”

Unlike fortified crack houses, street dealing, by its open-air-market nature, was fraught with inter-gang rip-offs that were among the leading factors in
driving L.A.’s homicide rate to a record 1,100 in 1993. Among the dead was
Jesse Vicencio, who’d lost his life over that potential sale of a $20 rock of cocaine.

David Mack, however, was not only exonerated for Vicencio’s death, he was awarded the department’s second-highest medal for heroism. As Mack and Perez later told it, Vicencio walked up to their Datsun undercover car dangling a chrome handgun on his right leg and proceeded to place it on Mack’s temple, whereupon Mack jerked his head away and fired off a round before Vicencio could, and then blasted off twelve more shots.
Two eyewitnesses, however—one Vicencio’s cousin, the other his friend—would swear to police investigators at the time, and to an
L.A. Times
reporter six years later, that Vicencio never pulled a gun on the two cops. In any case, the shooting was ruled “in policy,” and undoubtedly the case would have remained closed had not serious concerns arisen about David Mack and particularly Rafael Perez in the years to come.

**************

Rafael Perez was the kind of guy who could size you up and give you back what you wanted to hear as if he’d just thought of it. A tall, lithe, half-black, half-white, cocoa-colored Puerto Rican, he wore his hair and mustache close and neatly trimmed. Effortlessly charismatic, he projected a boyish eagerness to please and a personal warmth (“Call me Ray!”) that he could turn on and off like a light switch. Articulate in English, fluent in Spanish, he was also a great storyteller with a sharp cop’s eye for detail. Many young Latinas consequently found him irresistible, and although he was already on his second marriage he felt the same way about them, and never hesitated to show it. His
first wife divorced him when she found him cheating on her. Nevertheless, she remained inordinately fond of Ray, as did his
second wife, Denise, an LAPD dispatcher who would stand by her man, even as their lives came crashing down upon them.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1967, Ray’s childhood was not a happy time.
One of three children raised alone by his mother, he never saw as much as a picture of his father until he was over thirty years old. Arriving in the States when he was five, he and his family lived briefly in
Brooklyn
before moving to the weary factory town of Paterson, New Jersey. When he was in his early teens, his mother moved the family again, this time to a punishing black ghetto in
northern Philadelphia. There, as Ray later told it, he watched his
uncle run a drug ring out of the corner house down the street and his mother being beaten by her drunken, common-law husband as Ray stood hopelessly by.

After a three-year stint as a
U.S. Marine Corps infantryman, Ray
joined the LAPD in June of 1989, when he was just twenty-one years old.
Assigned first to the relatively sleepy Harbor Division, he
then worked patrol in Wilshire Division before volunteering for the West Bureau Buy Team.

His partner,
David Mack, was an African-American raised on the cruel streets of Compton, a small, then overwhelmingly black city adjacent to South L.A. that was also home to the seminal gangsta rap group N.W.A and Death Row Records and its thug impresario, Marion “Suge” Knight.

If anything, Mack—who was about a decade older than Ray and was Ray’s role model—was an even more singular character than his partner: a ghetto kid who
attended the University of Oregon on a track scholarship, became an
NCAA 800-meter champion,
qualified for the Olympics before being sidelined with an injury, and was
rumored to have dated the beautiful Olympic track star Florence Griffith Joyner. Later he’d marry another track star with whom he had
two children. But like Ray he was hardly a
Modern Bride
ideal family man. He liked the ladies and the action in L.A. and Vegas far too much for that. Still, he was a hero cop who, as Ray would always swear, had saved his life that night in Hollywood.

In 1994, however, their partnership would end when Mack became a training officer in the West Los Angeles Division, and Ray joined a special unit with which his name would become synonymous, and which he’d later make infamous: Rampart CRASH. The two, however, would remain close friends as each become notorious in his own right. Their future actions would have a far more profound impact on the future of the LAPD than anything that Willie Williams would ever do as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Bill Bratton and Rudolph Giuliani, November 1993, New York City

Rudolph Giuliani was not a subtle man. A balding, hard-nosed, strong-willed former U.S. attorney, he’d grown up in Brooklyn and Long Island, had
four uncles who
were cops, and in 1993 ran for a second time for mayor of New York City, narrowly defeating incumbent David Dinkins, New York’s first African-American mayor, that November.

A rare Republican in a Democratic city, Giuliani perfectly understood the rage and frustration of New York’s white working and middle class over the city’s inability to reduce crime, because he was them and they were him. For decades, as they saw it, New York had been corrupted by ivory-tower liberals and weak clubhouse politicians who’d been giving away control of their city to self-designated, endlessly demanding black leaders personified by the then intensely divisive young minister the Reverend Al Sharpton. Giuliani’s electoral success lay in him having the temerity to unapologetically ride the razor’s edge of their fear to victory.

The city’s African-Americans, for their part, were only too aware of the crime being committed by a minority of their young men, being, after all, the major victims of that crime. But they were desperate not just for their physical security but for long-denied opportunity and decent jobs in the strikingly polarized racial divide of the 1990s. Too much heat had built up over the decades to allow progress along both those fronts to occur without a wrenching transformation of the kind that had exploded in Los Angeles after the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the ’92 riots.

Rudolph Giuliani’s election brought that transformation to New York. Giuliani would turn out to be a touchy, revengeful, and sometimes buffoonish man, nasty, narcissistic, egomaniacal, and combative to a fault, who, like Frank Sinatra, had within him something of a wounded little boy who never forgot a slight. As a former U.S. attorney, he had
liked
putting people in prison, had taken delight in perp-walking suspects and seeing them shamed. That was just the kind of guy he was.