Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (25 page)

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One of the things about Ray Perez was that he was a good storyteller—so good, in fact, that he could weave a story with every detail you could want, and so convincingly that you’d think he was the nicest, most honest guy in the world. What follows is the tale that Ray Perez would tell DA and LAPD investigators in over three thousand pages of transcribed testimony. Some of it was fantastical; some was real. But it was also the story of a bungled investigation, an attempt to limit that investigation, and what it brought in its wake.

By 1996, Ray was so firmly in the loop that he was training new, wanna-be Rampart CRASH cops, and putting them to the Rampart Test. Once when he arrested a suspect for possession of rock cocaine, a new female officer named
Raquel Argomaniz asked him how they could book the guy when he wasn’t actually in possession of any rock cocaine. Don’t worry about it, Ray told her. After that, Rampart CRASH cops deliberately made life so unpleasant for Argomaniz that she finally transferred out of the unit.

In their isolation, Ray would tell investigators, they were a law unto themselves, with their own set of rules and playbook. For example, it rarely, if ever, mattered if someone was innocent or guilty. If a Rampart CRASH officer wanted a guy in jail, he
would
go to jail. Drugs and guns would be planted. Misdemeanors would turn into felonies. “
Throw-down” guns had their serial numbers shaved off so that the suspects could be charged with an additional felony. And if the planted gun was an automatic weapon, that would add another felony to the charges. According to Ray, he
planted evidence or made up phony arrest scenarios in 40 percent of the arrests he made in his two and a half years in Rampart CRASH.

There was even a
ten-sheet loose-leaf binder that was eventually
given to all Rampart CRASH officers, according to Ray, a kind of protocol on how to cover up problematic incidents written and printed up by a Rampart CRASH sergeant. Among the instructions most emphasized was how to make a bad officer-involved shooting or use of force look tactically correct and by the book.

A cardinal rule was to always quickly discuss the incident with the other Rampart CRASH officers on the scene, get your story down, and never change it. If a witness favored your story, you told him to stick around and talk to the investigators from the department’s officer-involved shooting team; if a witness’s account didn’t jibe with your story, you told him to get lost. Or so Ray said.

Another rule was never do searches of buildings with non–Rampart CRASH patrol officers, but to wait instead for other Rampart CRASH officers to arrive on the scene before doing the search. Why? Because if something bad goes down, you don’t want outside-the-unit cops with you who might tell the truth. It was all “
plain and simple,” as Ray would later explain. “
If you were in a bad position, you’re gonna be in a good position . . . if the guy [who was shot] didn’t have a gun, we’ll get him a gun . . . whatever we have to do to make it look like a justified shooting.” Collectively, these rules became known as “the Rampart Way.” Gerald Chaleff, the president of the Police Commission during the mid-nineties, would later describe the Rampart Way thusly: “
Whatever the way they did it, is the way they did it, and they didn’t give a shit what anybody else said.”

Pico-Union, with its powerless population, was the perfect place to make up the law and to be the law; and Rampart CRASH—with its separate unit, separate location, and near total independence—was in the ideal situation to never get caught. Enhancing that situation, said Ray, were two attorneys assigned to CRASH full-time: a deputy DA and a deputy city attorney. Both female. They were on-site to swiftly add alleged gangsters to a local gang injunction stripping them of many of their civil liberties—especially their right to freely assemble—and making them highly vulnerable to arrest for virtually any cause. According to Ray, the attorneys would sit in the CRASH office, listen as the cops joked about their cases, and later go out drinking and hanging out
with the boys over at the cop bar known as the Shortstop, not far from Dodger Stadium. They were all part of one group, said Ray, the “Rampart CRASH group.”

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In 1996, Ray got a new partner. Nino Durden was a dark-complexioned twenty-two-year-old African-American straight out of South L.A., handsome, slim, well built and delicately featured. He also wore a pencil-thin mustache that, at least from his pictures in the media, gave him the look of a pretty-boy star on an early fifties R&B road show.

Sometimes Durden would wear his 77th Division CRASH bomber-jacket to work. The 77th’s station house was among the very toughest areas to police, and Durden had worked there as a probationary officer for about four months before transferring to Rampart CRASH. Like Rampart, 77’s gang cops also wore a unit patch. It too featured a skull, but
77th’s had crossed bones in the background and a king’s crown sitting on the skull. Its motto read, “
77th Street eats their dead.” You could buy them up at the police academy in its small gift shop.

One day, said Ray, he and Durden seized a
one-pound bag of cocaine and a beeper from a dealer. Not long afterward, the beeper went off. Ray did what most smart cops would do in such a situation: he called back the number. A native speaker of Spanish, Ray acted as if he worked with the dealer and ordered a quarter pound of coke. Then he and Durden hopped into their unmarked black Thunderbird and drove to meet the guy and bust him. But once they arrived, they made a snap decision and decided instead to
steal the quarter pound of cocaine and sell the product. Then they hid the rest of the coke in a green ice cooler in the CRASH trailer. Thereafter, the cooler became their drug-storage container.

Ray and Durden soon began selling more seized coke they’d stolen or extorted from dealers, setting up shop outside of a Latino supermarket on Third Street, right across from the Nutel Motel, in the Ralph’s market parking lot at Third and Vermont. Soon, continued Ray, they began partnering with a few other Latino CRASH officers who were also ripping off coke from dealers.

Ray also told investigators another story: One day a fellow CRASH officer received a call from one of his snitches—a dope dealer looking to get rid of some of his competitors. He told him about
three midlevel dope dealers from Mexico who were cooking, cutting, and packaging about $20,000 worth of coke a day in an apartment nearby.

Ray and Durden immediately agreed to meet him there. The apartment’s window was blocked with a mattress when they arrived, and, unable to see in, they decided to just go ahead kick in the door. It took a couple of tries, but down it went. Then they immediately grabbed a man breaking up a
bunch of rock and trying frantically to flush it down the toilet. There was rock, powder cocaine, and cash lying everywhere they looked.

They seized it all and brought the suspect and everything else back to the Rampart trailer. On the arrest report they wrote that they’d knocked on the door and said they wanted to make a buy, and a guy came out holding a brown baggie, saw they were cops,
dropped the baggie (which was filled with dope), ran back inside, and locked the door. Consequently, they kicked in the door.

When they booked the dealer, as Ray told it, they also
booked some of his dope. But not the twenty-four ounces of already rocked-up cocaine and eight ounces of powder that they
kept for themselves.

Willie Williams, October to December 1994, Las Vegas

Willie Williams liked Las Vegas—liked the atmosphere and liked the action. He once even considered leaving the Philadelphia PD to work security at an Atlantic City casino before discovering how badly the Donald Trumps of the world paid their employees. In October of 1994, when he was away in Las Vegas celebrating his twenty-eighth wedding anniversary with his wife, Evelina, a popular Metro officer was shot and killed in the line of duty on a Friday night in Hollywood.

After he heard the news, Williams took his time returning to Los Angeles,
not arriving until sometime Sunday. For many officers Williams’s leisurely arrival was an unforgivable breach of the professional ties that
bind, especially since Williams had still not begun to build those ties. When a police officer is killed in the line of duty, goes the unwritten rule, the chief of police had better swiftly make an appearance unless he’s on a hunting trip deep in the Siberian tundra, unable to be contacted by phone.
Daryl Gates had always been there for his cops, and his downed cops in particular.

“Daryl’s speeches always promoted the thin blue line—us against them—the fact that the officers of the LAPD were the only ones who really knew what was going on in the city of Los Angeles, and that nobody from the outside could possibly understand them,” says David Dotson. “ ‘They were the best,’ he’d tell them, ‘and any one of our captains could run any police department in the country. So how could anyone from the outside
possibly
do as well as any number of our people from the inside?’ ”

Undoubtedly the same LAPD complainers would have cut a new
insider
chief some slack, happy that at least their worst fears about a “reform” chief had not been realized. But they cut Willie Williams not one inch.

Charlie Beck got to see it in real time while working for the Police Commission. “
The organization never gave Willie a fair chance to succeed,” says Beck. “It stonewalled him, blindsided him. I am not disagreeing with the fact that he probably wasn’t ready to be the chief of police of Los Angeles, but the organization just built a wall around him and just threw crap over the wall in order to run itself around the chief. There was a big disconnect between upper management and him. And the organization just ate him up because of that.”

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Part of the crap that continued being thrown over wall at Willie Williams was the time he had been spending in Las Vegas. It all came to a head in December when the Police Commission questioned him about a letter they’d received written by a former LAPD deputy chief named
Stephen Downing. It claimed that Williams and his wife had misused city cars and phones and were comped free rooms and service while gambling at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Receiving something of value without paying for it was prohibited under LAPD policy, and Williams doing so just reinforced the West Coast perception that these East Coast cops always had their hands out. Nevertheless, the letter may well have amounted to nothing, been explained away as a mistake, resolved by offering to pay for the rooms and promising not to do it again.

Instead, Williams categorically and repeatedly denied the allegations and put his denial in writing to the commission. “
I have never accepted without cost lodging, meals, and/or show tickets at any Las Vegas Hotel. Whenever I stayed in Las Vegas I paid all bills due from my personal expenses.”

Thus, what started out as a petty vendetta and played as a big story by the
Los Angeles Times
was turned into a far bigger and more serious event by Williams’s denial. The commission ordered an investigation, and when the results came back they were bad for Willie Williams. He and/or his family had indeed been
comped rooms at Caesars Palace
five
different times. Ignoring the initial issue of the comped rooms, the Police Commission voted to unanimously
reprimand Willie Williams for lying to the commission. Riordan’s Police Commission had now twice correctly exercised its oversight responsibility and at long last was functioning as it was meant to function under the city charter.

Williams appealed to the
City Council, and, usurping the power of the Police Commission, they overturned the reprimand. Making public his letter to the commission, however, had its intended effect of publicly embarrassing Williams, who had been caught in an official lie—just as the overturning of the reprimand had the unintended consequence of revealing how dysfunctional the government of the city of Los Angeles remained in its dealings with the LAPD.

O. J. Simpson, January 1995, Los Angeles Superior Court

From the opening arguments through the next 134 days of the “Trial of the Century,” there would be two defendants in the docket: O. J. Simpson and the LAPD. No homicide investigation, of course, can ever be
perfect. But with the whole world watching as the trial began in January 1995,
this
investigation had to be. Not only because of the Dream Team’s LAPD frame-up strategy, but because the omnipresent gaggle of reporters camped out in the downtown superior court’s shabby parking lot would be scrutinizing every aspect of the trial.

Inside the courtroom, Johnnie Cochran would argue that Simpson was the victim of an intricate LAPD conspiracy to pin the murders on him—going so far as to accuse one of the veteran investigating detectives, Mark Fuhrman, of being “
a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist” in the tradition of “Adolf Hitler” who wanted to “take all black people and burn them or bomb them.”

Cochran’s cover-up theory would have been laughable even given the department’s past history had it not been for the LAPD’s startling incompetence and hubris during its investigation. The only cover-up attempted by the case detectives, in fact, would be to hide their own sloppy investigative work, and most especially their failure to follow standard operating procedures for homicide investigations. And that had nothing to do with O. J. Simpson. They neglected to follow the procedures because that was how many detectives in Robbery-Homicide operated. It was one of Daryl Gates’s “elite” special units, a division with the latitude to operate as they wished.
That
, like so much else, had changed very little under Willie Williams.

Because of late notification by the detectives, for example, the coroner failed to arrive at the murder scene until almost ten hours after the two bodies were discovered. Consequently, the ability to take the temperature of the victims and better focus on the time of death was lost.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s staff, moreover, had a long and justly deserved reputation for incompetence. As a result, LAPD detectives would frequently wait as long as possible before notifying them. Once the coroner arrived, he was in charge of the body. But in this case, lead detective Philip
Vannatter—a twenty-five-year LAPD veteran who’d been involved in two hundred homicide investigations—had not only notified the coroner very late but had also then stalled him.