Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (30 page)

Signing a release form with a near-illegible scrawl, Ray jotted down a phony badge number and the name of a fellow LAPD CRASH officer,
Joel
Perez. Then he picked up the box, walked out the back door, snaked through Parker Center’s ramshackle parking lot to his maroon deluxe-model Ford Expedition SUV, and drove off.

About twenty minutes later he pulled into a Home Depot parking lot. Checking to ensure he’d brought his role of gray duct tape, he then hustled over to a nearby strip mall and bought some bags of
Bisquick flour. Back in his van, he unsealed the evidence box, pulled out the two plastic bags inside containing the cocaine, poured it into some bags he’d brought along, and replaced the drug with the Bisquick, exactly as he’d done the two previous times he’d checked out cocaine to sell. On those occasions he’d resealed the bags, now containing Bisquick, placed them back in the box, and then checked the substituted flour back into the property room as if it were the coke. Typically, the coke was never retested and, after the disposition of the case, was destroyed. Thus, although dangerous, it seemed a perfect deal for Ray.

This time, however, Ray decided on a different course of action—perhaps because his cop’s instincts sensed his vulnerability and the risk of bringing the Bisquick back to the property room and getting caught in the process. Whatever the case, he picked up the two bags of flour along with the empty evidence box and shoved them down a nearby storm drain.

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

Ray hadn’t been his usual charming self when he checked out that last 6.6 pounds of coke. But it was understandable. He was, after all, engaging in some high-risk stealing. Consequently, he’d been short and gruff; “
rude” was the word that property officer Laura Castellanos used when later describing him to LAPD investigators. Rude enough that Castellanos was able to recall him. Rude wasn’t the way officers normally acted in the property room, where the system was based on trust.

That attitude made Ray stand out. Castellanos remembered him and
told detectives that
Ray had “Negro” features
and spoke Spanish effortlessly. That, along with a further narrowing down of the field of suspects to those who had knowledge of such a large amount of coke, and the fact that Ray had been temporarily lent to a narcotics unit before going back to Rampart CRASH, enabled the detectives to zero in on him as a suspect.

They quickly discovered that Ray and Mack—who’d been arrested for the bank robbery about three months earlier—were close friends and former partners. That made the detectives even more intrigued. They were investigating not only the Bank of America robbery but also Brian Hewitt’s beating of the handcuffed Ishmael Jimenez; a strange, road-rage, LAPD cop-on-cop shootout that had left a black officer named
Kevin Gaines dead; and now the theft of large amounts of cocaine from the department’s evidence locker. All had occurred within a four-month period from early November 1997 to late February 1998, and all appeared in one way or another to be linked to Ray Perez.

Matt Lait and Scott Glover, August 1998, San Fernando Valley

Something big was afoot and
Los Angeles Times
police reporters Matt Lait and Scott Glover had received a tip about it.
A briefing was being held at a church in the suburban San Fernando Valley, and about two hundred CRASH officers were expected to attend. The purpose was to inform them about an investigation swirling around some of their fellow officers. The two journalists wanted desperately to be there. They already knew that the department was
investigating two bad
Rampart CRASH shootings, and surmised that the story could be very hot. The fact that this meeting was occurring only confirmed that suspicion. Lait and Glover knew they had to somehow get into the room. When they arrived at the church there were no “
LAPD only, check your guns at the door” signs, nothing that said stay out. So one of them blended in and sat down with the officers, and the other remained outside, close at hand, waiting to quickly jot down the insider’s observations when he
emerged during a break. The situation inside was not one in which a reporter wanted to call attention to himself by taking notes.

Soon enough, a guy in blue jeans got up and greeted the officers. And as he talked he didn’t say that the department was looking at two bad shootings. Instead, he said, they were investigating
seven
shootings.

He also told the officers that there was a sergeant who’d been quarterbacking the cover-ups and that, recalled Scott Glover, Rampart CRASH “had a crash pad and that they were using it to bring in prostitutes and drugs.” This admission confirmed something the two reporters had heard a couple of days before, when a woman they interviewed told them, “Well, yeah,
I had sex in this CRASH pad all the time.”

Meanwhile, the guy in the Hawaiian
shirt kept spilling
more secrets, which Lait and Glover memorized and called in to their editor. The next day they wrote the story. It was among the very first times that Matt Lait and Scott Glover knew they were onto something really big.

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

Earlier in that summer of ’98, Matt Lait had gotten another tip: 6.6 pounds of cocaine was missing from the LAPD property room, and the department suspected it was an inside job. Lait quickly started writing stories about what he was learning. Meanwhile, Scott Glover, who was covering the LAPD out in the San Fernando Valley, checked with one of his sources and learned that not only was the department investigating the stolen coke but they were looking at Perez, Mack, Gaines, and other LAPD cops. The two reporters started “
backgrounding” the officers, says Scott.

Gradually, Lait and Glover also began talking to some Rampart cops for background, off the record, and with prosecutors, defense attorneys, public defenders, and civil attorneys. They also filed several Freedom of Information Act requests to get access to the cops’ shooting reports and discipline records.

The first story they wrote was about the relationship between Ray Perez and David Mack. By now they already knew a lot about Perez’s officer-involved-shooting history and his disciplinary record. They were also hearing about Javier Francisco Ovando, whom they’d recognized
from one of Ray’s shooting reports that they’d already set aside “as
sounding weird.”

When Lait finally got ready to write the story, he met with the top LAPD brass, who asked him to hold off running it. Their concern was legitimate: Perez didn’t know he was under surveillance, and if they wrote the story, they could foil the department’s investigation.

Lait went back to his editor, who decided to make a deal with the LAPD:
the
Times
would hold off running the story, and the LAPD would give the
Times
the exclusive prior to a news conference announcing the arrest of Perez.

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

Lait and Glover were not happy when they heard one morning that Bernard Parks was going to hold a press conference that night. And they were on the phone to their editor, Tim Rutten, to tell him so.

Then in his forties, Rutten was a brilliant, crusty, subversive old-school journalist with
a working-class Irish Catholic’s sense of right and wrong, a passion for the underdog, and a fierce commitment to good journalism. Short, heavy, bearded, and a little disheveled, he liked to drink and tell a good story. He seemed to have met everybody in L.A. and was
married to the crusading firebrand defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who’d defended the Menendez brothers for murdering their parents as if, like them, her life was on the line.

Now he was listening intently as Lait and Glover told him of their suspicions. “I think they [Parks and the LAPD] may announce that they made an arrest in this Perez thing,” they told Rutten. “
Can we go with the story?”

“
We gave our word,” Rutten replied. “We can’t break our word.”

“Well, you know Tim,
they are going to fuck us,” they told him back.

“I can’t believe they would do that,” Rutten answered. “But beyond that we can’t be the one to break our word. We can’t operate unless we keep our word.” And that was that.

Rutten remembers afterward feeling “
a l
ittle prissy, a little self-righteous.” But also sure that he’d done the right thing. Then, as he later told it, “I’ll be damned if that evening they [the LAPD] didn’t call that
press conference and announce they’d arrested Perez. And they gave [the story] to everybody, including the TV stations [to air that night].” Just as Lait and Glover had feared, they had indeed been fucked.

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

“I want you to
glue yourself to this guy Perez,” Rutten told Laitt and Glover afterward. “I want to know everything there is to know about him. I want to know about his history in the department. You don’t do anything else but this story. No breaking news. If there is breaking news on your beat, you tell me and I will send somebody over there to get it. But I want you full-time on this now, nothing else.
This story is your life.”

Curtis Woodle and Joel Perez, April and May 1998, Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Like Ray Perez, Sergeant Curtis Woodle too was now a CRASH officer, working over at Operations Central Bureau CRASH. One evening
Woodle was in a Las Vegas casino with his ex-wife when she excused herself to go to the restroom. Nonchalantly Woodle took a seat to wait for her, which coincidentally obstructed the view to the left of him. Sitting there waiting, he suddenly noticed a guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a frantic look on his face, craning his neck in every direction. Then the guy turned and spotted Woodle out of the corner of his eye, stopped, and stared long and hard directly at him. “
What the fuck?” thought Woodle. Then he got it.
Hawaiian shirt, a cop-looking white guy craning his next around like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
and then locking his eyeballs on him: it was an LAPD undercover tail. But why?

Back in Los Angeles he quickly learned that LAPD Internal Affairs had been following not only him but
everybody in the Operations Central Bureau CRASH unit that he supervised, especially one of his officers named Joel Perez.

Woodle had been getting kickback memos from Parker Center’s evidence room about some cocaine Joel Perez had checked out but not returned.
“
After the third memo,” says Woodle, “I really got on him about it.” Joel Perez in turn left their meeting and headed to the Property Division evidence room, determined to straighten out the situation.

“When Joel returned he was carrying a piece of paper,” recalls Woodle, “and looked like he had lost about two shades of color. He looked at and me and said, ‘
Sarge, I have never checked out anything like this amount of cocaine.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘How much is it? Let me see that.’ ” Then Curtis Woodle looked at the paper and said, “What?
This is crazy man, this is crazy!”

Bernard Parks, Summer 1998, Parker Center

Bernard Parks was not a big exchange-of-information guy. He could be very charming. But
if you were a reporter he didn’t like—and they were legion—or a subordinate within the department, you never felt as if you were actually having a conversation with him.

Charlie Beck found that out when he began working directly under the new chief. Beck, it turned out, really liked Bernard Parks. He found him “
funny, cordial, and immensely personable.” He’d gotten to know Parks in 1998, after leaving his liaison work for the Police Commission—which he’d found invaluable in understanding the inner workings between the department and the commission—to transfer into the Management Services Division. His new job required him to report to Parks about once week for about a year. One of his tasks was coordinating the department’s grassroots community policing, which he found frustrating. How, after all, do you coordinate a grassroots community policing effort from inside a Parker Center tower? But centering the operation there was very much a part of Parks’s hands-on leadership style.

He also helped Parks draw up the department’s yearly work plan, which normally would have been an itemized page or two, but under Parks would grow to a
forty-page strategic plan for the organization that was rewritten every year. The plan, says Beck, was “
clear to Parks. But it just wasn’t clear to the rest of us.”

One of the first things he learned was that Bernard Parks was
very
demanding. A second was that Parks thought he was the smartest guy in the room—and “
in a lot of ways,” says Beck, “he was.”

Lots of bosses can be like that. But there was this other thing: “
Parks [would] demand a report and then grade it. He’d say something like ‘I’m thinking about running a jail out of some location,’ and then assign someone to look into it. Once the report was submitted, it was like getting back a homework assignment. He’d raise all these points and questions in the margins of the pages—and act like he already knew everything about the subject
before
you even looked into it.” He would antagonize people in the department, as well as the press and Protective League officials, “because,” says Beck, “
his attitude was always ‘I am teaching you and mentoring you. Don’t bring me something I
don’t
already know.’ ” Like Willie Williams’s unwillingness to reach out and develop a network of allies, Bernard Parks’s superiority complex would cost him when he most needed friends in high places.

Rafael “Ray” Perez, Summer 1998, Ladera Heights

That summer, Bernard Parks’s Internal Affairs investigators were busy working Ray Perez’s case hard, really hard. Every morning when Ray would leave his house for work, there’d be guys working up in one of those green high-wire telephone boxes. Then he started noticing that his phone was clicking during conversations and that a van was constantly parked right outside his garage.

In May of 1998 Bernard Parks and Internal Affairs had assembled a task force to investigate a handful of CRASH officers, most prominently Ray. Once on his case, the LAPD detectives became suspicious about the property room and other cocaine that had been checked out and returned in the last few years. When they tested those batches of coke,
they discovered the Bisquick. Now Ray, like Curtis Woodle, was seeing that investigation in action, just as it was closing in on him.