Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (34 page)

James Hahn was defeated in his second run for mayor, despite the fact that the people of Los Angeles owed him an enormous debt of
gratitude. Despite the fact that Bernard Parks had striven mightily to hold LAPD officers accountable for abusing the public for the first time in twenty years, he had been a bad chief. Reform was moving at a snail’s pace, officer morale was deep in the tank, officer attrition was mounting, community policing was haphazard or nonexistent, and a federal consent decree that Parks detested and was philosophically opposed to implementing was hanging over the city’s head. The survival of the LAPD as a credible and effective law enforcement institution going forward was dependent on Parks’s departure.

Matt Lait and Scott Glover wrote about
150 stories on Rampart over a period of more than two years, while, as Lait would later point out, “the number of press releases from the LAPD regarding the Rampart scandal could probably be
counted on one hand.”

Boyarsky, Rutten, Lait, and Glover were never able to expand their reporting beyond Rampart, although they had hoped to do so. When the
Times
was sold in 2000,
a new editor was brought in and the
Times
’ coverage of the story essentially shut down. But a federal consent decree enforced by a tough-minded federal judge was now in place—a decree that L.A. may well not have gotten but for the scandal.

As a result of Ray Perez’s testimony, over one hundred criminal convictions were overturned, and the
city paid over $75 million to the victims of the violence and abuse of Rampart CRASH officers.

Javier Ovando was awarded $15 million of that money, the largest police misconduct settlement in L.A.’s, if not the nation’s, history. Later, while en route to Las Vegas,
he was arrested near the Nevada state line for drug possession.

To this day Ray Perez and Nino Durden are the only cops who wound up doing any real prison time for the Rampart abuses. In 2002 Durden was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted on six counts, including
conspiracy to obstruct justice, perjury, and filing false reports. Bernard Parks’s limiting of the Rampart investigation and his refusal to grant immunity to officers who’d witnessed and failed to report misconduct had its effect, as the case of Brian Hewitt and Ethan Cohan can attest. By all reports, Cohan was one of the good guys in Rampart CRASH, and had not witnessed or even been in the room
when
Hewitt was banging Ishmael Jimenez around—had not, in fact, even known about the incident until after it was over. Nevertheless,
he was fired from the LAPD for failing to promptly report Hewitt for the beating when he’d heard about it. Hewitt too was fired, for the vicious thrashing of Ishmael Jimenez.

L.A. district attorney Gil Garcetti brought criminal charges against three LAPD CRASH members based on Perez’s testimony. They went to trial, and a jury failed to convict them. The officers then sued the city and Chief Parks and other defendants for
violating
their
civil rights and conducting an improper and negligent investigation. They prevailed at this civil trial, winning
compensatory damages of $5 million each, plus their attorneys’ fees. In 2008 the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judgment. In its decision, the Appeals Court quoted Garcetti as testifying that he’d “
spoken with Chief Parks six to twelve times about the Rampart investigation,” and that his deputy DAs were being “
hounded” by the LAPD to file criminal charges. Garcetti also testified that during a telephone conversation, Parks had said the following: “
Let’s get the case behind us. If we prosecute the case, even if you lose the case, it’s over. It’s done.”

And that’s what happened. LAPD investigators sprinted to make a statute of limitations deadline, and Gil Garcetti was left with cases that strongly relied on the word of a crooked cop who was an admitted multiple liar on the witness stand. Garcetti could have stood up to Bernard Parks. But that was not the history between L.A. DAs and the LAPD. “In New York the cops hold the door for the [deputy] DAs,” James Fyfe, an ex-cop turned college criminology professor, once observed to a reporter. “In L.A. it’s the other way around.”

PART FOUR

SOMETHING NEW

William Bratton and Rikki Klieman, Summer 2002, Los Angeles and New York

Bill Bratton didn’t really know Los Angeles, but he had spent time there. For more than a year after the signing of the federal consent decree in September 2000,
Bratton had been flying from his home in New York to L.A. about once every five weeks. There, he was helping monitor compliance with the decree for the mammoth New York–based private-security firm
Kroll Associates—which in turn reported its findings to the federal judge enforcing the decree.

Bratton had been intrigued by the LAPD ever since he watched
Dragnet
and
Badge 714
as a kid back in Boston. When the L.A. chief’s job opened up in 1992, he had considered applying, and changed his mind only after it became apparent that Tom Bradley and his
Police Commission wanted a black chief. Now, with both Willie Williams and Bernard Parks gone, Bratton knew the job was wide open. And he wanted it.

Over the course of his monitoring work he’d met with James Hahn while he was still mayor and discussed the idea of developing an operational action plan for the LAPD. Bratton wanted to address policy issues related to the consent decree, as well as the city’s homicide rate, which had fallen significantly but was again rising.
Since its peak of almost 1,100 murders in 1992, it
had dropped to 419 in1998—reflecting the dramatic decrease being experienced by most of the nation. But by the end of 2002 it had risen again by over
200—to a troubling 647. At the end of their discussions Hahn told Bratton to go ahead with the plan.

After putting it together, Bratton brought it to Martin Pomeroy, the acting chief of the LAPD, whose acquiescence he would need, as Bratton later put it, “to come in and
start messing around within the department.”

Walking into the chief’s office to present his blueprint to Pomeroy, however, turned out to be like “
walking into a deep freeze.” Pomeroy wasted little time letting Bratton know he wanted no part of his plan, whether it was coming with the mayor’s imprimatur or not—a sign that Bratton had yet to learn that New York brashness is rarely a welcome sight in L.A. and that Pomeroy—a true-blue believer in the greatness of the LAPD—would surely find it presumptuous for a back-east
professional turnaround man to come in and tell the department how good police work should be done.

But then Bratton needed that chief’s job. He was now fifty-four years old and hoped to one day step back onto center stage as the commissioner of the NYPD, or the director of the FBI, or in other positions currently unavailable to him. The LAPD job, at least, was open, and was right up his alley in terms of what needed to be done.

But there was something else: he
wanted
that job. No one was more attuned to the legend of Bill Bratton, or his place in American policing history, than Bill Bratton. But over the last several years he’d begun to feel that the narrative of his spectacular success in the subways and on the streets of New York was being dismissed, rewritten, and devalued by naysayers, while he was lacking a professional law enforcement platform from which to fire back.

In 1999, his frustration would bubble over as he spoke before a fraternal organization of idolatrous former and current NYPD officers known as the Shields.

Suddenly during his speech he’d stopped, “
put down his prepared remarks,” discarded his reading glasses, and—as writer Rory O’Connor described it in
Boston
magazine—announced to his audience that this was “
the best of times and the worst of times. The best of times,” he said, because “there’s a revolution going on in American policing. . . . Homicides [in New York City] have plummeted by 70 percent—a phenomenal decrease . . .

“And it’s the worst of times,” he continued, “when the claims of others
go unchallenged, claims that take credit for this decrease, [and credit instead] demographic or social changes that mystically caused this decrease in crime. Let me tell you that nothing infuriates me more. In fact,” he said, “it drives me crazy!”

Then, comparing the police to the gunmen heroes in the 1960s Western
The Magnificent Seven
, who never got the credit they deserved, Bratton continued: “
The only losers in New York City during the ’90s were the cops—the very people who made the rest of the city winners!”

Some of that rewriting of history, Bratton would later say, was due to the “anti-Giuliani-ism” that had exploded in New York as Giuliani neared the end of his second term, battling with seemingly everyone in the city. Bratton also blamed his successors as commissioner, Howard Safir and Bernard Kerik, for failing to promote the NYPD as the primary reason for the city’s crime decline, and had instead let it come “under attack.” It was deeply frustrating for him to watch all of that, he continued, to watch the “
gains to the profession, the gains for [him] personally and professionally being undermined.”

In short, his legacy was at stake, and Bratton knew it.

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

On the July Fourth weekend of 2002, Bratton, recently returned from Los Angeles, left his Manhattan apartment in fashionable Murray Hill, climbed into his black Jeep Cherokee, drove to the midtown headquarters of Court TV on Third Avenue near 39th Street, and picked up his fourth wife, Rikki Klieman, who was working as an anchor and analyst for the cable network.

A celebrity in her own right, Klieman was a vivacious, quick-witted, fast-talking former Boston defense attorney with a profile high enough to be named one of
Time
magazine’s top five “
most outstanding women trial lawyers” in the country in 1983.

An only child, she was
raised poor in a Chicago suburb by a
garment-worker father and housewife mother who gave birth to her after seventeen years of marriage. Her mother, she told Bella English of the
Boston Globe
, “
would buy dresses for her at the Salvation Army, three for a dollar. I didn’t know why they didn’t have money,” she added.

After graduating as a
theater arts major from Northwestern University, she headed for Broadway stardom in New York City.
Waiting on restaurant tables to support herself, she made the young actor’s rounds of auditions, without meeting success. Facing reality, she enrolled in
Boston University Law School. After graduating in 1975, she worked first as a
prosecutor for the Middlesex County (Boston) DA’s Office, and then left in
1981 to become a dedicated Boston criminal defense attorney—a hard, financially rewarding job in which she displayed both her brilliance and her near manic will to succeed. They were long and hard workdays and she grew increasingly reliant on
Valium,
losing fifteen pounds from her slender, five-foot-three, 120-pound frame. A
second marriage to a cop turned federal agent went bad—along with other failed romances. One day in court she literally
collapsed on the defense table during a trial.

At about this time, however, she’d started appearing on
Court TV as a guest analyst during the O. J. Simpson trial. Proving both sharp and telegenic, she was quickly
hired as an anchor,
moving to New York during the 1994 trial and later being teamed as
cohost with Johnnie Cochran.

At age fifty,
Klieman had met Bratton one morning in 1998, when she was dining in at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Regency Hotel—then a spot for celebratory power breakfasts. Noticing her, Bratton had risen from his seat, walked over, and kissed her cheek. Then, as Klieman later wrote in her autobiography,
Fairy Tales Can Come True
, “he smiled. ‘You look so beautiful,’ he said. ‘
If you were single, I’d marry you.’ ‘
You should call me for lunch,’ ” she replied. “
By the time [she] got back to the office, he had called.”

Then, as snowflakes fell in
February 1999, Bratton, who’d gotten the closed-for-the-winter
Central Park carousel opened specifically for the occasion, lifted her up onto a white carousel horse and, as Klieman would tell it many times over, declared, “I want to go
round and round with you.” The retelling had to it the ring of a true-romance paperback. Still, there was no denying that she and Bratton were mad for each other. Or that Bratton, who loved smart advisors, had married one who was extremely smart—and, equally as important, who understood the
liberal mind-set as well as she understood her own, a big assist for Bratton in the years to come.

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

As they headed out to their getaway home in the Hampton village of Quogue, Bratton told his wife he had something serious to discuss with her.
Klieman braced for bad news. “
I want to go after the job of LAPD chief,” he said.

It was bad news—for her. She had
survived and recovered from a heart attack, and didn’t want the stress of moving from a New York City she loved and from her job at Court TV, where she’d become a star. As one of Court TV’s makeup artists told
Boston
magazine in 1999: “When she first started working [here] she wasn’t New York enough. . . . Now she’s changed her clothes, her look. She’s got that sophistication now—
hip, chic, and glamorous.” And one more thing: Court TV had no studio or facilities in Los Angeles from which she could broadcast.

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

Early that Sunday, after Bratton returned to the house after a morning tennis lesson, she asked him why he wanted the L.A. job so much.

“
Nine-eleven,” he said. On that calamitous morning Bratton had finished doing a guest appearance on Don Imus’s radio talk show and then gone to vote in a municipal election with Klieman. Returning to their apartment afterward to pick up his briefcase for work, he snapped on his television set and saw replays of the first plane smashing into the World Trade Center. “
In your life as a police officer,” he’d later say, “you live to deal with crisis, to be tested by it. It’s very frustrating when you’re not in a position to do anything—particularly when you know what needs to be done.” Instead, he’d found himself powerless at the moment of supreme crisis in his adopted city, as he imagined all the things he would have done differently than the mediocre, corrupt, and inexperienced Bernard Kerik, who’d been working as Giuliani’s NYPD chauffeur/bodyguard before Giuliani had astounded the entire city by handpicking him as his new NYPD commissioner.