Former informant’s life gets more furtive

The hurried, raspy voice on the 10:59 p.m. phone message on Dec. 20 got quickly to the point.

“Mr. Parsons, this is Kamran. I’m just petrified of the situation.”

He said he’d just been notified by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, in accordance with its policy in such matters, that one of two men who allegedly assaulted him three weeks earlier in the garage of a Buena Park home had posted $100,000 bail. The other man remained at large.

The man’s release sent a chill through Kamran Mashayekhi, a 66-year-old limo driver and former police informant. As the victim of the alleged incident, he could do the math. Besides, Mashayekhi said, his assailant had told him that night he’d kill him if he went to the police.

Now, Mashayekhi says, he’s changing motels almost nightly.

He’s stayed in irregular contact with me since I wrote about his situation Dec. 8. In that column, he described how he’d answered a call for a trip to LAX and was lured into the caller’s garage on the premise that his luggage was there.

Once he got inside, Mashayekhi says, the man said he knew Mashayekhi had been a police informant. The alleged assailant and another man who arrived moments later then spent 60 to 90 minutes punching, kicking and threatening his life, Mashayekhi says.

Instead of following up on their threat to drive him to the desert and kill him, Mashayekhi said, they let him go. He called Buena Park police from the first pay phone he found; they arrested Gilbert Carrillo, who faces charges of robbery, false imprisonment and threatening a witness. A preliminary hearing is scheduled Jan. 17. A spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney says a protective order for Mashayekhi will be issued.

I talked to Mashayekhi last week and again this week. “Ever since he was released, it’s been a nightmare,” he says. He ticked off the names of several cities he’s stayed in, from San Diego County to L.A. County. Usually, he says, it’s one night at a time.

“Let me explain it to you,” he says. “If I’m not around, the D.A. doesn’t have a case. You understand?”

The thrust of my first column on Mashayekhi was his willingness to testify, perhaps in the face of potential danger. But when we talked that day, his alleged assailant was in custody.

And now that he had been released? Was Mashayekhi as resolute? Will he still show up if the case moves ahead?

“Absolutely,” he says. “Of course I’m going to show up. If I don’t, there’s no case. I have gone this far. I’m not going to back down. If I die, let the public know my blood rests on law enforcement in Orange County that didn’t want to lift a finger to help or protect me.”

That’s not how it works, says Susan Kang Schroeder, the D.A.’s. spokeswoman. She says Mashayekhi has been referred to the victim witness office. Depending on circumstances, potential witnesses can get up to round-the-clock surveillance or be guarded, she says. If Mashayekhi can demonstrate a credible threat, she says, “we definitely would help him and fashion the protection, depending on what was needed.”

If nothing else, the case highlights the uneasy relationship between informants and cops. Mashayekhi says he was an informant for several years, beginning around 2000, mostly in Anaheim, but also for cops in Westminster, Newport Beach and Garden Grove. Driving a cab and then a private limo gave him access to various nefarious activities, he says. He recalled at least one time when Anaheim police called him on a slow day to see if he had any information.

The world of snitches is not your standard 9-to-5 job. Cops may like some things you tell them and not others. You may think you’re one of them, but you never are.

Perhaps more to the point, it doesn’t behoove police to publicly discuss their informants. Mashayekhi has told me several times that police aren’t happy that he talked to me for the original column.

So, that is the in-between world Mashayekhi now finds himself in -- unfortunately timed, he says, with him the most frightened he’s ever been.

Anaheim police, citing policy on informants, won’t confirm his work with them. However, city officials have directed Mashayekhi to a county office that aids witnesses financially. Mashayekhi says he went to the office but concedes that he didn’t complete the paperwork.

Buena Park police, who investigated the alleged assault on Mashayekhi, seem unusually reluctant to give him their blessing. Sgt. John Swisher says the department isn’t certain yet that Mashayekhi needs protection. And while the charges remain against Carrillo, Swisher says the police investigation into the incident is continuing.

Schroeder echoed that. “It’s not unusual for us to continue an investigation even after we file charges,” she says. She declined to discuss the case in more detail.

Swisher, however, was a bit more forthcoming but only added to what sounds like a mysterious subtext. “I don’t want to say we question his veracity,” Swisher says of Mashayekhi, “but right now it’s not a fully completed investigation. That’s why we’re not seeking protection for him. The more and more we look into this, the more we thought what happened at first may not be exactly what happened.”

Mashayekhi says he’ll remain an itinerant witness-in-waiting. He hasn’t spoken to the prosecutor assigned to the case. He hadn’t considered the possibility, he says, that his alleged assailant would make bail.

I ask if he’s feeling brave these days. “I feel I’m brave, yes,” he says. “That’s a consolation prize.”

But if he was afraid before, he’s even more so now.

“If I’m going to die for this cause, let it be,” he says. “I’m sure if I die, you’ll pick up the story also.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.