LAPD Probe Fades Into Oblivion

Nearly four years after Rafael Perez told investigators that corruption and brutality had become commonplace at the LAPD’s Rampart Division, authorities acknowledge that they did not get to the bottom of his allegations and that officers suspected of committing crimes remain on the job.

Feuding among top officials, cursory investigations by some detectives and a pervasive police “code of silence” all helped to undermine the Rampart probe, a Times investigation found.

Asked if he was satisfied that the LAPD had thoroughly investigated the scandal, Police Commissioner Rick Caruso, until recently president of the commission, responded: “No -- quite the opposite.”

Bill Hodgman, a top prosecutor on the D.A.’s task force, said his “greatest frustration is that I don’t feel like we got to the bottom of it.”

Newly obtained confidential law enforcement documents, internal correspondence from the Los Angeles Police Department and the district attorney’s office and interviews with more than a dozen prosecutors and detectives have shed new light on the efforts to unravel the Rampart scandal and on the reasons why those efforts fell short.

They reveal that:

* Police and prosecutors, who were supposed to be working together, instead fought almost from the start. More than a year into the investigation, relations had deteriorated to the point that prosecutors called LAPD detectives before a grand jury to determine whether they or their superiors were intentionally hindering the prosecution of fellow officers. No indictments were ever issued.

* Over the objections of prosecutors, LAPD detectives routinely forced officers suspected of committing crimes to cooperate with administrative investigations. The practice made criminal prosecution of those officers all but impossible because statements they made in departmental proceedings could not be used against them in court.

* At the request of prosecutors, judges overturned the convictions of more than 100 defendants because of alleged criminal conduct by police. But the officers responsible were charged in only a handful of those cases and, in more than 30, prosecutors dropped the cases without any public explanation.

* Last year, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley disbanded his Rampart task force with a report that minimized the extent of the scandal and failed to address many of Perez’s allegations. Cooley, for example, made no mention of eight out of 10 shootings by police that Perez alleged had been unjustified and had been covered up.

The Rampart scandal began in September 1999 when Perez pleaded guilty to charges that he had stolen three kilos of cocaine from LAPD evidence facilities. In exchange for a five-year sentence, Perez promised to tell authorities about an unarmed man whom he and another officer had shot and subsequently framed. He also promised to identify corrupt officers.

Since then, Perez and seven other officers from the Rampart Division’s so-called CRASH anti-gang unit have been convicted of corruption-related offenses as a result of information he brought to light. Three of those convictions were overturned by a judge on procedural grounds in a case that remains on appeal.

More than a dozen officers who were under investigation either resigned or were fired. The city has paid $42 million in civil settlements to defendants allegedly victimized by police misconduct and expects to pay tens of millions more.

As the scandal unfolded, officials from the Police Department and the district attorney’s office vowed, not only to investigate Perez’s claims, but also to provide a full public accounting.

The LAPD has never produced such a report, despite repeated requests from the Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the Police Department.

As a result, the commission and Chief William J. Bratton recently agreed to have a panel of outsiders, headed by civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, review the LAPD’s handling of the Rampart investigation.

Cooley, who inherited the scandal when he took office in December 2000, sought last November to fulfill his pledge to account for his office’s role in the investigation. He released memos by prosecutors that analyzed the evidence in 82 Rampart-related cases and explained why criminal charges had not been filed against police officers.

Press releases accompanying Cooley’s report seemed to cast doubt on Perez, referring to the “so-called Rampart scandal” in which the ex-officer had “told tales of evidence-planting, false police reports and, in some cases, assaults and shootings of gang members.”

A Times review, however, found that the district attorney’s report had addressed only a fraction of the cases in which Perez claimed to have witnessed criminal acts by fellow officers.

*

Three months after the scandal came to light, the investigation was fraying. Richard Rosenthal, a deputy district attorney who had prosecuted Perez in the cocaine theft case and had been present when Perez accused officers of crimes, said he believed LAPD officials had been eager to close the case quickly.

Investigators who once returned his phone calls suddenly were unavailable, Rosenthal said. Reports he requested were not provided. Delays became common.

“It was abundantly clear to me that they wanted this scandal over and they would do anything they could to make it end,” said Rosenthal, who resigned from the district attorney’s office two years ago.

Despite public pledges of cooperation, then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and then-Chief Bernard C. Parks feuded. Garcetti accused Parks of withholding reports on police shootings and other documents from his prosecutors.

For his part, Parks expressed frustration at the pace of the district attorney’s probe and pressed for departmental action against officers who had committed misconduct.

According to newly obtained documents, prosecutors complained that the LAPD was hampering the probe by ordering officers implicated in crimes to give statements about the incidents or face termination.

While police can use such “compelled” statements against officers in internal disciplinary cases, prosecutors are barred from using the statements, or anything learned from them, against the officers in criminal proceedings.

Prosecutors wanted the LAPD to grant administrative immunity to minor players in the scandal, so they could cooperate without fear of being fired. According to Deputy Chief James McMurray, who then ran LAPD internal affairs, Parks rejected the proposal.

“I was told, ‘Not now,’ ” McMurray said.

Prosecutors were also troubled by a reduction, from about 30 to 15, in the number of detectives assigned to probe alleged crimes by Rampart officers.

“We continue to be concerned that the number of detectives on the ‘criminal’ side of the task force remains depleted at a time when our investigative needs are increasing,” wrote then-Head Deputy R. Dan Murphy in April 2000. “I cannot stress strongly enough our desire to see the task force returned to full force, with at least 30 detectives assigned as soon as possible.”

Parks, now a member of the City Council, declined comment for this article.

Some of the obstacles faced by police and prosecutors were beyond their control. For example, deadlines for filing charges passed for many of the alleged crimes, which dated to the mid-1990s.

Another stumbling block was the inability or unwillingness of officers to recall suspects they had encountered, arrests they had made or reports they had written. At least seven officers refused to cooperate before a grand jury, documents show.

“It’s almost like that invisible barrier,” said Hodgman, of the D.A.’s office. “Yes, there is a code of silence.”

At several points during the investigation, prosecutors believed that some LAPD officers or supervisors were intentionally sabotaging the probe. When investigators for the district attorney served search warrants on Rampart officers, at least one of the officers had been tipped off by an LAPD official, according to prosecutors’ internal memos.

And in the fall of 2000, in the days preceding the trial of the first four Rampart Division officers charged in the scandal, prosecutors discovered that police had failed to turn important documents over to defense attorneys. The result was that the judge excluded several key prosecution witnesses in a case against one officer. That officer was acquitted.

The detectives’ failure to turn over documents on time, among other things, prompted prosecutors to take the extraordinary step of launching a grand jury probe to determine whether the detectives -- or their superiors -- were attempting to hinder the prosecution of fellow cops. Prosecutors and police officials declined to discuss details of the probe, citing grand jury secrecy rules.

“We cannot prove that their withholding of any of this information was intentional, but it is suspicious,” Ellen Aragon, then a top prosecutor on the D.A.’s Rampart task force, wrote in a Dec. 28, 2000 memo to Cooley. “Either there is nothing wrong, beyond a certain level of incompetence, or there is a code of silence. We may never know.”

*

As the criminal investigation of the Rampart officers continued, internal affairs detectives developed cases against officers to be handled within the LAPD.

In the spring and summer of 2000, internal panels known as boards of rights found three CRASH officers guilty of misconduct brought to light by Perez. All three officers were reinstated after arguing in court that there had been technical problems with their firings.

Most of the officers accused in disciplinary hearings were found not guilty. Perez, fearing that federal authorities planned to prosecute him for a shooting that they did not believe was covered by his plea deal, began refusing to testify.

Meanwhile, accused officers’ attorneys summoned county jail inmates who testified that Perez, while incarcerated, had boasted about making false allegations against former colleagues.

While such “jailhouse snitches” are generally afforded very little credibility, those testifying against Perez were different. According to transcripts, board members at several hearings said they had found the informants credible.

McMurray, the internal affairs commander, said he was disappointed that some of the officers accused by Perez had been exonerated.

In some instances, McMurray said, he believed board members had thought the department was being overzealous and had taken it upon themselves to “rectify that a little bit.”

Missed deadlines, McMurray added, allowed some officers guilty of serious misconduct to walk away with slaps on the wrist.

Among them was Officer Michael Buchanan, who was found guilty by a departmental panel of planting a gun on a suspect, filing a false report and providing false testimony about the 1997 arrest of a gang member. Buchanan’s partner, Officer Daniel Lujan, was found guilty of filing a false report, testifying falsely and failing to report Buchanan for planting the weapon.

Both officers faced termination until their lawyers successfully argued that the charges against them had been filed after the legal deadline. They remain on the job.

*

When Cooley campaigned to replace Garcetti as district attorney, he repeatedly criticized his opponent’s handling of the “worst police scandal in the city’s history.” He said Garcetti had failed to see warning signs that could have prevented corruption from flourishing at Rampart and he accused the incumbent of dragging his feet in prosecuting dirty cops.

“L.A. Confidential was a movie,” Cooley said on several occasions, “Rampart is real.”

But Rosenthal and two other lawyers on the district attorney’s corruption task force, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said Cooley, once elected, seemed to have little interest in getting to the bottom of Rampart.”It was clear that he felt ... Rampart was Garcetti’s problem and it wasn’t going to be his,” said Rosenthal, now a civilian monitor for the Portland Police Department.

Days after being sworn into office, Cooley assigned two new prosecutors -- Hodgman and Peter Cagney -- to take over the Rampart investigation. Valuable time passed as they acquainted themselves with the case. Some holdovers from the Garcetti administration said Cooley’s team excluded them from the investigation.

“We had prosecutors playing cards, doing puzzles and shopping online,” Rosenthal said. “The perception was that Cooley felt that everyone assigned to Rampart was a Garcetti loyalist who could not be trusted.”

Cooley was openly dismissive of Perez, whom he referred to in interviews as a lying drug thief. He announced that he would examine Perez’s plea deal and see if it could be revoked. Though they never interviewed Perez face-to-face, Cagney and Hodgman also started to doubt Perez’s value, referring to him as “the devil.”

In the end, Cooley’s team of prosecutors filed charges against three officers in the beating of a gang member -- a case developed under Garcetti.

In November 2001, Cooley announced that he was “closing the book” on the Rampart investigation. Officials in his office promised to release a final report, explaining why Perez’s allegations had not resulted in prosecutions. It was another year before that report was released. And when it was made public, the prosecutors’ memos explaining why they had declined to file charges addressed only a fraction of Perez’s allegations.

Prosecutors did not mention cases such as the Nov. 24, 1997, arrest of Julian Lopez Hernandez on charges of heroin possession. Perez told investigators that he and Officer Randy Canister had lied in their police report about the circumstances surrounding the arrest.

“A thorough investigation by detectives from LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Task Force substantiated these allegations,” wrote Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Laesecke in court documents filed in February 2000, seeking to have Hernandez’s conviction overturned.

Also omitted was a 1995 case referred to as the “ketchup shooting.”

In that case, Perez told investigators, a sergeant in the CRASH unit had bragged that he and others had covered up a questionable shooting by a rookie officer to save the young man’s career.

The shooting occurred in an apartment. The officer allegedly fired prematurely at a suspect who emerged from a bedroom and startled him.

Perez, who was not present, said he had been told that officers contrived a scenario to justify the rookie’s actions. Among other things, they allegedly smeared ketchup on a wall of the apartment so the rookie officer could tell investigators that he had thought the ketchup was blood and had pulled his gun in fear for his safety.

The LAPD did virtually no investigation on the case for nearly three years, and then only after articles about it appeared in The Times. Since then, on the orders of current Chief Bratton, investigators have given the case a fresh look.

Deputy Chief McMurray, who was in charge of internal affairs while the case languished and when it was reinvestigated, said he had become convinced that officers had concocted a cover story to justify the shooting, as Perez alleged.

“I’ll go to the grave believing that was an accidental discharge.” McMurray said in a recent interview. “Need I say more?”

In May, the LAPD referred the case to the district attorney for review, even though the statutory deadline for prosecution had expired.

The list of cases that Cooley did not account for includes dozens in which prosecutors had asked judges to dismiss charges against defendants -- in some cases, even to let them out of jail -- because of possible police misconduct or perjury.

In at least 30 cases, charges were dropped against defendants but no action was taken against the officers involved.

One 1996 case involved “virtually the entire Rampart CRASH unit,” according to confidential district attorney’s documents.

In that case, officers recovered weapons at a gang party. Perez said that Officer Brian Hewitt had arbitrarily assigned the weapons to gang members, none of whom had actually been seen with a gun.

According to the district attorney’s files, gang members had corroborated Perez’s claim and prosecutors under Garcetti had planned to question officers before the grand jury.

LAPD officials said they had referred numerous cases to prosecutors under Garcetti, but Cooley had demanded that they resubmit the cases to his team. In many cases, they did not.

Hodgman said he and other prosecutors had unsuccessfully “pushed the LAPD to make these presentations.” It got to the point, he said, where maintaining the task force “was just not worth it.”Looking back, Caruso, president of the city’s Police Commission during much of the Rampart investigation, took a dark view of the outcome.

The LAPD, he said, had been more concerned about limiting the fallout from the scandal than about ridding itself of corrupt officers.

“I suspect a lot of it was to sort of circle the wagons and protect the fort,” he said. “What people forgot about is what the fort is there for. The fort’s there to serve the public. The big lesson we have to learn from Rampart is that it’s not about protecting the fort; it’s about protecting the city.”