Opinion: Money Can’t Buy ... Well, You Know
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C’mon, tell the truth: for two million or four million or ten million, wouldn’t you almost be tempted to tell the cops, ‘Bring it on, fuzz! Take a whack at me! I wouldn’t screw it up!’?
Twice in about three months, onetime gang-bangers who got multi-million-dollar settlements from police for something the cops did wrong have fallen from the world of millionaires back into the world of felony.
In 2000, a former gang-banger who was shot and paralyzed by a couple of bad Rampart cops got a $15 million settlement. Over the weekend, Javier Francisco Ovando allegedly ran a couple of red lights in Glendale, then led cops on a merry chase for an hour, sometimes flooring it to 90 mph before he got stopped and busted for felony evading. At least he went out classy: driving his 2001 Hummer. [He must have bought it right after he was busted that same year in his Cadillac Escalade for ferrying coke to Vegas, maybe the desert version of coals to Newcastle. He had to give up the Caddy, his gun and $50K to stay out of prison.]
More pathetically, in April, a onetime Anaheim gang-banger lived up, alas, to his nickname – Dopey. Three years ago, Jose Luis Munoz was badly hurt as he surrendered to the cops who were chasing him, and a police car hit him. The $2.5 million settlement coulda, shoulda been his ticket out of trouble once and for all. The authorities tried to keep him on the straight and narrow, told him to call if he felt himself backsliding, kept urging him to move out of temptation’s neighborhood. But on April 10, he was caught hanging out with gang members, and on April 11, he was back in prison. (One reader was quick to e-mail my colleague, reporter Gil Reza, that ‘you can take the [guy] out of the gang but you can’t take the gang out of the [guy].’)
The backsliding champ, though, has to be Rodney King. With $3.8 million of Los Angeles taxpayers’ money [minus his lawyers’ hefty cut] and a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card –- who would want to be the cop who busts the radioactive Mr. King? –- he kept getting into trouble, again and again. Once he was busted three times in two months. In the mythic arrest that led to the beating and the trials and the riots, he was stopped in 1991 for supposedly hitting 115 mph on the freeway. In 2003, he was going 100 in his SUV when he crashed into a house.
One more of these, and we’ll have the makings of a new celebrity reality show: ‘Who Wants to Bust a Millionaire?’