HIGH SCHOOL UNDERCOVER : The LAPD Sent Rookie Sharon Fischer to Buy Drugs. She Succeeded, But Paid With Her Career. Did the Discipline, She Now Asks, Fit the Deed?

IT IS 10:03 on a summer Friday night, and along with her parents, 23-year-old Sharon Fisch er sits in the makeup room at Channel 9, waiting to make her talk-show debut on “John Barbour’s Live Friday Night Talk Show” (a now-defunct television program). She is wearing a white cotton skirt and a turquoise-blue blouse, and her white earrings, shaped like tree leaves, offset her frosted blond hair, which is worn in the manner of Vanna White.

The only sign of pre-show jitters Fischer has shown is that she lightly fiddles with her fingernails, which are as long as fork tines and painted a deep pink. “I’m nervous,” she suddenly blurts out to her parents, Robert and Sherry Fischer, who have accompanied her this evening. It is the first thing she has said in nearly a quarter of an hour, and her words, weighted by this sudden confession, seem to hang in the air.

“How do I follow Danny Glover and Fred Travalena?” she ventures tremulously about the guests who will precede her.

“Now, Sharon,” Sherry, her mother, says of the celebrities, “remember: They have things that we want, and we have things that they want.”

“Oh,” says Fischer, “you mean that they’d want to be fired from the Los Angeles Police Department?”

Eleven months ago, Sharon Fischer was working for an arm of the LAPD called the School Buy program, a unit that specializes in sending dewy- skinned officers on drug-purchasing missions at local high schools. Her half-hearted joke refers to the fact that on Feb. 20, 1987, it was decided by the LAPD that while she worked undercover at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, she did her job not sensibly but a little too well. The day after she helped in the arrest of seven students and one adult, a cache of six blush-worthy notes that Fischer had written to a student was forwarded to the LAPD. An Internal Affairs investigation determined that, along with having written the letters, Fischer had maintained an “improper” relationship with the student, 17-year-old Akili Calhoun, who by all accounts had no connection whatsoever to the Kennedy High drug demimonde. By “improper,” they meant that she did something as simple as telephoning him at his home, and as provocative as, in the stilted language of official reports, allowing him to “fondle her breasts and her buttocks.”

She denied all the charges, with the exception of the phone call. “There were some notes,” she says, “but that was it. I never had any kind of relationship with him.” More than one eyewitness would say otherwise. (Because of the controversy surrounding her actions at the school, charges against the seven students were hurriedly dropped. Only the adult saw prosecution.)

Fischer’s case raised several embarrassing and fundamental questions about the 13-year-old School Buy program. In his defense of Sharon Fischer, her lawyer, Michael P. Stone, would challenge the wisdom of unleashing inexperienced and, some believe, inadequately trained officers among the delicate teen-age egos on a high school campus. There was also the matter of pitting novice cops against equally inexperienced drug dealers. (The danger of this arrangement was underscored tragically last October : A 21-year-old police officer working undercover at a high school in Midlothian, Tex., was executed by two students who shot him twice in the back of the head with a .38-caliber revolver.)

Of course, the criticism that Sharon Fischer’s story drew to the School Buy program wasn’t unique. For years, the project has been vilified by community-action groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union considers it an infringement on teen-agers’ constitutional rights. The School Buy program is also a favored project of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who happens to be its local creator. Because Fischer was still on probationary status--police officers must serve 18 months before they’re considered full-fledged employees--it was also Gates who dismissed her. On June 17, Stone filed a petition with the California Superior Court in an attempt to secure his client the right to a new--and, he says, more just--employee disciplinary hearing.

The scandal attracted enough press attention to make Fischer a minor celebrity. She’s received supportive fan mail and modeling requests and has been interviewed in print and on television. So many phone calls poured in from production companies hoping to buy her story rights that Fischer hired Allan M. Kassirer, a business manager who also represents consumer activist David Horowitz, to sort through the offers. “My goal,” says Kassirer, “is not to make her a media star. My goal is to make her story known. And I think the most effective way of doing that is through a well-told TV movie, which if it’s made, in fact, will reach tens of millions of people.” The Fischer family likes to tease Sharon that her part will be played by actress Heather Locklear.

WHEN SHARON Fischer was growing up in an ocher-colored subur ban tract home in Saugus, she often said she wanted to be a physical-education teacher. Later, when she was attending Los Angeles Valley College, she decided to become an accountant. Five years ago, on the day when she surprisingly announced she was applying to enroll in the Police Academy, her parents had opposite reactions. “It made me happy,” says her father, a 21-year veteran LAPD vice officer. “It’s a good job.” “The first thing I thought,” says her mother, “is, ‘You got to be kidding.’ Having lived through the job with (her father), all I could think about was the hours and the strain it puts on your family life.”

After she graduated from the academy, she was assigned to the North Hollywood division. She never expected that her good looks would get in the way of proving herself as a brand-new police officer. “It’s hard out in the field,” she says. “(Men) bother you all the time. Criminals look at you and say, ‘Oh God, if there were more cops like you, I’d get arrested all the time.’ You get tired of those kind of comments. You’re out there trying to be as professional as you can.” She fared similarly with her fellow policemen. “You’d hear talk about the girls that weren’t attractive and (it would be) about what good cops they were. And when they’d get around to talking about me or this one other blond girl, they’d talk about how they wanted to go out with us or ‘She’s cute.’ Not talk about the job I was doing.”

She was just six months out of the Academy when she and nine others were selected for the School Buy program, the most critical requirements being their rookie status and youthful appearance. “They don’t want you to have too much street experience,” says Fischer. “If you do, you’ll talk, act and have mannerisms like a cop.”

She could already envision her career’s upward trajectory. “It’s good to have a lot of stuff under your belt if you want to move up the ladder,” she says. “Besides, if they offer you a job, you should take it, because you may not get another chance.”

During the four-week School Buy training program, Fischer was tutored about types of drugs, their names and how much they sell for. She also learned what you should say when someone calls you a narc ( (snarling) : “I ain’t no narc. . . .”), words you should never ever use (marijuana), how to dress (rock-concert T-shirts and jeans) and how to simulate smoking pot.

Each officer was required to fabricate a new identity in the form of a short story. Fischer’s went something like this: “My name is Sharon Odell (after her mother’s surname). I’m 17. I used to go to Hamilton High School, where I got into trouble. Then we moved to the Valley. My dad is a paralegal at a law firm, where I work after school as a receptionist. My mom is an alcoholic.”

The most important point was her mother’s drinking. “That way, if kids ever asked if they could come to my house for lunch or to smoke a joint,” she says, “I could say, ‘Well, my mom’s an alcoholic, so we’d better not.’ ”

To get the School Buy trainees accustomed to buying drugs, they were run through a series of mini-maneuvers.

“One of the first situations,” she says, “was where you approach somebody and ask them, ‘Can I buy a dime bag of (marijuana)?’ ” Later, for a more realistic run-through, the class was split up into teams of twos and threes and taken to the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue to mingle with real-life drug dealers and to buy drugs. All the while, two detectives stood lookout on the opposite side of the street, monitoring their success and taking pictures.

Before graduating from the program, each officer was issued a phony driver’s license and school transcript. And although she received no written rule book to which she could later refer, one School Buy lecture specifically focused on the importance of remaining emotionally detached during an undercover assignment. “They tell you not to get too involved with your dope dealers, especially with the males, because they can use that as a defense,” she says. “They’ll come in and say, ‘She was cute, she liked me, so I sold (drugs) to her.’ ” Even after she lost her job, Fischer felt she stuck to protocol in this regard. “I didn’t think weeks, Fischer’s main strategy was to cut classes and hang out in the restrooms with other girls, talking and smoking cigarettes. While her undercover police colleagues were starting to make successful buys, she was still arriving empty-handed when she returned every afternoon to Parker Center for her daily debriefing. Often she felt the competitive pressure. “They tell you it’s not a numbers game,” she says, “but we had a lot of officers buying dope every day.” Always, there was the extreme loneliness.

Finally, on a warm afternoon, a pair of girls befriended Fischer as she sa twice, when she was a teen-ager, girls had picked fights with her and she’d repaid them by busting their noses. But on this day, as she frantically struggled, she was immobilized by his strong grip. Finally, she wriggled one hand free and knocked her forearm against his windpipe, then ran away.

Fischer knew that in 1984, a School Buy cop had been beaten and gang-raped. So the attack scared her deeply, and she took two days off to decide if she’d had enough. “I told her to quit the program,” says her mother.

In the end, she filled out a battery report, though it was never actually filed.

Her decision to stay was equal parts tenacity, ambition and pride. “I just decided I could handle it,” she says. “Besides, any time you take an oral (examination) to move up to a higher position, they’re gonna ask you, ‘Why did you give this up?’ Also, your classmates say stuff like, ‘She dropped out. What a wimp.’ That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t leave: I didn’t want them saying that about me.”

Fischer returned to school feeling particularly vulnerable. Perhaps the students sensed her fragility, and in their own cruel, uniquely adolescent way, punished her for it. Suddenly, and without clear reason, the “narking” escalated, and even Fischer’s most trusting drug dealers began to refuse her business. At some point, she decided that the answer to all her problems was to make friends with someone very, very popular, who could also double as a bodyguard. She told her supervising officer she planned to try a new strategy, infiltrating Kennedy’s athletic clique. “He said it sounded like a good idea,” she says. “He didn’t really tell me no.” (But Det. John Whipp, Sharon’s supervisor, claims that he and Fischer never discussed her decision to find a “bodyguard.” “She mentioned (Calhoun’s) name a few times. But by the time I found out about the whole thing, it was a full-blown investigation,” he says, adding, “It’s whose story you believe, I guess.”)

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Akili Calhoun was a bulky 6-foot-4, 240-pound defen sive end for the varsity foot ball team. He was also black, which could have been the only thing he shared with most of Fischer’s other acquaintances. The introduction was made through a mutual friend and, much as Fischer hoped, their association offered her a new credibility. After the first week she spent around Calhoun, people began selling her drugs again.

The pair rapidly became known as an item on campus, spending all of their nutrition and lunch breaks talking--mostly about Fischer’s fictitious family problems--with the heated intensity given to teen-agers. Later, Fischer would say that it didn’t matter that because of her job her end of the conversation was almost entirely make-believe. What mattered was that she had finally made a real friend. “Dopers never ask you about yourself,” she says. “All they’re interested in was doing their drugs. I could talk to Akili. He was just a nice guy.”

In the middle of the third week, Calhoun confessed to Fischer that he loved her. So she withdrew slightly, hoping that the sentiment would wither without her encouragement. At 17, such emotions need little nourishment, and patience ranks low on the ladder of importance. Calhoun’s response, says Fischer, was to double his efforts, interested mostly in persuading her to kick drugs and to show up at a Friday football game, then make love with him afterwards. The past few months of working undercover had taught her that the stickiest issues are best handled with an endless stream of lies, excuses and apologies. Every Friday, Fischer would promise Calhoun she’d meet him after the football game, and every Monday, she would greet him with “I couldn’t help it” and “My dad wouldn’t let me.” When that stopped working, she sent notes to him, a device she would later claim was only frowned upon by School Buy supervisors if it left an incriminating paper trail. (“They basically told us if you’re going to write letters, get them back.”)

Composed in what she considered the fizzy, crude voice of a teen-ager, she joked about sex (“Like, I’d say, ‘Where are we going to go? The 50-yard line?’ ”) and told him he had a great body (“Which he does, I mean, he’s a very big guy”). And maybe in honor of the closeness she felt, she tried to hint to him that something would happen in the next two weeks that would explain everything.

THE TERMINATION and highlight of every School Buy operation is marked by what is called “a roundup,” where LAPD officers go on campus, serve drug dealers warrants, arrest them, then have them identified by the respective School Buy officer somewhere off campus. Possibly, there is also a “buy bust,” or an arrest that takes place during or after an actual drug buy. By all accounts, Fischer’s “buy bust” and “roundup” went exceedingly well.

The first took place Dec. 1, 1986, with cinematic flashiness, in the back parking lot at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. A dealer’s older brother pulled his sports car alongside Fischer’s car and attempted to sell her $450 worth of rock cocaine. When she opened her car trunk, thus giving the pre-arranged signal, they heard the squeal of screeching tires and were suddenly surrounded by a swarm of police with their guns drawn, yelling, “Freeze!”

A roundup on the following day had considerably fewer theatrics. Fischer and her supervising detective parked on a dusty hilltop next to the Granada Hills Masonic Temple. Then, twice, unmarked police cars stuffed with her already handcuffed dealers stopped perpendicular to her car. As Fischer routinely identified each teen-ager, they stared at her with looks of disgust, disbelief and fear. Mostly their faces expressed their acknowledgment of Fischer’s total betrayal. Sharon knew that many of the detectives enjoyed the roundups, but she felt strangely downcast. “You know these kids committed a crime, but they also put their trust in you.”

On the morning of Dec. 3, word of the arrests and Fischer’s true identity spread through Kennedy High. By virtue of Calhoun’s association with her, he was labeled either a snitch or a chump. When Principal Jim Ball passed him in the hall, Calhoun could only mumble a humiliated, “Cold affair. . . .”

Later, Fischer heard that Calhoun had called his mother at work, crying. That same morning Fischer was at Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles, basking briefly in the afterglow of her accomplishments. She was helping colleagues with other roundups when a supervisor called her into his office. Calhoun’s mother, Connie Calhoun, had not only accused Fischer of sexually seducing her son but said she had suggestive letters to back up her claim.

WHEN SHERRY Fischer talks about the night of Dec. 5, she always refers to it as “Fright Night.” It was 10:30 p.m., and Sharon was asleep on a velveteen two-seater recliner chair, her mother watching television beside her, when the doorbell rang. When Sherry looked through the peephole, two plainclothes officers asked if this was the home of Robert Fischer. At the time, Sharon’s father was working a sting operation in the San Fernando Valley, and all Sherry could think of was that something had happened to him. Then they asked if they could take Sharon down to Parker Center.

On the way downtown, while the two policemen discussed their vacation plans, Fischer sat silently, wondering what was happening. When they arrived, she was escorted to an interrogation room and read her Miranda rights. This event would often be used by Fischer’s lawyer to show how the LAPD mishandled her case: Veteran police officers would know how to protect themselves, to ask for a tape recorder, a representative, a phone call; Fischer, who did not know that she could answer questions and still be protected, tearfully relinquished her rights.

They returned her home at 1 a.m., where she was met by her anxious mother and father. At 3 a.m., when she finished talking to her parents, she went into her back bedroom, so small that there is just enough room to accommodate her stuffed panda bear collection, a closet sagging with clothes and a large water bed. “Then I went to sleep,” she says, “if you can call what I did sleep.”

The next evening, the Internal Affairs officers returned at 7:30 to retrieve a piece of evidence mentioned to them by Akili Calhoun: a white high-top tennis shoe, on which a high school friend of Fischer’s had scrawled, “I WANNA SEE AKILI NAKED.” Calhoun had denied to the officers ever having slept with Fischer, but he said he knew that she wanted to--because of the writing on that shoe.

On Monday morning, Fischer returned to work and tried to behave as if there was nothing to worry about. On Tuesday, Capt. Clayton Mayes, the head of Central Juvenile Division, called her into his office, where Fischer remembers him saying: “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough. I want you to turn in your gun, your badge and ID to the supervisor. You’re assigned to home.”

In the LAPD, being assigned to home is roughly akin to house arrest. Fischer had to telephone in at 7 a.m. and out at 3:30 p.m., but could not leave the premises with the exception of a half-hour lunch break. From Dec. 9 to Feb. 20, Fischer stayed indoors. During that time, she cried often, developed an ulcer and would awaken from nightmares, sweating. She spent hours studying her penal-code handbook, so that when they asked her back she’d be ready.

SHERRY Fischer and her husband, Robert, sit in the kitchen drinking sugary iced tea poured from a brown plastic pitcher.

Robert Fischer is a quiet, bearded man who, when moved to an emotional gesture, will poke the air with his index finger for emphasis. After combing through the investigative report compiled by the Internal Affairs division--which was made available only after she had already been dismissed--Fischer’s father concluded that, according to his wife, if “I could put people in jail with this kind of criminal evidence, there wouldn’t be any criminals on the street.”

“I looked at the case in two ways,” he says tersely, “both as a father and a police officer. But I came to the same conclusion . . . (the report) was bull, a joke. There were so many inconsistent statements and outright lies.” He remembers being so angry at the LAPD that, in the middle of a vice operation, he suddenly decided to retire six months early. “We’ve gone to bed at nights wondering if in the morning,” says Sherry, “I could picket Chief Gates’ office.”

Though they uncompromisingly defend Sharon’s actions, neither of her parents has ever read the vivid letters their daughter wrote to Akili Calhoun. Fischer has adopted the inconsistent attitude that although she would like them released to the media “so that people can see that they’re not like things you’d read in a porno magazine,” they should be withheld from her parents “because they might be a little shocked by the language.” “The whole thing hasn’t been Sharon’s fault,” says her mother. “She . . . just . . . got caught up in circumstances she can’t get out of.”

ONE WOMAN WHO might disagree with Fischer’s parents is Frances Akers, who, along with her family and a neighbor, was visited by plainclothes policemen early in the investigation of Sharon Fischer. Akers, who lives a few blocks from Kennedy High, was shown a photograph of a striking blond girl whom she remembered seeing one afternoon with a tall, black teen-age boy in the street in front of her house.

“They were making out quite ferociously,” Akers says. “It really looked terrible . . . . I thought, ‘Gee, if I go outside, maybe they’ll stop.’ So I took out the garbage and made a lot of noise. (The girl) gave a little giggle and looked embarrassed.” Akers had seen the blonde shortly before incident: Her son had helped her jump start her car.

“The neighbors that supposedly saw this all had different stories about what went on,” Fischer says, “what I was wearing, what kind of car I had, how I was dressed. Akili had a cast on his leg and walked with a limp, and nobody ever said anything about that.

“Then they talked to all my dope dealers, and two of them said, ‘Yeah, we saw them kiss on campus all the time.’ They talked to the school nurse and the principal and the football coach, all of whom said they never saw us kiss or even hold hands. But that was their evidence against me.”

In response to Akers’ statement she says in a tight voice: “I remember that day perfectly. I didn’t sit there and kiss him. (Calhoun) was leaning up against the car, I was standing there between his legs. We were just talking. I gave him a hug goodby and left.”

Fischer told investigators that Akili was “so tall that when I hugged him I came to his chest. And if he leaned over it could look like he was kissing me on the cheek.”

MIKE STONE, who works for the Police Protective League, is Fischer’s best and most logical spokesman. He is her lawyer, was a cop himself for 13 years, and three years ago represented Alice Padelford, the School Buy officer who was gang-raped and beaten. Stone also seems to be one of the few principals in Fischer’s orbit willing to assess the circumstances and find blame on more than one side.

Sitting in his Wilshire Boulevard office he says: “We take a young police officer, male or female, and put them in a high school program. We say, ‘Go in there and act like a student, develop relationships and buy drugs.’ Well, not all the relationships that these young police officers develop in the school program are going to be bad ones. They (will develop) good ones, too. And if they’re likable people, they’re going to develop friendships. Some of the relationships that they develop are going to be with students who have nothing to do with drugs and are basically nice kids. Then when the big roundup comes, these kids--who are not drug dealers, but have befriended or had relationships with (a) police officer--find out suddenly that this friend of theirs, that they’ve had for several months and shared some intimate conversations with perhaps, was basically deceiving them . . . . all this time.

“If the first real contact that a high school student has with a police officer is being lied to and deceived, I just wonder what in the world good does that do?”

When discussing Fischer in the particular, Stone describes her as, “well . . . distant.” Though he supports Fischer’s argument that the raciness of her letters was merely an attempt to mimic a teen-ager’s writing style, he also admits, “I’m sure if Sharon could take them back, she would” and that “I told her from the get-go that nobody would ever accuse her of good judgment (in writing them).”

He can think of five reasons Fischer made friends with Akili Calhoun. “Number 1,” he says, “that she was young and inexperienced. Two, that she was not properly trained. Three, that she had a very real fear for her physical safety. Four, that she was, at the time she embarked on this relationship, not achieving much success in drug buying because people were ‘narking’ her. And five, that she was trying very hard to be what the department wanted her to be, and that was real productive in buying drugs, writing reports.”

Fischer may not have been ready for this assignment, Stone says, an opinion that was also voiced by some of her North Hollywood Division supervising officers. At her Liberty Interest hearing, Officer Leroy Rasmussen, recalled suggesting to her that she decline the offer. “I think you should be a police officer first so you know what you’re doing and then go undercover.”

In Fischer’s hearing and to the press, Stone has consistently asserted that though the LAPD found her conduct or procedures lacking, they didn’t have to fire her. “Discipline her,” he says, “if that’s what’s really called for. I mean, why ruin her career? Why not put her back where she was doing well?”

“Let me say something about probationary officers,” says Cmdr. William D. Booth, department spokesman for the office of the Chief of Police, “Probation doesn’t mean that a probationer is an idiot or lacking in intellect . . . . It simply means that there’s an 18-month period of time that is part of the selection process to determine that an officer can . . . demonstrate that they are capable of being a police officer.”

A champion of the School Buy program, Booth believes that “it’s very worthwhile,” pointing out that in the semester after Fischer’s School Buy experience, nine new recruits successfully made 161 drug purchases from 110 dealers during the 1987 spring semester. When asked if Fischer will be used as an example to future School Buy officers, he says: “We’re subject to talk about all experiences, the good and the bad. (Fischer’s experience) will be used to show what you can’t do and the terrible things that can happen if you do them.” Though he won’t comment on Fischer (“Closed case,” he says perfunctorily), his attitude about the incident is that it was “atypical.”

“It was one glitch that has been taken care of,” he says. “It has not proven fatal at all to the School Buy program, which will continue.”

From a parent’s point of view, however, it is unlikely that this incident would be considered a mere “glitch.” Connie Calhoun, Akili’s mother, declined to comment, saying only : “It was a terrible time for (Akili). I know he’s a big person and everything, but it was really hard on him.” Harold Rosenberg, her lawyer, claims that the negative attention caused his client such stress that last fall Calhoun rejected a football scholarship offer at USC. Hoping to leave the unhappy memory behind, Calhoun selected a University of Hawaii scholarship offer instead.

“He should feel bad,” Fischer replies woodenly when told of Calhoun’s new residence and why he chose to move there. “He ruined (my) career.”

FISCHER IS stubbing out a cigarette in a glass ashtray at Marie Callender’s in Toluca Lake. She stopped smoking shortly after the Kennedy High assignment, but for today she’s taken up the habit again. “Nerves.” She shrugs, as if by way of explanation. “Personal stuff . . . . “

Her schedule is always busy, as if to compensate for the many months when she had nothing on her hands but time to contemplate her situation. Two or three times a week she teaches aerobics classes, and she works five days a week as a security guard.

Last Nov. 7, Fischer married her boyfriend Ralph Garay, a deputy with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

“(Ralph) doesn’t think it’s fair how the LAPD treated me,” says Fischer, who lives with her new husband in a Canyon Country apartment. “He wants me to fight it all the way.”

Though technically Fischer hasn’t been a police officer for more than 11 months, she still sometimes acts like one. When driving she often pulls hard, one-handed U-turns mid-street when she wants to reverse directions. When she goes to a nightclub and a fight erupts, the first thing she thinks of is, “How can I break this up?” And as if to preserve these natural reactions, she’s applied for work with the Glendale police, where she is currently ranked No. 21 on the eligibility list.

As for Fischer’s pending court action against the LAPD, her lawyer explains: “I’ve been very frank with Sharon about (my) opinion. I don’t think that there is a chance in the world where Chief Gates would ever voluntarily take her back. He’s taken a position on . . . this case and he won’t be moved.”

Fischer clearly believes otherwise: “I mean, I haven’t really made a decision if I want to stay in the police department,” she says later. “But I am sure that once they see the evidence they will say, ‘This is ridiculous’ and reinstate me.”

A heavy badge is a police term used to describe cops who think they’re indestructible. “A lot of young officers go through that,” Fischer says. “You get out there on the street and you don’t realize how much authority you have. All of a sudden you can tell people what to do, and they will listen to you. Then you go, ‘Wow, nothing will ever happen to me. I have this badge pinned to my chest.’ ”

Some months ago, Fischer says, her cousin Jill graduated from the Sheriff’s Academy. “She came out of there with a heavy badge. But after what happened to me, she’s really changed her attitude. She realized, I guess, how easily it can all be taken away.”