Hawthorne Police, Bikers Play Out Conflict in Court

Ed (Fat Eddie) Serna had ridden with the toughest of them in his years with the Vagos, a band of notorious bikers formed in the 1960s to fight off the outlaw Hells Angels. But nothing from his biker days quite compared to the shock of what he says happened to his motorcycle at the hands of Hawthorne police.

Serna said the lovingly restored 1948 Harley Davidson was confiscated in a raid and returned months later in pieces--its motor rusted, the shift rod broken, the chrome pitted, a new paint job scratched, the taillight smashed, the carburetor torn loose and the seat missing. The mere sight of the disassembled machine, he said, plunged him into a lengthy despondence that almost wrecked his marriage.

Serna, since retired from the Vagos, is among 70 plaintiffs seeking at least $3 million in damages against the Hawthorne Police Department for alleged emotional distress and violation of their civil rights. The plaintiffs, who are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, are also seeking a permanent injunction prohibiting Hawthorne police from harassing the Vagos and others.

“It was in real bad shape,” Serna testified, recalling when his beloved Harley was returned to him. “I felt very angry. I worked four years on it and was that close to driving it, and it was taken away.”

The trial, which is now in its fourth week before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Maurice Hogan Jr., is expected to end in May. It is a study in contrasts.

The police officers, with their neatly trimmed hair and mustaches, stride into the courtroom impeccably dressed in business suits and carrying leather briefcases. They rarely talk with anyone but their attorney.

The bulky, bearded bikers, with such nicknames as “Panhead,” “Puff” and “L.A. Lenard,” come attired in ragged jeans and T-shirts with an occasional beer belly peeking out from underneath. When a reporter asked ACLU attorney Paul Hoffman why he didn’t “dress up” his witnesses, as some other attorneys do when in trial, he replied:

“They are what they are. This case isn’t about how they look, but what the police did to them.”

The case stems from two raids that occurred in August and September of 1983, when police searched 43 homes in 14 cities looking for a Vagos member named Raymond (South Bay Ray) Malloy, who was suspected of stabbing three patrons in a bar.

The police did not find Malloy at any of the homes they searched, but they did find a housewife stepping out of the shower, a mentally handicapped girl, a licensed child-care operator tending five babies, past and present Vagos members, and others who said they had never heard of Malloy or the Vagos.

Witnesses have testified that during the raids, police broke down doors, brandished guns in the faces of children, called them obscene names, used unnecessary force to detain them, trashed their homes, made false arrests, and confiscated motorcycles, cars, photo albums and other personal items.

Named in the suit, filed jointly by the ACLU and attorney Joanne Bockian of Sierra Madre, are former Hawthorne Police Chief Kenneth R. Stonebraker, three of his lieutenants, a sergeant and numerous unnamed officers who participated in the searches.

At the heart of the ACLU’s case is the allegation that Hawthorne police lied in affidavits so they could obtain search warrants to conduct the manhunt for Malloy. The ACLU contends the raids were conducted merely to harass the families so that Malloy would be pressured into giving himself up.

But Hawthorne police deny the allegations, contending they had good reason to suspect the Vagos were hiding Malloy, who also was wounded in the bar fight. Malloy eventually turned himself in to police.

Police say they were acting on solid tips given to them by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective and an informant, and from addresses and phone numbers they obtained from the Sheriff’s Department and even some members of the Vagos.

“They weren’t going to a convent with those search warrants,” said John Daly, a Los Angeles attorney hired by Hawthorne to defend the city and its police force in the suit. “They (Vagos) were known violent people, and the police were knocking on doors with the expectation of finding Malloy, who had been accused of three vicious stabbings.”

Daly plans to call to the witness stand dozens of law enforcement officers, who are expected to testify that they used standard police procedures in conducting the searches, which they considered dangerous.

The defense has painted the Vagos as an outlaw gang in which the men have long hair, the women tattoos, and members arm their homes with guns, knives and pit bulls. Through their own testimony, the Vagos have not denied much of that.

The ACLU, while not attempting to paint the plaintiffs as saints, has focused its case on such civil rights issues as invasion of privacy, unlawful search and seizure, false arrest and excessive and unreasonable force.

“The bikers’ rights were violated,” said attorney Bockian. “They have the same constitutional rights as everybody else in this country.”

As one trial participant noted, the courtroom drama really comes down to just one question: who were the meanest guys on the block--Hawthorne police or the Vagos?

A jury of seven women and five men will have to sift through testimony from nearly 200 witnesses. The trial’s outcome may hang on testimony of four people: Hawthorne Police Lt. Steven Frazier, Vagos International President Lenard (L.A. Lenard) Barela, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Fosdyck, and former Hawthorne police Officer Dana Griffith, who now works for a motorcycle dealership in Texas.

Frazier is a 13-year cop whose lanky boyish looks earned him the nickname “Opie” because of his resemblance to Ron Howard’s character on the old “Andy Griffith” television series. Frazier was the detective assigned to get the search warrants and find Malloy.

Frazier is expected to testify that in obtaining the search warrants he relied on information from the Sheriff’s Department--specifically Fosdyck--that the Vagos were hiding Malloy.

Fosdyck, a 20-year deputy sheriff with steely eyes and sandy hair, disputes that. In clipped and unemotional sentences, he testified that he told Hawthorne police that the Vagos were not hiding Malloy.

During cross-examination, the defense implied by its questioning that Fosdyck had a faulty memory, took no notes of his conversation with Frazier, and may have gotten in trouble with his superiors for giving out information on Malloy.

Fosdyck said he had a meeting with Barela at a local Denny’s restaurant during which the Vagos leader assured him that the bikers were not hiding Malloy. Barela is expected to buttress the detective’s testimony when he appears as a witness in the coming weeks.

Barela, a beefy man who said he joined the Vagos because many were Vietnam veterans like him who “felt lost,” often wears checked flannel shirts and work boots to court. He alternately listens intently to testimony, dozes off, and talks proudly out in the court hallway about his Harley Davidson or a daughter attending UCLA.

The fourth key witness is Griffith, whose curly, graying hair and cowboy-cut clothes make him resemble a country-Western singer. Griffith testified that his colleagues made unwarranted arrests, wrote false crime reports and brutalized suspects with the blessings of superiors.

Griffith testified that Hawthorne police commonly participated in what they called “P.R.” work, an acronym for “pound and release.” This meant stopping suspects and “physically manhandling them to let them know their behavior should be modified.”

Under “P.R.,” Griffith said, these people were not arrested, but “it made it a memorable event for them.”

Griffith also testified that when officers completed calls that involved blacks, Latinos, motorcycle gangs or whites of “low economic means,” they would radio the station that the incident had been “N.H.I.”--a label meaning “No Human Involvement.”

In another instance, Griffith testified, officers stopped a suspected pimp on a traffic warrant. Some of the officers knew he was paralyzed and, as a joke, told a rookie officer that the man was faking it, Griffith recalled.

“The officer dragged him out of the car through the window, and kept thumping him on his legs to get him to walk,” Griffith said.

The treatment of the Vagos, he added, was no different. Early on in his job, Griffith said he was told by senior officers that “no Vago was to ride through Hawthorne flying their colors without being stopped.”

He said in one incident, an officer even faked a disturbance call into police headquarters so police could hassle a group of Vagos at a bar. After their arrests, Griffith said he was asked to fake the crime reports.

Items confiscated from the Vagos--jackets, knives and key chains--were lined up on chairs in the station “like trophy displays,” and city employees came by to admire them, Griffith said.

The defense has sought to undermine Griffith’s credibility by saying Hawthorne police considered him a suspect in a murder and that he was allowed to resign from the force because of other unrelated allegations. Griffith denied the allegations and said he has never been interviewed by homicide detectives.

The ACLU argues that the alleged “harassment campaign against the Vagos” was part of a larger pattern of police abuse in Hawthorne that occurred between 1980 and 1983--a direct result of a conscious political policy of Chief Stonebraker and other city officials to get tough on crime.

In those years, Hawthorne was a city in transition.

Located 15 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, Hawthorne changed from a predominantly white, working-class city to one that is 40% minority. It faced several crises in the 1970s and early 1980s: budget deficits caused by the loss of employers, a grand jury investigation that was critical of the “Old Boys” network and nepotism in city government, and rising crime.

In 1980, in the city’s six-square-mile area, there were 13 murders, 601 robberies and 1,558 burglaries. The figures touched off alarm among several grass-roots groups, which demanded and got a reorganization of the Police Department.

As pressure was placed on the 80-member Police Department to “clean up the city,” Griffith said he witnessed excessive force and misconduct by police against the Vagos and others.

The Vagos’ run-ins with the law are legendary. Over the years, some members have been convicted of murder, rape, drug trafficking and other crimes.

But to hear the Vagos tell it, the organization--whose membership at times has exceeded 200--is not unlike the Rotary Club or other service organizations.

Vagos, which means “drifters” in Spanish, elect officers, hold weekly meetings at their clubhouses, have secretaries who take minutes, and adhere to strict bylaws.

Each member wears a green emblem on his motorcycle jacket depicting their logo: a devil astride a winged motorcycle. Vagos also pass out “courtesy cards” that bear their logo and names.

Their wives and girlfriends adorn their own clothing with “property patches,” which, as the name implies, indicate the wearer is the property of a Vago.

In the summer of 1983, as tensions rose between the Vagos and police, an incident occurred at the Country Girl bar on Hawthorne Boulevard that would ultimately trigger the raids and the resulting lawsuit.

“South Bay Ray” Malloy and a friend confronted three Latinos who were playing pool and told them to “talk English,” according to a police report. A fight ensued and all four suffered knife wounds.

In October, 1983, Malloy turned himself in to sheriff’s deputies. Authorities at the time said Malloy told them he was afraid of being picked up at his job. Malloy later claimed self-defense and pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault and battery and was sentenced to 142 days in jail and placed on five years’ probation.

Acting on search warrants, a force of 50 police officers, including two SWAT teams from various police departments around the Southland, conducted simultaneous raids on the mornings of Aug. 9 and Sept. 7.

In one of those raids, Barela’s former wife, Suzanne, testified that police “scared my children with their guns . . . threatened to shoot the dog . . . had a good ol’ time hanging my lingerie from curtain rods . . . paraded me in my nightgown outside in front of neighbors . . . and called me a (obscenity) lying (obscenity).”

She alleged that officers also said to her: “Since you are Lenard’s old lady, were you passed around to the brothers?”

“They told me to give Ray Malloy a message,” she recalled. “That if he didn’t turn himself in, they’d keep kicking in doors until he did.”

Malloy is the one person who may not testify at the civil trial, the ACLU’s Hoffman said.

The biker’s attorney told Hoffman:

“Malloy doesn’t want to have anything to do with any of it.”