Misconduct by Deputies Condoned, Trial Told : Corruption: Former sergeant, testifying at trial of six narcotics officers, says lawmen at “ghetto stations” were taught to cover up excessive force and other abuses.

Many Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at “ghetto stations” were “tainted” with corruption and taught to cover up excessive force and other misconduct by deputies, a former sheriff’s sergeant said Tuesday.

Robert R. Sobel, testifying in a civil rights trial of six narcotics officers, told a federal court jury that the Sheriff’s Department’s “old boy network” encouraged misconduct by pressuring deputies to “play the game” or risk harming their law enforcement career.

Sobel alleged that deputies who were assigned to inner-city stations, where he once worked before joining the Narcotics Bureau in the mid-1980s, were trained by fellow officers to tolerate excessive force and to lie in official reports.

The ex-sergeant testified that members of the Special Enforcement Bureau, where Sobel also once worked, engaged in similar misconduct.

“Everybody played the game,” Sobel told jurors in the trial of five sheriff’s deputies and a Los Angeles Police Department detective accused of beating drug dealers and skimming drug money.

Testifying for the eighth day as a prosecution witness, Sobel had already admitted to participating in thefts, beatings and other misconduct as head of the narcotics crew. And he said Tuesday that he took “the wrong road” early in his career as a deputy at the Firestone station.

There, Sobel said he learned from his training officers that he could not hope to advance his career unless he went along with deputies who used excessive force and falsified reports. Asked if most deputies engaged in such activities, Sobel said they did in the “ghetto stations” like Firestone, which covers the Florence-Firestone area and a portion of Watts.

“I’d say they’d be tainted,” Sobel said of his fellow deputies.

“With corruption?” defense attorney David Wiechert asked.

“Yes,” Sobel replied.

He added that many of the deputies who engaged or tolerated misconduct have since been promoted to lieutenants, captains and chiefs in the department. “I would say that those people trained in that background would still have those values,” he said. Sobel did not name any officers who had been promoted to high rank.

Asked for comment, Deputy Bill Wehner, a department spokesman, said: “We will continue to comply with the request of the United States attorney and will refrain from commenting on the trial and the investigation.”

According to Sobel, new patrol deputies were not explicitly told to beat suspects or to lie in police reports but were shown by veteran training officers how things were done on the street. The newcomers, who had been routinely assigned to jail duties following their academy graduation, were quickly exposed to wrongdoing--such as the use of excessive force--while on patrol, he said.

“The process is to get him dirty,” Sobel said of the new deputy. “The trainee either says he’ll cover it, or he says he won’t play.”

If he went along, the trainee would then be made to help write a false report, Sobel said. If the deputy balked, then he would be “branded as a coward” by other deputies, would be distrusted by his colleagues and would jeopardize his stay at an inner-city station--an assignment coveted by ambitious deputies because of the opportunity to rack up arrest statistics and gain street experience.

“That was the understanding,” Sobel testified. “If you worked a hot station, it was like getting your ticket punched (for promotion).”

In addition to using excessive force, deputies worked “a gray area” against suspects, Sobel said. For example, he said, a deputy who stopped a car may not have seen a gun on the driver but would lie in a police report and say that the gun was in plain view.

A deputy who stopped a drug suspect and found narcotics in his pocket would write in his police report that the officer saw the suspect “throw” the narcotics down, he added.

Sobel’s statements came as Wiechert cross-examined the former sergeant, who retired from the Sheriff’s Department shortly after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion in March, 1990.

The 20-year veteran acknowledged that he will receive $20,400 a year from his retirement benefits. He also disclosed that he has filed a worker’s compensation claim with the county contending that he was injured from “repetitive bending, crawling, squatting, walking and standing” during narcotics work. That claim is pending, he said.

Sobel said that while he stole $180,000 during his time on sheriff’s narcotics teams, he has reimbursed the government about $149,500 in cash and in property purchased with stolen money.

Sobel said he has paid about $70,000 in back taxes, but he testified that he has yet to pay the government $28,000 as called for in his plea agreement, and also has been allowed to retain other property bought with stolen money, including a car, a computer and a large-screen television. He did not elaborate.