Glendale Man’s Find Could Be a Paper Trail to Drug Kingpin

Scott Mathes loves to find bits of buried treasure among the garbage while doing his usual cleanup work deep in the canyons of Los Angeles.

This week, he says, he really outdid himself.

The environmentalist stumbled upon a cache of documents detailing a bizarre saga of drugs, possible murder and a one-armed cocaine kingpin with a penchant for violence.

Mathes found the soaked documents--some of them badly burned--Thursday in Little Tujunga Canyon above Lake View Terrace, so close to a wash that they probably would have been carried away forever with the night’s rains. Once Mathes spread them out on the hardwood floor of his Glendale living room and saw what he had, he alerted authorities here and in Arizona.

Before the sun was up Friday, the documents were in the hands of a Los Angeles County district attorney’s office investigator.

Arizona authorities eagerly await the documents, and say they--and whoever tried to dispose of them--could help them finally close the case of “the Ghost,” a one-armed, extremely dangerous and elusive cocaine kingpin named Jaime Barazza Lopez.

Lopez is one of three brothers responsible for masterminding one of the nation’s largest cocaine rings in Mexico, Texas, Arizona and Los Angeles, and may be linked to at least one slaying of an associate in Van Nuys, authorities said. The ring was broken by Phoenix authorities in late 1991, and Lopez’s two brothers were convicted of drug charges last year. But Jaime Lopez has eluded authorities despite an intensive manhunt.

“This aroused our attention, that’s for sure, especially with Jaime outstanding,” said Detective Joseph Soto of the Phoenix Police Department. “We’d like to find him. It indicates to us that someone over there in California has got some information.”

Many of the documents appear to be papers from the Phoenix Police Department and from Maricopa County prosecutors that were probably released to the Lopez brothers’ Beverly Hills lawyer, said Soto and others. The lawyer, James Devitt, could not be reached for comment.

But mixed in with those documents could be private phone records, correspondence and other information that could lead them to Jaime Lopez, or to someone who knows where to find him, Soto said.

Soto said authorities do not know and may never know where the several hundred pages of documents came from. He and other authorities in Arizona said they won’t know the significance of the documents--or whether they are merely copies of their own investigative papers--until they are dried, preserved and delivered to agents and forensic experts working on the case.

“Oh, I definitely want to see them. I want to see what they are,” said Dean Chatfield, a criminal investigator for the Maricopa County, Ariz., attorney’s office, which is looking for Jaime Lopez. “The mere fact of where the documents were found and how they were found is very curious. Why were they dragged all the way up into a canyon, burned and thrown out?”

“All the excitement over this is pure speculation on everybody’s part,” Chatfield said. “But documents from a law firm usually aren’t discarded way up in a canyon--they’d either be shredded or thrown out in the trash. So they could be anything you could think of.”

Richard Goldston, senior investigator for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said the documents could be part of a cache of legal papers and correspondence that authorities were looking for last year when they searched the office of a Beverly Hills paralegal helping the Lopez brothers with their defense. Two drawers in the office marked Lopez were empty, Goldston said.

The documents found in the canyon detail the activities of the Lopez family and other alleged drug traffickers. They include government transcripts of wiretapped conversations of people whispering in codes. One document details how Eduardo Lopez is fond of military grenades “to be used against some of his clients who owe debts,” while others go into detail about drug runs through Burbank Airport and how government informants won’t talk “for fear of injury or death.”

Soto and Chatfield said they also are interested because some of the documents appear to be similar to those found at the home of an alleged Lopez family accomplice, Rafael Loza, who was slain in the garage of his Van Nuys apartment complex last July. That means someone may have wanted to keep them out of the hands of authorities, Soto said.

Police speculate that Loza’s murder could have been related to the Lopez drug-dealing network, of which he was a known associate.

“The person who killed Rafael Loza knew him and dealt with him. It wasn’t a total stranger,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Joseph Aparicio.

Arizona authorities believe Jaime Lopez, a Mexican national, is dangerous and hiding out in Los Angeles. “We hear he is responsible for some deaths,” Soto said, “but no one has been able to verify it.”

As for Mathes, the bearded environmental activist doesn’t seem overly concerned about his role in the investigation of a fugitive. “It does, I have to say, make me a little bit nervous,” Mathes said while peeling apart moldy documents. “But if I see any one-armed Mexicans in Glendale, I guess I’ll drive the other way.”

Maricopa County authorities have been working with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to determine the best way to dry out and preserve the documents.

“We just want them to get in our custody before they disappear or start rotting away from being so wet,” said Chatfield.

Arizona authorities say the papers could also shed light on another Los Angeles man who may have been killed, or who may be a fictitious person created by the Lopez brothers to confuse authorities, Chatfield said. The documents also could become relevant in the fraud prosecution of a Beverly Hills paralegal who has helped the Lopez brothers with their defense.

Paralegal Anant K. Tripati and two other men have been charged in Phoenix with fraud for allegedly trying to put up worthless desert property as collateral so Rosario and Eduardo Lopez could post $2.8 million bail in 1991. The ploy didn’t work, and the brothers were sentenced last year to 13 and 17 years, respectively, in Arizona state prison.

Mathes said the authorities’ excitement has been contagious. “It looks like there’s a story somewhere in this mess,” he said, blowing the dirt off one paper. “I’d like to someday find out what this is all about.”