INTO THE SPOTLIGHT / BILL PAVELIC : Simpson Case Throws LAPD Critic Into Media Broiler

As O.J. Simpson’s lawyers seek to bolster their attacks on the Los Angeles Police Department, some say they could not have found a more dogged, thorough or obsessed advocate of proper police procedure than former LAPD Detective Zvonko (Bill) Pavelic.

Pavelic has been thrown into the international media broiler this week as the private investigator who first interviewed alibi witness Rosa Lopez.

The 18-year LAPD veteran has a reputation as a relentless sleuth who spent much of the second half of his career trying to expose what he believed was a pattern of Police Department corruption. Now, in taking on the LAPD in perhaps its biggest case, some former co-workers believe he has found the ultimate forum for venting his grievances.

“He left with a bitter attitude toward the department,” said one former colleague who asked to remain anonymous. “This is his way to get some revenge, to get even.” A former supervisor agreed, adding: “He is a natural for the O.J. case.”

But the 46-year-old Pavelic--who retired three years ago because of asthma and stress--insists otherwise. “The notion that I’m doing this for sinister reasons is ridiculous. . . . I am not obsessed by (the LAPD). I believe in Mr. Simpson’s innocence,” Pavelic said in an interview.

The bald, dark-eyed detective was widely known as an outspoken critic of the LAPD--condemning everything from the “code of silence” to alleged obstruction of investigations by department officials, as well as the slow response to the 1992 riots. He left the department with a disability pension, telling one doctor he would “rather go to the gulag” than return to work.

Pavelic was hired by attorney Robert L. Shapiro shortly after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Pavelic conducted the now-famed interviews with Lopez, the maid who said she saw Simpson’s Ford Bronco parked outside his Brentwood mansion when the murders were allegedly committed.

Prosecutors have attacked the Croatian-born investigator for leading Lopez through the interrogation. And Judge Lance A. Ito accused Pavelic of sandbagging by not initially acknowledging in court that he taped one interview with Lopez.

Pavelic has been the center of controversy in the Simpson case before. Sources said he planted false leads with defense team lawyer F. Lee Bailey in an effort to prove that Bailey was leaking information about the case to the media.

Pavelic has been working 16 to 18 hours a day on the case. Early on, he focused on trying to find alternative suspects in the bloody, double murder and later turned to myriad other duties. He is one of two defense investigators who have been a part of Simpson’s defense team since the beginning.

“He is basically the lead investigator on the case,” said John Dresden, who is coordinating several of Simpson’s investigators. “He is very thorough and tenacious.”

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Pavelic was born in Rijeka, Croatia, and moved with his family to San Pedro when he was 15. He told a psychiatrist in 1993 that he had a loving mother but that he was the “product of a post-World War II rape,” and never knew his father, according to court records filed in a workers’ compensation dispute with the city.

An ambitious officer, he received a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement and a master’s in communication administration, the latter from Pepperdine University. He made detective seven years after graduating from the Police Academy.

But Pavelic said he began to encounter trouble in 1984 when he broke the department’s “code of silence” by implicating two fellow officers in the unjustified shooting death of a fleeing suspect. Pavelic said that it quickly became apparent that the officers had lied to cover up the use of excessive force against a Cuban immigrant, Miguel Angel Herrera. Although one of the officers was fired and the other suspended for six months, Pavelic believed that he was forever stigmatized.

He charged that he was denied a promotion, faced trumped-up charges of falsifying reports and was denied a commendation for saving the life of the president of the International Olympic Committee, who was choking on food at a 1984 Olympic reception.

But the passage of time helped resuscitate his standing within the department, Pavelic later told doctors, according to the court records in the worker injury case. In 1988, a grateful father wrote a letter to The Times to thank Pavelic for helping direct his mentally ill son to the proper facilities. Pavelic received a string of commendations, getting special praise for solving an unusually high number of rape cases. In 1990, he was named supervising detective of the year in the department’s Southwest Division, Pavelic said.

While his friends saw him as a crusader for reform, his critics say he remained a malcontent.

In late 1990, he was one of several detectives who criticized the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for severely paring back the number of cases it was filing. “Nobody,” Pavelic said, “cares about victims anymore.”

The next year, Pavelic, his partner and their supervisor slammed the LAPD’s top brass, particularly then-Chief Daryl F. Gates and then-Deputy Chief William Rathburn, for allegedly obstructing an investigation into an alleged “date rape” by a USC fraternity member whose father was an influential lawyer and ally of the Police Department.

Pavelic went public with the charge when he spoke before a “people’s tribunal” of activist groups that held public hearings on the Police Department after the beating of Rodney G. King. After being introduced as a heroic cop who had “bucked the system,” Pavelic told the forum that the department’s “management has become an organization where managerial corruption, lying and covering up criminal misconduct has become the norm.” He received a standing ovation.

Shortly after that appearance, Pavelic said, he was shunted into a desk job. But he remained a harsh critic of the department.

He filed a lawsuit in federal court after claiming he was passed over for promotion. In the lawsuit, he said he was the victim of retaliation and reverse discrimination because the detective who received the promotion was African American, said Michael A. Weiss, his attorney.

When Pavelic left the force in early 1992, he received a disability pension after saying he was suffering aggravated asthma, chest pains, rashes and anger over corruption, according to court files. A psychiatrist’s report quotes him as stating in a questionnaire that he had “prior thoughts of homicide toward LAPD management.”

Pavelic on Wednesday denied having made that statement.

Psychiatrist Michael B. Coburn said Pavelic was too alienated from the Police Department to return to work, court records show.

Pavelic said he has no psychological disability, and Pension Board officials privately concede that his disability retirement was an accommodation to remove him from the force. Pavelic receives a disability pension of $2,433 a month, tax-free.

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Since leaving the department, the stoic officer, whose voice still carries a distant note of his Balkan ancestry, has worked as an investigator to support his wife and three children. Among other assignments, he said, he was an adviser to two men accused of beating trucker Reginald O. Denny at the start of the 1992 riots. He said he took that case on principle because police and prosecutors filed too many charges against the defendants.

“I only take cases I strongly believe in,” Pavelic said.

Before the Simpson case, the investigator reported earning about $60,000 a year for his investigative work, court records show. One police union official questions how Pavelic could be disabled enough to leave the department and still perform similar duties for Simpson and other clients.

But Pavelic insists that his retirement settlement is the city’s acknowledgment that it made his career untenable. “My pension was granted on the basis of corruption in the LAPD,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t work for another organization and perform some of the same functions.”

Times staff writer Edward J. Boyer contributed to this story.