WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : OUT IN THE COLD : Informant Battles Drug World--and the Police Agencies He Has Helped

Mike Kelley is sitting at the counter in a Westside coffee shop, trying not to give himself away as an undercover police informant.

It would seem a tall order for someone wearing Ray-Bans and a Hawaiian shirt. But he knows his stuff.

“Don’t mention the location, OK?,” he whispers once the waitress is out of earshot. Never mind that the restaurant is half empty and there isn’t a threatening soul in sight. “If certain people were to know I come here,” Kelley explains, “I could get smoked.”

In a dozen years as a free-lance crime fighter--much of it spent living out of a van that he constantly moves for fear of being tracked down by drug pushers he has helped put behind bars--Kelley, 42, has been shot at, assaulted, chased and threatened.

The eccentric inventor, surfer and sometimes pizza deliveryman is a paradox in the seamy world of police informants.

Unlike criminal snitches who spy for the cops in hopes of cutting deals with prosecutors, he isn’t looking for favors and doesn’t consider himself guilty of anything, except for maybe watching too many TV detective shows.

Once busted for possessing enough marijuana to make a joint (he claims he was trying to impress a drug dealer he was casing; the offense was later expunged from his record), Kelley is a self-proclaimed crusader in the war on drugs. He has long had supporters within law enforcement circles, and--especially since suing two agencies he once worked for--he also has detractors.

“He’s unpredictable at times, but he’s motivated by what he believes is right, which makes him rare in the world of informants,” says Mike Gorewicz, an investigator with the California Department of Justice who has known Kelley since 1982.

Another longtime acquaintance, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide Detective Mike Crowley, says Kelley “is trying, in his own way, to assist law enforcement. . . . His motivation is to make the streets safer and keep kids off dope.”

Others view him differently.

“The guy is a few grams shy of a kilo,” said a federal Drug Enforcement Administration officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. DEA spokesman Ralph Lochridge would neither confirm nor deny that Kelley had ever worked for the agency.

Kelley sees himself as a man with a mission, a citizen soldier in the nation’s drug war.

But having spent years lending a hand to federal, state and local law enforcement, he is now at odds with some of the very law enforcement personnel whose favor he once cultivated. In a line of work where participants do not usually turn on their handlers, and almost never make public pronouncements about their activities, he has done both.

Kelley has accused the Santa Monica Police Department and the DEA of cheating him out of rewards he says he is due for work in several drug busts. Both agencies deny this.

A federal judge dismissed Kelley’s claim against the DEA in February on technical grounds. A Santa Monica Superior Court judge has scheduled a trial for Oct. 16 in his lawsuit involving the Police Department.

Kelley contends that Santa Monica narcotics officers reneged on promises to pay him 10% of the value of cash and property they seized during several drug busts in 1993 while he was working under the code name “Bird Dog One” and that he has receipts signed by officers to prove it. In one bust, for which Kelley was paid less than $500, he says a narcotics officer told him that the police seized $50,000.

Kelley alleges that the Santa Monica department cut him loose without explanation shortly after learning of the DEA lawsuit, despite having regularly praised his work.

Police officials have denied the allegations, as well as Kelley’s claim that officers “maliciously” abandoned him in the middle of a mission in which two cocaine dealers threatened to set him afire.

In that mission, known as Operation Inglewood, Kelley alleges that he and the dealers were in his van parked next to a phone booth near Los Angeles International Airport waiting to meet a third drug dealer under police surveillance.

Narcotics officers in nearby unmarked cars and others in a police airplane circling overhead were supposed to provide protection, he said. But Kelley contends that the mission was aborted at the last minute and that the cars and airplane vanished, leaving him vulnerable. “I could have easily been killed,” he said.

In court documents, Santa Monica police acknowledge Kelley’s role in Operation Inglewood and several other undercover missions, but police officials declined to discuss Kelley for this article, citing the pending trial.

A police spokesman called the lawsuit “baseless and without merit.”

Kelley’s attorney, meanwhile, insists that the police took advantage of his client. “The tendency of law enforcement is to treat all informants like scumbags,” said Daniel D. Dydzak. “They know these people have a hard time asserting their rights.”

Regardless of how the matter is resolved, Kelley’s account of his actions as a crime fighter provides a glimpse of a shadowy world not often revealed.

Law enforcement officials say most informants are cut from the same cloth as the people they expose. They are cheated business partners, jilted lovers, people trying to beat a rap or settle a score. Usually they turn snitch only after getting into trouble themselves.

And then there are the “do-gooders,” such as Kelley: tipsters, wanna-be narcotics officers, police groupies. For a few, the informant lifestyle can be alluring and addictive.

Kelley became hooked in 1982 after going to a Malibu surfer party, where he ran into a convicted cocaine dealer who had escaped from prison. He says he informed federal authorities and collected a $700 reward.

“It was like a light suddenly popped on,” he recalled. “I figured, hey, I have contacts. I hang out at the beach. I see what’s going on. I could be useful to society, and if I make a few bucks that’s OK, too.”

Soon he began sleuthing for the Sheriff’s Department and the state Department of Justice.

He overheard someone talking about a Santa Monica pharmacist who was willing to sell narcotics over the counter to anyone with the right password and who could produce a phony prescription.

“This guy was a riot,” he said. “There was a picture of this dog next to the [prescription] window. If you wanted stuff, you simply said, ‘Say, that’s Tim’s dog, isn’t it?’ and the guy would fork over anything you asked for.”

With Kelley’s help, newspaper accounts say, the pharmacist was arrested.

Kelley was instrumental in having a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge removed from the bench after tipping off authorities that the judge was a narcotics abuser.

Law enforcement officials say he helped close a popular Venice nightclub by sharing information that one of its principals was a drug dealer with ties to organized crime.

In that mission, Kelley said, the original tip came from a parking-lot attendant musing about a cousin who owned a $189,000 Rolls-Royce despite not having a job.

“You’d be amazed at what you learn by just hanging out and being casual,” he said.

Kelley is a veteran of the “controlled buy,” making illicit purchases under the watchful eye of police. Usually, the buys involve drugs, but not always. He has occasionally worked deals involving counterfeit currency and once posed as an intermediary in purchasing hand-held rocket launchers, grenades and submachine guns from a suspected black marketeer.

“Frankly, I’m surprised that Mike has lasted as long as he has without running into some really perilous consequences,” said Crowley, the sheriff’s detective. “The people he infiltrates aren’t the kind you’d want to have over for dinner.”

Friends say Kelley has an uncanny instinct for spotting trouble, whether it’s breaking up a street brawl, or, as happened once while he was delivering pizza, making a citizen’s arrest of a hit-and-run driver.

“I dearly love the guy, but there’s a part of Mike that refuses to grow up,” said Eloise Buckner, a Malibu diet and fitness counselor who has known Kelley since the third grade. “I tell him, ‘You’ve got to stop trying to be a Power Ranger.’ That’s what the police are out there for.”

The son of a decorated World War II soldier who fought at Iwo Jima, Kelley grew up in a middle-class Malibu environment.

By his own account, he worshiped his father, a burly man who built a successful auto repair business and enjoyed playing the piano for relaxation. He died in a car crash in 1989.

Kelley recalls “standing for inspection” on Saturday mornings, fatherly quizzes about what he had learned at school, and instruction on such things as the proper use of knives and how to make a bed military style.

“My dad instilled in us values that I’m grateful for,” he said. “And one of those was you didn’t mess with drugs.”

Although his father came to tolerate his informant lifestyle, Kelley’s mother and sister remain mortified by it.

“My brother is his own person, and we’ve come to accept that,” said his sister, who insisted on not being identified for fear that some of the people Kelley has helped put in jail might seek retribution against his family.

Both his sister and his friend Buckner insist that little about Kelley’s upbringing points to the bohemian lifestyle he has adopted.

But, they say, he has always had an independent streak.

Even in high school, when his classmates were lifting weights or playing baseball, Kelley was laboring over the drafting table in his bedroom, tinkering with a design for a go-cart or fancy racing car.

“Mike is a stubborn, sometimes brilliant person who is intent on doing his own thing,” Buckner said. “For better or worse, that happens to be exactly what he is doing with this informant business.”

Kelley had spent barely a year at Santa Monica College in 1973 when he hit on an idea for a sturdier, more aerodynamic wheel for skateboards, whose popularity at the time had just begun to soar.

Scraping together a few thousand dollars from friends, he formed the Emotion Skateboard Wheel Co., which he said during three years produced enough wheels to equip a quarter of a million skateboards.

But for all of his creative talents, Kelley admits to being a lousy businessman.

Bored with the day-to-day chores of running the company, he abruptly sold a majority interest to a competitor in 1977 for $75,000 and a new Porsche. Although he enjoyed the car, he never saw most of the money.

He ran a Malibu surf shop for a while, toyed with a “fin” device--which he hopes someday to market--that gives surfers more control over their surfboards and, generally, assumed the life of a beachcomber.

Then came the obsession with pursuing drug dealers. After more than a decade, he has remarkably little to show for it.

His pride and joy, a 20-year-old van with thick cloth curtains, sits dead in its tracks on a Playa del Rey parking lot, awaiting new pistons.

Although currently living with a friend, Kelley intends to move back into the van--which has a seat that converts into a bed--once the engine is in shape. To live there now would be too risky, he says. “I’d be a sitting duck parked in the same spot every night.”

He has had to pawn his high-powered binoculars, and even the stereo and small-screen TV that make long stakeouts more tolerable.

But then, he may not need them.

Since entering the court challenges, he says, Kelley has been blackballed by law enforcement organizations once eager to use his services.

“You’ve heard of the spy who went out into the cold,” he said, mustering some humor. “Well, right now you’re looking at one chilly dude.”

An Eccentric Crime-Fighter ‘I tell him, “You’ve got to stop trying to be a Power Ranger.” That’s what the police are out there for.’-- Eloise Buckner, Longtime friend

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‘He’s unpredictable at times, but he’s motivated by what he believes is right, which makes him rare in the world of informants.’-- Mike Gorewicz, State investigator

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‘The guy is a few grams shy of a kilo.’-- DEA officer, Requesting anonymity