Internal Clashes Doomed Drug Strike Force

By any measure, the cops who hunted drug traffickers for SCAN--the Southeast Cities Against Narcotics task force--made a good team.

With fewer than a dozen investigators, pooled from five local police departments in southeast Los Angeles County, the special unit netted $100 million in cocaine and $14 million in cash in its best year.

That also turned out to be its last year.

When SCAN disbanded last spring, it was one of the premier local narcotics “crews” in the nation: It landed blow after blow to the Los Angeles drug network. Its agents seized everything from currency to airplanes from their suspects. In the process, they collected windfalls for their cash-craving departments with the help of forfeiture laws that allow law enforcement agencies to keep a share of what they seize.

But when the SCAN cops began to doubt each other’s honor, and that of their chiefs, it all came to a screeching halt. And their internal dispute may be about to surface, now that three officers who say their former colleagues were ripping off evidence are threatening to take their case to a grand jury.

What has most disappointed some former team members, however, is that the discord that ultimately unraveled the unit was over such a small amount of missing evidence--a video recorder and a couple of cellular phones. Three South Gate investigators say their former SCAN partners mishandled and illegally converted the phones to their own use. The official response from chiefs and other former task force detectives is that it was an innocent mistake.

“We’ve seized $14 million and tons of drugs, and the fact that this is all over a cell phone is ridiculous,” one detective said.

They never thought it would turn out this way. When the police forces of South Gate, Bell, Downey, Maywood and Vernon decided to fuse their drug-fighting resources in 1993, they did so in part because seizing currency and property from narcotics suspects had become a sure-fire money stream for departments across the country, and such task forces were proving to be profitable, not to mention effective in the war on drugs.

But the picture of the team that has emerged from interviews with police chiefs and former team members and internal police documents obtained by The Times is one of a specialized unit that, for a number of reasons, bit off more than it could chew and never recovered once its integrity was called into question.

“It’s a miracle that we were as good as we were,” said a Downey detective who was part of the defunct unit. SCAN itself was a revamped version of an earlier local task force that aided in the nation’s largest-ever cocaine bust, in which investigators seized 21 tons of the drug in Sylmar in 1989.

The cops of SCAN were already working under intense pressure to clear a towering caseload, in a fiscal environment where drug busts had become crucial to their own department’s budgets. Then came the disturbing claims: that one detective had used a narcotics raid to “shop” for personal items, that others had converted the cell phones for their own use, and that the team’s commanders willingly overlooked their officers’ peccadilloes.

Whether it all amounted to official misconduct or simply a string of errors may soon be answered once and for all. Three South Gate officers said they are weighing the idea of presenting their case to a grand jury or filing a lawsuit to seek an independent inquiry.

The officers--Lt. Andrew C. Key, Det. Robert Mayer and reserve officer John Affeld--say their former SCAN partners took property without completing required paperwork, and that Chief Ronald George never fully probed their allegations that officers mishandled cash and drug evidence.

But other former team members insist there was no criminal wrongdoing, and South Gate officials have cleared George, who doubles as the city manager, of the allegations.

To some, the narcotics task force seemed doomed from the outset, in no small part because its fragile command structure could never bear the pressure of overseeing so many busts and so much evidence. While the chiefs of the five involved departments met as the unit’s “executive board,” there was only one senior officer, Key, to help administer the task force on a daily basis.

And even though the chiefs offered up their best investigators for SCAN, they didn’t write a uniform policy on how evidence should be collected and stored. Police officials later blamed the lack of policy as a factor in the breakup of the team, but the South Gate officers noted that state laws govern all seizures and should supersede individual department procedures.

Trouble first stirred in early 1994, when one South Gate detective, Mayer, told the commander, Key, that he had learned that another officer had improperly seized a cellular phone and other evidence, violating state forfeiture laws. Other former team members say they weren’t told of those suspicions. But when they learned of the allegations the incident began to erode the trust within the tight-knit unit.

Then in May 1994, the task force, clad in bulletproof vests and helmets, raided a house in Montebello and seized some 500 pounds of marijuana, four cellular phones, a JVC video recorder and an assortment of other items, including a tool kit and jewelry. According to memos written by the investigators involved in the raid, the bulk of the evidence was booked at the Maywood Police Department, while Mayer held onto the phones to check them for programmed phone numbers and possible leads.

Sylvia E. Kellison, Mayer’s lawyer, said it was the other officers who mishandled the phones. She said Mayer never took possession of them and that the other investigators lied in their memos to cover themselves.

The task force lost track of the phones and the camcorder for several months, with two departments insisting that the other had the items. And Mayer charged that another team member had improperly taken the tool kit.

“The issue was dropped by the executive board with the understanding that the underlying problem was the lack of a policy manual,” according to one internal memo. Key, Mayer and Affeld, while remaining on the South Gate police force, resigned their SCAN duties by early 1995. Police officials restructured the unit by making Downey Chief Greg Caldwell a liaison between the other chiefs and the new administrative lieutenant.

When the dust had settled, the Maywood Police Department had fired its civilian property room manager, and a handful of SCAN officers were disciplined by their individual departments with letters of reprimand, a relatively light penalty, according to former team members. And the damage went even further--the unit’s reputation slipped from that of a premier narcotics crew to that of “a den of thieves,” one investigator said.

A few months later, Caldwell decided he was wasting his department’s resources by sending investigators to work on the unit.

He recalled the two Downey investigators assigned to SCAN, and the chiefs of the Maywood and South Gate departments decided to fold the tent soon afterward. Bell Chief Michael Trevis said he pulled his detectives from the unit not because of infighting, but because he needed more officers on the street. But he said narcotics enforcement in the region has suffered.

City officials and other chiefs agreed.

“I’ll tell you this,” said the mayor of one of the cities involved. “If I was a cocaine dealer, I couldn’t have asked for a better present.”