3 Kilos of Cocaine Stolen at LAPD; Officer Suspected

Three brick-sized kilograms of cocaine were stolen from a Los Angeles Police Department property room and detectives have identified at least one LAPD officer as a suspect in the theft, police sources said Thursday.

Investigators on Thursday afternoon searched the car, home and department locker of an LAPD officer whom they suspect planned and pulled off the bold theft.

The unfolding scandal strikes at the heart of the LAPD’s proud self-image as an institution with a nationwide reputation for incorruptibility. Even the 1991 Christopher Commission, which criticized the LAPD for allowing brutal officers to operate within its ranks, noted that the agency is “generally efficient, sophisticated and free of corruption.”

Investigators are exploring the possibility that other LAPD officers assisted the suspect in stealing the three packages of cocaine.

“We cannot rule out the possibility that other officers are involved,” said one high-level source. “Also, we cannot rule out that the officer was involved in other crimes in addition to those which he is under suspicion for today.”

Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, who is heading the internal investigation said Thursday that “the Los Angeles Police Department does not tolerate corruption in any form. We have been and will be very aggressive in rooting it out. We make sure we police our own.”

Pomeroy declined to discuss the details of the ongoing investigation.

The 30-year-old suspect was described by police sources only as a nine-year veteran and who had worked narcotics cases in the past. The officer, who was questioned by investigators Thursday, was “assigned to home” pending the conclusion of the investigation, sources said.

Police sources said that investigators believe two known drug dealers helped distribute the drugs for the officer. The two suspected associates of the officer currently are in custody in connection with other drug charges. Their names were not immediately available.

Sources said investigators have been building their case against the veteran officer for months and plan to arrest him soon.

In addition to the searches, investigators are reviewing cases that were handled by the primary suspect. They plan to interview the suspect’s current and former partners, as well as other LAPD and community contacts he had.

According to police sources, supervisors with the LAPD’s property room discovered that the cocaine, which was secured in a department vault, was missing in March after various security measures alerted supervisors that the property had been checked out but not returned.

LAPD officials immediately launched a massive audit of the property room to determine whether there was a systemic problem, sources said. Auditors accounted for nearly 100,000 pieces of property and determined that the theft was an isolated incident, sources said.

Department investigators discovered that the drugs had been signed out by someone who was impersonating another officer, claiming to need it for court. In reality, the drugs were never needed in court. According to sources, the cocaine originally was purchased by officers from drug dealers during an undercover sting operation. The roughly six pounds of cocaine sold for nearly $20,000 a kilogram and could be resold in smaller quantities on the street for more than $800,000, officials said.

Police sources said the investigators have gone to court to compel the suspect to give a handwriting sample, which they plan to compare against the signature used to check out the cocaine.

Chief Bernard C. Parks was notified of the missing drugs and immediately launched a criminal investigation into the matter using detectives from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs, Narcotics and Robbery-Homicide divisions. The investigation was so secret that some members of the task force were not fully briefed on all the facts of the theft, sources said.

According to one source, the suspect is a close friend of David A. Mack, an LAPD officer who was arrested in December on charges of holding up a bank at gunpoint and stealing more than $700,000. Sources, however, said investigators have not established a criminal link between the two.

Police sources also credited the department’s stringent procedures for handling evidence for identifying the missing narcotics. “The system worked as it should,” one source said.

In May, City Controller Rick Tuttle released an audit of the LAPD’s property rooms, concluding that there were internal weaknesses in supervision that jeopardized the success of criminal prosecutions and created an easy opportunity for abuse and theft. The critical audit, however, did not uncover the theft of cocaine.

The news that an LAPD officer is suspected of stealing and dealing drugs comes in the wake of disclosures that federal authorities have launched a civil rights investigation into allegations that several officers in the LAPD’s 77th Division committed perjury.