Perez’s Ex-Lover Pleads Guilty

The scorned lover of former Los Angeles Police Officer Rafael Perez pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to concocting a story that Perez and another officer killed three people and buried their bodies in a Tijuana ravine.

Sonia Flores’ allegations touched off a costly FBI search south of the border, and kept county prosecutors from calling Perez as their star witness in last month’s corruption trial of four Rampart Division officers.

Perez is the central figure in the Rampart scandal, in which scores of officers are suspected of unprovoked shootings, beatings and false arrests.

If U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz approves her plea agreement, Flores, a 24-year-old resident alien from El Salvador, will be sentenced on Feb. 26 to 10 to 16 months in custody.

However, either side can back out of the deal if Matz decides on a sentence outside the 10- to 16-month range. The maximum penalty for lying to federal agents is five years in prison.

Matz said he would carefully consider the recommendations of a federal probation officer assigned to the case in deciding Flores’ punishment.

Outside the federal courthouse, Flores expressed remorse about having lied to the FBI, sparking a frustrating two-month investigation that cost the government $200,000 to $300,000. The plea agreement requires her to make restitution.

“I’m going to stand up and take responsibility for what I did,” she told reporters. “If I have to go to prison, I’ll go to prison.”

Flores, who became involved with Perez when she was 15 years old, said she still despises Perez “for what he did to me.”

Her lawyer, Marshall Bitkower, said she was a naive “cop groupie” when Perez swept her off her feet. “He offered her a fast way of living. He was powerful. It was like rock ‘n’ roll to her.”

Flores, who has a ninth-grade education, told authorities she aborted Perez’s child when he began seeing other women.

According to an account read into the record Friday by Assistant U.S. Atty. Mary Carter Andrues, Flores falsely told the FBI in September that she had witnessed Perez and former LAPD Officer David Mack murder a man named Chino and his middle-aged mother during a drug deal that went awry in November 1994. Mack is now serving a life prison term for bank robbery.

Flores said that Perez arranged to have the bodies buried in Tijuana and that she accompanied him to the same site at a later date to dispose of another woman’s body, according to Andrues.

After failing a polygraph test last month, Flores admitted making up the story because she wanted Perez to spend spend the rest of his life in prison.