2 Officers Allegedly Gave Drugs to Informant

Disgraced former Los Angeles Police Officer Rafael Perez and his partner used a drug-addicted homeless woman as one of their regular informants, feeding her habit with crack cocaine as payment for information, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Perez and Officer Nino Durden would then use that information to shake down drug dealers, stealing their money and drugs for their own profit, Perez alleges in transcripts of his interviews with investigators.

The officers would also use the information to make legitimate arrests, but according to the transcripts, Perez now says that about half of all his arrests at the Rampart Division were somehow illegal. There were so many, he says, that he cannot remember the details of them all.

The informant, whom The Times is identifying only as “Mary” to protect her identity, told investigators that Perez and Durden once used her as a guinea pig to test a foul-smelling brick of drugs they had stolen from a dealer and suspected was “dirty dope,” the documents state.

“I think we gave her a piece of it,” Perez told LAPD Det. John Cook during a Nov. 3, 1999, interrogation. “She goes, ‘It tasted horrible. That’s not cocaine.’ ”

Mary is not the only informant that Durden and Perez allegedly abused. The transcripts are filled with accounts of people being bullied into informing for the former partners. The two cops would allegedly steal people’s money and jewelry and use the loot as leverage to obtain their cooperation. One man told investigators that the officers took his food stamps.

They seldom registered their snitches as legitimate confidential informants, as required by department policy. Perez was apparently so persuasive as a handler that he used one of his snitches--a woman he was dating--to inform on several members of her own family.

The LAPD’s massive internal probe into the administrative and operational failures that have come to light as a result of the ongoing corruption scandal has seized on the improper use of informants as a significant problem within the department.

In a recent report to the Police Commission, Chief Bernard C. Parks said there is “near-universal ignorance” of the LAPD’s rules for using informants and “even less comprehension of the dangers inherent in the use of informants.”

A Bond Between Officers, Informant

Perez and Durden weren’t the only ones who allegedly misused informants at Rampart. According to police documents, several officers used confidential informants without properly registering them with the department. One informant allegedly was beaten in the interview room at Rampart station.

The interview transcripts portray the relationship between Mary and her two police handlers as a perverse, symbiotic bond.

Perez and Durden allegedly used Mary to finger cabdrivers who were dealing drugs on the side and to point out locations where drugs were being sold. Sometimes the officers would send her to buy drugs, then burst in on the seller, the transcripts say, and allow her to retain drugs.

In one case in 1997, Perez and Durden dispatched Mary to buy drugs from a woman staying in a room in the Lafayette Hotel on Beverly Boulevard, the transcripts say. When the deal was done, the two officers went upstairs and confronted the woman and her husband. Perez said they found about $3,000 in cash.

“What happened with the $3,000?” task force Det. Jesse Castillo asked during an interview.

“We kept it,” Perez said, adding that the two promised to become informants, but were nowhere to be found when he and Durden returned the next day.

Another time, Perez said, he and Durden gave Mary $20 to buy drugs from a cabdriver, whom they then arrested. “Mary got to keep the money. And I believe she also got to keep some rock [cocaine],” Perez told his interrogators.

He said Mary approached him and Durden as often as they approached her. Frequently, Perez said, the woman, who had only one tooth, would show up at the police station unsolicited.

“Hey. I want to work. I need some money,” she would say.

On one occasion, according to the transcripts, Durden and Perez led her into a room at the Rampart station on Temple Street and instructed her to wait until roll call was over. Then they took some crack cocaine from a “hide-a-key” stuck to the bottom of a desk drawer, wrapped the rocks in tissue and dropped it on the floor.

“You dropped a Kleenex,” Mary quoted Perez as saying during her own interview with LAPD investigators.

“No, that’s not mine,” Mary said she responded, unaware of the ruse.

But she said Perez insisted. “No, you dropped a Kleenex.”

When she caught on, she opened it and found four “dimes” of rock cocaine.

Another time, Mary told investigators, she was hanging out under the freeway with some other people when Perez and Durden rolled up in a black and white police car. She said Durden told the others to leave and pretended to be telling Mary to do the same. But then he slipped her a small metallic box. When it was opened, Durden allegedly asked, “had she seen this much dope before?” the transcripts state.

It was apparently intended as a perverse act of kindness, according to Perez’s testimony to investigators.

“I don’t know what led up to it. . . . I think we might have just been driving by there and saw her,” Perez said. “But we decided: Let’s just give it to Mary.”

Det. Castillo asked where the drugs had come from.

“Oh, I mean, on many arrests we recover, you know, narcotics from different places. And a lot of times we just kept it,” Perez responded.

In another incident, Perez, Durden and two other officers, after a night of drinking beer at the Police Academy, decided to visit Mary in the motel room that Perez had rented for her after she was raped on the street, the transcripts say.

“We had extra beer . . . and [I decided]: Why don’t I drop it off to the informant?” Perez said.

“And let her tie one on?” Castillo asked.

“Yeah . . . I needed to give her money anyway--to tide her over for the weekend,” Perez said.

Giving Away ‘Dirty Dope’

At other times, Perez and Durden were less solicitous of their productive informant’s well-being. They were in the parking lot of the Rampart station when they gave her a sample of what they thought was “dirty dope” but was in fact about a pound of uncut methamphetamine. Even after Mary tasted the drug and said it wasn’t cocaine, the officers allowed her to leave with it, Perez said. “She still took it and tried to cook it up,” he said.

Perhaps Perez’s most striking work with an informant involved a young woman named Veronica Quesada, who would later become his lover and, police believe, help him sell some of the more than 8 pounds of cocaine he was convicted of stealing from LAPD facilities.

Before the relationship and the drug dealing, Quesada was a prolific informant for Perez, the transcripts state.

“She’s gotten me many, many cases,” Perez told investigators. “If you look at the [record], you will see that all those people I arrested and were put in jail were mostly her family members. She was tired of her family members being involved in this. That’s why she had no problem giving everybody [up].”

Perez and Durden’s alleged dealings with informants were replete with such twists and turns. In one case, Perez told his questioners that “everything in [an arrest] report is fabricated” at the request of the man they arrested.

The purported suspect, in fact, was one of the officers’ informants who had fallen under the suspicion of fellow gang members, the transcripts say. The young man asked Perez and Durden to arrest him to quell his confederates’ apprehension. They allegedly obliged by planting a gun on the man and taking him into custody, concocting a false report on the incident.

Sometimes the officers allegedly made sure their own case would fall apart to protect their informants. In one instance, Perez described how he and Durden falsified an arrest report in such a way that they were sure prosecutors would refuse to pursue the case against the man.

Perez told detectives that he and his then-partner did so because they did not want prosecutors from the city attorney’s office dealing with witnesses familiar with the officers’ illegal conduct--in this case an informant who knew that the pair routinely planted guns on suspects.

“We didn’t want to give our informant that much power, that much knowledge, something that he could hold over us,” Perez told his interrogators.