He Who Chased Monsters

It was late last September when the Los Angeles cop who sullied the badge and turned stoolie, Rafael A. Perez, explained what made him want to be a police officer in the first place.

Having grown up in Philadelphia watching ‘70s cops-and-robbers television fiction such as “Adam 12” and “CHiPs,” Perez once told Times reporters in a phone interview from the L.A. County jail, he remembered also watching real-life drug deals go down on Philly street corners, and thinking, “One day, I’m gonna be an undercover officer, and I’m going to bust all of you.”

He ended up busting people, all right--busting their heads open, or busting off a round into them with a gun.

Like that young guy Javier Francisco Ovando who has since haunted his sleep, that kid who did 2 1/2 years behind bars before Perez confessed that he and his LAPD partner shot Ovando and then framed the unarmed teenager for attacking them.

Whatever valiant intentions he once had, Perez had evolved from boy to man to monster. His acts of perfidy and deceit were compounded by the knowledge that brother officers had taken the same low, oozy career road he had, and that only when caught--not conscience- stricken--did he come forward to blow a whistle on them all.

Now these princes of the city who came to believe they could get away with anything, they are getting theirs, one by one--20 officers off the force and more under intense scrutiny since Perez gave them up.

“He Who Chases Monsters,” the Rafael Perez story, is a cops-and-robbers story for a new generation of kids who might someday become cops, a title Perez has picked out for himself.

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He sat in a cell, this 32-year-old lawman turned outlaw, last Thursday night and thought of what he was going to say at 8:30 the next morning in the Criminal Courts Building, where it was his turn to get sentenced, his turn to show repentance if he expected leniency, just the way Javier Ovando and so many others once had, and to wonder if anyone would swallow a single word of what he said.

Many a punk would turn mum, not bothering to grovel before some old guy with a gavel and waste breath on somebody who probably had his mind made up in the first place. How many cops must have snickered at the notion of a convicted defendant trying to wriggle off the hook by saying how terribly sorry he was? Particularly those cops who knew what the guilty party hadn’t done.

Rather than stand mute, Rafael Perez stood handcuffed Friday in a blue jailhouse-issue jumpsuit, took out a white legal pad and read from a statement of nearly 1,400 words that he had scrawled in his cell. On and on he rambled, 41 paragraphs’ worth, about the “landscape of broken lives,” about the lessons you younger cops can learn from all this, about the way “my job became an intoxicant” that caused the line between good and evil to blur.

Oscar Wilde barely wrote this much in prison.

The ex-cop’s prose apologia extended to the point where Perez spoke directly to his wife, got more than halfway through what he had to say, got choked up, composed himself and repeated the first 22 words back from the beginning. It was like somebody being interviewed for TV being asked to repeat a previous statement so as to capture the entire sound bite.

And then came the lollapalooza, the Moral to Our Story that for some reason this cocaine thief and yellow canary had to add: “He who chases monsters,” Perez told the court, “must see that he not become a monster himself.”

What a wordsmith in the making this is. Norman Mailer perhaps could become his literary patron while Perez writes in prison.

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These are all-time-low days in L.A., land of the true-blue TV cop shows. It is a time when convictions are being overturned by the dozen--a number of actual crooks no doubt getting sprung in the process--while lawmakers propose bills specifically aimed at law enforcement figures who change or plant evidence.

Cops seem to be in hot water for miles around. One was convicted Friday morning in Van Nuys for driving drunkenly around a traffic jam and grazing a fellow officer with his car. Another was arraigned in Beverly Hills on charges of taking $7,500 from a woman trying to hire him to commit a murder. An officer next week in Laguna Niguel has a court date scheduled for lying about how he got shot.

The odium of the LAPD lingers on, a fear and loathing of the very people any kid on any street corner should have longed to grow up to be. “I ask you to use me as an example of who you should avoid being,” Perez requested, in one of his less articulate but wholly accurate remarks. Happy to oblige, officer.

You and the other blue monsters who behaved as you did have made the people of Los Angeles mistrust a profession that they wish they could go to sleep at night trusting above all. For this, there is a special place waiting for all of you. You’re a good writer. You could call it a dungeon.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail:

mike.downey@latimes.com