Accuser Leads Authorities to Alleged Burial Site in Mexico

The onetime lover of ex-Los Angeles police officer Rafael Perez said Monday that she underwent a marathon 12-hour interrogation over the weekend, before leading U.S. and Mexican authorities to a trash-filled ravine in which she says Perez and another officer buried the bodies of three people they allegedly killed.

The informant, 23-year-old Sonia Flores, led investigators to the secluded site Sunday afternoon. She was accompanied by an assistant U.S. attorney and two FBI agents. She said the U.S. authorities, along with their Mexican counterparts, surveyed the scene in anticipation of excavating it.

Plainclothes Mexican police stood guard over the site on Monday, but refused to comment on the ongoing investigation. Flores had returned to her Los Angeles-area home and was scheduled to meet with authorities again today.

One U.S. official, who asked to remain anonymous, said Mexican authorities were seeking to place a number of conditions on any excavation, many of which U.S. federal authorities were not willing to accept. The official would not elaborate on the differences. Flores said Mexican officials were keenly interested in her allegation that a Tijuana police officer who was a friend of Perez’s helped arrange for the burial of the alleged victims.

In an interview with The Times last week, Flores said she saw Perez and ex-LAPD officer David Mack kill two people during a botched cocaine deal in the mid-1990s.

Flores says the bodies of the victims, a young man and a woman who appeared to be his mother, along with that of another woman allegedly killed by Mack, were driven here and buried in the middle of the night.

Perez and Mack are two of the LAPD’s most notorious former officers. Perez is the convicted drug thief whose allegations of widespread police corruption launched what is known as the Rampart scandal. Mack is a convicted bank robber.

At the time of the alleged killings, both were active duty police officers. According to Flores, the officers chose to get rid of the bodies in Tijuana because they thought they would not attract special attention among the murder victims discovered on a nearly daily basis as a result of the region’s drug wars.

Flores said she has signed an immunity agreement drafted by the the U.S. attorney that prevents her from being prosecuted for crimes in which she implicates herself.

Though some law enforcement sources privately question her credibility, federal investigators have gone to considerable lengths to corroborate her allegations. They have conducted forensic tests on the apartment near downtown Los Angeles where Flores says the double homicide was committed. They have also obtained a search warrant and seized a 1986 BMW belonging to another police officer, which she says was used to help dispose of the bodies. And now, in what may prove the ultimate test of her credibility, federal authorities in Los Angeles are negotiating with their counterparts in Mexico to dig for the remains of the alleged victims.

Mexican Officials Question Informant

Dealing with the Mexican officials has not been easy, Flores said. Flores said her lawyer, an assistant U.S. attorney and two FBI agents escorted her from Los Angeles to San Diego on Saturday. In San Diego, she said she was interrogated into the night by Mexican authorities. They tape-recorded her interview, and then produced a 25-page statement, which she was asked to read and sign. She signed the document, and was then driven home, arriving about 2 a.m. Sunday. She was brought back to the border area after just a few hours’ sleep, she said.

If true, Flores’ allegations against Perez could undercut his credibility as a witness against four of his former colleagues in the LAPD’s Rampart Division, whose trial on corruption-related charges began last week.

Although Perez has admitted to a litany of crimes during his tenure as an LAPD officer, he said he did not become corrupt until he joined the Rampart Division’s anti-gang CRASH unit in 1995, and that he never committed any crimes with Mack, his former friend and partner. Flores says she witnessed Perez and Mack involved in drug dealing as early as 1992. She said she acted as a courier in drug deals for Perez on numerous occasions.

Winston Kevin McKesson, Perez’s attorney, has said Flores’ allegations are false, and that she is merely seeking attention. Mack is serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison for the bank robbery he committed in 1997 while still an LAPD officer. Donald M. Re, the lawyer who represented him in that case, has not returned telephone calls seeking comment about Flores’ allegations.

LAPD investigators have long suspected a criminal link between Perez and Mack, but have not been able to prove it. Those suspicions were cemented when they learned that the two officers, along with Perez’s drug dealer girlfriend, went on a spending spree in Las Vegas two days after Mack robbed a Bank of America of $722,000.

Although there is skepticism about Flores’ claims, there is also evidence corroborating some of her allegations. Perez acknowledges that he had sex with Flores, though he says it was on only one occasion. Flores, on the other hand, said she dated Perez for years, beginning when she was 16 years old.

She was able to lead investigators unassisted to the “crash pad” apartment officers kept near the Rampart station. She also knew where Perez lived with his family.

It was in late 1994 or early 1995, she said, that she witnessed the alleged double homicide. She was at the “crash pad” with Perez and Mack when the two donned bulletproof vests and said they were going to do some business, she told authorities.

She accompanied them, she said, to a second-story apartment on Bellevue Avenue. There, in a dispute over money and drugs, Flores said, Perez and Mack shot and killed a drug dealer she knew as “Chino” and a woman who appeared to be his mother.

Trip Across Border Is Described

The next day, she said, Perez and Mack threatened to kill her and her family if she told anybody about what she had seen.

About two months later, Flores was traveling to Tijuana with Perez and Mack on what she thought was a spur-of-the moment excursion. Partway there, she said, she was told that they were going to dispose of another body in the same place that the other two bodies were buried. The third victim was a girlfriend of Mack’s whom he allegedly killed, Flores said.

Although she did not see the officers bury the woman, Flores said she was later taken to the site by the Tijuana officer who showed her the mounds of dirt where all three bodies allegedly had been buried.

Flores is not the first to accuse Mack of acts of violence.

In 1993, Mack and Perez were involved in an on-duty shooting that has drawn renewed scrutiny from investigators. In that case, a suspected drug dealer was shot to death by Mack after he allegedly pulled a gun on the two officers during a buy-bust transaction. Several witnesses, however, told The Times that the suspect never displayed a weapon before being shot at 13 times by Mack.

Errolyn Romero, Mack’s mistress of seven years and his accomplice in the bank robbery, alleged in court papers filed in that case that Mack had told her about several shootings he had been involved in while an LAPD officer.

In one of those shootings, Romero said she questioned why he had killed the suspect.

“Mr. Mack responded by stating that he did not want the person to testify about the circumstances surrounding the shooting,” said the court papers filed by Romero’s attorney, Edi M.O. Faal. “Mr. Mack told Ms. Romero that killing is sometimes necessary because you ‘don’t want to leave witnesses around.’ ”

Mack warned her to keep quiet in the days after the Nov. 6, 1997, bank robbery, court papers said. “The weak and those who talk too much get eliminated,” Mack allegedly said.

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Times editorial assistant Fred D’Aguilar contributed to this story.