UNMAKING THE CASE

It wasn’t much of a tip, certainly not much to justify a 1,400-mile round trip to California’s most remote prison. The letter, written by Pedro “Pete” Zuniga in almost microscopic print, said something about “numerous of issues” and alluded to an Oxnard gang member convicted of drive-by shootings. “Remember Chava,” it said, using the gang member’s street name. “This time way bigger than that was . . . it will be worth your while.”

The writer was another member of the Colonia Chiques gang, and Oxnard Police Det. Dennis McMaster had used him as an informant in a few cases. And for McMaster, Ventura County’s best known gang investigator at the time, any lead was worth following-even if it meant going all the way to Pelican Bay State Prison in the northwest corner of California.

So there McMaster was on a summer day in 1999, cloistered in a small office with Zuniga as prison guards hovered outside. The interview only lasted about 10 minutes and, McMaster would later recall, “It was borderline ridiculous.” Zuniga-concerned that the room was wired or the guards would snitch on him to other inmates-added little information to what he’d put in his letter. He scribbled several answers on scraps of paper, which he then retrieved from McMaster and swallowed.

What the detective did manage to glean involved a murder in Santa Barbara for which Zuniga’s cellmate, Efren Cruz, had been convicted in December 1997. McMaster had testified at Cruz’s trial as the prosecution’s expert witness on Oxnard street gangs. According to Zuniga, it was not Cruz who had fired a gun in a downtown parking lot, killing one man and wounding another; it was Gerardo “Big Gera” Reyes, Cruz’s cousin and a Colonia Chiques member with a reputation for violence.

Zuniga had come to his conclusion after many conversations in his tiny cell with Cruz. Of course, convicts protesting their innocence are about as rare in prison as gang tattoos. But Zuniga knew both Cruz and Reyes from the Oxnard streets-and which one of them might be capable of shooting someone in cold blood. “He knew that type of act was more [like] Gerardo Reyes,” McMaster says.

The so-called Lot 10 case wasn’t in McMaster’s jurisdiction, and it wasn’t as if Oxnard didn’t have plenty of its own crimes to solve. But he believed Zuniga was reliable and he knew Reyes’ history. Based on his familiarity with Reyes, McMaster had told Santa Barbara police within hours of the gunfire that Reyes was the likely shooter. He wasn’t the sort of cop to just let this go.

“You have to go home and sleep every night knowing that potentially there’s a guy in jail that shouldn’t be there and you’re not doing anything about it,” McMaster explains. “You have to do what you have to do.”

During the investigation, McMaster worked his contacts in the gang underworld for corroboration of Zuniga’s claims, picking up nuggets of information from people who normally keep their distance from cops. “A lot of them don’t have phone numbers,” he says. “And you can’t just go to their house and knock on the door.” After pulling a regular nine-hour shift working Oxnard cases, he would put in another couple of hours on the Cruz case. He made another grueling road trip to Pelican Bay, sometimes stopping to recline in the back seat to rest his aching back. For months, he negotiated with prison system officials in a futile effort to get Zuniga transferred to Ventura County.

McMaster’s doggedness eventually had some remarkable consequences-Reyes’ secretly recorded confession to the Lot 10 shootings; a court hearing that pitted Santa Barbara authorities against their neighboring Ventura counterparts, including McMaster; a ruling by a Santa Barbara judge that Cruz was wrongfully convicted, and, ultimately, Cruz’s release from Pelican Bay after nearly four years in prison. The case was McMaster’s swan song. After a year on disability, he retired in March because of back and neck injuries sustained in an on-duty traffic accident. Cruz, now 28, is suing Santa Barbara police and prosecutors for violating his civil rights, alleging in part that they ignored McMaster’s early opinion implicating Reyes. So McMaster and Santa Barbara law enforcement may meet again in the federal civil courts.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is what McMaster may have done for his much-maligned profession at a time when police scandals have become almost routine, each one adding to public cynicism toward law enforcement. Cops shoot and frame gang members on the mean streets of LAPD’s Rampart Division; cops moonlight as bodyguards for rappers; cops rape prostitutes and sodomize suspects with broom handles. The dust hasn’t yet settled from that violent, videotaped arrest in Inglewood this summer, but the stain is undeniable. The rogue cop character is a staple of Hollywood, from “Dirty Harry” and “L.A. Confidential” to “NYPD Blue” and “The Practice.”

Law enforcement colleagues see McMaster as an antidote to all of the cynicism. “With the Rampart scandal and everything else out there,” says Ventura County gang crime prosecutor Bill Haney, “people need to know there are guys like Dennis trying to do the best they can.”

McMaster would prefer that people not know about him. “If you heard about me being modest, it’s true,” the 43-year-old former cop says during an interview at an Oxnard restaurant a few weeks after Cruz’s release. The Cruz investigation was “just doing good police work. This is what the public pays us to do.”

McMaster shows up for the interview in a maroon T-shirt and jeans. With his tall, burly build, shaved head, walrus mustache and close-set eyes, he has an intimidating presence. But there’s something reassuring and rock-solid about him, a soft-spoken, “just-the-facts” straightforwardness that perhaps explains why even hard-core gang members such as Pete Zuniga would trust him. “He’s just an honorable man,” says Haney. “You know where you stand with him.”

Law enforcement, moreover, wasn’t just a job to him. “It [was] his whole life,” says Len Newcomb, a former Oxnard police officer who now works as a private investigator. McMaster won’t discuss his private life, but colleagues say he is single and devotes whatever spare time he has to an auto repair shop he owns. Although Oxnard has a population of more than 170,000, he operated like a small-town cop, even helping some gang members find jobs. “There’ve been cases where I have referred people” to employers, he says.

McMaster worked for the police department as an Explorer while still attending Channel Islands High School in Oxnard. He made police cadet before becoming a full-time officer in 1980. “I enjoyed the work,” he says. “That was basically it.” He brought some bedrock values to the job, although he is typically vague about where they came from. “Maybe I was taught that right is right and wrong is wrong.”

Phillip Dunn, an attorney for Cruz, was a deputy public defender in Ventura when McMaster was a young patrol officer. He remembers him as gung-ho, to say the least. “We used to call him ‘Supercop’ and ‘Batman,’ ” he says. “He’d pull people over for the most trivial violations.”

Some defense lawyers “did not like him.” They thought “he was out of control.” But McMaster’s arrests stood up in court because he didn’t cross any legal lines. “The bottom line was I could never catch him in a lie,” Dunn says. “He doesn’t break the rules.” For his first assignment as a detective, McMaster worked narcotics. Then, as Oxnard beefed up its anti-gang enforcement, he joined a newly created unit in 1995. By that time, the gritty coastal city was home to eight mostly Latino gangs-the largest, with 1,200 documented members, being the Colonia Chiques. “Colonia” refers to Colonia Road, which runs through the gang’s territory on Oxnard’s east side; “Chiques” refers to a slang name for Oxnard. “They are without a doubt the most violent gang in the area,” Haney says.

With McMaster and his partner, Trent Jewell, on the gang beat, conviction rates “soared,” according to Haney. McMaster tracked gang members like a hawk, jotting down their vehicle license plates in his notebooks. Once sheriff’s investigators came to him for help in solving a drive-by shooting in Camarillo. All they had was a partial license plate and a description of the vehicle used by the gunman. McMaster identified the plate as that on a vehicle belonging to Oxnard gang members. Sure enough, the car matched the description, giving investigators the evidence they needed to make arrests.

McMaster also assiduously cultivated informants. “You have to have people on the street telling you what’s going on,” he says. “Chava,” also known as Salvador Carrillo, was arrested for several “ride-by” shootings committed on a bicycle after McMaster received a tip from Pete Zuniga.

The detective believes even hardened gang members such as Zuniga have a moral code, that they do not always fit the stereotype of police-hating outlaws. “A lot of them do want to do the right thing,” he explains. “They realize there are people on the street that need to be stopped.”

Informants who committed a crime might get a break in return for their cooperation. But when Zuniga helped commit a home-invasion robbery in 1996, McMaster was there to bust him. “That was a serious felony,” he says. “He crossed the line.” Zuniga was sentenced to 11 years in prison, and the informant apparently bore no hard feelings. “They can respect you for that.”

Gang violence in Oxnard isn’t quite up to Los Angeles levels. “We don’t have the type of gang members who are out there shooting every weekend,” McMaster says. One whom he did have his eye on was Gerardo Reyes, a Colonia member known for his large stature and as a suspect in five gun-related incidents between January and June 1995, according to court documents. In one case, he allegedly shot and wounded a guest in the face at a graduation party. But McMaster could never make a case against Reyes-in part, he says, because witnesses were too afraid of the Colonia member to testify.

On Jan. 25, 1997, Reyes got together with several other Colonia members for a Saturday night outing to Santa Barbara. Also along for the ride was a cousin of Reyes who had recently enrolled at Oxnard College after being honorably discharged from the Army. Efren Cruz was not known as a gang member or a troublemaker. He’d never crossed McMaster’s radar screen. But that night, according to Santa Barbara police, he turned into a cold-blooded killer.

The trouble started soon after midnight in a bar on State Street, downtown Santa Barbara’s main drag and a mecca for tourists and revelers. The Oxnard group, about 10 in all, exchanged words with a smaller crowd of local men at the Hurricane Club. Bouncers intervened promptly, escorting the out-of-towners out the front door and the others out the back.

Reyes and his friends had parked next door to the club in the multilevel Lot 10. So, unfortunately, had the Santa Barbara group. They confronted each other again on the ground level. Taunts and gang signs flew. Then about six shots rang out. Michael Torres, a 23-year-old Santa Barbara resident, was fatally wounded in the head; his friend, James Miranda, 21, took a bullet to the neck. After delivering a few kicks to the victims, the Oxnard group scattered.

Police responded almost immediately. They found Cruz wandering the ground level in an apparent daze. He was the only suspect arrested at the scene, Reyes and his friends having made their getaways. On the second floor, officers found the murder weapon, a chrome .38-caliber revolver.

Almost a year earlier, a suspected Ventura gang member had wounded four pedestrians during a drive-by shooting east of downtown Santa Barbara. At the time, police described it as one of the worst gang incidents in the city’s history. What happened in Lot 10-a fatal gang-related shooting in a public parking garage just off the tourist strip-could hardly have been a more brazen attack. Santa Barbara police, who knew Cruz was from Oxnard and had some experience with Oxnard gang members, were soon heading down the coast to round up additional suspects.

Several detectives spent time that Sunday with Dennis McMaster at the Oxnard police station. They brought with them a grainy black-and-white surveillance camera videotape recorded before the shooting outside the Hurricane Club. Viewing the tape, which showed patrons entering the club, McMaster recognized Leo Gonzales, Gerardo “Little Gera” Palencia, Ramiro Reyes and Big Gera.”

Listen, this guy’s got to be the shooter,” McMaster said, pointing out Big Gera.

He asked the detectives if a revolver had been used because, as he stated later in a court document, “my knowledge of Gerardo [Reyes] was that he favored revolvers.” He also told them about Reyes’ alleged history, including the graduation party shooting. The Santa Barbara officers weren’t interested, however. “We’ve already got the shooter in custody,” one of them said.

“That kind of shut me up,” McMaster says. “I wasn’t going to argue. I had no knowledge of the case.”

By the time of a preliminary hearing, Cruz and three alleged accomplices-Gonzales, Palencia and Gerardo Reyes-were facing murder charges. Ramiro Reyes, who is not related to Gerardo, was a fugitive. Judge Joseph L. Lodge endorsed the prosecution’s theory that Cruz was the shooter and also bound Gonzales over for trial. The prosecution’s key evidence included gunshot residue found on Cruz’s hands at the time of his arrest and the testimony of Kenneth Freese, a motorist who was heading out of Lot 10 when Torres was shot and who identified Cruz as the shooter from the Hurricane surveillance tape.

But Lodge couldn’t find sufficient evidence to hold Palencia and Big Gera, forcing the prosecution to dismiss the charges against them. Gonzales would later plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact and get credit for time served in jail; after being arrested in New Mexico, Ramiro Reyes would be convicted of assault and spend a couple of years in prison.

Santa Barbara Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon had assigned one of his most experienced and aggressive deputies, Hilary Dozer, to the Lot 10 case. At Cruz’s trial, which began in October 1997, Dozer argued that Cruz had killed Michael Torres to enhance his standing in the Colonia Chiques. Dozer turned to McMaster as his gang expert, and McMaster provided the jury with a primer on the Colonia Chiques. From photographs introduced as exhibits, McMaster concluded on the witness stand that Cruz at least was an associate of the gang. In one photograph, he appeared to throw a “C” sign and wore a Dallas Cowboys shirt, which was favored Colonia Chiques clothing.

On Dec. 1, 1997, Cruz was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted murder. Judge Frank J. Ochoa sentenced him to 41 years to life in prison. “This crime is senseless, disgusting and it speaks to the worst,” he said. Back in Oxnard, McMaster had no reason to think he would have anything more to do with the Lot 10 case.

McMaster leafs through the binder he has brought to the interview. From it, he produces a copy of Pete Zuniga’s letter, the words crammed onto a lined piece of paper. This is the letter that landed on McMaster’s desk in June 1999 and plunged him back into the Lot 10 case. “Long time no see,” Zuniga wrote from Pelican Bay. “I’ve grown up a lot. I’m not the little boy that you knew.”

For two hours, McMaster talks freely about his Lot 10 investigation. He knows almost every twist and detail. He is in his element, focused on the police work and techniques that clearly fascinate him. He tries to avoid overt criticism of Santa Barbara law enforcement and their very different view of the evidence. But his frustration still comes through. “This could have come together nicely,” he says. “It came together, but not nicely. It was kind of ugly.”

Zuniga’s letter came to McMaster via an aunt of Efren Cruz. Cruz and his family, who were still hoping to prove his innocence, didn’t expect much of McMaster-after all, he had testified at trial for the prosecution. They also knew his reputation as one of Oxnard’s toughest cops. But that apparently didn’t matter to Zuniga. “He felt comfortable going to him,” Cruz says. McMaster’s brief meeting with Zuniga at Pelican Bay in 1999 was so tense that Zuniga communicated much of the time with hand movements. But, McMaster says, “I had no reason to not believe him.” Zuniga indicated that he would expect some time off his sentence in return for his cooperation. A few days later, McMaster relayed Zuniga’s tip about Gerardo Reyes to Dozer during a work-related visit to Santa Barbara’s Fiesta weekend. He also told Dozer that Zuniga was willing to wear a body wire and elicit a confession from Reyes. “I left very optimistic,” McMaster says.

McMaster thought he could simply assist a Santa Barbara investigation by acting as a liaison to Zuniga. But at a meeting in Oxnard on Aug. 26, 1999, he claims he got a chilly response from Dozer and three other Santa Barbara law enforcement officials, who suggested to his dismay that Zuniga had gotten together with Reyes and Cruz as part of a conspiracy to free Cruz. “I felt [I was] fighting a losing battle,” he says. Citing Cruz’s pending civil suit, Dozer declined to comment for this article. In earlier comments to a reporter, he said that McMaster’s information was “very limited . . . He had nothing other than he had used Zuniga in the past as an informant.”

At this point, McMaster could have backed out. Technically it was Santa Barbara’s case, and he didn’t want to ruffle any political feathers. But he had the support of his supervisors and Ventura Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Haney. And he just couldn’t rid himself of the thought that an innocent man could be “sitting in one of the worst prisons in California,” exposed every day to danger.

Still, McMaster faced the problem of getting Zuniga into the same room as Reyes. The inmate’s transfer from Pelican Bay to Ventura County Jail ran into red tape, forcing McMaster to travel to the prison again to make sure Zuniga, who was nearing his original release date, still wanted to cooperate. “He really wanted to do it,” McMaster says. “He didn’t want to leave Efren Cruz in there.”

Zuniga’s deal may have become a secondary consideration for him, the motives of the gangbanger having aligned themselves, remarkably enough, with those of the cop. For Zuniga, too, it was about not putting an innocent man behind bars for something he didn’t do. “It offended him that Gerardo Reyes had sold his cousin down the road,” McMaster says. “We did kind of mesh on that.”

McMaster left Pelican Bay encouraged. “I knew at least things were good on [Zuniga’s] side. But I still didn’t know what [law enforcement] was going to do.”In March 2000-nine months after Zuniga first contacted McMaster-the detective got a break when Reyes was arrested for a stabbing at an Oxnard restaurant. Now Reyes was in jail, making it easier to find a pretext to have Zuniga talk to him. And the more McMaster looked into the case, the more troubled he became. For one thing, the key eyewitness, Kenneth Freese, had identified Cruz from the surveillance tape rather than a photographic lineup, as is customary police practice. The gunshot residue was not conclusive because anyone within a radius of 15 feet can pick up residue when a gun is fired. “Dennis couldn’t stay away from it,” says Det. Trent Jewell, McMaster’s former partner. “He knew the evidence [to free Cruz] was there.”

Zuniga finally was transferred to Ventura County Jail in May 2000. After several more delays, Ventura prosecutors agreed to have Zuniga released from prison within a year of wearing a wire. As long as Zuniga cooperated by wearing the wire, he would get his deal no matter what Reyes said. On Aug. 25, 2000, investigators arranged for Zuniga and Reyes to go to court on the same day. In a courthouse holding cell, Zuniga got his “homie” to talk about Lot 10, their every word-much of it gang slang-traveling from Zuniga’s wire to a tape recorder.”

I did it, dog,” Reyes confessed, explaining that he had tried to protect Cruz and grabbed the gun from his car. Torres started yelling. Reyes mimicked the sound of a gun to suggest what happened next. “And I just ‘bah!’ ”

Some 10 months later, the trail Dennis McMaster started following in Pelican Bay brought him to a Santa Barbara courtroom. Reyes’ confession had provided defense lawyers with evidence for a habeas corpus petition seeking Cruz’s release. A habeas proceeding allows convicts to go before a judge and present new evidence that they were wrongfully convicted. Despite Reyes’ taped confession, the prosecutors in the Santa Barbara D.A.’s office still maintained that Cruz was the Lot 10 shooter. So Cruz’s petition came before Judge Ochoa for a hearing that began in June 2001 and featured both McMaster and Haney-as witnesses for Cruz. Haney called it a “twilight-zone experience.”

At the hearing, Dozer’s strategy was to discredit the confession, claiming that Reyes was just shooting his mouth off to bolster his reputation and that McMaster was not qualified to interpret the evidence. In March 2001, Reyes told Santa Barbara police that he had lied to Zuniga to get Cruz released and knew Zuniga was wearing a wire. But questioned by defense attorney Phillip Dunn, McMaster insisted it was a “righteous confession” and ridiculed the prosecutor’s theories.”

There is no reason at all for [Reyes] to claim that he did this murder unless he did it,” McMaster said.

When Dozer asked how Ventura County could give Zuniga a deal based on a “cryptic, short discussion” at Pelican Bay, Haney rose to McMaster’s defense. “You have to understand,” he lectured his fellow prosecutor, “our information source was Det. Dennis McMaster, and he’s not your average detective.”

Ochoa was as emphatic in his Oct. 12 ruling that reversed Cruz’s convictions. “[T]here is clearly more than a preponderance of the substantial credible evidence to prove that Gerardo Reyes, and not Efren Cruz, was the shooter in Lot 10,” he wrote. He also singled out McMaster for praise: “When a police officer is as eager to pursue evidence to exonerate the innocent, even post-conviction, as he is to convict the guilty, we have an example of police conduct we can, and should, all be proud of.”

When McMaster is reminded of those comments, he shrugs. “That’s flattering,” he mumbles. But the kudos don’t matter to him. What does is maintaining the credibility of police work. “What kind of credibility do you have for investigating crimes if no one wants to follow up on [information]?” he asks. “That’s where gang members get the idea they can’t trust the police. And you’ve got to get the right guy in jail. If you don’t, he’s going to kill again.”

Efren Cruz has moved out of state and is taking college computer classes. “There’s not enough thank-yous I can tell [McMaster] for what he did,” he says. “He’s out there for the truth, even if that means [showing] there was a mistake made.” McMaster, understandably, is having a hard time adjusting to life off the force. “I’ve been doing [police work] for 22 years,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I’m out of the loop.” While he would prefer “something that has to do with investigations,” he has yet to decide his next career move.

The Lot 10 case, too, is unresolved. Although Ochoa ruled that Cruz could not be retried since he had determined Cruz was not the shooter, Santa Barbara prosecutors have appealed that decision. “We have no credible evidence that has convinced our office to change our opinion as to the person who’s responsible” for the Lot 10 murder, Dozer told a reporter in response to Ochoa’s criticism.

Gerardo Reyes, meanwhile, is serving 12 years in prison for the restaurant assault. Legal experts doubt that the Santa Barbara district attorney could ever prosecute him for the Lot 10 shooting, and Dozer acknowledged that his office would be at “a substantial disadvantage” if it did. “I would expect defense lawyers to throw back at us our presentation” in the habeas hearing, he said.

Santa Barbara authorities still maintain that the gunshot residue and eyewitness evidence pointed to Cruz as the shooter. But both forms of evidence are less than unimpeachable. And if Santa Barbara police had followed McMaster’s hunch 51/2 years ago, there would be less chance of someone possibly getting away with murder.

The loose ends, the lack of resolution, bother McMaster. Back at the Oxnard restaurant, he sighs and shakes his head. “I’m frustrated it turned out the way it did,” he says. “I don’t think it’s right” that Reyes is not facing charges. But for McMaster, the job is done. “I did what I could do. I can’t do any more.”