Perez Details Gang Member Framing

The central figure in the Rampart corruption scandal told jurors Monday how he and his police partner shot a suspected gang member, leaving him paralyzed, then planted an assault rifle to cover up their crime.

The testimony from Rafael Perez, the disgraced Los Angeles Police Department undercover gang officer who blew the whistle on Rampart Division police misconduct, came as the shooting victim, Javier Francisco Ovando, sued Los Angeles County for allegedly providing incompetent legal representation.

Ovando contends that the county public defender in his 1997 criminal trial should have uncovered Perez’s scheme to frame him.

Though Perez provided no significant new details about the shooting, the testimony reprised a disturbing picture of police misconduct.

“I basically fed off my partner,” Perez said of the shooting. Perez fired three times and his partner, then-Officer Nino Durden, fired once. “It was an overreaction.”

Perez said Durden got the planted gun, a TEC-22 short-barreled assault rifle, from an informant. Perez said Durden shaved off the serial number. After the shooting, they dropped the gun next to Ovando’s hands.

Ovando, a tattooed member of the 18th Street gang, received a $15-million settlement from the city of Los Angeles after spending 2 1/2 years in prison based on false testimony from Perez and Durden. Ovando’s conviction was overturned in 1999.

Ovando’s current lawyer, Gregory W. Moreno, sought Monday to show that Deputy Public Defender Tamar Toister had failed to explore inconsistencies in Perez’s testimony that should have tipped her off to the staged arrest.

According to Moreno, Toister failed to check the backgrounds of the officers, interview witnesses who could have contradicted their stories and properly explore the facts of the case, including the exact circumstances of the shooting.

Chief among Toister’s failures was not listening to Ovando’s claims that the gun was “a plant or a prop,” Moreno said.

Toister, he said, could have accessed a database that would have shown that Perez ran a check on the weapon before the shooting, suggesting it was already in his possession.

“It’s the old smoking gun,” Moreno said. “The information was in their hands.”

In cross-examination, a lawyer representing the county detailed widespread deceit by Perez, in an effort to show there was little the public defender could have done to unmask such a big conspiracy.

Perez reportedly implicated about 70 Rampart officers in what he said was a pattern of misconduct involving beatings, shootings and false arrests of suspected gang members. More than a dozen officers were fired or resigned. More than 100 criminal convictions were overturned as a result of the Rampart scandal, and about 200 people sued the LAPD.

Perez was sentenced in federal court to two years in prison for violating Ovando’s civil rights. He also served three years in state prison for stealing cocaine from LAPD evidence lockers. He was released in 2001, and granted immunity from state prosecution for framing Ovando.

Durden was sentenced the following year to three years in prison for violating Ovando’s federal civil rights and for possessing an illicit weapon that was used to frame an innocent man.

The scandal triggered a federal consent decree placing the LAPD under the scrutiny of a federal judge, careful monitoring of undercover gang units and a computer system to track problem officers.