L.A. Dope Peddler Catches a Big Break

Sell a half-pound of cocaine, get caught red-handed by cops, and be out of jail and back to work in roughly two weeks.

Impossible?

Not in L.A.

Here’s the background:

After my Aug. 19 column about being solicited by dealers three times during a 45-minute stroll along Main and Spring streets, Los Angeles Police Department Capt. Andy Smith posted this on the LAPD blog:

“Imagine the frustration my LAPD officers feel every day, trying to enforce the law they are sworn to uphold and bring order to the chaos downtown, within an entire system that is terribly broken.”

He then mentioned the arrest of “a major downtown cocaine trafficker who was facing an exposure of 15 years state prison time.” Instead of hard time, Smith wrote, the dealer agreed to an offer of 120 days in County Jail, which was then knocked down to just a couple of weeks because of the jail’s early release program.

While I was away on vacation, my colleagues Megan Garvey and Maloy Moore looked into Smith’s claims and kicked their initial findings my way. It turns out that if Smith was exaggerating, it was only by a little.

The case involved a Long Beach man named Miguel Munoz, 25, who was caught on audio and videotape not once, not twice, but three times, selling drugs to undercover officers. The first two times he sold an ounce of cocaine in the skid row vicinity, each time for $675.

LAPD Det. Ron Hodges said police, working with federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers, were feeling pretty good about the case. It’s easy to nab guys peddling $5 hits, he said, but very difficult to go up the ladder to the suppliers. The cocaine bought from Munoz was in powder form, suggesting he was a distributor whose goods would later be converted to rock cocaine.

The undercover officers told Munoz they wanted a bigger buy and arranged to meet him in Lynwood. They paid him $5,000 for a half-pound of powder, which could have been converted into as much as $15,000 worth of crack. They then arrested Munoz on the spot.

A half-pound is no small amount, says Tom Higgins, a supervisor in the district attorney’s office.

“You’ve got 28 grams in an ounce, multiplied by eight ounces. It’s enough to light up all of skid row for days,” Higgins said. “That’s thousands of hits.”

And if it were distributed on skid row, that would have been thousands of hits in the vicinity of rehab centers where people are fighting to recover from addiction, mental illness or both. It’s also in a neighborhood where shop owners and residents have complained of the nonstop drug bazaar at their doorsteps.

So you’d think Munoz ought to be put out of business for a while. The criminal code calls for a sentence of up to three, four or five years in state prison for each charge -- although such sentences are rarely imposed on first-time felons -- and Munoz was facing three charges. But he, as well as two associates, all caught a big break.

In a program the district attorney’s office doesn’t particularly love, lots of non-major criminal cases get kicked over to an express-type court where deals are negotiated for the sake of clearing the way for more serious cases. Munoz agreed to plead guilty to one of the three felony charges of selling a controlled substance, the other two were dismissed, and he got a 120-day sentence in L.A. County Jail with three years’ probation. So did his two associates, whom Hodges described as his suppliers.

But no one in the courtroom could have expected Munoz to spend anywhere near 120 days behind bars. Because of jail overcrowding, Sheriff Lee Baca often releases prisoners after they’ve served as little as 10% of their time. Munoz was arrested July 10 and sentenced July 20, and he was a free man July 27, according to a frustrated Hodges.

“He’s a major supplier. That’s why we targeted him,” said Hodges, who thought three felony charges might result in prison time even though Munoz had no prior felony.

Instead he got a deal that makes drug peddling sound like a pretty good career choice. The hours are flexible, the pay ain’t bad and the risks are minimal. Without a prior, you can get caught with enough dope to fry half of downtown Los Angeles and be out of the slam and back on the job in no time.

But although Higgins of the district attorney’s office thought the Munoz case was outrageous and should have resulted in a stiffer sentence, he blamed it on “the culture of the building” rather than any individual.

“It’s a travesty,” he said. “I don’t feel that moving calendar [clearing lesser cases to make room for bigger ones] at the expense of justice for the people of this city is appropriate.”

It’s only fair to note that Higgins opposed Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley in the last election and might well take another shot next time around.

Janet Moore, Higgins’ supervisor, said there was nothing remarkable about the Munoz sentence given the heavy burden of criminal cases in the downtown courthouse. She disputed the LAPD claim that he could have done 15 years in prison, or anywhere near that amount, as a first-time felon. She said Munoz got the standard offer for his crime in the Early Disposition Program, and sending him to prison “would be bizarre.”

What’s more bizarre, if you ask me, is that this is standard operating procedure. I don’t mind giving a break to drug addicts, who ought to be in treatment rather than jail. But I feel differently about a heavy-duty dealer.

Hodges told me the bust involved 16 LAPD officers and DEA agents and roughly 200 man-hours. To that, you can add the cost of court personnel and jailers, and taxpayers spent a small fortune to lock a man up for 17 days.

Hodges thinks police can have only so much of an impact on skid row, where despite a concentration of social and mental health services there remains a vast shortage of everything from rehab to supportive housing. But he said the revolving door for drug dealers inhibits progress across the board.

If police felt so strongly about this particular case, Moore said, they should have made that clear from the beginning, and the district attorney’s office might not have agreed to early disposition in the case. Munoz’s defense attorney, Vivian Gray, agreed that this was a pretty standard disposition.

The man who decided her client’s fate, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Horowitz, said he often doesn’t even see the police reports and relies on recommendations worked out by the prosecutor and defense attorney. Although the judge couldn’t recall the Munoz case specifically, he said he would have considered a stiffer sentence if he had known the amount of drugs and police manpower involved.

When I mentioned all this to Hodges, he flipped.

“This is not one sale, not two, but three, and that’s what’s so disturbing about this -- that they treat it as one,” Hodges said. “They can shove it.... They decided to give this guy a walk in the park. They expect us to come down there and wave a red flag? We’ve done that, and it doesn’t make a difference.”

Check another county or two, Hodges suggested, and find out what kind of time you’d get for selling a half-pound of cocaine. So I called defense attorney Paul Wallin of Wallin & Klarich, which covers six Southern California counties.

“Criminals aren’t stupid,” Wallin said. “If I’m going to sell drugs, I’m going to sell in downtown L.A.”

Instead of serving roughly 10% of his sentence, Wallin said, Munoz would have done closer to two-thirds of his time elsewhere, and the sentence would have been longer in the first place. He estimated nine months to a year of county jail time in Ventura and San Diego, four to six months in Orange “if you get a really sympathetic judge,” six months to a year in San Bernardino, and in Riverside, “he may go to prison.”

Wallin said clients in other counties will often pay attorneys extra to try to negotiate work-release or community service as part of their sentence, but L.A. County clients don’t bother, knowing they’ve already hit the jackpot with the early release program.

Sure, Wallin said, the county has a crushing number of criminal cases.

“But the current system in L.A. perpetuates the crime rate,” he said.

I’d say it’s time for the district attorney, the police chief, the mayor, the sheriff, the county supervisors and the presiding Superior Court judge to talk, scream at each other, whatever it takes, about limiting the use of early disposition and early release. Until they do, any police crackdown on the drug trade is a waste of time and money.

One day last week, while leaving the Central Division police station, I bumped into an acquaintance. Bruce, an electrical engineer who hit the skids years ago with a combination of bipolar disorder and drug addiction, had recently made great strides. On this day, though, he was sprawled on the sidewalk after a hit of crack.

“I thought you’d finally pulled yourself together,” I said.

Bruce, who was disgusted with himself and embarrassed, as well, said he thought he’d finally cleaned up. But having a job downtown means constant temptation. Drugs are everywhere, with people lighting up and injecting heroin, and dealers having a field day.

“Steve, it’s downtown L.A.,” he said, making it sound like a line from the movie “Chinatown.” “It’s downtown L.A.”

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez