Beaten man says he won’t bow to gangs

It wasn’t about the money the cops gave him, which wasn’t all that great. It wasn’t about the adrenaline rush, although there was definitely some of that. Nor was it about some hidden desire to feel like a big shot for turning in the gangbangers or hookers.

None of that, says former cab driver Kamran Mashayekhi, is why he played police informant for several years in Orange County. But if he’d known how it would turn out -- with him getting beaten up and scared to death in a locked garage in Buena Park nine days ago -- he would have kept his eyes on the road, his hands on the wheel and his mouth shut.

“Of course, it was exciting,” he says. “I’m not trying to deny it, but mainly I did it because I truly believed in these officers. They were true policemen and good people, and they became friends, and I did them a favor.”

This is not a good moment in Mashayekhi’s life. Born in Iran 66 years ago, but a United States resident since 1959 and a citizen since 1964, he once worked for Iranian radio and TV in European capitals and in Washington, and he proudly shows snapshots of himself as a young man talking -- sometimes with microphone in hand -- to the elder George Bush, John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. A divorce and various other jobs followed, and he eventually began driving a cab.

These days he drives his Lincoln Town Car as an independent chauffeur.

But what is mainly on his mind is staying alive. So much so that he moves from motel to motel every few months, makes sure he’s near the office in a well-lighted area and keeps his eyes peeled. The most pressing matter is that he may testify in the weeks ahead against a man arrested in connection with the Buena Park incident.

His career as an informant began several years ago -- he puts it at 1999 or 2000 -- with a fare he picked up at an Anaheim motel. He came to suspect a woman there was selling crystal meth to young girls in exchange for them turning tricks. “I said, ‘This has to stop,’ ” Mashayekhi says, “so I called Anaheim police.”

Over the years, he says, he’s led police in a few cities, but mostly Anaheim, to dozens of arrests. Two young women he picked up at Fashion Island in Newport Beach took him to a “house of ill-repute” where drugs were available, he says. A parolee manufacturing drugs in Garden Grove who had used him previously as a cab driver was discussing business in the back seat with his “cook,” prompting the cook to ask: “Why in the hell are you talking so freely in front of this driver?” Mashayekhi chuckles as he recalls the man’s reply: “I trust Kamran more than I trust you.”

On another occasion, he tipped police off to a child pornography operation in a mobile home park. Another bust included a father-son rock cocaine operation.

It’s not that people openly discussed crime in the cab. It’s that Mashayekhi saw a lot of things, ferried people on suspicious trips and took mental notes.

Anaheim police won’t confirm that Mashayekhi was an informant, but neither will they volunteer any information about him being a crackpot with a wild imagination.

“We don’t identify or recognize informants, for a variety of reasons,” says Anaheim Police Sgt. Rick Martinez. Even if informants go public, Martinez says, police won’t verify their claims. Police like it when the public helps with solid information, he says, noting that detectives develop “sources” like journalists do.

While pleased with his crime-fighting, Mashayekhi also developed misgivings about tipping off the cops. If criminals got wind of him, he knew the likely consequences. The two, three or four hundred dollars the cops would sometimes give him for information was nice, but most of the time, he says, he got $100 or less. It wouldn’t pay for a funeral.

He persisted, he says, because he hated the drug-sellers and the gangbangers he considers the dregs of society. But what worried him recently was that a woman he’d known as a friend of gangbangers said she knew he was a snitch. She said she knew he’d tipped off cops about a bust three years earlier.

On Nov. 29, about 10 days after that conversation, Mashayekhi says, a man called before 7 p.m., needing a ride to LAX. He gave Mashayekhi directions to a Buena Park house and said he’d be out front setting up Christmas lights. That was the ploy, Mashayekhi says now, that fooled him.

Mashayekhi’s version of what followed:

He met the well-built man out front and they talked about the lights. He asked Mashayekhi to come to the garage for his luggage. Once they were inside, the man locked the door and cranked up the volume on a stereo. A big fist to the left side of Mashayekhi’s face sent him reeling. The man, his face now contorted in anger, called Mashayekhi profane names, said they knew he was an informer and that he was going to die that night.

He sat him in a chair. From a door leading into the house, a second man came into the garage. He wore a hooded jacket that, at first, concealed his face. But soon he peeled off the jacket and his shirt to reveal a torso virtually covered by a giant tattoo that Mashayekhi, in his dazed and bleeding state, couldn’t identify.

The second man was younger, baby-faced, and used a spray can to paint Mashayekhi’s upturned palms a light red. Later, cops told Mashayekhi they weren’t sure what that signified. The baby-faced man then turned Mashayekhi’s hands over and hit him once with a hammer on the top of his hand, but not very hard.

He then used a stun gun about the size of a hair dryer and zapped him for 10 seconds or more on the temple. Mashayekhi says he felt like an Al Qaeda hostage.

Over the next hour or so, they kicked and punched him but didn’t brutally beat him. They took his cell phone and about $120 from his pockets. Because he’s deaf in one ear and didn’t always hear their orders, they kicked him when he didn’t comply with commands or answer questions.

But the worst part were the continual threats that they planned to kill him.

The fake fare asked if he’d seen a van outside the house. “I said yes, and they said, ‘We’re going to tie you up, and this guy is going to put you in a blanket, take you to the desert and kill you.’ ”

They asked who he was and he said he was Persian and a Muslim. One of them said knowing Mashayekhi was a Muslim made him want to kill him on the spot. The younger man left. The other man said he was letting Mashayekhi go but that if he told police or if he ever saw him again he’d kill him.

Mashayekhi sped off in his Lincoln. At the first pay phone he saw, he called 911. Later that night, Buena Park police arrested a man at the house. He’s been charged with robbery, false imprisonment and threatening a witness. A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for next Thursday. The baby-faced accomplice hasn’t been found.

The obvious question for Mashayekhi: You escaped death, why go to the cops?

“I’m not going to let them run me away,” he says. “They’ve got to be punished. They thrive by terrorizing, creating fear in you. They think a victim is not going to police out of fear of being terrorized again.”

Why go public? Part of him is miffed with Anaheim police for not helping him more over the years with support. But far and away his main motivation, he says, is to use public attention to force law enforcement to go after gangs, which he says are behind virtually all of the problems he’s seen in recent years.

Counting on public outcry may be naive. Society has shown little interest in cracking down on home-grown terror, despite our interest in it abroad.

His days of informing for the cops are over, he says. With one exception: He will help them fight gangs.

I ask if he’s free of fear. “No, I’m not free of fear. Are you kidding? I’m extremely in fear. I’ve never been in fear like this. Imagine being beaten up, bleeding, tied up. Imagine the ride in the back of a van in a blanket to the desert. Visualize that, please.”

No, thank you.

You realize you could be killed over this, I say. “Yes, but I’m not giving up. If I die and it’s to catch these gangsters, let it happen. I’m not going to bow to this terror.”

--

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.