BAD COPS; Rafael Perez's Testimony on Police Misconduct Ignited the Biggest Scandal in the History of the L.A.P.D
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1 of 1 DOCUMENT The New Yorker May 21, 2001 BAD COPS; Rafael Perez's testimony on police misconduct ignited the biggest scandal in the history of the L.A.P.D. Is it the real story? BYLINE: PETER J. BOYER SECTION: A REPORTER AT LARGE; Pg. 60 LENGTH: 12496 words On September 8, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named Rafael Perez, who had been caught stealing a million dollars' worth of cocaine from police evidence-storage facilities, signed a plea bargain in which he promised to help uncover corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department. Perez hinted at a scandal that could involve perhaps five other officers, including a sergeant. Later, Perez began to talk about a different magnitude of corruption-wrongdoing that he claimed was endemic to special police units such as the one on which he worked, combatting gangs in the city's dangerous Rampart district. Perez declared that bogus arrests, perjured testimony, and the planting of "drop guns" on unarmed civilians were commonplace. Perez's story unfolded over a period of months, and ignited what came to be known as the Rampart scandal, which the Los Angeles Times called "the worst corruption scandal in L.A.P.D. history." Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the questions he raised about police procedure cast the city's criminal-justice system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney's office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it "may well be the worst man-made disaster this city has ever faced." The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had not, forcing the city to accept a federal role in overseeing the police department's operation. Yet in the view of the lead investigator, Detective Brian Tyndall, members of the task-force team investigating Rampart have come to believe that Rafael Perez is not just a rogue cop who had decided to come clean but a brilliant manipulator who may have misdirected their inquiry. "He's a convict," Tyndall says. "He's a perjurer. He's a dope dealer. So we don't believe a word he says." I-"HE'S GOT A GUN!" One of the early signals of coming trouble for the L.A.P.D. arose from the palm-lined boulevards below Universal Studios, where an officer named Frank Lyga worked undercover narcotics in the Hollywood division. Lyga became the central figure in an episode that exposed deep ruptures within the L.A.P.D., and within the city it polices-dynamics that would, in large measure, define and propel the developing Rampart scandal. In 1986, when Lyga joined the department, he was already an old-timer, a twenty-nine-year-old transplant from an Adirondack valley that his family had farmed for generations. He'd been on a local sheriff's force upstate, but he hated the cold, and he believed what he'd heard about the L.A.P.D. "It was professional . the best police department in the world," he says now. "I'm used to the East Coast police-not to knock the East Coast . a big fat cop sitting in a car eating doughnuts, drinking coffee. They couldn't get their gun out if their life depended on it." Lyga embraced the ethos of the L.A. street cop, a breed distinguished not so much by race, or even by gender, as by distinctness from the "insiders," or "bun boys"-officers who make their way to command positions through desk jobs and adjutancy. Street cops haven't necessarily read the police novels of Joseph Wambaugh, but they've seen the movies, and they believe that in "The New Centurions" Wambaugh got it just about right. Officers of the L.A.P.D. may become cynics, depressives, drunks, or bad husbands, but they believe that they form the outer membrane of civilization, and that chaos lies just the other side of the "thin blue line"-a term, as it happens, that was coined by the towering William H. Parker, an Eisenhower-era police chief whose distant memory is still revered. The street cops' language is something like the voice of arrested adolescence. The suspects they engage ("jam") are "knuckleheads" and "assholes," and their encounters are "capers." They refer to themselves as "coppers." Frank Lyga's description of a good day at work is "rockin' and rollin', putting people in jail." For Lyga, March 18, 1997, was not a good day at work. He and other members of his team were staking out a suspected methamphetamine dealer, and Lyga was the point man, which meant sitting in his unmarked 1991 Buick Regal and waiting for a drug deal to happen, so that he could follow the suspects back to their source. He'd sat there for three hours trying to look like an inconspicuous badass-with a Fu Manchu mustache and a ponytail, and dressed in jeans, a tank top, and a baseball cap adorned with a marijuana-leaf logo-when the deal was called off and the team agreed to reconvene at the Hollywood station. Lyga pulled his car onto Ventura Boulevard. While he was stopped at a red light, he heard the thumping beat of rap music at high volume emanating from a green S.U.V. that had pulled up next to him. Lyga says he glanced at the driver, a black man with a shaved head. The driver stared back. When Lyga rolled down his window and asked, "Can I help you?,'' the man made a menacing gesture and said, according to Lyga, "Ain't nobody looking at you, punk." Lyga, who prided himself on his Aryan Brotherhood cover-"All I lacked was the lightning bolts on my neck''-was surprised by the confrontation. He assumed that the other driver was a gang member, especially when, he says, the driver of the S.U.V. shouted, "Punk, I'll put a cap in your ass." "He was a stone gangster," Lyga recalls. "In my opinion, in my training experience, this guy had 'I'm a gang member' written all over him. He had a shaved head, he had a goatee, wearing a nylon jumpsuit, driving a sport-utility vehicle." Lyga mentioned the "hand motions" the man had given him. Lyga says he accepted a challenge from the other driver, suggesting that they pull over and have it out it right there. The driver of the S.U.V. did pull over, but Lyga bolted into traffic and drove off, chuckling as he glanced at his infuriated adversary in the rearview mirror. "I'm thinking, What an idiot, thinking I'm going to stop," Lyga recalls. "And I'm laughing, and I'm watching him in the mirror and he looked like he was going to rip the steering wheel off." But the other driver pulled back into traffic, and a slow-motion chase ensued, with the S.U.V. edging through heavy traffic until it neared Lyga's car. Hoping that his partners were just a few blocks behind, Lyga radioed for help: "Hey, I got a problem. I've got a black guy in a green Jeep coming up here! He may have a gun." Soon, Lyga was at another stoplight, and the S.U.V. started to pull up beside him on the left. Lyga swore, then unfastened his seat belt, anticipating a street fight. He again called for help-using a hidden radio microphone, activated by a foot pedal-and took out his gun, placing it on his lap facing the S.U.V. Lyga could plainly see the other driver now, and saw his arm extend across the passenger seat toward Lyga's car, his hand clutching what looked to Lyga like a steel-cased .45-calibre handgun. Lyga leaned forward, out of the line of fire, and radioed again: "He's got a gun!" Lyga says he again heard "I'll cap you," then he raised his weapon, a 9-millimetre Beretta, and fired into the S.U.V., missing the driver. Two seconds later, Lyga fired again, and this time, he says, "I almost could hear the impact, the thud of the round hitting him, and I definitely saw it in his face." The S.U.V. wheeled away in a U-turn, then rolled into a gas station, and stopped. Lyga radioed a last transmission: "I just shot this guy! I need help! Get up here!" Lyga pulled into the gas station and, holding his badge in his hand, yelled to a customer coming out of the station's minimart to call 911. Soon, a California Highway Patrol unit arrived, followed by Lyga's boss and the others on his stakeout team. Lyga had been right about his second shot-the bullet had struck the driver on his right side, puncturing his heart before stopping in his lung. Lyga had been right about the gun, too; the highway patrolmen found a stainless- steel 9-millimetre pistol on the floorboard of the S.U.V. The other officers, following standard procedure, took control of the scene. A few minutes later, one of Lyga's partners approached him, and Lyga asked, "Is he dead?" "Oh, yeah," his partner replied, "he's dead." Good, Lyga thought.