"Code 6-1-5-0-8 Southwestern." "The scandal broke, you know, became public in the fall of 1999 when Officer Rafael Perez was facing a trial for having stolen cocaine from Department evidence lockers and putting it back on the street." "I got a tip that six lbs." "Of cocaine were missing from an LAPD evidence locker." "I went about checking it through my sources and found an... found out yeah, sure enough, uh, cocaine was missing, they suspected it was an inside job, and, you know, on top of that, they suspected it was a cop." "When the three kilos was taken, it was taken through the normal process which was:" "Checked out for court, all the protocols were followed whereby the officers checked it out, signed their name, wrote their serial number, but the mistake was that the desk clerk did not actually check the identification of the person." "The cocaine was actually checked out under the name of "Joel Perez."" "Two weeks after it was checked out, a notice went to Joel Perez at his division saying," ""You checked out some cocaine, we need it back."" "So Joel Perez goes downtown to Property Division, shows them the notice, says, "I didn't take out this cocaine." "I don't know what you're talking about."" "Property Division then goes, pulls the record, and there is the property sign-out sheet saying Joel Perez with his serial number." "He looks at it." "He says, "That's not my signature."" "At that point, Robbery-Homicide Division is notified, they bring together detectives from numerous other divisions including Narcotics, Robbery-Homicide, Organized Crime, and they basically put together a core group of a task force to find this cocaine and figure out what happened." "And I was ready to write the story and I got a call from a high-level deputy chief at the LAPD asking me to come and talk to him before I wrote the story." "I went there, I met with him and he said, "Look, if you write the story, you are going to mess up our investigation." "The officer who's under investigation doesn't know that we're looking at him." "A story in your paper will alert him that he's under investigation." "So if there's any way you can hold off, you know, we're asking you to hold off."" "And the answer essentially was that we would hold off on the story provided that they gave us the exclusive when they were ready to make an arrest." "When Perez did the theft, he was wearing sunglasses and a cap, but he wasrt really disguised." "And what he was really intending to do was he just wanted to be as calm and collected as possible so he would not attract any attention." "The problem was that when he was doing that, the evidence clerk took it that he was being rude." "So she actually remembered the incident." "The department was looking not only at this guy suspected of stealing the drugs, but they were looking into a couple of other high-profile incidents involving officers to determine whether they might all be linked together." "And those incidents were:" "The robbery of a Bank of America near USC of more than $700,000." "It was later determined that it was done by an Officer David Mack." "A broad-daylight shoot-out that involved an on-duty, plainclothes narcotics detective and an off-duty officer." "The tip was..." "we were looking to see whether all of these things and some other incidents might be related." "Rafael Perez and David Mack were good friends." "They were partners." "They went and partied in Vegas a couple days after Mack robbed the bank." "There was no connection between Rafael Perez and any of the... misconduct that was allegedly committed by David Mack." "Is it hard to believe, you know, that they traveled to Vegas the day after this bank robbery and that that topic doesn't come up?" "Absolutely." "It is hard to believe, but, you know, that... that's smoke." "It's not fire." "I filed charges against Rafael Perez who we had identified as being the person who we believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, had actually stolen the three kilos of cocaine." "When we got Perez's cell phone records, we were able to identify that he had made a lot of calls to a particular woman." "When they ran her, they realized that she was a convicted felon." "We did a "door knock" on her house, and, at that point, they found evidence of narcotics dealing in her apartment, plus photographs of Perez in the apartment, and her brother walked in carrying a quarter pound of cocaine." "I pulled both their files and inside," "I found that Perez had actually written letters to get immunity or leniency for both of them in each of their cases inappropriately." "Now I had Perez socializing with and conducting inappropriate activities with respect to two convicted narcotics dealers, which, of course, tied him into the crime even so much more." "LAPD asked me to file charges in August, and what I told them was we had seized an enormous amount of financial records from Perez at his home." "I had issued about 20 or 30 subpoenas for records to all the various banks and institutions to try and establish that, in essence," "Perez was spending more money than he was bringing in, which would corroborate the fact he was engaged in narcotics dealing." "What I got was a request to go ahead and file the case even though the financial records were still outstanding." "Under normal circumstances, but for that request from LAPD," "I would have waited three more months until I got the financial records back." "Kevin McKesson, Perez's attorney, the moment we filed charges, decided he wanted to go to trial as soon as possible." "So we arrested him in August and we went to trial in December." "It was uneard of to have a case go to trial that quick." "In my mind, the reason why McKesson did it, was because he wanted to go to trial before those financial records came back." "I didn't mind that at all, because again I felt I had a good solid case." "Now the problem I had was that I knew that Perez was excellent at testifying." "Everyone I talked to in the courthouse talked about how he was one of the best witnesses, one of the best officer witnesses they had ever seen." "The bad news on that was that makes it more difficult to cross-examine." "The good news is I knew he was going to testify." "When Perez testified, what he admitted was that he actually was in the evidence room at or near the time the narcotics were stolen." "So, in essence, what he tried to show was:" "Yes, there was proximity, but there was an innocent explanation for it." "So he came up with a very elaborate lie, you know, that he just happened to be near the Property Division at the time of the theft;" "he just happened to be dating a woman who happened to be a narcotics dealer;" "that he just happened to call her shortly after the theft occurred." "When an officer is a defendant, jurors have a very hard time convicting." "And so there's a tendency to require more of the prosecution to convict a well-established and well-respected member of the community, such as a police officer." "What we ended up with was a hung jury, 8 to 4 for conviction." "So the result of that was a mistrial." "The jury had serious problems with the prosecutiors case," "I believe, because they can't prove he was there." "There's no videotapes." "There's no physical evidence to show he touched anything... anything of that nature, and so they can't prove he was there, he checked this out, nor can they prove he was enriched." "And since they were unable to show any enrichment, we argued that they could not prove their case." "Now with the retrial, we had more time." "At that point, the financial records had come back and we were going to have the opportunity of at least two months to further investigate everything that Perez said." "The LAPD detectives were sitting in on most of the trial." "They were absolutely infuriated by Perez's testimony." "They knew he was lying and they knew we couldn't prove it at the trial." "So they redoubled their efforts to look up each and every statement that Perez made, and try and prove whether or not he lied." "Another pound of cocaine had come up missing from another evidence room, on top of the theft of the three kilos," "I felt there was sufficient corroboration that I went ahead and indicted Perez for the pound." "During this point, Chief Parks, through intermediaries was telling me that the LAPD wanted us to reach an agreement with Perez where he would cooperate with the investigation." "They wanted to find out if there were other dirty cops." "They wanted to know if anyone else helped him with this." "They were really very concerned that Perez was involved with other bad cops." "What I offered Perez was five years in state prison." "So instead of eight years, he'd get five if he cooperated." "They wanted some information from Mr. Perez." "We discussed it with the..." "with the prosecutor." "We discussed with the judge and we basically... myself, Mr. Rosenthal and Judge Perry basically went line by line and negotiated this settlement agreement." "McKesson had one contingency." "He says," ""There is an... an incident." "It involves the use of force and we need that to be covered by the immunity agreement."" "I said, "You gotta give me more."" "At this point, we clear the courtroom so it's just Perez, McKesson, the court reporter and me." "And he says, "Well, back a couple years ago, my partner and I shot a man, we overreacted, and then we covered it up."" "What Perez tells us is that he and his partner Nino Durden, are in an "OP," an observation post." "They're in a vacant apartment building basically, looking out on the street, looking to see if they see any exchanges of guns or narcotics." "And while they're there, according to their story to the courts," "Javier Ovando bursts in, pulls a gun on Durden," "Durden shoots him and then Perez shoots him and he goes down." "Ovando was struck several times and was paralyzed from the waist down." "Javier Ovando, unlike many victims of the Rampart scandal, actually went to court to try to fight the charges." "And the judge sentenced him 23 years in prison, and threw the book at him largely because the judge said he, quote "showed no remorse."" "When Rafael Perez sat down to talk to investigators of the corruption task force, the official police version of the shooting of Javier Francisco Ovando, was the first thing that unraveled." "He said that the police account was completely wrong and fabricated." "We don't know whether or not Perez is telling the truth." "But what we do know is that he's recanted his testimony." "We know that there's not a judge on God's green earth who's not gonna give Ovando a new trial, if he were to ask for it, and we know that there's no way in the world we can convict Ovando" "based upon the state of the evidence now." "And we have to let him go." "The circumstances of this case are so egregious that we decided it was in the interest of justice and necessary for our office to take, uh, the lead." "In general, what Perez told us was that there was a large significant group of officers in the Rampart "CRASH" Division..." ""CRASH" stood for" "Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, which was the gang unit... who were framing gang members, planting guns on them, involved in bad shootings, committing perjury, and basically engaged in a wide variety of corrupt behavior." "He just goes on to lay out this whole thing, describing, um, the way that, you know, the gang unit works, and, you know, the whole "us against them"" "and "ends justify the means," and "we'll do what it takes," and so on." "And, you know, he gets into detail on various cases." "And this goes on over months, you know." "They're debriefing him in secret locations, and, they'll just sit case file after case file in front of him and he'll say, "This one was fine," or "No, there were problems with this one."" "And in some cases he had personal knowledge of problems in a case, and other cases he'd pulled them because he heard something was wrong with it." "And other cases he pulled because he... he said the way it was written to him seemed "suspicious."" "And so the department would take all of those things and investigate them all kind of equally." "According to Perez, to become a member of CRASH, the other officers in the unit had to vote you in." "Um, it wasrt like a situation where supervisors would look for the best officer to, you know, to fill in in the unit." "It was more kind of like a fraternity where people were voting people in and out of the unit." "You know, they wanted, quote "solid officers."" "And if you were a solid officer, you were considered quote "in the loop."" "These are phrases that were taken from the transcripts." "And what he meant by being a "solid officer" and "in the loop"" "was that you were willing to perjure yourself, back up your partner, even if that meant lying, you know, planting evidence, covering up unjustified shootings." "You were willing to, you know, to lie to protect the conduct or misconduct of you and your partner." "You know, for example, when it came to shootings, according to Perez, if there was an officer-involved shooting that involved CRASH, you're not gonna just get on the radio and call for backup and have sergeants and captains and everyone else responding." "You did a special call, "CRASH 10-20-30-40," I think it was, that just got all the CRASH guys there." "They would award plaques following officer-involved shootings." "You got one type of plaque if you wounded a suspect." "You got another type of plaque if you killed a suspect." "And, you know, we wrote about the tattoos that they had with skulls and the gleaming eyes and the aces and eights, you know, the "dead mars hand."" "And then, it got to the point where in Rampart, officers were carrying around crack cocaine in their pockets to plant on people that they didn't want on the streets, gang members that they thought were problems." "They were gonna get rid of them by taking cocaine out of their pocket, and putting it in theirs." "The environment in which CRASH operated allowed corruption to flourish." "I mean, the CRASH unit had an office that was off-campus, away from the main Rampart station." "They were their own little entity." "By the LAPD's own account, it was a poorly supervised unit that poorly documented their activities." "Crack was a huge problem." "Homicide numbers were soaring." "It was a violent time in the city, and what they thought was the ends justified the means." ""We're there to do a job." "We're there to take the neighborhoods back."" "We're there to make sure that regular people who obey the law, can walk down the street without being threatened by these gang members and these criminals." "You know, when you have a motto like "we intimidate those who intimidate others,"" "there's a certain attitude that goes along with it." "I don't think this seemed like a great big deal at the time." "I think they feel like they had the backing of the leadership and certainly of the the community." "The victims in these frame-up cases and whatnot are not sympathetic." "I mean, most of these are hardcore gang members who have committed lots of crimes and you know the saying," ""if they werert guilty of this, they're guilty of something else."" "And, you know, I'm sure that's true, but the question is:" "Do you grant the power to suspend the Constitution to some 25-year-old cop who decides who it's okay to frame and who it's not okay to frame and you know," ""I know what happened here so I'll take care of this,"" "and I think the answer that most people would say for that is no." "The Pager Incident was a key episode in Perez's career." "It's the first case in which he decided to break the law and profit from illegal conduct." "Let's go." "LAPD!" "LAPD!" " Don't move!" "Hands behind your head!" " Freeze!" "LAPD!" "Get your ass on the floor now!" "Shut up!" "They get inside the door, and there are drugs all over the place." "He and Durden take a pound of cocaine that's in a paper bag." "They decided to keep the dealer's pager, and when they get back to the station, somebody called the pager." " Check this out." " It's a common ploy in law enforcement to call back and make an arrangement and then arrest the people for attempting to buy narcotics." "?" "Donde estas?" "Ahi viene en 30 minutos." "Al rato." " What's up?" " Let's go." "Perez sets it up and they roll up in an undercover narcotics vehicle, and just as Perez is getting ready to walk out of the car and do the deal," "Durden says something to the effect of..." "Screw it." "Let's just sell it to them, man." "And Perez completely agreed." "They sold the dope, kept the money, kept the pager, told the guy, "You ever need anything else you know where to find us."" "And they did a couple more deals for about $10,000." "He says that this was the first time that he sold drugs and broke the law and it was the beginning of what would become a notorious career." " All good?" " Let's go." "There are two distinct elements to the Rampart scandal:" "There's Perez and Durden who admit to stealing drugs, putting them back on the street for their own personal profit." "Just straight out criminal activity." "The other element is the sort of widespread" ""us against them" kind of misconduct that Perez says was occurring throughout the anti-gang unit, sort of "the ends justifies the means."" "Perez told us a lot about the Shatto Place shooting where one individual was killed, another one was wounded, and there was a lot of gunfire with a large number of Rampart CRASH officers." "There were a group of gangsters who were holding a memorial service in front of the building for a slain gang member." "So they send in some officers through the back, and some officers through the front." "Perez came up on the scene just as one of the gang members went running into the apartment building." "The officer said that the gang member pointed the gun at him and then they shot him with a shotgun and injured him." "According to Perez, however, the gangster had the gun in his waistband but never pulled it out and pointed it at the officers." "And then in addition, you had a fatality where some officers in the back saw a gang member, chased after him, fired shots at him, all throughout the apartment building, and then as he ran down the stairwell," "he ran into another officer who fired a shot and hit him right in the center chest, one shot." "The gangster goes down, no gun." "So they plant a gun on him and take the gun out of the injured gang member and they just say that..." "they just throw it, so that it's out there where they can say that he was holding it." "The Shatto Place case was more significant in one sense than Ovando, because Ovando pretty much just involved Perez and Durden." "With Shatto Place, it involved the CRASH unit." "What it showed, in essence, was a corrupt division as opposed to simply two corrupt officers." "These werert the type of crimes that investigators who had been on this corruption task force were expecting to hear when Perez agreed to talk." "They thought he was gonna talk about his relationships with other officers who had gone bad on the job." "I was living two unmistakable lives... and each day the bad would consume a little of the good." "There have been a number of people who would like to cast Perez as a liar." "And clearly, you know, to some extent, he is a liar." "He admits, you know, lying for years in police reports and framing people and everything else, but he maintains that once he began identifying these allegedly crooked cops that he worked with, that the lies stopped." "As a condition of the plea agreement, uh, Mr. Perez was required to take a lie detector test." "The district attorneys took the the position initially, that the lie detector tests, uh, were flunked by Mr. Perez." "Each side hired their own polygraph examiners to review the results of the polygraph that Mr. Perez allegedly didn't pass." "And after the experts looked at it, both sides agreed that the polygraph was not administered properly and could not be relied upon." "He could have gotten many, many years for perjury if anyone could have actually proven that he lied about anything." "And in the end, no proof whatsoever came out." "The District Attorney wanted officers to come forward and they were going to grant them amnesty and confidentiality if they would tell them about the misconduct they witnessed." "They were trying to give these officers an opportunity to come forward without getting punished by the LAPD." "But once it became clear how far this went and that we were talking about potential systemic corruption within the LAPD, and how it was extraordinarily embarrassing to the LAPD, the Chief shut down, and he circled the wagons," "and he stopped cooperating with the DA's office." "Parks was known as a strict disciplinarian, and basically he made it known that if somebody witnessed misconduct and they failed to report it," ""you're gonna be fired because you did not live up to our expectations as a police officer."" "The result of that strict type of interpretation is that no officer will come forward, that you have assured that no officer will come forward to corroborate Perez." "And the way we knew that this really harmed us was one officer actually did go to the LA Times." "And the LA Times reported that he corroborated much of what Perez said." "This is the person we were searching for." "This is the witness who could have given us potentially a criminal case against multiple officers." "And the result of it is that the code of silence was just solidified." "So there would be stories in the paper where there was corroboration of what Perez was saying." "These officers would come forward to us provided that we not use their name for fear of retribution within the department." "We talked to high-ranking District Attorney's officials and high-ranking LAPD officials and they concluded that they never got to the bottom of Perez's allegations." "They never got to the bottom of the scandal that was occurring at Rampart and elsewhere in the Department." "And they feel that officers who committed crimes and serious misconduct remain on the job today." "My job became an intoxicant that I lusted after." "The lines between right and wrong became fuzzy and indistinct." "Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process, he does not become a monster himself."