Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (32 page)

One of those leading the investigation was then LAPD captain Pat Gannon, who described the questioning of Ray not only as him simply answering investigators’ questions but as something more: members of a team of sixteen LAPD investigators and DA prosecutors would huddle with Ray and some of the fifteen hundred pages of Rampart CRASH arrest reports culled from the DA and LAPD files. And they would say to Ray, “What about this one?” And as Pat Gannon tells it,
Ray would say, “ ‘Oh, that’s a bad one, that’s a good one . . . those were manufactured, those were dirty cases. The gun was planted. The dope was planted.’

“
In some cases,” Gannon continued, “Rafael was credible, in other cases he wasn’t. And the stack [of files] kept growing tremendously.

“What complicated the matter was that
Rafael Perez was a liar. So, in many respects, it was tough to get at the truth. Do I think that he was lying all the time? Not at all. But was there some stuff that was dishonest? Absolutely. That’s what we found the most difficult. We were able to put together some pretty good cases that we were able to substantiate. And in others we absolved the officer of any misconduct.” (Ray
failed an LAPD polygraph test but subsequently passed two others administered by a defense expert and the DA’s Office.)

Gannon ended his description of the interview process by adding that there was also a statute of limitations on all the cases looming over their shoulders, and consequently they
had to move quickly. That fact alone was a key problem that would compromise the LAPD’s investigation throughout the Rampart scandal. And there was also this, says Gannon: “We were
limited only to Rampart CRASH and to what Rafael Perez said and brought to the attention of the investigators.” And that was all.

Bill Boyarsky, December 1999, Downtown Los Angeles Minibus

Bill Boyarsky loved public transportation and riding buses. In Los Angeles nobody takes the bus unless they have to. But Boyarsky did. That was his quirk.

One afternoon in December of 1999, he stepped onto a downtown minibus, sat down, and continued a conversation with the man sitting next to him that they’d struck up while waiting for the bus to arrive.

“
Are you a lawyer?” the man asked Boyarsky.

“No, just the opposite,” replied Boyarsky. “I am a reporter.” They introduced themselves and Boyarsky told the man he was currently city editor at the
Times.
He was also the immediate boss of Tim Rutten, and intensely involved with the
Times
Rampart coverage. Close friends with Rutten, Boyarsky was a
working-class Jewish guy from the Bay Area, cut from the same cloth as Rutten. Both were decades-long veterans of the
Times
, loved journalism, bridled at injustice, and liked to drink. Boyarsky
was also an unassuming scorner of pretense, at various times a star at the newspaper, and always deeply respected by his fellow reporters.

While on the bus, Boyarsky listened as David Lewis [not his real name] began talking about his job in law enforcement, and about the Rampart scandal. It was a pleasant conversation, as Boyarsky later recalled it; they said good-bye, and he thought nothing further about it.

Afterward, however, Lewis phoned Boyarsky and told him
he had transcripts of the DA/LAPD Perez interviews and wanted to give them to the
Times
.

They agreed to meet in front of a bank adjacent to the
Times
building. There they spoke briefly, and Boyarsky then brought Lewis to a small room that served as his
unused city editor office, where he introduced him to Rutten.

It soon became apparent that Lewis knew precisely what he was talking about. “Hold on for a minute,” Lewis then said, reaching into his briefcase and pulling out parts of the Perez transcripts.

Rutten quickly
sent for a messenger to start copying the transcripts and to find his Rampart reporters, Lait and Glover. When the two arrived, they immediately began chatting up Lewis.

A few minutes later, they told Rutten, “You know something?
This guy has everything. The whole set of the transcripts.”

**************

Once all of the transcripts were delivered to Rutten and copied, he met with his two reporters at his house. He told them not to go home but to
check into a hotel and work overnight. Rutten knew they had to protect the transcripts from subpoenas. So a workplace was arranged for them at the printing plant away from the main
Times
building.

Even before the
Times
received the Perez transcripts, Boyarsky and Rutten had decided to play the Rampart story big and, just as importantly, to run each story as they got it, day after day, rather than to wait and run a two- or three-part series all at once—the usual manner in which investigative stories win Pulitzers.

Pulitzers, however, weren’t what they were after. They wanted
impact
. And they understood that if a newspaper wanted to have that kind
of impact on a powerful institution like the LAPD, they’d have to slam it home every day. And that’s what they did. The result was everything they could have wished for. “
One simply had to look at the
L.A. Times
,” L.A. County district attorney Gil Garcetti later told
Frontline
. “They set the agenda for the electronic media every morning, and they’d go with it. . . . They had big stories almost constantly. There was that drumbeat. And of course the pressure was on all of us . . . on the chief, [and] on me from the chief . . . the mayor and others . . . [to] just bring the case.”

The first big story the
Times
ran was about the Ovando shooting. Then, for the next five or six days, Rampart articles were the lead stories. Soon the word “Rampart” became generic for police corruption, and the number one item on the City Council’s agenda.
Richard Riordan became so angry, he demanded a meeting with the then
Times
editor,
Michael Parks, who essentially shrugged and said, “We’re running the stories. That’s what we do.”

One of the reasons Boyarsky and Rutten say they were able to feature the stories with the frequency and prominence that they did was because Kathryn Downing, the
Times
’ publisher, and Michael Parks, the editor, had no connections to Los Angeles’s power elite. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Parks, a short, oval-shaped man with a fifties crew cut, had been with the
Times
for decades, but for most of those years he
had worked as a foreign correspondent in South Africa, China, and Moscow. And
Downing was never a journalist. She came from the corporate business side of the paper and thought the stories were good for the
Times
. So as long as Parks and Downing were happy—and they were—Boyarsky and Rutten pretty much had carte blanche to run Lait and Glover’s pieces.

“
In the old days before Michael Parks was editor, that never would have happened,” says Rutten. “The mayor or police chief would have come across the street [to the
Times
] one Friday afternoon, gone up the elevator to the editor’s office, closed the door, and they all would have had a drink. Everyone would have then agreed that what we didn’t need was yet another crusade. Everybody would have been reasonable, trying to get along, and agreeing they all had the best interest of the city at heart.

“And then somebody would have come to me and said, ‘You know what, let’s tone it down, wrap this thing up, do a story, be done with it, and then let’s move on to other things. Let’s not be obsessional.’ ” But that didn’t happen with the Rampart scandal, and the fact that it didn’t can’t be overemphasized. Without the game-changing nature of the scandal coverage, much of what was about to happen almost surely wouldn’t have occurred.

Rafael “Ray” Perez, Friday, February 25, 2000, Downtown Los Angeles Superior Court

“
Whoever chases monsters
,” says Ray Perez, dressed in shackles and blue jail garb, “
should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.
”

Nervously clutching her handbag as she sat in the first row of a packed courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, Denise Perez leaned forward and listened intently to her husband.
A former LAPD dispatcher and devout Jehovah’s Witness, she was still finding it hard to believe the litany of unconscionable crimes her thirty-two-year-old husband had just admitted to committing, and the number of lives he’d left shattered in his wake.

Certainly the disgraced LAPD officer now standing before Los Angeles Superior Court judge Robert Perry, reading a statement of contrition before being sentenced, bore no resemblance to the husband she knew, to the police officer she’d always believed him to be.

She’d met a lot of cops as a civilian LAPD employee, and had worked with them daily. But Ray had been special—as fearless and gung-ho a police officer, she’d always thought, as he’d been a gung-ho marine. But that Ray Perez was nowhere on display on this February day in 2000. Instead, her husband’s powerful arms and wrists, visible through his short-sleeved blue prison jumpsuit, were handcuffed.

And he was referring to himself as a monster.

“
For many years
,” Ray Perez continues, “
I proudly wore a badge of honor and integrity. . . . Determined to make a difference . . .
”

Both Denise and Ray’s first wife had steadfastly supported him throughout his entire ordeal. But that was no real surprise. Ray, like Mack, was a player, a charmer, who appealed to women. According to what LAPD detective Brian Tyndall told
Frontline
, during Ray’s first trial—and before his current plea deal—
Ray had “made a lot of eye contact with the female jurors” during the jury selection process. Subsequently, when the judge asked if anyone in the jury pool had problems continuing with the case, a woman had stood up and said that
Ray “was too good-looking [for her] to be involved in the jury,” because she would never be able to find him guilty. The jury had later
deadlocked 8–4 and a hung jury was declared. All four female jurors voted to acquit. Nevertheless, the other jurors had voted guilty, and the judge seemed to believe he was as well. Ray had to serve another year in county jail before a new trial could be convened. Those facts convinced him to take the deal the DA was offering.

For the past five months Ray’s life had been a media circus, and today was no exception. The beat reporters, the journalists from the networks and national newspapers and magazines, were all there, packed so tightly together that any reporter with bad breath would nauseate the four people nearest to him or her. Ray’s defense attorney, Winston Kevin McKesson, had been approached, he said, to arrange interviews with Perez by
all the press corps’ then national stars:
60 Minutes
’ Lesley Stahl,
Dateline
’s Maria Shriver, NBC’s Geraldo Rivera, producers from
Nightline
and
Frontline
, and reporters from a score of magazines and newspapers, including
Time
,
Newsweek
,
Esquire
, and the
New York Times
.

“
The atrocities committed by myself and those who stand accused are unforgivable acts
,” continues Ray, his voice now growing stronger. “
It didn’t occur to me that I was destroying lives, the lives of those we victimized, and the families who loved them . . . Time after time I stepped over the line.
”

Well, yeah. But nobody had cared, nobody had questioned Ray’s stories or his sworn testimony in earlier courtrooms. It wasn’t important as long as he produced the numbers that they’d total up every month; the numbers that told them how many bodies he’d hauled into the station house. Arrest numbers, that’s what counted.

“
What I most want at this time is to remind the greenest of rookie cops that we have
[
all
]
this power. If used wrongly, at the most they could plant a defendant’s feet on the path to the death house. At the least they will leave a landscape of broken lives in their wake.
”

God knows, Ray certainly had. Just ask Javier Ovando.

“
I was living two unmistakable lives
,” says Ray Perez as he winds down his statement. “
Each day the bad would consume a little of the good. You were right, I was wrong. I pray that one day I can demonstrate my worthiness of being forgiven.
”

With that, Ray Perez was finished, and Judge Perry handed down Ray’s
plea-bargained five-year sentence in prison.

Ray’s act of contrition was pure Ray. Ray at his eloquent, believable, likable best. Ray blaming circumstances for his sins. Even knowing that he’d beaten and/or framed and terrorized hundreds of people and shot the unarmed Javier Ovando for
no good reason
. But then, you never knew if what Ray was saying was true or part of the con.

Bernard Parks, March 2000, Parker Center

Just moments after being flanked by fifteen starched and pressed members of his command staff, Bernard Parks would give his department’s official version of Ray Perez’s sins and Rampart CRASH’s transgressions. Stepping forward on the Parker Center auditorium stage, he announced to the seventy-five or so journalists and twenty-five TV cameras that he was releasing what Mayor Riordan would later describe as the most detailed and candid document “
in the history of mankind.”

Riordan’s reference was to the LAPD’s voluminous
Board of Inquiry into the Rampart Area Corruption Incident
. People were already skeptical about Parks’s LAPD investigating itself. And their skepticism proved more than warranted. The
362-page inquiry was one of those mammoth documents so big it seemed designed
not
to be read. But it was far more notable for what it failed to cover than what it did. A few bad players and “mediocre” midlevel management, according to the report, had been responsible for Rampart CRASH operating without the necessary accountability, hence the resulting scandal, which had now been taken
care of. After dismissing every pointed question from the journalists,
Parks then left the stage.