On a Monday afternoon in 1998, a nine-year
veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department strolled into the vast Property Division evidence
room at the downtown headquarters. The officer’s name was Rafael ‘Ray’
Perez and he was wearing a disguise. A five day old beard and mustache covered
the lower half of his face; he wore his wife’s thick reading glasses and a baseball cap was
pulled low on his head. At the counter Perez gave the property officer
a folder with a booking number, telling her that he needed the evidence for the case. Without checking his ID, she quickly retrieved
a taped and sealed cardboard evidence box and allowed him to sign for it. Perez scrawled the name of another cop ‘Joel
Perez’ and a fake badge number before leaving with the evidence. Twenty minutes later, Perez parked his SUV
near a strip mall. He ran over to a nearby store and purchased
a box of Bisquick baking mix. He returned to his SUV and finally opened
the evidence box. Inside were three kilos (6.6 pounds) of cocaine
with an estimated street value of $800,000. Just like he had done twice previously when
stealing coke from evidence to sell, Perez swapped Bisquick for the drugs. On both occasions he had been able to reseal
the evidence bags full of baking mix and return them without issue. Typically, coke was never retested and this
evidence was involved in a case that wasn’t going to trial. Sooner or later the coke would be destroyed,
forever hiding evidence of his illegal substitution. But today was different. Maybe Perez had a premonition or it was paranoia. But he ended up dumping the bags full of baking
mix and the empty evidence box into a nearby storm drain instead of trying to swap the
fake drugs back into the property room. But it was too late, his audacious theft was
already another link in a chain of events that would end in the exposure of the widespread
police corruption in the LAPD’s Rampart Division anti-gang CRASH unit. Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums
or CRASH was started in the 1970’s to combat gangs in South Central LA. In response to the drug fueled violence of
the 1980’s, the LAPD heavily funded CRASH and established other divisions throughout
the city for a total of 18 units. The elite teams of officers worked out of
their own substations, often wore plainclothes and made undercover drug buys. The unspoken rule at CRASH was that a prospective
member needed to be invited to join by a sponsor on the team. CRASH divisions were tight knit families separate
from other cops. Their mission was to take out gangs through
just about any means necessary. The Rampart CRASH unit pushed this idea to
the max and were known for being a law unto themselves. Rampart CRASH served Pico-Union, a dense poverty
stricken neighborhood full of of immigrants--both legal and undocumented, located just west
of L.A.’s downtown skyscrapers. Though Pico-Union is only about 8 square miles,
during the late 1990’s, the area had upwards of 30 different gangs including 18th Street
and MS-13. Rampart CRASH had a reputation for being dirty,
but after bad interactions with officers, few residents dared to come forward. Many were scared of the cops, spoke little
to no English or were involved in illegal activities themselves. The complaints of the few residents that spoke
out against the unit didn’t go anywhere. After the coke went missing, Internal Affairs
[IA] investigated officer Joel Perez who had allegedly checked out the drugs. They quickly discounted him. When IA went through property division records,
the logs showed that Rampart CRASH officer Ray Perez had previously checked out a large
amount of coke. Meanwhile, IA was already investigating Rampart
CRASH for the brutal beating of a suspect and a couple of bad shootings. Also 3 months before Perez’s theft of the
coke, his close friend and former partner David Mack had been arrested for a brazen
bank heist of $722,000 in cash. As of yet investigators hadn’t been able
to identify David’s co-conspirators who helped him rob the bank. However, they suspected Perez and a third
cop. Curiously, in one way or another Perez was
involved in or linked to all of these events. Worried that they had a couple of rogue cops
in Rampart, the LAPD created a task force made up of detectives and prosecutors from
the DA’s Office. They quickly put Perez under surveillance. They tapped his phone, parked a van outside
his house and on at least one occasion followed his SUV via helicopter. The task force discovered that Perez and his
wife drove expensive vehicles and had an upper middle class lifestyle that would be hard
to achieve on policeman’s pay. Also Perez had called his girlfriend, a known
sometimes cocaine dealer and informant twice on the day of the coke theft, once before
and once after. In August of 1998, the LAPD arrested Perez
for the coke theft. In December of 1998, he went to trial. Perez was a charismatic storyteller who managed
to enthrall several members of the jury. His case ended 8-4, in a hung jury. Perez remained in custody. The police task force went back to work to
try to build a stronger case against him. Their research turned up the fact that drugs
had gone missing from evidence before. There were 11 transfers with suspicious paperwork. 6 of the drug evidence packages had already
been destroyed, but they tested the remaining 5. All were Bisquick. Perez had been stealing from the evidence
room off and on for years. The newly discovered thefts bumped the charge
against Perez up to a felony. Rather than go to trial again, Perez had his
attorney reach out to Richard Rosenthal, a deputy district attorney, who was on the task
force and overseeing prosecution. Perez was willing to confess to a crime: the
shooting of an unarmed suspect, and the planting of a gun on him if he was granted immunity
on that charge and a reduced five-year term on the drug charges. In exchange Perez would spill the beans on
dirty cops in the Rampart division CRASH. The deal was approved. Perez was secretly transported from jail to
an office in the headquarters of the county transit system to meet with the task force. Worried about threats to Perez’s life, the
authorities didn’t want to meet in a police building. What Perez said stunned the room. He had been dirty since his very first drug
bust as a CRASH officer in 1995. He regularly kept some of the money he seized
during busts. Then Perez told the LAPD of the time he shot
Javier Ovando. On the night of October 13, 1996, Perez and
his partner Nino Durden went to a boarded-up apartment building for a surveillance stakeout. They found two homeless guys crashing in one
of the apartments, Nene and 19 year old Javier Ovando, a member of the notorious 18th Street
Gang. Durden and Perez were especially unhappy to
see Ovando, they had thrown him out of the building the night before. They handcuffed the two men and hustled them
to unit 407, their stakeout apartment. Perez unshackled Nene, telling the men that
he was sending them out one at a time. Nene left immediately. However, Perez and Durden didn’t let Ovando
leave, they started interrogating him. When he protested, refusing to offer up any
information, Perez suddenly pulled out his Beretta and shot him in the chest at close
range. Durden quickly did the same. Then, Perez lifted Ovando off the floor by
the front of his shirt, and fired a round into the side of his head. Perez called for assistance using Rampart
CRASH’s secret radio code for a dirty shooting. The code was a demand for other CRASH officers
in the know to keep outside supervisors away. By the time anyone else arrived at the scene,
Perez and Durden had positioned a loaded, chopped-down Tech .22 semi automatic by Ovando’s
body. Durden had previously filed the serial number
off of the gun. Once the sergeant arrived, unaware that they
had planted the gun, he listened to Perez’s story of the shooting and helped them clean
up any loose ends in the tale. According to Perez, Ovando busted into the
apartment, brandishing his gun with intent to kill. They shot him out of self defense. Miraculously, Ovando survived the shooting,
although he was left paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. When he was somewhat recovered, he stood trial. Based on Perez’s and Durden’s false testimony
Ovando was found guilty of 2 counts of assaulting a police officer with a semiautomatic rifle
and one count of brandishing it in the presence of a police officer. He received the maximum sentence—23 years
in state prison. Perez’s confession about Ovando’s shooting
was just the beginning. He claimed that 90% of all CRASH officers,
not just Rampart CRASH, falsified information. He also talked about dirty busts. Perez’s revelations sent the LAPD reeling. How many people were sitting in jail for crimes
they didn’t commit or their investigation was handled by corrupt cops? Perez’s first debriefing session was 3 hours
and there was the promise of more secrets to be divulged. On behalf of the DA's office the horrified
Rosenthal took the unusual step for prosecution and filed writ of habeas corpus overturning
Ovando's conviction. Within a week of Perez’s confession, Ovando
was freed from prison. He had served 2 and 1/2 years in jail. Over the course of 52 secret interrogations
lasting 9 months, Perez laid bare the corrupt culture and transgressions of the Rampart
CRASH division. He discussed how the majority of CRASH officers
were unscrupulous. They knowingly framed civilians, sometimes
with ‘drop guns’ like the one he and Durden planted on Ovando, perjured themselves on
the witness stand and were purposefully slow in calling for medical attention, allowing
injured suspects to suffer longer. Some officers drank or took drugs on the job. They also awarded each other plaques for shooting
people, with extra honors if the person killed was a suspect. Pérez told the task force the unofficial
CRASH motto: "We intimidate those who intimidate others." Early on, Perez had asked the task force if
he could see the CRASH “recap books”—logs of all activities undertaken by the unit to
refresh his memories. Perez reviewed 1,509 arrest reports and identified
91 arrests involving 160 suspects with alleged police misconduct. Of those 91 dirty arrests, Perez was involved
in 63 of which 44 involved Perez and his partner Durden. Perez also provided details on a cop on cop
shooting, and a brutality incident where Rampart CRASH officer Brian Hewitt brought Ismael
Jimenez, a member of the 18th Street Gang into the station for questioning. During interrogation Hewitt severely beat
the handcuffed Jiminez. However Perez refused to provide information
on David Mack, whom by now had been convicted and was serving a fourteen year sentence for
his bank robbery. Nor would Perez admit to being one of the
robbers and he had no idea where the loot from the bank robbery ended up. As of 2020, the stolen money has never been
recovered. Allegedly, the money was intended to be used
to pay off an assassin for carrying out the murder of Biggie Smalls. Reputedly, Perez and Mack were involved in
the planning of the famed rapper’s murder too. Meanwhile investigators scrambled to try to
corroborate the information Perez had provided. Detectives visited several prisons to talk
to inmates and even made a trip to a village in Central America to speak to a wronged party. Ultimately, Perez pointed a finger at over
70 officers for misconduct. Investigations found enough evidence to bring
58 of those officers before an internal administrative board. However, only 24 were actually found to have
committed any wrongdoing. 12 cops were given suspensions, 7 were forced
into resignation or retirement, and 5 were fired. Based on falsified evidence and police perjury
inquiries, 106 prior criminal convictions were overturned. There were over 140 civil lawsuits against
the city of Los Angeles, which cost the city an estimated $125 million in settlements. On November 21, 2000, Javier Ovando received
a $15 million settlement, the largest police misconduct settlement in Los Angeles history,
and possibly US history. Ray Perez and Nino Durden were the only cops
who wound up doing any real prison time for the Rampart Scandal. In accordance with his immunity agreement,
Pérez was sentenced to 5 years for stealing cocaine from LAPD evidence. He was paroled early. However, 2 federal charges were brought against
him: (1) conspiracy to violate Ovando's civil rights; (2) Possessing a firearm with an eliminated
serial number, the drop gun used to frame Ovando. He was sentenced to serve 2 years in federal
prison. Durden ended up being sentenced to 5 years
in prison after being convicted on six counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice,
perjury, and filing false reports. In the fall of 1999 LAPD chief Bernard Parks
created a Board of Inquiry to review management failure and probe the depth of the corruption
scandal. About 6 months later the Board released a
report which mainly blamed a few bad apples and mediocre departmental management for allowing
misconduct within the Rampart Division to occur. The report also offered recommendations for
improvement in several areas including police training and supervisory oversight. The LAPD experienced a great deal of inner
turmoil. Many cops felt like chief Parks closed down
the investigation too quickly. He quashed lines of inquiry into corrupt cops
tied to the Bloods and other criminal enterprises. Also he refused to grant immunity to officers
who’d witnessed and failed to report misconduct. That choice quelled any impulses of low level
officers to come forward about wrongdoing they might have seen with upper management. Lastly, Park limited the probe to Rampart
CRASH instead of instituting a wider investigation of all CRASH units even though during interrogation
Perez and later Durden brought up misconduct happening in the 77 Street CRASH division. Other cops felt like Ray Perez played the
LAPD for fools, feeding them exaggerated tales of police wrongdoing with a little truth mixed
in. CRASH was disbanded in 2000, and replaced
by the LAPD Gang and Narcotics Division. Several crimes involving Rampart CRASH officers
remain unsolved. The full truth may never be known about what
is probably the worst corruption scandal in the LAPD’s 151 year history. And now that you've reached the end of our
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