Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (29 page)

It had taken Bernard Parks over thirty-two years of faithful service to be named chief—an honor, he felt, that he’d been unfairly deprived of five years earlier by Willie Williams, whose selection also destroyed Parks’s other dream of becoming the department’s first
black
chief. Both losses had stuck deeply and notoriously in his craw ever since.

Now, however, his moment had arrived. He was enthusiastically received by civic leaders and political friends—many of whom seemed not to know or care that he’d spent much of the last five years undercutting Willie Williams while successfully projecting himself as the only alternative.

Certainly Parks at least
appeared
to be a perfect fit: tall, handsome, ramrod-straight, and an LAPD man through and through. But it wasn’t just that. He was also an African-American replacing a failed African-American, so no hint of racism could be attributed to Williams’s forced departure. Within the department his reputation was that of a
smart, knowledgeable, efficient technocrat. He had placed second to Willie Williams in the search to replace Daryl Gates. He was a son of Los Angeles, a favorite of the black bourgeoisie and, even more importantly, of the downtown political establishment—who really
liked
Parks. And that was no accident. He’d spent years cultivating them. He was very charming one-on-one, and had been astute and solicitous in delivering favors that helped cement their friendships.

As a result, he’d made an impressive circle of friends and supporters that had sprouted ever wider as he’d risen in the ranks. Many of those supporters, moreover, had unquestioningly assumed that Parks would
be the reformer they wished for. But that was the most interesting thing about Bernard Parks. That he wasn’t a
fundamental
reformer at all. Early on he’d signaled precisely that, pointing out that he didn’t so much want to reform the department as fix it, but his more liberal backers either missed the comment or were unaware of the significant difference between the two approaches.

It would therefore prove ironic that the seeds that would shatter his upcoming administration had been planted by none other than his idol Daryl Gates, and that they would bloom under the leadership of Willie Williams, his hapless foil.

Sometimes trouble comes from places or people not even remotely on one’s radar screen. So it was for Bernard Parks: a couple of dogged young reporters on the make, a couple of grizzled editors left to their own devices, and, above all, one lowly crooked cop. That’s all it finally took to ignite a scandal so explosive it would force a police chief out of office; the federal government to officially intervene in the running of the LAPD; and the hiring of the most prominent reform cop in America as the LAPD’s new chief of police.

David Mack, Thursday, November 6, 1997, South Central Bank of America

Wearing a gray
three-piece suit, a tweed beret, and dark sunglasses, Ray Perez’s old partner, David Mack, strode into a South Central Bank of America branch just north of USC on a November morning in 1997, filled out an entry form to view his safe deposit box, and was then twice buzzed through security doors leading to the bank vault. Accompanying him was twenty-six-year-old customer service/assistant branch manager, Errolyn Romero.

Just the day before, Romero had made a request that
$722,000—more than twice the amount usually delivered—be sent in twenty-, fifty-, and one-hundred-dollar bills to the bank branch at 9 a.m.—about ten minutes before Mack would arrive that morning. Because Romero had ordered the money, she was personally responsible for securing it in the
vault directly upon delivery. But instead she’d left the three plastic bags of cash outside the vault on a cart. When a coworker asked her why, her reply was succinct and direct. “Don’t bother me,” she said. “
I have a headache.”

Once at the vault,
Mack knocked Romero to the floor, glared at the two other bank employees present, and slung back his jacket to reveal a semiautomatic pistol hanging on a gun sling. Pointing the weapon directly at them, he ordered them to the floor, threatening to kill them if anyone pushed a buzzer or pager or in any way failed to comply. Absolutely convinced of Mack’s seriousness, they remained in place and did exactly as they were told. As Mack exited the bank lobby,
he was joined by a black accomplice who had been holding a handgun to the head of the bank’s security guard. Once outside, they hopped into a waiting
white getaway van driven by a third member of the robbery team and took off.

The following weekend
David Mack went to Las Vegas. With him was Ray Perez,
a fellow cop named Sammy Martin, and Ray’s foxy part-time nightclub-singing Honduran girlfriend, Veronica Quesada.
In addition to being Ray’s lover, she also dealt cocaine for him and was one of his best informants. They checked in at the Rio, then the Vegas Strip’s hottest casino, and spent thousands of dollars partying and gambling the nights away. In the weeks that followed
Mack would also spend over $30,000 on a sport-utility van, new household furniture, and the payment of a personal loan to a fellow cop.

The robbery and Vegas weekend said a lot either about David Mack’s sense of financial desperation, his sense of hubris, or both. Armed bank robbery is a federal crime taken
very
seriously by both the LAPD and the FBI. Yet he went ahead with his astoundingly audacious scheme anyway.

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

David Mack had first met
Errolyn Romero, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Belizean immigrants, in 1990 when
she was working as a ticket-taker at the Baldwin Theater in southwest L.A. Though Mack was married, they soon became lovers and engaged in a heated affair that lasted for the next seven years. Eventually Romero got a job as a
teller for the Bank of America, and in August of 1997, at age twenty-six, was transferred to the South Central branch where the robbery took place.

When investigators brought Romero into Parker Center for questioning, she took a
polygraph test that declared her “deceptive.” Under intense questioning she began to fold, but was so unnerved she couldn’t spit out David Mack’s name. Finally, she reached into her purse and slid something across the table. It was
David Mack’s LAPD business card. With that, she gave them Mack.
Mack, in turn, didn’t give them anybody. Which might have been very good for Ray Perez, who both the LAPD and the FBI always suspected was the second man in the bank. But they could never prove it, in large part because Mack refused to reveal the name of that second robber or the driver of the getaway van.

When the LAPD arrested Mack he had
$1,500 cash in his wallet and $2,600 more in his home,
owed the IRS $20,000, and had
$17,000 in credit-card bills.

On September 14, 1999, a federal judge
sentenced him to fourteen years and three months in federal prison and
Romero to two and a half years. The stolen money was never recovered. But credible allegations about David Mack live on to this day—most especially including those made by the principal LAPD detective investigating the criminal actions of Mack and Ray. The detective, Russell Poole, would claim that Mack was the hit man who killed the East Coast rapper
Biggie Smalls when he was in L.A. That allegation and others about Mack have never been proven. But one, made by the same detective, sticks out: that Bernard Parks shut down the investigation and thereby limited its scope and presaged its outcome—an action that would become a Bernard Parks MO throughout what would soon come to be known as the Rampart scandal.

Bernard Parks, Autumn 1997, Parker Center

When Bernard Parks worked for David Dotson,
Dotson had always liked him, liked his intelligence, his tenacity, and his work ethic. He’d
first gotten to see Parks in action when Parks was a lieutenant and Dotson a captain in the beachfront area of L.A. known as Venice, which was then populated by down-and-out hippies and plagued by street gangs.

Dotson also liked the fact that, even then, they both agreed on the need to make changes in the LAPD—to make it smarter, more efficient, and to stop doing stupid, counterproductive things just because they’d always been done that way. Dotson was impressed even then with the fact that Parks was thinking and problem-solving.

But he was not blinded to Bernard Parks’s flaws, to his obsessiveness, and particularly to his famous
minutiae flaw
. “
Bernie always got enmeshed in minutiae,” recalls Dotson. “He had to check everything officers did, not just by the
results
of what they did, but by the entire process of the task. And if he found one little glitch in the process, they had to do it over or get their asses chewed. So
his people didn’t want to tell him anything.
They just pulled their hair out.”

The other lieutenants consequently hated him. Particularly the detectives. But Parks was right: if any of the LAPD units were stuck in the inefficient and ineffective attitudes and procedures of thirty or forty years earlier, it was the detective units throughout the city. The problem was that Parks let them know that he didn’t give a
goddamn
about how they had always done things. This, he told them, was the way it was going to be—starting now. But, as Dotson would later point out, “
you can’t get an organization moving in any direction except against you, if you act like that.”

Later, up at the Police Academy, working with guys like Richard Eide, it was the same story. Many of the instructors were flying by the seat of their pants—teaching what they wanted. A ludicrous situation for an organization as large and important to the life of the city as was the LAPD. So Parks rightly demanded a syllabus from each instructor. The problem was that many had no idea how to even
write
a syllabus, and in response they became irritated and angry at Parks. “That was
the kind of downward pressure he put on people even then,” says Dotson. “
He didn’t say, ‘Hey, guys, let’s get together and talk about where we’re going with the instruction program; or let’s see what we can come up with to make it better’ and then move into the syllabus phase. He had no understanding
of preparing for change. He just didn’t. ‘This is the way I want it, and this is the way we’re gonna do it—my way or the highway.’ ”

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

For decades the LAPD had been notorious for “
yellow-sheeting” civilian complaints—that is, writing up a civilian’s complaint of abuse at the local station house and, instead of sending it up the chain of command, hiding it in case someone on high needed it or a lawsuit was filed, but other than that leaving it in a drawer to be forgotten.

To his credit, once Bernard Parks sat down in the chief’s chair, he decided to set in motion new procedures to ensure that civilian complaints would henceforth be taken seriously. The problem was, according to his critics, that
every
complaint would be taken seriously and receive the same weight during the investigative process. The result was that hundreds of officers were coming under investigation and waiting for a ruling at any one time. And hundreds of those officers began to seriously hate Bernard Parks. Not particularly because he was a tough disciplinarian, although they didn’t like that, but because he lacked a sense of
proportionality
. The apocryphal story always told was that someone stealing a fellow officer’s
can of Coke from the station-house refrigerator would require the same level of investigation as a cop accused of grave misconduct. Although absurd in practice, the story was true enough in spirit to be routinely repeated as illustrative of Parks’s need for control and the lengths to which he’d go to get it.

Brian Hewitt, February 1998, Rampart Division

Within Rampart CRASH, the grim-faced, fair-skinned
Brian Hewitt was known as a blunt, hard-charging guy who loved action, intimidating anyone he thought was a gangster and making arrests—lots of arrests. Ray would later tell investigators how Hewitt enjoyed beating up people who were handcuffed. Once, in a CRASH interrogation room,
Hewett was beating Ishmael Jimenez while screaming at the nineteen-year-old gang member to tell him about a gun—not a particular gun
having to do with a particular case, just a gun, any gun. He continued in the same vein until he suddenly stopped, slammed the handcuffed Jimenez against the wall, grasped him by the throat, and began choking him so furiously that Jimenez nearly passed out. Before that could happen, however, Hewitt
punched him so hard in the chest, neck, side, and solar plexus that Jimenez flipped backward onto the floor. When Hewitt then left the room to take a brief break,
Jimenez threw up violently.
Investigators would later find the outline of his blood-saturated vomit on the carpeted floor of the room. It matched Jimenez’s DNA and measured slightly less than two feet across.

But it wasn’t Ray who initially brought Hewitt to the attention of LAPD Internal Affairs investigators. After the beating Jimenez had been taken by a friend to a local hospital, where a
doctor and a security guard reported his injuries to the LAPD, causing Internal Affairs to focus attention on Rampart CRASH just as investigators were looking at Ray.

It was right around this time that Ray decided to pull off a caper that was in its own way as desperate and audacious as David Mack’s $22,000 armed bank robbery.

Rafael “Ray” Perez, Monday, March 2, 1998, LAPD Property Division

On a rainy L.A. day, Ray Perez tightly clutched his oversized jacket to his neck, stepped into the basement of the LAPD’s downtown headquarters, and headed to the department’s cavernous Property Division evidence room, which then held over two hundred thousand items.

As he entered, he tucked his black “NY” cap down low over his head.
He’d disguised his face in five days of bearded stubble that blended into his mustache, above which he was wearing a pair of his wife, Denise’s, Coke-bottle reading glasses. Although he had attached his badge-holder to his jacket, there was no badge inside.

Approaching a property officer, he slid a folder with a booking number across the counter to her. “
I need this,” he told her. Without asking for an ID, she took the folder, disappeared, and, after a few minutes, returned with a taped and sealed cardboard evidence box. Inside were three keys of coke—
6.6 pounds of powder cocaine.