Jurors Deliberate Rampart Case Minus Key to the Puzzle

When jurors in the first Rampart police corruption case resume deliberations today, they will try to make sense of a prosecution missing the testimony of Rafael Perez, the disgraced officer who unleashed the scandal a year ago.

Prosecutors did not call him to help make their case, and defense attorneys did not put him on the witness stand to discredit it.

Without Perez, the jurors have been left with pieces of testimony originally meant to corroborate his story. Perez would have been the insider witness, the glue that brought the pieces together, had he not been kept off the stand for reasons that remain unclear.

Perez’s confessions last fall supplied the basis for the charges against Sgts. Edward Ortiz and Brian Liddy and Officers Paul Harper and Michael Buchanan. They are accused of conspiring to pervert or obstruct justice by framing gang members with fabricated police reports, planted evidence and perjured testimony.

While Perez has yet to testify publicly about his allegations, much is known about what he has told authorities.

The thousands of pages of statements Perez gave to police and prosecutors don’t completely reflect what he might have said on the stand. But they do shed light on his basic allegations of police corruption.

What he told police led to more than 100 criminal convictions being overturned. Many of the wrongly accused then turned around and sued the city, which faces paying more than $100 million to satisfy their claims. After admitting to stealing $1 million worth of cocaine from police evidence lockers, Perez negotiated a plea bargain that gave him a lenient, five-year sentence. And then he started talking.

“I’m going to make a very broad statement, and you’re not going to like it,” Perez told investigators.

“There’s this thing called ‘being in the loop, being involved,’ ” he said, adding that 90% of Rampart CRASH officers “falsify certain information. They put cases on people. I’m not proud of this . . . it hurts me to say it. But there’s a lot of crooked stuff going on with the LAPD, especially the LAPD specialized units.”

All four of the officers on trial, according to Perez, were “in the loop,” as were many of the other police witnesses called by prosecutors during the three weeks of testimony.

“If I say ‘in the loop,’ it’s exactly what it means,” Perez explained in a series of interviews with police investigators and Los Angeles County prosecutors. “They will have no problem planting narcotics, a gun, whatever--falsifying PC [probable cause] to put somebody in jail.”

Perez Contradicts Officers’ Reports

Perez told investigators that the two 1996 gang sweeps at the center of the trial did not unfold the way the defendants said they did. Liddy never saw a gang member run, pull a gun and ditch it among parked cars, as Liddy asserted in his written police report, Perez said.

And, Liddy and Buchanan never were hit by a pickup truck driven by a fleeing gang member, he said. “None of that actually occurred. Buchanan got out of the way, slipped or fell. But no one ever got hit. . . . Officer Liddy never went to the ground.”

At the criminal trial, Deputy Dist. Attys. Laura Laesecke and Anne Ingalls alleged that the defendants fabricated a gun charge against 18th Street gang member Allan “Clever” Lobos after an April 26 sweep. They also alleged that assault with a deadly weapon charges against Temple Street gang members Raul “Prieto” Munoz and Cesar “Joker” Natividad after a raid of a gang meeting on July 19 were fabricated.

Regarding the April sweep, court papers filed by the prosecution said that Liddy “concocted a series of observations in his report to justify arresting Lobos for a gun found in a parking lot. His partner, Officer Paul Harper, reiterated those fabricated observations in the [probable cause] affidavit. Knowing the report was false, Sgt. Edward Ortiz approved both the report and the booking of Lobos.”

Contradicting Liddy’s report, Perez said all the suspects had been detained, but “we had nothing on them at the time.” Officers were “looking, looking around, looking around, looking around,” when a patrol officer “finally” found a gun.

“So I went over there and recovered it,” Perez said. “And then I told Liddy, ‘Hey, you know, I recovered a gun from there.’ And then of course he writes that, um, that he observed somebody placing that gun there.”

He added, “I gave him the gun and whatever he wrote in the report later was fine. It was his call. It was his caper. And he just did whatever he wanted.”

Liddy, Harper and Ortiz vehemently denied the allegations on the stand.

Regarding the July raid, prosecutors alleged in court papers that Liddy, “working in conjunction with Sgt. Edward Ortiz,” embellished being brushed back by a fleeing pickup truck “to create a scenario justifying the arrest” of driver Munoz and passenger Natividad for allegedly assaulting officers with a deadly weapon. Liddy’s partner, Buchanan, incorporated those embellishments into police documents, and on the witness stand during a preliminary hearing, the prosecutors alleged. “Aware of the fabrications, Ortiz approved both the arrest report and the booking of the suspects,” their court papers said.

Perez claimed that the arrests were bogus.

“I have some direct knowledge regarding some of the things that were written in that report, uh, things that were fabricated in order to affect an arrest,” he said.

“I read that . . . Munoz drove his vehicle southbound in the alley, hitting Officer Buchanan. And that the passenger of the vehicle opened his door and knocked over, or hitting, Officer Liddy,” he said. “Well, none of that actually occurred. That was what we decided to come up with after they were all taken into custody, in order to arrest them.”

Liddy, Buchanan and Ortiz insisted on the stand that the officers were indeed hit by the truck, an assertion supported by a defense accident reconstruction expert and the prosecution’s own expert.

Complicating matters, though, Perez volunteered that Ortiz had ordered Buchanan to break the truck’s windshield with his baton. He said he didn’t see anyone actually break the windshield.

It is a point Buchanan’s lawyer, Harland W. Braun, was eager to question Perez about after learning the windshield already had been cracked. Munoz was ticketed in the San Fernando Valley for driving with a cracked windshield two weeks before the incident in the alley.

“That was a real big issue,” Braun said.

In his statement, Perez pointed out that Liddy was disliked by some of the officers. “I think he had a complex about me,” he said. “Some of the guys were tighter with me than with him.”

He also said he “had problems” with Ortiz. “I just didn’t get along with him.”

Such statements would have given defense attorneys for the officers fertile territory to explore any biases Perez might have held in deciding who to implicate and who to protect, according to Braun and co-counsel Barry Levin, who represents Ortiz.

In court papers, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laesecke wrote that Perez would help to establish the existence of the loop and the conspiracy to obstruct justice.

“The People have alleged a broad conspiracy to obstruct or pervert justice. Rafael Perez, in conjunction with other evidence, would establish the nature and scope of that conspiracy. Specifically, Perez would identify all four defendants as being ‘in the loop’--meaning they would routinely plant evidence, fabricate probable cause, cover up misconduct and commit perjury. He would discuss how officers are brought into ‘the loop’ and how they were trained to stand by the lies they told even in the face of allegations of misconduct by attorneys, judges, juries of LAPD disciplinary officers.”

Without Perez’s descriptions of “the loop,” jurors heard little direct evidence of any conspiracy. Instead, prosecutors asked them to draw inferences about the police witness’ demeanor on the stand.

Jurors asked repeated questions about the code of silence and why the defendants’ memories were so much better than those of the police witnesses who testified for the prosecution.

Perez’s absence from the trial was the result of a bizarre confluence of circumstances.

When the trial began, Mexican authorities were digging into a hillside, searching for bodies as FBI agents and representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office stood by.

They were following a tip from a former Perez girlfriend, Sonia Flores. Then, as the jurors retired to deliberate, the scorned woman blamed for keeping Perez off the witness stand tearfully recanted allegations that he and a former partner, convicted bank robber David Mack, had been involved in three drug murders, burying the corpses at a trash dump in Tijuana.

Just as Flores’ allegations surfaced publicly on the eve of the first criminal trial to arise from the Rampart police corruption scandal, news of her recantation surfaced after incumbent Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti had lost the election and the case was in the hands of the jury.

Sides Differ on Why Perez Wasn’t Called

Prosecutors and defense attorneys differ on who was responsible for Perez’s absence from the witness stand.

The district attorney’s office, which refused to give Perez immunity from any potential murder charges, has maintained that it couldn’t call Perez because he would invoke his 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination if asked about the murder allegations. That would preclude the defendants from confronting their accuser during cross-examination--triggering a mistrial.

But defense attorneys Braun and Levin, who considered calling Perez themselves up until the trial’s last moment, say prosecutors could have, but never tried, to put him on the stand.

“They knew it would be a huge political embarrassment,” Braun said. “They gave the courthouse away to Rafael Perez. I think the D.A.’s office was very glad when this Sonia Flores situation arose.”

Braun and other defense lawyers said that after the criminal courts’ supervising judge, Larry P. Fidler, ruled Flores’ murder allegations irrelevant in another case, prosecutors could have asked the trial judge, Jacqueline A. Connor, to hold a hearing outside the jury’s presence. There, they could have determined whether the murder allegations were relevant at the trial, Braun said. Had the prosecution asked for a hearing, the burden would have fallen on the defense to prove the murder allegations could be true.

The defense says that the Flores’ allegations were a red herring and that Laesecke and Ingalls kept Perez off the witness stand because he’d do more harm than good to their case.

“Sonia Flores didn’t destroy their case. The guy who destroyed the prosecution’s case was Rafael Perez,” Braun said.

“This was a politically motivated, dishonest case,” said Levin. “Gil Garcetti wanted to show he would prosecute cops. He pulled the trigger too early, and Flores was the excuse they were looking for” to avoid calling Perez.

Prosecutors aren’t commenting while the jury deliberates, a spokeswoman said.