For Private Eye, King Case Gamble Never Paid Off : Investigation: Probe of the beating incident seemed like the chance of a lifetime for ex-cop Tom Owens. But now, he finds himself broke and locked in a lawsuit after King changed lawyers and he was ousted.

Two years ago, Tom Owens was a prospering private eye, the manager of an established agency with 14 investigators and five offices in two states. Business was good, and the company was expanding.

Then, in March, 1991, Owens landed the case of a lifetime: He signed on to work for Rodney G. King. It was a private investigator’s dream, and Owens devoted everything to it. Owens and his team of investigators rooted through trash cans and worked scores of sources--including a well-placed Los Angeles Police Department officer whom Owens calls “Blue Throat.”

They interviewed King time and again and sheltered him from the media for months. They canvassed witnesses, built files on each of the accused police officers and their lawyers, and produced several enhanced versions of the videotape of the beating. Owens’ information kept him and King’s lawyer, Steven Lerman, on top of the investigation from the beginning.

But now, with two of the officers convicted and King’s lawsuit finally moving forward again, Owens finds himself in financial ruin. His offices are closed and his investigators are gone. Many of his former LAPD colleagues shun him, and he is locked in a lawsuit with King’s new lawyer, who opted not to keep Owens on the case.

Owens concedes that his management of the case, at least from a business perspective, was misguided. He fronted thousands of dollars for equipment and other expenses, and he devoted so much of his practice to the King investigation that he let the rest of his company lapse in a calculated risk: If he had stayed with the case and King had won a large judgment against the officers, Owens would undoubtedly have seen his business soar.

Instead, he was ousted, and there was little to fall back on.

“This case single-handedly turned a million-dollar business into a $10,000 business,” Owens said in a recent interview. “It left me broke.”

On top of all that, the Internal Revenue Service has questions about his taxes, and when he was recently found to have skin cancer, Owens had to pay the surgery bill himself--his medical insurance had long since lapsed. Owens has tried to recover by writing a manuscript about the King case, but so far there have not been any buyers.

Owens seems an unlikely figure to lead an investigation against police officers. A Marine Corps veteran who earned five purple hearts in two tours of duty during the Vietnam War, Owens looks and talks like a police officer. He is a forceful presence, powerfully built and disarmingly direct.

In fact, he spent 12 years with the LAPD, and he still speaks of himself as a police officer in the present tense.

“If a police officer dies, I cry,” Owens said. “If a police officer gets hurt, I cry. That’s a brother out there, dying or getting hurt. The average person out there reads about it in the paper, puts the paper down and doesn’t give it a second thought, but we feel it for a long time.”

But Owens said he seethed with anger when he saw the videotape of the officers beating Rodney King. Within minutes, he had set out to grab a piece of the case, figuring that he could help punish the officers and build a name for his business--then valued at about $800,000.

He called around and was told by an associate that Steve Lerman, a Beverly Hills lawyer, was representing King. So Owens called Lerman and asked to meet with him. Lerman still remembers that first meeting.

“The second I saw him, he looked like the worst kind of white cop,” Lerman said. “He had the cop look. . . . He’s a blood-and-guts type of guy.”

Still, Lerman was wooed by Owens’ knowledge of the LAPD and moved by how much the beating had angered the investigator. Owens said he had hoped to land a small piece of the investigation, but when his meeting with Lerman ended, he wound up with the whole thing. Within hours, Owens had dictated an investigation plan, and both men dove into the case.

“It became, for Tom and me, a way of life,” Lerman said. “It was like jumping on a Brahma bull.”

Owens and Lerman were immediately overwhelmed. Calls poured in from reporters around the world, and law enforcement agencies tripped over each other rounding up evidence. When Owens and his team would arrive to interview witnesses, they would often spot journalists or investigators from one of the many agencies probing the incident; the FBI, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and the LAPD all were at work within days of the beating.

Other times, Owens and his team were first. After weeks of searching, Owens found the passengers of a car seen in the videotape as it passed the scene. Once he had interviewed them, Owens passed his material to the authorities to assist with their probe. Owens also rounded up other civilian witnesses and said he even managed to find George Holliday, the man who shot the videotape, before some of the many official investigators had located him.

Amid the uproar, Owens and his crew doggedly--and literally--dug in. While a few investigators guarded King’s hospital room at night, others would set out on their regular “Dumpster detail,” Owens said.

Among the trash containers that Owens and company rifled were those outside the Los Angeles Police Protective League--the union that represents police officers--and the LAPD’s Foothill station, where the officers involved in the beating had been assigned. According to Owens, one trip turned up a document that listed the four defense attorneys hired to represent the officers. Armed with that information, the investigators targeted the trash bins outside those lawyers’ offices.

Harland W. Braun, one of the lawyers for Officer Theodore J. Briseno, called the practice “totally offensive.”

“I think it really is scary,” Braun said. “We, as lawyers, assume that when we write things down that they’re confidential.”

In addition to running his own investigation, Owens kept tabs on the progress of everyone else’s. In that, his previous contacts with the LAPD came in handy. LAPD officials refused to let Owens have a copy of King’s arrest report, but Owens called on an old friend, whose identity he has never revealed, even to Lerman.

The friend--the one Owens calls “Blue Throat”--got him copies of the arrest reports, giving Owens and his employer an early jump on the case.

“Throughout this investigation, Tom got it all,” Lerman said. “He’s a total cop. Tom has made his way through some of the better doughnut shops in this city, and he used every resource on this case.”

In the fall of 1992, after more than a year of representing King, Lerman was dropped in favor of Orange County lawyer Milton Grimes. King has never publicly explained his decision to switch lawyers, but the move prompted a vitriolic exchange of accusations. Grimes fired first, accusing Lerman of withholding documents from him that were needed for the case and filing a complaint with the California Bar Assn.; Lerman responded with a complaint charging that Grimes had improperly lured King away from him.

Owens stayed with the case for a while but ended up on the outside. He says Grimes owes him money; Grimes denies it. Neither man has much to say about the other.

“I just flat don’t like Mr. Grimes,” Owens said. “I’m uneasy with his style.”

Last month, Owens filed a lawsuit against Grimes, alleging that the lawyer owes him $4,100 for work performed on King’s behalf. Grimes would not comment on the suit in detail, except to say that he had never hired Owens and looks forward to arguing the issue in court.

Grimes, who has his own private investigator, would not discuss why he refused to keep Owens on the case, but others say the lawyer may have been bothered by Owens’ tactics. One person familiar with Owens’ work alleges, among other things, that Owens once encouraged a witness to leave the country rather than be interviewed by lawyers for the officers--a charge Owens denies.

Owens said his conduct has always been ethical. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of police to search a person’s trash, so Owens believes that his garbage escapades were within bounds. “I was a thorough field investigator, and that’s all,” he said.

Today, with his 14 investigators gone, Owens works mostly out of his home and is trying to set up a small Orange County office. He has tried to solve at least a portion of his financial woes by writing a 359-page tome titled “Lying Eyes,” which meticulously tells the story of his work on the King case. Owens has hired literary agent Steven Fisher to market the book--an account rich in detail and told in Owens’ cocksure style--but so far, no publisher has come calling.

Grimes is aware of Owens’ literary efforts, and he does not approve. In his letter to the Bar Assn., Grimes criticized the investigator for trying to sell the story of his experiences while “Mr. King was in the clutches of Mr. Lerman.”

From King, there is only silence. Once Owens squired his famous client from hotel to hotel, intervened when he was being arrested on one charge or another. But the two men have not spoken since last year.

“I’m a little resentful of that, sure,” Owens conceded, his gruffness giving way for a moment. “To this day, as far as I’m concerned, I’m still his investigator.”

Lerman is sympathetic. Like Owens, he has been cut off. And he appreciates the pain of grasping a historic case, riding it to fame and then seeing it slip away.

“You’re just kind of left with a sad feeling,” Lerman said. “It’s as though Tom, as a soldier in the field, was deserted by his commanding officer.”