‘Vigilante’ Beating Conducted by Wilshire CRASH Unit in ’95

Long before the current scandal erupted in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division, top commanders had clear warnings that some of their elite, anti-gang officers lacked adequate supervision and were engaged in serious misconduct, including wrongly beating suspects and filing false reports.

Some of the same abuses now at the heart of Los Angeles’ biggest police corruption scandal in decades came to the department’s attention in 1995, when a Wilshire Division CRASH supervisor led his squad on a personal mission to recover his stolen pickup truck.

Sgt. Salvador Apodaca’s officers conducted what the city’s own lawyers subsequently called a “renegade run” and “vigilante effort” during which they beat and arrested without a warrant a suspect who never was charged, records show. An LAPD captain condemned the officers’ actions as street justice that violated the suspect’s basic constitutional rights.

Former LAPD Inspector General Katherine Mader said that complaints of various sorts were made about CRASH units across the city in recent years. The complaints alleged everything from use of excessive force and harassment of suspects and their families to general civil rights violations.

“We made efforts to initiate or participate in [Internal Affairs] investigations related to particular CRASH units,” she said. “But it was clear the department certainly didn’t welcome our inquiries, and we weren’t authorized to pursue them.”

Chokehold Used on Suspect

The worst offense in the Wilshire CRASH case, an LAPD discipline board found, was an officer’s use of a potentially lethal chokehold on one of the alleged truck thieves, Jose Cordova. “You better start talking,” the officer told Cordova, “or you’re going to do the rest of your time in the county hospital.”

Cordova recalled a forearm squeezing his neck and said he nearly blacked out as officers demanded information about a gun missing from Apodaca’s truck.

“I was thinking I was gonna die,” Cordova told The Times.

Critics question why the Wilshire CRASH incident--which led to suspensions and a referral to criminal prosecutors--failed to spark a broad review of the LAPD’s aggressive, anti-gang details.

“Didn’t alarms go off that this might not be an isolated incident?” asked Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the ACLU’s Southern California chapter.

“This wasn’t subtle. This wasn’t bending the envelope.”

Apodaca, who supervises street patrols in the Northeast Division, declined to comment.

But a high-ranking LAPD official who reviewed the case said it was investigated thoroughly and appropriately handled.

The official, Deputy Chief Michael Bostic, is leading the LAPD’s wide-ranging board of inquiry convened in response to the Rampart scandal. The board is examining all specialized units, such as CRASH, amid allegations that Rampart Division anti-gang officers illegally shot suspects, framed one man and improperly beat another, stole drugs, falsified evidence and covered up misconduct.

Bostic acknowledged that there are some similarities between the 1995 Wilshire CRASH incident and the more recent disclosures, including lack of adequate supervision. But he said it is a quantum leap to compare the situations. “We knew exactly what happened in the case of Wilshire,” said Bostic, who oversaw that division at the time as head of the LAPD’s West Bureau. “But with [Rampart] many mysteries still need to be unraveled.”

Bostic added that department investigators looked for broader patterns of wrongdoing involving the Wilshire CRASH unit, but did not uncover other incidents. The problem was addressed, he said, by breaking up Apodaca’s squad and making management changes in the Wilshire station.

In all, six Wilshire CRASH officers received suspensions of two to 35 days after being judged by two separate LAPD discipline boards, records show. The internal investigation was launched after Cordova’s father complained that his son was beaten by officers.

The first discipline board in 1996 dealt only with Apodaca and found him guilty of six violations. They included becoming personally involved in the truck theft case, approving overtime requests containing inaccurate information and going to Cordova’s house to arrest him without a warrant. However, the sergeant was found not guilty of allegations that he struck Cordova and another suspect.

A year later, the second board found five of Apodaca’s officers guilty of various misconduct counts, including filing false reports, court records show. Three were found guilty of using unnecessary force, such as choking Cordova or striking him with fists or flashlights.

Those three officers--John J. Flowers, Shands McCoy and Rodger Adez--sued to overturn the findings, charging that the penalties were unreasonable and that Cordova lacked credibility.

Court Backed LAPD Findings

Superior Court Judge Robert O’Brien, who heard the case, conducted his own review of the LAPD case and ruled that the department’s findings were supported by the weight of the evidence.

City lawyers defending the LAPD attacked the officers’ misconduct, saying that it involved “a vigilante effort by a group of officers to regain the personal property of their supervisor.”

Flowers, who is still assigned to the Wilshire CRASH unit, said he did not agree with the discipline board’s decision, but declined to elaborate.

McCoy, who is now working in a traffic detail, declined to comment, as did Adez, who left the force earlier this year.

The case was considered serious enough that LAPD commanders referred it to the district attorney for possible criminal prosecution. Prosecutors closed the matter without filing charges, according to the district attorney’s office.

The Wilshire CRASH detail’s “personal vendetta,” as the city attorney’s office described it, took place in June 1995 after Apodaca’s black Chevrolet pickup was stolen outside his San Gabriel Valley home, court records show. Inside were a handgun, cellular phones and a notebook with his officers’ addresses and phone numbers.

Apodaca traced calls made on the cellular phones to the Norwalk area. At the end of their regular shift on June 28, he and his officers headed to the area to hunt for the vehicle.

In Norwalk, they met with sheriff’s deputies and gathered gang intelligence information on possible suspects, records show. The CRASH unit’s work outside the city was totally unnecessary and could have exposed city taxpayers to severe liability had the officers become involved in a chase or confrontation, an LAPD captain said during one of the discipline boards.

Apodaca developed leads, but did not find his truck that night.

Afterward, some officers believed they deserved overtime for their work. But the pay reports they submitted indicated they had done administrative duties or updated gang books, records show. Apodaca signed off on the overtime.

The next day a Wilshire station supervisor approved Apodaca’s pursuit of the investigation into the LAPD’s Newton Division, records show.

Scouring an area of low-income residents and manufacturing plants, Apodaca’s crew saw the truck and arrested a suspect nearby.

The man later alleged that Apodaca “told him to shut up and knocked him to the ground” and then hit him repeatedly with a fist, elbow and a flashlight, according to court records.

Based on information they had obtained from the sheriff’s deputies, the CRASH unit headed for the home of Cordova, an alleged gang member, looking for Apodaca’s missing handgun and other property.

At the front door, Apodaca, backed by his men, waved a folder at Luciano Cordova, saying that he had an arrest warrant for his son, the father told The Times.

“They looked mad,” Luciano Cordova recalled. “I was afraid that I was gonna get hit.”

The CRASH officers entered his home without permission, he said, and Apodaca and another officer headed upstairs to his son’s bedroom.

Beating Is Recounted

Apodaca and Adez came in with guns drawn, Jose Cordova testified at an LAPD hearing. After he was handcuffed, he testified, he was choked and hit in the stomach by Adez.

He also said that Apodaca struck him in the face and stomach, records show.

During a Times interview, Cordova recalled Apodaca saying: “All I want is my gun. Give me my gun and I’ll let you go.”

Downstairs, the father said in an interview, he heard a thump overhead and noises “like when somebody hits you.” Luciano Cordova said he tried to go to his son, but was held back by police.

Jose Cordova testified that he was taken to the rear of his house and beaten by Adez, Flowers and McCoy, court records show. Flowers and McCoy took him to an unmarked police car, striking him with flashlights, he testified.

To stop the beating, Cordova testified, he told the officers where Apodaca’s gun was hidden.

He later was taken to the Wilshire station and signed a confession after officers allegedly threatened him again, he told The Times. “I signed it because I didn’t want to get beat up.”

The credibility of both Cordovas was questioned during Apodaca’s 1996 discipline hearing. That board dismissed the younger man as a gang member and highly suspect witness who admitted he “always lies to the police.” The officers produced a witness who partially supported their version of events.

However, the second LAPD discipline panel, along with the city attorney and Judge O’Brien, concluded that the account by Cordova and his father was more credible than that of the officers.

As the city attorney summarized it:

“Given the fact that these officers had left their own jurisdiction and headed out on a personal vendetta after a full shift at work, in the middle of the night, with a determination to regain custody of Sgt. Apodaca’s truck and belongings, the beating as described by Cordova is quite believable.”

Despite the city’s findings of serious misconduct and abuse, the Cordovas never pursued the matter legally. Jose Cordova, who has two small children and works in a cardboard plant, said he wanted to put the incident behind him. He and his father, a Mexican immigrant who owns the family home, said they are unsure of their rights.

One of the most unsettling aspects of the entire affair--and one that department critics and even some LAPD officers say should have triggered wider scrutiny of CRASH operations--was the context in which it occurred.

Officers who formerly worked in Internal Affairs question, for example, whether Apodaca was an appropriate choice to lead a specialized unit. He had a reputation as an energetic officer, and received a number of department commendations for his work in the field and the community. But he also had brushes with controversy before going to Wilshire. He was involved in two fatal shootings in the late 1980s and early 1990s that triggered unsuccessful lawsuits against the city. He also was part of the LAPD’s controversial dog handling unit when it was accused of an excessive number of attacks on suspects in civil rights suits the city later settled.

Moreover, at the time the Wilshire incident occurred, the department was still reeling from the fallout of the Rodney G. King beating and the findings of the Christopher Commission, which recommended a host of reforms.

Indeed, although LAPD commanders argue that the Apodaca case did not warrant the sort of sweeping review triggered by the Rampart scandal, they did acknowledge the misconduct was hard to fathom.

An LAPD commander noted during one of the discipline boards that the violations occurred amid “all the negative publicity, the civil litigation, and all the other associated problems we have had in the city of Los Angeles.”

“The officers should have known that administering a little street justice to a suspect would place the city and the officers in extreme jeopardy.”