Scandal Reopens Old Wounds for Parks

Shocked by signs of a potentially serious corruption scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department’s leaders launch investigators into one of the LAPD’s dark reaches. An entire unit is under scrutiny, and a captain’s supervision of it is questioned. So severe are the allegations that the chief of police convenes a special board of inquiry to examine what went wrong.

All of that describes 1999, as the LAPD wrestles with horrifying revelations out of its Rampart Division. But it also describes an earlier LAPD crisis, which occurred in 1980 and was centered in the 77th Street station.

That time, the charges involved LAPD officers in bed with bookmakers, tipping them off to arrests so as not to interfere with the business of gambling. And the captain some department bosses initially wanted to take the fall? None other than Bernard C. Parks.

Parks, now the department’s discipline-minded chief, was then a captain in charge of his first police station, a rising star for whom greatness was predicted. As officers under his command came under investigation, however, the future so many saw for him was suddenly clouded. Ultimately, it was rescued, in part because of the aggressive defense waged by a brash LAPD sergeant named David J. Gascon, now Parks’ chief of staff.

Had the 77th Street bookmaking scandal, in the parlance of the police station, “gone sideways,” there never would have been a Chief Parks, only a washed-up, 36-year-old ex-captain clinging to a broken career.

“Seventy-seventh influenced everything for me,” Parks said in a candid interview about a seminal chapter in LAPD history. “It affected me all the way through my career.”

Painful Parallels From Another Time

Although Parks is not a man given to reminiscing, his recollections of the 77th Street scandal are still fresh and sometimes raw. And the lessons he learned from it may well play out in the LAPD’s latest scandal, in which officers are accused of beating and shooting unarmed suspects, stealing drugs, planting evidence and lying to cover for each other.

Reflecting on the 1980 events, Parks can still recall the LAPD supervisor who looked at 77th Street, concluded without any investigation that the problems were widespread and announced: “That’s what happens when you put that many blacks in one division.”

He still expresses anger at the blindness or venality of departmental investigators who limited their probe because they didn’t want the scandal to spread beyond one station--the only one headed by an African American. He still believes that only his diligence as a captain saved him. And, despite his famous poker face, he’s still mad about what he and many others believe were the racial motivations of those who targeted him, then sought his help in cooling tempers.

As the 77th Street board of inquiry was winding down, a member of that panel suggested to Parks that it was his responsibility to tell the department’s black officers that the probe had been thorough and fair. Twenty years later, Parks remembers his answer: “I told him: ‘You have no right, no right to tell me what my responsibility is. I am the one who went through this.’ ”

The problems at 77th Street were hard to discern from the outside. In fact, what ultimately tipped commanding officers was not any single flare-up but rather the combination of timely tips from bookies and the curious absence of conflict.

Night after night, vice officers would round up bookmakers. They’d knock on doors and emerge with gambling sheets--so called “pays-and-owes”--as well as suspects. It was easy pickings.

Parks was the division’s brand-new captain at the time, having been given the 77th Street area as his first command. That was a personal breakthrough for him, but also a landmark moment for blacks at the LAPD. Few African Americans had ever had their own LAPD command, fewer still at such a young age. As a result, Parks attracted considerable attention wherever he went.

Furthermore, 77th Street was home to two other prominent black officers, Lt. George Johnson and Sgt. Paul Jefferson. Johnson, in fact, was the first African American to head an LAPD vice squad.

Settling into his new assignment, one thing Parks discovered was that his predecessor had not made a habit of closely reading arrest reports, at least those out of vice. Parks, ever attentive to detail, changed that. And as he perused the documents, he remembers noticing a strange sameness to them--virtually all the bookmaking arrests were made by knocking on doors and arresting those inside. There were no informants being developed, no gambling kingpins being brought to justice.

Parks asked subordinates to try some other investigative techniques, thinking it might produce new types of suspects. A few weeks later, when he received an arrest report that demonstrated a new approach, he commended the officers in writing, pleased that they were branching out.

That’s when the hammer dropped. Senior officials in the LAPD’s South Bureau, as well as leaders in Internal Affairs and Administrative Vice, summoned Parks to a meeting and presented him with his correspondence. Was he aware, they asked, that the arrests he’d commended were falsified? Parks said he was not.

“He has all these people around this table, and they just humiliate him,” Gascon recalled. “I saw Bernie Parks come out of that room. He was devastated. He was sick.”

Thanks to information supplied by bookies, what investigators were onto was a simple scam: LAPD officers, eager to make arrests, would roust low-level bookies across South-Central. The bookies, who apparently did not have to pay the vice officers off, cared little about the modest fines, so they’d agree to be taken in at the department’s convenience.

Officers would call, notify a bookie that it was his turn to take a trip to the station, and the bookie would be waiting when the officers arrived. That allowed officers to rack up scores of arrests--77th Street, Newton and Southeast stations would have contests to see who could get the most. And it let gambling go on virtually uninterrupted.

Questionable Procedures

At the height of the operation, a bookie anywhere in South-Central could arrange to be arrested in the morning and be back in business that same afternoon.

But when the LAPD cracked down, it focused only on 77th Street, not on the south side’s other divisions, Newton and Southeast. The speculation at the time and ever since was that 77th was targeted because African Americans were in charge.

“That’s a good speculation,” Parks said.

Lt. Johnson and Sgt. Jefferson faced multiple allegations, including the offense called “knowing or should have known”--meaning that they failed to supervise their officers adequately. Both fought the charges at a board of rights, defended by Gascon and another officer.

Gascon remembers their defense command post, a suite at the Bonaventure Hotel, stacked high with documents, walls covered with leads. He remembers, too, the repeated insistence by Internal Affairs authorities that they had turned over all their files to the defense. Then, he stumbled upon a box one day at Internal Affairs headquarters. The box, labeled “77th Street,” contained files on the case that had not been shared--including documents indicating that arrests Jefferson had made personally were untainted.

There were other signs that the fix was in. At a captains’ meeting before the details of the investigation became public, a senior department official announced that the case was “another example of captains not reading their reports and tending to business,” Parks said.

“I’ll never forget that,” he added.

Those inclined to think that Parks’ brush with the discipline system may lead him to sympathize with those who today sit on the other side of it should think again.

If anything, Parks says he learned during the 77th Street bookmaking scandal that a captain’s best defense is a strong offense. He argued persuasively that he, unlike his predecessor, read the vice reports, worried about their sameness and recommended changes.

“You clearly, as a commanding officer, had to do your job,” he said. “If I’d been sitting there, looking at the ceiling, not doing my job, I’d have been done.”

Not everyone in the 77th Street investigation came through as well. Nine 77th Street officers were charged with misconduct; two were fired, two received so-called “stress pensions” and left the department before charges could be brought against them.

Even some of those who won ended up losing. Gascon’s defense co-representative, Steve O’Neill, made lieutenant, but his career was cut short. He retired not long after.

Lt. Johnson, though vindicated by his board of rights--which incidentally was chaired by David Dotson, who ultimately rose to assistant chief and then emerged as one of former Chief Daryl F. Gates’ most intense critics--also was profoundly rattled.

“Here’s a guy who all he ever wanted was to be a police officer,” Gascon said. “He was on the captain’s list when this all broke. It ate him alive.”

Johnson retired without making captain.

A Puzzling Promotion

Cmdr. Jesse Brewer, a dignified and revered veteran who broke much ground for black officers in the LAPD, went on to criticize Gascon and his colleagues for their challenge to the 77th Street investigation. But Brewer, always canny in the subtleties of LAPD relations, sent a curiously mixed message by then hiring Gascon as his adjutant.

Gates said years later that Brewer had assured him that there was no racism in the 77th Street investigation--and insisted that Brewer had agreed to try to talk Parks out of believing that there was. Brewer, who died several years ago, accused Gates of misrepresenting their exchange.

“I certainly did not make any attempt to convince Parks that there was no racial motivation,” he said in 1982. “That you don’t come up with evidence is not to necessarily say that something does not exist.”

And then there was Parks.

He never was charged with wrongdoing and emerged from the scandal with an unblemished record and an insight into LAPD discipline that few commanding officers get and survive.

Among the lessons Parks says he took from that incident: No investigation should ever be limited, if evidence suggests otherwise; no claim of innocence should be taken at face value; and no excuse for a lack of diligence is acceptable.

Parks’ record before the Rampart investigation contains examples of that philosophy in action. He oversaw a sweeping audit of sexual harassment and discrimination at the West L.A. station, going beyond the allegations against two officers there and reaching into the station’s environment and management. He took over the investigation into claims of police misconduct made by disgraced LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman, a probe that revealed a host of internal problems, although critics remain unconvinced that it got to everything.

There are the 70 or so officers Parks says he has fired since becoming chief. And now there is the board of inquiry that Parks has convened to examine the full context of the current scandal.

“I learned from 77th that you need to investigate thoroughly, do it right, look at everything,” he said. “And then you need to let the chips fall where they may.”