Perez’s Lawyer Changed Roles to Defend and Befriend a Cop

They are an unlikely pair: The lawyer who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles fearing the police, and the cop who now admits he gave some residents in the LAPD’s Rampart Division good reason to fear him.

But after ex-officer Rafael Perez was sentenced to five years in prison Friday, few are questioning whether he was well represented by attorney Winston Kevin McKesson.

As part of a plea bargain, Perez pleaded guilty in September to stealing eight pounds of cocaine from LAPD evidence facilities. He has since admitted to stealing four more pounds of drugs, and has implicated himself and his former partners in a litany of crimes ranging from assaults to unjustified shootings. Despite being involved in the framing of more than 99 people, many of whom were sent to prison for years, Perez himself may walk free in as little as 16 months.

“I think some people would call it a pretty sweet deal,” said Laurie Levenson, a dean at Loyola Law School and a former federal prosecutor.

McKesson, who brokered the deal with Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Rosenthal, makes no apologies for what some may perceive as a light sentence.

“My guy,” he said, referring to Perez, “is going to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.”

McKesson, 42, is a lawyer far more accustomed to suing police officers than representing them. As a young man, he said, he and his friends were routinely harassed by police in the neighborhood where he grew up near the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, the flash point of the 1992 riots. His first term paper at Loyola Marymount University was on police misconduct. And soon after he graduated from UCLA’s law school in 1982 he went to work for a lawyer famous for filing civil rights lawsuits on behalf of the victims of police brutality.

“I could see in him then a zeal,” said civil rights attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who hired McKesson in 1985.

Cochran, who has been following the corruption scandal from his second home in New York City, praised McKesson’s handling of the case, which he described as “the ultimate irony” for his former protege.

Indeed, McKesson said he has represented only two police officers before Perez, and that both of them were suing other police departments for civil rights violations.

“If Perez had initially approached me and he was charged with excessive force claims, I probably would not have been inclined to take the case,” McKesson said. “I had always been on the other side, the person talking about civil rights.”

McKesson said he wound up representing Perez, in part, because a local judge who attends McKesson’s church recommended him to the former officer’s in-laws.

At the time, in the summer of 1998, Perez was charged with stealing six pounds of cocaine from LAPD evidence lockers.

McKesson defended Perez in that case, and in the process the two became friends.

“Even though he was the client, it was like we were a team,” said McKesson, who goes by his middle name of Kevin. “I’d be disappointed about something and he’d say, ‘Kevin, keep your chin up.’ This is OK.”

For a while, Perez was right. The judge ordered a mistrial when the jury declared itself hopelessly hung, 8 to 4 in favor of conviction.

Authorities investigating Perez said they were able to strengthen their case considerably in the months leading up to what would have been Perez’s second trial last September.

But McKesson contends his case had improved, too.

“I thought our case was stronger. I encouraged him to go back to trial,” McKesson said.

What the lawyer now says he didn’t know then was that Perez had more on his mind than just drug theft allegations, that he was having nightmares about what he’d done as cop.

“He looked at me and told me it was time for him to accept responsibility,” McKesson said.

Consumed by Work on the Case

Since that day, his role as dogged defense attorney has merged somewhat with that of civil rights proponent. He has worked 12-hour days since September, making sure that “the deal” didn’t fall apart, all the while reminding anyone who would listen that Perez, transgressions aside, was motivated by more than the desire to save what was left of his life.

A couple of days after the scandal broke with news that Perez had implicated himself and a former partner in the shooting and subsequent framing of an unarmed man, McKesson described himself to two Times reporters during a get-to-know-you meeting in the parking lot of a Hollywood burger joint.

No. 1, he said, he would not talk about anything that was part of the ongoing investigation stemming from Perez’s admissions and allegations.

Beyond that, “You can page me any time--24 hours a day. I’m a 24-7 type of guy. . . . The only time I will not return your page is if I’m at church, at my kids’ basketball game or practice or in court.”

McKesson is married to a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney and is the father of three boys, ages 11, 8 and 2. Although Cochran was his professional mentor, he calls his mother, a retired cosmetics saleswoman, and his father, a former skycap at Los Angeles International Airport, “my heroes.” He has a law office in Beverly Hills, where he works with two other former Cochran associates, Carl Douglas and John Sweeney.

“We call ourselves the ex-men,” McKesson said. “Johnnie Cochran West.”

For the past 18 months, one-third of Johnnie Cochran West has spent most of his time with one client--Perez.

During countless hours of interrogations with LAPD investigators and deputy district attorneys’, transcripts of the proceedings show, McKesson frequently would jump in, protecting the interests of his client. Over time, his jailhouse visits with Perez have moved from the purely professional to the more personal. He said the two would talk as much about baseball as bad shootings.

“I’ve grown to like Perez. I think we’re friends, and to some extent I really admire him,” McKesson said.

“I think he deserves more credit,” the lawyer added. “His courage is historic.”

McKesson dismissed the results of a polygraph test Perez failed, citing a nationally recognized expert’s opinion that the test was fatally flawed.

“People who are cynical, who are saying he’s just doing this to shave off time, they’re people who either don’t want to believe this is happening because they’ve got too much invested in the system, or, No. 2, know and understand that it’s happening but basically don’t care.”

McKesson said he feels good about the deal that could allow Perez to walk free by June of next year, even though he thinks he may have been able to win a second trial on drug charges.

“In a sense this is poetic justice,” he said of his client’s decision to come clean. “I do think society is going to benefit from these problems being exposed.”

At Friday’s sentencing hearing, the bond between McKesson and Perez seemed clear. At one point, as the ex-cop struggled to regain his composure while reading a handwritten letter in which he apologized for hurting his wife, McKesson rose and stood by his client.

Perez continued reading from the note he’d recently penned in his jail cell. Of McKesson, he wrote:

“He is just as irreplaceable as an attorney as he is a friend.”