Trial Promises to Be Showdown for Perez, Those He Accuses

For a little over a year, disgraced Rampart police officer Rafael Perez has woven a shocking tale of evidence planting, false testimony and frame-ups--spawning the largest corruption scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department’s history.

He has decided which of his fellow officers to implicate--about 70 are under investigation and five face criminal charges. He has chosen which convicted criminals to set free--more than 100 tainted convictions have been overturned.

Now, Perez soon may be telling his story in a setting he can’t control--a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. He will face top-notch criminal defense attorneys eager to cross-examine him in front of jurors notoriously skeptical of police. The future of other Rampart prosecutions probably depends on how Perez fares at his first public trial, legal analysts say.

“Up until now, he’s had incredible power. He’s been playing God,” said Harland W. Braun, attorney for Michael Buchanan, one of the officers Perez has implicated in the first criminal case to come out of the multifaceted Rampart investigation.

Several key rulings by Superior Court Judge Jacqueline A. Connor on Tuesday stripped away about two dozen prosecution witnesses--tightening the focus on Perez’s testimony and making him an even more important witness.

The Rampart probe has generated more than a million pages of reports, according to another defense attorney, Barry Levin, a former LAPD officer who represents Sgt. Edward Ortiz. It’s enough reading material, Levin said, to tie up his office printer for 273 days. If he pored over 200 pages a day, he added, the file would keep him occupied for 17 years.

The four officers--Ortiz, 43, and patrol officers Buchanan, 30; Brian Liddy, 38; and Paul Harper, 33--stand accused by Perez of planting evidence, filing false reports and committing perjury. They say they are not guilty.

They go on trial this week in Los Angeles Superior Court, accused of scheming to obstruct or pervert justice. Jury selection begins today, and the panel of 12 jurors and several alternates will be seated next week.

The allegations center on three arrests in 1996: The convictions of two men allegedly falsely accused of running down two Rampart officers with a pickup truck; the framing of a man on a gun charge; and the illegal search and framing of another man on a gun charge.

The defense strategy will be to paint Perez as a skillful liar who has manipulated the criminal justice system first as a crooked cop, and now as a corrupt accuser who made a deal with prosecutors to save himself by pointing the finger at other officers.

“He’s a sociopathic serial perjurer,” said Levin, who has questioned Perez at LAPD disciplinary hearings. “He’s a very skillful, manipulative witness who tries to control the questions. He loves the power. He’s a trained professional witness, and he’s used that skill to convince judges and juries.”

“He has every incentive to tell the truth,” retorted Perez’s lawyer, Winston Kevin McKesson. If he lies, McKesson said, Perez risks a sentence far more severe than the five years he must serve under his plea agreement.

And, the lawyer pointed out, if Perez is caught lying to frame other officers, he can be prosecuted for it.

Perez, at an unrelated hearing two weeks ago, testified that 75% of his cases at Rampart were fixed or tainted.

“It was like a war, us against them,” he testified. “They didn’t play fair. We went right along with it.”

But a trial is a far cry from a post-conviction hearing, an LAPD disciplinary hearing, or the one-sided debriefing sessions that have filled 33 legal binders--and spawned investigations that have glutted 27 CD-ROM disks, each holding the equivalent of an encyclopedia.

“We’re finally in a forum where the rule of law favors us,” said Levin. “We feel we’ll be able to expose him fully for the liar he is.”

There has been some speculation around the courthouse--fueled by comments Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti recently made--that prosecutors might not call Perez to the stand. But discussion of Perez has consumed the pretrial hearings before Connor.

Already, Connor has ruled that the defense will be able to confront Perez with results of five polygraph tests he failed.

And, other rulings Connor made Tuesday reduced the prosecution’s witness list by about one-third. The judge eliminated two dozen civilian witnesses that prosecutors Laura Laesecke and Anne Ingalls had hoped would corroborate details of Perez’s story.

Connor found that the prosecutors had failed to turn over to the defense the names of several witnesses interviewed in the last few weeks. Although she did not place blame on the prosecutors or exclude the witnesses to sanction them, the judge acknowledged that the result was the same.

The barred testimony includes the accounts of five women who were present when Sgts. Liddy and Ortiz and Officer Buchanan allegedly framed reputed gang members Raul Munoz and Cesar Natividad with a planted gun.

Laesecke argued that the five women would offer “a unique perspective” that other witnesses did not see, but the judge said investigators had turned up the witnesses too close to the start of the trial. Testimony could start next week.

Other witnesses, Connor said, were irrelevant or their testimony violated rules governing hearsay testimony. Also excluded were several LAPD commanders expected to discuss department policies, and about 10 officers that prosecutors said would testify that they did not hear two of the defendants complain about their injuries the night they supposedly were run down by the pickup truck. Convictions against the men they allegedly framed in that case have been overturned.

Connor, in excluding the witnesses, chided prosecutors, saying the case should have been fully investigated when charges were filed in April.

“All they have left now is Perez, a few cops and some gang members,” Levin said as he left court Tuesday. “It was a good day for us.”

In a defense brief, Levin and Braun--along with co-counsel Joel Isaacson and Paul DiPasquale--say they will attack Perez’s credibility the old-fashioned way, through cross-examination.

The defense also hopes to confront Perez with allegations made by former girlfriend Sonia Flores, 24, that he participated in several murders while at Rampart. At the request of federal prosecutors, the defense this week agreed to give them two weeks to complete their investigation of the girlfriend’s allegations before demanding FBI reports and other materials useful for cross-examination, according to the defense brief.

The defense also will draw on crime scene and forensic experts--including an expert in accident reconstruction who the defense says will rebut Perez’s allegations that Rampart officers lied about a gang member’s attempt to run them down with a pickup truck.

Perez--who has admitted being a dirty cop who stole cocaine--struck a deal for a reduced sentence by informing on others in Rampart’s elite, anti-gang unit, called CRASH.

With the loss of the untainted corroborating witnesses, the case once again focuses on Perez. In effect, he too will be on trial.

In her trial brief, prosecutor Laesecke says that she will rely on his testimony to “establish the nature and scope of the conspiracy.”

“Specifically,” the brief said, “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.” Perez also would testify “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.”

The prosecutor added that Perez will testify about the pressure officers felt to rid the streets of gang members. “To that end, Perez would tell a jury that the officers adopted mottoes such as ‘We intimidate those who intimidate others,’ and ‘Take it to the box’--i.e. the jury box.” It’s a compelling tale. Soon it may be up to a jury to decide whether it’s a believable one.