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Perez has recounted a stunning collection of illegal acts, many as bizarre as they are disturbing. He told of one officer whose car tires were slashed. The cop and his partner tracked down the gang member they believed was responsible and dropped him--naked--in a rival gang's turf. Perez tells of another CRASH officer who shot a suspect repeatedly with a beanbag shotgun--a nonlethal weapon used to knock suspects to the ground--for the fun of it.
Some of the malfeasance was more lethal. Perez's most incendiary story concerns the 1996 shooting of admitted gang member Javier Francisco Ovando. Ovando was a skinny 19-year-old whom Perez and his partner shot and then, according to Perez, planted a rifle on to make it look as if Ovando had attacked the police. Ovando was paralyzed, and may never walk again. The judge at the trial lambasted Ovando--who had to be wheeled in on a gurney--for endangering the lives of two hero policemen, before sentencing him to 23 years in prison. In September, Ovando was released after serving two years and 11 months.
Perez also claims to have helped cover up two other unjustified shootings. In one, he says, he watched police plant a gun next to Juan Saldana, 21, whom they had just shot. Perez says the cops delayed calling an ambulance for Saldana while they worked with a supervisor on getting their stories straight. Saldana ended up bleeding to death. In another case, Perez says, police shot at New Year's celebrators who were firing guns into the air at midnight. He says at first he helped pick up the officers' shell casings so they could deny having fired their weapons. When it turned out that two men had been shot, the police concocted a story: that the injured men had been aiming their guns at the police.
One of the most brazen officers was Perez's friend David Mack. Mack is serving a 14-year prison sentence for robbing a bank of $722,000. After the robbery, Perez says he traveled to Las Vegas with Mack for a high-living gambling spree. Mack has reportedly renounced his police associations and claims to belong to the Piru Bloods, an L.A. street gang. And the Los Angeles Times has reported that Mack is being investigated in connection with the murder of Christopher Wallace--the rapper Notorious B.I.G.--who was shot to death after leaving a party in 1997.
Last week the L.A.P.D. scandal veered off in a new direction as charges surfaced that the police have illegally used deportation as a weapon. Perez reported that CRASH officers conducted routine street sweeps to check the immigration status of suspected gang members. That would violate a 21-year-old Los Angeles policy that in most cases bars the police from arresting illegal aliens and turning them over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. CRASH officers have also been accused of using the INS to have antipolice witnesses deported. They allegedly worked from a list of 10,000 Latinos they believed to be deportable because of supposed gang ties. Latino leaders have charged that the list is so long it amounts to placing a whole community under suspicion.