Dead Wrong

by Randall Sullivan

  Hermosillo’s formal complaint against Parks for his actions involving his rapist relative and his daughter’s boyfriend had forced the LAPD to open an investigation. He and Hermosillo both believed “Bernie would be destroyed” by what was revealed in the reports that had accompanied the complaint against Parks, Rubalcalva said, “but, basically, nothing happened. The people I worked with in Internal Affairs thought it was their job to bury this thing. In the end, I was the only one punished, because everyone knew I had given Xavier the reports. Basically, my career was frozen. I retired a few months later.”

  At least the investigation his complaint launched prevented Parks from being considered for the position of LAPD chief, Hermosillo said. The officers running the Parks investigation “did everything they could to mess with me,” explained Hermosillo. “So I got a lawyer, and we answered by setting up meetings and canceling them. They always wanted to meet with me in hotels or some other off-site place, so I was legitimately concerned about my safety, but I also wanted to drag the thing out, to block Bernie becoming chief.”

  Hermosillo by then was supporting the leading Hispanic candidate, Lee Baca,* “but the fix was in: the people appointed to the selection committee all were going to pick a black chief, period,” he said. “So they chose Willie Williams, which I know was a dagger in Bernie’s chest.”

  Parks would not replace Williams until five years later. “Because Willie Williams was such a joke, Bernie considered himself the first black chief and became ever more arrogant,” recalled Hermosillo. “He and I by then had a very contentious relationship, but he couldn’t touch me and he knew it.” Parks’s standard rebuke to any white officials or politicians who challenged him was to accuse them of racism, but Hermosillo was a major figure in the largest minority group in California, “so he couldn’t try that stuff on me.”

  Also, Hermosillo had won the support of many of the LAPD’s African American cops because of how he handled the case brought against a black rookie officer he considered to be “the victim of a training officer who hung him out to dry.” For reasons Hermosillo could never learn, “Bernie wanted this kid gone, and the two captains who sat with me on the board knew it. That apparently was why they thought they could get away with the shit they tried. Every time we were meeting alone, they would refer to the kid as a ‘nigger.’ This one captain in particular was a dirty, rotten, racist bastard. He’d say things like, ‘We’re gonna nail that nigger boy.’ ”

  When he couldn’t take it anymore, Hermosillo announced he was halting the proceedings, then walked out of the room and straight to the city attorney’s office. “I told him I wouldn’t sit in a room with these two captains who keep calling the defendant a nigger,” he said. An investigation was launched, and both captains received suspensions and demotions. Hermosillo’s resulting notoriety made it impossible for the LAPD to refuse to renew his contract as hearing officer.

  “And so I stayed in a position to see again and again what a villain Bernie Parks is,” Hermosillo said. A case that especially rankled him involved Parks’s attempt to fire an officer who was less than sixty days from qualifying for his twenty-year pension. “He was a good police officer,” Hermosillo recalled, “and his wife was a great one. It was actually a photograph of her that they used on LAPD recruiting posters. They had three kids together, all developmentally disabled, so they were dealing with a whole lot. One day the wife calls and says she’s losing it. She’s home alone with the three kids, who are out of control and throwing stuff, and she’s sobbing. So the husband drives to their house, helps get her and the kids calmed down, then goes back to work. But he’d left the division he was assigned to and driven into another one, which could technically be considered abandoning his post. And Bernie, who had something against this guy, wanted him fired for it.

  “One of the two captains on the board hearing his case was Bernie’s boy, so there was no reasoning with him. He was gonna vote guilty and that was that. The other captain told me he had to vote to convict because Bernie had told him there would be no promotion otherwise. By then I was used to hearing that. Over and over captains would tell me, ‘Hey, I got a call from the sixth-floor corner office—the old man doesn’t like this guy.’ ”

  This particular case had gotten under Hermosillo’s skin, however. “The second captain on the board was basically a decent guy and was torn,” he recalled. “At one point he actually admitted to me that he knew he was choosing between his career and doing the right thing.” Hermosillo, unable to accept the possibility of a conviction in the case, finally went directly to Parks and threatened to go to the media “with what I knew about him.” When the Board of Rights hearing reconvened, “this captain tells me he just got a call from the chief’s office,” Hermosillo remembered. “I said, ‘He didn’t fire you, did he?’ He laughed and told me, ‘I just got a promotion.’ I told him, ‘I think you owe me ten percent of your raise,’ and he said, ‘I probably do.’

  “So now I not only know how dirty Bernie is, I also know how afraid he is of being exposed.”

  In December 2000, Hermosillo had joined the Board of Rights panel that would conduct the fourth hearing of the charges against LAPD sergeant Paul Byrnes. Sergeant Byrnes was among the many officers from the LAPD’s Rampart Division accused of misconduct by Rafael Perez. In the late 1990s, Byrnes had been a supervisor of the Rampart Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit. After Perez was charged with stealing large quantities of cocaine that had been booked into evidence at the LAPD’s Property Division, he had negotiated a deal based on his claims that he could name other corrupt CRASH team members and provide evidence against them. Paul Byrnes was implicated by Perez in an incident involving Gabriel Aguirre, a gang member who was wanted on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, and who was believed to have been involved in more than one murder. Perez and three other CRASH officers had found Aguirre sleeping in an abandoned apartment, and in the process of arresting the man had given him a severe beating, according to Perez. When their supervisor, Sergeant Byrnes, arrived on the scene, Perez said, he ordered the CRASH team to pour some beer on a nearby fire escape in order to support their story that Aguirre’s injuries were caused when he slipped and fell attempting to flee.

  The three CRASH officers charged in the case were all convicted based on testimony by Perez and Aguirre. Byrnes, however, was not charged criminally. The LAPD did file administrative charges against him, though, and relieved the sergeant of duty. By the time he came before the hearing panel that included Xavier Hermosillo, Byrnes had already been acquitted by three previous Boards of Rights.

  Cliff Armas of the LAPD’s Officer Representation Section was assigned to assist Byrnes in his defense and had performed an independent investigation that poked a number of holes in Perez’s story. “What happened was that Perez and a couple of these other guys found Aguirre in that apartment and were standing around talking about whether they should beat the shit out of him,” Armas recalled. “They hadn’t handcuffed him yet, and while they were talking the guy jumps up and runs out onto the balcony and climbs onto the fire escape. When he got down to the bottom floor, though, there were two other officers waiting. There was a struggle, and he was thrown up against a wall, where his head put a hole in the plaster. By the time Byrnes showed up, Perez and the others all had this story that the guy hurt himself when he tried to escape and fell. Byrnes didn’t speak Spanish, so he used Perez as his translator when he questioned witnesses at the scene about what happened. And Perez tells him the witnesses are saying nothing happened, they didn’t see anything, or they agree with the story he and the others are telling. So Byrnes buys it. That’s all he did wrong.”

  Byrnes would be tried a fourth time, though, “because Bernie Parks wanted him to be,” as Hermosillo put it. By then, the sergeant had been suspended without pay for more than two years. Once again, Rafael Perez would be the main witness against him. Hermosillo had already listened to Perez testify in “seven or eight previou
s cases” and knew the man was unreliable. “While he testified I would sit with my laptop and type and I would hear something and I don’t believe it,” Hermosillo recalled. “Within fifteen minutes he would contradict himself. I’d point it out and he’d say, ‘Oh, you heard me wrong.’ So I’d go to the court reporter and have her read his testimony back. Then he’d just say it didn’t matter.”

  “Slick and slimy” was how Hermosillo described Perez: “He had this smug attitude. He was cocky and combative at the same time. He loved being the center of attention.” Hermosillo had gradually grown dismayed at how determined the LAPD seemed to be to protect Perez. For instance, none of the cases involving Perez were held at the magnificent Bradbury Building on Broadway in downtown L.A. where Boards of Rights were ordinarily convened, Hermosillo remembered: “The hearings with Perez were held all over the place. I’d leave my house with no idea where the hearing was gonna be. I’d get a call on my cell phone while in transit directing me to this or that address. Then Perez would arrive like some head of state, with a security detail that large, all officers from Metro Division, who’d make the other cops on the scene put their guns away. When he’d change clothes, from his prison garb to a suit, it was like a ceremony.” By the time of the Byrnes hearing, Hermosillo had heard from other prisoners housed with Perez about how he received special treatment and extra privileges from his jailers. “One guy told us how they would bring the L.A. Times first thing in the morning, and give him a pair of scissors so he could cut out any articles that he thought might reflect badly on him.”

  Perez had testified in the Byrnes case at a downtown hotel. “We weren’t allowed to go into the room where the hearing was held until he was in place,” Hermosillo recalled. “When we walked into the room, that smile on his face. This guy reveled in his lies.”

  The rest of the Byrnes hearing would be held in the basement of the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, “the first and the last time I’ve ever seen that,” Hermosillo said. The location seemed to have been selected because of two witnesses who had been discovered and delivered by Cliff Armas. These were a pair of prison inmates named Kenneth Boagni and Felipe Sanchez, each of whom had been held with Perez at the special jail facility in Lynwood used to house accused criminals who either were police officers themselves or had close relatives who were cops.

  In September 2000, Armas had read one of the few Los Angeles Times articles that suggested reason to doubt Perez’s credibility. Another jailed ex-LAPD officer, Hank Rodriquez, had told investigators that while he was in a cell next to Perez’s, he had heard the former detective boast repeatedly about his ability to inflict harm on those who challenged or criticized him. “If someone pisses me off, I’ll throw their name into a hat and they’ll get investigated—innocent or not,” Perez had told his cellmate, according to Rodriquez, who said that Perez had adopted “a gang-member type of attitude” while locked up and regularly broke into rap tunes in which he savored having become the most powerful person in Los Angeles and boasted of his book and movie deals. The Times article included a claim by LAPD commander Dan Schatz that, although Rodriquez had made his allegations more than five months earlier, they were only now coming out because his statement was “misplaced” by investigators from the Rampart Task Force.

  Armas arranged a visit with Hank Rodriquez the next day. “He told me how he had heard Perez boasting about how he made up most of what he was claiming, to get a deal on his case,” Armas remembered. “What impressed me about Rodriquez was that he only told me what he had heard and said it wasn’t that much. But there was a guy who knew a lot more, he said, and that was somebody who had been Perez’s cellie at Lynwood. Rodriquez said the two were really tight and talked a lot to each other. He said the guy’s brother was a sheriff’s lieutenant and that his name was Kenneth Boagni. If I could get Boagni to talk, Rodriquez said, he could tell me a lot.”

  The next day, Armas drove southeast through the coruscating heat of the Colorado and Sonora deserts to Calipatria State Prison, in the southeast corner of California, near the Mexico border, to meet with Boagni. Though the crime that had gotten him locked up was burglary, Boagni was serving a sentence of forty years to life under the state’s three strikes law.

  “With nothing to offer in terms of helping with his sentence, I had the full expectation of him telling me that he didn’t want to talk,” Armas recalled, “but to my surprise he more or less opened up. He told me that almost everything Perez was saying was made up, that it was all a gag. He said the district attorney’s office would bring Perez stacks and stacks of arrest reports and that Perez would take them into his cell and start dividing them into three piles that he called ‘the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’ The first was arrests that were truly good, and the second was arrests that were bad. The ‘Ugly’ pile was for good arrests where Perez made up lies that turned them into bad arrests, because he wanted to fuck one or more of the other officers involved.”

  Knowing that he now had at least one strong witness who could impugn Perez, Armas began to look for corroboration. That was what had led him to Felipe Sanchez, another inmate who had been locked up with Perez at the Lynwood jail. Sanchez was now incarcerated at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, south of the Oregon border. “Sanchez told me a story that was very similar to the one I had heard from Boagni,” Armas recalled. “He said he was angry at Perez because his brother was a sergeant on the Pasadena police and was a good cop, and that he knew Perez could have done to him what he was doing to others. Sanchez said he had made detailed notes of the stuff Perez told him and that he had offered them to the L.A. Times but had been told the Times wouldn’t publish them and didn’t want to talk to him.” Two LAPD Metro officers who had been assigned to the Rampart Task Force, however, already had spoken to Sanchez about Perez. “I only knew that because Sanchez told me,” Armas recalled. “The task force was hiding the fact that they’d interviewed him and that while he was in the same pod with Perez at Lynwood he’d offered to wear a wire to get Perez to admit what he was doing. Not only did the task force guys turn that down, Manny Hernandez told them not to talk to Sanchez anymore and not to create any notes or reports of their conversations with the guy.” “Manny” was Lieutenant Emmanuel Hernandez, the Bernard Parks acolyte who Russell Poole claimed had threatened him and blocked his investigation back in 1998–99.

  The day before the Byrnes hearing, Armas would requisition a plane from LAPD Air Support to fly first to Susanville to pick up Felipe Sanchez, then to Calipatria to collect Kenneth Boagni, whom he considered his side’s two most important witnesses.

  “Boagni and Sanchez had been housed with Perez two years apart,” Hermosillo noted. “Plus, Boagni was black and Sanchez was Latino, and they were inmates in prisons in the far south and the far north of California, so we knew these guys didn’t know each other. That’s what made how identical their testimony was so convincing.”

  In the basement of the county jail, Boagni testified at length about all the times “P-Dawg” had boasted of punishing cops he didn’t like—especially those who “disrespected” him—by making up stories that destroyed their careers and their lives. He still considered P-Dawg a friend, Boagni went on, and felt bad about “stabbing him in the back,” but knew for a fact that Perez had falsely accused any number of fellow officers, including Sergeant Byrnes, of crimes they had not committed.

  The hearing’s central drama did not begin to unfold, though, until Boagni began to talk about what Perez had told him of his involvement, and David Mack’s, in the murder of the rapper Biggie Smalls. The LAPD’s representatives, Lieutenant Fabian Lizarraga and Sergeant Gary Farmer, immediately objected that Boagni was about to compromise an ongoing investigation. Farmer actually leaped to his feet and shouted out his objection. It was overruled. Just moments later, Hermosillo followed up with a question about whether Boagni had been in contact with anyone connected to Perez since he’d seen him at the Lynwood jail. Boagni began to answer that he had bee
n visited by two LAPD detectives who warned him against testifying about what he had heard from Perez, but Sergeant Farmer again leaped to his feet and cut the witness off. “I remember Farmer shouting at him, ‘Shut your mouth! You were told not to talk about that. It has nothing to do with this case,’ ” Hermosillo said.

  Boagni went silent for a few moments, “then says, ‘I’m done. Let me out of here. I just wanted to fly on a private plane and it was hot down there,’ ” Hermosillo recalled. “He stood up and said, ‘I don’t wanna die.’ I asked him, ‘Whattaya mean, you don’t wanna die?’ And Boagni says, ‘I shoulda listened to those detectives.’ ”

  He and the two captains sitting with him on the hearing panel, Kenneth Hale and Earl Paysinger, called a recess, Hermosillo remembered, then, “Earl and I went to talk to Boagni off to the side.” The two hearing panel members had known each other since Paysinger was a star high school athlete and Hermosillo was a teenage sportswriter. “I knew Earl was straight,” Hermosillo said. “So we try to talk to Boagni and he just says, ‘No, I don’t wanna die. I should have listened to those guys when they came to see me.’ Earl shifts course and tells Boagni he looks athletic, and asks if he ever played sports. He tells us that he was a baseball player, that he signed with the Houston Astros for a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus back when that was real money, but blew everything on drugs. He tells us he’s got a brother who was one of the best high school basketball players in L.A. history and who’s now a lieutenant on the Sheriff’s Department, and a sister who’s a doctor. ‘I’m the fuckup of the family,’ he says, and you could tell this guy felt really bad about that. We get him talking about Perez, and then we ask him about the two cops who came to see him, and eventually we get him to agree to tell us the story on the record.”