Nino Durden: The LAPD Officer Behind the Rampart Scandal

Nino Durden is a former Los Angeles Police Department officer who, as a member of the Rampart Division’s CRASH anti-gang unit in the mid-1990s, shot an unarmed 18th Street gang member, planted a rifle on him, and sent him to prison on fabricated charges. Durden later pleaded guilty to ten state and federal crimes tied to that shooting and to other on-duty misconduct, and his case became one of the defining stories of the Rampart corruption scandal that reshaped the LAPD.

What Durden Did to Javier Ovando

On October 12, 1996, Durden and his partner Rafael Perez were working out of an apartment used as a CRASH observation post in the Rampart patrol area. Nineteen-year-old Javier Ovando, an 18th Street gang member, wandered in. According to Perez’s later confession, the officers argued with him, and Durden opened fire. Perez fired three rounds. Durden fired one. Ovando was unarmed. He was struck in the chest and head and left paralyzed from the waist down.¹

Durden then staged the scene. He left and came back with a semi-automatic rifle fitted with a “banana clip” that had been seized in a prior gang sweep, a weapon whose serial number he had filed off days earlier. He placed it near Ovando’s body.² Durden took the lead with the shooting investigators and gave a fabricated account that Ovando had burst through a door armed with the rifle. Both officers repeated that story in their reports and under oath.¹

Based on that testimony and the planted weapon, Ovando was charged with two counts of assault with a firearm on a police officer. He was convicted on February 20, 1997, and sentenced to 23 years in prison, the maximum allowed. The prosecution memorandum described him as an armed assassin who had broken in to kill the officers.² He served roughly two and a half years before his conviction was vacated on September 16, 1999.³

How Durden Was Exposed

Durden was not caught through the Ovando case directly. He was caught because his partner was caught stealing cocaine.

In late March 1998, LAPD officials discovered that six pounds of cocaine, valued at over a million dollars, were missing from the property room at Parker Center. Investigators traced it to Rafael Perez, who had checked out the drugs under another officer’s name. Perez was arrested in August 1998. His first trial ended in a hung jury, and while prosecutors prepared a retrial, investigators found eleven more suspicious cocaine transfers in which Perez had swapped the drugs for Bisquick.⁴³

On September 8, 1999, Perez took a deal: five years in prison, immunity for all crimes short of murder, and full cooperation. Over nine months he sat for more than 50 interviews that produced over 4,000 pages of transcripts. He implicated roughly 70 officers and identified 91 bad arrests involving about 160 people. Forty-four of those arrests involved Durden.¹ Among what Perez told investigators was the full account of the Ovando shooting.

The Charges Against Durden and His Plea

On July 28, 2000, prosecutors filed criminal charges against Durden, then 32. He was arrested at gunpoint and held on $680,000 bail. The charges included attempted murder for the Ovando shooting, plus five additional counts of on-duty criminal conduct, among them an August 1997 armed robbery and a perjury count tied to the October 1996 arrest of Miguel Hernandez.⁵

At his July 31, 2000 arraignment, Durden pleaded not guilty. Judge Larry Paul Fidler refused to lower his bail. His attorney, Bill Seki, said Durden “remains innocent” and called Perez an “admitted liar and thief.”⁶

Within a year he reversed course. On March 30, 2001, Durden signed a comprehensive plea deal covering both federal and state charges, pleading guilty to ten counts in all. The six state counts were obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, two counts of filing false police reports, and grand theft. The four federal counts were three counts of conspiring to violate defendants’ civil rights and one count of possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. In exchange, the attempted murder charge was dismissed, and Durden agreed to cooperate fully with ongoing corruption investigations.⁷⁸

The crimes covered by the pleas went well beyond Ovando. They included the May 1997 framing of Jose Madrid, the April 1997 theft of $1,300 from Jorge Toscano and Cynthia Diaz, and the August 1997 theft of property from Grace Cox.⁸ District Attorney Steve Cooley announced that Durden had “agreed to cooperate with local and federal authorities in their continuing investigation into corruption by officers in the Rampart Division.”⁷

Durden’s Sentence

Durden was sentenced in two separate proceedings. In June 2002, U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder sentenced him to three years in federal prison for the civil rights violations and the obliterated-serial-number count. Judge Snyder also ordered $281,010 in restitution, an amount calculated primarily to cover the cost of prosecuting and imprisoning people falsely convicted based on his fabricated evidence, plus $1,300 to reimburse the couple he and Perez had robbed during a 1997 drug raid.⁹

On August 14, 2002, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley sentenced Durden to five years in state prison on the six state counts. The state sentence ran concurrently with the federal term. Judge Wesley ordered Durden to surrender to federal authorities on September 12, 2002.¹⁰¹¹

The record is not fully consistent on the overall term. At the time of his March 2001 plea, reports described an agreement for roughly seven years and eight months.⁸ The actual concurrent sentences imposed produced a shorter effective prison term.

Where Durden Fit in the Rampart Scandal

Durden’s crimes were among the worst individual acts in the Rampart scandal, but the misconduct around him was systemic. Perez described a CRASH culture in which officers emulated gang style, kept “war bags” with spare guns to plant on suspects, and received plaques from supervisors for officer-involved shootings. He said the unit’s unofficial motto was “We intimidate those who intimidate others.”¹

Prosecutors leaned on Durden because Perez alone was a problem witness. Former District Attorney Gil Garcetti called Perez “a liar, the thief, the perjurer” and insisted on independent corroboration before any case was brought on his word alone. In internal disciplinary proceedings, 69 percent of the 52 boards of rights hearings held by December 2001 ended in not-guilty findings.¹² Durden’s cooperation was meant to supply the corroboration Perez could not, though the available record does not detail specific trials in which Durden testified against other officers.

The broader fallout was large. Nearly 100 criminal convictions were overturned as a direct result of the scandal, and by 2007 defendants had filed about 333 petitions to vacate felony convictions, of which 156 were granted, with roughly 170 total exonerations.²¹²³¹³¹⁴

1
PBS Frontline. LAPD Scandal Audio
2
National Registry of Exonerations. Rampart Scandal Group Exonerations
3
PBS Frontline. Rampart Scandal Chronology
4
LAPD. Former LAPD Officer Perez Enters Into Plea Agreement
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Los Angeles Times. Rampart Officer Durden Expected to Face Charges
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CNN. LAPD Officer Pleads Not Guilty
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UPI. Rampart Cop Nino Durden to Cooperate
8
Los Angeles Times. Ex-Officer Pleads Guilty to 10 Charges
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Los Angeles Times. Ex-Officer Durden Gets 3 Years in Federal Prison
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CNN. Rampart Officer Sentenced
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Los Angeles Times. Ex-Officer Durden Gets 5 Years in State Prison
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PBS Frontline. Rampart Scandal Outcomes
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LAPD. Consent Decree Overview
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CBS News Los Angeles. Civil Rights Consent Decree Over LAPD Lifted After Almost 12 Years