Rafael Perez: CRASH Unit, Ovando Shooting, and Rampart Fallout

Rafael Perez was a Los Angeles Police Department officer in the Rampart Division’s anti-gang CRASH unit whose 1999 plea-bargain confessions set off the LAPD Rampart scandal, the largest police corruption case in the department’s history. After being caught stealing cocaine from LAPD evidence storage, Perez admitted to shooting and framing an unarmed man, planting evidence, perjuring himself, and routinely fabricating arrests, and he implicated roughly 70 other officers. His cooperation led to about 170 overturned criminal convictions, approximately $125 million in city settlement payouts, and a federal consent decree that placed the LAPD under outside oversight for 12 years.¹²

Who Rafael Perez Was

Perez was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in New Jersey and Philadelphia, served in the Marines, and joined the LAPD in 1989, where he was a squad leader in his Academy class.³ Bilingual in English and Spanish, he took on an outsized role in Rampart, a division with an overwhelmingly Hispanic population where few other officers spoke the language.¹

In the early 1990s he worked undercover on a narcotics buy team, conducting what he later claimed were about 600 hand-to-hand drug purchases over three years. His partner then was Officer David Mack. In 1995 Perez transferred to Rampart’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit, known as CRASH, the anti-gang squad at the center of the scandal.³

How the Scandal Started: The Cocaine Theft

The whole thing unraveled over missing drugs. In late March 1998, LAPD investigators discovered that six pounds of cocaine had vanished from the Central Property Division at Parker Center. The trail led to Perez, who had been signing out narcotics under another officer’s name, claiming they were needed for court proceedings.⁴ A search of his girlfriend Veronica Quesada’s apartment turned up cash, drug paraphernalia, and a photograph of Perez dressed as a Blood gang member.⁵

Perez was arrested in late August 1998.⁶ His first trial ended in a hung jury that December. As prosecutors prepared to try him again, they linked him to additional thefts totaling more than eight pounds of cocaine over three months and identified $36,000 in suspicious cash deposits he had made in early 1998.⁴

The Plea Deal That Opened Everything Up

Facing overwhelming evidence as a new jury was being selected, Perez pleaded guilty on September 8, 1999, to eight felony counts: four of grand theft and four of possession of cocaine with intent to sell. Under the plea agreement, he received a maximum sentence of five years in prison and immunity from prosecution for all crimes short of murder. In exchange, he agreed to testify honestly about everything he knew regarding police misconduct in the LAPD.⁴

Over the following year, Perez sat for more than 50 interview sessions producing over 4,000 pages of transcripts.⁷⁵¹

What Perez Said CRASH Officers Were Doing

Perez described CRASH as a unit operating with considerable independence from the rest of the department, built around a “war on gangs” mentality that resisted supervision and ignored standard department policies.¹ He estimated that roughly 90 percent of CRASH officers engaged in some form of wrongdoing, and that supervisors tacitly encouraged it by praising officers for “putting bad guys in jail” even when they knew the arrests were fraudulent.⁷

Among the practices Perez described were “war bags,” kits of spare guns officers carried so they could plant weapons on suspects to justify arrests or cover up bad shootings. Officers fabricated probable cause in arrest reports, committed perjury before Internal Affairs panels, and staged phony evidence of assaults on police by ripping their own pants and adding dirt to their uniforms. The unit even awarded commemorative plaques to officers who shot suspects: black for a fatal shooting, red for a nonfatal one.⁷

He named names: his partner Nino Durden; CRASH members Edward Ortiz, Brian Liddy, Michael Buchanan, and Paul Harper; officers Ethan Cohan, Manuel Chavez, and Shawn Gomez, who were later indicted for assaulting gang members and filing false reports; and Brian Hewitt, whom he described as preferring to beat suspects rather than arrest them.⁸⁷

The Javier Ovando Shooting

The single most notorious act Perez confessed to was the 1996 shooting of Javier Francisco Ovando, a 19-year-old gang member who was unarmed at the time. On October 12, 1996, Perez and Durden shot Ovando inside an apartment building in the Rampart area. The shooting left Ovando paralyzed from the waist down.¹

To justify what they had done, Durden retrieved a semiautomatic rifle whose serial number he had previously filed off, wrapped it in a dirty rag, and dropped it near Ovando’s feet. The two officers reported that Ovando had entered their observation post and threatened them with the weapon, and they testified to that story in court. On February 20, 1997, Ovando was convicted of two counts of assault with a firearm on a police officer and sentenced to 23 years in prison.¹⁷

Ovando’s conviction was vacated on September 16, 1999, after Perez confessed to the conspiracy. Ovando was released after serving roughly two and a half years. In November 2000, the city of Los Angeles awarded him a $15 million settlement, the largest single payout from the Rampart scandal.⁸

How Credible Was Perez

From the start, investigators struggled with the fact that their key witness was, by his own admission, a thief, a perjurer, and a drug dealer. Perez failed five polygraph examinations during his cooperation, and informants told investigators he was using the process to settle personal grudges against officers he disliked. Lead detective Brian Tyndall called him “a liar, perjurer, a thief, and a con.”³

Perez initially claimed that about 95 percent of all CRASH units citywide were engaged in misconduct, a figure investigators could not substantiate. Former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates publicly called him an “inveterate liar” who was manipulating the system to improve his own standing. Former District Attorney Gil Garcetti and others said Perez appeared to be selective in his disclosures, shielding information about his old partner David Mack in particular and withholding details about high-profile cases.⁹

The limits of his testimony showed up in the disciplinary results. Allegations against roughly 40 officers went before the LAPD’s Board of Rights, which heard 86 cases and returned not-guilty findings in 54 of them.¹ A civilian oversight board cleared one officer, Armando Coronado, after finding that Perez held a personal grudge against him. In the criminal arena, prosecutors found they could not bring charges on Perez’s word alone. As Garcetti put it: “Unless you show me as a prosecutor something that corroborates this liar… then I’m not going to prosecute it.”⁹

The sharpest rebuke came from officers Perez had accused. Ortiz, Liddy, Buchanan, and Harper were prosecuted for allegedly framing a gang member on a 1996 gun charge. Harper was acquitted. The other three were convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice in November 2000, but those convictions were overturned the following month because of juror misconduct, and the district attorney’s office never retried the case.⁸ The four then sued for malicious prosecution. In 2006, a federal jury awarded Harper, Liddy, and Ortiz $5 million each, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the award, finding the LAPD had violated the officers’ constitutional rights by arresting them based on an “incomplete investigation.” In January 2009, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to settle all six related lawsuits for $20.5 million.¹⁰

What Happened to Perez

On February 25, 2000, Perez was sentenced to five years in state prison for the cocaine theft charges. He had been jailed since his August 1998 arrest, and court officials noted he could be released in as few as 16 months with credit for time served.¹¹ He was paroled in July 2001 after serving nearly three years. A judge permitted him to serve his parole outside California because of safety concerns.³

Perez still faced federal charges for the Ovando case. In December 2001 he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate Ovando’s civil rights and one count of possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.¹² On May 6, 2002, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder sentenced him to two years in federal prison, followed by three years of probation, and ordered him to pay $246,392 in restitution. Unlike his state deal, the federal plea did not include immunity.¹³

After his federal release, Perez legally changed his name to Ray Lopez. In July 2006, while meeting with his federal probation officer in Inglewood, he was arrested by Department of Motor Vehicles investigators on felony charges for allegedly lying on a driver’s license application by using his new name without disclosing his original identity.¹⁴ That November he pleaded no contest to the perjury charge and was sentenced to three years of probation and 300 hours of community service.¹⁵

The Scandal’s Fallout

Between 1999 and 2001, approximately 170 criminal convictions were vacated or overturned. According to a 2007 analysis, defendants filed roughly 333 petitions to vacate felony convictions; courts granted 156 of those petitions, along with 15 additional writs for misdemeanor convictions.¹¹⁶¹⁰

The scandal accelerated a Department of Justice investigation into the LAPD that had been underway since 1996. In May 2000, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division formally accused the department of “engaging in a pattern or practice of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable searches and seizures.”¹⁷¹⁸

The decree ran much longer than its original five-year term. On May 16, 2013, Judge Feess issued a three-line order lifting it, declaring the department “fully as its own master” after 12 years of oversight.²

The LAPD’s own Board of Inquiry report, completed on March 1, 2000, under Chief Bernard Parks, concluded that “mediocrity was alive and well in Rampart” and that a lack of rigorous oversight, auditing, and document review had created the conditions for corruption. The report offered 108 recommendations spanning hiring, supervision, evidence control, informant management, ethics training, and internal audits.¹⁹

1
National Registry of Exonerations. Rampart Scandal Group Exonerations
2
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Consent Decree Lifted
3
PBS Frontline. Eye of the Storm
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Los Angeles Times. Perez Pleads Guilty to Eight Counts
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PBS Frontline. Connections
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LAPD. Former LAPD Officer Perez Enters Into Plea Agreement
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PBS Frontline. Perez Audio Transcripts
8
PBS Frontline. Rampart Scandal Chronology
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PBS Frontline. Perez Credibility
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Los Angeles Times. City to Pay Acquitted Rampart Officers $20.5 Million
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Los Angeles Times. Perez Sentenced to Five Years
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CNN. Perez Federal Plea
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Los Angeles Times. Perez Sentenced in Federal Court
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Los Angeles Times. Former LAPD Officer Perez Arrested on Perjury Charge
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Police1. Ex-LAPD Officer Involved in Scandal Pleads No Contest to Perjury
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Los Angeles Times. Rampart Scandal Payouts
17
PBS Frontline. The Consent Decree
18
LAPD. Consent Decree Overview
19
LAPD. Board of Inquiry Report