Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

THE CALL

Mayhem and ennui set the tone for a week spent in the forefront of the battle against a city’s murders.

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

October 25, 1987

It has been four days since anybody has heard from or seen Walter Moody and people are thinking that something is wrong. The tenants at the South Andrews Avenue apartment building he manages say he hasn’t answered his door since Thursday. His parents can’t get him on the phone. And he didn’t call his boss Saturday when he didn’t show up for his part-time truck-driving job.

This is not like Walter, everyone agrees.

It is now 1:40 p.m., Monday, June 29. The happenstance of concern from so many places for Walter Moody results in two Fort Lauderdale police officers and a locksmith coming to his apartment door. There is a small crowd of tenants watching closely.

The three-story apartment building has a Spanish castle motif: white walls, red barrel-tile roof, round turret with small arched windows at the corner. It is a U-shaped building with a neatly kept center courtyard dominated by a shade tree reaching all the way to the roof. There are small bushes and shrubs about the courtyard, all trimmed and cared for by the manager, Walter Moody. The tenants sit on a bench beneath the shade tree and look up to the second-floor walkway where the locksmith has just opened the door to Walter’s apartment. The officers go in and find the place ransacked and the door to the master bedroom locked. They call for the locksmith to open it. And after a few moments inside, they call for the homicide squad.

George Hurthas gone home early. His sinuses are acting up and the last few days have been slow. He figures he can take the break. He is sitting on the couch and has the afternoon paper in his hands when he gets The Call.

It’s another murder. An apartment manager. No smoking gun. No such luck.

He is told where. He is told when. The how is not yet known. It is Detective Vicki Russo telling him this. She’s rolling on it, she says. And so are the others – they being all available members of the homicide squad. George Hurt, sergeant in charge of the squad, says he’s rolling too. A routine week in homicide has begun. Hurt hangs up and curses to himself. This is number 38.

Murder in Fort Lauderdale comes in all ways, times, places and circumstances. It is a crime unclassifiable in any way other than by its final result, the taking of life. For George Hurt and the homicide squad the only sure bet is that it comes and comes. This is Monday, June 29, and already there have been 38 homicides this year. There were 42 in all of 1986. The most ever was 52, back in 1981. At this rate, George Hurt is thinking he is going to need another case chart for the wall in the squad room. There could be 60 to 70 murders in Fort Lauderdale this year. That’s kind of scary. And that’s why he curses each time he gets The Call.

It is hard to account for the numbers. Economics, drugs, heat, full moons, whatever. Hurt’s squad has investigated three people shot to death in a fast-food restaurant during a Saturday morning robbery; a high-profile divorce lawyer murdered a few steps from his office elevator; a rock-and-roll singer beaten to death because he was gay. More than a dozen times the victim was either the buyer or seller of drugs when things went wrong. There have been the quiet cases that rated only a few paragraphs in the newspapers, and the big cases that drew the TV trucks with the microwave dishes.

It all adds up to 37times in six months that the squad has assembled at a scene that defied common sensibilities, the Norman Rockwell portrait of life. And now it is time to gather again. Number 38, Walter Moody, lies cold in bed, his blood four days old on the sheets and pillows, waiting for the homicide squad.

“Smell that?” says George Hurt. “They just rolled the body over in there.”

Capt. Al Van Zandt, a supervisor of the detective division, puffs on his cigar so the smell of tobacco will overcome the sickly smell of death.

The two of them are standing outside the door to Walter Moody’s apartment. Hurt didn’t have to be inside to know what the smell is; he has had years of experience with it. Going back to his stint as head of the department’s forensic unit before coming to homicide, and even back 20years to Vietnam, he says that it seems much of his life has been spent rolling bodies over.

This time he stays mostly outside the apartment with Van Zandt, content to let the forensic investigators and the assistant medical examiner do the work inside.

There are five homicide detectives working the first hours of the Walter Moody case. One of the first to arrive was Phil Mundy, the squad’s senior detective. But after surveying the murder scene and discerning that it was a “whodunit” as opposed to a “smoking gun” case, Mundy returned to the bureau to run record searches on Moody and to coordinate requests that would come from detectives at the scene. His partner, Pete Melwid, is still at the apartment building questioning tenants. So are detectives Mike Walley, Gary Ciani and Vicki Russo. Russo’s partner, Kevin Allen, is on the way, called in from a day off. When was Walter last seen? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? These are the questions the detectives are asking. In the early stages of a case, information is the only available tool.

There is a basic rule to murder investigation; as more time elapses in a case, the chances of solving it grow slimmer. So whenever possible, depending on constrictions of time, the overtime budget, fatigue and so on, Hurt puts all available hands on the initial stages of a case. “It’s called trying to figure out what is what and going from there,” he says.

The squad has a rotation system for assigning cases to lead detectives. This time partners Russo and Allen are “up.” They will be responsible for the case from start to finish. If it is not solved by the group effort in the next few hours, it will be theirs to work alone.

“I haven’t had a smoking gun yet this year,” Russo says as she starts compiling information in a notebook. “For once, I’d like a gimme – to come in and there would be a victim and over there would be the suspect.”

But it hasn’t been that way for Russo or the rest of the squad for most of this year.

While the homicide detectives corral and question the tenants and the owner of the apartment building, three forensic investigators are inside the apartment looking for fingerprints, photographing and gathering evidence. Dr. Felipe Dominguez, assistant medical examiner, is in the bedroom with the body.

Moody lies faceup on his bed and almost looks as if he is asleep. Almost but not quite. There is a stab wound on his forearm, other cuts, but it is obvious that none were fatal. And there is blood on the sheets and pillow, but the odor of death is not noticeable to anyone without Hurt’s nose for it. The killer had left on the air conditioner, slowing decomposition.

The phone in the apartment rings but the detectives don’t answer it because there is blood on it and possible fingerprints. After several rings, a tape recording of Walter’s voice comes on asking the caller to leave a message. He’ll get back to them. The caller is Walter’s mother. She is hysterical and wondering what is going on.

“Please, will someone call us as soon as you know what is happening,” she pleads after the beep. A detective borrows a phone in another apartment to call.

The detectives interviewing the tenants have come up with three potential avenues of investigation: Walter evicted people from the apartment. Walter was set to be a witness in an upcoming robbery trial. And Walter frequently allowed young men to stay in his apartment in exchange for work around the building.

Working from experience, the detectives pick the third version as the best place to start. And the tenants have provided a description of a young man named Troy who was seen around the apartment as late as Friday afternoon. Let’s try to find this Troy, the detectives decide.

Dr. Dominguez is leaving the apartment now and tells Hurt the body is ready to be moved to the medical examiner’s office for autopsy. Hurt wants to know the cause of death.

“Knife wound in the back, between the shoulder blades,” Dominguez says.

“Big knife? Little knife?”

“Big knife,” Dominguez says. “Kitchen knife.”

Three men pull up to the apartment building in a white van and unload a stretcher. They are the body movers, from a company called Professional. All three are wearing suits and ties, the top buttons on their shirts fastened. They are easily the best-dressed people on the scene. They move in a solemn single file into Walter Moody’s apartment to take him on his last trip out.

As they do this, the crime scene begins breaking up. The detectives are heading off in different directions; Melwid to a fast-food restaurant to follow a lead on Troy, Ciani and Walley back to the bureau with three tenants who will help make a composite drawing of the suspect. Van Zandt also heads back. Hurt, Russo and Allen are tying up the last details at the scene before leaving. And inside the apartment, the crime scene technicians are going to take a dinner break. They will have to come back to the apartment later to begin a meticulous and long search into the night for evidence and clues.

When Walter Moody comes out of his apartment for the last time, one tenant is still standing under a shade tree, watching and sipping a beer. Moody is beneath a white sheet. Two of the Professionals – one now has blood on the sleeve and pants of his light blue suit – are straining under the weight of the stretcher, their heels shuffling on the concrete. Once down the stairs, the body is gently placed on a wheeled stretcher and covered with a green velvet blanket. It is then wheeled to the white van. One of the body movers has blue tears tattooed at the corners of his eyes. Somehow it seems appropriate. The people here can’t let true sympathy get too much in the way of the work.

At 7 p.m. the yellow plastic barricade tape police had strung across the entrance of the apartment building is taken down. The white van pulls away. The last of the police officers leave the scene. On the walkway outside the murder victim’s apartment, the cops have left five empty coffee cups behind. And there are 36 cigarette butts crushed on the cement or dropped in the wood chips spread around the shrubs that Walter Moody had once planted and cared for.

It is nearly 9 p.m. before the detectives are finished getting a composite of Troy from the witnesses and turning over the collected information to Russo and Allen, the case detectives.

Russo and Allen have several leads. First to check is a name that Mundy came up with on the police computer. It is a person being held in the county jail who gave Walter Moody’s address as his own. It might be a former roommate and someone who may know Troy. As Hurt and the other detectives head home for the night, Russo and Allen decide to head to the jail to interview the prisoner. Russo first calls her daughter to say she won’t be home until late.

At home, George Hurt watches the first half of a New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals baseball game on TV before falling asleep. But at 12:30 a.m. he is yanked out of it by the phone. The Call. Fifteen minutes later he is at 600 Southwest 12th Avenue, the corner of Riverside Park, looking at the facedown body of a man with a bullet hole in his back. Number 39.

Walley and Ciani are also there, the partners who are up on the rotation. Van Zandt is there, cigar in hand, as well as Dominguez and the crime scene detectives. Somebody asks if anybody knows if the Mets won. Somebody else starts an electric generator and a spotlight bathes the body in a harsh white light. Above the grim proceedings the detectives can see storm clouds forming. It will rain soon. They hurry.

The detectives begin talking to witnesses and the two men who had been with the dead man when he was alive just minutes before. They get an idea of what happened.

Michael Connable, 31, was walking with two friends down Sixth Street toward the Riverside Pub. It was midnight dark, and a second group of three men were approaching from the opposite way. As the two groups passed, one of the men from Group Two opened fire. The men of Group One began running. Fifty yards later Connable fell dead a few feet from the door of the Riverside Pub, his blood slowly seeping down an incline on the parking lot toward a storm drain.

Group One did not know Group Two. Group One did not say anything to Group Two. Group One consisted of three gay white men. Group Two consisted of three black men. What did it all mean? What was the motive? Was it random violence? Was it racial? Was it because the men in Group One were gay? In the silence and the darkness, how could the shooter even have known that?

By the time the body movers from Professional arrive – the same three who came for Walter Moody – the detectives know they have the kind of case that will take a lot of work on the street.

“The only thing we can do is hope to find a snitch,” says Walley.

In the last 12 hours, Hurt and his squad have gone zero for two. They’ve got two whodunits and few clues to the perpetrators. Hurt says he could sure use a smoking gun case. He could also use some sleep.

It starts to rain as Connable is put on the stretcher and carried to the waiting van. The detectives split up and go home. Connable’s blood starts to wash down the storm drain. And raindrops fall on the face of the body mover with the tattooed tears.

On the wall in George Hurt’s office is a sign that says, “Get off your ass and knock on doors.” It might have been made with a salesman in mind, but the slogan is a creed for the homicide detective as well.

Outside his office, the squad room is a quiet place during the days following the Moody and Connable slayings. No murders occur, but the detectives are out on the street, knocking on doors.

Tuesday is autopsy day. But in these cases the autopsies will not provide information critical to solving the cases. So Walley and Ciani and Russo and Allen get the cause of death details on Connable and Moody by phone. There is no need to stand in the tiled room and watch the post-mortem procedures like they do on the TV cop shows.

What is needed is the almost always boring legwork they don’t show on TV. Walley and Ciani spend their time during the rest of the week looking for witnesses in the Connable case, knocking on doors in the Riverside neighborhood, talking to regulars at the Riverside Pub, and checking out the few phone tips that have come in. They are getting nowhere.

The detectives are also working informants, putting the word out into the netherworld network of people who sell street information that this case will bring up to $1,000for the name of the shooter.

Working informants is one of the ironies of death investigation. Snitches are often criminals themselves; information is gathered on the street by those who work the street – drug dealers and thieves among them. Some wear beepers so they don’t miss calls from either customers or the cops. Cops despise them and need them at the same time. But the trouble at the moment is that this time nobody is calling with any information on the Michael Connable case.

“So far, we have nothing,” says Walley, a large man who seems more to hunker down over his desk in the squad room than to sit at it.

Russo and Allen are having similar difficulties. Their efforts to track down the missing Troy are getting them nowhere. The jail prisoner they talked to didn’t know any Troy, was no help at all. The fast-food worker named Troy that Melwid came up with can’t be located, and might not be the right one anyway. On his application form at the restaurant he put a phony address down. They have tips to three other men who might be their Troy but so far they’ve hit dead ends.

By Thursday, the only thing for sure about the week’s two cases is that both are getting older and harder to solve.

George Hurt is sitting at his desk, shaking his head. He has the reading glasses he usually wears while doing paperwork off and the tip of one of the earpieces clenched in his teeth. The plastic tip is grooved from being clenched there often. It is that kind of job.

Hurt has to shake his head because he is mildly amused, confused and annoyed. In the wake of the week’s two slayings he has sat back and watched and read about two occurrences that have left him perplexed. The Connable murder has resulted in a civic meeting between police officials and Riverside residents, and members of the gay community are airing fears that gays in the neighborhood are being targeted by gunmen. So far, the issue has played well in the newspapers and on TV, but the problem is that no one has checked with Hurt or the case detectives, Walley and Ciani, about it. And as far as they are concerned, such fears are unfounded.

“As far as we know at this point, sexual preference had nothing to do with it,” Hurt is saying. “We are looking at it as random violence. Some kid with a gun wanted to pop somebody. And he did.”

Hurt says the confusion on the case has been further compounded because the night before, one of the local TV news programs out of Miami showed a composite drawing of Troy from the Moody case and said it was the man police were seeking in the Connable shooting. Troy is a white man. The Connable suspect is black.

“Unbelievable, how it gets sometimes,” Hurt says.

Shortly before midnight on Thursday, July 2, Johnnie Eddines becomes number 40. Detectives Phil Mundy and Pete Melwid, along with Hurt, are called in from home.

But there is no murder scene to respond to this time. Eddines died in a hospital. He had been found in his car in the 600 block of Northwest 16th Avenue, bleeding from several bullet wounds. He was alive when medical rescuers got there and was transported to Broward General Medical Center. He made it no farther.

The case presents one more irony of homicide investigation. The effort to save Johnnie Eddines had been valiant, but in the end unsuccessful. And, as in most cases where such efforts are made, the crime scene has basically been destroyed, left unpreserved because of rescue efforts inside Eddines’ car to save him. It means the effort to save someone may hurt the effort to charge those responsible for his death.

What it also means is that there is no need for the homicide detectives to gather at the scene. Melwid goes by the hospital to gather information on Eddines. Mundy makes a cursory stop at the scene and then goes on to the detective bureau. Hurt heads there as well.

Patrol officers and a midnight shift detective have corralled witnesses to the shooting and are shuttling them to the police station. The victim’s car is put on the back of a tow truck and pulled to the police station, too. By midnight, the investigation has begun.

All days should be like Friday. All weeks should end like this.

By 2 a.m., Mundy, Melwid and Hurt are wrapping up the Eddines murder, the first of the week’s cases to be closed.

From the witnesses they had learned that they had what was basically a “smoking gun” case; open and shut. Eddines had stolen jewelry from his sister and the man who had given it to her came after him – with two friends and a gun. The detectives spent the morning hours taking statements from the witnesses and preparing warrants for the three suspects. It will just be a matter of catching them. They go home with the case, for the most part, cleared.

The good luck doesn’t end with the Eddines case. Vicki Russo comes in to work and gets a little bit of the wish she made outside Walter Moody’s apartment four days earlier. The wish for a “gimme.”

A friend of the long-sought-after Troy is on the phone saying that Troy wants to come in and talk about Moody. Russo says that’s fine, she’ll be waiting. A break is a break, even if it comes after a week of chasing dead ends.

When Troy comes in, Russo and Allen sit him down in one of the squad’s interview rooms. It is just big enough for a suspect and two interviewers to sit around a table with fluorescent lighting above. The only window, small, square and mirrored, is in the door.

The suspect, whose full name is Troy Tetreault, age 18, begins by saying he was there when Moody was murdered but he didn’t do it. He ends by admitting he did it, but only because he was defending himself. Moody was attacking me, he says.

But all of the explanations Troy offers do not explain how someone defending himself would stab his attacker between the shoulder blades and then ransack and rob his home. Troy is charged with first-degree murder, and case number 38is now counted as cleared.

What has been a bad week has turned out well for the homicide squad. Two out of three cases cleared. Moody’s murder is the 31st cleared so far this year, a better than 75 percent rate.

In future weeks, Walley and Ciani would continue to work the Connable slaying but it would remain unsolved. The detectives would get no closer to the three men of Group Two than they were the night one of them opened fire on Group One. In mid-August, Ciani would leave the police department to join a private investigation firm. The file on Connable would remain open on Walley’s desk, the detective waiting for a break, a name or a clue that would lead to the shooter. But it wouldn’t come, and he would have other cases to follow.

The murder pace would continue in Fort Lauderdale, with the city surpassing the previous year’s murder toll of 42 by the end of July and steadily heading toward the all-time high of 53. Two detectives would be temporarily assigned to the squad to help handle the case flow.

Sitting at his desk one day not long after the last week of June, George Hurt would ponder whether the pace was here to stay, whether three murders a week would no longer stand out as an aberration in Fort Lauderdale.

“Believe me, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he says. “But you can’t really predict what will happen. I’ve been hoping that this is just an oddball year. It used to be that four or five homicides a month meant a very heavy month. Now that doesn’t look so bad to me.”

Whatever happens, Hurt says, the homicide squad is ready.

“Whether there are 45or 75homicides, we are here,” he says. “I could say that old saying about it being a dirty job but somebody has to do it, but I don’t look at it that way. I see it as being a dirty job but somebody has to know how to do it. We know how. We do good work here.”

THE OPENTERRITORY

They are the most covert of cops, working in the shadows and watching the underworld. They’re closing in on the Open Territory.

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

March 29, 1987

Little Nicky was driving his white Rolls-Royce on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, heading for some dinner, when he saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. He pulled over.

Nicky immediately recognized the cop walking up to his window. It was one of the local detectives who stopped him from time to time to tell him to watch himself down here.

“Mr. Drago, howya doin’?” Nicky said after rolling down the window.

“Fine, Nicky,” the detective said. “You got your license with you?”

“I better have that, right Mr. Drago?”

“Yeah, Nicky, you better.”

Nicodemo Scarfo, reputed overlord of mob activities in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and frequent Fort Lauderdale resident, handed Detective Chuck Drago his license. Everything was in order – not like the time Little Nicky’s 300-pound driver and bodyguard had handed Drago a counterfeit license and gotten himself arrested.

This time Drago and Scarfo talked almost like old acquaintances. Scarfo said he was leaving town that night, taking a charter up to Pomona Airport near Atlantic City. He’d had enough Florida sun for a while.

“I like your style,” Scarfo said. “You’re not sneaking around, watching me, trying to sit near me in restaurants, following all the time. You come up to me, man to man. I like that.”

Drago smiled. Nicky Scarfo had just paid him the highest possible compliment, without knowing the reason why.

The fact is, Drago and members of the secret police unit he belongs to did sneak around and follow Nicky, go to the track with him and eat at the same restaurants – sometimes at the tables right next to him. They followed his yacht down the Intracoastal, even went to the barbershop with him. They were closer than Scarfo could have guessed, as his compliment to Drago had just confirmed.

This is a tale from the Open Territory: Broward County, a location unclaimed by any single mob yet a place worked and sometimes called home by members of many of the nation’s organized crime families.

It used to be that South Florida was tolerant of the mobsters. But the nature of the territory is changing – and Nicky Scarfo is a sign of the times. After Scarfo had rolled his car window up and gone on his way, Detective Drago went to a phone and made a long-distance call. And that night, when Scarfo stepped off the plane in New Jersey, he was met by FBI agents and the police. He left the airport in handcuffs, facing his second indictment on mob-related charges in as many months.

Drago had done more than just tip his northern counterparts that Little Nicky was on his way. He and his partners’ work down here had helped put Scarfo in jail up there. They, too, are a sign of the times, a reason why the Open Territory is changing. They are covert cops, part of a new cult of police intelligence.

The sign by the office’s front door changes every so often from one business name to another. But it doesn’t really matter what it’s called because the name will always be phony and the business will never have any real customers.

The actual name is MIU, short for Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. Plain old MIU goes better with a nondescript operation in a nondescript location.

The detectives assigned to MIU work undercover. They are watchers and gatherers. They move through the streets in cars with windows tinted smoky black, comb through the record stacks at the county courthouse, and access the networks of law enforcement computers.

They watch through telephoto lenses and listen through electronic bugs. They tell their friends never to acknowledge them at the supermarket, the mall, even sitting out by the pool at a waterfront bar. They might be on the job.

MIU’s 25or so detectives come from Broward’s major law enforcement agencies. Their business, in simple terms, is raw intelligence. They are experts in the art of surveillance.

For three years they have led a quiet war on organized crime in Broward. Their major weapon is cooperation, the welcome mat they put out for other law enforcement agencies, both near and far.

MIU Detective Steve Raabe likes to tell a story about the time he went down to Miami two years ago to sit in on a hearing held by the Presidential Commission on Organized Crime. The witness that day had once been a major narcotics supplier to New York City. He sat with a black hood over his head and testified about the inner workings of organized crime.

When the witness was finished, one of the commissioners leaned toward his microphone and asked the man what he thought law enforcement was doing wrong. How come organized crime still flourished, despite all the task forces, the commissions, the police agencies, the money spent to combat it?

The witness didn’t hesitate. You people have to start communicating, he told the commission. Police have to cooperate with each other. It’s the only way.

“Now that sounds kind of strange coming from the mouth of a criminal,” says Raabe. “But he hit it right on the head. Crime doesn’t stop at the county or city line. There are no boundaries. So the only real hope of law enforcement on any level is cooperation.

“Networking. And that’s what MIU is all about.”

By quietly documenting the activities of mobsters in Broward County, MIU has become a clearinghouse of intelligence on organized crime activities for federal, state and local authorities. Nicky Scarfo was only one of MIU’s targets. Other tales from the Open Territory read like movie scripts.

Even so, MIU remains one of Broward’s best-kept secrets. It doesn’t seek headlines. “It’s not a glamour group going out to make arrests,” says Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Ron Cochran, a member of MIU’s board of directors. “It has always been behind-the-scenes work. The arrests go to other agencies.”

“We’re bricklayers,” explains Detective Raabe. MIU’s operatives help build the cases, put the foundations in place. But they usually aren’t around when the building is finished.

It goes back to the days of Capone and Lansky. For half a century, mobsters have come to South Florida to vacation, to retire, or to stay out of reach of the northern police agencies that watched their every move.

“South Florida,” says Raabe, “has always been seen by these people as a place where they could be at their leisure, and not worry about being watched by that Philly or New York detective who has been on their back for 20 years.”

And Broward County has always been one of the mob’s favorite hideaways. By the end of 1985, law enforcement agencies had identified over 600 members and associates of traditional organized crime mobs as residents, full- and part-time, in Broward. They ranged from soldiers to dons. Paul Castellano, head of New York ’s Gambino organization until his murder in front of a steakhouse in 1985, had a home in Pompano Beach. Gus Alex, an aging, reputed leader of the Chicago mob known as The Outfit, has a Fort Lauderdale address. So did Chicago mob boss Jackie Cerrone until he was imprisoned recently. And so on.

“Organized crime is a growth industry and there is money to be made in Broward County,” explains MIU Detective Curt Stuart. “It is safe to say we have seen the interest of all 28 of the nation’s organized crime families here.”

What that means is that the Open Territory is like few other places where traditional organized crime is found.

“In a city up north, law enforcement has to know the members of maybe one or two crime families,” says Sgt. Ken Staab, an MIU supervisor. “Down here we have to know all the families because we’ve got them all.”

And that’s why there is an MIU.

Twice in the early 1980s, grand juries evaluating efforts to stop organized crime in Broward concluded that the law enforcement structure seemed ideally suited for the expansion of organized crime.

Investigations were undermanned, efforts fragmented along lines of departmental jurisdictions and jealousies. MIU was established in 1983 after two other task forces had been formed and dismantled because of the same problems.

MIU has a $2 million budget, with each member agency paying the salaries of participants and sharing the overhead. Investigators currently come from police departments in Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Hollywood and Plantation, along with the Sheriff’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. The head of each agency sits on MIU’s board of directors.

“A frequent criticism of law enforcement is that it is too parochial,” says Cochran. “While a parochial approach may be adequate in some areas, we feel the best way to go against organized crime is consolidation of expertise. We began with the ambition of creating a first-rate intelligence unit. And I’m satisfied it is one of the best in the country.”

MIU directors and detectives often point to the Scarfo case as an example of what the unit can accomplish.

Investigators say that Nicodemo Scarfo’s interest in Broward County coincided with his release from prison in 1984 and rise to the top of the Philadelphia/Atlantic City mob. The diminutive, 57-year-old Scarfo has a criminal record that includes manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm.

The Philly-South Jersey organization had been run by the “Docile Don,” Angelo Bruno, until he was gunned down outside his home in 1980. Nicky took over after Bruno’s successor, Phil Testa, was killed by a nail bomb.

Investigators say at least 17mob-related murders occurred in the City of Brotherly Love during Scarfo’s rise to the top of the rackets.

That rise brought Scarfo billing on Fortune magazine’s list of the most powerful and richest mobsters in the country, his money allegedly coming from unions, numbers, loan-sharking, extortion and gambling.

The indications are that Scarfo was looking to move up the Fortune list. He started routinely making lengthy visits to Fort Lauderdale. In 1985, he set up his southern operations on Northeast 47th Street near the Intracoastal Waterway, in a two-story, Spanish-style house with an iron gate out front. He put up a sign on the front wall that named the place Casablanca South. The yacht docked out back was also called Casablanca, but there was a smaller postscript painted below the name. Usual Suspects, it said, a wry reference to the police inspector’s instruction in the famed Bogart movie: “Round up all the usual suspects.”

It’s a funny thing about the house and boat, Detective Drago says: Scarfo didn’t own them. Investigators are still trying to learn how he came to control them.

“Nicky liked the house and the boat,” Drago says. “So he took them. When Little Nicky wants something, he just takes it. You don’t argue.”

By all estimates of law enforcement authorities, Scarfo wanted to take Broward County, or at least part of it.

Florida had an upcoming referendum on casino gambling, and investigators believe that Scarfo was preparing to direct organized crime’s interests if casinos came to pass.

A decade earlier, Scarfo had done the same thing in Atlantic City. The President’s Commission on Organized Crime named him as the chief figure behind the mob’s influence in the casino construction industry there. Coincidentally, MIU investigators say, contractors who bid against the mob companies had a tendency to get killed.

Shortly after Scarfo arrived in Fort Lauderdale, the FBI initiated what was called the Southern Summit, a law enforcement conference on organized crime influences in the South. They named Nicodemo Scarfo as their primary target and directed MIU, a relatively unknown agency less than two years old, to work in concert with investigators building cases in New Jersey and Philadelphia against the reputed mob lord.

MIU would turn out to be a major conduit of raw intelligence on Scarfo, the reason being that Scarfo believed he had a free rein in the Open Territory.

“He was a priority up here, but I’m sure he thought he wouldn’t be much of a priority down there,” says Sgt. Bill Coblantz of the New Jersey State Police mob intelligence unit. “They’ve got a lot of other organized people to watch down there. So he went to South Florida without the same kind of police paranoia he had up here. He relaxed. That’s what Fort Lauderdale is for, right?”

But Nicky was wrong.

The mansion he had chosen for his Casablanca South was on a remote, dead-end street, but it faced an empty lot that bordered a canal. And across that canal was a five-story condominium complex.

While Nicky and his associates met at Casablanca South, their cars lined up and down the street, Chuck Drago and other detectives from MIU, the FBI, even Philadelphia and New Jersey, would be watching from behind the darkened windows of one of the upstairs condos across the canal. The view was good and the FBI kept the lease on the place for a year. The cameras were always rolling.

The detectives looked out on a world not previously documented in the Open Territory. While law enforcement pressure in northern cities had made the big meetings of crime families largely things of the past, Scarfo was in Fort Lauderdale hosting meetings so large that he needed a caterer. Sometimes, he’d take 15 or 20 people, documented by police as crime associates, out for rides on his yacht.

“It was amazing what we were seeing,” recalls Staab, the MIU supervisor. “These other agents would come here from up north and they couldn’t believe how open this guy was being.”

“When you see them go into a restaurant and the chefs and the waitresses all walk out and stand around while the doors are locked for the meeting inside, you really get an idea of what is going on down here,” says Raabe.

Little Nicky’s associations were not only with members of his own crew. The covert cops watched him meet in Fort Lauderdale with high-ranking representatives from many of the country’s major mobs – Colombo, Lucchese, Buffalino and so on.

“The nature of intelligence work is to take raw information and hypothesize, come up with theories of what is happening,” says Raabe. “So we see Nicky meeting all these people. Business is obviously being discussed. We can’t say for sure what was happening, but we have a good idea.”

And these meetings came with all the clichés of movies like The Godfather. There was the reverential treatment of Mafia leaders, the ceremonial kissing of cheeks and hands.

“Sometimes it got to be funny,” Drago says. “We’d see the cars pull up with 10 or 15 guys getting out for a meeting and they’d be circling all over the front yard trying to make sure they kissed or hugged everybody.”

Just like the mobsters, police don’t like offending their own. Law enforcement agencies are territorial, careful not to encroach on others’ turf without invitation.

It is the axiom of parochialism that Chief Cochran of Fort Lauderdale speaks of.

And that axiom flies in the face of MIU’s all-for-one, one-for-all concept of sharing intelligence among law enforcement agencies. After years of working cases, MIU has neither been joined by all the police agencies in Broward County nor has it replaced the organized crime or intelligence units of its member agencies. Instead, it continues to work with them and, as always, remains quietly in the background.

“It would be my hope that MIU would one day be the organized crime investigative enterprise in this county,” says Cochran. But in the meantime, investigators in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and maybe even people like Nicky Scarfo, probably have a better understanding of what MIU is all about than the Broward citizens who help pay for it.

“MIU is becoming a highly respected information bank on what these types of OC characters are doing down there,” says Coblantz of the New Jersey police. “Put it this way – on the Scarfo case, MIU has given us leads that we are still tracking down.”

While Nicky Scarfo was under the eye of MIU in Fort Lauderdale, two high-ranking members of his organization were in Philadelphia talking to the FBI and then to a grand jury. There were also 800 tapes of wiretaps. And from Fort Lauderdale came the MIU dossiers and indications that Scarfo was running the organization from Casablanca South. On Nov. 3, 1986, he was arrested while on a trip to New Jersey. A grand jury had indicted him and 17 associates for conspiracy and racketeering.

A day later in Florida, the casino issue was defeated at the polls.

Scarfo was released on bail and returned to Fort Lauderdale once more, but the grand jury wasn’t through. While he lay on the chaise longue behind Casablanca South, Scarfo’s empire was being quietly dismantled. He would face still another indictment.

On Jan. 7of this year, Little Nicky’s white Rolls pulled into Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the gray-haired, well-tanned man was dropped off at a charter airline’s front gate. Scarfo was traveling light – no bodyguard.

He went into the airport lounge for a drink before boarding. He didn’t know it then, but a couple of hours later he would land in New Jersey and the FBI and police would be waiting. Detective Drago had tipped them earlier that day after stopping Scarfo on his way to dinner. This would be the night that Scarfo would be jailed without bond for his second indictment.

Over at the bar, two men sat and watched Scarfo until he walked to the boarding gate. They followed and watched while he went down the loading ramp.

Maybe Nicky had a premonition. Maybe the back of his neck was burning. Whatever it was, something made him turn and look back as he got to the plane’s door. He saw a man standing at the other end of the ramp looking at him. It was a man Nicky had never seen before. Steve Raabe, detective from MIU, stepped out of character for that moment and smiled. Then he waved good-bye to Nicky Scarfo. A send-off from the Open Territory.

CROSSING THE LINE

South of the border is no longer safe for criminals.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

December 13, 1987

Seven years ago, the body of first-grader Lisa Ann Rosales was found dumped in a ditch near her home in Pacoima. She had been sexually molested and strangled. The case was not an easy one for the Los Angeles Police Department – it took a tip five years later for

detectives to identify a suspect, and then they discovered that the man had fled to his native Mexico.

In previous years, the case might have ended there, with police thwarted because the suspect was beyond the reach of U.S. laws. The problem, which had long frustrated American law enforcement officials, was that Mexico refuses to extradite its own citizens to the United States for trial, despite the existence of an extradition treaty between the two countries.

But this time the case did not end. Detectives turned to a new squad in the LAPD, the foreign prosecution unit.

Six months after the Los Angeles detectives decided that they knew who killed Lisa Ann Rosales, Mexican authorities were handed a complete file on Luis Raul Castro, translated into Spanish, and were even told where he could be found. They took the case from there.

Today, Castro stands convicted in a Mexican federal court of murder. He is expected to be sentenced by the end of the year and could serve up to 40years in a Mexican jail.

“Before we had the foreign prosecution unit, people were literally getting away with murder,” said Lt. Keith Ross, supervisor of the unit. “The fact was we were not actively pursuing Mexican suspects that fled to Mexico. That has changed.”

The Rosales case is one of many examples of how Los Angeles crime means Mexican prison time since the four-member unit began working with Mexican authorities in 1985. Since then, 48Los Angeles cases – all but three involving murder – have been brought in Mexico. More than half the suspects have been captured, convicted and jailed there.

Scattered cases have been brought in other countries as well, including one in France.

“The first thing people ask is ‘Can you do that? Is that legal?’ ” Ross said. “The answer is that it is a legitimate means of prosecution that is available to us.”

But some legal observers question whether suspects should face Mexican justice for American crimes. They argue that Mexico ’s justice system affords defendants few of the protections of the U.S. system – most notably, defendants do not have a chance to face their accusers; the testimony of the American witnesses is delivered solely through documents.

“My first reaction is that it presents an enormous problem,” said Leon Goldin, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. “We are talking about the LAPD, acting as an arm of our government, using court procedures in Mexico that wouldn’t pass muster here in a moment.”

The record shows that the California law enforcement officials are almost certain to go home happy after bringing a case to Mexico. No case brought by the LAPD has yet to result in an acquittal.

It is a great contrast to the situation Los Angeles police faced when they conducted a 1984 study that prompted creation of the foreign prosecution unit.

In that study, according to Ross, police reviewed all outstanding murder warrants – cases in which a suspect had been identified, but no one arrested. Of 267 people being sought, about 200 had Latino surnames, he said.

“That gave us the strong feeling that a large number of suspects were fleeing to Mexico and finding sanctuary,” he said. “There was no department-wide procedure for tracking, arresting and prosecuting them.”

“There was a lot of frustration,” said Detective Arturo Zorrilla, noting that the attitude of most officers was, “Let’s file the case away and hope [the suspect] comes back across.”

In theory, prosecutors here could have sought extradition on any of the suspects confirmed as being in Mexico. The two countries have an extradition treaty that provides for Mexican citizens to be returned to the United States to face trial for serious crimes. But, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said, “It has not occurred, ever.”

The refusal to extradite, officials said, is rooted in a firm belief in Mexican law that Mexican citizens who commit crimes outside the country should be prosecuted by Mexican authorities.

U.S. law, on the other hand, provides that U.S. citizens who commit crimes in other countries should be subject to prosecution there. (About half a dozen American citizens have been extradited to Mexico in the last decade to face trial, according to the Justice Department.)

The different approaches are reflected in a provision of Mexico ’s penal code that allows for the prosecution of foreign crimes. Although on the books since 1928, the provision was infrequently used until recently because other countries’ law enforcement agencies rarely brought cases to the attention of Mexican authorities.

Before the Los Angeles foreign prosecution unit was formed in April 1985, the LAPD, like most U.S. police agencies, did not have formal procedures for cutting through the diplomatic red tape to pursue cases in Mexico. Few detectives even knew it was possible.

Today, a U.S. Justice Department international law specialist said, the Los Angeles unit is in “the forefront of using this tactic.”

Operating under the fugitive division headed by Ross, the foreign prosecution unit is led by two homicide squad veterans, Detectives Zorrilla and Gilberto Moya.

Both see their jobs as equal parts detective work and diplomacy.

To file cases in Mexico, the unit, whose members are bilingual, compiles a written record of the case in Spanish. Affidavits, witness statements, photographs and descriptions of evidence are put into a report they call the “murder book.”

This consolidation and translation is often the longest part of the procedure, usually lasting several weeks. The Lisa Ann Rosales case filled four thick files.

The district attorney’s office must then formally relinquish jurisdiction of a case, an action that is not taken lightly. Prosecutors acknowledge that because of the U.S. Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy, if they seek trial of a case in Mexico and do not get a guilty verdict, any attempt to refile the charges in the United States would be quickly challenged.

Norman Shapiro, a deputy district attorney who handles the foreign cases, said the decision depends mainly on the prospects for prosecution in the United States and a certainty that the suspect will not return from Mexico.

“We have to have solid information that the suspect is down there,” Shapiro said. “When we have that, we have been quite willing to let Mexico prosecute. We have been satisfied with the results.”

Of the 26Los Angeles cases that have made it through the Mexican justice system, according to the foreign prosecution unit, all have resulted in convictions. And although Mexico does not have the death penalty, officers familiar with U.S. cases tried there said prison sentences seem to be slightly longer. Because of differences in laws, making exact comparisons is impossible.

Before the case travels to Mexico, the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles must certify the authenticity of the investigative documents. In practice, this usually means confirming that a crime was committed and that the investigating officers are legitimate.

Then, once officers have determined through informants and other detective work where a suspect is in Mexico, the unit moves.

This year, the detectives have checked their weapons at the border and crossed into Mexico an average of twice a month.

Occasionally they travel with Mexican police to observe the arrests, but most often they wait at police stations or hotels until a suspect is in custody or local police determine that he or she cannot be found. Moya said the officers go to Mexico to streamline the filing process, strengthen relations with authorities there and be available to offer additional case details or even question suspects themselves.

The officers make no secret of the value of the social side of the visits.

“Diplomacy and image are important,” Moya said. “You make concessions, courtesies to their protocol. You pay your respects. We don’t want to meddle in the internal workings of the law enforcement of another country. We work within their customs.”

On a recent trip to Mexicali to present evidence in connection with an East Los Angeles murder, Moya and José Herrera, the case detective, did not go directly to the prosecutor who would handle the case.

They first went to see the director of the state police, whose men had caught the suspect a week earlier based on leads Moya and Herrera had provided. Then there were several meetings with Mexican detectives and police administrators to shake hands and pay respects.

The Los Angeles officers offered the Mexicans small gifts of basic equipment not provided by their own department: flashlights, handcuffs, notepads, even bullets. The Californians had purchased the items in the United States with their own money.

When the detectives finally got to the office of Angel Saad, attorney general of the state of Baja, their stay in Mexico was nearly over. Saad looked over the file, grimaced at photographs of the victim’s body and asked detailed questions about the legal and diplomatic procedures they had followed.

After a 45-minute meeting, Saad finally placed the “murder book” in the hands of one of his prosecutors.

In a year or so, after the process of trial and appeal is completed, Mexican authorities will officially notify Los Angeles police of the outcome.

American law enforcement officials acknowledge that procedural differences make it easier to get convictions in Mexico than in the United States.

Once a case is accepted for prosecution in Mexico, a defendant is assumed to be guilty and then has to prove his innocence. There is no bail allowed in murder cases, no jury trials and guidelines on the admissibility of evidence are less stringent.

LAPD foreign prosecution unit officers said they know of no instance in which a witness in a Los Angeles murder case, detectives included, went to Mexico to testify. Instead, Mexican prosecutors rely upon the witness accounts and affidavits supplied by police.

That the defendants thus are denied the opportunity to face their accusers, a cornerstone of the U.S. justice system, is disturbing to some attorneys.

“No one says a criminal should go unpunished,” said Jaime Cervantes, a former president of the Mexican-American Bar Assn. in Los Angeles. “But this country has a long-developed concept of how someone is proven guilty of a crime and there is something fundamentally unfair about going to another country to convict and punish them.”

Peter Shey, chairman of the international law committee of the local National Lawyers Guild, also questioned the Mexican prosecutions.

“Basic notions of fundamental fairness are either nonexistent or rarely employed in their justice system,” Shey said. “If people are required to stand trial in Mexico for crimes in the United States, they would be placed at a significant disadvantage.”

Lt. Ross, the unit’s supervisor, said he believes that such concerns are unfounded.

“I think a lot of people have tended to view Mexican justice with a jaundiced eye,” he said. “But that is an American perception and it is a misconception. Mexico has a very legitimate legal system that operates very well.”

Ross and his fellow officers contend that a murder suspect who flees to avoid prosecution in Los Angeles is accepting the justice system of the country he runs to.

“You have to accept the risks that you have incurred by fleeing,” Moya said.

Much like the LAPD unit, the California attorney general’s office has developed specialists in bringing cases to Mexico. The state’s chief expert is Ruben R. Landa, a special agent with the attorney general’s office in San Diego, who took his department’s first murder case to Mexico in 1980.

Since then, Landa has helped various California police departments bring 70 murder cases to Mexico, 14 so far in 1987, more than in any previous year. About 20 of the cases have worked their way through Mexican courts, he said, all resulting in convictions, although one of those was thrown out on appeal.

“Now it’s sort of snowballing,” he said. “More and more detectives are finding out that this is a way to go with their cases.”

One benefit for U.S. authorities is financial. Mexico pays for prosecuting the cases, and police officials estimate that it costs American taxpayers less than $1,000 in travel and other expenses to bring a case there, an amount that pales in comparison to the costs of jailing, prosecuting and defending a murder suspect in Los Angeles.

“You are probably talking about saving thousands of dollars on every case,” Ross said.

But Angel Saad, the Baja attorney general, said the arrangement does not just help the U.S. agencies.

“It is a two-way street with positive results for both countries,” he said. “For Mexico, it signifies its willingness to punish its citizens that commit crimes in foreign countries.”

A more tangible way the relationship pays off for Mexico, police say, is when the foreign prosecution unit, acting on tips from Mexican police, locates Mexicans in Los Angeles who are suspected of crimes in their own country. So far this year, 13 such suspects have been arrested by immigration authorities in Los Angeles as illegal aliens and returned to Mexico with the help of the unit. Because they are illegal aliens, they can be shipped back without lengthy extradition proceedings.

Although most of its time has been spent on murder cases in Mexico, the foreign prosecution unit has been used on occasion in child abuse, robbery and auto theft investigations. And its officers have pursued murder cases in other countries where laws allow prosecution of foreign crimes. Two cases have been brought in El Salvador, one in France and one investigation is pending in Honduras.

The crimes that lead the officers across the border are quite varied, involving both Mexican and American victims.

Lorraine Kiefer, 70, was a well-liked Van Nuys widow and retired real-estate broker who worked without pay at an American Cancer Society thrift shop. In 1980, she had married Gilberto Flores, a longtime acquaintance who was 38 years her junior. Four years later, police said, Flores hired a second man, Andreas Hernandez Santiago, to kill her for $5,000.

After detectives unraveled the Oct. 2, 1984, killing, the case was filed in Mexico, where the two men, both Mexican nationals, had fled. Santiago was arrested in Oaxaca and later convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Flores is still being sought.

In one of the first cases handled by the unit in 1985, Juan Francisco Rocha, 36, was arrested in Monterrey, Mexico, for the killing in Hollywood of his girlfriend, Brenda Joyce Abbud, a decade earlier. She had been doused with paint thinner and set on fire.

“Many of the cases have strong impacts on their communities,” Zorrilla said.

The Dec. 8, 1980, killing of Lisa Ann Rosales was such a case, prompting the Los Angeles City Council to offer a$25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. A local high school started a college scholarship in Lisa’s name and an elementary school named a garden after her.

There were few solid leads until a woman called police anonymously in 1985, saying her conscience bothered her and that she wanted them to know that Castro, who worked as a maintenance man at the Rosales home, was the killer. That lead gave the case a new focus, and police said more evidence was uncovered against Castro.

Castro, who had returned to Mexico weeks after the killing, confessed shortly after he was arrested in Mexicali in 1986, according to police in both countries.

COPS ACCUSED

Mary Kellel-Sophiea says homicide investigators wrongfully tried to pin her husband’s slaying on her. The detectives still believe she’s guilty.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

September 15, 1991

Mary Kellel-Sophiea says she is on trial for murder. But it was her choice.

For more than two months last year, she faced a possible death sentence after being charged with the murder of her estranged husband. On Jan. 31, 1990, Gregory Sophiea was stabbed to death in his bed in the Shadow Hills home that the couple had shared for five years.

But then a prosecutor dropped the charges against her, telling a judge he did not have enough evidence to proceed with the case in court.

A year and a half later, the additional evidence has not been found. But Kellel-Sophiea is back in court. She is suing her accusers, charging two Los Angeles police detectives with violating her rights by arresting her without cause and conspiring to frame her with a murder she did not commit.

The two-week-old civil trial before a jury in U.S. District Court has unfolded much like that of a murder trial.

Detectives testified about their investigation and identified an 18-year-old transient who has been convicted of the murder and who they believe conspired with Kellel-Sophiea to kill her husband. A medical examiner discussed the details of the autopsy. A next-door neighbor told the jury about finding the dead man and the blood-spattered butcher knife.

Though no death sentence rides on the jury’s verdict, the 10-member panel will, in effect, be asked to cast judgment on Kellel-Sophiea, deciding whether she has been wrongfully pursued by two obsessed investigators or possibly is a killer who has not only gotten away with her crime but is now seeking monetary damages from her pursuers.

Kellel-Sophiea, 40, now lives in Long Beach. She is seeking unspecified damages from Detectives Woodrow Parks and Gary Milligan. She believes the jury will exonerate her by finding that the detectives wrongfully arrested her. She said such a verdict will finally help end the suspicion that surrounds her.

“If I was guilty, why wouldn’t I just go on with my life and thank God I had gotten away with it?” she asked in an interview last week. “Why would I go through with this trial? It’s like a murder trial. If I was guilty, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

The lawsuit focuses on what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 31 at the Sophiea family’s Orcas Avenue house and whether detectives assigned to the case correctly and honestly interpreted the evidence left by a killer. Kellel-Sophiea claims they did not.

“They threw this woman on a freight train to hell, and they still are trying to shovel coal on the fire,” said Ken Clark, one of her attorneys.

According to testimony at the trial, Gregory Sophiea and his wife argued on the last night of his life.

The couple had separated after 10 years of marriage but had agreed to meet at the house they owned – and where Gregory, a salesman and caterer, was staying – to discuss its sale.

Kellel-Sophiea, a former advertising executive, testified that the couple argued over furniture she needed for her new apartment in Long Beach, and related financial matters.

Later, Gregory went to sleep in the master bedroom while his wife slept in another bedroom and their 6-yearold daughter, Kristen, slept in a third room.

In a tape-recorded interview with police on the day of the murder, Kellel-Sophiea said she was awakened shortly after 3 a.m. by a noise and heard a gurgling sound. Knowing her husband was asthmatic, she rushed to his bedroom and saw him lying on his back on the water bed gasping for breath.

She said she saw blood on the sheets and assumed he had injured himself – something that had occurred once before during a morning asthma attack. She did not notice the stab wounds on her husband’s chest and neck, she told the detectives.

Though there was a phone on the nightstand Kellel-Sophiea ran to another phone in the house, dialed 911to report her husband could not breathe and then ran to a next-door neighbor’s house for help. While the neighbor, Larry Rotoli, went into the bedroom to try to aid Sophiea, Kellel-Sophiea remained at the front of the house to direct paramedics inside.

When the paramedics arrived moments later, they found Gregory Sophiea dead, with seven stab wounds in the upper body.

Kellel-Sophiea was taken to the Foothill Division police station to await questioning while several detectives gathered at the scene of the crime. Among them were Parks, who had eight years’ experience as a homicide detective, and Milligan, who was working his first case as homicide detective trainee. They would be the lead detectives assigned to the case.

Among the pieces of evidence awaiting the detectives was a bloody butcher knife on the bedroom floor. They found the window in one of the bathrooms open to the backyard and an undamaged screen leaning on an outside wall. There was dirt on the toilet seat and the bathroom floor.

Bloodstains were found in other parts of the house, and there were bloody fingerprints on a backyard fence. They also found pry marks on the outside of a rear door.

On the surface, evidence seemed to indicate that someone had broken into the house through the bathroom window, and escaped through the window and over the fence after stabbing Sophiea. But the detectives, after conducting a routine preliminary investigation, came to a different conclusion.

Parks and Milligan testified that they found no footprints in the dirt below the bathroom window. The detectives determined the window screen could not have been removed from the outside without being damaged. And using an oblique lighting technique, they determined that dust on the stone pathway that led to the bathroom window had not been disturbed – indicating no one had walked there that morning.

They also found chemical traces of what could have been blood in two sinks and a bathtub in the house.

The detectives developed the theory that the break-in had been staged to throw the investigation off course.

“We were all in unanimous agreement that this was not a burglary,” Milligan testified last week. “I don’t believe anyone went in or out of that window.”

Burglary eliminated, their suspicions turned to the widow. The detectives testified it was their opinion that the victim had been dead at least an hour before Kellel-Sophiea said she saw him struggling for breath and dialed 911. Also, a chemical test of her hands revealed traces of blood, though she had said she did not remember touching her husband before seeking help. Most of all, it was her story that did not ring true, the detectives said.

“This man with seven holes in his body was having an asthma attack?” Milligan testified. “What she told us was incredible. I wondered… why anyone would look at this individual and say he had an asthma attack.”

The two detectives questioned Kellel-Sophiea at the Foothill station for two hours, but she did not change her original story, according to a transcript of the interview, which was played for jurors. Instead, she became hysterical when told her husband had died of stab wounds, not an asthma attack, and that she was under arrest:

Parks: “You murdered the guy.”

Kellel-Sophiea: “Oh, come on. I don’t understand any of this… What do you mean? I don’t even know what you are talking about…”

Parks: “Well, let me tell you real quick… I’m talking about you going to jail… killing your husband.”

Kellel-Sophiea: “I never… I’m no killer. I don’t have that in me… I don’t believe this.”

Parks: “Well, believe it.”

Kellel-Sophiea: “… I didn’t do anything wrong. Why would I? This has got to be a dream.”

Kellel-Sophiea was jailed and was arraigned two days later on murder charges in San Fernando Municipal Court. She pleaded not guilty.

Investigation of the case continued, and in mid-February, the investigators learned that the bloody fingerprints on the fence did not belong to Kellel-Sophiea as they had expected. Instead, they belonged to an 18-year-old drug abuser and former psychiatric patient named Tony Moore.

On Feb. 20, 1990, the detectives arrested Moore, and during a six-hour interrogation, Moore gave a variety of versions of what happened Jan. 31, alternately implicating himself and Kellel-Sophiea as the killer.

David Romley, another of Kellel-Sophiea’s attorneys, said a tape recording of the Moore interrogation is a key part of his client’s case against the detectives. He said the tape shows the detectives fell into “tunnel investigation” and “suspect of convenience” syndromes by steering Moore toward their set belief that the burglary was staged and that Kellel-Sophiea was involved.

“They just tried to mold everything into their conclusion,” Romley said.

According to a transcript of the taped interrogation, Moore initially denied ever being in the Sophiea house, but when told that his bloody fingerprints were found at the scene, he replied, “OK, you got me.”

Moore then told the two detectives step by step how he had broken into the house through a bathroom window and took a butcher knife from the kitchen. He said he stabbed Sophiea when the man awoke while Moore was in his bedroom looking for items to steal.

But the detectives told Moore he was lying, and he changed his story to include Kellel-Sophiea as the killer. He said she paid him $600to kill her husband, but he said she did it herself when he was unable to go through with it.

Moore said he and Kellel-Sophiea then staged the break-in to make it appear that a burglar had killed Sophiea.

Moore changed his story two more times as the interrogation continued, going back to admitting that he had killed Sophiea while burglarizing the house, then once again saying Kellel-Sophiea was the killer, this time adding that he was romantically involved with her.

Kellel-Sophiea branded as preposterous Moore ’s accusations that she was involved with him or the killing. Romley said the detectives led Moore “down the garden path” by feeding him information about Kellel-Sophiea and the evidence during the early stage of the interrogation, which allowed him to later concoct her involvement in the killing.

Romley said he intends to play the tape for the jury this week, though Assistant City Atty. Honey A. Lewis, who is defending the two detectives, has opposed allowing jurors to hear it. Lewis, Parks and Milligan declined to discuss the case before completion of the trial.

Following Moore ’s arrest, Kellel-Sophiea was rearraigned on murder charges, this time including an allegation of murder for financial gain, which carries a possible death penalty. The financial gain allegation was added because police and prosecutors believed Kellel-Sophiea was motivated to kill her husband to collect insurance money and to avoid having to share the proceeds from the sale of the house.

Moore later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 27years to life in prison. But detectives were unable to find evidence substantiating Moore ’s claims about Kellel-Sophiea’s involvement, and charges against her were dropped on April 5, 1990, the day a preliminary hearing was set to begin.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig R. Richman testified during the federal trial last week that the charges could be reinstated if additional evidence against Kellel-Sophiea is ever found. He also said he has seen no evidence that dissuades him from his belief that the burglary at the Sophiea house was staged.

Parks and Milligan also are unswayed in their suspicions of the widow. Both have testified that they still believe she was involved in her husband’s slaying.

“I think she and Tony Moore entered into a conspiracy,” Milligan said.

Kellel-Sophiea’s attorneys have sought to bolster her innocence with a variety of testimony and witnesses.

Though the detectives said Sophiea was dead an hour before his wife sought help, Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Irwin Goldin, who conducted the Sophiea autopsy, testified that it was impossible to pinpoint the time of death within the two hours before paramedics arrived. Two private experts in criminology have testified that the bathroom screen can easily be removed from outside the house, contrary to the detectives’ view.

Rotoli, the neighbor whom Kellel-Sophiea went to for help that night, testified that, although he spent two minutes attempting to render help to Sophiea, he also did not notice any stab wounds on the man’s body – largely because the victim’s chest was thickly covered with hair.

Rotoli also said he washed blood off his hands in the kitchen sink. And a forensic expert testified that tests for trace amounts of blood found in the other sink and bathtub and on Kellel-Sophiea’s hands could be inaccurate or could be identifying blood unrelated to the slaying.

Kellel-Sophiea’s attorneys charge that all of their information was available to the detectives immediately after the slaying but that they bungled the case by focusing too soon on Kellel-Sophiea. And now, having accused her, they refuse to back down.

“Before they even got out to the crime scene they were thinking the wife did it,” Romley said. “Then they saw the burglary evidence, and they didn’t want to look at it. They had a predetermined mind-set. They already had her convicted.”

Kellel-Sophiea said she remains fearful that she could lose her freedom again.

“I don’t know if they will ever stop,” she said of Parks and Milligan. “That’s why I am doing this. I want to stop them from doing this to anyone else.”

September 26, 1991

A police investigation of Mary Kellel-Sophiea as a suspect in the stabbing death of her husband continued Wednesday, a day after two detectives were cleared of wrongdoing in her lawsuit charging they had falsely arrested and conspired to frame her.

A federal court jury deliberated only 35 minutes before returning a verdict in favor of Los Angeles Detectives Woodrow Parks and Gary Milligan.

Kellel-Sophiea, 40, had sued the officers, saying they had bungled the investigation of the Jan. 31, 1990, stabbing of Gregory Sophiea in the couple’s Shadow Hills home. The lawsuit contended that the detectives wrongly focused on her as a suspect when it was clear that a burglar had killed her husband.

Kellel-Sophiea was arrested the morning of the killing, but murder charges were dropped two months later when prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence. An 18-year-old transient, who police contend conspired with her to kill her husband, later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27years in prison.

Parks, who continues to handle the investigation, said Kellel-Sophiea remains a suspect. He said studies of scientific evidence, including DNA analysis, are ongoing. He declined to discuss that evidence.

“This isn’t a holy mission, but it is an open case,” Parks said. “I don’t have any personal vendetta. She ought to be brought to justice because there are a lot of things here that show she did have something to do with her husband’s killing.”

Milligan, who now works as a narcotics investigator, could not be reached for comment.

During the three-week trial in U.S. District Court, attorneys for Kellel-Sophiea sought to show that she was innocent and that the man later convicted of the slaying had acted alone.

At the time of the killing, Kellel-Sophiea and her husband were separating and slept in different bedrooms in their Orcas Street house. She testified that at 3 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1990, she heard and saw her husband struggling for breath, and thinking that he was having an asthma attack dialed 911and ran to a neighbor’s house for help. Rescuers found that Sophiea had been stabbed to death, and police discovered that a bathroom window was open and the screen removed.

Parks and Milligan testified that the evidence indicated that the burglary had been “staged” to throw off the investigation. They said contradictions in Kellel-Sophiea’s statements along with other evidence – including blood found on the floor of her bedroom – focused their attention on her as a suspect.

Two weeks after Kellel-Sophiea was arrested, the detectives traced bloody fingerprints found on a fence at the house to Tony Moore, an 18-year-old Sun Valley transient. Moore was arrested, and during nine hours of interrogation he gave several versions of what happened, implicating himself and at times saying Kellel-Sophiea took part in the killing.

Though Moore ’s statements about Kellel-Sophiea were never corroborated, the investigators continue to believe that the burglary was staged and that she was involved.

Before jury deliberations began, Judge James M. Ideman dismissed the lawsuit’s allegation that the investigators were conspiring to frame Kellel-Sophiea, ruling that there was no evidence of such behavior.

Deputy City Atty. Honey A. Lewis, who defended the detectives, said the jurors were left to decide whether the investigators acted in good faith when they arrested Kellel-Sophiea. Whether she was guilty or innocent in the slaying was not at issue, Lewis said.

“That’s an unsolved mystery,” she said. “That wasn’t under consideration. The issue was whether the detectives had probable or reasonable cause to arrest her. The jury determined there was good reason for the detectives to make the arrest.”

One of Kellel-Sophiea’s attorneys, Ken Clark, said her case was hurt when Ideman ruled that jurors could not hear a tape recording of the Moore interrogation that he said showed the detectives manipulated the suspect into implicating her in the slaying.

Clark said the verdict will probably be appealed.

DEATH SQUAD

POLICE SURVEILLANCE UNIT POLICE SURVEILLANCE UNIT KILLS 3 ROBBERY SUSPECTS

February 13, 1990

Three suspected robbers were killed and a fourth was wounded early Monday by nine officers from a controversial Los Angeles police squad who watched the suspects force their way into a closed McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland and rob its manager at gunpoint.

Shortly after the suspected robbers climbed into their getaway car – and one pointed a gun at the officers, police said – the officers fired 35shots into the late-model bronze Thunderbird. No officers were injured during the 2a.m. confrontation in front of the deserted Foothill Boulevard restaurant. The manager, who had been tied up by the robbers and left behind, also was unharmed.

Police said the officers, who are members of the police department’s Special Investigations Section, a secretive unit that often conducts surveillance of people suspected of committing a series of crimes, watched the robbery take place but did not move in because of safety reasons.

After the suspects, who were believed to have been involved in a string of fast-food restaurant robberies, got in their car, the SIS officers pulled up, shouted “Police!” and opened fire upon seeing one of the men point a gun at them, police said.

Three pellet guns that appeared to be authentic handguns were found in the car and on one of the suspects after the shooting. Police said it did not appear that any of the pellet guns had been fired.

The police shooting was being investigated by the department’s officer-involved shooting unit. Lt. William Hall, head of the unit, said the officers did not violate a year-old department policy that says officers should protect potential crime victims even if it jeopardizes an undercover investigation.

The policy was instituted after police officials reviewed the procedures of the SIS. A Times investigation in 1988 found that the 19-member unit often followed violent criminals but did not take advantage of opportunities to arrest them until after robberies or burglaries occurred – in many cases leaving victims terrorized or injured.

Police said the officers involved in Monday’s shooting are SIS veterans with an average of 19 years of experience with the Los Angeles Police Department. The officers were identified as Richard Spelman, 39; James Tippings, 48; Gary Strickland, 46; Jerry Brooks, 50; John Helms, 40; Joe Callian, 31; Warren Eggar, 48; Richard Zierenberg, 43; and David Harrison, 41.

The gunfire early Monday echoed throughout the commercial and residential area where apartment buildings sit alongside restaurants, convenience stores and small service shops.

“I woke up hearing many, many shots,” said Alejandro Medina, whose corner apartment overlooks the shooting area. “I got up to see and then there were more shots. I hit the floor.”

Although SIS officers had watched at least one of the men off and on since the beginning of the year, Hall said the suspects were not seen breaking any laws before they forced their way into the McDonald’s at 7950 Foothill Boulevard.

“At the times the surveillance has been on the suspects, [police] saw no crimes,” Hall said. “To stop them they needed a reason. That had not occurred. Once [the suspects] went up to the restaurant, maybe they crossed that threshold.”

Hall said the officers, however, then decided they did not want to risk the safety of the restaurant manager by attempting to burst into the McDonald’s and arrest the robbers.

“The decision was made that, since there never had been any injuries involved in any of these robberies, rather than try to force entry into the building, they would wait and let the suspects exit,” Hall said.

The names of the three dead men were not released Monday. The wounded man was identified as Alfredo Olivas, 19, of Hollywood. He was in serious condition, suffering from two shotgun wounds, at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. Police said that when he recovers, Olivas will be arrested on a murder charge because, under California law, he can be held responsible for any deaths that occur during a crime he allegedly committed.

Police began their investigation of the suspects after the robbery of a McDonald’s in downtown Los Angeles in September, Hall said. Because detectives and McDonald’s security officials believed the robbers had knowledge of how the restaurant operated, several employees were questioned and given lie-detector tests.

One employee was fired after failing the polygraph examination but there was no evidence to arrest him, police said. The downtown robbery was similar to at least six others – five at McDonald’s restaurants and one at a Carl’s Jr. – in Los Angeles since August, police said. In each case, the robbers had knowledge of the business’s operations and forced a lone manager at gunpoint to open a safe after hours, police said.

SIS officers began to follow the former employee in early January and, on Sunday night, the officers watched as he met with three other men in Venice and drove with them to Sunland in a bronze Thunderbird belonging to one of the men, police said.

The four men arrived at the McDonald’s as it was closing at midnight and watched it from the Thunder-bird parked across the street, police said. At 1:36 a.m. when only night manager Robin Cox, 24, was still inside, three of the suspects got out of the Thunderbird and approached the restaurant.

Hall said one man remained in front while two others attempted to break in a rear door. Cox heard the break-in attempt and called police. Patrol units were not dispatched, however, because SIS officers were watching the restaurant.

Hall said the officers held back on arresting the suspects because the suspects were too spread out. As the officers watched, the two suspects at the rear of the restaurant moved to a side door and forced their way into the McDonald’s.

All four suspects then entered the restaurant. Cox was tied up and threatened at gunpoint until she opened the restaurant’s safe. Several thousand dollars was taken, police said.

The suspects came out of the restaurant half an hour later and walked across the street to the Thunderbird. After they were in the car, four unmarked cars containing eight officers pulled up from behind and one officer ran up on foot.

Hall said the officers identified themselves and were wearing clearly marked “raid” jackets that said “police” on the front and back.

“When they approached the vehicle they saw one of the suspects with a handgun point it toward their direction,” Hall said. “One of the officers said, ‘Watch out, they’ve got a gun.’

“At that time we had several officers fire into the vehicle. The passenger in the front exited and fled into an open field. He was carrying a handgun and several officers fired at him. All the shots were fired in just a few seconds.”

Hall said that after the firing stopped, two officers approached the car and fired four more shots into it when they saw “two of the suspects were moving around, reaching down to a floorboard where a gun was.”

A total of 23shotgun blasts and 12shots from 45-caliber handguns were fired by police at the suspected robbers, Hall said.

Several residents in the area said they were awakened by the gunfire and shouts of the police officers.

“My husband yelled to me to call the police,” said Ronda Caracci, whose apartment also offers a view of the shooting area. “I looked out the window and said, ‘Hey, it is the police.’”

Courts: Case will focus on tactics of Special Investigations Officers who fatally shot three robbers.

January 10, 1992

Members of a controversial Los Angeles police squad who fatally shot three men after a 1990 robbery in Sunland were called “assassins with badges” Thursday by an attorney representing the families of the dead men in a civil rights lawsuit.

Attorney Stephen Yagman made the allegation during opening statements in a U.S. District Court trial that will focus on the tactics of the police department’s Special Investigations Section, a 19-member surveillance unit that targets suspects in serious crimes.

The families of the three men killed in the Feb. 12, 1990, shooting, along with a fourth robber who was shot but survived, charge that the SIS is a “death squad” that follows suspects, allows them to commit crimes and then frequently shoots them when officers move in to make arrests.

“What they do is attempt to terminate the existence of the people they are following,” Yagman told the 10 jurors hearing the case.

Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent countered that the officers acted properly and that the SIS is a valuable police tool. “This is a necessary organization that most police departments have,” he said. “It is even more important in Los Angeles, a city of 365 square miles… where the criminals are just as mobile as the police.”

The trial before Judge J. Spencer Letts is expected to last at least two weeks. The suit names members of the SIS, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, Mayor Tom Bradley, the Police Commission and all former commissioners and chiefs during the unit’s 25-year existence. Yagman says officials have allowed an environment in which a “shadowy” unit such as the SIS can operate. The shooting in front of a McDonald’s restaurant on Foothill Boulevard occurred after a lengthy investigation into a series of restaurant robberies. Police said that in late 1989 investigators identified the suspects – Jesus Arango, 25, and Herbert Burgos, 37, of Venice and Juan Bahena, 20, and Alfredo Olivas, 21, both of Hollywood.

SIS officers followed the four intermittently for three months before they watched them break into the McDonald’s where manager Robin L. Cox was working alone after closing for the night.

After they tied up, gagged and blindfolded Cox, the robbers left the restaurant with $14,000from its safe.

When all four were seated in their getaway car, SIS officers moved in on foot and in cars. Police said two of the men pointed guns at the officers, who opened fire, killing three and wounding Olivas in the stomach. Police said they recovered three pellet guns that resembled pistols.

Officers later explained that they could not make arrests before the robbery because the four men moved too quickly and were too spread out around the restaurant.

Whether the men in the car were armed at the time of the shooting will be at issue in the trial. Yagman said they had no weapons and were shot in the back.

Olivas, the first witness to testify, said that the robbers stored their weapons in the trunk of the car before getting in. The shooting started a few seconds later, said Olivas, who is serving a 17-year prison term for the robberies.

Vincent in his opening statement sharply disagreed, saying two of the robbers drew the police fire when they pointed their weapons at the officers. “Officers have a right to self-defense,” he said. “They don’t have to wait for someone to shoot them.”

Police: Existence of inquiry came to light in suit over SIS unit’s killings of three men who had robbed a Valley restaurant.

January 16, 1992

The FBI is investigating the killing of three robbers in Sunland by a controversial Los Angeles police squad, and the Justice Department apparently has taken the case before a federal grand jury, court documents showed Wednesday.

The investigation surfaced when the U.S. Attorney’s Office mentioned it in asking a U.S. district judge to throw out a subpoena for an FBI agent called to testify in the trial of a lawsuit filed over the shooting.

The request indicated that the shooting by the Special Investigations Section had been under investigation for nearly a year.

The FBI agent, Richard Boeh, was subpoenaed to testify in the civil rights suit filed after the Feb. 12, 1990, incident, when nine SIS officers fired at a getaway car used by four robbers who had just held up a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland. They killed three and wounded the fourth.

The survivor and relatives of the slain men are suing the city and the police department, alleging that the SIS squad violated the robbers’ civil rights by executing them without cause.

Police have contended in testimony in the week-old trial of the lawsuit that the robbers were shot because they pointed pistols at the officers. Weapons found at the scene were discovered to be pellet pistols, similar in appearance to firearms.

Stephen Yagman, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, summoned Boeh as a witness, saying the federal agent has information that could be vital to proving the suit’s key contention – that the robbers had placed their pellet guns in the trunk of the getaway car before getting into it, and therefore were unarmed when the SIS officers surprised them and opened fire.

Yagman said the FBI investigation dates from early last year, when Boeh interviewed the sole surviving robber, Alfredo Olivas, now 21and serving a 17-year prison term for robbery.

“It would be a perversion of justice for the jury to deliberate this case without hearing what the FBI has found,” Yagman said outside of court.

But the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a motion to quash the subpoena for Boeh. In a declaration contained in the motion, Boeh said he has been investigating the police shooting since April 1991 and indicated that he has provided testimony to a grand jury investigating the incident.

“If called to testify, my testimony would violate the rule of secrecy relating to proceedings before the grand jury,” Boeh said.

Boeh said that if he testified he would also have to reveal the identity of informants and other details of the federal investigation.

“To my knowledge, the information from the informants and the identity of the informants is known only to the government,” Boeh said. “My testimony would reveal facts relating to the strategy of the government in the investigation.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Sean Berry, who is seeking to block Boeh’s testimony, did not return a phone call seeking comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office routinely withholds comment on grand jury proceedings, which are secret.

Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent, who is representing the police officers and other defendants in the civil rights suit, including Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley, could not be reached for comment after the trial recessed Wednesday.

Judge J. Spencer Letts has not yet ruled on whether Yagman will be able to call Boeh to testify.

In trial testimony Wednesday, a parade of former top managers of the police department testified briefly about their roles in running the department – some going back to the early 1960s.

Yagman called 13 former members of the civilian Police Commission and three former police chiefs in an attempt to bolster the lawsuit’s contention that the SIS, a secretive unit that places criminal suspects under surveillance, is a “death squad” that has operated for 25 years because commissioners and chiefs have exercised little control over the department.

According to testimony, the unit has been involved in 45 shootings since 1965, killing 28 people and wounding 27.

Most of the former commissioners testified that they considered the appointed post a part-time job, and four testified they never knew of the SIS while they were members of the commission. Former Chief Tom Red-din, who held the top job from 1967 to 1969, said in brief testimony that he had known of the unit’s existence but had never investigated its activities.

Roger Murdock, who served as interim chief for six months in 1969, said he thought the SIS unit was formed to investigate the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Yagman did not ask Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), who was police chief from 1969 to 1978, about the SIS. Instead, he asked how Davis viewed the role of the Police Commission during his time as chief.

“I might have been wrong but I always thought they were my bosses,” Davis said. “They were tough bosses… I danced to their tune. I wanted to keep my job for a while.”

note: FBI Agent Richard Boeh refused to testify about his investigation of the SIS and was held in contempt of court. The agent immediately appealed and the contempt order was reversed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The trial then resumed after a month’s delay without his testimony.

Courts: The findings of the city-commissioned panel could work against L.A. when jurors rule in police brutality suits.

February 4, 1992

As Mayor Tom Bradley sat in the witness chair, a thin smile played on his face. He was facing an uneasy situation that he and the city may have to get used to.

Bradley was testifying in federal court last month as a defendant in a civil rights trial. And he was repeatedly saying, yes, he fully agreed with the conclusions of the Christopher Commission, the independent, blue-ribbon panel that last year investigated the Los Angeles Police Department and found problems with management, excessive force and racism.

“You have no reservations about your agreement with those conclusions?” the plaintiffs’ attorney, Stephen Yagman, asked.

“No,” Bradley told the 10jurors.

Bradley was testifying in a civil rights case in which police officers are accused of killing three robbery suspects without provocation. Police managers and Bradley are also accused in the suit of tolerating excessive force and many of the departmental problems cited by the commission.

In effect, the mayor was being cut with his own sword; after all, he was a main force behind creation of the commission. Now, the commission’s findings could prove pivotal when jurors decide if the officers acted improperly and their supervisors – right up to Bradley and Chief Daryl F. Gates – are responsible.

While the trial is the first in which the report has been brought up by plaintiffs against police and city officials, it most likely will not be the last.

Yagman, a civil rights attorney who specializes in police-related lawsuits, said he has clients with five more cases set for trial this year. He plans in each case to introduce the commission report as evidence of a police department that he says is out of control. Other civil rights attorneys said last week that they plan to do the same.

“It is paradoxical and sweet,” Yagman said of having such a key document essentially prepared for him by the city that his clients are suing. “The effect of having this report is like putting whipped cream on a malt.”

Meantime, Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent, in charge of defending the city against police-related lawsuits, said his staff is developing strategies to deal with the report when it comes up in trials. He conceded that his task may only be beginning.

“It is a valuable tool for all civil rights attorneys,” Vincent said. “I am sure we will be facing this for several years to come.”

Though the report has been discussed at length in front of the jury in the trial, Vincent hopes to block inclusion of the 228-page volume as evidence in the case. Though pointing out that the report makes many favorable conclusions about the police department, Vincent said its damaging claims are largely hearsay and opinion – not evidence.

The current case arose from a shooting on Feb. 12, 1990, in which nine members of the police Special Investigations Section opened fire on four suspects who had just left a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland after a holdup. All four men were hit by police shots and only one survived.

The families of the dead men and the survivor, who was later imprisoned for robbery, filed suit against the officers, Bradley, Gates and the Police Commission alleging that the robbers’ civil rights were violated because the police opened fire without provocation. The lawsuit also alleges that the SIS is a “death squad” that has been created and fostered by an environment of lax management, brutality and racism in the department.

More than a year later, the Christopher Commission, formed by Bradley after the outcry that accompanied the Rodney G. King beating, delivered a report highly critical of management of the department and concluded that the police force had problems with excessive force, racism and a “code of silence” among its officers.

Yagman said in a recent interview that many of the report’s conclusions mirror the allegations in the lawsuit spawned by the McDonald’s shooting.

He unsuccessfully sought to have Warren Christopher, who chaired the commission, testify as a witness. However, U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts has allowed Yagman to use the commission’s report to question witnesses such as Bradley, Gates and police commissioners.

Letts is expected to rule later whether the report will be accepted as evidence and whether jurors will be able to refer to it during deliberations.

Regardless of the ruling, the report and its conclusions are already a large part of the trial record. So much so that at one point during Bradley’s testimony, Letts interrupted and cautioned the jury that they were not deciding a case on the incident that prompted the report.

“Don’t get confused,” Letts said. “Rodney King is not here.”

Outside of court, Yagman has told reporters that his questioning of witnesses has covered “every single chapter” of the report.

But how important the Christopher Commission report will be to the case and others that follow cannot be determined until verdicts are returned.

Jurors in the McDonald’s case have heard conflicting testimony over the report. Bradley said he agreed with the report’s conclusions, while Gates testified that he believes many of them are untrue or exaggerated.

And even in testifying that he accepted the report, Bradley sought to repair any damage to the defense by stressing that the report targets only a small portion of the force. He said that, overall, the city has the finest big-city police department in the country.

But Yagman and other attorneys said the commission report will automatically lend a strong degree of validation to claims made in lawsuits of police abuse.

“This is not a wild-eyed civil rights lawyer saying this, it is a blue-ribbon panel appointed to fairly evaluate the LAPD,” attorney Benjamin Schonbrun said. He plans to introduce the report as evidence in two upcoming trials against the Los Angeles police.

“I’ve been saying these same things for years,” Yagman said of the report’s conclusions. “Everybody now believes it.”

Other attorneys specializing in police misconduct litigation said the effect that the report will have on how they prepare lawsuits against the Los Angeles police will be significant, and possibly expensive as damages are assessed.

“By all means, it is terribly important,” said Hugh R. Manes, a civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles for more than 35 years. “I think it is a very important tool against the LAPD. It is based upon their own files and records going back 10years and thus shows a pattern of misconduct.”

Manes said the report’s broad coverage of the department’s problems will mean that at least portions of the report will be relevant, and admissible, in almost all LAPD-related cases.

Veteran police litigator Donald Cook has a federal suit pending against Gates and the city that also alleges misconduct by the SIS.

“And guess what I am going to use as evidence?” he asked recently.

He said that, like Yagman, he will attempt to introduce the commission’s report as evidence of the department’s poor management and condoning of excessive force.

“It is a great piece of evidence – really trustworthy, credible evidence of what we have been saying for years,” Cook said of the report. “It is ironic that we are validated by the city. It is really ironic.

“I think the city is getting a dose of justice.”

Vincent, the deputy city attorney, has yet to mount the city’s defense in the current case. Though he declined to reveal specifics about his strategy, he said his task is to clearly separate the report from the facts of the shooting that is the basis for the lawsuit.

“We are going to stick to the facts of the case,” Vincent said. “Our opinion is like the mayor’s. It is still the finest police department in the nation.”

He said that almost all documents used as evidence in lawsuits against the police come from police-shooting reports, policy statements and disciplinary records. So facing the commission report is not a totally unfamiliar situation. Still, Vincent said, its impact may be the most difficult to deal with.

“I think it is significant,” he said. “It has certainly gotten recognition and prestige.

“But I think it is something we will effectively deal with. We think some of it is flawed. It gives a skewed view.”

That view comes from the report’s focus on problems within the department without a full reporting on positive aspects of the force, Vincent said. The report’s conclusions are too broadly drawn, he added, and jurors will be unable to ascribe them to the officers involved in the McDonald’s shooting because neither they nor their unit is mentioned in the report.

“This type of information should never be used,” Vincent said. “It has come into this case to prejudice officers that are not even named in it.”

Still, Vincent is resigned to having that task of deflecting the effect of the report in trials to come.

“I am not sure of all the ways it can be used against us,” he said. “So we are thinking about it.

“We are just going to take it one case at a time.”

L.A. DETECTIVE TELLS DETAILS OF FATAL SHOOTING

Civil rights: The officer is testifying as a defendant in a suit alleging the Special Investigations Section killed three unarmed robbers.

March 5, 1992

In testimony lasting nearly three hours in federal court Wednesday, a Los Angeles police officer described in grim detail the shooting in which he and fellow officers fired 35 times at four robbers outside a Sunland McDonald’s, killing three and wounding the fourth.

Detective John Helms said he fired six times with a shotgun and three times with a pistol after seeing one of the bandits flee the getaway car with a gun and a second man brandishing a gun inside the car.

Afterward, police discovered that the weapons used by the robbers during the Feb. 12, 1990, incident were pellet guns that were replicas of real firearms.

During the shooting, Helms said: “I was looking for any indication that these men were trying to submit to arrest. I saw nothing” that indicated surrender.

Helms’ testimony came in the months-long trial of a civil rights lawsuit filed by the surviving robber and the families of the men killed.

Their suit contends that the nine officers who opened fire did so without warning or provocation and that the use of excessive force violated their rights. The suit says the officers, all members of the department’s Special Investigations Section, are part of a “death squad” that specifically targets criminal suspects for execution.

The surviving robber, Alfredo Olivas, testified earlier that the bandits had stowed their pellet guns in the trunk of the car after the robbery and therefore were unarmed when fired upon. Several officers later testified briefly that they saw guns being brandished, prompting the shooting.

Now, in the defense phase of the trial, the officers are testifying at length about the incident and why they opened fire.

Seemingly choked with emotion during some of his testimony about the shooting, Helms told jurors that, because of tactical and safety concerns, the officers could not move in to arrest the bandits until the thieves left the McDonald’s after robbing the lone employee inside.

When the four men were in their car, which was parked on the street, four SIS cars moved in to block their escape. Two of the police cars actually hit the getaway car, “jamming” it behind a parked truck.

As officers jumped out of their cars, Helms said, he heard one officer shout “Gun!” – a warning that he saw a gun in the getaway car. Helms then heard shots being fired and shouts of “Police! You’re under arrest!”

“Things were going on simultaneously,” Helms said. “I saw a man get out…and I saw a gun in his right hand. I saw him start to run.”

Helms said that, because the robbers had used guns during previous crimes, he believed the men still inside the car were also armed and that the officers surrounding the car were in danger.

“I started directing fire at the back,” Helms said. “The next thing I saw was one of the handguns being brandished through one of the holes in the rear window.”

Helms fired again, emptying his shotgun of shells. In the meantime, other officers shot the man who had run from the car when he allegedly turned and pointed a pellet gun at them.

“I knew I was out of ammo on my shotgun,” Helms said. “I put it in my car and took out my.45.”

Helms then described how he and his partner approached the car to make sure the three robbers inside were no longer a threat. He said that when he looked into the car one of the men in the backseat was reaching for a gun on the floor. Helms said he yelled for the man to stop and fired twice when he did not comply. Helms said the other man in the backseat then reached for the weapon, and Helms fired at him as well.

Helms said he did not know how long the shooting lasted. “When I believe my life is in danger, I am not a good estimator of time,” he said.

During cross-examination of Helms, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Stephen Yagman, pointed out that the weapon the officer claimed to have seen in the car was an unloaded pellet gun. Yagman has said that the jury will have to decide whether it is plausible that the robbers would have pointed or attempted to reach for pellet guns when confronted by nine officers with shotguns and.45s.

GATES WANTS TO BE ‘JUDGE, JURY, EXECUTIONER,’ LAWYER SAYS

Courts: Attorneys make their closing arguments in the trial stemming from a February 1990 shooting in Sunland in which officers killed three robbers.

March 25, 1992

The Los Angeles Police Department is a “Frankenstein monster” created by Chief Daryl F. Gates, who has allowed a squad of officers to operate as “assassins,” a federal jury was told Tuesday in a trial over a police shooting that left three robbers dead.

But the allegations made by an attorney representing the robbers and their families was rebutted by the city’s attorney, who defended Gates and said members of the police squad – the Special Investigations Section – use tactics designed to avoid shootings.

The statements came during closing arguments in a three-month trial stemming from the Feb. 12, 1990, shooting outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland.

“The police have gone too far in Los Angeles by using excessive force,” plaintiffs’ attorney Stephen Yagman said.

“The LAPD and Daryl Gates have ruled this community for 14years by fear,” Yagman said. “He does and has done as he pleases. The LAPD is his Frankenstein monster. It is something that has gone beyond all bounds… He wants to be judge, jury and executioner.”

Gates and nine SIS officers are defendants in the lawsuit filed by the families of three bandits who were killed by police and a fourth who was shot but survived. The lawsuit contends that the officers used excessive force and fired on the robbers without cause. The 10-member jury is expected to begin deliberations today.

Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent countered Yagman’s claims by telling jurors that evidence presented in the case clearly shows the nine officers opened fire when they sensed they were in imminent danger. He defended the firepower – 35 shots from shotguns and handguns – as being an appropriate response when the officers saw the robbers brandishing weapons. The weapons were later discovered to be pellet guns resembling real handguns.

Vincent cautioned jurors not to confuse the superior firepower of police with excessive force, noting that each officer feared for his life and had reason to fire. “This is not the Old West where you get out on the street and have a shootout at noon,” Vincent said. “They are not the sitting ducks of the public.”

According to trial testimony, the officers opened fire on the bandits after they watched them break into the closed McDonald’s, rob the lone employee inside and then return to their getaway car. The shooting started almost immediately when officers converged on the car.

The plaintiffs contend that the bandits had put their unloaded pellet guns in the trunk of the car and therefore were unarmed when the shooting started.

Noting that U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts ruled earlier that the police had probable cause to arrest the four suspects before the robbery, Yagman argued that the officers allowed the crime to take place and orchestrated the stakeout in such a way that the shooting was “inevitable, inescapable.” He said the special police unit has a long record of using tactics that often end in shootings.

Yagman said police took the pellet guns from the trunk after the shooting and “planted” one inside the car and one on the body of a robber who had run from the car before being shot by police. He said police photos show the gun inside the car in different positions, indicating police tampered with the evidence.

He said that while the claim that guns were planted might be “hard to digest,” the alternative – the police story – defies common sense.

“What person, when faced with nine officers with shotguns, would point an unloaded, inoperable pellet gun at them?” he asked. “What does common sense tell you?”

In his closing argument, Vincent denied that Gates condones excessive force. He also said an extensive department investigation cleared the officers of any wrongdoing.

He recounted police testimony that the gun was indeed moved. Vincent said the gun was photographed as it was found by officers and then removed from the car but later replaced so additional photos could be taken. But the original photographs are clearly marked, he said.

Vincent noted that the weapon allegedly planted on the body of Herbert Burgos was the same weapon the survivor, Alfredo Olivas, testified that Burgos used during the robbery. Vincent asked jurors how the officers could have known on which robber to plant which weapon.

“Nothing was planted in that car,” he said. “It would mean that it was happenstance that they placed the right gun with the right body.”

Vincent said the explanation for why the robbers pointed unloaded pellet guns at the police will never be known. “They might have thought it was someone else and raised the guns to scare them,” he said.

note: The federal jury hearing the SIS case found for the plaintiffs, awarding the families of the killed robbers and the lone survivor a total of $44,042in damages.

Attorney offers to drop members as defendants if they make Gates pay damages assessed in same incident. Officials angrily charge extortion.

April 2, 1992

Los Angeles city council members were sued Wednesday over a police shooting that left three robbers dead, but the attorney who filed the case offered to drop them as defendants if they make Police Chief Daryl F. Gates personally pay for damages assessed against him this week for the same shooting.

Council members familiar with the new suit and a city attorney who defends the city in police-related cases reacted angrily to the offer from civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, which was contained in a letter to the council that accompanied the new $20-million suit.

“Sounds like extortion, doesn’t it?” said Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent, head of the city’s police litigation unit.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who favors making Gates pay the damages from his own pocket, said he was nonetheless disturbed by Yagman’s letter.

“Nobody likes to be threatened,” he said.

Councilwoman Joy Picus, who is undecided on the issue of whether Gates should pay, said Yagman was using tactics of intimidation and harassment.

“The nerve of him,” she said. “I’ve dealt with attorneys who have tried to extort and threaten me before. I’ll be damned if I’ll be intimidated by him.”

Yagman denied his offer to the council was improper or threatening.

“Everybody has a right to ask people in the government to do or not do something, and to say if you do it the way we want we will take action or refrain from taking action,” Yagman said. “That’s not extortion. That is trying to settle the lawsuit.”

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court against the council and numerous police officers and officials is the latest twist in the case that has followed the Feb. 12, 1990, shooting outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland.

The shooting initially spawned a lawsuit on behalf of four family members of three robbers killed by members of the police Special Investigations Section and a fourth robber who was shot but survived.

The plaintiffs, represented by Yagman, contended that the police used excessive force and fired on the robbers without provocation. Gates was named as defendant because the suit said he was ultimately responsible for the officers’ actions and condoned the use of excessive force.

After a three-month trial, a federal jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiffs Monday and awarded punitive damages of $44,042 against Gates and nine members of the SIS. Jurors said the damage award was purposely set low because they believed the chief and his officers should pay it out of their own pockets. Gates was to pay $20,505of the award.

The verdict touched off a debate this week among council members over whether the city should pay the damages anyway. The council has routinely picked up the tab for punitive damages assessed against police officers for incidents that occurred while they were on the job.

On Wednesday, the new lawsuit further added to the controversy. The new suit is identical to the first one but was filed on behalf of two-year-old Johanna Trevino, daughter of Juan Bahena, one of the robbers police killed.

Yagman said Trevino was born six days after Bahena, whose real name was Javier Trevino, was killed and can file the lawsuit under a federal precedent set last year in another case involving the SIS. In that case, in which Yagman is also the plaintiff ’s attorney, a federal appeals court held that a child who was not yet born when a parent was killed by police may still sue for damages over losing a parent.

The new lawsuit names 20SIS officers, Gates, Mayor Tom Bradley, 17 former police chiefs and commission members and all city council members in office at the time of the shooting.

In a letter enclosed with the suit to the council, Yagman said:

“If the council votes not to indemnify Gates for the punitive damages in this case, then all of you who make up the majority so voting will be dismissed voluntarily as defendants in this new case.”

Vincent, the city attorney, said he could not comment on the lawsuit until he received it. But of Yagman’s letter to the council, he said, “I have never heard of an attorney doing anything like that at all.”

Council members who received it Wednesday also reacted strongly.

Councilwoman Joan Mike Flores said the lawsuit and Yagman’s tactics were an outrage.

“I will not be intimidated by these types of tactics,” she said in a statement.

Yaroslavsky said the letter Yagman sent could hinder efforts by council members who believe Gates should pay the damages awarded by the jury.

“I don’t think Yagman’s letter advances that cause at all,” he said. “I think it’s unnecessary and inappropriate. My inclination is not to pay for Chief Gates… I will come to a final conclusion based on the facts, not a threat.”

But Yagman said his letter was an effort to make the council abide by the wishes of the jury that heard the McDonald’s shooting case.

“We are just saying that if they refuse to indemnify Gates, we will drop the case,” Yagman said. “It might be wrong to threaten to sue them. But we haven’t done that.

We have sued them and said, ‘If you act in a responsible way we will consider dismissing you from this lawsuit.’”

ATTORNEYS AWARDED FEE OF $378,000 IN BRUTALITY SUIT

Courts: The ruling could lead to more sparks between lawyer and the city council.

August 5, 1992

A federal judge has awarded $378,000 in legal fees to civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman and his partners for their work on a successful excessive-force lawsuit against former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and nine police officers.

The ruling released Tuesday sets up another potential conflict in a running legal battle between Yagman and the city council over the council’s financial support for officers defending themselves from civil suits alleging brutality.

Yagman outraged city officials earlier this year when he submitted a bill that asked for nearly $1million in fees for himself and two partners who handled the lawsuit over a 1990 police shooting that left three robbers dead and one wounded outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland.

City attorneys, who had argued that the fee award should be about $216,000, said they considered it a victory that Yagman received much less than he asked for, but Yagman said he was satisfied with the amount. A decision has not been made by the city on whether to appeal the decision. After a three-month trial, the surviving robber and the families of the three dead men won a $44,000 damage award against Gates and the nine officers, all members of the department’s Special Investigations Section. The plaintiffs maintained that the officers violated the robbers’ civil rights by opening fire on them without cause, and that Gates’ leadership fostered such excessive force.

The determination of legal fees by U.S. District Judge

J. Spencer Letts on Friday could widen the battle between Yagman and the council over who will pay the lawyers’ fees. Although the jury had urged that Gates and the officers pay the $44,000damages personally, the council earlier this year voted to pay the awards from the city treasury.

Yagman said Tuesday that the legal fees awarded in the case should also be personally paid by Gates and the officers. Under federal law, an attorney who brings a successful civil rights case to trial must be paid by the defendants, with a judge determining the amount after hearing arguments from both sides.

“We have no judgment against the city,” Yagman said. “We have a judgment against nine SIS officers and Gates. They should pay it. Why should the taxpayers pay?”

Yagman said that if the council pays the $378,000from city coffers, it will provide him with new ammunition in another lawsuit stemming from the same police shooting.

The second case, filed on behalf of a daughter of one of the dead robbers, names council members as defendants as well as the police. Yagman argued that council members should be held responsible for the officers’ actions on the grounds that their decision to pay the damages in the first case in effect condoned the police misconduct that the jury found.

Yagman has contended that each time the council members vote to shield police officers from personal financial penalties in civil brutality suits they strengthen his argument that they are promoting police brutality and should also be personally liable for damages.

The second case has not yet been scheduled for trial. But Letts last week refused to dismiss the council members as defendants, rejecting the city attorney’s argument that they are automatically immune from civil liability for their official actions.

Deputy City Atty. Annette Keller said council members don’t have a choice over whether to pay such fees.

“It is part of the legal obligation of the city to defend employees sued for action taken in the course and scope of their employment,” Keller said. “We are obligated to pay any judgment for attorney fees. It is not an issue for the council.”

Yagman said his proposed fee was simply a “wish list” and that he was pleased with Letts’ ruling. “This is a lot of money and I am happy to get it,” Yagman said. In a 24-page order outlining his decision on fees, Letts praised Yagman for taking on the case that he characterized as “peculiarly undesirable” because the plaintiffs were a convicted robber and the families of robbers.

A Times investigation of the SIS four years ago spawned criticism that members of the unit trailing people with long criminal records often watched violent crimes take place without making a move to stop them so that the criminals could be arrested on the most serious charges possible, carrying more severe sentences.

In the McDonald’s case, members of the unit followed the robbers to the restaurant and watched as they broke in and robbed the lone employee inside. She was left physically unhurt but is also suing the officers, claiming that the incident was handled negligently.

KILLED BY A KID

ROOKIE OFFICER DIES IN ROOKIE OFFICER DIES IN STRUGGLE FOR GUN

LOS ANGELES TIMES

June 8, 1988

Arookie Los Angeles police officer, on street patrol less than three months, was fatally shot Tuesday during a struggle for his gun with a 16-year-old burglary suspect he confronted on a North Hollywood street, police said.

The teen-age gunman, Robert Steele of North Hollywood, was later tracked by police dogs to the attic of a nearby vacant house, where he was shot to death by four officers after he repeatedly attempted to reach for the revolver he had taken from the slain police officer, Cmdr. William Booth said.

A 19-year-old accomplice in the burglary was captured, police said.

Officer James Beyea, 24, was pronounced dead at 1:28

a.m. at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, less than an hour after he was shot in the head and leg, apparently with his own gun, Booth said.

Beyea and Officer Ignacio Gonzalez, 44, an 18-year veteran who was Beyea’s training officer, had answered a

12:20 a.m. burglary alarm call at an electronics store at 7261Lankershim Blvd.

When the officers arrived at Alpha Electronics, Booth said, they found a door open and went inside to search. They found no one in the store but could not search one storage room that had been locked from the inside.

Shortly after they walked outside to wait for the owner of the business, who had a key to the storage room, the burglar alarm went off again and the officers saw one person running from the rear of the building.

They quickly returned to their patrol car and drove around the block in an attempt to cut the suspect off, Booth said.

“Then they split up,” the police spokesman said. “Beyea went on foot and Gonzalez stayed in the car. They thought this would be the best way to go after the suspect.”

Beyea caught up with the suspect on Hinds Avenue, just north of Wyandotte Street – about two blocks from the electronics store – and attempted to arrest him, Booth said. From the car, Gonzalez saw his partner and the suspect struggling for control of a gun.

“Gonzalez was about a block away when he saw the struggle,” Booth said. “As he went toward them, he heard and saw gunfire.”

Beyea fell to the ground, Booth said, and the suspect fired at Gonzalez as he approached. Gonzalez returned the fire, but neither was hit. The suspect then ran off while Gonzalez went to Beyea’s aid.

About 50 officers, assisted by a helicopter and seven police dogs, searched a 16-block area around the shooting site, Booth said. About 4:30a.m., one of the dogs led officers to a vacant house at 11828Runnymede St., about three blocks from where Beyea had been shot.

Officers entered the one-story house, located on a wooded lot, and found Steele hiding in a corner of the attic.

According to a police statement, Sgt. Gary Nanson, 34, and Officer John Hall, 41, climbed into the attic and ordered Steele to raise his hands. The teen-ager complied and told the officers that the man they wanted was hiding downstairs, police said, but then he reached to his side to grab a gun.

Hall fired one time and wounded Steele in the head, police said. Despite several warnings to stay still, Steele twice again attempted to pick the gun up and was fatally shot by Nanson and two other officers, who had also climbed into the attic, the statement said.

The gun retrieved from Steele’s side was Beyea’s service revolver, Booth said. Ballistics tests will be conducted to determine if it was the weapon used to kill the officer, he said.

No other weapon was found, police said, and no one else was found in the house.

But during a search of the area, officers found Alberto Hernandez, 19, hiding in bushes about a block from where Beyea was killed. He admitted taking part in the burglary and was arrested on suspicion of murder, police said.

Beyea was the first Los Angeles police officer killed in the line of duty this year. Two were killed last year.

Beyea, a Reseda resident, entered the Police Academy last October and graduated March 25. Capt. Charles (Rick) Dinse, commander of the North Hollywood Division, where the rookie was assigned, said Beyea was routinely paired with a veteran who had training officer qualifications.

“I can only say he was considered by his supervisors and training officer to be one of our best,” Dinse said. “He was a sharp policeman who we expected to have a great career.”

Beyea, who was single, was born in Reseda and graduated from Cleveland High School in 1981. He served in the Air Force and Air Force Reserve.

Beyea’s grandfather was a Los Angeles traffic officer before retiring in 1961, police said.

Funeral arrangements were pending Tuesday. Beyea is survived by his mother, Cathleen Beyea of Northridge. Beyea is the second North Hollywood officer to be killed in three years. Detective Thomas C. Williams, 42, was shot to death Oct. 31, 1985, in what authorities said was an effort to prevent him from testifying in a robbery case.

Times staff writer Steve Padilla contributed to this report.

Youth had minor scrapes with law but didn’t fit image of a cop killer.

June 9, 1988

Bobby Steele was swinging the bat well, and by Sunday was on a nine-game hitting streak with a city youth league baseball team, the Sun Valley Park Pirates.

On Monday, the 16-year-old was able to parlay a morning dental appointment into a whole day off from school. The grandparents who raised him didn’t mind that he spent the rest of the day around the house.

But by 9 p.m. he was ready to get out of the North Hollywood home where he had lived his entire life. He baked himself a batch of cookies and then left to meet a friend. When he walked out the door, he left behind everything that appeared to be routine about his life.

A few hours later and a few blocks away, Robert Jay Steele killed a cop, Los Angeles police say. A few hours after that, police killed him.

“It doesn’t make sense,” his grandmother, Pauline Steele, said Wednesday as she sat on the dead youth’s bed and looked at the collection of baseball trophies on his bureau.

“It seems like we are talking about two separate people,” said his sister, Lori Lyn Steele. To his family, Steele may have been a mischievous youth, someone who had his troubles in school and with authorities, but he did not fit the picture of a cop killer.

At 12:20 a.m. Tuesday, however, according to police, the teen-ager grappled with a rookie police officer for control of the officer’s gun. Within seconds, Officer James Beyea, 24, fell to the ground, fatally shot in the head.

Steele, suspected of having just burglarized a nearby electronics store, then fired the weapon at the policeman’s approaching partner and ran off. He was later cornered in the attic of a vacant home and shot to death by officers when, according to authorities, he repeatedly tried to pick up the gun.

“He had been in trouble before but never anything like this,” his 23-year-old sister said. “I feel that what happened was that he was scared. He got in with the wrong people, did something wrong and got scared.”

Police declined to say whether Steele had a juvenile record. His family said he had minor scrapes with authorities in the last year, including a fight with a teacher and an arrest when a police officer found a pair of brass knuckles in a car in which he was riding. Details of the incidents were unavailable Wednesday.

Steele was a student at North Hollywood High School, where he frequently missed classes, until May 9, administrators said. Then he was placed in a school program supervised by Los Angeles county juvenile authorities, but officials declined to say what prompted the transfer.

“He liked sports and to goof around. But there was a little bit of a mystery about him,” said Ricardo Davis, recreation leader at Sun Valley Park, who knew Steele for eight years. “He came to the park right before his games and he left right after. I don’t know if the friends he had on the team were his really close friends or just friends while he was here.”

Police said a friend away from the park was Alberto Hernandez, 19, of North Hollywood. After Steele left his home Monday night, investigators said, he and Hernandez broke into Alpha Electronics, about six blocks from Steele’s home.

A burglar alarm touched off at 12:20 a.m. Tuesday brought Officer Beyea and his partner, Officer Ignacio Gonzalez, to the shop. After searching the premises, they saw someone running away and gave chase.

The officers split up, Beyea on foot and Gonzalez in the car. Soon after, Gonzalez saw Beyea struggling with someone in the street, police said. From a block away, he heard two gunshots and saw his partner fall.

Steele then exchanged gunfire with Gonzalez, police said, and ran through the neighborhood to an abandoned house. A police dog tracked him there at 4:30a.m.

Police said the K-9 officer, Jon Hall, and Sgt. Gary Nanson, one of dozens of policemen who by then were searching for the suspect, took a ladder from the garage of the vacant home, propped it in the attic entrance in the hallway ceiling and climbed up.

Using flashlights, they spotted Steele between two rafters near a corner of the attic. Steele began to comply with an order to surrender and told the officers that another suspect was in the house, police said, but then suddenly attempted to grab a gun that was by his side. Hall fired once, hitting Steele in the face.

According to police, Hall and Nanson crawled over to Steele and, after examining him, believed that he was dead. They left the gun next to him and backed away so the scene would be undisturbed for investigators.

Police said Hall then climbed out of the attic to search the house. About three minutes after the first shot, police said, Steele stirred and reached for the weapon again despite a warning from Nanson.

Nanson fired his gun, hitting Steele in the face again, police said. Two other officers heard the second shot and quickly climbed into the attic, police said, and both fired their guns when they saw Steele still grabbing for the gun. One shot hit Steele in the face for the third time and the other shot missed.

The officers found Beyea’s service revolver at the dead youth’s side.

Hernandez, who was found hiding in some bushes nearby, is scheduled to be arraigned today on a murder charge.

A funeral with full police honors is scheduled at 11

a.m. Friday for Beyea, the grandson of a traffic officer, at the Praiswater Funeral Home in Van Nuys, with interment to follow at Oakwood Memorial Park.

1,000 ATTEND RITES FOR SLAIN ROOKIE OFFICER

June 11, 1988

The first police funeral attended by March graduates of the Los Angeles Police Academy was for one of their own.

Two dozen members of the class, tears streaking many of their faces, stood at attention in a line of blue uniforms Friday and snapped crisp salutes as taps was played for Officer James Clark Beyea at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth.

Beyea, 24, who graduated with them on March 25, was fatally shot about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday in North Hollywood during a struggle for control of his service revolver with a burglary suspect.

His funeral drew about 1,000 mourners, most from law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California. Also in attendance were Beyea’s family, Mayor Tom Bradley, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and representatives of the Air National Guard unit to which Beyea belonged.

“It hurts to lose him,” said Officer William Casey, one of Beyea’s academy classmates. “It hurts when anyone in this profession is killed, but when it is someone that you feel is like a member of your family, it is harder.”

Officer Dave Porras said Beyea, the grandson of a Los Angeles traffic officer, was quick to share action stories from his new job.

“He would tell me about the foot pursuits and the narcotics arrests and the fun he was having,” a tearful Porras said to the overflow crowd at Praiswater Funeral Home in Van Nuys.

“Jim once told me that he couldn’t believe he was actually paid to do police work. But you can’t put a price on what happened this week. Jim was out there because he wanted to be out there.”

Beyea was shot when he confronted a 16-year-old youth suspected of burglarizing an electronics store.

Authorities said Beyea’s killer was Robert Jay Steele, a suspected gang member who was later cornered in the attic of a nearby house and shot to death by other officers when he attempted to reach for a gun. An accused accomplice in the burglary, Alberto B. Hernandez, 19, was captured and has been charged with murder and burglary.

The two teen-agers “were both active members” of a street gang that often gathers in East San Fernando Valley parks, including Sun Valley Park, where Steele was also known as a talented member of a youth baseball team, Sgt. Ray Davies said.

Beyea was the first Los Angeles police officer to die in the line of duty in a year and the 175th killed since 1907.