Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (20 page)

But Willie Williams never made such a pronouncement, or put out that memo, or made that speech.

Willie Williams, September 1992, Police Administration Building

Approaching Jesse Brewer—now the new president of the Police Commission—and Mike Yamaki—the new VP—
Willie Williams stopped, greeted them, and then asked if he could take a vacation. Neither could believe what they were hearing. Willie Williams had been chief for just ninety days. How could he not understand that as a stranger leading an already hostile and skeptical LAPD he had to show he was working ten times harder than everybody else? But instead, Williams was complaining about the long hours he’d been working and how tired he was. And not without reason.

During those first three months
Williams’s schedule had been grueling. He’d attended scores, if not hundreds, of meetings, with everyone from neighborhood block associations and district leaders to business associations, church and synagogue congregations, and every kind of advocacy organization. And everyone had seemed enthralled by his affable charm, confidence, and promises. But following those successful meets-and-greets, high expectations started giving way to low performance.

“
Jesse Brewer tried—desperately—to tell him to go out to roll calls [at all the department’s eighteen divisions],” recalls Ann Reiss Lane, “and he’d agree. He always agreed to everything.” But Willie Williams did not go. Did not talk and listen to sergeants and patrol officers and address their questions and anxieties face-to-face; did not tell them what he intended to do and why it would be helpful and more effective for them to police in a new, modified way. Instead he left a vacuum for others to fill.

It was a bad decision, not listening to Brewer, made at a particularly bad time. Williams’s arrival had coincided with a moment when the rank and file was especially—historically—demoralized and defensive. They’d just experienced the yearlong pain of a thumping collective headache, one brought on by the unceasing, near-universal denunciation of the department following the beating of Rodney King and then the riots. For many of them, Williams’s appointment was just another insult—and Williams himself just another convenient surrogate for their anger, to be pounced on as if they were piranhas and Willie Williams the first flesh they’d seen in days.

Bernard Parks, Fall 1992, Parker Center

On the wall of the office of then assistant LAPD chief Bernard Parks hung a picture of Daryl Gates, an ode to the Great Man himself that showed the world who Parks was to his very core: a disciple of The Chief—
a Daryl Gates cop
.

Parks, however, was a very impressive guy in his own right: a tall, trim, movie-star-handsome African-American straight out of central casting, who
would later be named by
People
magazine as one of the world’s “50 Most Beautiful People.” The
son of a thirty-eight-year veteran Los Angeles Port Police sergeant, Bernard Parks had grown up in Watts and was as shrewd and smart as he was headstrong—the kind of perfectionist utterly convinced that whatever he thought was
the final word
.

Not for him was the subtle, inch-by-inch working for racial justice and in-house change in the style of Tom Bradley or Jesse Brewer. Parks rose through the ranks as the kind of black man who’d come of age in a still overtly racist America and made it by hard work and determination, and he brooked no excuses for those who hadn’t. Intellectually he well understood the causal effects of crime; that society wasn’t dealing with them, and that it was using police departments like the LAPD to contain the fallout. But he also felt that one of the biggest culprits in this crime tragedy was the profit-driven, quick-take, sensationalistic press.
Not only was it failing to
support
the police but in its own twisted way it was laying the blame squarely on the police instead. “It’s easy to point [at the police] and say they shot so many black people in [a] city,” he once said. “What’s hard [for the press to explain] is why all those black people have guns that are creating crime and why the police are confronting them daily.”

Once at a conference at USC
Parks was asked about a series of LAPD crises going back to the 1940s—“the Zoot Suit riots, the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating, the ’92 riots.” With all that history and controversy, asked the questioner, “how do you think policing has evolved in L.A.?” “
I think we’ve evolved in a variety of ways,” Parks replied. “What’s unfortunate [is] when you mentioned those highlights [Rodney King, etc.], many of those are ten or twenty years apart. . . . [And the press] doesn’t view them in context. In between, there have been the day-to-day activities . . . of providing a service that the public appreciates.” It was an astoundingly ahistorical appraisal, given that from at least the Watts Riots through the ’92 riots, the entire twenty-seven-year history of the LAPD had been nothing
but
context, as one abuse bled into another like an unbroken daisy chain.

**************

Bernard Parks’s modus operandi during interviews was to parry even mildly critical questions about the department with a deluge of “facts” so intricate, jargon-filled, and complexly drawn that a reporter would leave Parks’s office with nothing he could use or even understand.

Unless, of course, he liked you, and Bernard Parks liked very few reporters. But he did like Jim Newton, who was the
Los Angeles Times
’ deputy bureau chief at the city-county bureau, and the man to whom Parks was dishing dirt on Willie Williams with unbridled enthusiasm. “
Parks always thought Jim was a good guy,” says Tim Rutten, a veteran
Los Angeles Times
editor and columnist. “It was the Willie Williams era when they bonded. Jim was on the beat. Bernie was his source. Willie Williams was Jim’s story.” And what Parks was telling Newton and others was bad news for Williams.

Early in his term, Williams had made Parks chief of operations. It
was a plum job, a key position where, on a daily basis, Parks—who’d placed second to Williams in the runoff for chief—would be
in charge of about 85 percent of the force and could really make things hum. Or not. It all depended on how competent he or she was or, in the case of Parks—who was working for Willie Williams, who knew nothing about the inner workings of the LAPD—how good a job he
wished
to do.

And Parks wished to do a
very
good job indeed. Just not in that position under Williams. He’d made no secret of his anger at not being chosen chief. In fact, recalls Anthony De Los Reyes, “
Parks didn’t talk to Jess [Brewer] for more than a year after the selection.”

“
Parks was livid with Jesse because Jess had assured him that he’d be the next chief,” says David Dotson. “And I have no doubt that Parks was really pissed off when he wasn’t chosen . . . and felt that [the commission] had done a disservice bringing in Willie—whom he considered an inferior person.”

Had Parks
not
been so enraged, he could have been very, very helpful to Williams. “
Bernard knew everything about the Los Angeles Police Department—
everything
,” recalls Charlie Beck. “He knew the combination to every locker in Parker Center. He did know. We all believed he did. Willy wouldn’t have known where the locker room
was
.”

And Parks wasn’t about to show him. Instead he used his powerful position against Williams, as Curtis Woodle later put it, “to teach the department how to
undermine the chief, to make sure that Willie failed.” As the driver and
bodyguard to the mayor, Woodle was in a position to know. “And when that happens, when you have the number two guy
talking bad about the top dog, everything else is going to go under. You have eighteen different [LAPD] divisions all over the place just kind of out there. . . . So even if Willie was giving directions to Parks, it wasn’t getting down to them.”

Williams, fed up with his disloyalty,
would later demote Parks as a way of forcing him into retirement. But Bernard Parks had many strong supporters on the City Council, who, astoundingly, decided to intervene in what should have been strictly an internal department matter. In the LAPD, assistant chiefs—who serve directly under the chief of police—are by statute chosen by him and serve at his pleasure. So, unable to thus
rescind the demotion, the council decided instead to show Willie Williams who they really loved by awarding Parks
a $15,000 raise.

Alfred Lomas, Early to Mid-Eighties, Scotland, the Philippines, and L.A.

While Bernard Parks had been busy climbing the LAPD career ladder in the early 1980s, Alfred Lomas was serving in
the United States Marine Corps. He’d joined the Corps in 1982 when he turned eighteen, figuring it would be a good way to stem his burgeoning alcoholism. But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, three years later, he’d found himself sipping on a
fifth of whiskey as he bounced around on a Greyhound bus seat, peeping out bleary-eyed at the landscape as the bus made its way from North Carolina to Los Angeles. In his duffel bag was an “
other than honorable” discharge and behind him a year he’d just done in the brig.

The marines hadn’t changed him much. After boot camp and specialized training, he’d had too much time on his hands, and found himself in a Marine Corps where hard-man attitudes and serious drinking had been cornerstones of the culture for centuries—if you kept it within bounds. But there were always guys like Lomas who knew no boundaries.

For a while, however, he’d done quite well. He was bright and a habitual reader, which, along with a keen ability to retain information and a fascination with military machismo, enabled him to test well enough to be assigned to specialized infantry units.

Assigned to Scotland, he told a lieutenant commander to fuck off and physically threatened him. That got him busted from lance corporal to private.
Reassigned to the Philippines, his alcoholism spiraled into full-blown blackout drinking and brawling. There, he refused a lieutenant’s direct order and also threatened
him
. That second threat landed him in a
high-security red-line brig in North Carolina, where, if you stepped over any red line on the floor, you’d be smacked in the head with a billy club. Of all the places he would ever be incarcerated, Lomas
would always remember that federal brig in North Carolina as the hardest time he’d ever done.

**************

Stepping off the Greyhound after four or five days on the road, Lomas headed straight to the old neighborhood, dropped off his stuff at his mother’s apartment, and beelined it to the
Tami Amis—a dive of a joint in the heart of a warren of bars in Huntington Park, frequented by hard-core Chicano ex-cons.

He was sitting on a stool at the bar, drinking hard, trying to get
right
, when a
pretty Latina struck up a conversation with him. She looked just like a hundred other neighborhood girls he’d known, nothing special, but she didn’t seem beat down by life, or by some pimp-like boyfriend either. Still, she was in the Tami Amis, which meant there had to be something off about her. After a while she suggested they go to the
Toles Motel nearby to party. When they entered her room, she asked for $10, left for a moment, returned, pulled out a pipe, lit up, took a hit, and passed it to Lomas. An instant after inhaling, he felt an intense wave of euphoria and clarity, followed by something akin to “
an orgasm magnified—one hundred times,” and lasting for about half an hour. It was a fateful experience. Alfred Lomas was about to spend most of his next twenty years
chasing that crack high.

**************

About a week later, Lomas placed twenty bucks in his pocket and set out to score at the Toles. Like the Tami Amis bar, the motel was a sad place of drugs and desperation. Walking up the Toles’s seedy stairs into a hallway, Lomas felt intensely out of place. He was dressed in clean clothes, with clean fingernails, brushed teeth, and freshly washed hair. The contrast between him and the chronic junkies and crackheads he was passing stunned him.

At that time in much of South Central and greater South Los Angeles, blacks dominated the crack trade. Some older black guys had crossed Alameda Boulevard, the traditional black/Chicano dividing line, and set up shop at the Toles and other motels in and around Huntington
Park. They were mostly old men using their Social Security checks to deal, not part of the aggressive black crack-cocaine gangs of the nineties, who would kill you over territory or most anything else. It was still way too early for that. This was still the beginning time; the Colombians’ cocaine mule lines weren’t established as a business model yet.

Making his way down the hallway, he spotted men sitting in their rooms through their open doorways. As he passed each room the door slammed shut, and Lomas, understanding what was happening, started shouting that he wasn’t a cop. But nobody was buying that, until a homeboy diffused the tension with four simple words: “
Hey, what’s up, dawg.” “Once he said that,” says Lomas, doors started creaking open as the occupants realized that he was a customer with money.

**************

In the days and months that followed, Alfred Lomas’s addiction to crack played out like an oft-told tale from a million AA meetings. A week later he went back to the Toles and scored some crack and a woman—the latter being a given. There was always a sensual, addicted woman around, looking to get high, doing what it took. And, of course, his tolerance level soon became higher and higher in tandem with his desire for more and more, just as his money supply became smaller and smaller. Lomas was left with two choices: start stealing or start dealing.

Stealing, he figured, was too high-risk. And he was smart enough to realize that by the nature of his then drunken, dope-addicted, violence-prone life he wouldn’t make a good salesman—which is one of the prerequisites of being a successful drug dealer.

For many years, however, he’d been one of those “five percenters” that the LAPD talks about—the 5 percent of the gang population responsible for most of the gang violence. He’d been exposed to those guys growing up, and had been one of those guys, one of those
vato locos
. And he’d learned from that experience that talk was cheap and violence ruled, and that violence and the threat of it was exactly what he had to sell. So he decided that he’d become the guy who would protect a dope dealer. And he had one in mind: a guy from his neighborhood, a
fellow Florencia 13 gangster named Billy [not his real name] who was, says Lomas, “
one of the best crack dealers I had ever seen.” It was no coincidence that Billy was a Florencia 13 gangster. Even in the Corps, Lomas was always in the gang, still tagging the walls of buildings and bar bathrooms in North Carolina, Okinawa, and the Philippines with “
F13” like he was still in the hood, claiming territory.