The Rampart case was not the first time Poole had been prevented by his department from investigating bad cops. The trail to Rampart began a year before Perez was arrested, when Poole and his partner at Robbery/Homicide, Fred Miller, were assigned to investigate the March 1997 Studio City shooting of LAPD officer Kevin Gaines. Gaines was killed in a "road rage" dispute after he brandished a gun at another motorist.

That motorist happened to be an undercover cop, Detective Frank Lyga, who pulled out his own gun in self-protection and shot Gaines through the heart. While investigating the shooting, Poole learned that Gaines had a history of bullying and intimidating motorists and attacking cops. At the time of his death, he was already being investigated by Internal Affairs for calling in a phony crime report and staging a confrontation with the responding officers. Had he not been killed, according to Internal Affairs documents, he would have been fired from the department. (The license plate on Gaines' car read "ITSOKIA," which was widely believed to be a taunt to Internal Affairs.)

Poole also learned that Gaines had ties to L.A.'s gang scene. He had been living with Sharitha Knight, rap star Snoop Dogg's manager and the ex-wife of imprisoned Death Row Records mogul Marion "Suge" Knight. He was living large in the L.A. and Las Vegas nightclub fast lanes, sporting expensive clothes, cars and girlfriends. Poole turned up a credit card receipt showing that Officer Gaines had recently dropped nearly a grand for lunch at Monty's Steakhouse in Westwood, a Death Row hangout.

An informant told Poole that Gaines and other cops were moving money and drugs for Suge Knight. Gaines told many of his friends he was being followed by the FBI. A Death Row insider informed Poole and his partner that Gaines and another cop, David Mack, were "confidants" of Knight's who were frequently seen at Death Row functions. Informants reported that both Mack and Gaines were Blood gang members who worked for Knight, who was also a Blood.

Despite what he uncovered, Poole's LAPD superiors prevented him from investigating Gaines any further. "He was dead, and they didn't want to know anything more about him," says Poole. "Here he is at some gangster hangout buying lunch for $952. Don't you think the department should want to find out a little more? I wanted to do a financial investigation on Gaines. You know what the department said? 'No, he's dead. This case is closed.'"

Chief Parks also kept evidence about Gaines from public view by agreeing to a settlement with attorney Johnnie Cochran, who filed a $25 million wrongful death suit against the city on behalf of Gaines' family. Despite strong evidence that Lyga was acting in self-defense, the Cochran suit alleged that Lyga was "an aggressive and dangerous police officer" and implied there was a racial motivation to the shooting. Officer Lyga is white, while Gaines was black. Lyga urgently wanted to fight the suit, but city attorney James Hahn structured a deal so that the three plaintiffs -- Gaines' wife and two daughters -- each received compensation below the $100,000 monetary threshold that required City Council approval.

City Council member Laura Chick called this backroom deal "deplorable and unacceptable." The judge called it "political." Frank Lyga, rather than having his name cleared, was hung out to dry, as the public was led to believe the city was covering for him. In fact, the LAPD and City Hall were burying embarrassing information about Officer Kevin Gaines. (Lyga remains on the job, having been cleared of any wrongdoing at two departmental board hearings.)

Poole's superiors also didn't want him to investigate Officer David Mack, or Mack's best friend and former partner, Perez. Mack was arrested in December 1997 for the armed robbery of $722,000 from a Bank of America on Jefferson Boulevard. Two masked accomplices of Mack's remain at large and the money remains unaccounted for. Mack was later convicted and sentenced to 14 years. Perez, another cop who was living way too large, celebrated with Mack at a Vegas hotel after the heist. (In testimony to the D.A.'s office, Perez acknowledged partying with Mack in Vegas after the robbery, but says he didn't know about his friend's crime.)

Perez finally got caught in the first place as a result of connections made by Russell Poole. A special task force, including Poole, had been formed to investigate Perez because IAD suspected him of stealing 6 pounds of cocaine evidence that disappeared in March 1998 from a police storage room.

While conducting a close audit of narco-evidence, the task force found something interesting. On Feb. 6, 1998, an additional 2 pounds of cocaine evidence, submitted by narcotics detective Lyga, had been stolen from the downtown Evidence Control Unit. This drug theft occurred one month after Lyga was cleared in his final board hearing on the Gaines shooting. Somebody ordered up Lyga's evidence, using the specific division report number, and had it delivered to Rampart station. When task force detectives talked to the property manager, she identified the caller as Perez -- who had signed out the dope at Rampart under yet another name.

Poole and his fellow investigators concluded that Perez had targeted Lyga's cocaine haul as an act of retaliation for killing Gaines. As Poole would learn, retaliation was the Rampart Way. Over the next six months, task force investigators tailed Perez and concluded that he was dealing drugs through a girlfriend. Poole finally slapped the cuffs on Perez in August 1998 and charged him with stealing a total of 8 pounds of cocaine and some police radios.

A year later, when Perez made his deal with the D.A.'s office, he denied knowing anything about the crimes of his friend Mack. He also denied knowing Lyga. "I don't even know who Lyga is," he told his interrogators.

"He's lying," says Lyga, who worked with both Perez and Mack a few years before the Rampart scandal broke. For a while, Lyga supervised a narcotics operation that Perez worked on. "There's no way he doesn't remember me," says Lyga.

One of the biggest crimes Poole says he was prevented from adequately investigating, for fear the trail would lead to a cop, was the murder of Notorious B.I.G. While investigating the Gaines shooting, Poole received a tip that the rogue cop might be involved in the killing of the rap star, who was shot one week before Gaines himself was shot dead. Poole conferred with detectives at the LAPD's Wilshire Division station and before long he was given the Notorious B.I.G. case as well. He and his partner eventually pursued over 250 leads in the case, some of which involved Mack.

Once again, they were kept from following those leads because they implicated a cop. "They told me, 'We're not going to get involved in that.' Their attitude was, 'Mack had already gone down for bank robbery. Let's not get involved in more controversy.'"

After he resigned, Poole attempted to go public with his story of the suppressed report, and the LAPD's failure to investigate cops, by going to the L.A. Times. But selective reporting by the Times landed him in the middle of a bizarre media firestorm.

Reporters Matt Lait and Scott Glover chose to write only about the Biggie killing, revealing some but not all of the 20 clues that Poole had uncovered linking Mack and his friend, Amir Muhammed (also known as Harry Billups), to the crime. Lait and Glover ran a story saying the LAPD was looking for Muhammed/Billups as a suspect in the Biggie killing. But months later, another L.A. Times reporter, Chuck Philips, wrote that the LAPD was in fact not looking for Muhammed. (Philips located Muhammed, who said he was a mortgage broker who had nothing to do with the crime). Brill's Content online jumped on the story of the dueling Times stories, and in the ensuing imbroglio, Poole was identified as Lait and Glover's source -- and dismissed in one local weekly as a "disgruntled" former cop.

But Poole's entire story had not been told. In fact, he'd explained to Lait and Glover that the LAPD wasn't looking for Muhammed/Billups -- not because he'd been cleared, but because of his ties to a cop, David Mack. Muhammed and Mack were neither exonerated nor proved to be involved in the killing, Poole says, because the LAPD cut its investigation of them short. And Lait and Glover's partial telling of his tale, Poole says, obscured the truth. "They'll say I'm disgruntled," says Poole. "Well, anyone who was placed in my position would be disgruntled. I left because the department literally wanted me to lie and keep things from the D.A.'s office."

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