Poole says he expects to be attacked by the LAPD for going public with his charges. He predicts that the department will try to undermine his credibility and even smear his reputation. He believes that Chief Parks has already circled the wagons. The police officials who attended his September 1998 meeting with Chief Parks will be muzzled, says the former detective. (They all refused to comment for this story.) Asked who could confirm his recounting of the meeting, Poole responds, "Beatriz Cid, my partner, would be your best chance. I can't believe she would lie about it. But she also won't be able to comment. Nobody will. Not unless the D.A. first grants them immunity."

Detective Cid is now working at the LAPD's Hollenbeck Station. Approached there at the front desk and asked about Russell Poole's allegations, Cid became frightened and defensive, waving the reporter away. "It's not for me to say. I can't say anything. I can't comment about anything," she said, before walking away.

Law enforcement experts outside the LAPD who were asked to review a copy of Poole's report told Salon it seemed solid and credible. Scott Landsman, a nationally renowned police expert and recently retired LAPD training officer, concluded that it is "thorough and professionally done. Nothing looks manufactured or trumped up. He did everything by the book and the evidence pops up by itself. That's how a good investigation is done."

Landsman also said that if Poole's superiors thought the report was not up to department standards, the proper procedure would have been to send it back to him to do it over. "By no means should it have been withheld from the D.A.," says Landsman. Other LAPD sources concurred.

According to Joseph McNamara, a retired police chief of San Jose and Kansas City who has written extensively about the LAPD, the department's handling of Officer Perez is a textbook case of damage control getting priority over the truth. "They should have run a sting operation after they got him," says McNamara. "They could have spread the net. Instead, they nailed one guy and that's the end of it. Time and time again they do that and let some of the worst bastards get away. Then, when the guy rats out everybody else, he makes a deal and gets off easy. That's the terrible ethical immorality of what they do over and over." According to Poole, they did it over and over: with Kevin Gaines, David Mack, Rafael Perez.

A research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, McNamara is author of the forthcoming book "Gangster Cops: The Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs." He testified before the L.A. City Council after the Rodney King riots, calling for then Chief Daryl Gates to resign and sat on the screening board that helped select Gates' successor, Willie Williams.

McNamara says the LAPD suffers from an institutional, militaristic attitude about control -- of information as well as of the streets. "It's a very macho organization and it always has been," says McNamara. "It isn't something that was formed by Parks." Despite reform efforts, he says, the LAPD culture hasn't changed. "Both Williams and Parks missed the boat. They had a mandate to do that. You need to constantly fight against the tendency of the police to become a secret, closed organization."

McNamara says the problem is not unique to the LAPD. "I've discovered 'Rampart' characteristics in almost every major police department in the country," he says. "There's no way that can exist without a strong code of silence. The mayor and police chief put their spin on the scandal for damage control, describing it as a few rotten apples, when in fact it's endemic. The chief reason is the lack of political accountability "

According to retired LAPD Deputy Chief Steve Downing, "The corruption of Rampart would have been uncovered and brought to an end at least a year earlier if the natural leads in the cases of Gaines, Mack and Perez had been followed. Firing 100 cops is no badge of courage," says Downing, referring to the 100 officers Chief Parks has dismissed during his tenure. "Have those cops been further investigated? Where did all these crooked cops come from? That's the question nobody will address."

However bad things are at the LAPD, however, McNamara believes the city is making matters worse by entering into a consent decree with the Justice Department. "The federal government doesn't know how to run anything, especially police departments," says McNamara. "The record of federal law enforcement agencies is even worse. This tendency to give all power to the feds makes things worse and you spend more money. The tradition of local policing is really a sacred one for a free society, but we seem willing to trade it away. The FBI is not accountable like a local force. Willie Williams got fired and L.A.'s new mayor will probably fire Bernard Parks. On a local level, at least there is some degree of control and accountability. But who controls the Justice Department? No one."

It's hard to believe any entity would handle the scandal worse than Parks and the LAPD did. "Rampart was staring [the LAPD] right in the face for years," Poole says. "They knew the seriousness of what was going on but they just let it go. Their excuse was that these [gang members] were terrorists running the streets. But it turned out the cops were worse. They were running their own little enterprise and taking the law into their own hands. It comes down to a lack of leadership. The supervisors had no courage. They all knew this stuff was happening, but nobody had the courage to say, 'Wait a minute!'

"From Day 1, this investigation was always about containment, not about exposing the truth," Poole charges. "Because they suppressed my report and purged documents from the D.A.'s package, I believe they are guilty of obstruction of justice. Plain and simple. All the way up to the chief of police. Had I or any other officer tried to do what the chief and my superiors ordered me to do, they would be in jail right now for obstruction of justice."

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