Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (48 page)

But after a few tin-eared false starts of the sort made by many pushy northeasterners newly arrived in L.A., Bratton had settled in and restored a stature and legitimacy long lost to the office of the Los Angeles chief of police. At the same time, he also brought the department’s Police Protective League, which had been furiously hostile to Parks, into his decision-making processes while stabilizing and rationalizing the disciplinary system.

Beyond the changes mandated by the consent decree, Bratton also started the conversion of the LAPD’s culture by altering the way the department’s patrol officers thought about their jobs. Under him and commanders like Charlie Beck, George Gascon, and Pat Gannon, there was a much wider focus on having a positive community impact as opposed to just racking up arrest numbers.

Charlie Beck’s reform of the Rampart Division and his multipronged,
community-engaged revitalization of MacArthur Park had taken place because Bratton had allowed him to experiment by giving him just five words of instruction: “Clean up that fucking park!”

Beck and Pat Gannon would embrace a gang interventionist academy and develop the kind of strong relationships with grassroots community organizations and activists that would help grow the concepts of legitimacy and fairness within the LAPD—again because Bratton gave them the freedom to do so.

Bratton was also successful as chief because he cultivated key members of L.A.’s police-focused political establishment. His support for the concepts that came out of Connie Rice’s
Call to Action
report—especially the gang-interventionist academy and the mayor’s Gang Reduction and Youth Development office—were key to their passage.

In addition, Bratton had spotted Rice as someone with ideas, just as he spotted Jack Maple in New York, and entered into a partnership with her, giving Rice the imprimatur of the LAPD and the opportunity to get reforms instituted within and around the LAPD that directly advanced both her agenda and his own.

Bratton also began the process of making the LAPD a far more efficient and accountable department while—at least according to the department’s own numbers—starting a record of crime decreases that lasted for eleven straight years.

Then, among his last acts in office, he successfully campaigned for Charlie Beck to succeed him. Soon after, among
his
first acts in office as chief,
Charlie Beck walked a beat in Jordan Downs—where Andre Christian was now working as a gang interventionist—while shaking hands and introducing himself to the residents.

But he had also greatly ratcheted up the number of gang injunctions and legitimized stop-and-frisk in Los Angeles.

Pat Gannon, Ron Noblet, and Alfred Lomas, December 2010, Magnolia Place Community Center

Standing unobtrusively at the back of a large, unadorned meeting hall in a low-slung South Central community center, Pat Gannon was busy chatting with a reporter as mingling clusters of black and Latino men and women ambled into the room. Some were young, but many were approaching or settling into middle age, and had the weathered look of lives hard lived. Stopping to grab a cup of the coffee and some doughnuts or bagels on a table behind Gannon, they then took a seat in one of the metal folding chairs facing the podium at the front of the room.

It was a rainy mid-morning in December 2010—graduation day at the Urban Peace Academy, the second since the opening of the gang-interventionist program the previous summer—and twenty-five men and women were about to receive their graduation certificates.

Not far from Gannon stood
Ron Noblet, pale-vanilla face expressionless, arms folded, absolutely still. Tall, broad-shouldered, his gray hair crew-cut, he looked like some white-socks-wearing, plainclothes Irish cop from the Bronx, circa 1972. But in fact he was a half-Mexican-American, half-Eastern-European
ex-marine and
native son of Los Angeles. A
Slavic studies major at USC, Noblet had been working with gangs as a consultant and interventionist for forty years and had become a key part of the academy’s management team. He’d grown up with an
alcoholic father who’d raised and disciplined him with
terrible beatings and berating. His life quest subsequently became trying to understand what violence was about, and how it might be mitigated.

When Noblet heard that the Advancement Project was creating the UPA, he called Connie Rice and introduced himself with one sentence: “
You don’t know me, but you need me.” It turned out she did. Rice had spent a great deal of time working with and understanding gangs and intervention through the prism of black interventionists in South L.A., but she knew little about Mexican and Central American gang culture. Ron Noblet knew a lot.

“
Ron was very important,” recalls Rice. “He was all but a member
of the Latin Kings and El Sereno when he was growing up, and went on from there to study the blood feuds of Eastern Europe at USC. And as a half-white, half-Latino kid he didn’t belong anywhere, and consequently was geared to really soak up what he was learning in a uniquely impartial and academic way.”

During his decades as an interventionist, Noblet dealt with serious, deadly people, and had to figure out a way to gain the trust of both gang members and cops and not be considered a creature of either. The way he found was to walk a tightrope between rival gangs and between gangs and the police, intervening or brokering deals whenever he could while being so boldly transparent that everybody could see him in action and watch as he kept his word.

“The difference in gang work now,” Noblet would later say, “is there’s real cooperation between blacks and browns, and interventionists and the police. I don’t mean snitching. I mean a mutual understanding that both sides want to lower the level of violence. Gang workers don’t help the police investigate the last killing,
they help to stop the next killing.”

Meanwhile, just as the graduation ceremony was about to get started,
Alfred Lomas rushed in. Looking like a lawyer late for court, he was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie that somehow managed to conceal the amazing maze of gang tattoos spread across his arms and upper body, including vivid flames running up the collar line of his neck.

Lomas, it turned out, was one of the Urban Peace Academy’s first graduates, brought into the fold by Noblet.

In 2005, Lomas’s obsession with getting high had again landed him in L.A. County Jail. Once released, he found himself wandering the streets of Skid Row. There he met members of a church ministry called
the Dream Center, looking to save lost souls. He agreed to accompany them back to the church’s large social-welfare center west of downtown, in Echo Park. There they enrolled him in an in-house drug treatment program. Once sober and off drugs, Lomas proved a remarkably articulate, coiled ball of energy, working for the ministry’s food distribution program, operating a mobile food bank.

One day in 2007 he received a phone call from an LAPD captain
named Mark Olvera, who was then the commanding officer of the Newton Division.
Olvera asked for a favor, much like the one Pat Gannon had asked Bo Taylor for in South L.A. two years earlier: help in averting an explosive situation between the black and brown residents of the Pueblo del Rio housing projects. A Mexican kid had been found dead, and rumors were flying that he was a victim of the project’s black Bloods gang, the Pueblo Bishops. Neither the LAPD nor the coroner’s office had yet determined the cause of death, however.

Prospects for retaliatory violence were nevertheless running high and Olvera asked Lomas if he’d try to head it off. Lomas agreed. Fortunately, he knew the dead kid’s parents and some of their friends and told them that, despite the rumors, he had firsthand knowledge that law enforcement had not yet determined what had killed their son.

He also gave the Florencia gangsters living in the projects the same message, adding that whatever the truth was, he’d let them know face-to-face as soon as he learned it. That bought Lomas and the LAPD a twenty-four-hour window to “
keep everybody calm and all the rumors from spreading.” And it worked. “It could have turned into a huge retaliatory black-and-brown gangbang,” says Lomas. “Instead, it turned out
the kid had died of an aneurysm, and that was the end of it.”

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

Being out in the open about both his old life as a gangster and his new life on the square, Lomas was duty-bound to live life as he was proclaiming it to be, a credo taught and reinforced within the bond he’d forged with Ron Noblet. “
Al was a generation behind in age of some of the really heavy shot-callers in various organizations,” Noblet would later say. “With Chicanos and Mexicans there is a hierarchy. And part of that hierarchy is age difference. The older guys knew what he was trying to do now, and gave him a pass. Even though they themselves were stone criminals and gangsters, if you say you’re trying to do the right thing, and you do it, they’ll give you a chance. But if they find out you’re playing both sides, you’re dead.
They don’t like hypocrisy.”

If his fellow gangsters were giving Alfred Lomas a pass, however, law enforcement definitely was not. And in 2007, two years before the
birth of the Peace Academy, he started getting squeezed. The LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department and the feds had launched a two-year gang investigation including a sweeping injunction against six gangs that included Florencia 13.

For Lomas, this was deeply disturbing news. All that was needed for him to effectively spend the rest of his life behind bars was to get caught up in some mad-ass lawman’s supposition that he was still a muscleman for drug dealers, and then see to it that a federal RICO conspiracy indictment was slapped on him. And that’s exactly what almost happened.
Three times—with the last incident occurring during Bratton’s last year in office, 2009.

Lomas was then working with the Pueblo Bishops in the projects, where he was also establishing himself as a God-fearing, evangelizing interventionist.

Early one morning the gang task force suddenly raided Pueblo del Rio, arresting eighty Bishops for drug dealing and then putting heavy pressure on some of those arrested, according to Lomas, to implicate him.
Claiming to have suspicious surveillance pictures of Lomas at the projects and at gang funerals, the cops told him they believed that his work in the projects was simply a front, and that in reality he was a drug connection between Florencia—which was a transnational gang with access to drugs from Mexico and Colombia—and the Bishops.

It was not an unreasonable assumption. A Mexican-American ex-gangster going into black gang territory claiming to be doing good works, and being permitted to do so, was unheard-of. And the cops, who were not buying it, started, as Lomas later told it, to put fierce pressure on Lomas to confess, and on the Bishops to roll over on Lomas. Neither happened. But Lomas believes that the only thing that eventually saved him was the fact that he’d already established his bona fides with the LAPD.

One of those who wound up vouching for him was LAPD sergeant Curtis Woodle, who had arrived at the day’s graduation shortly before Lomas. One of Woodle’s jobs, says Lomas, was establishing “
who was real and who wasn’t” during the Peace Academy’s selection process.

Woodle became Charlie Beck’s point man on a lot of issues dealing
with gangs. Beck had first met Woodle when he was commanding the Rampart Division. Curtis Woodle had been revolted when he’d once pulled up to a drive-by shooting and discovered the bullet-riddled dead bodies of two girls, one thirteen, the other sixteen, sprawled across the seats of their car, each looking, in Woodle’s eyes, like his daughter, Veronica. That day he vowed
to do something other than be just a hard-nosed gang cop.

That’s what he was trying to be when Charlie Beck first noticed him.
Woodle had chosen a local middle school as a personal project to try to keep kids out of gangs, and one day Beck had stopped by to check him out. He liked what he saw—which was the kids flocking around LAPD cop Curtis Woodle and his astounding superhero physical presence.

When Beck was subsequently assigned to South Bureau, he decided to bring Woodle along with him to run similar antigang youth programs. Then, as the Peace Academy was developing, he assigned Woodle as his liaison to smooth out any problems between this new, odd mix of cops and interventionists. “
And Curtis,” as Beck would later tell it, proved “very good at figuring out how to do that, how to make strong relationships with people, and he became a big piece of that program.”

Lomas’s other savior was the very same Captain Mark Olvera whom Lomas had helped out during the episode when the Latino kid was found dead in the projects. Olvera too was involved with the Peace Academy, having served on UPA’s Law Enforcement Curriculum Development Work Group. The five words that might well have quasi-officially saved Alfred Lomas came from Olvera in an article in the
Los Angeles Times
: “
He is the real deal.”

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

When Pat Gannon was called up to the graduation podium to speak, Connie Rice, acting as the day’s MC, introduced him as the “deputy chief in charge of South Bureau—which Peter Jennings of ABC News had called the deadliest beat in America.”

It proved a good segue for Gannon. “Well, I’ve got to tell you,” Gannon
replied as he gripped the podium, “because of the work you’ve done, South Bureau is no longer the deadliest beat in America.

“
This year, right now, the city of Los Angeles has had 287 murders. In 1992 we finished with 1,100. And in my nearly thirty-three years on the LAPD I can’t think of one thing that has done more to impact those numbers than gang interventionists. What you’ve done to stop indiscriminate street crime and retaliatory shootings has been a huge benefit. In the nineties, one shooting led to ten retaliatory shootings. We simply don’t see that today.

“In 2009,” Gannon continued, “Chicago had 458 murders; we had 314. They’re smaller than L.A. And it’s twenty-one degrees there today. If it was twenty-one degrees in L.A., we wouldn’t have
any
crime. We should finish 2010 under 300.