Police Corruption

A second former Los Angeles police officer has admitted he was among a group of rogue cops who committed invasion-style robberies across Southern California staged to look like legitimate law enforcement raids, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

Fernando Ocegueda hasn't seen his son since gunmen dragged the college student from the family's house three years ago. Alma Diaz wonders what happened to her son, Eric, a Mexicali police officer who left a party in 1995 and never returned. Arturo Davila still pounds on police doors looking for answers 11 years after his daughter and a girlfriend were kidnapped in downtown Ensenada.

Neil Thomas Gunn Sr. wheeled his pickup truck to the curb in a quiet hillside neighborhood in Burbank, about a mile from the police department where he'd worked for 22 years. He got out toting a 12-gauge shotgun, walked to a grassy area and turned the weapon on himself. Knowing that officers from his department would be dispatched to the scene, Gunn had left two notes in the truck. One asked that the vehicle not be impounded, but instead released to his family. The other said "this is absolutely work related."

The sensational revelations emerging from the LAPD's Rampart corruption scandal have sparked a bitter legal debate that promises to alter the landscape of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County for years to come. At issue is exactly what defense attorneys are entitled to know--and when they are entitled to know it--about the credibility of the police officers who investigate, arrest and testify against their clients.

It was one of those times when work in the Organized Crime Intelligence Division became most sensitive, when snooping on purported mobsters led detectives out of the shadows and into a very public world. An informant told Los Angeles Detective Norm Bonneau that he had seen several New York Mafia figures cozy up to then-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. at a fund-raising dinner for Brown's fledgling 1980 presidential campaign and give him a check.

After 4 1/2 years as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief here, Andy Fenrich figured that Operation King Cobra was bound to be a classic. Two Philippine businessmen wanted to sell 22 pounds of high-grade heroin. Unknown to them, the buyer was an undercover DEA agent backed by elite Philippine police. As hidden video cameras rolled and tape recorders whirred, the date and price was set for one of the biggest Philippine drug stings--called a "buy-and-bust" here--ever.

A Los Angeles County sheriff's sergeant, who has become the central figure in a money-skimming scandal involving an elite squad of narcotics officers, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to conspiracy and tax fraud charges and agreed to testify against his former deputies. Sgt. Robert R. Sobel, 45, who once commanded the crew of veteran deputies--all of whom have been indicted--tersely admitted in open court that he had helped steal more than $1.

The Miami River was once a crystal clear flow. Coconut palms lined the shore, and Seminole Indians paddled up the twisted path to a single trading post. But by the 1930s, the river had been dredged and stretched for barges and tankers. Fisheries and junkyards opened along the banks, and pollutants darkened the water into a brown ooze. As the decades passed, it was almost inevitable that this 5.2-mile meander would become the rusted-out back door for Miami's best-paying commerce.

Philadelphia settled a federal lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the ACLU in the wake of a police corruption scandal, agreeing to sweeping reforms to make the department more vigilant and increase its accountability. The settlement, hammered out in eight months of negotiations, sets into motion "by far the most ambitious anti-corruption program ever undertaken by this police department in its history," Mayor Edward Rendell said.

It happened without warning. The FBI swooped in, shut down Troup's five-man police force and jailed the chief and a sergeant -- the 2005 Chamber of Commerce officer of the year, no less -- on charges of corruption. Startled residents watched in silence as authorities secured the tiny station with yellow crime-scene tape and swarmed the building for evidence. Sgt. Mark Turner, 47, was charged with delivering marijuana and tampering with or fabricating evidence.