photo by Kara Mears

We have a new project, new headquarters, new home.

After so many years of living next to our neighbors (same city/different world), we’ve decided to really move in with them, out of our America & into theirs –

+ onto a new street
+ with a new, huge family
+ into their house,
+ into The Entryway.

This is where our story starts.

please VISIT! and find us/become a FAN on Facebook!

Con cariño,

from The Entryway,

Devin & Kara

The day this picture was taken was a very American one. An amazing (Emmy-award winning, in fact!) photographer named Josh Cogan visited MPM and we walked around and ate tacos made by Koreans and stepped into a Tae Kwon Doe studio staffed with instructors from Mexico. I told him about the new kimchee tamale at Mama’s and also the Korean man recently busted for making fake IDs at the mercy of what he calls “street people” but who everyone else calls miqueros, a word with roots in the Mexican acronym MICA, for green card. All around MacArthur Park were fusions that had nothing to do with either one of us, only all the more fascinating. More of Josh’s photos below.

This Tae Kwon Doe studio was packed! Classes are taught in English and Spanish.

A standard miquero uniform: striped, collared shirt, baseball cap (or hair with lots of gel), and standing on a busy corner like this one.

Just in love, love, love with the color of the neighborhood. Beautiful and bold.

Sometime before photography, Josh was an anthropologist. I was too, in his company. We went into thrift shops to see what was being given away/bought, scouted out where the police like to park, and of course crashed a martial arts class taught in Spanish.

I love this guy's hat, I love his mustache, I love all the blues of Union.

On the drive to Venice (which involved many freeways, as I got lost at least twice in my own city), Josh couldn't help but hum/sing/finally find Wish I was a Baller on my iPod.

MPM thanks both Josh Cogan and the Association of Independents in Radio for the introduction! We were lucky to be a part of AIR’s mentorship program last year, lucky to know Josh and to host him on his way back from Southeast Asia to DC.  He’s also affiliated with Blue Cadet Interactive, one of MPM’s hero multimedia design agencies.

By Carmen Johns

It took me a long time to realize that I live in a bad neighborhood. In fact, it took me up until about three and a half months ago when a girl I knew named Lily Burk was abducted five blocks away from my house  and then killed. I moved to the outskirts of K-town when I was around eight years old, and the idea of merely spending time on my front porch alone, day or night has always seemed slightly unsettling- so why did it take nine years for it to really click? I guess it comes down to the fact that nothing nearly this scary has happened to me or someone I knew directly in all these years. When Lily was killed, as terrible a thing as it was, I didn’t immediately become hysterical and curl up in a ball under my comforter (as appealing as it may have sounded at the time). I began to really think about my neighborhood, and it all really began to sink in.

I remember the day (July 25, 2009), the time (I would pin it around 6:00 p.m.) the exact moment I found out that Lily had been killed.

Now, let me make it clear that Lily and I were not close in the least. She was someone whose company I found just lovely that I saw from time to time at various gatherings. Lily and I knew each other through our mutual bestie, Zoe. Every room in Zoe’s house has at least a couple pictures of Lily and her family in it, including some of the girls when they were wee little ones, so even before I ever went to a party or one of Zoe’s birthday lunches with Lily, I had a pretty good idea of who she was.

Surprisingly enough, Zoe wasn’t the one who broke the news of Lily’s murder to me. In fact, I didn’t talk to her about the matter for weeks. I’d called her brother, Jake, in search of Zoe moments after they stepped off the plane from their vacation in France. He picked up his cell, sounding placid as usual at first, telling me about bad movies he saw on the flight and a couple stories about the trip, mostly involving nutella crepes. The tone of his voice became more and more strained throughout the conversation. He’s a teenage boy—it was hard to pick up that any sort of tragedy had occurred (not to say he wasn’t deeply affected; it’s just how they talk). He finally spat it out. “Lily… she …she died. Yesterday.”

At this point, Jake nor anyone else had an idea of what exactly had happened since it had happened only hours before I spoke to him, but the pieces of the story slowly came together over the next couple days. Lily was said to have been running errands for her parents around 2:00 p.m. and somehow got abducted by a middle aged, unruly looking black man right outside the Bullocks Wilshire who, as it later came out, was supposed to be on house arrest with an ankle brace. Somehow he had been able to slip through the slimy cracks and he managed to get her to hand over her car keys. He proceeded to drive her from ATM to ATM down Wilshire, trying to get her to take money out for him but the card didn’t work since it was credit only. The man must have become frustrated in his search for quick cash and beat Lily brutally in the head and neck area and left her in the passenger seat of her car near 5th and Alameda. According to the police, she died around 5 or 6 that night but was found twelve hours later. The murderer was found only hours later with a crack pipe and Lily’s keys and cell phone. (The rest is self explanatory.)

With every new piece of info that landed in my lap, my mind reeled, my stomach lurched, everything happened to me that’s supposed to happen to you when you hear bad news, but what bothered me the most was that since I didn’t really know Lily all that well, I almost felt like it wasn’t my place to feel as sad as I was. But I couldn’t help it and I still can’t. I couldn’t have dreamt up a weirder more painful, tragic, heartbreaking thing to happen.

And now I feel like my eyes have opened. My neighborhood has gotten better over the years but it’s still crawling with crime and grime. I live a minute’s walk away from Shatto Park, a regular spot for gangsters and crack dealers. You can find people having sex in their cars or doing shady deals in questionable vans in front of my house at any given time between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. I almost slid and fell on what looked like a heroin needle the other day, walking to my car. Not to mention that my house has been broken into and cleaned out twice in the past five years. And now I’m realizing- these things have become so routine in my life that I’ve never stopped myself and thought about how scary these facts are. It’s taken nine years to realize how blind I’ve been. It’s not like I don’t have any fond memories of my neighborhood at all- I do. I have very fond memories of walking our old cocker spaniel Henry or walking to the grocery store on those cool summer nights, however I still only ever felt 100% secure and safe when I was walking around with both my mom and step-dad; a happy little family unit, floating around at the surface of a melting pot of criminals.

When people who have heard about what happened find out that I knew Lily Burk the little bit that I did, and that this tragedy happened only a matter of yards away from my house, they always expect me to confess to them with wide eyes about how much more scared I’ve become of my crime-ridden neighborhood since then. When I answer, I feel my mind drift off to another place and I robotically give them an answer they expected to hear. “Yeah man it gives me straight-up chills to walk by there, even to walk to the Vermont/Wilshire metro and see the Bullocks. Even down my own block to go to Rite-Aid. Nothing’s ever stopped me from Thrify’s ice cream until now” (I promise my jokes are still this bad when I’m not trying to make something heavy into a lighthearted conversation). What I feel though, is that these fears have always been there in many shapes and forms, whether it was the questionable van or the syringe in my driveway. It was the faint silhouette of the hoodied gang, the shaking of the spray paint cans; it was the shadows of the grotty old hobos and the clanging of their shopping carts. My fear was once vaguely embodied by these faceless people, and this tragedy brought these people to life, sharpened the features on their faces. I guess I had been scared for a reason.

Babe In The Woods

By Devin Browne

Is there any real hope for us to ever be anything else when we’re young and white and living in neighborhoods like this one? When I first moved to MacArthur Park I woke up and walked to work when it was still dark out and all the men on the corners and in the parking lots were already up and always I tried to avoid them, but couldn’t. I remember one man once caught me staring down an alley that stank of urine and trash and he looked at me for a very long while until I gave myself away; I was afraid and he knew it. Later I learned to wear sunglasses, no matter the weather, and so I did not look at the men who whistled or the miqueros who stepped in front of me to ask ID Bonita? or at the men who slowed their cars to a walking speed and followed me down the street, yelling through their windows things I never heard because I did not take off my headphones to listen.

Of course I knew that I did not belong here. I knew as well that I might even be in danger here, but it didn’t seem to matter then because it was all part of the story and the story was what I cared about. I remember walking one morning past the men who wrap flowers to sell on the corners and the sidewalks where they worked were strewn with petals and some of the boys were only sixteen and had walked across deserts to get here and I could see the sun rise over the downtown skyline behind them and I knew that I didn’t want to be a reporter any place else. Everything was illegal here and everyone was up to something. The women on 7th Street seemed to be pushing strollers with babies in them, but were really pushing, and selling, strollers with hot tamales tucked underneath baby blankets. The stores on Alvarado said they were discount stores for kitchenware and small home appliances when what they really meant was that their sales clerks in the window were prostitutes who did business at the Oasis Motel.

So my reasons for living here were never about whether or not the neighborhood was a “good” neighborhood, but whether or not it was an “interesting” neighborhood. This justification worked some, but not all, of the time. My first year in MacArthur Park I did not have a car and so I took the train, sometimes very late at night, and I would step off the escalator and into the deserted street, fair and alone, and it was to fight fate then not to feel afraid. All I could do was run (the strategy was to appear strange rather than desirable) and I did: in skirts, in heels, for blocks and blocks, until I arrived home, at my apartment building. On nights like these I did not care, at all, that my neighborhood was interesting. All I could think about were the headlines, humiliating and unsympathetic, that might later explain what had happened: White Girl in Heels Runs Through MacArthur Park After Midnight, Gets Shot. Sometimes it was worse; sometimes I heard a line not that I had imagined but that I remembered. It was harder to dismiss, then, and it only sounded all the more panicked if I tried: Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!

All of my brothers and sisters admit to keeping lines from our father around; we play them when we either know that they’re true or when we fear them to be. In this case, since the scolding happened in my hometown, a place so insistently safe and suburban it’s often called a “bedroom community,” I had thought at first that it was not true, that he was overreacting. We were  grocery shopping and I put my wallet in the shopping basket and forgot about it until the cashier held it up and asked, “Is this yours?” My dad looked appalled, really twisted his face in a cringe, like he had again caught my brother throwing dirt bombs in the new swimming pool and yelled, “Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!”

So often since then I have heard this. I mean over and over again: in a dress, with my laptop, walking from my car to apartment at night. It is a line heavy on alert, but thin on specifics; last month I parked my car in front of my building at 9 p.m. and I did not like at all the guy walking towards my building — his hoodie, his cigarette, I don’t know — and in this moment I decide try not to be a babe in the woods means wait until he’s gone before getting out of my car. In the end it isn’t enough. As soon as my key makes contact with the gate I feel a hand on my skirt, squeezing. “Hey baby, cómo estás?” he says.

Part of the problem is that the line is a terrible one and even if it doesn’t become a track that I commit to memory and play all the time like I do try not to be a babe in the woods, I will still hear it, as hey baby, cómo estás is part of the neighborhood ambiance — and now, forever, when I do, risk the reminder of this guy, grabbing me. The other problem, of course, is that he is grabbing me. I am not sure what to say to him, really. All I want is for him to go away and it’s been awhile since the self-defense class I took in the eighth grade so I tell him I’ll call the police and he says “No, baby.” I tell him I’ll gouge his eye out with my key (I have no idea how to do this, by the way) and he offers me his cigarette. One twist is that I speak English and he apparently does not, and neither does anyone else on the street. The couple I try to appeal to (“Excuse me, but this man is really bothering me!”) look away when they hear what is not Spanish. I take the same line to a man outside of a hardware store on the corner, screaming it this time from a block away, and I don’t know if the man on the corner heard or not, but the guy in the hoodie did and he leaves. I run inside to my apartment and put down my blinds and decide tonight is the night for pepper spray.

Of course I have known many more dangerous things to happen in other nicer neighborhoods, but the settings in those cases are such that the victims cannot be fairly I-told-you-so-ed. They have done the best that they can. It is to no fault of my parents that their house, in a gated community, near Palm Springs, was robbed; they pay guards and have a security system installed. When my car was smashed on a nice street in Echo Park, when my roommate was raped in the room next door to mine in a house we shared in Silver Lake, I felt, in both cases, that it had simply been a rash of bad circumstance, proof that there is no such safe place. I suppose only part of me believes this then, for it is in MacArthur Park alone that I hallucinate in headlines. White Girl Walking Alone Near MacArthur Park with Expensive MacBook Gets Mugged. They are always of the same formula: stark in their absence of surprise, unforgiving, almost accusatory at those of us that could be someplace else.

So now I have pepper spray, the 2 million SHU formula, police-strength, in a dispenser patented for its speed and accuracy, with refills and an internal safety that apparently prevents spraying by a preschooler. I will say that it was not a totally happy day when the pepper spray arrived; the man on the cover of the package that was being sprayed in eyes was old and in a beenie and likely homeless and this made me feel bad, like I was now part of the problem. So it is with things that are meant to sting. I like carrying it and I like holding my finger on top of the button when I get out of my car at night and I do not like to think about whether a babe in the woods is a babe still, even with Spitfire Point & Shoot Pepper Spray on her key chain.

The other option is to leave the woods altogether, another story.

The crime map for the neighborhood from 9/9 to 9/16. Personal theft is by far the most common crime noted.

Then, last night, some guy goes to the Pan American on Temple, gets in a fight, and shoots and wounds three men outside the club. Soon we will have more blue dots to mark the occasion. The police don’t know yet who the shooter was, and all we know about the men who were shot is that they were between the ages of 20 and 25. The police told an independent news crew that one man was shot in the back, another in the chest and the other in the arm.

I’ve never been to the Pan American, but I do frequently stare at it when I drive by. Mainly I am mesmerized by the six-inch, jelly platform heels the women wear and the signage, in classic Spanglish. I did once suggest that a few friends and I go there after bookclub (we read They Shoot Horses Don’t They? about dance marathons and it seemed the most relevant spot in the area to tie the theme in), but my friend Molly said we no, because we’d need bodyguards.

update, 9/22 — Not so fast on the no yellow dots. Two men were shot yesterday in MacArthur Park, one of them fatally. The men were apparently sitting, chatting on a park bench near the corner of 6th/Alvarado at 10:30 in the morning, when another man approached them and started shooting at them in the head and all over their body. From the LA Times:

The incident at MacArthur Park marked the first shooting there since January 2008 and the first fatal shooting at the park since August 2006, [LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio] Diaz said.

Once considered a magnet for violence, drug dealing and other crimes, the park has undergone a revival in recent years as the LAPD beefed up patrols and city leaders invested in the site. Among the features of the revived park is a new soccer field that has been popular with Westlake District residents.

“Anytime we are talking about a crime in MacArthur Park, there’s an added dimension,” Diaz said. “It’s pretty bold to do this in the day when there’s lots of people around.”

Not entirely by coincidence, today is also the day I ordered Pepper Spray to carry with me on my key chain.

Continued from above.

It is hard not to want Esperanza to be more like Camino Nuevo. They test less and score higher. They have art, music, dance, computers, and field trips to The San Diego Zoo. All parents volunteer at least 15 hours during the school year. If they cannot help during the day, they can translate documents on the weekend or sew costumes for the school’s annual dance recital at the end of the year. Conferences are mandatory; so are school uniforms, punctuality, and attendance at four different workshops (how to start a college fund, how to prepare for the CST). Even their building makes more sense. L.A. Unified hired architects who built Esperanza’s classrooms out of concrete, so that it is nearly impossible to hang student work or even the alphabet outside of the designated boards on the walls. The windows are lined in bars. At Camino Nuevo’s Burlington site the classroom walls are all bulletin boards (and if not bulletin boards, then wipe-off boards that open into ample amounts of storage space) and student work is everywhere. There are skylights in the classrooms and perforated panels outside the building so the kids can enjoy natural light without staring right into it. None of the windows have bars.

The Odds

The problem is that it is no way guaranteed — and in fact, the odds are less than likely — that if Esperanza were to be taken over by an outside entity that it would perform similarly to Camino Nuevo. Stanford’s latest research on charter schools finds that, nationwide, only 17% of them perform better than traditional public schools while 46% perform at about the same level, and 37% perform worse. Mr. Cole-Gutierrez, featured, added to this that charter-takeovers have a much lower success rate than those that start independently and then dimly noted that the scores at Locke High School, which the Mayor took over in 2008, “didn’t exactly jump off the page.” (In fact, they stayed almost exactly the same.)

And remember:

Founders, funders, and board members of charter schools vary widely. The Walton family, of Wal Mart, gives millions to charter schools; so do CEOs and boxers and politicians (Donald Fisher, of The Gap, Oscar de la Hoya, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, respectively. The latter two each have their own charter academies in L.A.). Some charters are run for-profit, others have imbued themselves in controversy over their use of the bible or classroom instruction in Hebrew.

The Difference

Charter schools are publicly-funded, but independently run so that they do not have to hire and fire teachers based on seniority and they do not have to have unions. In fact, few of them do — Mr. Cole-Gutierrez told MPM that only 30 out of 161 charter schools in L.A. are unionized.

Camino Nuevo is one of these 30 schools. (Actually, since they are K-12, with three different sites, they constitute three of these 30 schools.) The Camino Nuevo Teacher’s Association has bargained for competitive salaries and extended contracts for teachers who have worked at the school for more than five years. (First-year teachers with a credential make $50,100 at Camino Nuevo; similar teachers make $45,637 in L.A. Unified.) But Camino Nuevo’s teachers also work a longer school year (195 instructional days, compared to 180) and a longer school day (8-3 p.m., compared to 7:45-2:15 p.m.) and they have part-of-the-job after-school committee obligations that teachers at traditional public schools do not. (Listen to Shanna Burbank, above.)

The Concern

Mostly the traditional public school teachers, and even some district personnel, that MPM talked to are concerned that charters do not admit students with learning disabilities, a history of behavioral problems, or a low-level of English. Many teachers at Esperanza insisted that this regularly happens; Mr. Cole-Gutierrez admitted that this sometimes happens. (Also that it is illegal.) Ms. Casallas was unequivocal in saying that this so-called cherry picking does not happen at Camino Nuevo. Their numbers support this — 10% of Camino Nuevo’s student body has special needs which is the same percentage of students who have special needs nationwide.

The Appeal

That charter schools may or may not screen for the most motivated students likely obscures the larger point which is that most charters don’t actually need to screen for these kind of students, because they already, inherently attract them. Academies like Camino Nuevo appeal to families who are willing to commit to a longer school year and a longer school day, who want to volunteer their time, who want to go to workshops on college preparation, who like the word academy. The school’s incredible success — Camino Nuevo High School’s 2008 graduating class sent 100% of its students to 4-year universities or community colleges — may or may not have to do with managerial differences fundamental to charter schools, but it seems wrong to ignore that, similar demographics aside, the parental priorities vary greatly. MPM interviewed a teacher at Esperanza who said that in 14 years of teaching, he had never had a parent volunteer. Turnout at Open House is 50%, at best. Every year, there are parents he never meets: they don’t pick up their kids, they don’t come to conferences — they need to work and can their child’s fourth grade sister come to the conference instead?

Ms. Gutierrez works full time, during the day, but makes it to every conference. They are mandatory. She completes her volunteer hours on the weekend. She likes Camino Nuevo because she thinks it has more choices than traditional public schools. In fact, she thinks so highly of it that she has decided that it is too advanced for her older daughter, newly arrived from Mexico, and not yet able to speak English. Where to send her eldest daughter then, who needs a lot of work? Ms. Gutierrez put her in Hollywood High School, a traditional public school down the street from her house.

Notes

*The resolution also makes 51 new schools available for outside management. These schools are set to open over the next four years.

Esperanza Elementary is located at 680 Little Street, Los Angeles 90017. (We need to include this so The Takeaway will appear on news aggregate sites like Everyblock.)

Credits

Written and produced by Devin Browne. Graphics and media programming by Alex Amerri. Photographs by Devin Browne, Alex Amerri, and Louise Baker.

And they are everywhere — carnicerias all along the street (real dives with peeling paint and misspelled signage written in Spanglish, not restaurants with cactus murals painted on the front), stores advertising SE CAMBIAN CHEQUES/WE CASH CHECKS, dried chili peppers in the market — this is not a marginal population in this prairie town, population 24,000, but the driving cultural force.

Mostly I saw men who appeared to be in street gangs, so many of them. In MacArthur Park we have a mix — we have men who wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots and belts with large buckles on their way to what seems to be the ranch, but is actually the 99¢ store, and we have men in MS 13 and the 18th Street Gang and the Crazy Riders and more. Here there seemed to be only the latter. Sixteen, seventeen year-olds with the red, backwards baseball cap in very, very low-riders with thin mustaches and many, many tattoos that often reference a recent death: RIP BAM BAM. They looked extremely familiar to me, and then upon coming home, I see that they are more or less a part of the same affiliations as some of the men in LA. Active gangs in the small heartland towns of Garden and Dodge Cities include: Surenos, Brown Pride Villians, Brown Pride Gangstas, Brown Pride Aztecs, Latin Kings, South Side Orphans, Folk Nation, KBC, TSV, Norte. None of this is very new; The New York Times reported in 1993 that there were 3,100 gang members in the state, most of them kids in between the ages of 11 and 21 involved with drug dealing, gun smuggling, theft, even murder. (The man I spoke with at KBI said that they do not have numbers on the amount of gang members currently in the state.) When I mentioned this at Ferret Camp (really) a few days later, it was old news to the Kansas State biology students as well. Oh yeah, they said, we have drive-bys.

The farmer in Lakin was white, his wife Latina. He admitted that it was almost impossible for him to find white people willing to work, anywhere anymore, that they would rather stand around and get paid to watch other people flip burgers. The only kids he could find to hire to help on the farm were the ones with Mexican parents or grandparents, he said, as they are only one or two generations removed from real work.

MacArthur Park Media has been live for exactly one month today, and we think we really love life on the web. LA Daily wrote about us, and so did Boing Boing. LAist, Univision, and Marketplace sent fan mail, the last of which was serious enough to make Antonio of MPM’s Tamales on the Run a national radio star on their show today. Many neighbors have written; some of the nice ones have commented. More than 1,000 people have visited MPM in this first month, a lot of them via a search for “macarthur park fake IDs” which I find amazing.

Also amazing: this photo and its makers, Louise Baker on Photoshop and Silas Dilworth on font design. I like the photo because I like the sign, and I like the sign because it lets you know that MacArthur Park still feels much of the time like it’s in the 80s. This is when infrastructural development essentially stopped here; refugees from El Salvador were arriving en masse, rent was cheap, the crime rate high, and for these and other reasons the neighborhood was left to date. So we still have signage like this, hot pink with jade and purple pop lettering. We still have Stand and Deliver murals. We still have stores of payphones, and the people who pay for them.

The other thing about the sign Westlake Mall is that it says Westlake Mall. To be clear, the neighborhood is actually named Westlake. We know this, city planners know this, so do people who work at the CRA. But people in the neighborhood, apparently, do not: when they say Westlake, they mean Westlake Street — the one just east of Alvarado. White people seem similarly confused, very often associating Westlake with Westlake Village, a suburb in the Valley, or (not kidding) The Westside Pavilion, a shopping center.

MPM loves MacArthur Park for all of its irony, this included, and we have so many more stories about this place on the way — stories of fake ID busts, Asian/Latino race relations, the future of bilingual education, and reporters’ notebooks from ride-alongs in bullet-proof vests with the Rampart Division’s gangs unit. We’re excited. We love it here.

More soon,

MPM

Javier Ovando, Officer Rafael Perez, Officer Nino Durden

Shortly after Javier Ovando won his first settlement, in 2000, against the City of LA and the LAPD, for $15 million, he sued the County of LA and public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice. It was announced this week that he has finally settled, for $750,000.

Ovando was shot, paralyzed, and then framed by police officers later disgraced in the Rampart scandal in October of 1996. In his trial a year later, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon with the intent of committing great bodily injury, and exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He would have likely served all 23 years, had Officer Rafael Perez — one of the officers whose false testimony had put Ovando in prison — not been caught stealing a million dollars of cocaine from an evidence locker in the LAPD property room. Perez’s arrest implied a serious and lengthy sentence that he bartered his way down by offering to testify about a number of cases officers in the CRASH unit had “put on” people, one of which was Ovando’s. (These allegations of widespread police misconduct effectively broke open the Rampart scandal, in which more than 70 police officers were implicated in everything from unprovoked shootings to drug-dealing, perjury to bank robbery. The scandal is one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in US history.)

Ovando’s conviction was overturned two-and-a-half years into his sentence, in 1999. Not long after, he sued the County of LA and his prior public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice, alleging that she represented him incompetently during his trial. He claimed that Toister did not call two witnesses who could have confirmed that he was unarmed the day he was shot. In Toister’s defense, County lawyers said that she had used “reasonable litigation strategy” and that if she had called the witnesses Ovando wanted, damaging evidence about his gang affiliation would have surfaced.

When the case originally went to trial, a jury found in favor of Ovando and awarded him $6.5 million. But this decision was overturned — one of the jurors failed to disclose in the selection process that she was an actress who had starred in “Gang Warz,” a movie about the Rampart scandal, and the judge felt it unfair that all blame had been placed on Toister, and not on Perez and Durden. Ovando’s lawyers appealed this to the State Supreme Court and lost. They were set to start trial again on July 22nd, but will no longer have to since the case was formally dismissed, after the settlement agreement was reached, on the 3rd of last month.

Epilogues:

Rafael Perez was sentenced in 1998 to five years in prison for stealing cocaine from the LAPD. He served three years, and was released on parole in 2001. According to PBS, federal prosecutors have cut a deal with Perez’s former partner, Nino Durden, whose testimony may now be used to bring further charges against Perez.

Nino Durden was sentenced in 2002 to five years in prison, and served less than three.

Tamar Toister is still a public defender. She wrote her account of what went wrong at the trial, in 2000, here.

Javier Ovando has other cases in the works. He was arrested last year for apparently making criminal threats to the new couple that bought his Topanga Canyon mansion. And in that same week, he lead police officers in his Hummer on a high-speed chase from Glendale to South San Gabriel. The case is still open.