Charles Rappleye

District Attorney Steve Cooley chose a middle course last week in his first major decision on the Rampart scandal, moving to appeal the judge’s decision to throw out the verdicts against three LAPD officers. Cooley‘s choice fell short of the more aggressive option -- refiling the charges and launching a......

It was the end of a case that INS District Director Thomas Schiltgen termed ”a significant blow to the public trust“ : Former Special Agent Jesse Jerry Gardona was sentenced Monday to 18 months in federal prison for conspiring to accept bribes and for smuggling illegal immigrants. The sentence was......

You get the impression that Deputy District Attorney Laura Laesecke saw it coming all along. After all, from the first day of the criminal trial of four officers from the LAPD‘s Rampart Division, Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor had consistently ruled against the prosecution and in favor of the accused......

Jesse Jerry Gardona, a special agent assigned to the anti-smuggling squad of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, will be sentenced next Tuesday in federal court on charges of bribery and harboring and transporting illegal immigrants. The 41-year-old Gardona, a 12-year veteran of the INS, was liked by his colleagues and......

The guilty verdicts against Rampart officers last week were immediately hailed as confirmation that there was indeed a scandal at the LAPD. In fact, the jury verdicts showed that there are two Rampart scandals. One centers closely on Rafael Perez, the admitted rogue cop whose sensational confessions launched the scandal......

Last Friday marked a milestone in the year-plus history of the citywide temblor known as the Rampart scandal. Sergeant Edward Ortiz, named by Rafael Perez as the CRASH-unit supervisor who routinely helped officers cover up crimes under color of authority, and indicted in April on criminal charges alleging the same......

The evening of April 26, 1996, was just another lousy night in the dead-end world of L.A.‘s most notorious street gang. An 18th Street regular named Frosty had been shot and killed the week before; tonight, members of three separate 18th Street cliques were getting together to hoist a few......

One moment last week in the ninth-floor hallway of the Superior Court building downtown brought all the crosscurrents and strange alliances of the first criminal case involving Rampart cops into sharp highlight. It came on the third day of trial, after LAPD Officer Raquel Duarte Argomaniz was called by the......

Late in the afternoon of February 6, 1996, a gangbanger and midlevel hustler named Miguel Malfavon stepped onto the patio of a McDonald‘s restaurant at the corner of Temple and Alvarado streets, in the northeast section of the Rampart District. There was traffic on the street, there were people eating;......

LAPD Deputy Chief Maurice Moore gave a new, official version of the bicycle demonstration that netted 71 arrests last Wednesday, more than any other single event during the Democratic National Convention. The demonstration had a permit, Moore explained to the city’s Police Commission Tuesday, but once under way, the demonstrators......