The Rampart Scandal may not have happened if it wasn’t for one man, Frank Lyga, an LAPD Detective from the Hollywood Division.
In 1997, Frank and his unit we’re staking out a drug dealer. Frank was sitting in an unmarked Buick Regal waiting for the drug deal to go down. He intended to follow the suspects back to their source and arrest them but the operation got canceled. Frank drove off.
He was sitting at a red light on Ventura Boulevard when another vehicle pulled up next to him. The driver, Kevin Gaines, demanded to know why Frank was following him. The light turned green and Frank drove off. Kevin Gaines followed him and pulled out a gun. Frank fired two shots at Gaines. One of the bullets punctured Gaines in the heart as he rolled his vehicle into a nearby gas station.
Detective Lyga identified himself as a police officer and asked a bystander to call an ambulance. More police officers arrived on the scene and took control of the situation. Detective Lyga returned to the Hollywood Station and waited for further instructions. It was there that he learned Kevin Gaines was an LAPD police officer. Frank had shot and killed one of his own. He would later learn that Officer Gaines was a gang member living with celebrity Suge Knight’s ex-wife.
Several witnesses to the shooting confirmed Detective Lyga’s account as did surveillance video at the gas station. A media frenzy followed but the video proved that Detective Lyga fired in self-defense. A shooting investigation led by Police Chief Bernard Parks stated that the shooting was within policy and no action was taken.
Even though Detective Lyga was found not guilty the city of Los Angeles agreed to pay $250,000 to the family of Officer Kevin Gaines. The settlement was thought to be politically motivated.
A few months later Detective Lyga was under investigation again. This time a pound of cocaine was missing from Parker Center. Detective Lyga was cleared when a new suspect emerged; LAPD Officer Rafael Perez. The theft of the cocaine was an attempt to frame Detective Frank Lyga for the shooting of Perez’s best friend, Kevin Gaines.
In 1998, Perez was arrested for stealing 8 pounds of cocaine from a police property room worth around $800,000. Prior to the LAPD hiring Perez, he had been rejected by several other police departments in California. The City of Los Angeles had secretly forced the LAPD to abandoned all its hiring practices. Anyone with a criminal record was allowed to join the force and those officers were suddenly getting arrested.
After his arrest, Rafael Perez became a police informant and the LAPD Rampart Division went down in flames. Perez implicated dozens of Rampart officers, claiming various forms of misconduct from planting evidence to drinking on the job. The investigation focused on the CRASH unit, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
More than 100 criminal convictions were overturned based on Perez’s testimony. Many questions of his credibility came to light but the public had already made up their mind.
According to the media, the Rampart Officers had preyed on the mostly immigrant members of the community it had sworn to protect. The Rampart Division was in an area of Los Angeles plagued with crime and poverty.
It has been more than 20 years and the Rampart Scandal has all but been forgotten. Everyone involved has either retired, been fired, or died.
Frank Lyga was one of the last officers standing and he didn’t even work for Rampart. Still, there were some people inside the Department that wanted him gone and he retired in 2014.
In 2016, the city of Los Angeles awarded Frank Lyga $50,000 for wrongful termination. They didn’t admit to any wrongdoing, they didn’t apologize, and they didn’t offer him his job back.