From: Miss Marple
Date: 7/3/01
Time: 8:30:02 PM
This is from an unrelated case, but a lot about Brambles. He sounds just like MF, are they all like that?
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To most of his colleagues at the LAPD, Mike Brambles was one ambitious son-of-a-bitch. In less than a decade he had risen from patrol to vice, then narcotics, before being promoted in 1979 to the Sexually Exploited Child Unit, a special squad established to counter the growing perception of a child prostitution problem in Los Angeles County. The following year, Brambles broke his first big case with the arrest of Eagles lead singer Don Henley, in whose home a 16-year-old female prostitute was allegedly found nude and whacked out on drugs. It was during his follow-up work on this case that Brambles began to consider the possibility of a kiddie porn conspiracy.
According to LA Magazine, one of his main sources in the Hollywood sex trade was Elizabeth "Alex" Adams, the notorious "Beverly Hills Madam." Brambles was fascinated with Madam "Alex"'s little black "trick book," a private phone directory that reputedly contained the names of LA politicians, police brass and other prominent locals. The trick book was mostly a tame affair -- few public officials of any rank had ever been exposed in it -- but Madam "Alex"'s frequent rumour-mongering about an international kiddie porn and prostitution ring provoked thoughts of conspiracy in Mike Brambles. When his investigation of Allan Licht led him to John Lewis, a former California resident now living in Canada, he must have thought he was onto something.
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Three weeks later, on August 26, 1983, Brambles held an LA press conference announcing that he had broken an international kiddie porn and prostitution ring that involved "prominent Canadians," including two members of Parliament.
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In 1984, Mike Brambles reached the pinnacle of his LAPD career when police chief Daryl Gates promoted the former traffic cop to the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, an elite unit revamped by Gates in the mid 1970s to combat the growing mob presence in LA County. In the early going, Brambles shone in the OCID. In 1988, he was selected as the LAPD's star witness at congressional hearings into organized crime. But he was also a loose cannon, and there were signs that Brambles was too unstable to maintain a high position in the LAPD for very long. In 1989 Brambles's world came crashing down when a former partner accused him before a grand jury of coaching a witness. Accused of rigging a photo lineup, Brambles was demoted to West LA auto theft and ordered to appear before the grand jury. There he denied the accusation and lied about the reason for his demotion.
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He was at the beginning of a downward spiral that led to the breakup of his marriage and of a subsequent affair, charges of sexual harassment, and his retirement from the LAPD in 1993. He then moved to Las Vegas but made several trips back to the Los Angeles area, which he said were just to visit his ex-wife and run errands for "Alex," the Beverly Hills madam. But that wasn't all he was up to. According to at least 20 witnesses, Brambles also found time to walk into several small businesses in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County, pull out a pistol and hold up the cashiers. In two of those robberies -- at closing time, when no one else was present -- he raped the female clerks. On July 5, 1994, police arrested him at his home in Las Vegas.
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On April 19, 1995, jurors for the State of California vs. John Michael Lewis returned from a brief recess to find Mike Brambles sitting at the witness stand. There was little about the disgraced former cop's appearance that could have tipped them off to his current status. Unlike most prisoners who testify in court, Brambles was dressed in civilian business attire rather than jail blue overalls. An imposing figure in a suit and tie, he was introduced as a retired police officer and former supervising detective in the LAPD's elite Organized Crime Intelligence Division. Respectable. Authoritative. And, according to his lawyer, "an expert on pedophilia."
The jurors had no idea about the 26 charges Brambles would soon be facing, including armed robbery and rape, because the judge ruled that this knowledge might prejudice their verdict in the Lewis case. Lewis was disappointed with the judge's ruling, but hopeful that the jury would see through Brambles's façade. "He looked pretty weathered," Lewis recalls of his first glimpse of the disgraced former cop. "Obviously [jail] had taken its toll." When asked if he had ever made false statements while he was a police detective, Brambles tried to invoke the Fifth Amendment. (He was refused, and finally answered "yes" when the question was repeated.) Asked if he had used coercive tactics to convince the San Diego victim to testify against Lewis, the former cop replied, "Probably."
Brambles's testimony was anticlimactic compared to that of George Kristensen. After the morning break on April 21, the Vancouver detective, now working in his department's Major Crime division, opened his briefcase and pulled out a piece of paper he claimed to have found when he first confiscated Lewis's address book. The handwritten page contained the names of not two but nine MPs from the B.C. Lower Mainland.
It was a strange piece of evidence. Most of the MPs were staunch "family values" Tories unlikely to have set foot in a gay bar, never mind peddling in kiddie porn. Glancing at a copy of the list provided to his lawyer, Lewis could see that the handwriting was not his own. Unlike the other names in his book, there were no addresses or phone numbers beside the MPs' names. Finally, the names appeared to have been photocopied onto an existing page in the address book. It sure seemed like a third-rate forgery job. But who would have tried something so stupid? Lewis, comparing samples of Mike Brambles's handwriting from an arrest warrant with the handwritten list of MPs, didn't take long to find his culprit. A few days later, a forensics documents examiner with 16 years' experience testified that it was indeed Brambles, not Lewis, who had written the list.
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On September 20 of the following year, Mike Brambles was sentenced to 102 years in state prison. The former LAPD golden boy had been convicted in LA County on 18 counts of robbery, six sexual-assault-related charges and assault with a firearm. Brambles will likely spend the rest of his days in maximum security.