Cat Tribunals Part 9 - More Than I Want to Know About Ben Lovato

LA Animal Watch blogger Edward Muzika keeps a close eye on the overpaid bureaucrats who are supposed to be protecting animals in Los Angeles. Other blogs are noticing this bizarre story too, but LA Animal Watch is the most active. The main page changes frequently, so check the menu on the right.

From here on, this installment of Cat Tribunals is just another story of a public servant gone bad, so if you've heard too many of them lately - and haven't we all? - feel free to move on to Part 10.

Earlier this week, one of Muzika's readers brought to his attention an article written by Mae Brussell, concerning the previous activities of Ben Lovato, the hearing officer at the City Attorney's Office with whom I had such an unproductive meeting (See Cat Tribunals, Part 6 "A Date with a City Attorney") I wasn't planning to write a whole section on this particular public official, but the more I looked, the more I had to look. And who knows what else is out there?

Mae Brussell of Carmel, California was an independent investigator who maintained files in 1600 subject categories, mainly about the crooked activities of government officials. Biographer Tim Canale, who maintains her website, says, "The epitome of Mae's journalism, "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination" appeared in Larry Flynt's premier issue of Rebel magazine in November 1983." She was an indefatigable shiner of light upon evil, and a prolific writer for many magazines. Part of her legacy is the 650-plus hours of radio broadcasts that are still available, and well worth listening to.

As it turns out, hearing officer Ben Lovato is a former officer of the Los Angeles Police Department. Actually this is not surprising. I've met a lot of jerks that happened to be cops, and I've met a lot of jerks in general, but I don't think I've ever before formulated the phrase "more testosterone in his blood than blood cells." This guy just had something to prove. At the "hearing," during which only one of us was heard, I think if he could have gotten up and pistol-whipped me, he would have done it.

An incident from Lovato's past career is mentioned in a copyright article by Mae Brussell . The piece outlines the facts connected with the LAPD's creation of some two million files stuffed with information on private citizens with no criminal connections. The information, gleaned by illegal means during the '50s, '60s and '70s, targeted members of such organizations as the Coalition Against Police Abuse, Alliance for Survival, the Peace and Freedom Party, Greater Watts Justice Center, the American Civil Liberties Union; every existing anti-nuclear group; and numerous other socially progressive organizations, including churches.

In 1975, the Los Angeles Police Commission ordered those files, the fruit of illegal domestic surveillance of law-abiding American citizens, to be destroyed. But they weren't.

In 1983 the ACLU, on behalf of 131 clients who had been the object of these investigations, sued the LAPD and 54 specific officers from the Public Disorder Intelligence Division, including Ben Lovato. It was revealed that a police officer named Jay Paul had taken home somewhere between 50 and 100 boxes of these intelligence files, and that his wife, Ann Love, was being paid to enter the information into a computer. She did this for a foundation called Western Goals. (Elsewhere, Brussell describes Western Goals as "a data bank in Alexandria, Virginia, that serves as a national right-wing clearinghouse for negative information about leftists and radical groups and individuals.") The chairman of Western Goals was John Birch Society president Larry McDonald, who was also a member of the US House of Representatives from Georgia.

Apparently the John Birch Society didn't want to see all the LAPD's hard work go to waste, and was happy to pay Ms. Love a salary of $30,000 a year to transcribe the paper files into electronic form, for its delectation. (The following sentence is pure speculation on my part: Don't you kind of wonder whether Ann Love, the attorney and wife of an LAPD officer, is a relative of LAPD officer Ben Lovato, with an Anglicized name?)

According to Brussell, Rep. McDonald explained the transfer of LAPD intelligence files to Western Goals as part of the vital security setup for the 1984 Olympic games, held in Los Angeles. She also reports, "Evidence emerged that Western Goals, members of the LAPD and Pentagon personnel planned previous riots and fatal provocations."

As a result of the ACLU lawsuit, Western Goals and its chairman Larry McDonald were ordered to turn over all their stolen records to a grand jury. By strange coincidence, McDonald died in an aircraft accident a couple of weeks later, when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down over Soviet airspace.

Two weeks after that, the incoming Western Goals chairperson Linda Guell refused to testify before the grand jury unless she was granted immunity. On the same day (and here's where the present-day City Attorney's hearing officer comes into the picture) Mae Brussell says, "September 15, 1983: LAPD Detective Ben Lovato, one of those being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union, was accused of threatening to kill Western Goals editor John Rees."

Flight 007

Brussell explored this airline disaster thoroughly in "Who Killed Larry McDonald?", which was published in Hustler in early 1984. (It's a source of pride, to have in common with Brussell that I too have published a feature article in Hustler.)

For some reason, the commercial passenger flight strayed more than 200 miles into Soviet territory and was shot down, killing 269 people. Brussell reports that McDonald's widow believed the plane was destroyed in order to assassinate her anti-Communist husband, and that a former CIA spook named Ralph McGehee, during a university lecture, claimed that the plane had been on an espionage mission. The South Korean pilot of the plane had boasted to his friends that he was spying for the United States, photographing Soviet military bases. Soviet president Andropov accused the US of taunting his military with that airplane, daring them to create an incident. Brussell has a great deal more to say about this, and her article is highly recommended.

If Rep. Larry McDonald had lived, he would have been expected to testify about the illegal intelligence-gathering, the transfer of the LAPD files to Western Goals, and the entering of information into his state-of-the-art computer (which, back in the day, before ubiquitous personal computers, is said to have cost $100,000.) Revelations made by McDonald to a Los Angeles County grand jury would have damaged many people who considered themselves too important to obey the law, including Ronald Reagan.

Brussell feels that it very well could have happened this way: "Let's assume that the CIA, FBI and all federal agencies that worked with McDonald - particularly the Pentagon - wanted him silenced immediately. At the same time, because McDonald was so violently anti-Communist, why not make the Soviets responsible for his murder? A New Right martyr could be created…"

Why a death threat against John Rees?

Who was John Rees, the man Ben Lovato is said to have made a death threat against? With the title of "editor," Rees was one of the three top executives of Western Goals, and therefore a close associate of Rep. Larry McDonald. (Later, in 1993, Rees became the director of a right-wing think tank, the Maldon Institute.) He was also an agent provocateur who worked for Western Research, a secret organization that screened the records of potential employees and appointees, on behalf of Ronald Reagan. Western Research (or Research West) also vetted job candidates for corporate clients, and gave information to the LAPD concerning politically active left-leaning individuals. His wife, Louise Rees, is believed to have taken over the massive files on political dissidents maintained by Senator McCarthy of anti-Communist witch hunt fame, and his sidekick Roy Cohn. Rees and his wife published Information Digest, which disseminated illegally gathered intelligence about left-wing activists to conservative groups.

Why would Ben Lovato have threatened to kill John Rees, back in the early 1980s? Presumably, for the same reasons which actually resulted in the death of Larry McDonald: he knew too much, and was being warned not to tell what he knew. And what ever became of that accusation? Who investigated it? What was the outcome? We know one of the outcomes: No longer in such rarefied political circles, Ben Lovato now exercises his will-to-power in reduced circumstances, issuing threats to people who give water to cats.

Other online mentions of Ben Lovato

Briefly: Late in 1994 a drive-by murder suspect was released on a "technicality," that technicality being that the Los Angeles Police Department officers who investigated the case were accused of misconduct.

But it wasn't his release that drew media attention, it was that he went out and killed someone else a couple of years later. The point was made that if he hadn't been freed on the first murder charge, the second person would not be dead.

And why was this drive-by killer set free on a "technicality" after the original murder? Because two cops gave false testimony at his preliminary hearing, and were charged with misconduct. One of them "admitted that he that he fabricated documents as a ruse to obtain witness statements," but claimed that he didn't really commit perjury - it was only that he consulted his own fake documents, and got confused.

Sure, that's understandable. It could happen to anybody.

When these two showed up for their own disciplinary hearing, who was there to stick up for them? Detective Ben Lovato, who had been their boss at the time when the alleged misconduct occurred. He called the pair reliable, and according to this story, used his influence to try to stop knowledge of their malfeasance from becoming public. When the suspension of the two officers from the force became public via television, Lovato is quoted as saying "It was horrible." He is not known to have commented on the horror of some creep being set free to kill again, because employees under Lovato's supervision messed up bigtime.

So there you have it. Dishonest, corrupt police officers should be given a pass, while ordinary people, who offer water to animals in a heat wave, are to be treated with the utmost severity. It's so reassuring to see a public official who has his priorities straight!

And, up until the current situation on Wilkinson Avenue, the most recent online mention of Ben Lovato comes from April of 2006, when he performed his duties as a hearing officer in a case where an employee of California State University Northridge was said to have mistreated a child at a campus facility. Police found enough evidence to arrest the woman, but hearing officer Lovato didn't believe a crime had been committed, according to the Daily Sundial.

So here's a guy who could have been a contender. But for a simple twist of fate, the cop who so zealously served bent politicians might have become another Karl Rove. But it was not to be. No longer involved in schemes that affect the fate of nations, he now regulates feral cat watering holes.

Everywhere across the land, police officers are doing things they ought not to do. It seems there's no shortage of these public officials who think they're above the law, and they don't mind messing with evidence or anything else.

Every time I tell my father another bad cop story, he says, "Well, they're not all bad." And I'm always saying, "Why do any of them have to be this bad?"

And besides, there are good cops. Of course there are, and I bet I can name more good cops than you can. Take Linda Wheeler-Holloway, for example, a powerful force, on the side of the angels, in the Masters case. Then there's Dan Picagli, subject of another Earthblog article.

This current debacle dangerously reminds me of things that came up when we were researching things in the Tim Masters case. In a miraculous outcome, for once the corrupt police did get exposed to daylight, and the innocent convicted man was released, although he didn't get ten years of his life back. That's a big deal in Colorado now, with three or four different high-level investigations stemming from it, Special Prosecutors assigned, national network TV coverage, and print media journalists getting awards for their coverage of the story.

After Masters was freed, I wasn't looking for a new public official to drag out of the closet into the daylight. But somehow, Ben Lovato is now a factor. With his background in surveillance and with the electronics that are available today, Ben Lovato could be watching me from his home or his office any time he wants. I could be watched by all these creeps. There's the government looking into my yard, potentially. The camera on a pole next door could actually feed to Ben Lovato's computer. If something like that happened, no doubt it would become national news and give his career a new lease on life.

Not only are cameras sprouting from every orifice of the house next door, it seems like there are more cars driving by these days - perhaps animal lovers wanting to monitor the situation. Many eyeballs are trained on this situation.

And it's odd how the government would want to have all this attention on this neighborhood, where speculation has it that people in the witness protection program have been peacefully living for years. They would have picked this street because most of us have been here so long, they know what kind of kooks we are; they know we're not anything that they have to avoid. People who need that kind of protection could be comfortable on such a street. A blast of media attention could blow their cover.

Any way you look at it (even through the lens of a surveillance camera) what we have here is a situation that should not be happening.

Cat Tribunals Part 10 - A Tragic Consequence of the Law

I sent an email out to several essential people involved with animal rights in Los Angeles, and have received a lot of information and advice. This saga is being picked up on several blogs. For instance, LA Animal Watch writer Edward Muzika has become interested.

Muzika has also recently passed along a fact-filled analysis of the Los Angeles Animal Services budget. The discrepancy between the bureaucracy's alleged purpose of helping animals, and its actual practices, is almost beyond belief. Does their mission statement read, "Ensure that the least number of animals get adopted, the largest possible number of animals end up dead, and Slaughter Czar Ed Boks gets the biggest possible raise."? It should.

Here on Wilkinson Avenue, for whatever reason, Los Angeles Animal Services have not shown up or called again. But the evidence of their policies and those of the City Attorney's Office is close at hand. A horrible incident happened one night this week, another unintended consequence of our City's laws and discriminatory enforcement. A young feral cat that was well beyond the kitten stage, but not a full-grown cat, drowned in our pool. This cat was too big to get nourishment from its mother anymore but it was still too short to drink out of birdbaths.

So, after the first hot day in while, there was water in only two places for this poor creature: the birdbath which it couldn't reach and the 40,000 gallons of pool water full of chemicals, which it fell into and couldn't climb out of for the same reason that it couldn't reach the birdbath's water: it was too small.

The cat that drowned was a true feral cat that no human has ever touched, as far as I know. It was born in the bushes in some nearby neighbor's yard during kitten season. Its parents may have been some of the visitors to our yard since many of the local ferals come by and relax for a while. This young cat was well beyond the kitten stage. I couldn't have caught this cat with my bare hands if I wanted to. They are quick, wary and usually mind-readers too. Had this tragedy not occurred I would have hoped to have been able to trap this cat and get it fixed before returning it to "the wild" of Wilkinson, a mostly cat-friendly neighborhood of people with respect for all of the critters we share the local landscape with.

And meanwhile, what's up with the toxic next-door neighbors? A professional carpet cleaner was at our house, and his helper saw Mr. Toxic Neighbor writing down the license tag number of their vehicle. Here's proof that, in addition to his 360-degree spy camera, this guy is doing all the surveillance on us that he can. Supposedly he's worried about his home being broken into, but I don't think someone taking carpet-cleaning equipment in and out of a car is the way someone cases the joint to steal out of his house.

It seems that some of the city laws are in conflict with the state laws, going from the postings on LA Animal Watch, and there also appear to be a lot of supportive people out there who want law enforcement troops go after the people who are really doing something nasty. I've been getting phone calls from people all around the country who say they will call or write to the City Attorney's office, and not only encourage him to lay off of me, but to do something about the real criminals, the ones who are committing animal cruelty against the cats by throwing pipes, bottles, stones and other missiles at them.

As far as Los Angeles Animal Services, I continue to be astonished at how their reports and recommendations, which appeared so benign when the visiting officers discussed them with me in person, seem to have transmogrified into some epic of unparalleled animal hoarding by the time it reached the hands of the City Attorney's hearing officer. Their cordiality and willingness to work with me suddenly, overnight, turned into hostility when interpreted through Mr. Lovato. I believe the great majority of people who have chosen the career of Animal Services officers are well-intentioned and are not necessarily in accord with the policies and procedures which they must follow. In fact, I have talked with a former Animal Services employee who was totally sickened by the recollection of his previous job. But that's another story.

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