"Brambles"

[MARG0349]

From: Alex Constantine <ale...@mediaone.net>
<< o Former police detective Michael D. Brambles, an acclaimed
mob investigator, convicted to 102 years in state prison for a
string of stickups and sexual assaults in 1994. The 47 year
old OCID veteran exhibited "no remorse whatsoever," Superior
Court Judge John W. Ouderkirk observed from the bench
(Abrahamson & Lieberman).<<

And from Los Angeles Magazine:

ROGUE COP - Los Angeles Magazine, May 1995 {Mike Brambles}
by Joe Domanick - the author of To Protect and Serve: The LAPD’s Century of
War in
the City of Dreams, nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Fact
Crime.;
Research assistance was provided by Michelle Birnkrant:
<<So, the LAPD was called. When the detectives arrived, they searched the
suspect’s room
and found a gun and jean jacket. They asked the ex-cop to take a ride with
them to the
Wilshire division station. Abdelmallak had no way of knowing, but his call
from the
front desk of the Motel 6 would add yet another bizarre tale to the series of
scandals the
LAPD has endured since the March 1991 beating of Rodney King. The suspect LAPD
detectives shepherded into Wilshire last April wasn’t just any ex-cop. 45 yr
old Michael
D. Brambles was a former supervising detective in the department’s
elite----and highly
secretive---Organized Crime Intelligence Division. For most of his 23 years,
the clean
cut, articulate Brambles seemed the embodiment of the Hollywood inspired myths
of the
LAPD as “America’s cops”. >>

(more one Brambles)

<<“If he had a problem with lieutenants and detective commanders, his
attitude was: “Hey,
I’m Michael Brambles. Don’t fuck with me.’ And when push came to shove,
and he
decided to put stuff down on paper, he turned them [over] and gave the
information on
them to the next higher in command. In 1992, Brambles placed a picture of
himself---naked from the waist down and bent over in the mooning position---on
the desk
of a female officer. When a lieutenant brought him up on charges of sexual
harassment,
according to Chapman, “Brambles wrote a 4 page letter to our commanding
officer and
that lieutenant was gone a week later---transferred out to Hollywood. Brambles
said:
‘Well, ok pal, you want to do that? Let’s go. Let’s go to war.’ And
Brambles won.”
But he still had to face a Board of Rights disciplinary hearing over the sexual
harassment
charges. By that time, however, Brambles was gearing up to retire---which he
did in
late March 1994, after using up his sick leave. He had already remarried and
was
living in Las Vegas, returning twice weekly to visit his children. It was
during those
visits, beginning in January 94 that, according to Deputy DA Michele Daniels,
he
allegedly committed the string of robberies and rapes.
Brambles and his team, including veteran criminal defense attorney Anthony
Brooklier, insist it’s all a matter of the ex-detective being in the wrong
place at the
wrong time----and a willingness on the part of the LAPD to belive him guilty.
“I don’t
believe the detectives investigating the case have knowingly tried to frame
him,” says
Brooklier {who was Heidi Fleiss’s atty and son of LA mob boss!!}, “but the
LAPD has
cleared a number of crimes---30 or 40----that were committed using the same
modus
operandi and for which Mike has not been charged.” One of the suspects,
he says, a
convicted robber previously charged with one of the holdupsand then released
after
Brambles’ arrest, had silver gloves in his possession, “identical” to
those used in the
robberies. Additionally, he says, they have proof that Brambles could not have
been at at
least “several” of the robbery locations at the times the crimes were
committed. “I will
put my life on the line that he is not guilty,” says Kathryn Brambles, his
wife of a year
and a half. “This is not blind faith but based on what I know.”
“Mike has an explanation, a very plausible and logical explanation for how
these victims
have come to identify him,” says his friend Peter Knecht. “He has alibis
for some of the
occasions. And he has reasonable explanations. I mean, it is really easy, I
think, to
frame somebody on an identification issue.” But the eyewitness
identification of
Brambles---first from police photos, then in lineups and finally at his
preliminary hearing
last December---appears overwhelming. Witness after witness---about 20 in all,
with
more to come during the trial---had looked Brambles in the eye and positively
ID’d him.
“That many people mis-identifying someone,” according to Dotson, “is
highly
improbably.” Even more farfetched, says Dotson, is the possibility that
Brambles was set
up. “With the OJ Simpson case,” he says, “there was room for one or two
people to
do something---it was small, but it was there. But [in Bramble’s case] I
don’t know of
any two or three people who could control such a massive conspiracy.”
And there is also the physical evidence against Brambles---a jean jacket, a
gun
and that unique pair of gloves that were found in his possession, as well as
initial DNA
and blood samples that match Brambles’. In addition, his days as a narc, his
simultaneous relationships with Chandra Brambles and Susan Harrison and his
ability to
maintain a choirboy LAPD image, make it clear that he was more than capable of
living
several lives.
And then there is the why. According to Harrison, Brambles liked to live
well,
and when they were together, she--an attorney making a good ‘6 figures a
year’---considerably more thaan Brambles---was “living up to her
[financial] limit.” In
the 3 years they were together, they traveled to Las VEgas, New Orleans, San
Diego,
Arizona twice to Hawaii, where they stayed in a “beautiful, expensive set of
condos on
the beach for a week.” And Brambles “paid the way a lot of times.” He
was spending a
lot of money for a separated man with a wife and two kids at home---a man
making about
$70,000 to $80,000 a year, including overtime. He now had to support a new
wife with
his own two kids and a modest house in Las Vegas---bought mainly with her
money---which they never could afford to furnish. He was drawing perhaps
$1,400 a
monthy from his pension while paying over a thousand dollars a month in child
support.
Well before then, according to Harrison, he would complain about being
financially
strapped, paying his bills with credit cards to stretch out the payments. When
he was
arrested, it was Kathryn’s father who put up his bail and then paid the
attorney fees
during the preliminary hearing. Currently his lawyer is being paid by the
court.
>>