Rampart Criminal Injustice

Facing a potential life sentence in federal prison, a former Los Angeles police officer who was the admitted mastermind of a home invasion robbery gang apologized for his crimes Monday, telling a federal judge, “I became something that I despised.”

In a somewhat rambling, emotional address made moments before he was sentenced, Ruben Palomares told U.S. District Court Judge Gary A. Feess that he failed to face up to undisclosed “problems” he encountered as a young police officer and “I took a short cut.”

Palomares has been sentenced to 13 years in federal prison. Coupled with time that Palomares is serving on a related drug case, he probably will spend 20 years behind bars before he is released, prosecutors said. The disgraced officer, who also admitted to planting drugs on suspects and committing other crimes while working in the LAPD’s Rampart Division in the 1990s, had earned a reputation as one of the department’s most notoriously corrupt officers in recent memory.