With the constant tweeting of hate attacks on prosecutors, judges, and news commentators by the President, I thought back to when my life and the lives of my family were threatened during my career as a District Attorney. When a threat like the one I faced is determined to be creditable, a lot of moving pieces had to be put into play to guarantee our safety. Words matter and angry tweets that result in threats by deranged followers are serious and need to be treated as such.
So here’s my story and what we went through.
One afternoon, I was working at my desk in the Torrance Branch Courthouse when my secretary informed me that there was a call for me coming in from the Los Angeles County Jail. At that time, I was a Head Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles, and I oversaw fifty trial lawyers in this particular branch courthouse.
I picked up the phone and a voice I didn’t recognize asked me if I was Peter Berman. I replied that I was. “You don’t know me,” he began, “but I’m calling to let you know that there’s a guy in the cell next to mine who says his case is going to be dismissed next week, and as soon as he gets out, he and another guy are going to kill you and your entire family.”
Now, in my capacity as a prosecutor, I’ve had threats before, so I wasn’t immediately alarmed. I had just finished a five-year assignment as the head of the Hardcore Gang Division, where threats of violence against witness and others were common, so rather than panic, I got his name and told this guy that I would send someone out to talk to him later that afternoon. I then notified the District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation about the threat, and I returned to my duties with no more thought about it.
The Bureau is the District Attorney’s own group of law enforcement officers. In short, it is a specialized police agency.
Two hours later, I got a call from one of our Bureau Lieutenants. “Stay in your office and don’t go out,” he told me. “I’m sending over a team that will escort you home.”
Hmm, so I guess the threat is real?
In fact, calls were coming into the LADA’s office at an alarming rate from law enforcement officials throughout the US. Officers were calling in to say that their confidential informants had reached out to them to say that plans were underway to assassinate a prosecutor in LA. How the news of the plot spread so quickly throughout the USA was a mystery that later came to life. It turns out that the informant who notified me was immediately transferred to a protective unit in the county jail where inmates who cooperated with law enforcement were grouped together to protect them from other inmates. Turns out that he told others in that unit what he knew, and those informants passed the threat on to police officers around the country in hopes of getting some kind of leniency for themselves.
Needless to say, the sheer volume of calls coming in was taken as a sign that the threat was very real, so the reaction was swift and extensive.
I placed a call to my home to let my wife know that teams were now on their way to our house. To my surprise and relief, teams were already there. “They’ve sealed off our street, and only residents can enter our cul de sac,” she told me. “There are officers with shotguns on the hillside out behind our house and several teams out in the house.
There was a momentary pause, and then she asked, “So? Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Not wanting to alarm her, I told her “It’s just a drill. A guy has been making threats against me, but he’s already in jail, so the DA’s Bureau is using this opportunity to do a training exercise.” Did she believe me? Not for a moment. She knew that it was far more serious than I was letting on. “Where are the kids?” I asked. “They’re in the garage with two investigators. While they were searching it, they found a rattlesnake, so the kids are getting a look at it.”
Oh, great! Armed men and poisonous snakes in my house. What next?
The guy who wanted to kill us was the leader of a street gang, and he had previously enlisted members of his gang to kill a witness in one of his cases. What I didn’t know until later that evening was that he had enlisted an accomplice while he was in state prison and that the accomplice was also due for immediate release. Once the accomplice was out, they were going to follow me home from work and murder us in my home.
At the time this all came to light, he’d been out of custody for almost six months. During that time, he had picked up two rape cases, and that was why he was in the County Jail where he was waiting for a preliminary hearing. According to the informant, members of his gang paid a visit to the victims and convinced them not to testify. That’s why he believed that his case would be dismissed and why his plans to kill us were now imminent.
The guy who wanted me dead had three prior convictions for manslaughter. His arrest record included possession of a machine gun and violence against police officers. I sent him off to prison a decade before for conspiracy to kill a witness in one of his other shooting cases, and I guess he was just a dangerous, sore loser.
Because I was a law enforcement figure, my family and I were placed under governmental protection around the clock for the next six weeks. My wife was given a gun permit and a quick course in how to use a firearm, and since carrying a weapon was already part of my daily routine, during lighter moments together, we would laugh together in the mornings because our getting dressed ritual now included putting on his-and-her holster rigs.
Our kids were all under fourteen, and rather than being scared, they thought it was cool to have so many police officers hanging around our house. That changed a few days later when they realized that their freedom was all but completely curtailed. The house was guarded around the clock by teams of officers who covered the property front and back. When the kids were home, our cul de sac street was blocked off, so they could only play behind the police protection line. You would have thought that our neighbors would have felt a sense of comfort at having so many police officers present in our neighborhood. But that wasn’t the case. Some of them were afraid to let their kids even walk past our house. Fear seemed to spread up and down the street, and friendships we had made in the past seemed to melt away, some of which now twenty plus years later have still never been repaired.
My protective detail stayed with me whenever I left the house. I was not allowed to drive my own car. I continued to go to work every day, and I chose to brown bag my lunches to minimize the chaos that seemed to be generated whenever I left my home or office.
My wife was given a protective detail. They allowed her to drive her own car, but a team was always close behind. She liked to drive fast, and apparently, she lost them on the freeway one day on a trip to get her hair done. Thereafter, she got the word that if it happened again, they were going to have to take away the keys to her car. We laughed about that too, but she never ditched them again.
The kids soon got quickly tired of the restrictions. Because we could no longer go out in a single-vehicle, (too risky a target), each of them had two detectives and a car assigned to them personally. In the mornings, on school days, a procession of four undercover units and my wife in her station wagon would leave the house in a fast-moving, red-light-busting convoy. To say it caused a stir at the grammar school is an understatement. To move the family in and out of the school grounds required shutting down the street in front of the school and blocking entry into the school parking lot until the kids were safely inside their classrooms. The officers stayed with them during the school day, and my youngest actually started her first days attending preschool with two burly detectives who hung out with her whenever she went out on the playground.
My wife and I immediately started to feel guilty about leaving the house at night. The men and women of the day watch team who provided our protection were required to stay on duty until we were tucked in for the night. I’m talking about ten different officers for my family of five. There were additional teams stationed at the house around the clock, so they could have regular shifts. But our individual teams had to work overtime whenever we planned to go anywhere at night. I know that some of them enjoyed the overtime pay, but we hated to keep them away from their families, so after a short while, once I got home from work each afternoon, we tended to stay in for the night.
One evening, when the voluntary confinement had us going stir crazy, we chose to go out to our local mall with the kids for a nice, quiet dinner, and perhaps even a movie. When the five-car convoy finally got us to the mall, a phalanx of plainclothes officers created a no-go zone around us, and as we strolled through the mall on the way to the restaurant, patrons were required to stay out of our way.
It was very presidential-like in a way, but it totally stripped us of our privacy.
I’m sure the people at the crowded mall thought we were a family of political VIPs or celebrities of some kind, but nothing could be farther from the truth. That type of security, while needed, is truly oppressive. We just wanted to have a quiet time with our kids, away from the confines of our well-protected home. Instead, we became the objects of intense interest by everyone who saw us, and because the threat to us was real, it was a constant reminder that it wasn’t a game and that our very lives were in jeopardy.
We had a quick dinner and decided against the movie. It would have been too much disruption for everyone.
We learned much later that our oldest boy was going to bed at night with a bb-gun. He wanted to be able to protect the family if the bad guys made it past the teams outside the house. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about things like that, but in situations like this, they do.
As the weeks went by, a couple of senior detectives paid a little visit to the inmate who wanted us dead. He was still in jail. I was told that they explained to him the facts of life, beginning with the bad news that the witnesses against him were now in protective custody and that they would be testifying against him as scheduled. They also imparted some sage advice for him to consider. “If you threaten one of us, you threaten us all.” Rumor has it that he was placed in an isolation cell, without privileges of any kind. No exercise time, no cellmates to talk to, no phone calls, no visitors. Just four windowless walls to leave him with sufficient time to seriously cogitate the advice he’d been given.
Apparently he got the message, for he soon pled guilty on the rape cases for a sixteen-year sentence.
After that, we had to go through a time of decompression. We all needed to get used to the idea of being on our own without our protection details. We split for several weeks to a resort in Hawaii. Everyone felt comfortable there so that when we got back, the kids were able to re-assimilate into a normal routine very quickly. I was forced to continue with my team for another month after that, but they always remained hidden until my kids left for school so as not to worry them unnecessarily.
For a very long time thereafter, we were still overly cautious when it came to matters of our personal security. And to this day, I still take certain precautions that I never would have it this threat had not occurred.
So, that’s what it was like for us when a serious threat to our lives was made. And it’s why hate tweets and rabble-rousing comments by so-called political pundits should be universally condemned because messages of hate can have unintended consequences that can deeply affect a great many lives, and we are a country that should be so much better than that.
Let me know what you think…
A fictionalized version based in part on this true-life experience of mine appears in my second novel… WEB OF BETRAYAL.