LOS ANGELES
DOWNTOWN
NEWS Volume 39, Number 50
INSIDE
Goodbye Jack Kyser 5
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W W W. D O W N T O W N N E W S . C O M
December 13, 2010
The Curious Case of Brian Alexik Drugs, Guns and Counterfeit Cash. Inside the Jailhouse Mind of the Man Who Evaded Police and Captivated Los Angeles
Urban Scrawl on the Sacramento scene.
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PICK THE
PROS Pick football games, win prizes.
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Another shake-up at El Pueblo.
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photo by Gary Leonard
A tight timeline for South Park football plans.
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Brian Alexik was arrested in June, six weeks after fleeing his Reserve Lofts penthouse. He’s representing himself in court against a slew of charges. He maintains the police search of his apartment was illegal. Here, he listens to a Superior Court judge during a hearing in September.
by Ryan VaillancouRt staff wRiteR
O
Dance real hard at REDCAT.
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Start planning for New Year’s Eve.
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19 CALENDAR LISTINGS 22 CLASSIFIEDS
n the evening of April 19, Brian Alexik decided to run. As firemen and police stood outside his penthouse apartment asking to get in, he rigged two metal rods to jam the door handle and rolled a five-foot circle of Plexiglass in front of the door. The Plexiglass was covered in mosaic tile, so it was heavy. He scooted out to the balcony, which overlooks the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve, then hopped onto a neighbor’s balcony and re-entered the building through a rooftop door. He scurried down several flights of steps, popped into the garage, and simply walked out of the building. The police and fire department had responded to apartment 701 at the Reserve Lofts to investigate a neighbor’s report of an exhaust smell. She described hearing a rattling noise, like that of a gaspowered electric generator. The sound had stopped when police arrived. When authorities asked to enter, Alexik shouted a refusal. LAPD Officer Michael Orosco didn’t smell anything, but the neighbor’s report was alarming, he would later testify, and after a while, Alexik stopped answering. As the room went silent Orosco feared an explosion, or that something had happened to the person inside. Minutes after Alexik split, police used a battering ram to break down the door and the hastily assembled barricade. Inside, the lights were out. Alexik’s power had
been cut. Light spilling in from the hallway illuminated a five-foot-wide handmade tile mosaic of the CIA seal, the object previously standing on its side to block the door. It had tumbled to the ground and settled face up. Once inside, Orosco used the light on his pistol to find his way. He saw a framed image covered in Arabic writing and depicting a woman in a burka, pointing a high-caliber pistol right back at him. A framed portrait of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hung on one wall. The place was littered with power tools. A musty scent lingered. As Orosco moved into the bedroom, the toe of his boot caught something hard poking out from under the bed. He pulled out a rifle-sized gun case. He opened it and found a sawed-off shotgun, a handgun and components for an SKS assault rifle, the Soviet predecessor to the AK-47. They found one of those, too. Orosco’s partner noticed the AK propped up against a wall inside a closet. It was loaded and “ready for live fire,” Orosco would later testify. Dozens of plastic identification cards were strewn across a bed. An open desk drawer was full of cash. After Orosco and his partner found the guns, the police prepared a search warrant affidavit and, at 4:20 a.m., a judge approved it. Investigators tore through the apartment for at least four hours, uncovering a veritable buffet of drugs — crack, heroin, Ecstasy, crystal methamphetamine, cocaine and an array of pharmaceuticals. They also found miscellaneous gun parts that detectives believe were part of a weapons manufacturing operation.
The Voice of Downtown Los Angeles
But the most curious contraband was the $15,000 in counterfeit hundred dollar bills, a noteworthy find considering the location. The Reserve Lofts building was the former home of the Federal Reserve, before the institution moved into more modern digs next door. The LAPD had come to investigate a gas smell and stumbled onto something bigger. Yet for everything police found, they had an unanswered question. Who was this guy? Where did he go? Was he planning some kind of attack? A witness told police she saw Alexik throw two duffle bags off the roof. Investigators still wonder: What was in the bags? There were other questions they didn’t know to ask, like how did Alexik manage to watch from a neighboring building as investigators tossed his apartment? In the following weeks, the mysterious fugitive caught the attention of the Secret Service and the FBI, and popped up on the America’s Most Wanted website. An LAPD release warned that he was armed and dangerous, and reported that he was of Russian descent. An LAPD official compared Alexik to Jason Bourne, novelist Robert Ludlum’s fictional super spy played by Matt Damon in three blockbuster films. National media outlets latched on to the affiliation and came to refer to Alexik as “the real life Jason Bourne” in headlines. The LAPD assigned its Major Crimes Division, which investigates terrorism cases, to find Alexik. Six weeks later, on June 3, they traced him to his girlfriend Brittany Morrill’s apartment at see Alexik, page 8