Whipped Cream Difficulties

There’s a strange and noteworthy story in today’s LAT. Brian C. Mulligan is a high-ranking executive with Deutsche Bank (“a managing director and vice chairman”). Mr. Mulligan is also pursuing a $50 million damage claim against the city of Los Angeles.

According to Mr. Mulligan, he went to purchase “medical marijuana products” at a local dispensary on the night of May 15th. (Mr. Mulligan says they “help him sleep”. I was unaware that insomnia was a condition that you could prescribe marijuana for, but in retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised.)

Mr. Mulligan goes on to claim that law enforcement officers detained him, “walked him to a run-down apartment complex and told him to go to the fourth floor”. According to Mr. Mulligan, he panicked and fled from the police in the direction of Occidental College, which was nearby.

According to the LAPD, two officers responded to a report of a strange man trying to break into cars at a local Jack in the Box. While responding to that report, a second similar report came in. The two officers found Mr. Mulligan near Occidental. Their report says he matched the description of the man trying to break into the cars, he was “drenched in sweat and walked with an ‘unsteady gait'”, but he passed field sobriety tests.

The LAPD report goes on to state that Mr. Mulligan told the responding officers he had used both marijuana and “white lightning”, which the LAT claims is another name for “bath salts”. “He said he hadn’t slept in four days, was going through a divorce and felt depressed, the report said. Mulligan also said he was being chased, according to the report, which nonetheless described him as calm, lucid and cooperative.” Mr. Mulligan denies telling the LAPD officers any of this.

The officers drove Mulligan to his Toyota Prius, which they searched; Mulligan’s attorney said he had not given them permission.

Search incident to arrest?

They found his Irish passport and enough cash that they called in a supervisor, said the report, which did not specify an amount.

That seems odd. If I find enough cash to get a supervisor involved, I’m darn sure noting the exact amount (and counting at least twice) on my report.

Mulligan’s claim pegged the cash at about $5,000, a sum he said he normally carried for business travel. Then police took Mulligan — whose cellphone and passport remained in his car, his attorneys said — to the nearby Highland Park Motel, a low-rent building across from homes with barred windows.

That also seems odd. If they felt he couldn’t drive or otherwise take care of himself, shouldn’t they have taken him into formal supervised custody? Doesn’t dropping him at a “low-rent” motel set you up for exactly this kind of problem?

(The LAPD report claims Mulligan asked to be dropped off there. Mulligan denies this, and says “he was taken there against his will and told ‘he could not leave, under threat of death.'”)

At the front desk, Flanagan said, the officers took away Mulligan’s car keys and forced him to pay the roughly $40 room bill. They also gave him back the cash they’d found in his car, said another Mulligan attorney, Valerie Wass.

Since everyone seems to agree that Mulligan was dropped at the motel, I’m not exactly shocked they made him pay the bill up front. I’m not saying dropping him there was a good idea in the first place, but if they did drop him there, someone’s got to pay for the room…

…one officer escorted Mulligan to Room 208, which he said did not have a telephone. He eventually cajoled a clerk into returning his keys, his attorney said, and ran away from the motel. This week, a motel employee said he could not recall the incident.

I kind of think I’d remember something like this, if I were a clerk. Then again, I wonder if anyone actually talked to the clerk who worked that night (the LAT doesn’t specify that), or if that clerk is even still working at the motel.

In any case, the same two officers encountered Mr. Mulligan later on that night (actually, around 1 AM the following morning). Mr. Mulligan was allegedly “trying to open the passenger-side door of an occupied silver van”. The van drove off, the officers told Mr. Mulligan to get off the sidewalk, Mr. Mulligan cursed at them, and apparently ran off. (That’s the LAPD’s account: Mr. Mulligan’s lawyers apparently dispute that he was trying to open the van door, or that he cursed at the police.)

The officers soon gave chase, the report said. “At that point,” Mulligan’s claim said, “he was in such great fear that he believed the LAPD officers were not truly LAPD officers but may be impostors bent on robbing or killing.”

So he didn’t recognize these officers as the same ones who took him to the motel earlier? Or he did, but he thought the ones who took him to the motel were imposters? Do you often go to “low-rent” motels with people posing as police officers? What was the point of checking him in and making him pay the bill if they were imposters planning on “robbing and killing” him?

Anyway, the LAPD chased Mulligan down. They claim he went into a fighting stance and charged the officers, who took him down and arrested him. Mulligan’s attorney, of course, denies that his client charged the officers. And:

No charges have been filed against Mulligan, though a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, which handles misdemeanor crimes, said the incident was under review.

I’m not sure what to make of this, as I have a lot of trouble believing that either side is telling the whole truth about what went on that night. There doesn’t seem to be any dispute about the whole “checked him into the ‘low-rent’ motel” part of the story, though, and that strikes me as being a big deviation from what I’d expect to be proper procedure. Was the LAPD trying to cut a rich white guy a break? Or…?