ALLEGED LETTER FORGERY PROBED

Prosecutors are investigating allegations that someone forged a character-reference letter in the name of an El Monte police officer for a defendant who was seeking lower bail in a high-profile drug-money case, authorities said Thursday.

Pedro Yanez, a narcotics detective with the El Monte Police Department, told The Times that he did not write the Aug. 5 letter, which bore a photocopy of his business card. He said he knew little about the defendant, Covina resident Julissa Lopez, who is awaiting trial along with her brother and two Mexican federal police officers. They are scheduled to appear in court today.

Yanez said he has known the brother, Hector Lopez, for several years because they had played together on an adult baseball team, but that he had not seen him in the months before the July arrests.

The detective and El Monte Police Chief Tom Armstrong said the signature on the letter is strikingly different from the ones in Yanez’s personnel file. “They’re not even close,� Armstrong said. “He did not write the letter. . . . He’s a good guy.�

The signature also does not match the one on Yanez’s voter registration records.

Mark Werksman, Julissa Lopez’s attorney, said he submitted the letter to Los Angeles County Superior Court after receiving it and others from thedefendant’s family. He said the family could not recall who gave him the document.

Werksman had been asking the court to reduce Lopez’s bail, which originally was $2 million.

She was released last week on $400,000 bail, Werksman said.

“I don’t have reason to believe the letter was fabricated,� he said. “Why would any family member be so audacious as to fabricate a letter from a law enforcement officer? Preposterous.�

The Lopezes and the two Mexican federal agents are charged with possessing more than $600,000 in connection with a drug transaction. They have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, they face up to four years in prison.

They were arrested in a raid at the Covina home of the Lopezes’ parents, who have not been implicated in the case.

After The Times inquired about the letter, Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said that the agency had asked case investigators to launch a forgery probe.

“If the allegations are true, we would ask for revocation of bail,� Robison said.

A court spokeswoman said Judge William Ryan, who is presiding over the case, had “no recollection� of the letter and that it had nothing to do with the decision to reduce Lopez’s bail.

Yanez said he might have given his business card to the Lopez family during the years he played baseball with Hector Lopez.

Addressed “to whom it may concern,� the letter does not mention the charges in the case or the bail, but praises Julissa Lopez’s work at her father’s tire business. “[S]he has taken very well care of my cars,� it says. “. . . She can be seen at a local kids baseball game, softball game, soccer game, and in the library with her kids all in one week.�

Lopez, 36, is the common-law wife of defendant Carlos Cedano Filippini, 35, who was a Mexican federal police commander when he was taken into custody.

Also charged is Victor Juarez, 36, identified as an investigator for Cedano at the Mexicali office of Mexico’s Federal Investigative Agency, that nation’s equivalent of the FBI.

Cedano is believed to have been the target of a shooting in Mexicali last summer in which gunmen killed two of his aides. Mexican media reported that Cedano abandoned his job after the shooting.

Yanez, whose department was not involved in the Covina investigation, said he had no knowledge that Hector Lopez, 33, might have been the target of a drug probe. He said he had only a vague memory of ever meeting Julissa.

An attorney for Hector Lopez could not be reached for comment.

A stakeout team of narcotics investigators that stormed the house on North Monte Verde Drive seized a suitcase full of cash, a money-counting machine, other bundles of currency, heat-sealable packets for the bills, and notations believed to be records of payments and debts for narcotics, authorities say. Defense attorneys have said the lists were the innocent jottings of family activities.

No drugs were found, but a police dog trained to sniff out narcotics residue showed a positive response to the suitcase and to other items in the bedroom, investigators say.

The defense has filed a writ with the state appeals court asking that the case be thrown out because investigators have not revealed what led them to the house.

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