Global Courant
An infamous 1990s Los Angeles murderer known as “Big Evil” is eligible for parole after serving more than 25 years on charges that once landed him on death row.
Cleamon “Big Evil” Johnson, 55, pleaded no contest and was convicted on Thursday of a single murder in a case stemming from five murders in the early 1990s when he was the leader of a small but disproportionately violent subgroup of the Bloods – the 89 family swans – in South Los Angeles.
Johnson was once on death row at San Quentin State Prison for two of the five murders, but racist remarks from the lead LAPD detective on the case led a judge to rule that Johnson would no longer face the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted at a retrial.
The convicted killer has been in state prison for more than 25 years, which means he’s now eligible for parole, but that doesn’t mean he’ll get it.
“I’ve worked on this case for 16 years and I’m very happy with the outcome,” said Bob Sager, Johnson’s attorney.
Johnson’s no-contest plea came Thursday for the murder of Payton Beroit, who was shot with his friend, Donald Loggins, at a car wash at 88th Street and Central Avenue in 1991.
Although Johnson pleaded no contest to Beroit’s murder, charges against him were dropped for the murder of Loggins, along with three others: Albert Sutton, Georgia Jones, and Tyrone Mosley.
Johnson’s case has bounced through the court system for decades, with the California Supreme Court tossing his 2011 conviction on a juror-related issue from his first trial.
But in 2014, the LAPD’s lead detective on the case, Brian McCartin, used the N-word when referring to black gang members while hanging out with a deputy district attorney and a public defender. The information was not turned over to Johnson’s defense until 2018. The comments became a flashpoint in Johnson’s case. In May 2022, the judge in the case ruled that McCartin’s comments and the four-year delay in turning over to the defense were unfair to the defendant.
“A lot of unfortunate things happened in this case and it’s disheartening,” said Jon Lipsky, an FBI agent who worked on the case in the 1990s.
While Lipsky said Johnson is a “stone-cold killer,” he also believed McCartin’s comments and failure to quickly pass them on was a violation of the law.
“I believe in the rule of law,” Lipsky said, speaking of the sentence of 25 years to life. “I think it’s a fair and just determination.”
Still, Lipsky remembered Johnson as an “anomaly” in the Los Angeles gang scene of the 1990s. While in Blythe’s Ironwood State Prison on a drug charge in the early ’90s, Johnson ran his gang with violent efficiency, Lipsky recalled, ordering hits in code on phone calls. The scale of the murders Johnson and his gang were charged with was astonishing, Lipsky said.
“It was unparalleled,” he said.
The single murder for which Johnson is now legally responsible is a far cry from what police once charged him with. Police attributed “more than 20” murders to Johnson and his crew, according to a report in The Times in 1998. Johnson himself admitted at the time to 13 murders, Lipsky said.
In 1998, Johnson told The Times that he was like an American soldier sent to “Vietnam … programmed to kill”.
‘Here again we couldn’t stop killing our enemies. I was one of those sick individuals. They locked us up, but we needed mental help,” he said. “I was the epitome of a gang member. I was real. … Some people worshiped Allah or Jesus. I worshiped Bloods.”
