He was a star LAPD investigator, then he went to jail. Now he might be going back

A former star investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department’s organized crime division is in custody after being charged with a 1994 kidnapping during a store robbery in Thousand Oaks.

Former Det. Michael D. Brambles is accused of kidnapping a woman, identified as SW, at a gift boutique and using a gun during a sexual assault a month after he retired from the LAPD, ending a career that saw the late Police Chief Daryl F. Gates call him “one of the smartest . . . most innovative detectives I’ve ever known . . . exactly what you’d want in a detective.”

The alleged April 19, 1994, kidnapping and attack was part of a series of armed hold-ups and sexual assaults across the L.A. region. Brambles received 102 years in state prison in 1996 for his L.A. County crimes. Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryoff said investigators identified Brambles and he was charged, but because of his sentencing in L.A., the case was dropped.

But Fryoff said as part of a Ventura County sexual assault kit initiative, all sexual assault cases are being reviewed and retested with modern technology. As part of investigating the assault on SW, detectives learned that Brambles had been released from custody under California’s parole laws for elderly inmates.

“As you can imagine, this was devastating news for SW. The man she believed would spend the rest of his life in prison had been released,” Fryoff said.

Earlier this summer, authorities informed SW about the results of their investigation and asked if she wanted to press charges, said Ventura County Dist. Atty. Eric Nasarenko. She said yes.

“I was shocked to hear not only this man was walking free, but he’d been out of prison six years,” SW told reporters at a press conference Thursday. As a policy, The Times does not identify sexual assault victims. “The justice that I and his other victims deserved was denied when he was only required to serve a fraction of his sentence.”

Brambles, now 77, was arrested Wednesday in Santa Maria after Ventura County prosecutors charged him with kidnap for robbery and use of a weapon during a sexual assault, along with a plethora of other special circumstances that could lengthen any prison sentence. He is being held on $2 million bond in Santa Barbara County jail. He is expected to be arraigned Friday. He was not charged with a sex crime due to the statute of limitations, officials said.

His storied LAPD career was overshadowed by revelations that in the last year on the job, while on medical leave, he moonlighted as an armed robber and, in some violent hold-ups, sexually assaulted victims.

In 1996, Brambles was found guilty of 26 felony counts stemming from a four-month string of robberies in which a lone gunman entered restaurants, shops and dry cleaners around Los Angeles — many along the Ventura Boulevard corridor of the San Fernando Valley — to clear out their cash registers at closing time, twice sexually assaulting female clerks. For the crimes, he got a 102-year sentence with a judge, himself a former cop, declaring Brambles had “no remorse whatsoever.”

But in 2020, Brambles was freed from prison. Nasarenko said he was the beneficiary of a 2018 law that grants prison inmates who had served 25 years continuously and were over 60 years old an opportunity to seek elder parole.

Once dubbed “a golden boy” at the LAPD, he was the department’s highest-profile organized-crime fighter, a man wondrously articulate who would spend hours on the street pursuing some of the most salacious cases the city had to offer.

A surfer and physical fitness buff, Brambles rose through the ranks quickly, eventually becoming a supervisor in the elite Organized Crime Intelligence Division.

In 1987, he headed a team of detectives probing the collapse of the ZZZZ Best carpet cleaning company, run by Barry Minkow, and later represented the department at congressional hearings on stock fraud—and mob involvement—in the Reseda-based firm.

But in 1989 his LAPD superiors transferred him from the organized crime unit to the West Los Angeles station—to work car theft investigations—after another detective alleged before a grand jury that he rigged a photo lineup.

Brambles took medical leave in November 1993, then retired the following March, two months after the robberies began. He became a suspect after a clerk at a dry cleaners that had been robbed saw Brambles at a motel and called police. A search of Brambles’ motel room and vehicle turned up evidence linking him to the robberies.

After he retired, he shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and his Las Vegas home, and investigators allege he committed the Thousand Oaks crime during one of those visits.

Authorities say there is DNA linking him to the crime. During his months-long trial in 1996, prosecutors also presented DNA evidence, along with a parade of robbery victims.

In that trial, Brambles swore he was the victim of a “tragic mis-identification” while hinting at a conspiracy against him because of a stormy 23-year career.

During that time, he made a slew of enemies — from mob figures who accused him of fabricating evidence to fellow law enforcement officials who described him as a glory-seeking loose cannon.

At the trial, Brambles took the witness stand, recounting how he clashed with top vice detectives while he served as the LAPD’s chief “handler” for the late “Beverly Hills Madam,” Elizabeth Adams.

After the vice squad arrested Adams, Brambles testified in her defense that she had been promised immunity from prosecution for forwarding sensitive “pillow-talk” intelligence picked up by her pricey call girls.

Adams swore to the end that he was “one of the most honorable, decent cops I have ever met,” and she had met–and tested–a lot of cops.

In the probation report after the conviction, Brambles again professed his innocence. But he did confide that he “wonders if he was under so much stress that he lost his mind, committed the crime and then did not remember it.”