Charges Tell Tale Of Wholesale Police Fakery A Sixth Officer In The 39th District Is Accused Of Framing Suspects. Rendell Is Angry About The City's Growing Liability.

The official report reads like a police drama. Two officers try to stop a

drug suspect only to find their car rammed by the suspect's car. They chase it down a busy street and corner the "perp" in a parking lot.

The reality, federal prosecutors said yesterday, was dramatically different. John Clouse was driving near the 3800 block of North Broad Street on May 21, 1990, when a car with two men in it rammed him once, twice, three times. Clouse pulled into a convenience store lot, where the men smashed his driver's side window and made him lie face-down on the ground.

The car pursuing Clouse, prosecutors charged yesterday, was an unmarked Philadelphia police car, and the men in it were Officers Louis J. Maier 3d and John Baird of the 39th District.

The details of Clouse's arrest were contained in a criminal information charging Maier, 38, of Juniata Park, a decorated 13-year veteran, with conspiring to violate the civil rights of four people.

Maier was the sixth former 39th District officer to be charged in what officials are calling one of the largest corruption scandals in Philadelphia police history. Five others, including Baird, have pleaded guilty. Maier will do the same, his lawyer said.

The charges against Maier offer new twists in the now-familiar pattern of 39th District officers lying, stealing and framing North Philadelphia citizens: Baird lit and burned a marijuana joint (from what prosecutors now call "the 39th District drug stash") and planted it on a suspect. He and Maier shamelessly faked their report of the Clouse car chase. When the two officers found about $500 in a house on North Hicks Street, they reported $10 and pocketed the rest.

Maier's case means another wave of 39th District drug arrests may now turn to embarrassing dismissals and costly lawsuits.

Bradley S. Bridge, of the Public Defender's Office, said all Maier's past arrests - possibly several hundred - will be reviewed. "Every single Maier case is going to have to go down the tubes," he said.

The new charges were filed on a day when Mayor Rendell made his strongest statement yet on the widening investigation, saying lawsuits arising from the scandal would cost the city money "we desperately need for human needs and basic services."

As for crooked cops, Rendell said: "We will fire them and fire them and fire them."