The Great Shark Hunt, page 19
By late Sunday, however, the sheriff’s story had collapsed completely—in the face of sworn testimony from four men who were standing within ten feet of Ruben Salazar when he died in the Silver Dollar Cafe at 4045 Whittier Boulevard, at least a mile from Laguna Park. But the real shocker came when these men testified that Salazar had been killed—not by snipers or errant gunfire—but by a cop with a deadly tear gas bazooka.
Acosta had no trouble explaining the discrepancy. “They’re lying,” he said. “They murdered Salazar and now they’re trying to cover it up. The sheriff already panicked. All he can say is, ‘No comment.’ He’s ordered every cop in the county to say nothing to anybody—especially the press. They’ve turned the East L.A. sheriff’s station into a fortress. Armed guards all around it.” He laughed. “Shit, the place looks like a prison—but with all the cops inside!”
Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess refused to talk to me when I called. The rude aftermath of the Salazar killing had apparently unhinged him completely. On Monday he called off a scheduled press conference and instead issued a statement, saying: “There are just too many conflicting stories, some from our own officers, as to what happened. The sheriff wants an opportunity to digest them before meeting with newsmen.”
* * *
Indeed. Sheriff Pitchess was not alone in his inability to digest the garbled swill that his office was doling out. The official version of the Salazar killing was so crude and illogical—even after revisions—that not even the sheriff seemed surprised when it began to fall apart even before Chicano partisans had a chance to attack it. Which they would, of course. The sheriff had already got wind of what was coming: many eyewitnesses, sworn statements, first-hand accounts—all of them hostile.
The history of Chicano complaints against cops in East L.A. is not a happy one. “The cops never lose,” Acosta told me, “and they won’t lose this one either. They just murdered the only guy in the community they were really afraid of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter.”
I could accept that. But it was difficult, even for me, to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it… because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.
As for Acosta’s charge of murder, I knew him well enough to understand how he could make that charge publicly… I also knew him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t try to hang that kind of monstrous bullshit on me. So our phone talk naturally disturbed me… and I fell to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had told me the truth.
On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case—either pro or con—from my bundle of notes and newsclips relating to Salazar’s death. By that time at least six reportedly reliable witnesses had made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial points, with the original police version—which nobody believed anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff’s account of that accident; it wasn’t even a good lie.
Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops—rather than street-snipers—the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on “known dissidents” who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, “thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions.”
Pitchess did not identify any “known dissidents,” but he insisted that they had committed “hundreds of provocative acts.” For some reason the sheriff failed to mention that his deputies had already jailed one of the most prominent Chicano militants in the nation. “Corky” Gonzales had been arrested during Saturday’s riot on a variety of charges that the police never really explained. Gonzales, fleeing the combat zone on a flatbed truck with 28 others, was arrested first for a traffic violation, then on a concealed weapons charge and finally for “suspicion of robbery” when police found $300 in his pocket. Police Inspector John Kinsling said it was a “routine” booking. “Any time we stop a traffic case and find that there is a weapon in the car and that its occupants have a sizeable amount of money,” he said, “we always book them for suspicion of robbery.”
Gonzales ridiculed the charge, saying, “Anytime a Mexican is found with more than $100 he’s charged with a felony.” The police had originally claimed he was carrying a loaded pistol and more than 1000 rounds of ammunition, along with many spent cartridges—but by Wednesday all felony charges had been dropped. As for “robbery,” Gonzales said, “Only a lunatic or a fool could believe that 29 people would rob a place and then jump on a flatbed truck to make their getaway.” He had climbed aboard the truck with his two children, he said, to get them away from the cops who were gassing the rally, to which he’d been invited as one of the main speakers. The $300, he said, was expense money for himself and his children—for meals in L.A. and three round-trip bus tickets from Denver to L.A.
* * *
That was the extent of Corky Gonzales’ involvement in the Salazar incident, and at a glance it seems hardly worth mentioning—except for a rumor on the Los Angeles lawyers’ grapevine that the robbery charge was only a ruse, a necessary holding action, to set Gonzales up for a “Chicano Seven” conspiracy bust—charging that he came from Denver to Los Angeles with the intention of causing a riot.
Both Sheriff Pitchess and Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis were quick to seize on this theory. It was the perfect tool for this problem: not only would it frighten the local Chicanos and hamstring nationally-known militants like Gonzales, but it could also be used to create a sort of “red menace” smokescreen to obscure the nasty realities of the Ruben Salazar killing.
The sheriff fired the first salvo, which earned him a giant banner headline in Tuesday’s L.A. Times and a heavy pro-police editorial in Wednesday’s Herald-Examiner. Meanwhile, Chief Davis launched a second blast from his listening post in Portland, where he had gone to vent his wisdom at the American Legion convention. Davis blamed all the violence, that Saturday, on a “hard core group of subversives who infiltrated the antiwar rally and turned it into a mob, “which soon ran wild in a frenzy of burning and looting. “Ten months ago,” he explained, “the Communist Party in California said it was giving up on the blacks to concentrate on the Mexican-Americans.”
Nowhere in the Herald editorial—and nowhere in either statement by the sheriff and the police chief—was there any mention of the name Ruben Salazar. The Herald, in fact, had been trying to ignore the Salazar story from the very beginning. Even in Sunday’s first story on the riot—long before any “complications” developed—the classic Hearst mentality was evident in the paper’s full-page headline: “East Los Angeles Peace Rally Explodes in Bloody Violence… Man Shot to Death; Buildings Looted, Burned.” Salazar’s name appeared briefly, in a statement by a spokesman for the L.A. County sheriff’s department—a calm and confident assertion that the “veteran reporter” had been shot in Laguna Park, by persons unknown, in the midst of a bloody clash between police and militants. So much for Ruben Salazar.
And so much for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner—a genuinely rotten newspaper that claims the largest circulation of any afternoon daily in America. As one of the few remaining Hearst organs, it serves a perverted purpose in its role as a monument to everything cheap, corrupt and vicious in the realm of journalistic possibility. It is hard to understand, in fact, how the shriveled Hearst management can still find enough gimps, bigots and deranged Papists to staff a rotten paper like the Herald. But they manage, somehow… and they also manage to sell a lot of advertising in the monster. Which means the thing is actually being read, and perhaps taken seriously, by hundreds of thousands of people in America’s second largest city. At the top of Wednesday’s editorial page—right next to the Red Menace warning—was a large cartoon titled “At the Bottom of it All.” It showed a flaming Molotov cocktail crashing through a window, and on the bottom (bottom, get it?) of the bottle is a hammer and sickle emblem. The editorial itself was a faithful echo of the Davis-Pit-chess charges: “Many of the dissidents came here from other cities and states to join agitators in Los Angeles to set off a major riot, which was planned in advance… That the holocaust did not erupt into greater proportions is due to the bravery and tactics of the sheriff’s deputies… Those arrested should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Precautions must be doubled to prevent a recurrence of such criminal irresponsibility.” The continued existence of the Hearst Examiner explains a lot about the mentality of Los Angeles—and also, perhaps, about the murder of Ruben Salazar.
So the only way to go was to reconstruct the whole thing on the basis of available eyewitness testimony. The police refused to say anything at all—especially to the press. The sheriff said he was saving “the truth” for the official coroner’s inquest.
* * *
Meanwhile, evidence was building up that Ruben Salazar had been murdered—either deliberately or for no reason at all. The most damaging anti-cop testimony thus far had come from Guillermo Restrepo, a 28-year-old reporter and newscaster for KMEX-TV, who was covering the “riot” with Salazar that afternoon, and who had gone with him into the Silver Dollar Cafe “to take a leak and drink a quick beer before we went back to the station to put the story together.” Restrepo’s testimony was solid enough on its own to cast a filthy shadow on the original police version, but when he produced two more eyewitnesses who told exactly the same story, the sheriff abandoned all hope and sent his scriptwriters back to the sty.
Guillermo Restrepo is well known in East L.A.—a familiar figure to every Chicano who owns a TV set. Restrepo is the out-front public face of KMEX-TV news… and Ruben Salazar, until August 29, 1970, was the man behind the news—the editor.
They worked well together, and on that Saturday when the Chicano “peace rally” turned into a Watts-style street riot, both Salazar and Restrepo decided that it might be wise if Restrepo—a native Colombian—brought two of his friends (also Colombians) to help out as spotters and de facto bodyguards.
Their names were Gustavo Garcia, age 30, and Hector Fabio Franco, also 30. Both men appear in a photograph (taken seconds before Salazar was killed) of a sheriff’s deputy pointing a shotgun at the front door of the Silver Dollar Cafe. Garcia is the man right in front of the gun. When the picture was taken he had just asked the cop what was going on, and the cop had just told him to get back inside the bar if he didn’t want to be shot.
The sheriff’s office was not aware of this photo until three days after it was taken—along with a dozen others—by two more eyewitnesses, who also happened to be editors of La Raza, a militant Chicano newspaper that calls itself “the voice of the East L.A. barrio. “(Actually, it is one of several: The Brown Berets publish a monthly tabloid called La Causa. The National La Raza Law Students’ Association has its own monthly—Justicia O! The Socialist Workers Party covers the barrio with The Militant and the East L.A. Welfare Rights Organization has its own tabloid—La Causa de los Pobres. There is also Con Safos—a quarterly review of Chicano Art and Literature.)
The photographs were taken by Raul Ruiz, a 28-year-old teacher of Latin American studies at San Fernando Valley State College. Ruiz was on assignment for La Raza that day when the rally turned into a street war with police. He and Joe Razo—a 33-year-old law student with an M.A. in psychology—were following the action along Whittier Boulevard when they noticed a task force of sheriff’s deputies preparing to assault the Silver Dollar Cafe.
Their accounts of what happened there—along with Ruiz’s photos—were published in La Raza three days after the sheriff’s office said Salazar had been killed a mile away in Laguna Park, by snipers and/or “errant gunfire.”
The La Raza spread was a bombshell. The photos weren’t much individually, but together—along with Ruiz/Razo testimony—they showed that the cops were still lying when they came up with their second (revised) version of the Salazar killing.
It also verified the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony, which had already shot down the original police version by establishing, beyond any doubt, that Ruben Salazar had been killed, by a deputy sheriff, in the Silver Dollar Cafe. They were certain of that, but no more. They were puzzled, they said, when the cops appeared with guns and began threatening them. But they decided to leave anyway—by the back door, since the cops wouldn’t let anybody out of the front—and that was when the shooting started, less than 30 seconds after Garcia was photographed in front of that shotgun barrel on the sidewalk.
The weakness in the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony was so obvious that not even the cops could miss it. They knew nothing beyond what had happened inside the Silver Dollar at the time of Salazar’s death. There was no way they could have known what was happening outside, or why the cops started shooting.
The explanation came almost instantly from the sheriff’s office—once again from Lt. Hamilton. The police had received an “anonymous report,” he said, that “a man with a gun” was inside the Silver Dollar Cafe. This was the extent of their “probable cause,” their reason for doing what they did. These actions, according to Hamilton, consisted of “sending several deputies” to deal with the problem… and they did so by stationing themselves in front of the Silver Dollar and issuing “a loud warning” with a bullhorn calling all those inside to come outside with their hands above their heads.
There was no response, Hamilton said, so a deputy then fired two tear gas projectiles into the bar through the front door. At this point two men and a woman fled out the back and one of the men was relieved by waiting deputies of a 7.65 caliber pistol. He was not arrested—not even detained—and at that point a deputy fired two more tear gas projectiles through the front door of the place.
Again there was no response, and after a 15-minute wait one of the braver deputies crept up and skillfully slammed the front door—without entering, Hamilton added. The only person who actually entered the bar, according to the police version, was the owner, Pete Hernandez, who showed up about half an hour after the shooting and asked if he could go inside and get his rifle.
Why not? said the cops, so Hernandez went in the back door and got his rifle out of the rear storeroom—about 50 feet away from where Ruben Salazar’s body lay in a fog of rancid CS gas.
Then, for the next two hours, some two dozen sheriff’s deputies cordoned off the street in front of the Silver Dollar’s front door. This naturally attracted a crowd of curious Chicanos, not all of them friendly—and one, an 18-year-old girl, was shot in the leg with the same kind of tear gas bazooka that had blown Ruben Salazar’s head apart.
* * *
This is a fascinating tale… and perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that it makes no sense at all, not even to a person willing to accept it as the absolute truth. But who could possibly believe it? Here, in the middle of a terrible riot in a hostile ghetto with a Chicano population of more than a million, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had put every available man on the streets in a vain attempt to control the mass looting and arson by angry mobs… but somehow, with the riots still running in high gear, at least a dozen deputies from the elite Special Enforcement Bureau (read TAC Squad) are instantly available in response to an “anonymous report” that “a man with a gun” is holed up, for some reason, in an otherwise quiet cafe more than ten blocks away from the vortex of the actual rioting.
They swoop down on the place and confront several men trying to leave. They threaten to kill these men—but make no attempt to either arrest or search them—and force them all back inside. Then they use a bullhorn to warn everybody inside to come out with their hands up. And then, almost instantly after giving the warning, they fire—through the open front door of the place and from a distance of no more than 10 feet—two highpowered tear gas projectiles designed “for use against barricaded criminals” and capable of piercing a one-inch pine board at 300 feet.
Then, when a man carrying an automatic pistol tries to flee out the back door, they take his gun and tell him to get lost. Finally, after firing two more gas bombs through the front door, they seal the place up—without ever entering it—and stand around outside for the next two hours, blocking a main boulevard and attracting a large crowd. After two hours of this madness, they “hear a rumor”—again from an anonymous source—that there might be an injured man inside the bar they sealed off two hours ago. So they “break down the door” and find the body of an eminent journalist—“the only Chicano in East L.A.,” according to Acosta, “that the cops were really afraid of.”
Incredible as it seems, the sheriff decided to stick with this story—despite a growing body of eyewitness accounts that contradict the police version of “probable cause.” The police say they went to the Silver Dollar Cafe to arrest that “man with a gun.” But eight days after the killing they were still trying to locate the source of this fatal tip.
* * *
Two weeks later at the coroner’s inquest, the sheriff’s key witness on this critical point mysteriously appeared. He was a 50-year-old man named Manuel Lopez who claimed all credit for the tip with his tale of having seen two armed men—one with a revolver and one carrying a rifle in the port arms position—go into the Silver Dollar shortly before Salazar was killed. Lopez quickly “motioned to” the sheriff’s officers stationed nearby, he said, and they responded by parking a patrol car directly across the six-lane boulevard from the Silver Dollar’s front door. Then using a loud bullhorn, the deputies gave two distinct warnings for everybody in the bar to “throw out their weapons and come out with their hands over their heads.”
