The Great Shark Hunt, page 20
Then, after a five- or ten-minute wait, Lopez said, three rounds of tear gas were fired at the bar, with one projectile glancing off the front doorway and two whooshing through a black curtain that was hanging a couple of feet back from the open doorway. It was too dark to see what was happening inside the bar, Lopez added.
By his own admission at the inquest, Lopez’ behavior on the afternoon of Saturday, August 29th, was somewhat singular. When the riot broke out and mobs began looting and burning, Mr. Lopez took off his shirt, donned a fluorescent red hunting vest and stationed himself in the middle of Whittier Boulevard as a volunteer cop. He played the role with such zeal and fanatic energy that by nightfall he found himself famous. At the height of the violence he was seen dragging a bus bench into the middle of the boulevard in order to block all traffic and divert it off to side streets. He was also seen herding bystanders away from a burning furniture store… and later, when the riot-action seemed over, he was observed directing a group of sheriff’s deputies toward the Silver Dollar Cafe.
Indeed, there was no arguing with his claim two weeks later that he had been right in the middle of things. His testimony at the inquest sounded perfectly logical and so finely informed that it was hard to understand how such a prominent extroverted witness could possibly have escaped being quoted—or at least mentioned—by the dozens of newsmen, investigators and assorted tipsters with access to the Salazar story. Lopez’ name had not even been mentioned by the sheriff’s office, which could have saved itself a lot of unnecessary public grief by even hinting that they had a witness as valuable as Manuel Lopez. They had not been reluctant to display their other two “friendly” witnesses—neither of whom had seen any “men with guns,” but they both backed the Lopez version of the actual shooting sequence. Or at least they backed it until the cops produced Lopez. Then the other two witnesses refused to testify at the coroner’s inquest and one of them admitted that his real name was David Ross Ricci, although the police had introduced him originally as “Rick Ward.”
* * *
The Salazar inquest rumbled on for 16 days, attracting large crowds and live TV coverage from start to finish. (In a rare demonstration of non-profit unity, all seven local TV stations formed a combine of sorts, assigning the coverage on a rotating basis, so that each day’s proceedings appeared on a different channel.) The L.A. Times coverage—by Paul Houston and Dave Smith—was so complete and often so rife with personal intensity that the collected Smith/Houston file reads like a finely-detailed non-fiction novel. Read separately, the articles are merely good journalism. But as a document, arranged chronologically, the file is more than the sum of its parts. The main theme seems to emerge almost reluctantly, as both reporters are driven to the obvious conclusion that the sheriff, along with his deputies and all his official allies, have been lying all along. This is never actually stated, but the evidence is overwhelming.
A coroner’s inquest is not a trial. Its purpose is to determine the circumstances surrounding a person’s death—not who might have killed him, or why. If the circumstances indicate foul play, the next step is up to the D.A. In California a coroner’s jury can reach only two possible verdicts: That the death was “accidental,” or that it was “at the hands of another.” And in the Salazar case, the sheriff and his allies needed a verdict of “accidental.” Anything else would leave the case open—not only to the possibility of a murder or manslaughter trial for the deputy, Tom Wilson, who finally admitted firing the death weapon; but also to the threat of a million-dollar negligence lawsuit against the County by Salazar’s widow.
The verdict finally hinged on whether or not the jury could believe Wilson’s testimony that he fired into the Silver Dollar—at the ceiling—in order to ricochet a tear gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to come out the front door. But somehow Ruben Salazar had managed to get his head in the way of that carefully aimed shell. Wilson had never been able to figure out, he said, what went wrong.
Nor could he figure out how Raul Ruiz had managed to “doctor” those photographs that made it look like he and at least one other deputy were aiming their weapons straight into the Silver Dollar, pointing them directly at people’s heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His testimony at the inquest was no different than the story he had told me just a few days after the murder. And when the inquest was over there was nothing in the 2025 pages of testimony—from 61 witnesses and 204 exhibits—to cast any serious doubt on the “Chicano Eyewitness Report” that Ruiz wrote for La Raza when the sheriff was still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by “errant gunfire” during the violence at Laguna Park.
The inquest ended with a split verdict. Smith’s lead paragraph in the October 6th Times read like an obituary: “Monday the inquest into the death of newsman Ruben Salazar ended. The 16-day inquiry, by far the longest and costliest such affair in county history, concluded with a verdict that confuses many, satisfies few and means little. The coroner’s jury came up with two verdicts: death was ‘at the hands of another person’ (four jurors) and death was by ‘accident’ (three jurors). Thus, inquests might appear to be a waste of time.”
A week later, District Attorney Evelle Younger—a staunch Law & Order man—announced that he had reviewed the case and decided that “no criminal charge is justified,” despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the “death by accident” verdict were now saying they had made a mistake.
But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and all the rest of the testimony only reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash. When the D.A. announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson, several of the more moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation. The militants called for an uprising. And the cops said nothing at all.
* * *
There was one crucial question, however, that the inquest settled beyond any reasonable doubt. Ruben Salazar couldn’t possibly have been the victim of a conscious, high-level cop conspiracy to get rid of him by staging an “accidental death.” The incredible tale of half-mad stupidity and dangerous incompetence on every level of the law enforcement establishment was perhaps the most valuable thing to come out of the inquest. Nobody who heard that testimony could believe that the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department is capable of pulling off a delicate job like killing a newsman on purpose. Their handling of the Salazar case—from the day of his death all the way to the end of the inquest—raised serious doubts about the wisdom of allowing cops to walk around loose on the street. A geek who can’t hit a 20 foot wide ceiling is not what you need, these days, to pull off a nice clean first-degree murder.
But premeditation is only necessary to a charge of first degree murder. The Salazar killing was a second-degree job. In the terms of Section 187 of the California Penal Code and in the political context of East Los Angeles in 1970, Ruben Salazar was killed “unlawfully” and “with malice aforethought.” These are treacherous concepts, and no doubt there are courts in this country where it might be argued successfully that a cop has a “lawful” right to fire a deadly tear gas bazooka point-blank into a crowd of innocent people on the basis of some unfounded suspicion that one of them might be armed. It might also be argued that this kind of crazed and murderous assault can be accomplished without “malice aforethought.”
Maybe so. Maybe Ruben Salazar’s death can be legally dismissed as a “police accident,” or as the result of “official negligence.” Most middle-class, white-dominated juries would probably accept the idea. Why, after all, would a clean-cut young police officer deliberately kill an innocent bystander? Not even Ruben Salazar—ten seconds before his death—could believe that he was about to have his head blown off by a cop for no reason at all. When Gustavo Garcia warned him that the cops outside were about to shoot, Salazar said, “That’s impossible; we’re not doing anything.” Then he stood up and caught a tear gas bomb in his left temple.
The malignant reality of Ruben Salazar’s death is that he was murdered by angry cops for no reason at all—and that the L.A. sheriff’s department was and still is prepared to defend that murder on grounds that it was entirely justified. Salazar was killed, they say, because he happened to be in a bar where police thought there was also a “man with a gun.” They gave him a chance, they say, by means of a bullhorn warning… and when he didn’t come out with his hands up, they had no choice but to fire a tear gas bazooka into the bar… and his head got in the way. Tough luck. But what was he doing in that place, anyway? Lounging around a noisy Chicano bar in the middle of a communist riot?
What the cops are saying is that Salazar got what he deserved—for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he happened to be in their way when they had to do their duty. His death was unfortunate, but if they had to do it all over again they wouldn’t change a note.
This is the point they want to make. It is a local variation on the standard Mitchell-Agnew theme: Don’t fuck around, boy—and if you want to hang around with people who do, don’t be surprised when the bill comes due—whistling in through the curtains of some darkened barroom on a sunny afternoon when the cops decide to make an example of somebody.
* * *
The night before I left town I stopped by Acosta’s place with Guillermo Restrepo. I had been there earlier, but the air was extremely heavy. As always, on stories like this, some of the troops were getting nervous about The Stranger Hanging Around. I was standing in the kitchen watching Frank put some tacos together and wondering when he was going to start waving the butcher knife in my face and yelling about the time I Maced him on my porch in Colorado (that had been six months earlier, at the end of a very long night during which we had all consumed a large quantity of cactus products; and when he started waving a hatchet around I’d figured Mace was the only answer… which turned him to jelly for about 45 minutes, and when he finally came around he said, “If I ever see you in East Los Angeles, man, you’re gonna wish you never heard the word ‘Mace,’ because I’m gonna carve it all over your fuckin body.”)
So I was not entirely at ease watching Frank chop hamburger on a meat block in the middle of East L.A. He hadn’t mentioned the Mace, not yet, but I knew we would get to it sooner or later… and I’m sure we would have, except that suddenly out in the living room some geek was screaming: “What the hell is this goddamn gabacho pig writer doing here? Are we fuckin crazy to be letting him hear all this shit? Jesus, he’s heard enough to put every one of us away for five years!”
Longer than that, I thought. And at that point I stopped worrying about Frank. A firestorm was brewing in the main room—between me and the door—so I decided it was about time to drift around the corner and meet Restrepo at the Carioca. Frank gave me a big smile as I left.
A man police say preyed on elderly women was charged Tuesday with one count of murder and 12 of robbery. Frazier De Wayne Brown, 44, a 6-foot, 2-inch, 230-pound former Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy, was arraigned in the same Hall of Justice courtroom where he once worked as a bailiff. Police had long been seeking a man who befriended elderly women at bus stops and later attacked and robbed them. Evidence against Brown included possessions taken from victims of strong-arm robberies and found in his home.
L.A. Times 3/31/71
Several hours later we came back. Guillermo wanted to talk to Oscar about putting pressure on the KMEX-TV management to keep him (Restrepo) on the air. “They want to get rid of me,” he explained. “They started the pressure the day after Ruben was killed—the next fuckin day!”
We were sitting on the floor in the living room. Outside, overhead, the police helicopter was looping around in the sky above Whittier Boulevard, sweeping the neighborhood with a giant searchlight beam that revealed nothing—and served no purpose except to drive the Chicanos below into a seething rage. “Those sons of bitches!” Acosta muttered. “Look at that goddamn thing!” We had all gone out in the yard to stare up at the monster. There was no way to ignore it. The noise was bad enough, but the probing searchlight was such an obvious, outrageous harassment that it was hard to understand how even a cop could explain it away as anything but deliberate mockery and provocation.
“Now tell me,” said Acosta. “Why are they doing a thing like this? Why? You think they don’t know what effect it has on us?”
“They know,” said Restrepo. He lit a cigarette as we went back inside. “Listen,” he said, “I get about fifteen telephone calls every day from people who want to tell me stories about what the police have done to them—terrible stories. I’ve been hearing them for a year and a half, every goddamn day—and the funny thing is, I never used to believe these people. Not completely. I didn’t think they were lying, just exaggerating.” He paused, glancing around the room, but nobody spoke. Restrepo is not entirely trusted in these quarters; he is part of the establishment—like his friend, Ruben Salazar, who bridged that gap the hard way.
“But ever since Ruben,” Restrepo continued, “I believe these stories. They’re true! I realize that, now—but what can I do?” He shrugged, nervously aware that he was talking to people who had made that discovery a long time ago. “Just the other night,” he said, “I got a call from a man who said the cops killed his cousin in the yail. He was a homosexual, a young Chicano, nobody political—and the police report said he hung himself in his cell. Suicide. So I checked it out. And, man, it made me sick. This guy’s body was all bruises, black and blue marks all over him—and right across his forehead he had 16 fresh stitches.
“The police report said he tried to escape so they had to dominate him. They got him sewed up at the hospital, but when they took him to yail, the warden or yailer or whatever they call the bastard wouldn’t accept him, because he was bleeding so bad. So they took him back to the hospital and got a doctor to sign some paper saying he was OK to be put in the yail. But they had to carry him. And the next day they took a picture of him hanging from the end of the top bunk with his own shirt tied around his neck.
“You believe that? Not me. But you tell me—what can I do? Where do I look for the truth? Who can I ask? The sheriff? Goddamn, I can’t go on the air with a story about how the cops killed a guy in the yail unless I know something for proof! Jesus Christ, we all know. But just to know is not enough. You understand that? You see why I never made that story on TV?”
Acosta nodded. As a lawyer, he understood perfectly that evidence is necessary—on the air and in print, as well as in the courtroom. But Frank was not convinced. He was sipping from a quart of sweet Key Largo wine, and in fact he didn’t even know who Restrepo was. “Sorry, man,” he’d said earlier. “But I don’t watch the news on TV.”
Acosta winced. He watches and reads everything. But most of the people around him think The News—on the TV or radio or newspapers or wherever—is just another rotten gabacho trick. Just another bad shuck, like the others. “The news,” to them, is pure propaganda—paid for by the advertisers. “Who pays the bill for that bullshit?” they ask. “Who’s behind it?”
* * *
Who indeed? Both sides seem convinced that the “real enemy” is a vicious conspiracy of some kind. The Anglo power structure keeps telling itself that “the Mexican problem” is really the work of a small organization of well-trained Communist agitators, working 25 hours a day to transform East L.A. into a wasteland of constant violence—mobs of drugcrazed Chicanos prowling the streets at all times, terrorizing the merchants, hurling firebombs into banks, looting stores, sacking offices and massing now and then, armed with Chinese sten pistols, for all-out assaults on the local sheriff’s fortress.
A year ago this grim vision would have been a bad joke, the crude ravings of some paranoid hysterical Bircher. But things are different now; the mood of the barrio is changing so fast that not even the most militant of the young Chicano activists claim to know what’s really happening. The only thing everybody agrees on is that the mood is getting ugly, the level of tension is still escalating. The direction of the drift is obvious. Even Gov. Reagan is worried about it. He recently named Danny Villanueva, one-time kicking specialist for the Los Angeles Rams and now general manager of KMEX-TV, as the Governor’s personal ambassador to the whole Chicano community. But, as usual, Reagan’s solution is part of the problem. Villanueva is overwhelmingly despised by the very people Reagan says he’s “trying to reach.” He is the classic vendido. “Let’s face it,” says a Chicano journalist not usually identified with the militants, “Danny is a goddamn pig. Ruben Salazar told me that. You know KMEX used to be a good news station for Chicanos. Ruben was the one who did that, and Danny was afraid to interfere. But within 24 hours after Ruben was murdered, Villanueva started tearing up the news department. He wouldn’t even let Restrepo show films of the cops gassing people in Laguna Park, the day after Ruben died! Now he’s trying to get rid of Restrepo, cut the balls off the news and turn KMEX-TV back into a safe Tio Taco station. Shit! And he’s getting away with it.”
The total castration of KMEX-TV would be a crippling blow to the Movement. A major media voice can be an invaluable mobilizing tool, particularly in the vast urban sprawl of Los Angeles. All it takes is a sympathetic news director with enough leverage and personal integrity to deal with the news on his own terms. The man who hired Ruben Salazar, former station director Joe Rank, considered him valuable enough to out-bid the blue-chip Los Angeles Times for the services of one of that paper’s ranking stars—so nobody argued when Salazar demanded absolute independence for his KMEX news operation. But with Salazar dead, the station’s Anglo ownership moved swiftly to regain control of the leaderless news operation.
