Crime in LA - City and Regional Magazine Association

[
[MODUS DI[
N
A
R
E
P
[O
HARD
BODIES.
DEAD
BODIES.
SUNNY L.A.
IS KNOWN
FOR BOTH—
AND FOR OUR
ONGOING
FASCINATION
WITH WHAT
LURKS IN
THE
SHADOWS.
DAVID MILCH
CONSIDERS
WHY WE
CAN’T LOOK
AWAY
HeArT Of
DaRkNeSs
motives that separate us from simpler beasts—envy, bitterness, regret.
Most of us have a measure of selfcontrol that reins in that little killer,
stops us from looting RadioShacks
and crushing our enemies in a bloody
spree. But that little killer still demands a workout.
Cop and courtroom shows get
us only so far. There’s a puzzler’s diversion in watching the mystery unpacked. But in stories and in natural life, what often engages us on
a more cathartic level than the gory details of how one person manages to kill another are his reasons why.
We all know that the laws governing our little killer’s choices are
only nominally related to laws on the books. The real forces that
control our urges owe far more to our moral code, the individual
H O U G H T H E T O U R I S M department won’t soon be put-
ting it in brochures, crime in Los Angeles has always held a
certain dark allure. Maybe it’s the long shadow of noir that
makes our bad guys seem glamorous; maybe it’s that so often the perp in the mug shot is familiar for his decadent TV
smile. Could be that in L.A. we’ll take our mysteries unsolved,
keeping the threat loose, turning crime into legend: the Black
Dahlia, Nicole Brown Simpson. Crime reminds us that Tinseltown can be a hard, messy place where dreams get carved
up and gutter out, providing some satisfying contrast to the
paradise promised in ads; under all those gentle palm fronds, this
is a city of devils.
Sometimes the devil is us. Beneath that California nice, a little
killer lives in our chests who would knock our neighbor’s teeth in
for the noise of his mower. We’re just animals in sunglasses, still
subject to the jungle’s fear and anger and desire as well as worse
*** ThE ***
FiNaL »
Crime doesn’t pay, but a visit to
LAmag.com/crime does. We have a
new blog, featuring TrueCrimeDiary
.com’s Michelle McNamara, that
delves into the dastardly. Here’s a
peek at our online-only features:
RePoRt
*
82
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JULY 2013
7
6
5
GLIMPSES
inside the
minds of the
city’s most
deranged
criminals
COLD CASES
that will
make you yearn
for answers
DOWN-ANDDIRTY DAMES
who have
killed for the
thrill
CRIME IN LA
More
Manson
Murders?
» Just after mid-
HANDCUFFS: COURTESY JOE FOX ([email protected]);
MANSON: AP PHOTO; CRIME TAPE: COMRADE
LOCK & KEY
These American-made
handcuffs, circa 1860, are
one of many pairs owned by
Los Feliz collector Joe Fox
disambiguation of right from wrong that
we excavate over a lifetime.
Our favorite criminals are the ones
working not purely from animal urge, but
operating from that personal code—outlaws doing bad for their own good reasons:
Michael Corleone, Tony Soprano, Omar
from The Wire. We know that a man’s specific sense of justice is often more complex
and thoughtful than rules applied to the
masses could ever manage, and watching
someone live in subtle negotiation with
broad laws excites our understanding that
life is always more complicated than governance would allow. When the criminal acts
in defense of what he believes, he becomes
someone we can understand, even root for.
In real life, even in real Los Angeles, we
might cheer to see the criminal wind up in
chains—safer that way. But in our imaginations we’re untouchable and thereby free to
let guilt and innocence grow as thorny and
complex as they truly are. Having the dimmest sense of our own capacity for bad behavior, we ought to not be comfortable with
cartoon notions of white hats and black.
Secretly we wonder whether guilt is just a
matter of perspective, that if we knew the
whole story, breaking the law would seem
like justice.
David Milch, a TV writer and producer,
created Deadwood and Luck and was a
co-creator of NYPD Blue.
4
3
2
1
HIGH-SPEED
CHASES
all caught on
tape
EXPERT Q&As
with, among
others, a lawyer
who once defended Michael
Jackson
CRIME MAPS
that show what
happens where
(plus a guide
to local gangs)
FACE-TO-FACE
ENCOUNTER
with “Night
Stalker”
Richard
Ramirez
P h o t o g ra p h b y JESSE NARDUCCI
night on August 9,
1969, Polish actor
Voytek Frykowski
was asleep on his
friend Sharon
Tate’s couch in
Benedict Canyon
when he was awakened by whispering. “What time is
it?” he murmured,
and felt a kick in
the head. A young
man with a vacant
expression stood
over him. “I’m the
devil,” said the
stranger, Charles
“Tex” Watson. “And
I’m here to do the
devil’s business.”
It has long been
thought that this
began one of the
most infamous
crime sprees in
American history.
Charles Manson
and his “family”—a
group of disciples,
including Watson—are in prison
for their roles in
what are commonly called the
“Manson murders.”
But 44 years later
do we know the
full extent of the
business the devil
did? The LAPD
could be closer to
finding out now
that a Texas judge
has given the department access
to eight hours of
taped conversations between Watson and his nowdeceased attorney.
Detectives recently
began listening to
the tapes, searching for clues about
the Manson family’s involvement
in several unsolved
homicides.
One cold case of
interest is that of
17-year-old Marina
Habe, who was
abducted from the
driveway of a West
Hollywood bungalow on December
30, 1968. Habe’s
mother was awakened around 3:30
a.m. by the sound
of a loud car. When
she looked out the
window, she saw a
man standing next
to a dark sedan.
“Let’s go,” he shouted, jumping into
the passenger side.
Marina’s car was
in the driveway,
but she was gone.
Her corpse, which
bore multiple stab
wounds, was found
on New Year’s Day,
1969, at the bottom of a ravine off
Mulholland Drive.
Seven months later
the murders of Tate
and her friends,
along with Leno
and Rosemary
LaBianca, shared
a similar overkillby-knife signature.
A connection was
suspected but
never confirmed.
A year after Habe
disappeared, the
bodies of two Scientologists, Doreen
Gaul, 19, and James
Sharp, 15, were
found dumped in
downtown L.A.
Both had been
stabbed repeatedly
and beaten. Manson family member
Bruce Davis was
an ex-Scientologist
and rumored to
have dated Gaul.
If detectives get
lucky, the Watson
tapes could help
solve this mystery
as well.
> MICHELLE
M C NA M A RA
LAMAG.COM
ArT Of tHe StEaL D[OFF[
[RIPPE
HOME BURGLARIES AND AUTO THEFTS
ARE LESS THAN RARE IN THE BIG
CITY. HERE’S THE DIRTY LOWDOWN
HeAdEd
FoR A PlEaSuRe
CrUiSe
BrEaKdOwN Of a bReAk-In:
4 fAcTs
YoU ShOuLd
KnOw
PoInTs oF EnTrY
» Burglars slip
through an
unlocked door
or window in 40
percent of cases.
Forcible entry
through a door is
the most common
form of access
when a house has
been locked tight.
StOp sIgNs
WhO GeTs
BuRgLeD ThE MoSt?
» A security sign in the front yard and stickers
on your windows do lower the odds of burglary.
But the LAPD can’t attest to whether security
systems themselves make a difference.
ThE BiG BuMp
» Used by lock-
smiths, a “bump”
key opens 90 percent of traditional
door locks. And
with help from
the Web, it’s easy
to make. Locksmiths, though,
can install locks
that are impervious to bump keys.
HoT ItEmS » Purses, wallets, credit cards, and cash are
the first to go, followed by electronics
(a laptop worth $1,000 can pawn for $50 to
$100) and jewelry (which often lands in
the Jewelry District).
city But at more than 17
17,000
000 a year
year, there aare still
≥ B U RG L A R I E S A R E D O W N by 20 percent in L.A. County and more than 30 percent in the city.
plenty to go around. ≥ R E N T E R S are burgled at a rate that’s about 50 percent higher than that for home owners. ≥ YO U N G H O US E H O L D S —
those headed by people between 20 and 34—are hit far more often (59 out of 1,000 households) than those headed by someone 66 or older (just 12 per 1,000).
≥ S O L O DA D S are targeted far more (59 out of 1,000) than C H I L D L E S S C O U P L E S (14 out of 1,000). ≥ T H E P O O R —those earning less than $7,500 a year—
are burgled the most (47 per 1,000). ≥ B E T T E R - O F F H O US E H O L D S —with incomes of $75,000-plus a year—are struck at a fraction of the rate (17 per 1,000).
GERS[
[STICKY[FIN
A GoOd gIrL’S SeCrEt tHrIlL
FOR MANY, SHOPLIFTING IS A CRIME OF WANT, NOT NEED
F I R S T D I D I T with two friends, probably in the eighth grade. I want to say I
took lip gloss or something small from
the drugstore. It wasn’t like I couldn’t
afford to pay for the stuff. It was just the
idea that I could have anything I want-
84
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LOS ANGELES
|
JULY 2013
ed. Like, “I don’t really need this, but it’s
free!” I just wanted something new.
When I was a junior in high school, I
got another friend to do it with me. It
didn’t take a lot of coaxing. I’d say, “Let’s
go to the mall,” and she’d just sort of
know. We’d go to Nordstrom and I’d
bring a big purse. First you’d take a top.
Then a pair of jeans. You’d test the limits. It was easy. None of the clothes had
sensors on them. You’d simply put
things in your bag and walk out, wonG r a p h i c b y B RYA N C H R I ST I E
CRIME IN LA
ThE FaTe oF YoUr cAr: 4 sCeNaRiOs
BmW
ArRiVeS AbRoAd
» German
’67 mUsTaNg
TaKeN FoR A JoYrIdE
» Often found
GoEs tO tO
O
PoRt
P R oF L.A.
oF L.A
A.
» As many as four
stolen
l vehicles
hi l
can be slipped
unnoticed into a
sea-bound shipping container.
AcUrA
within a week.
TeStEd fOr
LoJaCk
» Thieves may
leave a car parked
for days in case
it has a tracking
system.
CaSeD AnD FoLlOwEd
» Thieves troll
DuMpEd
DuMp
Mp
pEd
d
FoR DoUgH
FoR
DoUgH
» Since the eco-
car shows and
the classic-car
gathering at the
Burbank Bob’s Big
Boy. Candidates
for theft are followed home and
stolen days later.
nomic downturn,
there’s been a rash
of cash-strapped
SUV owners staging thefts of their
own cars; they
to
torch them in the
desert to collect
d
insurance.
GoEs tO ThE ChOp
hOp sHoP
» Chop shops can be as small as a home
mee
on
garage; they often relocate to avoid detectio
detection
while they break cars down
own into parts.
performance cars
are shipped to Europe, the former
Soviet Union, and
the Middle East.
ScRuBbEd
ScRuBbE
Of iTs pAsT
pA
» AAtt the ch
chop
shop
h your car’s
car ID
DMV
number and D
title are switc
switched
of a
with those o
salvaged veh
vehicle
model
of the same m
and year. Your
Y
Yo
car sells as a
restored version
of the wreck.
dering if anyone was going to stop you.
That moment was kind of scary, but exciting, too.
My parents have a very clear sense of
right and wrong, and I was always the
good kid growing up. I never did drugs. I
didn’t drink until my senior year of high
school. I hung out with the good kids and
got good grades. So shoplifting was the
one thing I did that was against the rules.
Since I took things from big stores—I
GmC SuV
SoLd fOr
PaRtS
» Hard-to-find
vintage parts
fetch high prices;
third row
thee third-row
seatss of Escalades
arre also hot;
are
Honda
Ho
onda owners
use black
b
market
high-performance
high-performancee
Ac
ura parts to
Acura
boostt horsepower.
boos
know this is wrong—I’d think, “Oh, it’s
OK, they make enough money.” I didn’t
think much about the risks. A girlfriend of
mine got caught in a grocery store, and it
was embarrassing. I figured the odds that
I’d get thrown in jail were pretty low.
When I got to UCLA, I’d go to the student store and take workout clothes, magazines, little stuff. But then my boyfriend
caught me with something from the Gap.
I didn’t tell him I’d done it before. He
ReAcHeS
ReAcHeS MeXiCo
» The vehicle
may cross the
border within
hours. Criminal
gangs and drug
cartels often favor
large SUVs.
didn’t give me an ultimatum, but he was
disappointed in me. After that, the temptation was still there because I knew it’d
be so easy. But I pretty much stopped.
It’s interesting, but now that I have a
job and make my own money—I’m a lawyer—I’m very strict about paying for everything. I don’t know if that stems from
guilt or trying to make up for the past, but
if I’ve been undercharged, I’ll go back and
make sure that I pay. > A N O N Y M O US
LAMAG.COM
[
BOODUYNT
[[[COUN
COU T]
CO
BrInGiNg
OuT ThE DeAd
IF THERE WERE A MARKER FOR EVERY PERSON WHO DIED A VIOLENT DEATH
IN THE CITY, THE LANDSCAPE WOULD BE RIDDLED WITH HEADSTONES.
CRIME NOVELIST DENISE HAMILTON PAYS HER RESPECTS TO THE DEPARTED
Even in a metropolis built on fame, murder is the great leveler. It
can bestow the same notoriety on actor Sal Mineo—stabbed to death
assailant sprayed bullets
in a West Hollywood alley in 1976—as it can on retired airline clerk
through the living room winHervey Medellin, whose head was found last year by dogs below
dow of a Beverly Hills home,
the Hollywood sign (see sidebar). I can’t run in the Hollywood Hills
killing gangster Benjamin
without thinking of him—or about all the people who pass through
“Bugsy” Siegel as he sat on his
the area without being any the wiser.
lover’s couch reading the eveThe dead are lost amid the sheer size of the city, an ever-expandning paper. Almost 70 years
ing geography of violent endings. Here’s the Pyrenees Castle in Allater, the lushly landscaped
hambra where Phil Spector shot actress Lana Clarkson.
Spanish home
There’s Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon where
blends in with its posh surroundings, except for the
A
L
N
I
C
M
ODE
CRI
four people with drug ties to porn star John Holmes
buses that pull up daily to disgorge tourists eager to exwere massacred. Shall we order gnocchi tonight at Viperience L.A.’s dark past. It’s a busy itinerary for those
SLAMMING
tello’s, the Studio City eatery where Robert Blake took
on the murder circuit, because L.A. is a city of ghosts,
N JUNE 20, 1947, an unknown
*** ***
a spectral landscape teeming with invisible gravestones. It’s only if you know where to look that these
anonymous sites and their sad stories snap into focus.
86
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LOS ANGELES
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JULY 2013
?
≥ A term used by
taggers and graffiti
artists to describe
painting in a very
conspicuous or
risky area. Bigger
slams mean more
street cred.
his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, the night she was killed
just around the corner? Is that the Beverly Hills intersection where Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen was
P h o t o g r a p h b y DA M O N CA S A R E Z
CRIME IN LA
The
Hollywood
Head
» First the head
NO T R AC E
The body of Elizabeth Short, aka
the Black Dahlia, was found on January 15,
1947, 54 feet from the hydrant (left),
JMNWZMPWUM[_MZMJ]QT\QV\PM+ZMV[PI_ÅMTL
The Daily News documented the discovery
gunned
nned d
down late one night in 2010 in her Mercedes,
a scenario that reads more like the opening of a film
noir than a news story? In L.A. it’s usually only the poor
and unlucky who die on the streets. Unlike in Chicago
or New York, much of our violence unfolds behind tall
gates and closed doors.
Not long ago I visited a Crenshaw neighborhood of
tract homes and visualized the fields that sprawled here
when the Black Dahlia’s severed body was discovered
in 1947. The sidewalk is clean; the parkway, green. The
tidy homes reveal no secrets. I seek a moment of stillness to feel whether Elizabeth Short’s presence lingers,
but the nearby traffic distracts me and everything looks
so eerily…normal.
As a crime novelist and reporter, I’m often haunted most by the anonymous victims—the ordinary folks
like me and my kids and the people we know. Consider
the 18-year-old boy killed while eating at a food truck
on Alvarado, the 17-year-old girl allegedly hit by a gang
bullet outside Carson’s Bistro 880, the man beaten to
death and buried in sand at Venice Beach. Once I stood
outside a boarded-up, condemned building in Santa Monica where a 14-year-old chronic runaway was
found murdered by her satanist street kid boyfriend in a
basement of overflowing toilets, pentagrams, and damp
earth. And I wondered, Do bricks and mortar retain
memories of crimes committed in airless rooms? Can
violence sear a pattern into walls that no layers of paint
can cover? Is this small patch of earth forever cursed?
With every life taken, police tape goes up. Investigators dust surfaces. Loved ones leave flowers, candles,
photos, and mementos at sidewalk shrines, but the sun
bleaches everything of color—even bloodstains—and
nocturnal fog smears the ink on good-bye notes. It’s
only when the Santa Anas blow their devil winds and
scatter the tatterdemalion offerings that the voices of
the departed wail in the alleys and fancy boulevards,
the tenements, mansions, and street corners, saying,
“Don’t forget us. We, too, lived and laughed.” If we lit a
candle for each victim back to the pueblo days of shootouts and lynchings, L.A. would be engulfed in flames.
A former reporter with the Los Angeles Times,
Denise Hamilton recently published her seventh book,
Damage Control (Scribner).
was found, sniffed
out in January 2012
by nine canines
led by a pair of dog
walkers on an afternoon trip through
Bronson Canyon
Park. Then came
one hand—discovered by police—
followed by the
other. Next, the feet.
Finally, a name:
Hervey Medellin, a
66-year-old retired
Mexicana Airlines
employee who had
lived near the park
with his boyfriend,
Gabriel CamposMartinez. Perhaps
because the victim’s
name evoked the
“Medellín Cartel,” a
theory was floated
that he was a drug
mule being punished by traffickers.
Detectives then
looked for possible
connections to the
Canadian porn
star and accused
ice pick murderer
Luka Magnotta, but
the alleged necrophiliac was soon
off the suspect list.
An ex-lover, William Ladewig, was
also questioned:
Apparently feeling
spurned by Medellin, Ladewig had
allegedly harassed
Campos-Martinez.
After a polygraph,
police deemed
Campos-Martinez
“deceitful of dismembering the
victim’s body and
having knowledge
of the victim’s
murder,” but he
vanished before he
could be nicked.
> DAV E
G A R D E T TA
LAMAG.COM
A NoVeL ApPrOaCh
[INK[NED[
I
[STA
BOOKS
THAT
MOSLEY
ADMIRES
WITH MORE THAN 30 BOOKS
S BETWEEN THEM,
THESE WRITERS HAVE SPENT
NT AS MUCH TIME AS
ANYONE PONDERING L.A.’S UNDERBELLY.
ANN HEROLD FINDS OUT WHAT
HAT DRIVES THEM
ON EASY
WaLtEr ≥
MoSlEy
> I’m not Easy
Rawlins. I’m not
that age, that generation, there are
a lot of things I’m
not. But there are
things I am, too.
When I’m writing
from Easy’s point
of view, he says
things I would
never say. He does
things I would
never consider
doing. But that’s
me writing. So in
a way that’s me
completely and in
a way it’s a completely creative
construct.
Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins—private
lins—private investigator, forbly plant worker, WWII vetermer aircraft assembly
ent of Watts—has appeared in
an, onetime resident
els set in the ’40s through the
12 of Mosley’s novels
n was published in the spring.
’60s. Little Green
ON
WHAT’S
LEFT OUT
> The interesting
thing about being
a novelist—and
this is also probably true of nonfiction—is, you can’t
tell everything. It’s
impossible. So certain things get left
out. I write about
a time and a place
and a people, and
I am hoping that
when you read the
book, you will inform it with your
own emotions and
feelings.
ON
CRIME
FICTION
> My father used
to work in East
L.A., in the barrio,
and how people
lived there and
how people lived
in my neighborhood in SouthCentral was so
different. The culture was different,
the language was
different, the economic pressures
were different, the
expectations. The
thing about Los
Angeles is, there’s
all kinds of life.
The whole purpose
of crime fiction is
to find those different places.
88
|
LOS ANGELES
ON L.A.
> L.A. is a place
where people are
always changing,
making the world
better. You have
things like the
Watts riots that
changed America.
The riots were
a surprise and a
shock. You have
the rise of political
leadership kind of
early on.
|
JULY 2013
ON
INSPIRATION
> I wanted to
write about a large
and disparate
group of people
over a period of
time in Southern California. I
wanted to bring to
life those people
who didn’t have
a literature even
though they lived
in a place that
has a lot of literature. I wanted
to talk about the
displaced African
Americans who
came from Texas
and Louisiana,
who moved to
California to start
a new life not
because they really wanted to be
city people but
because where
they came from
wasn’t welcoming
socially.
MONKOLOGY
M
By Gary Phillips
> I love Gary and
am a fan of his
w
work.
He can
wri about anywrite
thi
thing, but when
he writes about
L.A
L.A., I like that
the
there’s
a kind of
rebellious
po
politics
in the
p
people he’s
in
involved
with.
THE BIG
NOWHERE
N
By James Ellroy
> El
Ellroy is a great
wri
writer. Who’s the
poe
poet who wrote,
“I’m going to make
m
me a world?”
Th
The poem is so
ph
physical. That’s
wh
what Ellroy does
when he’s
at his best. The
wa
way he uses his
lang
language, it crashes iinto itself—it’s
a war of the
wor
worlds. I find that
won
wonderful and interesting.
P h o t o g r a p h b y D U ST I N S N I P E S
CRIME IN LA
MiChAeL ≥
CoNnElLy
Connelly's most famous character is Hieronymus
etnam vet, Hol“Harry” Bosch—LAPD detective, Vietnam
lywood Hills resident. He is the subject
ect of 17 books
set in modern L.A. The Black Box came
me out in 2012.
ON HARRY
> When I first
started writing
him, I was a newspaper reporter in
Los Angeles, and
I made it my business to visit one
police station a
day. So I was seeing a high number of detectives
as I was formulating this character. I would say
about half of them
rubbed off on me.
ON NOBILITY
> Detectives go
into the darkness
every day in the
course of their
job, to the worst
kind of people,
and that has to
do something to
you. You go into
the darkness and
then you have
to go home and
throw the ball
with your kid and
be as normal as
possible with your
family, and that’s
hard to do. Those
who can do it, no
one knows about
their nobility. It’s
the people who
can’t do it, who
break down and
become a Christopher Dorner, who
too often stand as
the image.
BOOKS
THAT
C
CONNELLY
A
ADMIRES
ON
AUTHENTICITY
ICITY
> Ten yearss ago a
ent me
detective sent
an e-mail.. I had
used the phrase
k” in a
“perp walk”
aid, “I
book. He said,
love your books,
pe you
so I hope
nd if I
don’t mind
n’t use
say we don’t
n L.A.
that phrase in
astern
That’s an eastern
phrase.” And he
made the fatal—
take of
fateful—mistake
u ever
saying, “If you
p...” So
need any help...”
d him.
I contacted
He’s been helpful
ever since.
ON
INSPIRATION
ATION
> I got hooked
ked on
tion as
crime fiction
er. The
a teenager.
big three for me
were Rosss Macdonald, Joseph
h, and
Wambaugh,
Raymond Chanre was
dler. There
ng adsomething
n readdictive in
ing about people
ed unwho reacted
essure
der high pressure
e-andand made life-andes and
death choices
ling to
were willing
step up and do the
right things. To me
ies are
these stories
about the way we
uld be.
should
ON
N L.A.
> Los Angeles is a place that could have
ave everything going for it but can’t grab thee brass
ng that
ring. There will always be something
will go wrong. I moved to L.A. in 1988, so aspects of the Rodney King riots have played
ng I’m
in several of my novels. It’s something
n. This
Thi
Th
hiss
still trying to work out for some reason.
paart
rtt.
city I loved was falling ap
apart.
P h o t o g r a p h b y P R E ST O N M AC K
Christa
Helm
» She didn’t find
THE
S
SHORTCUT
MAN
By P.G. Sturges
> I’v
I’ve read a lot of
crim
crime fiction set
Lo Angeles, so
in Los
when I find somebod
body with somethi
thing new, I’m
draw
drawn to it. This
is about
abo a problem
solve
solver who works
off th
the books, and
the way he goes
ab
about solving
crim
crimes is unique.
The author has a
coo
cool way of conne
necting small
prob
problems people
hav
have to a larger
soci
social reflection.
N
NORTH
OF
MONTANA
M
By April Smith
> Th
This novel uses
L.A. landscape
the L
in interesting
way
ways. Smith also
pie
pierced the veil
of FB
FBI superiority
and invulnerability and showed
w
what it’s like
to b
be a woman
in that
bu
bureaucracy.
success in Hollywood. Tall, blond,
and gorgeous,
Christa Helm could
count only bit parts
on Wonder Woman
and Starsky and
Hutch as her high
points. But she excelled at parties and
in bedrooms in the
Hollywood Hills,
where she consorted with the likes of
Warren Beatty, Mick
Jagger, Joe Namath,
and the Shah of
Iran. Details of her
trysts Helm kept in
her “sex” diary, and
that is why, on the
night in 1977 when
she was found
stabbed and bludgeoned to death
on a street in West
Hollywood, police
suspected she had
been killed for what
she knew. The diary, complete with
a rating system for
the famous men she
bedded, had disappeared. Tapes of her
sexual encounters,
secretly recorded
by Helm, were also
missing. Was the
actress murdered
because she had
turned to extorting the celebrities
and politicians she
knew? The last lead
in her now-cold
case is a cryptic
postcard Helm sent
to a friend before
she died. “I am in
way over my head
here,” she wrote.
“I’m into something
I can’t get out of.”
> D.G .
LAMAG.COM
William
Desmond
Taylor
» A prolific direc-
tor of silent films,
William Desmond
Taylor was found
dead on February 2,
1922, in his bungalow in MacArthur
Park, a stylish
movie colony at
the time. He had a
.38-caliber round in
his back. Irish born,
with steely looks,
Taylor maintained
a revolving set of
girlfriends who
included the comedic actress Mabel
Normand, a cocaine
addict whose dealer
Taylor had vowed to
see jailed. Nineteenyear-old starlet
Mary Miles Minter,
whose lust for Taylor went unrequited, was a momentary suspect, as was
her manipulative
mother, Charlotte
Shelby, who owned
a .38-caliber pistol.
As scandal sheets
fanned rumors,
Paramount studio
honchos were accused of a cover-up.
The tabloid drama
peaked when an enterprising reporter
shepherded the
black butler, Henry
Peavy, to Taylor’s
grave site, where a
confederate dressed
in a white sheet
cried out, “I am the
ghost of William
Desmond Taylor!
You murdered me!
Confess, Peavy!”
The butler balked,
but the ghost—a
hoodlum named
Al Weinshank—followed Taylor to the
grave seven years
later, gunned down
in the Chicago St.
Valentine’s Day
Massacre. > D.G .
CRIME IN LA
SlEeP TiGhT
ht[ s[
[nig
or
[terr
DOWNTOWN’S CECIL HOTEL HAS HOSTED SERIAL KILLERS AND WITNESSED
MORE THAN ITS SHARE OF DEATH. STEVE ERICKSON CHECKS IN
LAM: LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT/AP PHOTO
ROM THE BED in my room at the Cecil Hotel, I see four
locks on the door—a bolt, a button, two latches. Did they add
the last after a 21-year-old tourist was found dead in the hotel’s water tank earlier this year? Did they add the third after “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez slept at the Cecil by day
and terrorized the city by night in the 1980s, murdering at
least 13? Maybe it was when another resident, paroled Viennese “journalist” Jack Unterweger, strangled at least three
prostitutes (and some undetermined number of earlier victims). Was the second lock installed half a century ago when
5th Street, a block and a half away, became skid row’s main drag, or when the
Depression rendered the Cecil a transient way station, advertising weekly rates
still emblazoned across 15 floors of the building’s brick side? ¶ Actually I can
see the door locks from any place in my room because from any place in my
room except the shower—at a rate of $98 a night, this is one of the hotel’s premium accommodations—I can see any other place in the room. A bed, a chair,
a stool, and a small TV are the amenities at the Cecil, so old that when the
front desk gives you a room key, it’s a
key. At 6th and Main the hotel has become the locus for the downtown L.A.
of the imagination as well as hub for
all my memories of a hundred blackand-white B-movies and Dragnet episodes I watched when I was a kid in the
Valley; this is the Nameless Downtown
that stands in for all the anonymous
downtowns flickering in the projection
room of the collective conscious. Walk
in the front doors that opened in 1924,
through the marble foyer breathless
so long ago with high hopes, and you
come out the other end of a metropolitan rubble one or two recollections on
the far side of forsaken. The dungeon
of Angeleno cultural archaeology, the
Cecil is to urban L.A. what the Chelsea is to Manhattan’s nether regions,
halls inhabited not by junkie rock stars
but prowled by strange men counting
something on their fingertips, lips moving but silent.
I steal a DO NOT DISTURB sign
from my neighbor and put it outside
my room, because when someone
knocks on your door at the Cecil, it
isn’t room service. I have a soundtrack
to keep me company within my room’s
barren walls: Miles Davis’s “Générique”
P h o t o g r a p h b y T O M F OW L K S
tations, inconsolable for a glimpse of
Hollywood or the beach that the travel
guide promised is only “minutes away.”
The Cecil hasn’t been minutes away
from anything worth being minutes
away from for decades. When I return
from Cole’s, “my” DO NOT DISTURB
sign hangs on another door down the
hall; this is the floor’s most coveted
item, as though the premises’ current
psycho du jour will be diverted like the
Angel of Death passing Egyptian doors
marked with lamb’s blood.
“It had to have been someone who
works here,” a woman whispers to me
in the elevator. She means whoever
might have killed young Canadian
Elisa Lam, missing three weeks and
found in one of the four rooftop tanks
only when guests complained about
the drop in water pressure. She was
last seen on a videotape in this same
elevator pressing buttons—absently
in a daze? or frantically in flight?—to
F I NA L M O M E N T S ?
Elisa Lam hides in the Cecil’s elevator
close the door. “You can only get to the
on January 31, 2013
roof from the 15th floor with a key,”
my fellow passenger elaborates beand the Touch of Evil score by Henry
tween the eighth floor and the ninth,
Mancini, David Raksin’s theme from
though there’s speculation Lam got
The Bad and the Beautiful and Julie
there by the fire escape. The Cecil will
London singing It begins to tell round
reveal to you whatever it is you’re a
midnight, round midnight, I do pretfugitive from. Over the years women
ty well, till after sundown. In the evehave leaped from these rooms to their
ning when I head out for Cole’s around
deaths, one landing on the marquee,
the corner, a saloon (or “public house,”
another on a pedestrian strolling by
as a sign still calls it) opened in 1908,
below, killing him; even the sidewalks
the hotel’s halls and downstairs mezof the Cecil are dangerous. Bolts and
zanine are filled with other languages,
latches on the door will not only keep
a reminder of how much noir L.A. was
everyone else out but trap you within,
founded by exiles—middle-aged failwhere there are no locks at all on the
ures, desperate ingenues,
windows, beyond which
Germans on the run from
the siren city beckons.
A
L
N
I
C
M
ODE
CRI
Hitler. If you aren’t at the
Steve Erickson, the film
Cecil to hide, or to look for
APPLE PICKING
and TV critic for Los Anthe city you’ve occupied
≥ The practice,
geles, is the author of nine
but never known, you’re
also known as
iCrime, of taking
novels, including 2012’s
probably a foreign traviPhones and iPads
These Dreams of You.
eler stranded by expecfrom victims on
*** ***
?
the street. The
devices are often
shipped overseas.
LAMAG.COM
FEB
O
F
B Y A M Y WA L L AC E
≥ Because of a change
in delivery schedules,
the safe contained
$303,305, not the
expected $750,000.
H A M L I N ST.
9:25 a.m.
A watch that one
of the robbers
had sewn onto the back
of his glove goes off (it
was set on an eight-minute timer—the estimated
average police response
time). Arriving outside
are patrol and detective
units, along with a SWAT
LOS ANGELES
ThE BaNk
L AU R E L CA N YO N B LV D .
Nicknamed the
“High Incident
Bandits” because of
earlier heists they’d
pulled, Larry Phillips
Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, dressed in full body
armor, enter the bank.
They are spotted by two
officers, who report a
possible 211 in progress.
The duo open fire at the
ceiling, then force their
way into the vault.
A R C H WO O D ST.
≥ He and Matasareanu
were the subjects
of a 2003 TV movie
as well as a 2009
Megadeth song.
K I T T R I D G E ST.
9:17 a.m.
|
LaRrY PhIlLiPs jR., 26
M AY H E
I T I S P E R H A P S the
city’s most haunting
armed confrontation—a
botched robbery at a
bank on Laurel Canyon
Boulevard on F E B RU A RY 2 8 , 1 9 9 7. The number of fatalities (two perpetrators), injuries (11
officers, seven civilians),
types of weapons (the
robbers carried illegally
modified automatic rifles
and ammunition capable
of penetrating metal),
and rounds fired (nearly
2,000) make it one of the
longest and bloodiest
events in U.S. police
history. Here’s how it
went down:
92
19 9 7
M
ONE MORNING THE
WORLD WATCHED AS
THE BULLETS KEPT
COMING AT A BANK OF
AMERICA IN NORTH
HOLLYWOOD
|
team that had been on
an exercise run. The
SWAT officers are
wearing running shoes
and shorts under their
body armor.
9:32 a.m.
Phillips exits
through the
bank’s north doorway;
Matasareanu, through
JULY 2013
the south. Officers
demand they drop their
weapons. The pair begin
discharging their AKMs
and HK-91 rifles, and
a prolonged firefight
follows, wounding 18.
Matasareanu climbs into
the getaway car in the
bank’s parking lot. Phillips flees on foot.
9:52 a.m.
Phillips heads
east, still firing.
After one of his weapons
jams, he is wounded
in the hand and then
shoots himself in the
head in an apparent suicide attempt. Police hit
him several more times;
it’s unclear which of the
bullets kills him.
10:01 a.m.
Matasareanu, who has
abandoned his car after
its tires are shot out,
tries and fails to carjack
a pickup truck. Police
shoot him in the legs
as he takes cover. He
dies from excessive
blood loss.
G r a p h i c b y B RYA N C H R I ST I E
PHILLIPS, MATASAREANU: AP PHOTO/GLENDALE POLICE; CAR, POLICE: MIKE MEADOWS/
AP PHOTO; BANK: GENE BLEVINS/AP PHOTO
4
s
InUtE
m
4
CRIME IN LA
e[
[[tLhANDMARK[
ThE GeTaWaY CaR
≥ The bank robbers’
bullet-pocked 1987
Chevrolet Celebrity is
on display at the Los
Angeles Police Museum.
CrImE
CeNtRaL
EmIl
MaTaSaReAnU, 30
THE MOST FAMOUS BUILDING IN THE LOCAL LEGAL
SYSTEM, THE HALL OF JUSTICE RISES AGAIN
≥ Emergency personnel
were prevented from
attending to him while
the area was an active
crime scene.
ThE PoLiCe
≥ More than 300 law
enforcement officers
responded; 19 LAPD
officers were awarded
the departmental
Medal of Valor.
HALL OF JUSTICE: LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY (1946)
O N G I T R E I G N E D as L.A.’s Taj Mahal of Misdeeds.
Swathed in white Sierra granite, molded in the august beaux arts style, the Los Angeles Hall of Justice
held 14 floors of courtrooms and jail cells, evidence
rooms and coroner tables, as well as HQs for the district attorney, public defender, and sheriff’s department. From its 1926 dedication ceremony to its redtagging after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the
hall operated as a one-stop justice system, a nerve
center for flatfoots and legal beagles. Perps were
jailed, corpses autopsied, and punishment meted
out. It was here that Robert F. Kennedy was officially declared dead after his
assassination at the Ambassador Hotel, here that his killer, Sirhan Sirhan,
was tried and convicted. Charles Manson pronounced his tiny jail digs
“stone age,” while the actor Robert Mitchum—doing soft time for a 1948 pot
bust—chose to gussy up his cell block, mopping floors for the news cameras.
Hollywood both romanticized and feared the hall. Outside, Harold Lloyd
clung to the Italianate columns for his one-reel comedies; inside, Errol Flynn
and Charlie Chaplin slumped through sex and paternity cases. Beneath the
hall lay sanctified criminal ground, Pound Cake Hill, where bordellos stood
in the late 19th century and lynchings were staged. In 1870, half the police
force was wounded or left dead in a gunfight on the site. Did mischief seep
into those marble walls? In 1990, an elevator operator was crushed to death,
and even the building’s mice were said to be hooked on a grass stash in the
evidence room. No matter. An ongoing $300 million restoration has stripped
the interior down to steel beams. When the hall reopens for business in 2015,
it will become the home once again to the sheriff’s department and public
defenders. The mice should be out of rehab by then. > D.G .
LAMAG.COM
B[
HE[JO
[ON[T
“A PiEcE Of
YoUr hEaRt”
S TA R T E D W O R K I N G
homicide in the 77th
Street Division in
South L.A. in 1986.
That was during the
rock cocaine epidemic,
when 77th had a
record high number of
murders. The victims
were primarily young
black males between
the ages of 17 and 22.
Assault weapons were
prevalent, and the ammunition they were
using was crazy stuff from China: steelcore, copper-jacketed rounds for AKs.
Houses and bystanders and cars would be
shot up. Nowadays drive-bys are almost old
news. Gang members are bolder. They’ll
drop off the suspect and circle around the
block while he walks up and shoots you.
Since I started, the homicide units I’ve
been assigned to have handled over 7,000
cases. Murders are at an all-time low these
days, but it’s tough for me to drive around
South L.A.: I’ve been to pretty much every
corner, every business, and every other
house. It’s, like, total recall. Still, I have a
difficult time remembering the first
homicide I responded to; I think it’s only
because a lot of “firsts” come to mind, like
“I GeT ThE JoB DoNe”
VETERAN PROCESS
SERVER J SCOTT BERGMAN
ON DELIVERING BAD NEWS
94
|
LOS ANGELES
|
JULY 2013
the first child victim or first double or
triple, or the first murder I worked on that
took place on a holiday.
One case that still bothers me involved
a woman by the name of Michelle Lovely. It
was December 21, 1987. She and a young
nephew or cousin were on their way to
LAX to pick up her twin sister. They
stopped at a liquor store to get some soft
drinks and snacks. As she got back into the
car, the suspect walked up—somebody in
his late teens, most likely a gang member—
and reached into the car to grab her purse.
She fought, and he shot her in the head. I
knew I’d have to visit the hospital to see
the family, something that is always very
difficult. You have to go to a different place
in your head; a lot of times it’s all you can
do to keep from crying. What made it
tougher was, I could relate to this family.
She was going to see her twin, her dad was
a preacher, and they were all getting
together for the holidays. The case remains
unsolved. We did recover some fingerprints, and every year I’ll have them rerun
those prints to see if we get a hit.
When a loved one’s killed, the family
often connects with the detective they
dealt with. So on birthdays, anniversaries,
the day of the death, we get phone calls,
letters, postcards. I get invited to baptisms,
weddings,
ddi
and
d gatherings.
h i
A
At crime
i
scenes
I’ll be approached by a grandma, an
auntie—someone who recognizes me. And
if the kids or the gangsters see me talking
to folks who are respected in the neighborhood, it can loosen them up to talk, too.
When I was younger, I learned that driving
up to gang members without drawing any
guns or throwing anybody against the wall
went a long way. You’d have better luck
buying a couple beers at the store, leaning
against the car, and talking or having a
cigarette with a few guys.
No two interrogations are alike. A lot is
based on the character or the makeup of
the person being interviewed, of course,
but we have our trade secrets that, thank
goodness, nobody’s brought out on TV.
With seasoned criminals, it can be a battle
of wits. They know what they did. They
know what the evidence is. They know
who’s talking or not. You need to go in
there prepared with facts. Can you lie? Can
you cheat? Can you curse in the interview?
N C E I S E RV E D papers at a
support group for drug
addicts in Pasadena. I wanted
to serve the woman in
question outside. But it was
raining—everyone had coats
and hoods on—and I couldn’t identify her.
So I walked in and sat there, clapping at
everyone’s speeches. Seeing an empty seat
right in front of her, I went over. I said,
“Oh, you’re such and such!” She said, “I
am.” I handed her the papers and left.
Another time I had to serve a woman as
she came to work. I sat outside the
elevator. She saw me and proceeded to run
down the hallway to her office, with me
right behind her. She was like, “Don’t you
come in here!” But with process service,
they don’t have to touch it. If they know
why I’m there, I can drop it at their feet
and they’ve still been served.
You’ve got divorces. You’ve got civil
MARIO ANZUONI/GETTY IMAGES
LAPD HOMICIDE DETECTIVE SAL LABARBERA ON
DEALING WITH DEATH AS A WAY OF LIFE
CRIME IN LA
“I ReMeMbEr
BeInG UnHiNgEd
AlL ThE WaY HoMe”
AN ANONYMOUS PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR ON THE
STRANGE BUSINESS OF ROOTING OUT SECRETS
HEN I
BITTER END
Lana Clarkson and the Colt revolver that
Phil Spector used to kill her in 2003
Sure. “We have your fingerprints at the
scene.” That’s a lie we can make. Can we
make promises? No. There are limitations.
But a detective won’t be satisfied without a
confession or an admission of guilt.
Sometimes, though, what someone omits
from their responses can be just as good as
admitting to having done the deed.
A haunting part of this job is all the
bodies. Each one takes a piece of your
heart. We treat every case as if it were our
own loved one, but sometimes I can’t look
at myself in the mirror and feel good about
it, knowing that so much of the investigation is being affected by the city’s many
other priorities. Lack of personnel, lack of
equipment, lack of resources—we’re
dealing with the same frustrations I was
dealing with 26 years ago. There’s so much
more that we could do. > A S T O L D T O
M AT T H E W S E G A L
litigation. Then there’s the
criminal stuff. That can be
weird. When you’re confronting someone who could be
dangerous and you’re just a
Ben Stiller-looking Jewish guy,
you have to be a little bit
concerned. You’re this
unwelcome presence. One
time I reached a guy on the
phone and he told me that if I
tell people I’m a private
investigator, the first
thing they usually say is
“How sexy!” But that is
not actually the case. I
have no guns or martinis or venetian blinds in
my office. Or even women who suspect their
husbands are cheating
on them. By the time
they get to me, they already know they’ve
been betrayed. They
just want to know
where the assets are
hidden so they can take
their revenge.
These days the bread
and butter of the P.I. industry is due diligence.
In L.A. that means
working for the studios
to make sure a realityshow contestant doesn’t
owe child support or
tracked him down, “let’s just
say you might not have a very
good day.” I told my client it
wasn’t worth the money for
me to pursue it. I don’t need to
be beaten up.
Becoming a process server
was my version of waiting
tables. Just out of college, in
the late ’90s, I was a singersongwriter, and I was not
that a celebrity’s prospective nanny isn’t a
convicted extortionist.
The work can be like the
city itself: lonely and
disjointed. Almost everything is done online,
so it’s rare to come faceto-face with a subject.
When it happens, it can
be weird because by
then you think you
know them from your
research, and suddenly
you’re interviewing
them in their living
room and you realize
they have an enormous
porcelain frog collection. It makes you wonder if the things people
collect reveal their criminal predilections. Like,
maybe people who collect paperweights tend
to be forgers. And the
rooster people are
necrophiliacs.
The weirdest encounter I ever had was
with this guy who was
an alleged pedophile.
making a living. At first the
job felt creepy. To this day,
after more than 15 years, it’s
not a comfortable thing to do.
But I’m good at it. I get the job
done. And it subsidizes my
music career.
I served a guy up in the
hills of Malibu. He didn’t
answer the door, but I saw
him in his Jacuzzi. I go, “Don’t
The client sent me to
the man’s house to get a
confession. I planned
the encounter out a
thousand times in my
mind. But when I got
there, he was with his
mother, who’s old and
frail and senile, and
they wanted me to eat a
sandwich with them.
We ended up at the dining room table, and every time I began to tell
him why I was there,
the old lady would reach
over and start caressing
my arm, saying how
much she loved me. I
couldn’t go through
with it. I remember being unhinged all the
way home. But I also remember having this inexplicable sense of relief
at the realization that
no matter how much
you follow a person or
go through their garbage, you can never really know what’s in
their heart.
want to ruin your evening, but
I have some papers for you.”
He said, “Oh, just leave them
at the door.” I was loose, and
he was, too. When I approach
somebody to serve them, of
course I want to be successful.
But if I can be less intense
about it—it serves me. No pun
intended. > A S T O L D T O
A M Y WA L L A C E
LAMAG.COM
[rogues’[
[gal
[g
all
le
er
ry
y[
ThE AnGeL Of dEaTh
ThE SpUrNeD LoVeR
ThE GaNgStEr
≥ A PUDGY, BESPECTACLED respiratory
therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical
Center, EFREN SALDIVAR would
materialize at the bedsides of critically ill
patients, syringe in hand. Confessing
to 50 murders in 1998 but pleading
guilty to only 6, Saldivar explained that he
was just trying to end his victims’ suffering—
and lighten his workload on the
graveyard shift.
≥ WHEN SHERRI RASMUSSEN’S bulletriddled body was discovered in her Van Nuys
townhouse in 1986, her parents had a theory
about who did it. STEPHANIE LAZARUS , an
LAPD officer who had been jilted by Rasmussen’s husband, had been harassing Sherri
for months, but as one of Chief Daryl Gates’s
own, she seemed above suspicion. Not until
2012 was Lazarus convicted, her DNA matching the saliva from a bite on her victim’s arm.
≥ OVER THE YEARS EDDIE NASH gained
a reputation for drug trafficking and was
charged on multiple counts of murder that
never stuck. During his first trial for masterminding the Wonderland Murders—the
1981 killing of four drug dealers—Nash bribed
one juror, paying her $50,000 to vote
against conviction. The second trial ended in
an acquittal, and Nash accepted a plea bargain on another charge.
FoRgOtTeN,
THIS MOTLEY CREW OF MURDERERS AND MISFITS SHOULD BE SEARED INTO OUR MEMORIES.
ThE WeStSiDe rApIsT
ThE “DaTiNg gAmE” kIlLeR
ThE FaShIoNiStA
≥ IN 2008, five decades after his conviction
for burglary and attempted rape (for which
he served nearly ten years), 72-year-old insurance adjuster JOHN FLOYD THOMAS JR.
gave his DNA to police. Tests identified him as
“the Westside rapist,” who in the 1970s sexually
assaulted women in their homes, strangling
six of them. After serving five years for a rape
in Pasadena, he had resumed his crimes in the
1980s and is a suspect in five murders.
≥ REPRESENTING HIMSELF during his
2010 trial for the murder of four women
and a 12-year-old girl, RODNEY ALCALA
showed the jury a 1978 video of his triumph
as Bachelor #1 on The Dating Game. During
the penalty phase, he played a snippet
of “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie’s
Vietnam-era protest song, and warned jurors
against becoming “a wanna-be killer in waiting.” They sent him to death row anyway.
≥ AT 33, ANAND JON ALEXANDER
had already dressed Janet Jackson and Paris
Hilton. In the spring of 2007, the fashion
designer was set to star in his own
VH1 reality series when he was arrested in
Beverly Hills for raping and sexually
assaulting models, some as young as 14. “I
was busy designing hemlines,” he told the
judge after his conviction. “What, I’m gonna
threaten them with a sewing needle?”
96
|
LOS ANGELES
|
JULY 2013
CRIME IN LA
ThE JaIlHoUsE LaWyEr
ThE OuTlAw
ThE gRaY WiDoWs
≥ AWAITING HIS SECOND murder trial,
JOE HUNT , ringleader of the Billionaire Boys
≥ ON TRIAL FOR the 2000 kidnapping and
murder of a 15-year-old boy who was the
brother of a “business associate” in the
drug trade, JESSE JAMES HOLLYWOOD testified that the 1984 film Blame It on
Rio inspired him to flee to Brazil as a fugitive
from justice. Five years after the killing,
the San Fernando Valley pot dealer
was caught with false papers and
extradited. He’s serving life.
≥ BEFORE THEY MURDERED two homeless
men, septuagenarians HELEN GOLAY and
OLGA RUTTERSCHMIDT killed them with
kindness. The women put a roof over their
heads and fed them for a couple of years—
while taking out millions of dollars in life
insurance policies on the men and listing
themselves as beneficiaries. Then they did in
their victims by staging hit-and-runs in 1999
and 2005. The pair was convicted in 2008.
Club’s lethal Ponzi scheme, amassed so many
law books and legal documents that officials
declared his cell a fire hazard. Already serving life for a 1987 murder conviction,
Hunt didn’t win an acquittal but did become
the only California defendant who, acting
as his own counsel, succeeded in sparing his
life in a death penalty case.
NoT fOrGiVeN
COULD YOU PICK A SINGLE ONE OF THEM OUT OF A LINEUP? BY ED LEIBOWITZ
ThE ChIcKeN CoOp kIlLeR ThE LoOsELiPpEd mAdAm
ThE WrOnG MaN
≥ IN 1926, GORDON STEWART
NORTHCOTT brought his 13-year-old nephew
≥ IN THE GREAT ’90s crackdown on sex for
money in Hollywood, Heidi Fleiss
refused to reveal the names of clients in her
little black book. Fellow madam JODY
BABYDOL GIBSON observed no such code of
honor. After serving time, she published a
2007 memoir identifying some of her most
prominent customers, prompting the
likes of Bruce Willis and Tommy Lasorda to
issue vigorous denials.
≥ CHESTER TURNER sexually assaulted
and strangled the last of his 11 known victims
after another man was wrongly convicted
of assaulting the first three. In 1992, David
Allen Jones, a janitor with an eight-year-old’s
cognitive skills, had confessed to those
killings when he was grilled by the LAPD
without a lawyer present. Only in 2003, once
Turner was found guilty of sexual assault, was
his DNA linked to the multiple murders.
to live on his chicken ranch in Riverside
County. For Sanford Clark, life with his
uncle meant being beaten and sodomized
and witnessing sexual assaults on at least
a dozen other boys, three of whom Northcott
killed in cahoots with his mother, Sarah
Louise Northcott. The 2008 film Changeling
was based on the case.
I l l u s t ra t i o n s b y SAM KERR
LAMAG.COM
[
oke
[[ssmig
ignals[
BuRn nOtIcE
FOR FIREBUGS, OUR CRISPY HILLS ARE ALL TOO ENTICING. ARSON INVESTIGATOR
R S O N I S T H E C R I M E of malicious burning.
There are various reasons why people set fires—
rage, revenge, financial gain, to cover up a murder
or a burglary, mental issues—but most arsonists
feel powerless. Setting fire gives them a sense of
power. You did this to me;
look what I can do to you.
Serial arsonists are few
and far between. They say
there’s no stereotype, but the
majority seem to be white
males between, say, 16 and
I N F E R NO
Watching the
Station Fire
from Tujunga in
September 2009.
An act of arson,
the unsolved blaze
SQTTML\_WÅZMÅOP\ers and burned
160,577 acres
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35. I’ve read studies that say
the reason more men are
responsible for fires is
because women are able to
channel their fascination
with fire through cooking. I
don’t know if I agree, but I
understand part of it because
boys normally aren’t taught
to cook. Their experience of
fire is setting a campfire or
using a magnifying glass to
ignite the grass.
I’ve been a firefighter for
29 years; I drove the engine
for 14, and I’ve been an arson
investigator for 8. Lots of old
crusty investigators/detectives will tell you that arson
investigation is an art form.
To most people something
burned up just looks like
something burned up, but
every fire “speaks” to the
investigator. Even the air in a
charred building has a
certain weight and feel and
odor. That’s where we start—
the burned remains of
everything. We have more
arson structure fires than
arson brush fires, but the
brush fires are more
CRIME IN LA
ROSA TUFTS ON SIFTING THROUGH THE ASHES
spectacular—for the arsonists, the
citizens, and the firefighters. Los
Angeles is a city like no other: 470
square miles in virtually the
middle of a desert. With proper
weather conditions, you can get a
fire that burns from Hollywood to
the ocean.
There are 16 arson investigators in the City of Los Angeles;
I’m the only female. We work in
pairs—two pairs on 24-hour duty
every day. They call us “fire
cops.” I carry a .40-caliber
handgun. There are times when
the arsonist will return to the
scene, like the 32-year-old male
whose wife decided she preferred the woman next door. He
set fire to the woman’s sofa,
which lit up the whole house and
threatened the block. He came
back to admire his handiwork.
We arrested him on the spot.
I’ve been on some horrific
incidents, but the one that
Rosa Tufts on three
that got away
haunts me was the father who
strapped his two children into
their car seats and set fire to the
car. It took seven years for the
case to finally be adjudicated.
When the arson case includes
murder, the arson investigators
are the only ones who can speak
for the dead. And we never stop.
When I take an arsonist off the
streets, I’m putting out more
than one fire. > A S T O L D T O
March 2006
E L A I N E K AG A N
a mortgage loan
company to start
his own. His former
boss, convinced he’s
stealing business,
tells him to close
down. The man
refuses, and his
Northridge office is
firebombed. After
many failed attempts to interview
the ex-boss, we
surprise him at his
office. He’s dressed
like it’s 1977 with
a Saturday Night
Fever outfit, and
there are Scarface
posters on his
walls. While we
were pretty sure
he was behind the
fire, we couldn’t
prove it.”
» “After a fire is
extinguished at an
apartment in Mid
Wilshire, three bodies are discovered. It
appeared that one
person had stabbed
the others to death
before dying of
smoke inhalation,
but we couldn’t
prove it.”
May 2007
» “A man leaves
December
2011
WALLY SKALIJ/COPYRIGHT © 2009, LOS ANGELES
TIMES. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
» “Someone breaks
into a Van Nuys
clothing warehouse, distributes
gasoline, and ignites it, destroying
much of the stock.
The owner claims
she has been doing
millions in sales.
But the warehouse
is practically full,
her receipts don’t
show that kind of
profit, and each
time we speak to
her husband, he
gives us a different
alibi. We suspected
insurance fraud but
lacked evidence.”
LAMAG.COM
NG[
[MUGGI
StArS In
StRiPeS
WHEN IT COMES TO WAYWARD
CELEBRITIES, WE’RE NUMBER ONE
N E W YO R K H A S
its share. New Orleans,
for sure. And never
count out Dade County. No
place, however, can compete
with the volume of famous
people who run amok in
L.A. The ever-growing roster of stars whose arrests
have been documented by
jailhouse photographers
here has transformed the
mug shot into something of
an art form, complete with
subgenres: There’s the stab
at composure exemplified by
Mischa Barton (popped in
2007 for drunk driving), the
peering-through-the-haze
squint of Ryan O’Neal (assault, 2007), the mania of
Phil Spector, and the keep-atit-till-you-get-it-right style of
Ms. Lohan. The images, we
tell ourselves, are glimpses
of the reality behind the
NaMe
ThAt
PeRp!
FOR A COMPLETE
LIST, GO TO LAMAG
.COM/MUGSHOTS
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JULY 2013
facade—proof that we all
have our bad days—but the
truth is, they’re just a dollop
of schadenfreude for most
people. Way back, the famous
could rely on protection from
an army of publicists, studio
bosses, and newspaper hacks,
insider aces who cooked the
story like bagmen burying
evidence. That’s probably one
reason you won’t see booking shots of Robert Mitchum
(nabbed for pot in 1948) or
Hedy Lamarr (shoplifting at
the Wilshire May Co. in 1966)
or Charlie Chaplin (arrested
for drunkenness). Another is
more mundane: Not all local
police departments release
mug shots. While the sheriff’s
department and jurisdictions
like Santa Monica do, law
enforcement agencies in Los
Angeles and Beverly Hills do
not. > M . S .
CRIME IN LA
On
ThE RuN
FrOm tHe
cOuRtRoOm
tO ThE pOpUlAr
cUlTuRe
ThE BlOoDy
GlOvEs
≥ Cashmere lined,
size extra large,
the pair turned a
courtroom line into
a public meme:
“If it doesn’t fit,
you must acquit!”
WHEN O.J. SIMPSON WAS
ACQUITTED OF DOUBLE MURDER
IN 1995, IT SEEMED THERE WAS
NOTHING HE COULDNƭT EVADE.
THEN LIFE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM
SIMPSONS: ROBIN PLATZER/GETTY IMAGES; GLOVES: VINCE BUCCI/AP PHOTO; BRONCO: JEAN-MARC GIBOUX/GETTY IMAGES
BEFORE THE END
Simpson with his then wife,
Nicole Brown Simpson, in 1993
AT E O N T H E E V E N I N G of June 12, 1994,
Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife of football star O.J. Simpson, was slaughtered on
the brick walkway of her condominium on
Bundy Drive, along with her friend Ronald
Goldman. A waiter, he was returning a pair
of eyeglasses Nicole’s mother had left behind
at the restaurant where he worked. Goldman
was stabbed more than 20 times; Brown
Simpson suffered a severe blow to the head,
who’d considered O.J. guilty before becoming convinced that the
evidence was lacking to prove his
guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
By then evasion had long been a
specialty of O.J.’s. Hobbled by rickets as a child, he rushed past blockers to earn a Heisman
multiple knife wounds, and a fatal slash so deep across
Trophy, a berth in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and a
her neck, it nearly severed her head.
movie career that had nothing to do with his acting abilThat double homicide demoted the 1947 Black Dahlity. In his criminal trial he slipped past prosecutors’ grasp
ia murder to L.A.’s second-most-famous unsolved crime.
despite evidence like bloody shoe prints that matched his
Unlike in the Elizabeth Short case, the most indelible
and the suicide threats he made during his slow-speed
image to emerge was not of the victims but of the prime
car chase. Ordered to pay $33.5 million in a civil trial
suspect: O.J. Simpson. His “trial of the century” lasted
over Goldman’s wrongful death, the Juice went right on
from December 1994 until his acquittal the following
playing golf and claiming penury. The Goldmans won
October, spawning an entire industry that has fed off
the rights (and proceeds) to If I Did It, O.J.’s “fictional” acthe flip sides of outrage: those who cheered the notcount of the murders, but then rumors began to float that
guilty verdict as one person of color’s triumph over an
O.J. was trying to sell the actual knife from the murders.
LAPD conspiracy of extraordinary proportions, and
What finally tripped him up, of course, was his atthose who condemned it as a rich celebrity getting away
tempt with a gun to reclaim some memorabilia in a Las
with murder. Friends, family members, journalists,
Vegas hotel room. Imprisoned in 2008, Simpson reaphacks, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses
peared last May seeking to overturn his
have produced more than 70 books on the
A
L
N
I
C
kidnapping and armed robbery verdict. His
case. Of the four jurors who contributed
M
O
I
DE
CR
effort at another end run was no surprise.
to the canon, exactly zero has professed to
His appearance—shackled, gray, bloated—
second thoughts. Juror Anise Aschenbach
DOXING
however, was. Because it turns out that dedid tell CNN, “I think he probably did it,
≥ Dumping a
spite all that dodging, there was one area
and that’s the pits.” But she’d already gone
victim’s purloined
personal informawhere he had been fixed in place for 19
on record as one of only two on the panel
tion—real name,
home address, social
years: our consciousness.
(and was one of only two white jurors)
*** ***
security number,
financial data—on
the Internet.
ThE WhItE BrOnCo
≥ As O.J. reportedly held a gun to
his own head, Al
Cowlings drove the
Ford into infamy. A
joke on late-night
TV, the model was
discontinued in
two years’ time.
ThE BrUnO MaGlIs
≥ Their prints
were all over
the crime scene.
Though he wore
the size 12 shoes
at a Buffalo Bills
game, O.J. called
them “ugly ass.”
Sales jumped after
the trial coverage.
ThE KaRdAsHiAnS
≥ O.J. was a
friend of the nowdeceased lawyer
Robert Kardashian. Did he father
Khloe, one of Kardashian’s famous
girls, too? That’s
the rumor, but her
family denies it.
LAMAG.COM
ThUgLaNdIa
E[
et[LIF
[stre
WITH MANY DATING BACK 50 YEARS, GANGS ARE PART OF THE CITY’S DNA. WHAT’S DIFFERENT
THESE DAYS, WRITES MICHAEL KRIKORIAN, IS HOW THEY GO ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS
S A J O U R N A L I S T who has
covered the street gangs of
Los Angeles off and on for the
past 17 years, I have often stated, with perverse pride, “L.A.
has the best street gangs in the
> The Wanderers had a presUnited States,” the way someence in the northwest portion
of the park, but this less-trafone might boast about Yosemficked area has been taken over
ite’s waterfalls. Big and gauin recent years by cliques of the
dy and violent, they’ve been
Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS13.
rapped about and emulated
the world over. But lately if you
don’t live in a gang-infested
neighborhood, you’d be forgiven for thinking that thugs are
forsaking the thug life. Annual
city homicide totals are down
dramatically from the early 1990s, when there were more than 1,000
killings (nearly half of them gang related), to fewer than 300 in 2012.
But don’t be mistaken. The gangs are still here causing nightly
heartbreak. They just aren’t as flagrant as they once were. Among the
reasons: the huge drop in crack use, intense gang intervention efforts
7T
by former gang members, and police strategies that include upping
H
ST
.
their presence (along with surveillance cameras) in the Watts projects
and bettering their relations with community leaders. There’s also
the sheer number of dead and imprisoned gang members to consider as well as the exodus of thousands of others to “expansion cities.”
Those aren’t the only theories. “I think it’s more about business,”
says Los Angeles Police Department sergeant Richard Lozano, who
> Running the quadrant at 7th and Park
works in the Rampart gang unit that oversees the area around MacView streets, the MacArthur Park Locos
Arthur Park. “The violence brings too much attention from us, and
and the Rampart Locos are factions of
MS13, the gang whose members are as
that ruins the potential for making money.” In the park itself several
well known—and feared—for their facegang factions manage to sell their drugs without killing one another.
covering tattoos as for their violence.
You’ve got the Columbia Lil Cycos, the most notorious clique of the
18th Street Gang, in the northeast quadrant. Almost half the park is
held by two large factions of Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS13. Another
large chunk belongs to the Crazy Riders, and several other gangs exist
in the surrounding area. This year’s death toll so far? Zero.
Gangs aren’t just less openly hostile to one another, though. They’re
Miles south of MacArthur Park, the quest for illicit financial gain
less specialized than they used to be, too. In the 1980s, the Rollin 60s
has produced some strange partnerships. “It’s not unheard of anyand Rollin 90s were infamous for brazen bank robberies. Inglewood
more for some guy from Grape Street to team up with a Hoover
Family Bloods did “smash and grabs” at jewelry stores. The Bounty
[Street Criminal] to go rob someone or break into a house,” says LAPD
Hunters, operating out of Nickerson Gardens, robbed
detective Chris Barling, head of homicide at the 77th
A
L
N
I
C
motorists along Imperial Highway on an hourly basis. In
Street Division. Acting on street intelligence that no one
M
O
I
DE
CR
Boyle Heights, Big Hazard from Ramona Gardens earned
will be at a residence, members from two or three gangs
a reputation for their convenient “drive-ins,” where cusclean the place out—what they call “flocking.” Or they
KNOCK-KNOCK
tomers copped drugs without leaving their cars. Home
might get together for a little “OTM,” as in Outta Town
BURGLARY
invasions? They were a trademark of Asian gangs. But
Money: Someone has connections in, say, Phoenix, and
≥ Thieves targeting affluent neighthese days “there’s no secrets in the gang world,” says
L.A. gangsters go there to burglarize houses with the loborhoods knock
Cleamon “Big Evil” Johnson, who led the 89 Family
cal as their guide.
on a front door. If
ń
NoRtHwEsT CoRnEr
ń
SoUtHwEsT
CoRnEr
*** ***
?
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nobody is home,
they break in. Also
called “flocking.”
CRIME IN LA
OnE PaRk,
ThReE WoRlDs
ń
NoRtHeAsT CoRnEr
> The busiest section of
the park, by 6th and Alvarado streets, has long
been the bastion of the Columbia Lil Cycos, a clique
of the 18th Street Gang.
Though 18th Street is considered L.A.’s largest gang,
with as many as 15,000
members, it’s actually an
amalgam of 20 cliques.
» MACARTHUR PARK is too big,
crowded, and profitable for a single street gang
to control. So for many years a détente of
sorts has existed that allows three or four
gangs to run the drug trade—nowadays
mostly meth—in a park that in the
1990s saw several killings a year.
ń
SoUtHeAsT CoRnEr
NOTORIOUS B.I.G.: RAY TANG/REX FEATURES
AL
VA
RA
DO
ST
.
> The Crazy Riders, a mix of
Bloods and won an appeal in 2011 after spending 14
years on death row and is now in county jail awaiting
retrial. “When other gangs heard that someone was doing good with a crime, they’d be on it, too.”
That said, no gang can do credit card or medical
fraud like Armenian Power (I’d recommend paying
cash at a 99 Cents-Only store). The Avenues have a
notorious specialty as well: The region’s preeminent
gangster racists, they’re known for trying to rid Highland Park of blacks through intimidation and murder.
But no matter how heinous the Avenues’ crimes,
for sheer violence Highland Park can’t compare to the
G r a p h i c b y B RYA N C H R I ST I E
mainly Mexicans and Central Americans but also
some blacks and whites,
control the park’s southeast
section. Far smaller than
MS13, they began as a group
of guys who played American football in the park.
LAPD’s Southeast Division, which encompasses Green
Meadows and Watts, among other neighborhoods.
During the first four months of this year, there were
16 killings in 11 of the LAPD’s 21 divisions. In Southeast
there were 17. In fact, the last gang-related funeral I
went to, back in February, was for a guy from Southeast, and I can tell you nobody at the church that day
was celebrating that gang deaths are down.
Michael Krikorian is a writer based in Los
Angeles. His first novel, Southside (Oceanview), is
coming out in November.
Notorious
B.I.G.
» On March 9,
1997, after leaving
a hip-hop event at
the Petersen Automotive Museum
with his entourage,
the Brooklyn rapper Notorious
B.I.G., aka Christopher Wallace, was
shot four times
in his SUV by an
unknown assailant. A single bullet
killed him, piercing
his heart, colon,
liver, and a lung,
but the suspect list
seemed endless.
A year earlier Bay
Area hip-hop artist
Tupac Shakur had
been gunned down
in Las Vegas; Wallace, whose first
album was titled
Ready to Die, was
rumored to have
supplied the gun.
The pair had been
tangled in an East
Coast/West Coast
feud that involved
members of the
Bloods and Crips as
well as Sean Combs
and Death Row
Records cofounder
Suge Knight. Was
the Miracle Mile
killing payback,
orchestrated and
covered up with the
help of rogue LAPD
officers working
security for Knight?
That’s what Rolling
Stone contributor
Randall Sullivan
hypothesized in a
book. Former Los
Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips, who’d written
a contested series
on Shakur’s death,
called Sullivan’s
account “one of
the worst reported
news stories I’ve
ever read.” > D.G .
LAMAG.COM
NES[
E
C
S
[
[crime
RuThLeSs cItY
THIS TOWN IS NEVER SO BEGUILING AND DEADLY AS WHEN ITƭS IN FRONT OF
THE CAMERA. STEVE ERICKSON SURVEYS L.A.ƭS CELLULOID TERRAIN
»
R AW I N G T H E D E S P E R AT E and the adrift, Los Angeles has
long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic. As close to anarchic as an urban landscape can be, it’s not
only the natural setting for dramas of grand larceny, illicit lust,
and cold-blooded murder, but it has played the heavy as well.
Here’s a moviegoer’s guide to L.A.’s most enduring archetypes:
TaRnIsHeD KnIgHtS “ D O W N T H E S E M E A N streets,” wrote Raymond Chandler
famously, “a man must go who is…neither tarnished nor
afraid,” but L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe is more tarnished than
he knows, by disillusion if not cynicism. Marlowe has been played
by many actors, including Dick Powell, James Garner, and Robert
Mitchum. The definitive portraits—at opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum—are from Humphrey Bogart in 1946’s The Big Sleep,
sweating through his clothes in a greenhouse yet still the coolest man onscreen, and Elliott Gould in 1973’s The Long Goodbye,
wandering among the naked nymphs of a sun-blasted era that was
more noir than anyone knew at the time.
»
SuCkErS AnD FeMmEs fAtAlEs
F I L L E D W I T H S E L F - H AT R E D , sexually possessed by a si-
lent-movie goddess taking revenge on the talk that destroyed
her career, William Holden is a screenwriter in 1950’s Sunset Bou-
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levard, bearing witness to the
absurdity of not simply his own
situation but any possibility that
L.A. can offer a true or redeeming
passion. Hitchhiker Tom Neal in Detour—a toxic piece of povertyrow cinema from 1945—is Holden’s distant cousin, on his way crosscountry to see his girl; he winds up at the end of the leash coiled
around the hand of the most fatale of femmes, before she winds up
in L.A. at the end of the (telephone) line coiled around her neck. It
may be that when Esquire pinup Bernice Lyon chose the name Ann
Savage for her Hollywood career, she was bound to become film’s
darkest woman.
»
UnHoLy uNiOnS
O N LY L . A .’ S D E B AU C H E D paradise could produce alli-
ances so depraved that the forbidden lovers of 1944’s Double
Indemnity—golden dominatrix Barbara Stanwyck lashing Fred
MacMurray to her homicidal intentions—would be the most innocent, their transgressions garden-variety adultery and murder
(that “smells like honeysuckle”). Released in 1974, the same summer that devoured the presidency of Richard Nixon, Chinatown
I l l u s t r a t i o n b y S E A N M C CA B E
evoked a corruption of the American spirit so indisputable that the
movie’s unspeakable evil—the sexual affair between daughter Faye
Dunaway and father John Huston—had a special metaphorical authority. Conversely in 1990’s The Grifters, con woman (and John’s
daughter) Anjelica Huston cons her son, con man John Cusack, the
only way she knows, by an erotic seduction for which con girlfriend
Annette Bening is no match.
»
SOURCE PHOTOS: EVERETT COLLECTION
ThE GoOdS
I N 1 9 4 9 ’ S C R I S S C RO S S , L.A. descends—by Bunker Hill’s
airborne trolley, Angels Flight—from the bright light of day
into the noir imagination, where Burt Lancaster tries to hijack both
an armored truck and mobster wife Yvonne De Carlo. By 1955’s Kiss
Me Deadly, what’s at stake is nuclear oblivion glowing from a suitcase opened four decades later by Pulp Fiction’s hit men; navigating L.A. at its most anonymous, they find either the Void or the
face of God, winding up dead (John Travolta) or quoting scripture
(Samuel L. Jackson). The most valuable score of all in 1982’s Blade
Runner is nothing less than the essence of humanity: the memories,
profoundly felt (whether “real” or not) of a life savored (whether
“lived” or not) by Rutger Hauer’s dying android in a future where
L.A. descends yet again from the promise of possibility into a maelstrom of decay. These four movies finished off for good the romanticism that previously infused even the darkest of homegrown noirs.
»
ShOoT-OuTs aNd fAsT GeTaWaYs P I C K I N G U P W H E R E Criss Cross’s heist leaves
off, the best-laid plans of criminal mastermind
Robert De Niro run up against cop Al Pacino during
one of cinema’s great firefights, the Battle of Downtown in Heat, a three-hour 1995 crime epic that might
have been written by William Thackeray had he been a pulp novelist and had Vanity Fair been a tableau of contemporary L.A. rather
than a 19th-century European capital. Stranded by their getaway
driver, De Niro and company could use someone like Ryan Gosling,
whose behind-the-wheel maneuverings from the industrial lofts to
the Staples Center in 2011’s Drive guide us through a city—viewed
at both ground level and from the night skies—defined by entropy
rather than gravity, constantly coming apart and never cohering.
»
ThE CiTy aS CoNsPiRaToR AT S O M E P O I N T, not cop or criminal or crackpot is a match
for the city itself. Somewhere in the shadows between the
beach and the palisades, before the desperation that drives Holden
to his doom sets in, In a Lonely Place (released the same year as
Sunset Boulevard) finds hair-trigger screenwriter Humphrey Bogart at the mercy of the very inner violence that Hollywood pays
him to conjure. Somewhere between city hall corruption and postWorld War II Central Avenue, black detective Denzel Washington
in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) learns that enemy territory lies beyond the avenue, as the race-crazed cops can attest to in 1997’s L.A.
Confidential, a tabloid almanac of the city as we openly dread and
secretly fantasize it once was. Somewhere between the elusiveness
of identity and the rapture of voyeurism, Bill Pullman, the no-wave
sax player of Lost Highway (also ’97), commits murder—maybe—in
an L.A. that’s become the most depraved home movie
A
L
N
I
C
ever, starring Patricia Arquette as the resurrection of
M
O
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DE
CR
Ann Savage, glowing like the end of the world in a
suitcase. All metropolises are vice ridden, but in none
URBAN MINING
other are justice and mayhem so interchangeable; in
≥ Applied to recyno other city does the pulse quicken so identically for
cling metals from
electronic equiprage and desire alike, or can the demons so easily be
ment, the term also
mistaken for angels.
describes stealing
*** ***
copper pipes, catalytic converters, and
other materials.
LAMAG.COM
[straig[ht[
E
[DOP
HiGh tImEs,
LoW LiVeS
S P E E D R AC E R S
Street kids shoot up in
the Palms Hotel in West
Hollywood, 1988
NOVELIST JERRY STAHL USED TO
SCORE AT A MICKEY D’S IN PICO-UNION.
HE REFLECTS ON HOW A DAY DAWNS
IN THE LIFE OF A JUNKIE
H E N E V E R I F I N D myself near skid row, I slow
down to check out the nonstop, invisible-to-the-untrained-eye, hand-to-hand transit of crack, meth,
tar, and doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals. It’s not
that I want to buy anything. Not anymore. It’s that
I know that if I did, I could. Even after a busload of
years off the needle, I still have the morally questionable ability to spot who has what, who probably sells a solid bag, who’s bent, and who’s undercover, parked across the street in an unmarked car with two haircuts
sitting up front. Down here, or in any of the floating drug bazaars that
always migrate from one corner of low-end L.A. to another, people
do what they have to do. In the late ’80s, early ’90s, I was one of
those people who made regular trips downtown or to 4th and Bonnie Brae, 8th and Alvarado, MacArthur Park. The hoods change, but
the business doesn’t.
Back in the bad old days, my dealer and his customers, along with
a gaggle of other criminal characters, would hang at the 18th and
Western McDonald’s at six in the morning. It was a Breakfast Club for
L.A. lowlifes. There was the two-time loser with a knack for B&E who
liked to sneak onto the Fox lot and steal Selectric typewriters. (That
I’d worked there, writing for Moonlighting, was just a coincidence,
Your Honor.) There was the strung-out makeup lady whose sister’s
boyfriend washed George Hamilton’s cars and stole his Percodans.
Of course, like most addicts, she was a congenital liar, as there is no
evidence Tawny George ever took so much as an aspirin. That, or
she may have had him confused with Iggy Pop. Luz, the crack-maid,
cleaned rooms at the Sunset Marquis and told tales of filling Bag-
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gies with one of the Pretenders’ leftover narcotics,
scooped right off the carpet. We were all coming from
the methadone clinic, telling festive lies.
One morning Lilac (picture Ving Rhames at 60,
with breasts and Jheri curls) came in beat and said
the cops had shot her son. A diabetic who sold needles to finance her chiba jones, Lilac had a mumble
that dripped with simmering resignation. That’s the
way it was. We asked if we could kick down a little
something to help bury her boy.
My own experience with the LAPD—this was the
Rampart era—was limited to being picked up on the
corner of Crack and Eight Ball at four in the morning with a color TV still in the box. “Asshole, you’re going to jail,” the
uniforms said as they shoved me into the piss-smelling backseat of
a black-and-white. But thanks to the Optima card I’d somehow been
issued even after I declared bankruptcy, I had a receipt for the little
Sony from the all-night electronics store in what is now the Beverly
Connection. I’d go in there every couple of nights and charge a TV or
boom box I could never pay for, then trade it for drugs. For a junkie,
that was like having a job.
The police let me go with a smack on the head after I agreed to
leave the TV and get the fuck out of the car. From what I can tell,
nothing much has changed. Except these days you can’t trade a portable TV for heroin. All the homeboys want iPhones.
Jerry Stahl’s latest novel is Bad Sex on Speed (A Barnacle Book).
His memoir, Permanent Midnight, was made into a 1998 film starring Ben Stiller.
P h o t o g r a p h b y J I M G O L D B E R G/ M AGN U M P H OT O S
CRIME IN LA
HiT DrUgS
≥
city, with dispensaries that shovel out
L . A . I S A NA R C O - F U E L E D
the stuff by the bushel, doctors
who double as dealers, and dealers
who’ve gone tech to move their goods.
Even with its quasilegal
status, pot is still big on the black market, and in MacArthur Park meth
is outselling coke and heroin these
days (see page 102). But there are
a panoply of other ways and means by
which Angelenos are altering their
minds. Herewith, a taste. > D.G .
SoUrCiNg
StReEt
InTeRnEt
ShOpS
DoCtOr
AdDeRaLl
≥
The pharmaceutical psychostimulant is popular with college students and
club kids pulling all-nighters. Lindsay Lohan recently tried to abort her
court-appointed rehab stint when staffers threatened to confiscate her supply.
NiTrOuS OxIdE SmIlEs
≥ Like dropping
mescaline with an
Used by ravers
≥
who want to feel
dizzy, “laughing
gas” is sold in shops
that illegally label it
as a component for
welding torches.
Small whipped
cream chargers are
a common source
as well.
Ecstasy shooter, the
popular chemical
compound 2C-1—a
white powder that’s
snorted—debuted a
decade ago in
Dutch drug bars.
Increased emergency room visits in
L.A. are blamed on
the substance.
≥Nicknamed
hydro, norco, and
AfGhAn
InCeNsE
≥
A legal
compound resembling hash, it’s
featured in YouTube
videos, where
bong-wielding men
smoke the stuff
in what appear
to be their parents’
basements.
SaLvIa
BaTh sAlTs
≥A Central American herb, Salvia di-
vinorum is smoked
in shamanistic rituals. Rec users boast
of going into a state
where “injuries can
be sustained without feeling pain.”
KrAtOm
Chewed by addicts to alleviate the effects of
≥kicking,
Kratom leaf is a natural, opiate-like
BlUe
DoLlAr
≥
Combining
MDMA (Ecstasy)
with caffeine, benzylpiperazine, or
other stimulants,
these pill cocktails
sell like Frappuccinos at raves.
stimulant that can be as addictive as Vicodin.
BEN FRANKLIN: SHUTTERSTOCK
» In June 1986, a
ViCoDiN
vikes, this synthetic
and often counterfeit opiate is available for purchase
on Craigslist, along
with warnings from
sellers like “Don’t
call if you’re a cop.”
The Hole
in the
Ground Gang
Sold in packets
≥with
names like
Crazy Train and
Scarface, the synthetic stimulant
mimics methamphetamine. Last
year a user chewed
on a man’s face.
SpEcIaL K SpIcE
≥
Pot on steroids.
The shredded plant
material (various
kinds are used) is
mixed with synthetic cannabinoids
and sold online as
K2, Yucatan Fire, or
Moon Rocks.
MoLlY Pure MDMA,
≥it’s
for drug
connoisseurs who
disdain Ecstasy
cocktails as just
another version of
the New Coke.
Injected as a pain
≥blocker
in medical
procedures,
Ketamine is snorted by users seeking
to “slip into the K
Hole”—conscious
but paralyzed, like
watching a Michael
Bay movie.
group of men riding
all-terrain vehicles
slipped unseen into
the city’s underground storm drain
system, heading for
the First Interstate
Bank at Spaulding
and Sunset. They
carried gas-powered
generators, hammer drills, power
saws, and—most
important—digging
equipment, which
they used to tunnel their way 100
feet up and into
the bank’s vault.
They made off with
$172,000, a Matisse,
and a reputation
for audacity. The
following year the
gang hit the Bank
of America at Pico
and La Cienega,
grabbed $98,000,
and then vanished
forever, though tips
continued to pour
into the FBI: The
thieves were Vietnam vets, familiar
with the Viet Cong’s
tunnel systems, or
maybe they were
actual ex-V.C. or
mole people—troglodytes who inhabit
the sewers yet still
know how to get
their hands on a
$2,000 diamondinfused drill bit.
Whoever they were,
they were smart
enough to know
when to quit. The
vault’s alarm had
been tripped in the
second heist—perhaps the reason
that when a third
tunnel was eventually unearthed in
Beverly Hills, it was
found abandoned.
> D.G .
LAMAG.COM
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JAMES MINCHIN III
DR AMA LAB
Breaking Bad
creator Vince
Gilligan and his
leading man,
Bryan Cranston,
on the set
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≥ NOBODY WOULD HAVE
EXPECTED BREAKING BAD
TO BECOME
<-4->1;176ƭ;57;<
ADDICTIVE CRIME SHOW,
AND WITH JUST EIGHT MORE
EPISODES TO GO,
NOBODY CAN IMAGINE LIFE
WITHOUT IT
LAMAG.COM
ViNcE Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, has had the final season under
such strict lockdown that actors were delivered scripts with other people’s lines blacked out. I was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement
before I could step foot on the set in Albuquerque, and once there, I was
never left alone. Which was smart. Draw whatever parallels you like to
methamphetamine, fans of the show want a fix and they want it now.
So I admit to being momentarily distracted during my interview
with Bryan Cranston when I see what I think is a script poking out
M E T H E M AT I C S
from his Malcolm in the Middle shoulder bag one afternoon. The crew
Above: Jesse Pinkman
(Aaron Paul) at the
is setting up to shoot a scene from Breaking Bad ’s fourth-to-last epia stray vine. Gilligan wrote that mix
home of cartel boss
Don
Eladio. Right: Walt
sode, and we sit on director’s chairs in the middle of a suburban street,
of light and dark into the first words
(Bryan Cranston) suits
up for some cooking
a fabric canopy serving as a makeshift shelter from the mighty New
uttered on the series: “My name is
Mexico sun. All down the block, neighbors and their pets stand in driveWalter Hartwell White. I live at 308
ways watching a little bit of television history. (Tune in on August 11.)
Negra Arroya Lane.”
But at the moment I can’t afford to peer at Cranston’s script because
And so began the most unlikely crime show ever to ignite Amerikeeping up with him takes focus; the man is quick. When a skinhead
can audiences. Breaking Bad does not take as large a view of the world
with a swastika neck tattoo walks by, I say, “I’m guessing that’s a bad
as did, say, The Wire, which detailed the web of corruption binding all
guy.” “No, just misunderstood,” Cranston shoots back, shaking his head
human institutions, high and low. Like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad
with pretend sadness. I note that the bruise on the actor’s cheek looks
gets a lot of juice from juxtaposing criminality with the humdrum of
real, and he says, “It is real. Vince decked me.” Sporting a twill buckthe everyday—setting after-murder meals at Denny’s gave the writers
et hat like the kind Bob Denver wore in Gilligan’s Island, Cranston is
endless pleasure. But Breaking Bad is something else entirely. It tells a
clad in all beige as befits an international meth kingpin trying to pass
story central to Western civilization, from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizfor AnyGuy, USA.
abethan play Doctor Faustus to The Godfather—of a man who gains
I’m interviewing Cranston in snatches between scenes—first in a
the world but loses his soul—and it tells it in a new way, in a way that
bedroom, where he flings himself into an odalisque position and sighs
makes that dusty tale profoundly personal and alive.
dramatically, “I do all my interviews like this”; the second time, on a
At first glance it seemed the show might be about the recession
porch swing. “We’re going backward,” I say of our move from bedroom
and health insurance. The Walt we meet in the 2008 pilot has two jobs
to porch. “Next time we meet we’ll be shaking hands on the street,” he
and can’t afford decent care when he’s diagnosed with inoperable lung
says, practically before I finish my sentence.
cancer. Inching along in his faded Pontiac Aztek, Walt evokes a painCranston is known for comedy, which may be why executives at
ful pity; he’s mired in circumstance and in the residue of choices he’s
Sony were unsure he was the right actor for the role of Walter White.
made. He turns to meth-making so that he can leave money for his
Gilligan asked them to watch a 1998 episode of The X-Files—Gilligan
pregnant wife and their son, who struggles with cerebral palsy. Somehad been a writer and producer on the show—in which he had cast the
thing in the pilot’s diabolically comic detailing of Walt’s humiliations
actor as an anti-Semite with a bizarre disorder. Cranston
signaled that Gilligan had large ambitions, that major
A
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had made the miserable wretch somehow sympathetic.
groundwork was being laid. “The only time we see early
M
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In addition to depth the actor brought a sublime physiWalter come alive is when he’s teaching chemistry,” says
cal agility to his part—one thinks of a tall Buster Keaton or
Cranston. “But meanwhile his students are yawning, seeSWATTING
Bill Irwin when Walt, driven by some profound desperaing him as a dinosaur, completely useless to them. This
*** ***
tion, sends his body hurtling awkwardly through a plate
glass door or over a hedge, where he stops to box with
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?
≥ Making a false 911
report of an ongoing
incident, usually at
a celebrity’s home,
to generate a heavy
police response. The
LAPD’s term for it:
“911 abuse.”
man is professionally and literally impotent.”
Worse, his teenage son seems to look up more to his
CRIME IN LA
blustering brother-in-law, Hank, a DEA agent. At a party
RJ Mitte, as Walt Jr., hands Uncle Hank’s Glock to his dad.
“It’s heavy” is all Walt can muster. “That’s why they hire
men,” says Hank, to the laughter of his friends. (Dean Norris, who plays Hank, thought the show was to be a comedy
when he first read the script.)
During the ride-along with Hank that will introduce
him to the world of meth, Walt sits in the backseat wearing a seat belt over a white bulletproof vest, looking like
a child in a life preserver. Soon after, he chooses to cook
drugs to support his family. “I am awake,” he declares, the
decision made. Who among us would deny him, or ourselves, that feeling of elation, of suddenly stepping into our bodies fully alive? Who
would give it up? Posing that question so passionately may be the true
innovation of Breaking Bad.
PeRhApS nothing new happens in
television without naturally occurring crises—one artistic, the other at the executive
level. In the case of Breaking Bad, the idea
for the show came to Gilligan in a period of
unemployment, during a freak-out over his approaching 40th birthday. He was speaking on the phone to Thomas Schnauz, a friend since
the days when they’d made student films at New York University. The
two had worked on The X-Files, and Schnauz would go on to write for
Breaking Bad. On this day in 2004, though, they were joking that their
next job might be as Walmart greeters. Schnauz had just read a New
York Times piece about two young girls made ill by fumes from their
mom’s meth operation in the attic near where they slept. The men
were incredulous. “Who would do something like that?” they wondered. From there the conversation led to another news item—rumors
of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs. It wasn’t long until Gilligan came up with his story about a hapless pair of meth cooks
working in a ramshackle RV, wearing gas masks and causing havoc.
In 2005, Gilligan and producer Mark Johnson pitched the show to
Sony executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who had admired
Gilligan’s work on The X-Files. “We wanted to be in the Vince Gilligan
business,” Van Amburg told me. It took Sony a year to find a buyer.
AMC at the time was known primarily as a movie channel; Mad Men
did not debut until 2007; Breaking Bad, the following year. Gilligan’s
sense that he had nothing to lose mirrored the view of the executives
at AMC who bought the series: The network did not have much of a
track record; Charlie Collier, its president, looked on risk as not only
acceptable but necessary.
The success of Mad Men and Breaking Bad transformed AMC into
a player. In 2010, the cable channel debuted The Walking Dead, which
rode the wave of pop culture’s recent craze for the undead to become
AMC’s most-watched program, attracting around 11 million viewers
per episode (compared to Breaking Bad’s 2.6). Now competing with
network numbers, AMC today might very well pass on a script as seemingly uncommercial as Gilligan’s.
Broadcasters have long assumed their audiences want the familiarity of characters who don’t stray from templates—characters who
can be counted on to be who we know
they are. Networks also tend to prefer
self-contained episodes because syndication is so lucrative and “syndicators
don’t want shows that flow from one
episode to another,” says Gilligan. But
the power of Breaking Bad is revealed
only in consecutive viewing—how else
to follow the incremental steps that, as
Gilligan says, take “Mr. Chips and turn
him into Scarface.”
Every step in this transformation is
propelled by a conscious decision on
the part of Walt, a cost-benefit analysis that must be either seconded or
slipped by his young and more emotional partner, Jesse Pinkman
(played by Aaron Paul). Walt’s calculations almost always make sense,
until they don’t. Part of the show’s allure lies in parsing what might
have been the irreversible moment for Walter White. As Walt loses his
immortal soul, Jesse discovers that he has one.
Gilligan is more interested in karma than in hellfire. His writers
scatter repeated images and phrases throughout the story, creating a
thick collage of clues and symbols—ambrosia to narrative nerds. “Nothing delights us as much as circularity,” says Schnauz, “bringing stuff
back.” Hence the multiple appearances of a deranged-looking eyeball
that, ripped from a child’s teddy bear during an airplane crash, winds
up in the skimmer basket of Walt’s pool. He plucks it out, puzzles over
it, and keeps it in a drawer, where his wife, Skyler, later finds it at a
point when she also is crossing into criminality. Such cues—along with
periodic POV shots from the bottom of a bathtub or a bucket—convey
the sense of a (for now) benign but watchful universe, taking note of
every trespass against it. “We like to reward the careful viewer,” says
Sam Catlin, another of the show’s writers.
In season two Walt sits in a hospital room; through a series of lies
he’s made his way back to his family after being kidnapped by a drug
dealer named Tuco Salamanca. As he’s inter- (CONTINUED ON PAGE 154)
LAMAG.COM
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CRIME IN LA
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WINER
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JAMES MINCHIN III
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≥ NOBODY WOULD HAVE
EXPECTED BREAKING BAD
E
T
TO BECOME
<-4->1;176ƭ;57;<
ADDICTIVE
CRIME SHOW,
A
A
AND
WITH JUST EIGHT MORE
EPISODES TO GO,
NOBODY CAN IMAGINE LIFE
N
WITHOUT IT
DR AMA LAB
Breaking Bad
creator Vince
Gilligan and his
leading man,
Bryan Cranston,
on the set
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LAMAG.COM
Chemical Reaction
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 1 1 1
viewed by a psychiatrist, Walt can’t tear his eyes
away from a painting of a man rowing a small
boat out to sea as his family waves good-bye
from shore. Cranston’s gaze seems to convey an
ocean of ambivalence as Walt, too, drifts away
from his wife and kid. The painting (crafted by
the art department) reappears in season five,
this time in a hotel room, where Walt silently
stares at it while some ex-cons plan a prison
massacre. “Where do you suppose these come
from?” he asks an uncomprehending bad guy.
“I’ve seen this one before.” The painting is an
emotional marker for us and for the character, who grimaces as he struggles to recover the
ghost of a former yearning.
////
G
I L L I G A N, a bespectacled 46-yearold Virginian with beautiful Southern
manners and the facial hair of Walter
White, is known for spending more time with
his writers than most show runners. While
Breaking Bad shoots entirely in New Mexico,
the writers are headquartered in a suite of offices on Burbank Boulevard. “The room does not
function as well without him there,” says Gennifer Hutchison, who started out as Gilligan’s
assistant. After she proved herself by taking on
what some might see as the crap job of writing
“Hank’s Blog” for the AMC Web site, Gilligan
hired her as a writer.
Mad Men employed 25 writers for its first
five seasons and The Sopranos, 19. By contrast
Gilligan has depended on only nine writers to
put together all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad,
indicating that he is either extremely loyal or
good at getting what he wants from people.
He and six others wrote the final two seasons.
Moira Walley-Beckett was writing for the legal
drama Eli Stone when she first saw Breaking
Bad and felt “I was on a mission from God to
write for that show.” She was brought on after
submitting a spec script, even after she’d been
told that the producers weren’t accepting them.
Gilligan credits her with deepening his own understanding of Skyler and “credible dialogue for
the most hard-boiled bad guys on earth.”
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George Mastras, a novelist and lawyer, is
most responsible for Tuco, a character inspired
by the time Mastras spent working at a notorious juvenile facility in D.C. The strip mall lawyer Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk,
came mainly from writer Peter Gould, who is
now at work with Gilligan on a possible spinoff for that character. Then there’s Schnauz and
Sam Catlin, “one of the funniest people” Gilligan says he has ever met.
He and the writers took more than a year
to nail down the details of the finale. Have I
been able to piece together what will happen?
Not entirely, but I can report that every writer who worked on one of the final eight episodes told me that, in his or her episode, the
shit goes down.
When I meet Gilligan in the writers’ room
three weeks after the show has wrapped, most
everything is packed in boxes but for some
books with titles like Money Laundering and
Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, 7th
Edition, and a crystal-growing kit for kids. In
his gentle drawl Gilligan talks about a “neurotic,” “hair-tearing” version of himself who
appeared, for instance, the day he lost actor
Raymond Cruz to another show. Gilligan had
big plans for Cruz’s ballistic dealer, Tuco. “But
losing him forced us to come up with Gustavo
Fring,” says Gilligan of the character played by
Giancarlo Esposito. Fring, the meticulous local businessman who, like Walt, hides in plain
sight, drives seasons three and four. Gilligan’s
lesson: “If you roll with the punches, you find
happy accidents. Because, really, how much crazier could Tuco have gotten? He was already
snorting meth off of the tip of a bowie knife.”
Gilligan spent his childhood in the town of
Farmville, Virginia, where his mother taught
reading in an elementary school. Gilligan would
roam the aisles of his grandfather’s used-book
store in Richmond, pulling out books to bring
home. He loved Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut and remembers reading Mother Night in
nine hours, with plans to devour a new book a
day. Like a lot of American men born in 1967,
he grew up consuming a great number of movies and TV shows, and Breaking Bad constantly
tips its hat, visually speaking, to some of Gilligan’s favorites: The Godfather, The Graduate,
Pulp Fiction, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler, recalls being
struck early on by the discipline Gilligan imposed on the writing process. “In rehearsal Gilligan would sometimes stop a scene, saying, ‘No,
I don’t want to go down that path,’ ” says Gunn,
and he “right there and then starts rewriting.”
One scene featured Skyler brushing her hair in
the bathroom of her lover, looking down at her
bare feet on his heated floor. “The script said
her toenails were to be painted red,” she says,
“and Vince had to see a plethora of colors. It
couldn’t be too pink and girlish, but it couldn’t
be too brazen, either. I can’t imagine how his
mind works: No detail is too small to escape
him. Bryan and I talk about how Vince is this
soft-spoken Southern guy, and how does this
stuff come out of him?”
Of the actors, Aaron Paul has perhaps gained
the most from the show. Neither AMC nor Sony
wanted him for the part of Jesse Pinkman, for
which he’s won two Emmys. “They said I was
too clean-cut,” he tells me between scenes, and
his clear blue eyes for a moment register the
incredulity that makes Jesse so endearing. Gilligan fought to hire him but had plans to kill off
Jesse in the first season. (Asked how Jesse was to
have died, he laughs and answers, “Horribly.” )
Seeing the pilot, Gilligan knew that Breaking Bad could not go on without Paul. He was
Robin to Cranston’s Batman; their combination
of strengths and weaknesses came to define the
show. Jesse’s emotionality, his amazement in
the face of increasingly outrageous situations,
never gets tired—and the writers never tired
of finding new ways to abuse him. “Maybe I’m
sadistic,” says Schnauz, “but I love making the
characters suffer.”
While the strings of fate run from plot point
to plot point, season to season, Gilligan was
also careful to set the series in a timeless limbo. There are no seasons in Breaking Bad, no
summer vacations for Walt Jr., and no holidays,
though they do celebrate Walter’s birthdays.
The show begins on Walt’s 50th, and he turns
52 during the final season, though five years
have elapsed in real time. Just about the only
sense of the clock’s movement comes from the
time-lapse sequences, in which the city or the
desert seems agitated by all the human drama
taking place within, or the recurring musical
montage sequences that capture the way hours
flow when one is deeply immersed in work—be
it making meth, dealing meth, or destroying a
meth superlab.
Looking for a seamless marriage between
the story and the visuals, director of photography Michael Slovis borrowed references from
cinematographers as diverse as Owen Roizman (The French Connection), Tonino Delli
Colli (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), and
Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion). “The
writers take advantage of storytelling clichés,
in that they constantly subvert them,” he tells
me as we sit on folding chairs in the middle
of an Albuquerque street. “They mete out information when you do not expect it, when it
will surprise you. I felt I had to come up with
a visual vocabulary to match.” That’s why we
often get a long shot when a close-up is expected and vice versa.
After Slovis came onboard in season two, the
show’s palette deepened on both ends: Its shadows darkened, and its desert scenes became
////
I
N B U R BA N K and on the sets and locations of Albuquerque, people who work
on Breaking Bad tend to see it, artistically
speaking, as a camel passing through the eye
of a needle, and there has been a near-mania
for preserving the experience. After every episode, Kelley Dixon, one of the show’s editors,
conducts an insider podcast for AMC during
which Gilligan and assorted coworkers reminisce, sometimes for longer than the episode
itself. “I talk about how it all went down, not so
much because of a sense of history but because
I want to remember it,” Gilligan says. “It’s the
next best thing to keeping a diary, which I have
not had time to do.”
Sam Catlin recalls seeing the last index
cards representing scenes pinned to the large
corkboard in the writers’ room. “God, is that
really how it’s going to end?” he thought. “Maybe we should all just be entombed together.”
Everyone handles the end in his or her
own way. After shooting their final scene,
Gunn, Cranston, and Paul engage in a prolonged three-way hug. Cranston breaks the
tension, saying, “In six months we won’t remember each other’s names.”
Gilligan admits a part of him is relieved
to “finally shed this overcoat. I pour a lot of
myself into Walt, and some of Walt pours into
me; the liquid levels constantly go up and
down,” he says. “For six years I’ve been engaged in a long, slow chess match with Walter White, always examining hundreds of permutations and possibilities. And I don’t really
play chess, so it’s been exhausting.”
Built into Breaking Bad from the start was
the idea of an inevitable and definitive ending;
there will be no Sopranos-like fade to white on
September 29. “For years we’ve wondered, ‘How
much more story do we have in us?’ ” says Gilligan. “I worked hard on The X-Files for seven
years, and when I finally looked up from my
desk, I realized the world was moving on. It’s always better to leave the party on a high note.” Q
Laurie Winer is a contributing writer for Los
Angeles. She has been a critic for The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the
Los Angeles Times and is a founding editor at
the Los Angeles Review of Books.
THE GOOD LIFE: MEN’S LUXURY EVENT
Saturday, May 4
Los Angeles magazine and Land Rover hosted the first annual “The Good Life” men’s
luxury event on Saturday, May 4 at the Malibu Golf Club. The intimate afternoon, just
for the guys, featured exclusive views of the all-new 2014 Range Rover, Range Rover
Sport and Range Rover Evoque. Gourmet bites were prepared by Chef Matt Zuerod
of Malibu and Vine Bar & Grille on the Sub-Zero/Wolf BBQ Trailer and Michelob Ultra
was served at the bars. A putting contest and complimentary 9 holes of golf were also
enjoyed by guests during the picture perfect afternoon. When the men were not out
on the course, they browsed the AG Jeans, Travis Mathews, and Matsuda Eyewear
pop-up shops, tasted a variety of Balvenie Whisky, and were gifted hand-rolled cigars
from El Cañito Cigars.
P H O TO C R E D I T : JIM DONNELLY PHOTO
more sun-drenched. He also brought to the
show some signature imagery—those dreamlike vistas of the sun washing over the desert as
tiny people conduct their life-and-death business. The tall, slim Easterner remembers at first
turning down the series once he learned it was
filmed in New Mexico. “Luckily my wife made
me watch it,” he says. “This show demanded
things of me that no job ever has.”
From top, left to right: the all-new 2014 Range Rover and Range Rover Evoque flanked the entrance of Malibu
Golf Club; AG Jeans and Travis Mathews pop-up shop; hand-rolled cigars from El Cañito Cigars; guests tried
on and shopped the Matsuda Eyewear Collection; guests tasting Balvenie Whisky; Chef Matt Zuerod grilling
up bites on the Sub-Zero/Wolf BBQ Trailer; guys enjoying Michelob Ultra; attendees in the Men’s Luxury
Suite; golfers testing their skills in the putting contest
LOS ANGELES
JULY 2013
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