Mohammed Ali and Me

Back in 1979, when I was a young policeman, I was working uniformed patrol in Hollywood Division.  My partner and I were driving on Hollywood Blvd one evening on a Saturday night in the middle of summer.  It was still light out, and the sidewalks were crowded with the usual tourists and Gawkers that visit Hollywood.  We were stopped at a red light at Hollywood Blvd and McCadden Ave when I looked over at the group of pedestrians bunched up on the corner waiting for the light to change.  There was a crowd of about 10/15 people waiting there, and right in the middle of them, unaware to anyone in the crowd, was the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, Mohammed Ali, and his then wife Veronica Porsche.

I yelled to my partner, “Stop the car,” and bolted towards the crowd.  You can imagine the faces on the people there as they watched a police officer run straight at them.  I ran right up to the Champ, who had this startled look on his face, and said, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” He suddenly relaxed, let out a laugh, and replied, “Rumble young man, Rumble!”  The crowd finally realized who was standing in their midst, let out a great cheer, and began clapping.

The Champ couldn’t have been more gracious.  We chatted for a few minutes and then he signed my officer’s notebook.  You just never know who you’re going to meet on the streets of Hollywood.   

The Kennedy Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, and J.D. Tippit

As a former LAPD Homicide detective, I am always fascinated by the seeming public allure of conspiracy theories.  As a detective, you try to uncover the facts and find proof of who committed the crime.  The emphasis here is on the word 'proof.'  Whether it is through interviews, forensic evidence, witness identification etc., detectives are constantly trying to find who actually did the crime.  The beauty of conspiracy theory adherents is that they don't have to prove anything, just come up with multiple theories to discount whatever evidence or proof has been gathered.  I dare say that there are more conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination than probably any crime that was ever committed. 

In almost all of these theories, there is this malevolent unknown mastermind who brilliantly set up the most complex web of deception, including numerous small time bit players, that were not only able assassinate an American president, but then masterfully kill the person who the authorities blamed for the crime, Lee Harvey Oswald.  It's as if Professor Moriarity, Sherlock Holmes arch nemesis, pulled off the greatest crime of the century without anyone knowing of his existence.  

I find it amazing that with all the bit players and innumerable pieces of the puzzle that would have had to be in place to accomplish this, not one person has ever revealed him or herself to be part of the plot or shown any evidence to prove it.  Think of the notoriety, not to mention the financial reward that a person would have if they did this, yet no one has ever come forward.  Conspiracy theorists will usually be quick to mention that the key players were all eliminated.  They would want us to believe that the landscape is full of unsolved murders and mysterious disappearances that law enforcement agencies were not only unable to solve but in actuality were linked to this vast, complex conspiracy.  

I think in many cases the forgotten key to this assassination was the killing of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Immediately after the president was shot, it was believed that the assassin had fired the shots from the Texas Book Depository.  The rifle used to kill Kennedy was recovered from the 6th floor of the building.  A description of the suspect had been broadcast to police units throughout the vicinity.  Officer Tippit stopped a man fitting the assassin's description a few blocks from the residence that Lee Harvey Oswald had rented under an assumed name.  After the officer exited his vehicle and approached him, the suspect shot the officer a number of times and then fled the scene on foot.  Multiple independent witnesses later identified Oswald as the man who shot the officer and fled the scene.  Oswald was later apprehended in a movie theater not far from the Tippit shooting.  During the struggle to arrest him, Oswald attempted to fire a gun but it misfired.  After he was apprehended, it was discovered that Oswald worked in the Texas Book Depository. 

In closing, I think a lot of people who doubt Oswald killed Kennedy find it difficult that such a marginally small and troubled man, and not a vast, complex web of deceit could have so radically changed the course of American history in those few seconds in Dallas, Texas in 1963. 

LAPD Officers Shot

On June 25, 2013 the Los Angeles Times reported that two LAPD officers were ambushed as they were waiting for the gate to open at the station parking lot.  On the same day, in a different part of town, another LAPD officer and a parole agent were shot inside a home during a search.

Although it appeared that both shootings were unrelated, it brings up the dangers that police throughout the United States face on a daily basis.  Both situations were on different ends of the threat level meter.  One occured out of nowhere, while officers are sitting in a relatively safe area in a police vehicle waiting to enter the police parking lot.  They were ambushed from the rear and fired on in a location where the threat level would be considered very low.

In the second shooting, the officer and the parole agent were in a much more heightened  threat level as they searched a residence for a suspect.

Police work is a job that can go from sheer boredom to extreme danger in the blink of an eye.  Cops are always looking, their minds working like a computer that can register things in a nano-second that 'don't seem right' or are 'out of place.'  The work is extremely mentally taxing.

Cops are the ultimate symbol of authority in our society. They are the ones that can take away a person's freedom.  They are the ones who stop people from acting out there worst behavior on others.  There are really bad people out their with a grudge against society and the people that stand between them and us are the police.  These people obey their own code, and shooting a cop is their ultimate defiance against the society they hate.

Whether there uniform cops on patrol or detectives working on cases, once they hit the street, they are always on alert.  Even when off-duty, they're always looking.  You cant turn it off.  The price they pay for that over a career is often high blood pressure, broken marriages and alcoholism.  It comes with the job.  But they are the sheep dogs who protect the sheep from the wolves who would prey on them.

Aaron Hernandez Arrest

New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez was arrested yesterday in Massachusetts for murder.  In following the case in news broadcasts and the internet, I was struck by the appearance of the detectives during the multiple searches that were done at Hernandez's residence.  In the videos and photographs I saw of the detectives conducting the searches, I noticed that the majority of them were not wearing a sports jacket.  

When I was a LAPD homicide detective in South Central Los Angeles, my lieutenant was a stickler for us to always wear our sports jackets any time we were at a crime scene or in the public eye.  People even called homicide detectives 'the suits.' It didn't matter how hot it was, whether we were canvassing a neighborhood for witnesses, or baking at a crime scene; he made us wear those jackets.  At the time some thought he was old fashioned and out of touch, but now that I look back on it, he kept up the public image of professionals at work.  Even today as a private investigator, I still wear a sports jacket when doing interviews or witness canvasses.  When people think of police detectives, they think jacket and tie.  Anything less and it minimizes the public perception.  

It was interesting to note that when Hernandez was led out of his house in handcuffs, the two detectives with him both had their jackets and ties on.

Death of the Night Stalker

Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, died in prison on death row on June 7, 2013.  According to his bio on Wikipedia, He was convicted of 13 murders, 5 attempt murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries.  His trial lasted over four years. That was the headlines.  Here’s the reality.  Ramirez’s crime rampage occurred in the spring and summer of 1985.  It was during an extremely hot weather period.  He terrorized the state of California.  People were afraid to open their windows at night, despite the heat, for fear of the Night Stalker.  Although most of his crimes occurred in Los Angeles County, on one weekend he murdered a man and shot his wife in San Francisco and then drove to Orange County were he shot a man and raped his fiancé.  In his long list of crimes, he nearly decapitated one murder victim, gouged out the eyes of another, and on two occasions shot and killed a husband and then raped his wife.  I worked the LAPD Night Stalker task force in the hunt for this serial killer.  He professed allegiance to Lucifer and left pentagrams at crime scenes and on a victim’s body.  Of all the criminals I came in contact with and investigated during my police career, he was the one that was truly evil.  He lived 23 years on death row before he died.  I did not mourn his passing.      

Homicide Rates in the City of Angels

When people talk about homicide rates, I always tell them about the Homicide division I worked in back in the late 1980’s for the Los Angeles Police Department. The police division was the 77^th Street Division, which was located in South Central Los Angeles.  There were seven teams of homicide detectives with a total of 14 detectives along with one detective supervisor.  In 1987 there were 160 murders in that division alone, which is the most for any one police division in the city’s history.  Again, that was not the city wide homicide count; it was just our division’s.  I believe there were 18 LAPD geographical police divisions at the time. It was not uncommon for one team that had the weekend on call in 77^th Division to have two or three homicides over a weekend.

There is no other way to put it, but that 77^th Division was a violent area.  It was the divisional policy to call out a homicide team only if the victim was pronounced dead at the scene.  There were shootings, stabbings, bludgeoning’s and beatings etc. almost daily.  Many of these crimes were gang related with Crips and Blood gangs shooting each other with regularity.  The term ‘drive-by shooting’ became a household word.  On many of these occasions the victim(s) miraculously survived.  Those serious crimes were the victim(s) lived were handled by the crimes against persons (CAPS) unit.  If homicide detectives had to roll out for every serious crime that occurred in the division where the victim was still alive they would have completely worn us out.  It is truly amazing how resilient the human body is and how much punishment it can take. 

I recall on one occasion where we were called out because the victim had been stabbed in the heart and another where the victim had been shot multiple times, including one to the head, and they were still alive but in critical division.   The sergeants at both crime scenes felt that the victims were going to expire and called us out.   We worked all through the night and into the next day conducting the crime scene investigations, canvassing the area and interviewing witnesses.  In both cases the victims survived.  The cases were then turned over to CAPS detectives.  Our case load was too intense to handle anything other than homicides.

It also seemed that no one died till after midnight.  When you had the weekend on-call duty, you’d try not to work overtime on Friday and get home and jump into bed for a few hours’ sleep.  The phone calls from the watch commander’s office notifying us of a murder always seemed to come between midnight and 4:00 AM.  You never got enough sleep, you were always working overtime trying to solve cases, and when you did you were constantly in court for preliminary hearings and murder trials.  

You also knew that you and your partner were the only ones that could obtain justice for the victim.

UNDERCOVER WORK AND DISGUISES

How do you make yourself blend in to your surroundings?  How do you dress if you’re doing foot surveillance or you’re undercover in a specific location and you don’t want to be ‘made’?  Most cops who start out in undercover work immediately grow a beard and long hair.  It’s almost a dead giveaway, like an undercover uniform.  When you see a neatly scrubbed guy with a trimmed beard, long hair, baseball cap, Pendleton shirt and jeans with clean hands and often times a wedding ring in a high crime area, it’s usually a cop. 

I got to be good at disguises when I worked Hollywood Vice and other undercover assignments with the LAPD Metropolitan Division.  When I started out in plainclothes undercover work I thought, “Where would be the best place to look at lots of people and figure out who didn’t look like a cop?”  Answer:  The local mall.  I would go down there and just sit for an hour or so and watch all the people walk by.  I’d take notes on individuals regarding how they dressed, walked and what things they carried.  Pretty soon I came up with a number of disguises that I tested in the field.  The hardest people to fool in those days were the street walkers in Hollywood, so if I could fool them, I could fool anybody.  Here’s a list of just some that I used:

1. Car accident victim-I wore a whiplash neck brace.  For added effect, I would put a plaster cast (taped) on my non-shooting hand.  If I had someone in the car, I would act like I had difficulty turning my head.

2 .Crutches-I’d practice walking with crutches so I had the gait down.  I’d also use a taped on plaster foot cast for added effect.

3. Emergency room scrubs-I put on a pair of scrubs with a stethoscope in my pocket as I drove or walked around.

4. Baseball Uniform-During baseball season I’d put on a baseball uniform and have a bag of bats, balls and a glove or two in the car.

5. Workout clothes-Shorts, sweatshirt or T shirt, towel around the neck and gym bag with a racquetball paddle sticking out. I’d also have a dirty towel along with wet socks and T shirt in the bag.

6. During an interior bank stakeout, I was dressed in a dark suit and tie sitting at a desk in the bank.  I had a shotgun between my legs along with a handgun in the wastebasket next to me.  I also had another gun on my hip.

7. Passed out drunk-On one occasion I had to be the guarding officer for an undercover female officer on a ‘Trick’ task force.  I wore an old watch cap, my old Marine Corps horse blanket overcoat, rubbed in axle grease around my face and hands, rubbed on some cheap wine for aftershave, and for the piece de resistance, mixed wine and oatmeal in a bag and poured it on the ground when I ‘passed out’ just a few feet away from the undercover female on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood.  Pedestrians literally stepped over me like I was part of the scenery.

8. Homeless-Working undercover with my partner in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles, I dressed in an old Navy pea coat, watch cap, unshaven beard, dirty jeans, and carried a sleeping bag tied by some rope over my shoulder.  We followed two car burglars for over three hours before they broke into a car and we arrested.

9. Santa Claus outfit-I arrested 4 different prostitutes who propositioned me on Christmas Eve driving around in a Santa Claus outfit.  I even put a pillow under my costume to have the fat man look. 

Here’s the bottom line regarding disguises; the sky's the limit. Use your imagination and have some fun in the process.

WAS THAT REALLY EDDIE HASKELL?

While I was in the LAPD Police Academy, they would have role playing situations for the recruits where they would have staff personnel acting as suspects in field situations.  On this one day, we were doing vehicle pullovers.  The first recruit officer went through his run and then returned to our group with a quizzical look on his face.  We all asked him how it went.  He said, “You’re not going to believe this, but the driver of the car was Eddie Haskell, the real Eddie Haskell, and he talked and acted just like him.”  Eddie Haskell was the character on the TV show ‘Leave it to Beaver’ when we were kids.  Haskell was the guy who was overly polite to everyone’s parents and was mean and ornery behind their backs.  Everybody of my generation remembered him. 

 We all thought the first guy was hallucinating until it was our turn.  Sure enough, it really was Eddie Haskell.  Well, actually, it was LAPD Officer Ken Osmond, the actor who played the character of Eddie Haskell in the show.  After the show had its full run, he had joined the LAPD.  At the time I was in the academy, he was one of the staff instructors.  He looked exactly as he did when he was on TV.  He later became a motorcycle officer with the department.  Can you imagine getting pulled over by a motor officer and getting a traffic ticket and looking up and seeing it was Eddie Haskell!  I’m sure he had a lot of funny stories as to how people reacted to him when he cited them.

The dangers of police work caught up to Ken Osmond.  He went in foot pursuit of a suspect who shot him three times.  Two shots hit him in the chest, but luckily he was wearing a bullet proof vest.  The third shot ricocheted off of his belt buckle and he survived.  He eventually retired from the job.

WHEN IT RAINED BULLETS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

Back when I worked as a police officer and homicide detective for the LAPD in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a custom there that on New Year’s Eve the local citizens would fire off their guns in celebration.  You would hear a cacophony of gunshots from 11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve till about 1:00 AM New Year’s Morning.  If you were working patrol during those hours, you would try to get back to the station and sit in the parking lot to avoid getting hit.  I vividly recall pulling into the station parking lot and seeing a guy who lived in one of the apartments next to the station run out on his porch and fire a bunch of rounds from his gun into the air right around the stroke of midnight.   If you couldn’t make it back in by then because you were on  a call, as soon as you cleared that scene you’d at least try to make it to a freeway underpass if you weren’t close to the station.  It wasn’t that people took a free pass to shoot at the cops, it was just that there were so many guns down there and so many rounds going off you might become an accidental casualty.  Newton’s Law of Gravity, what comes up must come down, definitely plays into effect here.  All those rounds being shot in the air have to go someplace, so if they go up, eventually there going to go down. They also come down at the same speed they went up.  My homicide partner at 77^th Street Division handled a murder that happened just around midnight one New Year’s Eve where the unfortunate victim happened to be walking down the street when a spent bullet  came down and hit him on top of the head, killing him instantly.  With so many people firing their guns off in celebration in the area, how were you going to identify the shooter?  The case went unsolved. One year we put a tape recorder on top of the station on New Year’s Eve and left it up there for about an hour.  When we played it back, it sounded like the Battle of Hue City (Viet Nam).  So every year when I celebrate the New Year, my memories take me back to the one night each year when it rained bullets in the City of Angels.

THE BEST DETERRENT TO COP KILLING

As a brand new officer with the LAPD, I was fortunate to have as a training officer the best street cop I ever worked with, and I worked with a lot of them.  This was the first night I ever worked with him.  As it was getting close to End of Watch, we started the perennial circling pattern near the station so when the on-coming shift came down we’d get in quick.  It was near midnight and we were driving in a residential neighborhood when we both noticed two men peering into the picture window of the corner house.  Even though I had only a few months on the job, I knew something wasn’t right.  My training officer stopped the car, and we both jumped out with our guns drawn.  The two men both started walking away from the house in different directions.  As we yelled for them to freeze, they both reached into their waistbands and tossed guns on us.  After proning them out on the ground and calling for backup, they were taken into custody without further incident.

Once we got them back to the station, my training officer interviewed them separately with me just sitting there.  One of them confessed that they were hit men sent out from the East Coast to kill the people who lived in that house.  He was a parolee and had done a lot of prison time back east.  My training officer asked him, what with his prior record, the fact that he was on parole and had a gun, and knowing he would go back to prison again for this, why didn’t he shoot it out with us.  I will never forget what the suspect said.  He told my partner, “You both came out of the police car with your guns out, and you were ready.  I didn’t want to die!”  My training officer then told him, “Your right.  We’d of shot you down like a dog in the street.”

After we booked them, I talked to my training officer about that conversation.  He told me that every time he got a gun off of a suspect, he would always ask them why they didn’t shoot it out and try to get away.  Invariably they’d say something like you were ready, or it wasn’t worth it, but whatever the reason they’d initially give, they’d usually end by saying they didn’t want to die.  He would give them that signature line about being shot down like a dog in the street to make an imprint on their mind.  He told me, “Someday that guy may have the drop on some cop. I want him to think about the consequences and what’s going to happen to him if he kills a cop.  I figure someday that will save a cop’s life.”

From that day on every time I got a gun off of a suspect, I had the same conversation and told him the same thing.  I’m sure there’s more then one cop walking around alive today because a suspect who had a gun and had the drop on him hesitated when he thought of the consequences.

HOW I BECAME A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

One night while I was still a rookie police officer with the LAPD, my training officer and I made a felony arrest.  In those days, in order to book an arrestee for a felony, you had to get booking approval from the night watch detective.  On this particular night, our division night watch detective was on a day off, so we had to go to another division to get booking approval.  When I handed their night watch detective the booking approval, I noticed he was looking at what appeared to be an identification card that had his photograph on it.  Being naturally inquisitive, I asked him what the card was. He replied that it was his private investigative license.  I was non-pulsed, to say the least.  I asked him how a police officer could also be a private investigator.  He told me that the department allowed you to work as a private investigator off-duty as long as you didn’t work any criminal cases or civil cases involving the City of Los Angeles.  He added that you needed three years on the job before you could apply to the state and take the PI test.  You also needed a work permit from the department after you received the license.  I filed that away in my mind under things to do later, and thirteen years later I took the test and obtained my PI license.  Another chance encounter, but one that would later have a large impact on my life.

PS-Some years after I retired, after a headline grabbing case, the LAPD rescinded their approval of allowing officers work off-duty as PIs.

HOW I BECAME A COP

I’m a big believer in Divine intervention.  What I mean is that oftentimes we try to plan and calculate our important life decisions, but what usually happens it’s the chance encounter or the ‘lucky’ incident that dramatically affect our lives.  Take my life, for instance.  I became a Los Angeles police officer by what I think was divine intervention.  I was still in the Marines and had returned from my first overseas deployment.  I was stationed at a large naval base on the east coast.  I had decided to leave the Marine Corps and go into law enforcement.  I was due to be separated from the Corps in one week.  I was late for chow and took a shortcut to get to the mess hall.  Just by chance I ran into my old battalion Sergeant Major who I had served with overseas.  Neither of us had known the other had been stationed at this base.  After I advised him I was getting out of the Marine Corps, he asked me what I was going to do.  I told him I wanted to go into law enforcement, and I was going to apply to either Philadelphia PD or NYPD.  I also mentioned that they, like most police departments on the East Coast, had a one year residency requirement.  The Sergeant Major then asked me if I had ever thought about the Los Angeles Police Department.  He might as well have asked me if I had thought about a police department on the moon.  When I brought up the fact that not only did I not know anyone in Los Angeles, I thought I might have a tough time finding a job there while I waited for the one year residency to kick in.  He then floored me with the fact that not only did they not have a residency requirement; he had a high ranking contact on the department.  One week later, I was an honorably discharged Marine and flying across the country to Los Angeles.  I spent 22 years working as a police officer and later as a detective, and as they say, the rest is history.

HOW CHANCE ENCOUNTERS CAN EFFECT OUR LIVES

I’m a big believer in Divine intervention.  What I mean is that oftentimes we try to plan and calculate our important life decisions, but what usually happens it’s the chance encounter or the ‘lucky’ incident that dramatically affect our lives. Take my life, for instance.  I became a Los Angeles police officer by what I think was divine intervention.  I was still in the Marines and had returned from my overseas deployment.  I was stationed at a large naval base on the east coast.  I had decided to leave the Marine Corps and go into law enforcement.  I was due to be separated from the Corps in one week.  I was late for chow and took a shortcut to get to the mess hall.  Just by chance I ran into my old battalion Sergeant Major who I had served with overseas.  Neither of us had known the other had been stationed at this base.  After I advised him I was getting out of the Marine Corps, he asked me what I was going to do.  I told him I wanted to go into law enforcement, and I was going to apply to either Philadelphia PD or NYPD.  I also mentioned that they, like most police departments on the East Coast, had a one year residency requirement.  The Sergeant Major then asked me if I had ever thought about the Los Angeles Police Department.  He might as well have asked me if I had thought about a police department on the moon.  When I brought up the fact that not only did I not know anyone in Los Angeles, I thought I might have a tough time finding a job while I waited for the one year residency to kick in.  He then floored me with the fact that not only did they not have a residency requirement; he had a high ranking contact on the department from his days when he had been stationed there on recruiting duty.  One week later, I was an honorably discharged Marine and flying across the country to Los Angeles.  I spent 22 years working as a police officer and later as a detective for the LAPD, and as they say, the rest is history.

I'D RATHER BE LUCKY THEN GOOD 101

Once when I was a homicide detective in South Central Los Angeles, we we’re handling a very difficult gang murder.  It had happened in broad daylight on a residential street, but this particular gang had intimidated the neighborhood to the point where after a number of weeks we still didn’t have an eye witness to the murder.  We had already canvassed the neighborhood on two previous occasions, but if you’re dead in the water on a case you go back to Detecting 101.  So we went back out for a third canvass.  We came to one particular house where we had already interviewed the two elderly residents.  One was blind and the other one had beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  Being dogged detectives, and having no other good clues to work with, we again door knocked it.  When we were let into the residence, I noticed a middle aged female sitting in the kitchen.  She looked towards me, and then immediately looked down at the floor.  I walked down the hallway to where she was sitting and the first thing I said to her was, “You saw it, didn’t you!”  She slowly looked back up and nodded her head.  She identified the shooter and the other participants and we were able to solve the case.  Like I said, I'd rather be lucky then good.