Knowing Nothing Probably Saved My Life

Maybe there’s an advantage to not knowing anything.

It was Christmas Eve, 1981, and I was working graveyard at LAPD’s Southwest Division. We went to work around 10:00 that night and would finish at 7:00 Christmas morning. Almost everybody else had been given the night off, and I remember looking around the roll call room and seeing something I don't think I ever saw again during my career. Nobody had stripes except the sergeant. There wasn't a lieutenant. There was just one three-striper running the watch and a room full of slick sleeves.

I was definitely one of them. I had about twenty months on the job and had been off probation for maybe two months. I was 22 years old and brand new to Southwest. My partner was even newer. He had less than a month on the job. We knew nothing, although at the time we didn't know that we knew nothing. At 22, I probably thought twenty months made me fairly experienced. More than forty-five years later, I can assure you it did not.

Right out of roll call, we drove over to a donut shop around Exposition and Crenshaw. It was open even on Christmas Eve, and we got some coffee. There wasn't much happening on the radio, so I spent some time getting to know the kid sitting next to me. It was cold for Los Angeles, one of those wonderfully crisp winter nights when the onshore flow has blown all the garbage out of the air and everything seems unusually clear. I was wearing a long-sleeved uniform shirt, but there wasn't a single service stripe on it. You can see that in the photograph.

We finished our coffee, got back into the radio car and started driving. Somewhere around Crenshaw and Adams, I smelled something. It smelled bad, very bad, and it was strong enough that I turned the car around. There were industrial properties scattered through that part of the division, so I figured something might be coming from one of them. I didn't say much to my partner because I didn't really have anything to tell him. He knew even less than I did.

I drove south on Crenshaw and started working the side streets, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. The farther I went, the stronger it became. It was unmistakably chemical, although I couldn't have told you what chemical. Eventually I worked my way into an alley somewhere around Jefferson and Second or Third Avenue, and there the smell became almost overwhelming. Whatever it was, I had found it.

We pulled over and put ourselves Code Six for a general investigation. Nothing dramatic. We were just getting out of the car to see what was going on. But getting out of a police car in 1981 was different from getting out of one today. We didn't have portable radios. The radio was in the car, so when you walked away from the car, you walked away from your communications. That's what the two of us did. We left the radio car and walked down the alley trying to find the source of the smell.

There was an open garage door, and when I looked inside, there was what appeared to be a chemical factory operating in the garage. I had no idea what kind of factory it was. I didn't know what they were making, and I certainly didn't know that I was looking at a massive clandestine PCP laboratory where something had apparently gone wrong with the system that was supposed to contain the fumes. I didn't know any of that. I just knew that what I was looking at wasn't right.

Then I noticed the guns. There were rifles stacked against the garage wall toward the rear. Even with only twenty months on the job, I understood enough to realize that this had suddenly become something more than two cops trying to figure out where a bad smell was coming from. We got some help coming, and from that point forward Christmas morning changed considerably.

People who had probably expected to sleep through Christmas morning started getting telephone calls. Detectives came out. Narcotics people came. Crime scene and fingerprint people came. Specialists had to deal with the chemicals and determine what we had actually walked into and whether it was safe. More police officers arrived. Evidence started coming out of the location. Before long, newspaper reporters and photographers were there. Our very quiet Christmas graveyard shift had turned into a major police operation.

As everything was sorted out, the scale of what we had stumbled across became apparent. It was a major PCP laboratory containing an estimated $3 million in street-value PCP. There was marijuana, two plastic bags containing a substantial amount of heroin, and containers filled with assorted pills. Then there were the guns. There were 64 of them.

The photograph taken later tells a lot of that story if you know what you're looking at. I'm holding a large bag filled with marijuana. The two plastic bags sitting on top of it contain heroin. You can see ammunition, containers and boxes of evidence around me. In the background are some of the rifles, including a sawed-off M1 carbine. Some of the weapons have a strange silver appearance because by then the fingerprint people had dusted them for prints. The picture isn't just a young cop posing with a drug seizure. It's a photograph of a crime scene that had become such a big deal that a whole bunch of people had been awakened on Christmas morning because of it.

The operation was connected to the Black Guerrilla Family, a violent prison gang. This wasn't a couple of guys making a little dope in their garage. We had wandered into a substantial criminal operation involving dangerous chemicals, large quantities of narcotics, ammunition and dozens upon dozens of firearms. That's the part of the photograph that looks very different to me today than it did when I was 22.

At 22, I saw the bust. Today, I see the guns. I see the fingerprint powder on them and the ammunition sitting nearby. I see all the evidence that had to be processed. I think about the detectives, narcotics officers, fingerprint people and chemical specialists who had expected to spend Christmas morning somewhere else. I think about the reporters and photographers who showed up because the two slick sleeves from Southwest had somehow managed to stumble into something big enough to make the newspaper.

And then I think about how we found it. We weren't conducting a narcotics investigation. We didn't have an informant. Nobody had given us intelligence about a PCP laboratory or a prison gang. We didn't recognize the smell of PCP, didn't know what kind of operation could produce an odor like that, didn't know who might be protecting it and certainly didn't know there were 64 guns associated with the place. We smelled something bad and followed our noses until we found an open garage door.

There are a dozen ways I can explain today why walking down that alley was a bad idea. If I had understood what I was smelling, I would have approached the situation completely differently. I would have been thinking about cover, suspects, weapons, chemical exposure, containment, backup and escape routes. I would have been thinking about all the things that experience eventually teaches a police officer to think about.

Instead, I was thinking, What the hell is that smell?

And strangely enough, I sometimes wonder if that ignorance saved us. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe whoever was there saw us coming and disappeared. Maybe they didn't perceive two young patrol cops wandering around an alley as much of a threat. After all these years, I don't know exactly what happened on the other side of that garage door before we arrived, and I'm certainly not going to manufacture an answer now.

But there is another possibility that has occurred to me over the years. Maybe Christmas Eve worked both ways. Southwest Division was clearly running the B team that night. The experienced people had Christmas off. There wasn't even a lieutenant in the building. One sergeant and a collection of slick sleeves were holding down the fort. My partner had less than a month on the job, and I had twenty months and probably considerably more confidence than knowledge.

Maybe the PCP lab was running its B team, too. Maybe the people who normally protected an operation containing millions of dollars in drugs and 64 guns had Christmas Eve off themselves. Maybe whoever had been left behind wasn't paying attention. Maybe when the containment system failed and the fumes started pouring into the neighborhood, they decided that discretion was the better part of spending Christmas morning somewhere else. I have no idea, but given what was ultimately found inside that place, something kept this from becoming a very different story.

The B team had stumbled onto the B team.

That may have been our only advantage. Two inexperienced cops wandered into a major drug operation connected to a violent prison gang, and nothing happened to us. If their A team had been there, I suspect they would have handled our arrival very differently. If our A team had been working, they certainly would have handled the discovery differently. Instead, for whatever reason, a couple of slick sleeves walked into something they didn't understand and walked back out again.

The photograph ended up appearing inside the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on December 26, 1981. The newspaper itself disappeared years ago. I don't think the photograph had anything to do with that.

I've kept the picture ever since, and people have seen it sitting in my office over the years: a very young cop with no service stripes, holding a bag of marijuana and surrounded by drugs, ammunition, evidence and fingerprint-dusted guns. At 22, I looked at that photograph and saw a hell of a drug bust. Today, I look at those 64 guns and think about two slick sleeves walking down an alley without portable radios because something smelled bad.

That's really what the photograph is to me now. A 22-year-old cop with twenty months on the job, a partner with less than one, an almost empty Southwest Division, a cold and crystal-clear Los Angeles night, a cup of coffee and a terrible chemical smell that we were just ignorant enough to follow down an alley.

There are plenty of times in police work when not knowing what you're doing can get you killed. On Christmas morning in 1981, I think the opposite happened. Maybe the B team at Southwest simply got lucky and stumbled onto the B team at the PCP lab. Whatever happened, more than forty-five years later, I can look at that photograph and recognize something I couldn't possibly have understood when it was taken.

Knowing nothing probably saved my life.