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.

The Dangerous Cat

Summer nights in Southwest Los Angeles were usually my favorite time to work. By then I had three or four years on the job and was already a training officer working graveyard shift in Southwest Area. Graveyard ran from about eleven at night until seven in the morning, and whenever I was in patrol, I was almost always working either graves or swings. Those were the hours I liked. The city felt different after midnight. The air was cooler, but the city certainly wasn't quieter. If anything, it was busier. The people who lived normal lives were asleep, and another Los Angeles had come alive.

Except during heat waves.

This was one of those late August or early September stretches when some high-pressure system settled over the basin and refused to move. The days were hot, but the nights were worse. The air got heavy and wet. The whole city felt like it had been wrapped in a damp blanket. In a wool uniform and a bulletproof vest, you sweat like a pig.

Which, under the circumstances, seemed appropriate.

At roll call we learned about a series of hot-prowl burglaries. Most people say their house got robbed, but cops don't use the words that way. Robbery is taking property from a person by force or fear. Burglary is entering a structure to steal something. A hot prowl is worse because the burglar is entering occupied homes while people are inside, usually asleep.

I'm not a psychologist, but this always struck me as something more than a property crime. This guy wasn't just stealing purses. He was sneaking into houses while people slept a few feet away. There seemed to be a thrill component to it, like he got a kick out of being inside somebody's home and walking around while they were there. That kind of person always seemed unstable to me and liable to do just about anything if something went wrong. To my way of thinking, this was a real dangerous cat.

There had already been at least a dozen of them in about five days. It was summertime, and people were sleeping with their windows open. Sometimes the suspect appeared to be reaching through an open window and grabbing a purse from a chair or table. Other times he was going all the way inside. Nobody knew how many homes he had actually entered. They only knew about the ones where someone discovered something missing.

That bothered me.

The next morning I went to detectives and got copies of the reports. They had an old map, but I wanted to look at the pattern myself. I pulled out a Thomas Guide, which some of you will remember, and started plotting the locations. What jumped out was that the burglaries weren't spread all over Southwest. They were concentrated in a very small area, roughly from Coliseum north toward 39th and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and from Norton on the west to somewhere around Westside or Welland on the east. It wasn't a big hunting ground. Maybe eight blocks wide and a block or two deep.

That night I went to the watch commander.

Lieutenant Marion Hellenkamp was working the night watch out of Southwest. She had a way of communicating entire conversations with a look. One look meant, "If you say that again, something bad is going to happen to you." The other look meant, "You're clever," or, "You're a good boy." I usually knew which one was coming because it depended almost entirely on my own conduct.

"Give me a shift," I told her. "I'll catch him."

She gave me one of those looks.

Then she asked, "What are you going to do?"

I told her the plan. This guy was taking women's purses. Sometimes from outside the window, sometimes from inside the house. He had been too consistent. To me, it looked like a compulsion. He wasn't taking nights off. He was going to be out there again.

When I finished, she said, "Okay. One shift. Off the books. Off the radio. No calls. Work the problem."

That was all I needed.

My partner David and I got into our black-and-white and headed for the neighborhood. The car was an old Matador with a bench seat, one of those old-style patrol cars that feels prehistoric now. We didn't have portable radios on our belts yet. Southwest hadn't issued them to us. Everything depended on the car radio.

We turned the radio all the way down. Not low. Down. You could not hear it at all. We didn't want any sound coming from the car. The radio was only on in case I had to grab the microphone and broadcast.

Then we rolled all four windows down.

Those cars had a little switch hidden up under the dashboard, to the left of the steering wheel. You had to hunch forward to find it. If you held it while braking, the brake lights didn't come on. You couldn't just flip it and leave it off. You had to hold it. But with the headlights off and that little switch held down, you could move through a neighborhood completely dark.

So that's what we did.

For hours, we rolled through those streets in darkness. No headlights. No brake lights. No radio. The only sounds were the low hum of the engine, the tires moving slowly over the pavement, and our own breathing. We'd ease down a block in the gutter, turn a corner, stop and listen. Then we'd move again. Street after street. Block after block.

The little brake-light kill switch was tucked so far up under the dashboard that I couldn't sit normally while holding it. I had to stay hunched forward in the seat, one hand on the wheel and one hand holding that switch. After a while my back started aching. My shoulder started aching. My neck started aching. There was no comfortable position.

The windows were all down, but we were moving so slowly there wasn't much air coming through the car. The heat just sat there with us. The humidity wrapped itself around you and stayed. Sweat ran down my back and soaked through my uniform shirt. The wool uniform trapped the heat. The vest trapped even more. Every few minutes I'd shift around trying to find a more comfortable position, but there wasn't one.

Neither of us talked much.

You couldn't. Not if you wanted to hear what was happening around you.

A barking dog.

A screen door.

Footsteps.

A voice somewhere down the block.

The sound of somebody moving through a yard.

Every noise mattered.

We were relying on each other to keep our heads on a swivel. While I watched one side of the street, David watched the other. Every parked car. Every alley. Every shadow. Every figure walking down the sidewalk. We had spent enough time reading the reports to know exactly who we were looking for.

I'm not saying the guy was armed. We didn't know that. But anybody willing to sneak into occupied homes in the middle of the night while people were sleeping was dangerous enough. If a homeowner woke up. If somebody confronted him. If something went wrong. Who knew what he'd do? That's one of the reasons these crimes bothered me so much.

The longer the night went on, the more it felt like sitting in a hunting blind.

Except our blind rolled.

Slowly.

Silently.

Through the darkness.

We weren't just driving around looking for a burglar anymore. We were hunting a prowler.

And I knew he was out there.

Sometime deep into the shift we were rolling south on Degnan. The streets in that part of Southwest don't all run clean and straight. Some of them curve toward each other and form little triangles and pockets around Edgehill and Norton. We crossed 39th and kept moving slowly, the car blacked out and quiet.

Then I heard David's door open.

After hours of silence, the sound was like a gunshot.

For hours we had been moving through the neighborhood without talking, listening to every sound around us, staring into the darkness, watching shadows and doorways and parked cars. The hunt had become almost hypnotic. The opening of that door shattered all of it. We'd worked together long enough that neither of us needed an explanation. The sound told me everything I needed to know. There was no discussion. There was only action.

I looked over and he was already halfway out of the car.

Standing right there, only a few feet away, was a man about six foot six inches tall. He had a woman's purse in each hand, and not little purses either. These were big grandma purses, the kind that probably wouldn't qualify as carry-on luggage at the airport.

His eyes were wide open.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then David moved.

The suspect turned and ran.

I reached down, grabbed the microphone, and at the same time threw the car into reverse. The passenger door was still open as I accelerated backward down the street. I broadcast that my partner was in foot pursuit westbound through the houses from Degnan, south of 39th. I shoved the microphone down between the seat cushion and the seatback so it wouldn't fly around or disappear, then slammed the transmission into drive and accelerated forward.

As I crossed Degnan, I looked down the street and saw David still running west. That meant the suspect had already crossed ahead of him. I kept moving, trying to get around them. Then I realized I couldn't hear anything from the radio because we had turned it all the way down. I cranked the volume up and the car suddenly filled with radio traffic.

I turned onto Norton, and just as I did, the suspect popped out from between two houses.

I broadcast again, threw the car into park, jumped out, and joined the chase.

We chased him through yards and over walls. At one point he went over a wall into another yard, but there was a dog on that side, and the dog made it clear that the suspect had selected poorly. He came back over onto our side.

By then the cavalry was coming.

You could hear the sirens closing in. The helicopter came over the neighborhood and bit into the sky above us. Lights were flashing in the distance, but we didn't have portable radios, so once we were out of the car, we couldn't tell anybody exactly where we were.

The suspect finally stopped and put his hands up.

I drew my gun and ordered him to the ground. David put the hooks on him. Hooks are handcuffs, for those who didn't grow up speaking police.

We walked him out to Norton, and that's when the helicopter spotted us. The light came down, and everybody knew we had him in custody.

That was the guy.

The hot-prowl burglaries stopped.

Back at the station, we confirmed he was six foot six. Then I ran him for warrants and criminal history. That's when I found out he had been arrested 108 times.

Lieutenant Hellenkamp came back in and looked at him.

"Does he have a record?" she asked.

"Lieutenant," I said, "he doesn't have a record. He's got an album."

I thought that was pretty funny at the time.

Her look suggested I was not as funny as I thought I was.

Several months later, I got a subpoena to testify at trial at 210 West Temple. By then there had already been a preliminary hearing, and the case was going to jury trial. I don't remember whether David and I discussed it or whether the prosecutor just decided, but I was the one who was going to testify.

Whenever I testified in a jury trial as a patrol officer, I liked to show up in uniform. Some officers wore suits, and that was fine. But if you're telling a jury a story about working patrol, I think the uniform matters. It helps them see you in the role. If your gear is squared away and your shoes are shined and you look like a patrol officer, it becomes part of the story. It gives the jury something to believe in visually.

I walked into the courtroom and immediately noticed something strange. There was only one person at the defense table.

I must have had a quizzical look on my face because the judge leaned toward me and said, "The defendant is representing himself, Officer."

"Oh my," I said out loud.

The district attorney examined me first. I told the story of the surveillance, the blacked-out car, seeing the suspect, the foot pursuit, and the arrest. Then the defendant stood up to cross-examine me.

His first question was, "You testified you saw a man coming out from between two buildings."

"No, sir," I said. "I testified that I saw you coming out from between two buildings."

He tried to object that I wasn't being responsive.

The judge overruled him.

From the judge's tone, I got the feeling this had been going on for a while.

The defendant kept going, line by line. We went through the chase yard by yard, wall by wall, turn by turn. He was trying to challenge every detail. Then we got near the end.

"And then you testified that I jumped over the wall," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"No, I didn't," he said. "I turned around and came back to you."

The courtroom froze.

The jury smiled.

The prosecutor smiled.

I didn't need to say anything.

The defendant had just corrected my testimony by admitting he was the man we had chased through the yards.

That's why you shouldn't be your own lawyer.

He was convicted and got sixty-five years in prison. For all I know, he may still be in prison, or he may have died there. Later, I remember getting a call from the detective.

"He got sixty-five years," the detective said.

"Who?" I asked. "The defendant or the lawyer?"