Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone Read online

  This was not common knowledge in the community until after he was murdered. When he went out to cover the rally that August afternoon, he was still a “Mexican-American journalist.” But by the time his body was carried out of the Silver Dollar, he was a stone Chicano martyr. Salazar would have smiled at this irony, but he would not have seen much humor in the way the story of his death was handled by the cops and the politicians. Nor would he have been pleased to know that almost immediately after his death his name would become a battle cry, prodding thousands of young Chicanos who had always disdained “protest” into an undeclared war with the hated gringo police.

  His paper, the L.A. Times, carried the account of its former foreign correspondent’s death on its Monday front page: “Mexican-American newsman Ruben Salazar was killed by a bullet-like tear gas shell fired by a sheriff’s deputy into a bar during rioting Saturday in East Los Angeles.” The details were hazy, but the new, hastily revised police version was clearly constructed to show that Salazar was the victim of a Regrettable Accident which the cops were not aware of until many hours later. Sheriff’s deputies had cornered an armed man in a bar, they said, and when he refused to come out—even after “loud warnings” (with a bullhorn) “to evacuate”—“the tear gas shells were fired and several persons ran out the back door.”

  At that time, according to the sheriff’s nervous mouthpiece, Lt. Norman Hamilton, a woman and two men—one carrying a 7.65 automatic pistol—were met by deputies, who questioned them. “I don’t know whether the man with the gun was arrested on a weapons violation or not,” Hamilton added.

  Ruben Salazar was not among those persons who ran out the back door. He was lying on the floor inside, with a huge hole in his head. But the police didn’t know this, Lieutenant Hamilton explained, because “they didn’t enter the bar until approximately 8 PM, when rumors began circulating that Salazar was missing,” and “an unidentified man across the street from the bar” told a deputy, “I think there’s an injured man in there.” “At this point,” said Hamilton, “deputies knocked down the door and found the body.” Two and a half hours later, at 10:40 PM, the sheriff’s office admitted that “the body” was Ruben Salazar.

  “Hamilton could not explain,” said the Times, “why two accounts of the incident given to the Times by avowed eyewitnesses differed from the sheriff’s account.”

  For about twenty-four hours Hamilton clung grimly to his original story—a composite, he said, of firsthand police accounts. According to this version, Ruben Salazar had been “killed by errant gunfire ... during the height of a sweep of more than seven thousand people in [Laguna] Park when police ordered everyone to disperse.” Local TV and radio newscasts offered sporadic variations on this theme—citing reports “still under investigation” that Salazar had been shot accidentally by careless street snipers. It was tragic, of course, but tragedies like this are inevitable when crowds of innocent people allow themselves to be manipulated by a handful of violent, cop-hating anarchists.

  By late Sunday, however, the sheriff’s story had collapsed completely—in the face of sworn testimony from four men who were standing within ten feet of Ruben Salazar when he died in the Silver Dollar Cafe at 4045 Whittier Boulevard, at least a mile from Laguna Park. But the real shocker came when these men testified that Salazar had been killed—not by snipers or errant gunfire—by a cop with a deadly tear gas bazooka.

  Acosta had no trouble explaining the discrepancy. “They’re lying,” he said. “They murdered Salazar and now they’re trying to cover it up. The sheriff already panicked. All he can say is, ‘No comment.’ He’s ordered every cop in the county to say nothing to anybody—especially the press. They’ve turned the East L.A. sheriff’s station into a fortress. Armed guards all around it.” He laughed. “Shit, the place looks like a prison—but with all the cops inside!”

  Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess refused to talk to me when I called. The rude aftermath of the Salazar killing had apparently unhinged him completely. On Monday he called off a scheduled press conference and instead issued a statement, saying: “There are just too many conflicting stories, some from our own officers, as to what happened. The sheriff wants an opportunity to digest them before meeting with newsmen.”

  Indeed. Sheriff Pitchess was not alone in his inability to digest the garbled swill that his office was doling out. The official version of the Salazar killing was so crude and illogical—even after revisions—that not even the sheriff seemed surprised when it began to fall apart even before Chicano partisans had a chance to attack it. Which they would, of course. The sheriff had already got wind of what was coming: many eyewitnesses, sworn statements, firsthand accounts—all of them hostile.

  The history of Chicano complaints against cops in East L.A. is not a happy one. “The cops never lose,” Acosta told me, “and they won’t lose this one either. They just murdered the only guy in the community they were really afraid of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter.”

  I could accept that. But it was difficult, even for me, to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it ... because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.

  As for Acosta’s charge of murder, I knew him well enough to understand how he could make that charge publicly ... I also knew him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t try to hang that kind of monstrous bullshit on me. So our phone talk naturally disturbed me ... and I fell to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had told me the truth.

  On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case—either pro or con—from my bundle of notes and newsclips relating to Salazar’s death. By that time at least six reportedly reliable witnesses had made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial points, with the original police version—which nobody believed anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff’s account of that accident; it wasn’t even a good lie.

  Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops—rather than street snipers—the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on “known dissidents” who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, “thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions.”

  Meanwhile, evidence was building up that Ruben Salazar had been murdered—either deliberately or for no reason at all. The most damaging anti-cop testimony thus far had come from Guillermo Restrepo, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter and newscaster for KMEX-TV, who was covering the “riot” with Salazar that afternoon, and who had gone with him into the Silver Dollar Cafe “to take a leak and drink a quick beer before we went back to the station to put the story together.” Restrepo’s testimony was solid enough on its own to cast a filthy shadow on the original police version, but when he produced two more eyewitnesses who told exactly the same story, the sheriff abandoned all hope and sent his scriptwriters back to the sty.

  Guillermo Restrepo is well known in East L.A.—a familiar figure to every Chicano who owns a TV set. Restrepo is the out-front public face of KMEX-TV news ... and Ruben Salazar, until August 29, 1970, was the man behind the news—the editor.

  They worked well together, and on that Saturday when the Chicano “peace rally” turned into a Watts-style street riot, both Salazar and Restrepo decided that it might be wise if Restrepo—a native Colombian—brought two of his friends (also Colombians) to help out as spotters and de facto bodyguards.

  Their names were Gustavo Garcia, age thirty, and Hector Fabio Franco, also thirty. Both men appear in a photograph (taken seconds before Salazar was killed) of a sheriff’s deputy pointing a shotgun at the front door of the Silver D
ollar Cafe. Garcia is the man right in front of the gun. When the picture was taken, he had just asked the cop what was going on, and the cop had just told him to get back inside the bar if he didn’t want to be shot.

  The sheriff’s office was not aware of this photo until three days after it was taken—along with a dozen others—by two more eyewitnesses, who also happened to be editors of La Raza, a militant Chicano newspaper that calls itself “the voice of the East L.A. barrio.”

  The photographs were taken by Raul Ruiz, a twenty-eight-year-old teacher of Latin American studies at San Fernando Valley State College. Ruiz was on assignment for La Raza that day when the rally turned into a street war with the police. He and Joe Razo—a thirty-three-year-old law student with an MA in psychology—were following the action along Whittier Boulevard when they noticed a task force of sheriff’s deputies preparing to assault the Silver Dollar Cafe.

  Their accounts of what happened there—along with Ruiz’s photos—were published in La Raza three days after the sheriff’s office said Salazar had been killed a mile away in Laguna Park, by snipers and/or “errant gunfire.”

  The La Raza spread was a bombshell. The photos weren’t much individually, but together—along with the Ruiz-Razo testimony—they showed that the cops were still lying when they came up with their second (revised) version of the Salazar killing.

  It also verified the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony, which had already shot down the original police version by establishing, beyond any doubt, that Ruben Salazar had been killed, by a deputy sheriff, in the Silver Dollar Cafe. They were certain of that, but no more. They were puzzled, they said, when the cops appeared with guns and began threatening them. But they decided to leave anyway—by the back door, since the cops wouldn’t let anybody out of the front—and that was when the shooting started, less than thirty seconds after Garcia was photographed in front of that shotgun barrel on the sidewalk.

  The weakness in the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony was so obvious that not even the cops could miss it. They knew nothing beyond what had happened inside the Silver Dollar at the time of Salazar’s death. There was no way they could have known what was happening outside, or why the cops started shooting.

  The explanation came almost instantly from the sheriff’s office—once again from Lt. Hamilton. The police had received an “anonymous report,” he said, that “a man with a gun” was inside the Silver Dollar Cafe. This was the extent of their “probable cause,” their reason for doing what they did. These actions, according to Hamilton, consisted of “sending several deputies” to deal with the problem ... and they did so by stationing themselves in front of the Silver Dollar and issuing “a loud warning” with a bullhorn calling all those inside to come outside with their hands above their heads.

  There was no response, Hamilton said, so a deputy then fired two tear gas projectiles into the bar through the front door. At this point two men and a woman fled out the back, and one of the men was relieved by waiting deputies of a 7.65 caliber pistol. He was not arrested—not even detained—and at that point a deputy fired two more tear gas projectiles through the front door of the place.

  Again there was no response, and after a fifteen-minute wait one of the braver deputies crept up and skillfully slammed the front door—without entering, Hamilton added. The only person who actually entered the bar, according to the police version, was the owner, Pete Hernandez, who showed up about half an hour after the shooting and asked if he could go inside and get his rifle.

  Why not? said the cops, so Hernandez went in the back door and got his rifle out of the rear storeroom—about fifty feet away from where Ruben Salazar’s body lay in a fog of rancid CS gas.

  Then, for the next two hours, some two dozen sheriff’s deputies cordoned off the street in front of the Silver Dollar’s front door. This naturally attracted a crowd of curious Chicanos, not all of them friendly—and one, an eighteen-year-old girl, was shot in the leg with the same kind of tear gas bazooka that had blown Ruben Salazar’s head apart.

  The Salazar inquest rumbled on for sixteen days, attracting large crowds and live TV coverage from start to finish. (In a rare demonstration of nonprofit unity, all seven local TV stations formed a combine of sorts, assigning the coverage on a rotating basis, so that each day’s proceedings appeared on a different channel.) The L.A. Times coverage—by Paul Houston and Dave Smith—was so complete and often so rife with personal intensity that the collected Smith-Houston file reads like a finely detailed nonfiction novel. Read separately, the articles are merely good journalism. But as a document, arranged chronologically, the file is more than the sum of its parts. The main theme seems to emerge almost reluctantly, as both reporters are driven to the obvious conclusion that the sheriff, along with his deputies and all his official allies, have been lying all along. This is never actually stated, but the evidence is overwhelming.

  A coroner’s inquest is not a trial. Its purpose is to determine the circumstances surrounding a person’s death—not who might have killed him, or why. If the circumstances indicate foul play, the next step is up to the DA. In California a coroner’s jury can reach only two possible verdicts: that the death was “accidental,” or that it was “at the hands of another.” And in the Salazar case, the sheriff and his allies needed a verdict of “accidental.” Anything else would leave the case open—not only to the possibility of a murder or manslaughter trial for the deputy, Tom Wilson, who finally admitted firing the death weapon; but also to the threat of a $1 million negligence lawsuit against the County by Salazar’s widow.

  The verdict finally hinged on whether or not the jury could believe Wilson’s testimony that he fired into the Silver Dollar—at the ceiling—in order to ricochet a tear gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to come out the front door. But somehow Ruben Salazar had managed to get his head in the way of that carefully aimed shell. Wilson had never been able to figure out, he said, what went wrong.

  Nor could he figure out how Raul Ruiz had managed to “doctor” those photographs that made it look like he and at least one other deputy were aiming their weapons straight into the Silver Dollar, pointing them directly at people’s heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His testimony at the inquest was no different than the story he had told me just a few days after the murder. And when the inquest was over, there was nothing in the 2,025 pages of testimony—from 61 witnesses and 204 exhibits—to cast any serious doubt on the “Chicano Eyewitness Report” that Ruiz wrote for La Raza when the sheriff was still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by “errant gunfire” during the violence at Laguna Park.

  The inquest ended with a split verdict. Smith’s lead paragraph in the October 6 Times read like an obituary: “Monday the inquest into the death of newsman Ruben Salazar ended. The 16-day inquiry, by far the longest and costliest such affair in county history, concluded with a verdict that confuses many, satisfies few and means little. The coroner’s jury came up with two verdicts: death was ‘at the hands of another person’ (four jurors) and death was by ‘accident’ (three jurors). Thus, inquests might appear to be a waste of time.”

  A week later, District Attorney Evelle Younger—a staunch Law & Order man—announced that he had reviewed the case and decided that “no criminal charge is justified,” despite the unsettling fact two of the three jurors who had voted for the “death by accident” verdict were now saying they had made a mistake.

  But by that time nobody really gave a damn. The Chicano community had lost faith in the inquest about midway through the second day, and all the rest of the testimony only reinforced their anger at what most considered an evil whitewash. When the DA announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson, several of the more moderate Chicano spokesmen called for a federal investigation. The militants called for an uprising. And the cops said nothing—at all.

  The night before I left town I stopped by Acosta’s place with Guillermo Restrepo. I had been there earlier, but the air was ex
tremely heavy. As always, on stories like this, some of the troops were getting nervous about The Stranger Hanging Around. I was standing in the kitchen watching Frank put some tacos together and wondering when he was going to start waving the butcher knife in my face and yelling about the time I Maced him on my porch in Colorado (that had been six months earlier, at the end of a very long night during which we had all consumed a large quantity of cactus products; and when he started waving a hatchet around I’d figured Mace was the only answer ... which turned him to jelly for about forty-five minutes, and when he finally came around he said, “If I ever see you in East Los Angeles, man, you’re gonna wish you never heard the word ‘Mace,’ because I’m gonna carve it all over your fuckin’ body.”).

  So I was not entirely at ease watching Frank chop hamburger on a meat block in the middle of East L.A. He hadn’t mentioned the Mace, not yet, but I knew we would get to it sooner or later ... and I’m sure we would have, except that suddenly out in the living room some geek was screaming: “What the hell is this goddamn gabacho pig writer doing here? Are we fuckin’ crazy to be letting him hear all this shit? Jesus, he’s heard enough to put every one of us away for five years!”