Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (10 page)

Acosta has been practicing law in the barrio for three years. I met him a bit earlier than that, in another era—which hardly matters here, except that it might be a trifle less than fair to run this story all the way out to the end without saying at least once, for the record, that Oscar is an old friend and occasional antagonist. I first met him, as I recall, in a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen, when he lumbered up to me and started raving about “ripping the system apart like a pile of cheap hay,” or something like that ... and I remember thinking, “Well, here’s another one of those fucked-up, guilt-crazed dropout lawyers from San Francisco—some dingbat who ate one too many tacos and decided he was really Emiliano Zapata.”

Which was okay, I felt, but it was a hard act to handle in Aspen in that high white summer of 1967. That was the era of
Sgt. Pepper’s, Surrealistic Pillow
, and the original Buffalo Springfield. It was a good year for everybody—or for
most
people, anyway. There were exceptions, as always. Lyndon Johnson was one, and Oscar Acosta was another. For entirely different reasons. That was not a good summer to be either the president of the United States or an angry Mexican lawyer in Aspen.

Oscar didn’t hang around long. He washed dishes for a while, did a bit of construction work, bent the county judge out of shape a few times, then took off for Mexico to “get serious.” The next thing I heard, he was working for the public defender’s office in L.A. That was sometime around Christmas of 1968, which was not a good year for anybody—
except Richard Nixon and perhaps Oscar Acosta. Because by that time Oscar was beginning to find his own track. He was America’s only “Chicano lawyer,” he explained in a letter, and he liked it. His clients were all Chicanos and most were “political criminals,” he said. And if they were guilty it was only because they were “doing what had to be done.”

That’s fine, I said. But I couldn’t really get into it. I was all
for it
, you understand, but only on the basis of a personal friendship.
Most
of my friends are into strange things I don’t totally understand—and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn’t change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?

Whatever’s right, I say. Never fuck with a friend’s head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then—well, you do what has to be done.

Which more or less explains how I suddenly found myself involved in the murder of Ruben Salazar. I was up in Portland, Oregon, at the time, trying to cover the National American Legion Convention and the Sky River Rock Festival at the same time ... and I came back to my secret room in the Hilton one night to find an “urgent message” to call Mr. Acosta in Los Angeles.

I wondered how he had managed to track me down in Portland. But I knew, somehow, what he was calling about. I had seen the
L.A. Times
that morning, with the story of Salazar’s death, and even at a distance of two thousand miles it gave off a powerful stench. The problem was not just a gimp or a hole in the story; the whole goddamn thing was wrong. It made no sense at all.

The Salazar case had a very special hook in it: not that he was a Mexican or a Chicano, and not even Acosta’s angry insistence that the cops had killed him in cold blood and that nobody was going to do anything about it. These were all proper ingredients for an outrage, but from my own point of view the most ominous aspect of Oscar’s story was his charge that the police had deliberately gone out on the streets and killed a reporter who’d been giving them trouble. If this was true, it meant the ante was being upped drastically. When the cops declare open season on
journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of “unlawful protest” a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day—and not just for journalists.

Ruben Salazar was killed in the wake of a Watts-style riot that erupted when hundreds of cops attacked a peaceful rally in Laguna Park, where five thousand or so liberal/student/activist type Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of “Aztlan citizens” to fight for the U.S. in Vietnam. The police suddenly appeared in Laguna Park, with no warning, and “dispersed the crowd” with a blanket of tear gas followed up by a Chicago-style mop-up with billyclubs. The crowd fled in panic and anger, inflaming hundreds of young spectators who ran the few blocks to Whittier Boulevard and began trashing every store in sight. Several buildings were burned to the ground; damage was estimated at somewhere around a million dollars. Three people were killed, sixty injured—but the central incident of that August 29, 1970, rally was the killing of Ruben Salazar.

And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to “carry on the spirit of Ruben Salazar.”

There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody’s militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal
Los Angeles Times
. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like the work. So he must have been slightly bored when the
Times
called him back from the war zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering “local affairs.”

He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the
Times
down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as news director for KMEX-TV—the “Mexican-American station,” which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department
so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got onto a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything—including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries strongly suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to “tone down his coverage.” And each time he told them to fuck off.

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.