Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  “I TOLD MR. LLOYD I’M NOT GOING FIRST,” CLAYTON ADAMS TOLD JUDGE HENNIGAN on the morning of May 18, 1982. “That’s it. That’s the rule. I’m not going first.”

  “Mr. Adams, I’ll remind you, you don’t necessarily make the rules in this case,” Hennigan said. The judge had entered the courtroom that morning expecting Adams to begin his opening argument only to find he had yet another situation on his hands.

  “For the identical reason stated by Mr. Adams, I have the same problem,” Alan Olson told the judge with equal finality.

  “All right. Do you agree, Mr. Lloyd, that in view of your position on this, that it would be logically better for you to open the defense case?”

  “No,” replied Lloyd.

  “I gather everybody wants to go last. That cannot be,” sighed the beleaguered judge.

  The three attorneys declared that whoever went first would need at least another week to prepare for opening and witnesses in light of Lloyd’s revelation. Hennigan reluctantly agreed to the continuation and then ordered the bailiff to dismiss the increasingly frustrated jury for another entire week. “As far as who goes first, in view of the attitude of all three defendants, I think the only way I could handle that is to draw lots or something and decide who will go first.”

  This made nobody happy. “If I should lose in the lottery, I will lose big,” Alan Olson complained. “It is as simple as that.”

  “I would oppose any kind of chance or gambling, whatever you want to call it, in a case of this nature,” Adams added.

  Hennigan could find no other alternative. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “I will do what I suggested. I’m going to get three slips. And I have written One, Two, and Three on them.” They each picked a slip. “All right. Who got what?”

  Olson held up his slip with the number 2 written on it. “I got Three,” said Lloyd. Clay Adams crumpled up the slip of paper in his hand, disgusted with the whole situation. “I defer to Mr. Lloyd,” he said dryly.

  “Mr. Adams, you will commence your case with your opening statement on Monday at nine o’clock and will be prepared to have your witnesses follow on that.”

  CLAYTON ADAMS FELT AS THOUGH HE HAD ACHIEVED THE MOST IMPORTANT part of his defense efforts on the part of George Smith during cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses. Through his own witnesses, he set his sights on having Smith’s mountainside confession to detective Ross Dvorak thrown out. “We intend to produce evidence that the taped interrogation of George Smith was not only conducted under the most cruel kind of circumstances, but that there is definite evidence of tampering, tampering to the extent that certain deletions have been made.”

  There was no question the breaks in the tape by Dvorak were unusual and at seemingly random intervals. An acoustic expert named George Papcun testified that after analyzing the tapes there was clear evidence of tampering, which Adams contended were deletions by police of all the time George had said he no longer wanted to speak with Dvorak and had requested an attorney. Additionally, Adams called in doctors and produced medical reports showing that Smith had lost so much blood that he was not competent to waive his Miranda rights.

  With his military background and desperate need to prove the fatal bullet did not come from Russell Harven’s gun, Alan Olson had become the ballistics and criminology expert of the group. After all his haranguing of prosecution witnesses, it was the testimony of one of his own that allowed the least experienced of the defense attorneys to score what might have been the single greatest success among them. It was Olson’s ballistics expert Donald Dunn, with his comparison of lands and grooves in bullets to specific gun barrels, who convincingly ruled out Russ Harven as the killer. Never mind that Dunn all but destroyed the friendly fire defense in the process by also ruling out D. J. McCarty’s weapon. For Olson, it was far more important to keep the fatal bullet out of his client’s gun than it was to put it into McCarty’s.

  After fifteen witnesses, Olson rested his case. It had taken Adams and Olson a total of three full weeks to present their cases. As they left the courtroom on Friday, June 4, there was nothing left for them to do but wait and see what surprises Michael Lloyd had up his sleeve.

  ON THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, LLOYD DROPPED THE SAME BOMBSHELL ON THE jury that he had on the other two defense teams a few weeks before. “What I will prove to you is that Christopher Harven didn’t have any guns that day in any of those crimes. He did not have any guns with him, and he did not participate in the crimes as they are alleged. What we’ll show to you in our defense is that the idea for the robbery, the conception of the robbery came from Billy and Manny Delgado. They enlisted the help of one of their friends by the name of Jerry. His last name is Cohen, C-O-H-E-N.”

  The jurors stared back at Lloyd with knitted brows and looks of general confusion. There were hushed whispers among the spectators. Six months into this damn trial and suddenly . . . this? Who the fuck is Jerry Cohen?

  As the jury looked on in bewilderment, Lloyd outlined how poor judgment, bad luck, and exploitation at the hands of a mercurial figure named Jerry Cohen had led his client to be charged with forty-six felony counts he did not commit. According to Lloyd, Chris had backed out of the heist at the last second and was not even there for the robbery of the bank or the shootout at the intersection of Fourth and Hamner. Yes, Chris had driven the stolen truck all the way up to the washout and then fled into the mountains, but only after being picked up while walking on Hamner north of the bank and forced to by Manny Delgado and Cohen.

  Perhaps the most fascinating character in the trial of the Norco 3 was a man who did not even exist. As presented, Jerry Cohen was a composite of George Smith in attitude and Chris Harven in actions. It was Jerry Cohen who had planned and led the robbery, who was the dominant personality of the group, the one who pressured the others to follow through with the scheme when they had wanted to back out. That guy inside the bank vault, outside the bank shooting a Heckler .223 at Glyn Bolasky, stealing a truck at gunpoint, sticking a .45-caliber revolver out the driver’s window to fire bullets into the patrol units of Rolf Parkes and Herman Brown? Yeah, that was Jerry Cohen, too. Jerry Cohen had also been the third guy along with Manny and Billy who kidnapped Gary Hakala and stole the van. So where was Jerry Cohen now? Well, just like Gary Hakala said four months ago: “I can tell you that right now that I believe that there is still a man out there.”

  Through cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, Lloyd had already established no less than five witnesses having heard the robbers call out the name “Jerry” inside the bank. Glyn Bolasky testified to seeing a man in a khaki poncho much like those worn by the bank robbers running north on Hamner less than a minute before the 211 tone went out. And then there had been Gary Hakala’s definitive statements that none of the three defendants in the courtroom had been involved in stealing his van and that neither of the getaway cars parked at the Little League field at Detroit and Hamner had been the car in the parking lot at the Brea Mall. Over the next two weeks, Lloyd called an additional fifteen witnesses who either saw people they thought were suspects fleeing in various places along the pursuit route or testified to seeing five suspects in the yellow truck at points along the pursuit.

  NEAR THE END OF HIS WITNESS LIST, LLOYD CALLED JUANITA DELGADO BACK to the stand a second time. Still just barely over twenty years old, Delgado was somber and uncomfortable as she briefly testified that, no, she did not remember meeting, or her husband Manny ever mentioning, anyone named Chris Harven. Excused from the stand, Juanita Delgado lingered for a moment, her eyes searching the three men responsible for leaving her a widow and her children fatherless.

  “Could I ask a question?” she said softly. “Where is Chris? Who is Chris?”

  “The gentleman who is seated right next to me is Chris,” Michael Lloyd said.

  “Oh, okay,” she said, studying Harven. “I just wanted to know.”

  WITH ALL THEIR WITNESSES CALLED, LLOYD AND HARVEN WERE NOW FACED with the task of weaving
a tale which would somehow stitch together all the threads of corroborating details about Jerry Cohen while also explaining away a vast amount of glaringly contradictory evidence, most of it coming from Chris himself.

  “Please state your name for the record.”

  “Christopher Gregory Harven.”

  Chris Harven took his seat on the witness stand dressed in the dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie he had worn most days of the trial. He was clean-shaven except for a neatly trimmed mustache, hair cut stylishly short and parted down the middle.

  “Do you know of a person by the name of Jerry Cohen?” Michael Lloyd began, after walking his client through a brief set of autobiographical questions.

  “Yes, I do,” Chris answered, speaking softly in his deep, baritone voice.

  “When did you first meet him?”

  “I must have met him in late February or early March of 1980.”

  “Who introduced him to you?”

  “Manny.”

  Chris said Cohen was not a friend, just some dude who would come by occasionally when Manny and Billy were at the Mira Loma house.

  “Could you give us a description of what Jerry Cohen looks like?”

  “Roughly, five foot ten, a hundred and sixty-five to a hundred and seventy pounds. Brown hair, much redder than mine, sort of what you would call the Prince Valiant style. Parted in the middle, a mustache and a goatee that I believe ran along the edge down to here.”

  “And the complexion of skin, was it about the same complexion, or was Jerry darker or lighter?”

  “Jerry always had a good tan.”

  Chris described Cohen as a Caucasian who often affected Chicano ways.

  “What kind of car did Jerry Cohen drive?”

  “A 1963 blue lowrider. Very metallic blue in color. Lowered. It was a nice car.”

  “Did you know the make of the car?”

  “Chevrolet.”

  Not coincidentally, that was precisely the vehicle Gary Hakala had described seeing in the Brea Mall, right down to the color, make, style, and year.

  Originally, Harven had just thought of Jerry Cohen as odd, but soon developed a dimmer view of the man. “He had radical ideas that didn’t correspond with the views with the rest of us, especially myself. He had a tendency to think that guns were power. He had a tendency to think that, you know, that there was different ways of making a buck. You know, he just had all sorts of ideas that were not consistent with my train of thought.”

  Chris tried to explain his motivation for becoming involved in the robbery plan to begin with, elevating it to a higher calling than simple greed.

  “Was there any particular interest that you had in common?”

  “Yes. All of us were interested in survivalism.”

  “What purpose did you have as to being a survivalist?”

  “Well, I feared there would be, and I still do, that there is going to be tremendous social upheaval around the world, wars, famines, droughts, economic collapse, so on and so forth. And I feel that I want to be among the ones that survive when it’s complete and ran its course.”

  Harven explained that his failure to back out earlier than the morning of the robbery was also noble in nature. “Other people were recruited into this operation that were dependent on me. There was the old ‘am I going to let everybody down?’ thing, so I just, you know, went along.” He said he had tried his best to talk the others out of going through with the heist. “I had told them this is completely out of our department; that one thing was going to lead to another; that this whole thing is rotten; it is not going to work. And that, you know, I tried to persuade them all to give it up.” Failing at this, Harven felt he owed it to the others to keep his word and participate. “I couldn’t let the people down that were in on this.” On the day of the robbery, Chris said he brought all his guns and ammo along as planned because he promised he would.

  Upon meeting up with Manny, Billy, and Jerry Cohen in the parking lot of the Little League field later that day, Harven professed shock at discovering there had been a kidnapping. “‘What’s this?’ I go, ‘This is just what I said, one thing is going to lead to another. I mean, this wasn’t agreed upon; that guy wasn’t agreed upon.’ I go, ‘It’s gotten completely out of hand.’” Again, Chris argued not to go forward. “And then I turned to them and I said, ‘But it’s not too late. We can just leave this guy and leave this van and we’ll get in our cars and forget it.’”

  Chris had convinced everyone to give up on the job except Jerry Cohen. “Jerry would go, ‘You’re just screwing up the operation. Every time we get together you always screw up the operation. You’re always talking this way or that way.’ And why don’t I just shut up.”

  Harven said he finally gave up. “It got to the point where I wasn’t making my point, nobody was going along with me and I told them that, ‘Hey, I’m getting out,’ you know, and they’re telling me, ‘Go ahead and get out, we want you to get out.’”

  From there, Chris said he was unceremoniously booted out of the van at the Kmart parking lot, but not before Jerry Cohen forced him to leave his guns behind. “I had it moved over by the door, and at the point where I got out, Jerry put his foot on it and said, ‘Hey, we are short of rifles anyway; you are screwing up the operation all the way around. You got your skin; you got what you want, just get out of here.’”

  “Okay. Did he say anything else to you at that time?” Lloyd asked, leading Chris to an explanation for a critical flaw in their sixth-man defense: Why had Harven never mentioned Jerry Cohen before now—not to detective Larry Malmberg, not to investigators, not even at the preliminary hearing?

  “He said if I ever open my mouth about his involvement, that he knew where my girlfriend lived; he knew where my son lived; he knew where my mom lives, and he knew where to find me.” In other words, Christopher Harven was not only willing to rob a bank to save his loved ones from the coming Apocalypse, he was also willing to go to the gas chamber to save them from Jerry Cohen.

  Unarmed and left behind, Chris wandered around Kmart for a while and then set off on a three-mile hike straight up Hamner Avenue to get to his Z/28 at the Little League field. On the way, he passed directly in front of the Security Pacific Bank. All was quiet. “Just a normal Friday,” Harven said. “I was thinking they didn’t go through with it.” Moments later, Harven said he heard gunfire erupting from the area of the bank just 250 feet to the south. “I thought, ‘God. Here it is. Something went wrong. Something happened.’”

  Harven promptly hoofed it north on Hamner until, minutes later, a yellow truck he had never seen before pulled up to the curb beside him. The passenger door swung open and Manny Delgado stepped out holding Chris’s HK93. “I heard my name. I looked over to the side and Manny had the door open, and Jerry was waving to me. They said that everything went haywire. You know, ‘Get in, we will give you a ride. We shook the cops.’” Chris decided to accept the ride to his car in the interest of getting the hell away from the bank. “What were you thinking at the time you got in the truck?” Lloyd asked. “I was very, very, very confused and very, very scared.”

  Then began the wild ride through Wineville and Mira Loma with Jerry Cohen behind the wheel, Manny sitting out the window shooting at anything that moved, and Chris Harven sandwiched helplessly between the two.

  “I believe, just after Sixth Street, that I heard some fire coming from Manny. And I turned over and looked at him, and looked in the direction his body was pointing, and saw a police unit over on the opposite side of the street.”

  “What did you do at that time?”

  “Grabbed him and hauled him back inside. I was asking, what the heck he was doing? He said, ‘Hey, they killed my brother. You know, we’re all going to get killed. They are going to’—You know, he started rambling on and on in that sort of demeanor.”

  “Was he angry to you?”

  “I think he was angry at the world in general. Me in particular.”

  “What was he angry
at you about?”

  “He said later on in this thing, he said that if I wouldn’t have got out when I did, his brother would still be alive.”

  It was during the attempt to carjack Robert LeMay’s van at the Can Do Market that the elusive Jerry Cohen finally bailed out of the truck and vanished into broad daylight, never to be seen again. Asked why he did not take the opportunity to do the same, Chris said, “Well, there was police in the area, and I didn’t particularly want to hang around for questioning, so I drove and left.”

  From that point on, blame-Manny-for-everything became Harven’s primary defense. Chris said that all the times he slowed the truck on Interstate 15 and in Lytle Creek was not to ambush police, but an effort to extract himself from the situation. “What the hell are you doing?” Manny said to him a one point. “I’m pulling the truck over before somebody gets killed. I’m getting out here.” Manny responded with a threat: “Well, if somebody gets killed, it’s going to be you, if you chicken out on us again.”

  Testifying to his actions at the ambush site, Harven did not have all that much to lie about, considering he had not been accused of engaging in the firefight that killed Jim Evans. “You know, I opened the door. I said, ‘This is it. This is where I get out. I can’t go no further. I’m leaving.’” Chris said that after taking the bullet in the back, his first thought was that it must have been Manny who shot him. “He felt I was responsible for the death of his brother. I wasn’t helping them with anything at the end.”

  With the explanation for his actions on May 9, 1980, complete, Chris tried to explain why he had confessed to things he had not done in the interrogation by detective Larry Malmberg. He told them he feared his whole family would be killed if he didn’t “ride the beef” for Jerry Cohen. “I just substituted my name for Jerry’s” to avoid ratting out Cohen, he said.