Lines and Shadows

by Joseph Wambaugh

  That year the U.S. Border Patrol was estimating that they would arrest more than 250,000 aliens. The wishful statistic they always gave to the press was that they probably caught one third. Which the cops called “a hallelujah batting average.” Prosecuting aliens for illegal entry was a nightmare. After three or four arrests it was possible to get a conviction for a misdemeanor, which might mean five days in jail. Reentry after formal deportation was technically a felony, but very hard to prove. The Border Patrol investigator would have to get certification of the existence or nonexistence of records in Washington. Aliens are rarely fingerprinted, don’t carry identification, and often change their names on later tries, so it was nearly impossible to prove identities. If the Border Patrol caught 10 percent of all pollos, they were doing remarkably well, the cops figured.

  Border patrolmen talked wistfully of La Ley de Fuga, The Law of Flight. If you flee you are shot. The law of Mexico. The law of many “developed” countries. But alien smugglers have been known to make a million dollars a year. It’s lucrative, and everyone knew that if the aliens were somehow miraculously all rounded up, half the restaurants from San Diego to the Oregon border would have to serve buffet style on paper plates. And wealthy Californians would suddenly be washing their own cars and cutting their own grass and cleaning their own houses and tending their own children. And who in the hell would pick the crops? And what of the small factories? And what would happen to the garment industry? And so forth.

  So with this incredibly complicated headache, only too familiar to the people of San Diego living just north of that imaginary line, it wouldn’t do for Dick Snider to approach the police administration with do-gooder talk about the tragedies inflicted by bandit gangs. The way to approach it was to present cold, incontrovertible numbers, and to tell the police administration how he could make those big numbers get smaller.

  It wasn’t easy, in that things move very slowly in a bureaucracy. At first the brass was not particularly troubled by the numbers. But the reported alien crimes, which Dick Snider had always estimated to be a tenth of the actual occurrences, were causing some damage to the overall portrait of “America’s Finest City,” whose tourist bureau touted the most temperate climate on earth. A city where tourism was huge. A great retirement community and an enormous military base. Very unlike the bigger city “up the road”—meaning Los Angeles—San Diego was advertised as being lovely and smog-free. And safe.

  But the San Diego Police Department daily occurrence sheets were telling another story:

  Saturday, 2300 hours. Spring Canyon, alien robbery. Two males armed with a gun. Three victims.

  Saturday, 2100 hours, Deadman’s Canyon, three suspects, two victims. Knives and machetes used.

  Wednesday, 2000 hours. Alien robbery, E-2 Canyon. Clubs and rocks used. Ten victims. Five suspects.

  And the aliens were not only being robbed by bandit gangs, but others were finding the pollos too tempting to resist:

  Wednesday, 1930 hours, alien robbery, Monument Road. Three victims. Armed Tijuana police officer ambushed them.

  Wednesday, 2245 hours, alien robbery. Three victims. Monument Road. Border Patrol interrupted robbery. Tijuana auxiliary policeman (unarmed) in custody. Other uniformed officer (armed) escaped into Mexico.

  Friday, 0700 hours. Alien robbery. Suspects were two Tijuana police officers. Victim struck in face, threatened with gun, maced in eyes.

  Thursday, 2230 hours, alien robbery. Three victims robbed in gully by two male suspects dressed in tan Tijuana police uniforms.

  Then the robberies began getting steadily more ferocious, the log entries more grim:

  Wednesday, 0950 hours. Body found ⅓ mile east of Hollister, 200 feet north of border fence. Male, Mexican, 30’s, throat cut.

  Friday, 1430 hours. Border Patrol found body on mesa near mouth of Spring Canyon. Badly decomposed male.

  Tuesday, second watch. Border Patrol says Tijuana Police Department notified them of murder by soccer field in Spring Canyon, 0100 hours.

  If the pollos were lucky enough to run the gauntlet in the canyons, there awaited the Mexican-American youth gangs of San Ysidro. Who could resist? The pollos were so timid. So easy:

  Wednesday, 2300 hours, alien robbery, San Ysidro View Park. Victim struck from behind. Face beaten in. Hospitalized.

  Friday, alien robbery, 0100 hours, 8 male susps, 17–20 years. Armed with knives and clubs. Two victims and their children robbed.

  And if the pollos were lucky enough (and fit enough) to outrun the bandit gangs in the canyons, or the moonlighting Tijuana cops, or the Mexican-American youth gangs, or the helicopters and four-wheeled vehicles of la migra, they found other perils awaiting them in their crossing:

  Saturday, third watch, Interstate 5 under pedestrian bridge. Alien struck while running across freeway.

  Monday, third watch, Otay Mesa Road, vehicle ran over fleeing alien. Broken pelvis.

  Saturday, third watch. Another alien hit by car on Highway 805, running across freeway. Taken to Bay General. Not expected to live.

  And if the male aliens managed to survive the bandits in the canyons and the moonlighting Mexican cops, and the Mexican-American youth gangs, and the speeding cars, there were additional perils for females between the ages of ten and seventy:

  Sunday, 2300 hours, Border Patrol chopper interrupted gang rape. Five suspects. Spring Canyon.

  And so forth. There were some San Diego police administrators starting to get a very large headache from all these statistical entries, and the last thing in the world they needed while they pondered the border phenomenon was civilian pressure. But that’s exactly what they got. Articles started appearing with regularity in the San Diego newspapers:

  ALIEN BOY PARALYZED BY ROBBERS

  Sixteen-year-old has spinal cord cut

  Seventh alien robbery this week

  During the summer, investigative reporters interviewed a Mexican-American youth gang member in San Ysidro for his lurid account of alien robberies. In a short career he had beaten and robbed countless victims, and raped fifteen alien women, one for every year of his life.

  By midsummer 1976 the Tijuana mayor was sweating out all the reports of his police officers ambushing aliens on American soil. A spokesman for Mayor Fernando Marquez Arce told U.S. reporters: “We are sure these are bandits impersonating Tijuana police and not members of our department. There are stores in Tijuana where uniforms resembling police uniforms can be bought and we are sure there are people buying these and posing as police.”

  Finally, by summer’s end Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez addressed the U.S. government on the fate of pollos being robbed, beaten, raped and murdered at the American border.

  He said: “They deserve the respect accorded to human beings by every civilized society,” and he added that the attitude of the Mexican government “has been and will continue to be uncompromising” on the safety of these aliens.

  And while some U.S. citizens said who gives a shit what some boss beaner in Mexico City found “uncompromising,” there were those in Washington who listened to everything said in Mexico City these days. The beaners at last had something the gringos needed at this point in history: oil. No one knew how much as yet, but it was there. Oil!

  So, with ever more frequency the San Diego press and indeed the national press began to pay attention to the reports of border bandits, and in virtually every local article and every television interview (sometimes three a week) there was some statement by one Southern Division lieutenant named Burl Richard Snider.

  “Only ten percent of the crimes are reported,” he liked to say. “Here’s a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl when they finished with her. Here’s what they did to a man who didn’t have enough money to satisfy them. Here’s …”

  Oh, they just loved him for that uptown. Cops generally trust the press about as much as they trust politicians, judges, lawyers, psychiatrists and the Red Army. Dick Snider was conducting a one-man publicity camp
aign. He was even quoted in a business journal as to the impact of millions of aliens in America.

  “You’d have to build a Chinese wall two thousand miles long to stop them,” he said. “To tell the truth, pard, I don’t know if that would do it.” And not that he’d stoop to overkill, but he once perversely noted that when Joseph and Mary fled King Herod they were illegal aliens.

  And when asked for the solution to the grave dilemma, Dick Snider would just squint a slaty eye at his interviewer and roll the ubiquitous cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other and rock back on his cowboy boots and say, “Pardner, I don’t think I have a solution. I just don’t want people brutalizing them on my beat. In my city. In my country.”

  In his country! That did it. Uptown, in the corner pocket, the department brass started ricocheting like snooker balls. Who is this son of a bitch? His freaking city! His freaking country! You ought to be able to trust a goddamn Okie with a goddamn dust-bowl kisser not to make speeches on behalf of the goddamn country!

  Nevertheless, his publicity campaign was working with a vengeance. He was appearing on television more than Mayor Pete Wilson. And some of the high-ranking officers—who didn’t trust any middle-level management person who would crawl around the hills like a rattlesnake—these same brass hats had to become instant border-crime experts because slavering reporters were demanding answers to the questions Dick Snider was raising.

  Even Chief of Police William Kolender, known as a progressive police administrator, telephoned Dick Snider with his jaws a bit torqued, complaining that he was made to look bad during one of the lieutenant’s impromptu press interviews.

  It wasn’t that Dick Snider disliked the chief; in fact quite the opposite was true. He thought he might have a chance with his secret scheme precisely because Kolender was the new chief. So he chose his words a bit more carefully, but continued his publicity blitz, supplying any journalist who called with all the lurid details of alien ambush by bandit wolf packs.

  And the top brass of the San Diego Police Department found themselves paying visits to Southern Division to tramp around the goddamn hills and canyons, slipping in coyote crap, trying to become instant border-crime experts, thanks to one bigmouth lieutenant named Snider.

  One of the more critical reporters of the police beat overheard a deputy chief bitching about Dick Snider, and the reporter remarked that it goes to show you can’t trust any white man that talks good Spanish. And the deputy chief stopped nodding like a dashboard doll and said that was about as humorous as a prostate probe.

  But Dick Snider hadn’t been in law enforcement most of his adult life for nothing. He understood the workings of the bureaucracy well enough to mitigate any radical notions of fighting border bandits simply for the sake of saving illegal aliens. Especially at a time when Californians were talking about taxpayer revolts. He did what every wise civil servant would do: he found a buzzword.

  “We need a federal grant,” he told reporters. “To create a … sort of task force.”

  Dick Snider envisioned a force of men, comprised of San Diego cops and federal officers from the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs. But during any discussion of his idea he’d toss around his buzzword: federal grant.

  The fact is it was virtually impossible to receive a law-enforcement federal grant. But he bandied numbers about, and was quoted in several interviews as to the modest amount of money he would need to field a force of men to deal with the bandits. And journalists ran to U.S. Customs and U.S. Border Patrol to discuss the merits of proposals being put forth by a San Diego police lieutenant who seemed to have “his finger on the pulse of the border,” as they put it.

  In police circles what Dick Snider was doing is called washing dirty laundry. And cops just don’t do their duds in public, not if they care about their police careers. Not if their pension is not secure. And his wasn’t. But there had always been a certain naïveté about the big lieutenant. Other policemen talked about it. He tended to believe that if your cause is just, you can’t get hurt too badly. Which caused more cynical colleagues to show white eyeballs.

  The federal grant went nowhere. However, after the media barrage Chief Kolender fulfilled Dick Snider’s hopes and dreams. He began discussing with federal authorities a task force to cope with the crime problems of the border. And to Dick Snider that meant at long last he would deal with the bandits. He had an idea whose time had come—a generation later.

  THE INSIDERS

  ANY COMMENT ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NO-MAN’S-land by the international border usually begins and ends with a judgment, critique, debate about one Jesus Manuel Lopez, the police sergeant chosen by Dick Snider to ramrod his fledgling Border Crime Task Force.

  It would be a mistake to try to understand Manny Lopez too quickly.

  “The better we came to know him, the bigger the question mark,” is how one of his men would later put it.

  And the metaphor could not be more appropriate. Manny Lopez was marked by the interrogation point. He was only twenty-nine years old, with a hairline already retreating on a small head. He had nearly Asian eyes, a nose more Middle Eastern than Mexican, slightly pocked cheeks, a gap-toothed impish grin. He would have looked at home selling carpets at a bazaar in Izmir, and there was probably never a rug peddler who could have outtalked him. But what one would not forget about Manny Lopez was the question mark. When he was in any way aroused, his right eyebrow did the most remarkable reptilian sidewinding crawl up up up his forehead until it formed a perfect question mark across his skull.

  Many a man in the months to come would be amused, bewildered, terrified, watching that right eyebrow begin to slither, creep and crawl until the interrogation point was formed. And then you had an indelible portrait of Manny Lopez. A question mark. He, staring intently, the right eyebrow curling, squiggling, locking in.

  “Manny Lopez kept turning me down at first,” Dick Snider said. “He was a hard-charger and superambitious. He wanted to be a plainclothes investigator. He didn’t seem too impressed with what I was selling. But he was my only choice from beginning to end. It wasn’t just that he was the only Mexican sergeant crafty and crazy and gutsy enough to pull it off. He was the only sergeant period.”

  All of the task force members would call Burl Richard Snider “Lieutenant” when they addressed him directly. But when talking about him to others it was “Burl the Pearl.”

  “Dick Snider is a pearl,” Manny Lopez always said. “I worked for him back when he was a sergeant and I was a rookie. The guy could never be anything except outfront. But that can be a fatal flaw in police work.”

  During his police career Manny Lopez was elected president of San Diego’s Latino police organization, not an important career step given the makeup of the department. In a force of 1,365 men and women, on the very fringe of a sea of Latinos stretching from Baja California to Tierra del Fuego, less than 5 percent of the department were Mexican-Americans. There were four sergeants. There were no lieutenants, no captains, one inspector, no deputy chiefs. Incredibly enough, there was only one in homicide, and none working burglary or robbery.

  The large city of San Diego has been accused of nourishing a village mentality in areas of social progress, tucked away as it is in a far corner of America. And a police department always reflects its community. The Mexican-American cops did not refer to themselves as “Latinos” or “Hispanics” or “Mexican-Americans.” They called the majority “whites” and they called themselves “Mexicans.” And yet even this might be refuted by those people living south of the imaginary line who feel they are nothing like the northern “coconuts,” who are brown on the outside but white within.

  Linguists say that there are not many people who are truly bilingual—that is, foreigners who can fool a native speaker by conversing in the mother tongue unaccented. Manny Lopez was one who could. And he was a talker in both languages. He had also been director of the San Diego Police Officers Association, the first Mexican-American to hold this post. And
the Police Officers Association represented all cops: white, black and Mexican. He was also on an advisory panel to the chief. So Manny Lopez knew something about politics. He had career ambitions and wasn’t impressed with Dick Snider’s obsession with aliens being victimized on American soil. But when Dick Snider showed Manny Lopez some photos of an alien who’d been robbed and had his face ripped away by a two-by-four studded with nails, Manny looked at the pictures and said, “Okay, you got it. Count me in.”

  And Dick Snider was ecstatic. He had the man to ramrod the task force. And he figured that the man of his choice had been persuaded by the very thing which so obsessed him: the agony of aliens.

  Except that Manny Lopez wasn’t persuaded by that. He privately said, “Dick Snider coulda shown me a picture of an alien with his head cut off. I woulda said that’s tough. Life’s tough.”

  The truth is, he was sick of waiting for an investigative job and he was sick of Northern Division with its bloated whiny millionaires. He was even sick of ogling all the bikinis stuffed with surf bunnies that littered the streets of La Jolla. He was almost thirty years old and wanted some action before he settled down and made a real run at promotions.

  “I was bored. Real bored,” he admitted. “That’s why I joined Burl the Pearl’s task force.”

  And that decision would completely change the direction of his life.

  It was jointly decided by Dick Snider and Manny Lopez that the Border Crime Task Force should probably be composed of Mexican-American cops. As it turned out, this was a fortunate decision, given the radical change in direction the experiment would take. But at the start the search for Mexican-American officers began only because Dick Snider was one of the few in middle-level management who spoke Spanish and realized its importance here where the ocean of Latinos was flowing inexorably north.

  He assumed that all Mexican-American cops would at least understand Spanish well enough to do the job as he had conceived it. He and Manny Lopez were going to lie in wait in the canyons, much as Dick Snider had done alone these many months. They were to listen and observe and catch the bandits smack in the middle of their robberies. They would ambush the ambushers. That was the plan.