by Norm Stamper
My previous undercover work was merely sneaky—I’d disguised but not replaced myself. This assignment called for more drastic measures. All of my records at the PD had been sealed and removed from Personnel. I held my own records-sealing ritual at home, wrapping a rubber band around my driver’s license, credit cards, a picture of Dottie and Matt. I stuffed the bundle in the bottom of my sock drawer. When my hair had grown a bit shaggy and my face showed the makings of a beard I drove the cool car down to the DMV in Chula Vista.
“Yep, tha’s right,” I told the woman behind the counter. “Hit was turrible.” I winced for her, recalling the tragedy. “Lost ever’thang. The whole trailer up in smoke. Woosh!” It had been caused by faulty wiring, I told her. The fire back home in Corpus Christi. “Ever last thang I owned, burnt to a crisp. My wallet, birth certificate. I got nothin’ left. Not a single worldly possession.” Did I have a local address? “Nope, I just pulled into town two days ago. That’s why the P.O. box. I’m livin’ out of my friend’s car at the moment.” I was in search of a job, maybe she knew of something?
I passed the written, then the driving—no “California stops,” parallel-parked with reasonable precision, didn’t hit anyone. I went to window three to have my eyesight checked and my picture taken. Three weeks later my official fake ID arrived at the P.O. box.
I’d decided to keep my first name. O’Brien was right: anyone, someone I’d arrested, an old high school buddy, even a naïve or malicious cop, could shout it out in a sensitive situation and blow my cover. Cops, I would soon learn, were the worst. A few weeks after my trip to the DMV a beat cop in Old Town yelled out my name from the front seat of his patrol car. “Hey, Norm! What are you working? You dirty or something?” Idiot! Don’t you remember what they told you in the academy? You never acknowledge an undercover. Thank God, I was alone. Still, I copped an attitude and shot him a withering glare. He cringed, apparently in recognition of his faux pas. I wondered what he’d think when he learned I’d been fired.
The cool car had been registered in my new name, through contacts in Sacramento, and I’d been licensed to drive. Beyond that I was a man with no history. I concocted a cover story (one that didn’t require me to affect a Texas accent).
I spent hours in the downtown library and at SDSU and UCSD reading up on the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, and other lefty political organizations. I took a crash course on Marx, Lenin, Hegel, Trotsky, Marcuse. And on Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro. I bought, read, and carried around Mao’s little red book. The cool car was littered with back issues of campus and underground newspapers.
I’d made a decision to interrupt my own studies at SDSU. I’d be too busy, for one thing. But also I wasn’t sure I could pull it off: a maniacal-looking, red-bearded, afro-haired honky in a peacoat festooned with the distinctive red-and-gold Mao pin. How would I fit in with a bunch of criminal justice majors who looked like Dobie Gillis and Gidget?
Within a month I had infiltrated the UCSD chapter of SDS. I attended meetings, ran the mimeo machine, leafleted, did other did shit work, marched in antiwar protests, participated in sit-ins, and demonstrated against ROTC and Dow Chemical recruiters at the university. As my face became better known, and trusted, I was invited to social events off campus (dopeless parties where people talked the same talk they talked on campus). In time I penetrated the inner circle of La Jolla’s “radical chic,” meeting black militants and later some of the “old left” forces, similar to the marvelous, romantic communists seen in Warren Beatty’s movie Reds. I was in on strategy planning sessions. I wrote for and had articles published in one of the underground papers. My 35mm camera had become as trusted and as ubiquitous as I was.
Every week I met with my contact, Bud Bennett, SDPD Intelligence. We’d meet in a different place each time, a busy coffee shop usually, somewhere in the vastness of San Diego County. I handed him a five- to fifteen-page report, documenting what I’d seen and heard. Who was planning what? Where? When? How? Why? As I stood at my makeshift stand-up desk puffing away on my pipe and hammering at the keys of the antique Royal, I felt like a reporter. An investigative reporter.
When moral anxiety cropped up from time to time, which it did often enough, I stuck its head under water and held it there. I’d heard enough rumors and direct threats to know that a small minority of crazies and dyed-in-the-wool anti-Amerikan forces were capable of following through on their threats: to bomb a troop train, or take down Richard Nixon (or Hubert Humphrey) on a campaign swing through San Diego, or turn in a phony call for the police and then “off the pigs” when they showed up (none of the above, incidentally, was suggested by SDS members but by off-campus, loudmouthed “agitators”). Because I was often present when threats were made and demonstrations planned, I was able to sort them out, weigh them on a scale of potential violence. Rarely did I have our patrol cops called in; most often my intelligence was used to keep my fellow cops at bay. But there was this one time . . .
“They say they gonna off the sister. Tomorrow!” It was “David,” my source. He sounded like a sassy black woman on the phone. In truth, he was a skinny white guy. Short, intense, with Trotsky’s beard and glasses. He spouted Marxist theory nonstop. He was on record, my record, on the need for the violent overthrow of the government.
David showed up, Zelig-like, everywhere (something that could have been said of me), but I did notice that, like me, he never took the mike at rallies or demonstrations to demand that we bomb the admiral’s home over in Coronado or torch police headquarters down on Market. He did do a lot of ranting, though, in our small-cell conversations. Others mostly dismissed him. I took him for an FBI snitch with a loose circuit. But he was in the know on a lot of stuff.
“They mean business, Norm. It’ll be bad for the Movement and, I’m telling you, she’s as good as dead even as we speak.” I put the phone down, tugged at my bushy beard and peered through rimless glasses at the rain and lights of Rosecrans. It was a Sunday, just before midnight. I’d been working sixteen-hour days, six or seven days a week for months. Throughout that day I’d been sniffing out the same rumors David had apparently picked up: that a contingent of black men from UC Santa Barbara was headed for San Diego to “silence” Angela Davis.
What did that mean? Were they going to caucus with her, get her to agree to lower her profile in the Movement? Davis, tall, eloquent, charismatic, had garnered a great deal of national and international media attention. One rumor was that her clout was undermining the role and status of indigenous black male leaders, and inspiring people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write, in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” of the power of the “black matriarchy” in America. Black women, he’d written, had a disproportionate influence over both family and community life because of the absence of strong men. Such men being absent owing to their rates of incarceration—and death by homicide. Another possibility: Certain black militants were unhappy with Davis’s ideology, her political priorities. They wanted her to rearrange those priorities so that she would be less a New Left Marxist, more a black nationalist or liberationist.*
Whatever its reasons, was the Santa Barbara crowd’s unhappiness with Davis enough to want her whacked? I didn’t know, which was why I’d had my ear to the ground that Sunday. My conversation with David, however loopy, clinched it. I had to call in the troops.
In police work you get all kinds of chances to choose between two wrongs: do something when you should do nothing, or do nothing when you should do something.
It was now after midnight. I slipped two dimes into the slot and waited for Bud to pick up. It was a short conversation, ended by Bud with, “I gotta call the boss right away. If you’re right about this thing we don’t have any time to use.”
“You mean if David is right.” I wanted as much distance between me and loony tunes as possible.
And yet, I wanted loony tunes to be right.
I may have been
a “liberal” cop but I was still a cop. I was hardwired for action and hadn’t gotten any for several months. Don’t let any police officer tell you otherwise: We talk crime prevention, and some of us even mean it, but we live for the moment the bank gets robbed or the murder fugitive is spotted on our beat.
It’s not that I wanted anyone to get hurt, especially Dr. Davis. I admired her for her courage—she was taking a lot of heat from people who, I thought, should have been on her side—and her ability to calmly, forcefully present the case against racism, classism, imperialism, the war in Vietnam. The ideal scenario? The dudes from Santa Barbara show up on campus, pull all manner of artillery out of knapsacks and duffel bags, and get taken down by a small army of my (armed) undercover colleagues. No shots fired, the day saved.
As much as I wanted to be involved in the arrests it was out of the question. My cover had taken months to establish and was too important to blow. If we were going to go with undercover operatives the best choice would be narcs, real narcs. Even if they got burned they’d have no trouble going right back to their buy-busts on the streets of City Heights or Barrio Logan.
Throughout the night detective supervisors were on the phone, scaring up dirties. In the end they rounded up only four, three from Narcotics, one from Fencing. Plus a number of plainclothes detectives and their supervisors.
Foregoing sleep altogether for what seemed like the hundredth time in two years, I took a quick predawn tour of the campus at UCSD. Nothing. No doors propped open, nobody lurking on the balcony of the big central library that overlooked the free-speech square. I hit the parking lots, getting out once to palm the hoods of a small pickup and a van parked side by side near a grove of bluegum eucalyptuses. Both were cold.
Back in the car, I drove down I-5 for my first and only headquarters visit during the undercover stint. I parked three blocks away and walked up to the Pacific Highway entrance. It was still dark out. Bud let me in. We walked up the stairs and into the Intelligence office. “He don’t smell as bad as he looks, boys,” he announced to a room full of cops, most of them dirties or detectives, slurping from styrofoam cups. O’Brien, standing just outside his office, was the only one in coat and tie. The cops eyed me warily. It occurred to me that most of them had never seen me. I didn’t look like other dirties, didn’t look like a Haight hippie either. I looked . . . political.
It felt weird being in that room, like I’d entered enemy territory. Just weeks before, I’d called the man who would soon become our new chief a pig. Inspector Ray Hoobler had stepped on my foot at a Hubert Humphrey campaign rally. David had noticed it, I had to say something.
“Okay, listen up, guys,” said O’Brien. “Most of you don’t know Stamper.” He nodded at me. “Hell, you wouldn’t want to cop to it if you did.” Laughter, some of it a little too robust for that time of the morning. “Seriously, Stamper’s been working the reds and pinks at UCSD. Quite a bit with the Panthers too, if you can believe that.”
Yeah, right. The Panthers.
Usually it was Bud who called me: We heard something might be going down in Ocean Beach. Can you swing by and check it out? We got word that some shit’s going down at the love-in in Balboa Park. How about . . . I was like a Dirty for All Seasons. This call, however, had come directly from O’Brien. He wanted me to go to a meeting on Imperial Avenue. Intelligence had gotten word that the Panthers were planning “something heavy” in response to perceived (and no doubt actual) police harassment. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll check it out.” It was the last time O’Brien would send me somewhere on the strength of the FBI’s say-so.
I walked into the building, a nondescript storefront. The front office was empty so I walked through it and down a dark hall that fed an equally dark, windowless room. Four black men were seated around a table under a low-watt bare bulb. They’d been talking quietly but went stone silent when I walked in. I recognized one of them, not the others.
“Who are you?” said one of the strangers. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “What are you doing here?”
“Is this where the meeting’s at, man?”
“What meeting? What you talking about?”
“The meeting,” I said, impatient. “You know.”
“No, man, I don’t know. You tell me.”
“You know, the meeting to plan the demonstration.”
“What demonstration?”
“Against the war, man.” I let my frustration show. “You’ve heard about it, maybe? A little skirmish in Southeast Asia?”
“Look, my friend . . .”
“No. You look. If I got the wrong place all you gotta do is tell me. I got better things to do with . . .”
“All right, all right. Just cool it. This happens to be a private meeting, catch my drift? It’s not about the fucking war, okay? Now why don’t you just tell me how it is you’ve come to this place?”
“What? You gonna act like the Man now? You gonna fucking interrogate me? I told you, man. There’s supposed to be a meeting to plan the demonstration. Today. Right now.” I jabbed my finger at the floor. “Right here. A brother at the university told me about it. He . . .”
“What’s the brother’s name?”
“James.”
“His last name, fool.”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.” I turned to leave. “But I’ll tell you his last name. It’s McCory.” One of the men at the table wrote it down. “And don’t think I’m not going to tell him about the reception I got here. Seems to me we got enough shit going down these days without . . .”
“Look, you honky motherfucker . . .” He caught himself. “Look, we . . .” He caught himself again, I could see it. “What’s your name, my friend?”
I was already headed for the hall to make my exit. I formed the words “fuck you” but I’m pretty sure they never left my throat. “I told you I’m out of here.” I refused to run, but I scurried out the door, praying these guys wouldn’t locate a James McCory anywhere in San Diego.
O’Brien turned to me to explain what was going down on campus. It was the first time since high school that I’d stood in front of an audience. I liked it. So much that I droned on and on. A glance at O’Brien cleared things up. These men, all with eight or ten or twenty years on me, had been awakened in the middle of the night for a reason. It wasn’t to witness a rookie cop’s emergent love affair with the center of the stage. I cut to the chase. O’Brien finished up, handing out assignments and offering cautions. He stressed that I was not to be burned, under any circumstances. “You get your tit in the wringer, don’t even think about approaching Stamper. You don’t know him, got it?”
For the rest of the guys there was time for a refill and a doughnut from the box that had remained untouched during the briefing. I had to hustle back out to the university.
The sun was up. A few dozen cars had materialized on the lots. I circulated among them, finding nothing suspicious. I parked the cool car near the Revelle campus and walked up the stairs to the library balcony which gave me a bird’s-eye view of the square. I’d be able to monitor almost every potential ambush site and keep on eye on my fellow spies.
As I stood at the railing, a cup of machine coffee in hand, the realization of what I’d set in motion shot through me, a fleeting high-octane rush. Which quickly gave way to dread and foreboding. There’d been a lot of shouting down on that square over the past several months, a lot of obscenities and threats, but no physical violence. And no guns. Until today, and we were the ones who’d be importing them.
I knew my brethren had to be packing; the intelligence left us no choice. But what if something went wrong? What if innocent kids got caught in the crossfire? Kent State hadn’t happened yet (that was May 4, 1970) but I had visions of young innocents lying in pools of blood.
The first dirty got burned the moment he walked on the square. An angry ex-girlfriend. “Narc! Narc! Narc!” she bellowed. Loud enough to be heard over the bullhorned incendiary comments of the first speaker. Loud
enough to be heard in Bakersfield. “Narc” didn’t stick around to protest. I watched as he pivoted and split, with deliberate haste—cops don’t run unless they have to—toward the north where he’d come from.
Moments later, not knowing at the time what had caused the first cop’s exit, I spotted a second one powerwalking his way back to the lot on the east side of the campus. I chalked this one up, erroneously it turned out, to his attire: Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, a Panama hat (a Panama hat, for chrissakes!). What was he thinking? It’s a wonder he wasn’t sporting black socks and black leather shoes. (He’d also been burned by an ex, an ex-wife who was putting herself through school and who’d been trying to collect child support from the cop, a deadbeat dad. If he wouldn’t cooperate with her she saw no reason to cooperate with him.)
Two down. I’m leaking confidence. I could see what was happening below but had no way of knowing why, until later. If those dudes from Santa Barbara showed up now we’d be at half strength. Even as I was lamenting the odds they got worse. Forty-five minutes into the detail, a third cop got burned. This was beyond bizarre. Had members of the crowd swept the square with some magic narc-detector device? The third guy fell when an old pal recognized him. “Jimmy!” he’d yelled. “Jimmy, you old fucker, you! What’s it been? Three, four years? You still with the PD? What’s with the beard? Oh, I’ll bet they fired your ass, didn’t they?” A vocal subset of the crowd started pointing and chanting, “Pig! Pig! Pig!” Jimmy quickly walked to his vehicle, a few diehards escorting him the whole way.
Terrific. This was just dandy. We’re down to a lone cop, packing a two-inch Chief’s Special in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker. I’m packing nothing. We’ve got no way to communicate. And Angela Davis has just been introduced to a thundering ovation. I abandoned my post and walked down the concrete steps to mingle with the masses. I checked the crowd, scanned the surrounding buildings. Nothing suspicious. But where the hell was David?