With the arrival of Steve, the soon-to-become-epic battle of good and evil was validated by the novel; here was law enforcement coming to the rescue as if in answer to prayers, and together the three allies saw themselves as carrying the cross of goodness across a parched landscape of ill winds. Indeed, the alliance was all the more astounding for the friendship between Connie, a Catholic, and John, a Baptist; members of the two communities often find themselves embroiled in an ongoing dispute over the interpretation of biblical matters, and John and Connie themselves were astonished as their bond developed. As the three found themselves in the midst of a time-honored battle, there was a keen sense of urgency, fueled by people who tried to undermine them by publicly accusing Steve of asking for protection money from the businesses he defended. The battle played out in local newspapers, in bars where people gossiped, and at heated town council meetings where members of the local establishment fought for the status quo against the three upstarts who were trying to reform an old process, opening it up to long-time Hispanic residents of Lake Los Angeles. In the early months of 2003, the issue became so contentious that over 700 people attended one of the council gatherings—a huge turnout in a town with about 12,000 residents. To the cheers of many, José Gomez addressed the crowd, along with other locals who were under siege, including business owners Oscar Espitia and Manuel Magana—fellow members of a group called Latinos Americanos in Acción who had coalesced around the trouble in Lake Los Angeles. Pastor John and Steve also made statements, and Connie reported it all in the Lake Los Angeles News; the trio was marching on through the desert.
While Steve wouldn’t have described his mission as religious, it certainly was righteous, and in the manner of the driven, he did not let up. Along the way, he acquired a variety of enemies—those who thought he was a gung-ho cop and out to prove something, including some valley bikers who were not pleased with his zealousness, unlike others who cleaved to him, to this day painting a picture that recalls Christ or the saints walking with lepers, only in this case it was a man in a Los Angeles County sheriff’s uniform who was blazing a path behind a badge and a wall of will.
From day one, he had been available to those in his jurisdiction, and sometimes even outside of it, every minute of every day—the quintessential beat cop as Captain Carl Deeley of the Lancaster station, Steve’s reporting agency, would describe him at his funeral. Many locals had his cell phone number—and used it, for all manner of requests. But now, his job seemed to consume his entire being. A fair number of the calls he received were from residents complaining about neighbors who lived in Section 8 homes. “Section 8” is a federal program in which landlords can rent designated properties to low-income tenants at a reduced rate, with the government picking up the difference between the tenants’ payment and the rent specified in the owner’s contract with the government. During Steve’s tenure in Lake Los Angeles, the housing market was at an all-time low. “Investors and local realtors were buying properties like crazy,” Connie says, “and making them into Section 8 housing. Section 8 was paying landlords the same rate for low-income renters as they were in other parts of LA County. For a 1,200-square-foot house in LA, the landlord could make $1,400 a month, with the renter paying around $200 out of pocket. In Lake LA, where renting was only around $600–$700, the landlord would bring in the same amount, even though the house wasn’t in the same market. So it didn’t matter that the renter low-life was thrashing the place, selling drugs, or lowering the standard of living in the neighborhood. The landlord was making bank, and the check was being sent to his house from the county.” Steve, Connie remembers, went after this “like a dog with a bone.” At one point he found out that a local real estate office was sending flyers into welfare offices in Los Angeles and Pacoima. “One-way free U-haul service to Lake LA for Section 8 housing,” the flyers proclaimed. “Steve was furious,” Connie says. “He started a crackdown on the trouble spots in town and went after the landlords, and the criminals living in their houses.”
As Steve’s campaign escalated, people seemed edgier than ever, and “sometimes even we were worn out,” Connie recalls. Some locals who opposed them began to refer to Steve, Connie, and Pastor John as “the toilet paper gang.” Steve took the epithet and owned it, giving the band a motto—“to wipe the slate clean”—and at the height of their battle, commissioning special T-shirts for the group, bearing the logo of a hand wielding a plunger pushing through a roll of toilet paper. Those on the other side of the battle did not take kindly to the reference that they were something to be cleaned up. Strange things happen in the desert, but as the battle for the soul of Lake Los Angeles escalated, such episodes seemed to come more quickly. In fact, within several weeks, there was a cascade of omens. Cat heads on poles appeared outside the Carmelite convent in Lake Los Angeles. “We took this as a response from the Wiccans,” Connie says. “Then my dog was poisoned.” Pastor John’s door was shot at, and animal carcasses were strewn at the church door. In the face of such things, some might have called it a day and left town. But the trio was not backing down, and in the days preceding his murder, Deputy Steve Sorensen filed a lawsuit against some Lake Los Angeles locals, stating that he feared for his life. But his job as resident deputy trumped all, and no one was going to run him off his beat. “Looking back on the whole thing,” one resident remembers, “I now understand the urgency. I see why Steve was in such a rush for us to do so many things. He didn’t have much time.”
CITY OF LIZARDS
Ask the dust.
—John Fante
ACCORDING TO AN LA LEGEND, THERE IS A STRANGE SYSTEM OF tunnels that was constructed 5,000 years ago under what is now the downtown library. In this ancient system, there was once a kingdom of Lizard People. Do you think it’s strange or funny when people traverse the sands with metal detectors, hoping to find lost rings, coins, or buried treasure? If you happened to have been walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles in 1934, you might have seen a rugged-looking man in a jacket, jodhpurs, knee-high boots, and a fedora, seated on a folding chair and tinkering with sensitive instruments wedged into the ground. This was G. Warren Shufelt, an educated version of the pilgrim with the magnetized trident, a geophysical mining engineer who was looking for minerals in the netherworld below LA. After driving a 250-foot shaft into the seams of Los Angeles and then taking X-rays, he was in for a serious surprise. For he had detected not just minerals but tunnels. Upon further studies across an area stretching from the library on West Fifth Street to the Southwest Museum at the foot of Mount Washington, our engineer became ecstatic, believing he had located a sophisticated arrangement of tunnels. He mapped the course of the tunnels and found that there were large rooms along the tunnel route, catacombs and vaults, as well as deposits of gold. For a time, he pondered the meaning of his strange discovery. One day, the story goes, there came a meeting with Little Chief Greenleaf, a Hopi medicine man in Arizona, and Shufelt recounted his discovery. The medicine man knew instantly what the engineer had found in the bowels of the city of the queen of the angels. According to an ancient Hopi legend, there were three lost cities on the Pacific coast. One of them was in Los Angeles, and it was dug 5,000 years ago by the Lizard People. This feat occurred after the great catastrophe—“a huge tongue of fire that came out of the Southwest, destroying all life in its path.” To survive future catastrophes, survivors headed underground, building a sophisticated city.
They did this by entering the underworld through the ocean and using powerful substances to burrow tunnels without removing earth. They lined the tunnels with a cement that was stronger than any used in modern times. The system they built was well-planned and complex: there were several layers of tunnels, and every day the tide passed in and out of the lower tunnel portals, forcing air into the upper levels, providing ventilation for city dwellers, and cleansing the basement structure.
Like all lost cities, the underground city of Los Angeles was fabulous. There were large rooms inside the tops of hills a
bove the city, labyrinths where 1,000 families lived on separate floors just as they would today inside skyscrapers. To guard against the next catastrophe, there were vast stores of imperishable food such as herbs that sustained life, healed wounds, and grew in underground gardens. But it was not just herbs that were stored below. The people who went to ground harbored an elaborate kingdom of riches, maintaining their records on golden tablets of precise measurements, as they always are in disappeared capitols. In this case, they were four feet long and fourteen inches wide. Inscribed on one of the tablets, as it always is, was the story of the origins of the human race. Shufelt tried to excavate the room that was said to house the critical tablet, but the endeavor was doomed. Worried about a cave-in beyond 350 feet, officials shut down the dig, and the vault was never to be penetrated again.
But this is much more than a tale of elusive treasure and a fruitless attempt to cipher a great mystery. For the purposes of this story, the most telling feature of the lost city underneath Los Angeles is its shape. You see, the Lizard People had not just burrowed underground like reptiles; their entire city was laid out like a lizard.
According to the Hopi legend, its tail lies to the southwest, below Fifth and Hope streets. Its head is situated on the northeast, in the direction of Dodger Stadium. The key room is directly under South Broadway, near Second Street, and that’s where the directory to the city and its golden tablets can be found. It was in tribute to the reptile that signified a long life that the underground city was fashioned, and also in prayer; the ancient people of Los Angeles had chosen to live in the body of a lizard to escape the next great fire. Scoff not, for fires were frequent then, as they are now; prehistoric residents of the LA basin referred to the region as the Valley of Smokes, after the seasonal eruptions of flame. If they had to, our legend goes, they could burrow deeper into their subterranean universe and slither away, crossing the reptile door.
Amid a flurry of publicity when his dig was shut down, engineer Shufelt vanished from the record. There seems to be no mention of Little Chief Greenleaf in tribal records. There is, however, mention of a Lizard Clan that traveled to the Pacific from the Southwest and back again in Hopi migration stories. What they left behind we do not know, and perhaps it is only this strange story of survival and transformation, a tale that is discovered from time to time, whispered and repeated in esoteric gatherings when Los Angeles is on fire, and when it is not. And decades later, the story has resurfaced, cast in a different light: some say there is a tunnel system beneath the Mojave Desert, one that resembles the infamous Cu-Chi tunnels of Vietnam, used by guerrillas during that war as living quarters, supply routes, emergency rooms, weapons caches, and a communications hub. The United States mounted a concerted campaign to take out the tunnels, at first sending B-52 bombers over the area to drop thirty-ton loads of explosives and later deploying 8,000 troops from four divisions to root out the enemy. But the campaign failed, proving how comparatively simple tunnel systems with trap doors that were camouflaged, and sometimes rigged with explosives, can outlast sophisticated orchestrations of warfare.
The tunnel system of the Mojave Desert is said to function like the tunnels of Cu-Chi, serving as an escape hatch for those who find themselves in the never-ending war against civilization, finding refuge in a sprawling city where people—lizard-like perhaps—are said to flourish. Tales of this system wax and wane, and sometimes people say that the system is linked to the one found under the library by the defrocked engineer. It was during the manhunt for Donald Kueck that such tales would reach a fever pitch, reverberating across the Antelope Valley and in Internet chat rooms and on the general grapevine that seems to come alive whenever there is a fugitive in our midst. Had Don himself—a devotee of shamanism, student of desert plants and rocks and creatures and ways—molted and gone to ground? Had he crossed the reptile door and entered the secret labyrinth of Los Angeles County?
THE HERMIT VANISHES
There it is. Take it.
—William Mulholland at the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1913
AS DAY THREE HEADED TOWARD THE AFTERNOON HOURS, THERE was still no sign of Kueck. On the ground local cops who had known Steve were especially frustrated. Since the first day of the manhunt, they had been squeezed out of the operation, after some had swarmed and entered Kueck’s trailer, attempting to mount their own search, as LASD SWAT was about to mount theirs. “They do fight or flight,” a member of the SWAT crew told me months later. “And we don’t.” The situation caused chaos on the ground, and now no one was telling them what was going on. Not that that was strange in an operation of this magnitude; locals were often shut out when headquarters took over. Still, Steve was not just a cop but their friend, and they wanted some answers.
Looking to the sky on the third day, they saw one, and knew that something critical was underway. Throughout the manhunt, Deputy District Attorney Brian Berger, a longtime AV local, had been keeping a blog. “Lake Los Angeles is not far from Palmdale Airport’s Plant 42,” he wrote, “home to, amongst other things, Skunkworks—the top secret aeronautical research and development center. We are used to seeing strange things flying above us. Well, we started seeing a low-flying C-130 overhead. It made too many passes over too long a period of time to be anything other than a hi-tech surveillance plane.” Berger and his associates were right. After searching Don’s trailer on Day One, investigators had found some of Kueck’s letters and personal papers, learning the names of his family members. They contacted them that afternoon. A sister of Don’s, Peggy Gilmore, provided important information, including the fact that they had bought Don a cell phone, hoping he would stay in touch and use it during an emergency. They had also learned that Don had a daughter who lived in Riverside; on the day after Steve’s death, they converged at Becky’s apartment just moments after Don had called, attaching a tape recording device to her telephone. They also gave her a cell phone—a direct line to cops. Although she was worried about entrapping her father, she also wanted to see him come in, alive, on his own volition, and she thought she could help. Now, as local deputies watched the skies, they took heart in this new phase of the investigation. It wasn’t just the plane they noticed; there were three Chevy Suburbans with government plates circling the area beneath the C-130’s flight pattern. Each vehicle was top-heavy with antennae. The plane and the cars with the listening attachments were the sign of one thing only, and that is what’s known in law enforcement as a trap and trace operation. In other words, cell phone tracking had now intensified. It worked by making use of the pings, or cell phone signals, that were bouncing off cell phone towers that crisscrossed the Mojave. If surveillance is picking up pings from one tower, that means the pings are in line with the phone’s action. If the pings are coming from three towers, that means they are in the area of use. The areas of use—or effect—will intersect in the general location of the cell phone, but the exact coordinates cannot be ascertained. As Berger knew, use of this surveillance meant that now the FBI and Justice Department had joined the hunt, since they are the agencies that have to sign off on the operation. “It was only a question of time before we would capture Kueck,” he wrote.
But where was he? There were no signals coming from his phone, and there were no sightings. As the heat-seeking tentacles of law enforcement continued to probe every fissure in the Antelope Valley, cops squeezed Kueck the old-fashioned way. An old mug shot had been broadcast and plastered everywhere, and it proved all too familiar to certain locals, who called in to report sightings of the guy with the demented gaze, the defiant Mojave ponytail and Fu Manchu, the collapsed speed-freak face—someone had seen a man running down the Southern Pacific tracks in Llano; there was a guy with a sword near the dumpster at the mini-mart; someone just stole someone else’s rifle. In a furious attempt to bag the killer, cops in black-and-whites and SUVs raced all over the Mojave, only to find the sad truth of the American desert: another ex-con with no place to go, lying facedown in the sand, blasted on Yukon J
ack.
At the Saddleback Market in Palmdale, everyone had a theory. “Maybe he flew out of here in one of those ultralight planes,” said one local chick, sucking hard on a Marlboro. “I hear he’s in Mexico,” said a guy in a T-shirt that read “Show Me Your Tits.” Someone else ascribed Sorensen’s murder to secret army experiments up in the buttes, suggesting that Kueck was set up, while another theorized that Kueck had floated down the aqueduct to Los Angeles. This last theory was fairly credible. The Los Angeles aqueduct ran 419 miles from Inyo County to the north right through the Antelope Valley and into Los Angeles—from where airplanes, buses, and trains were going everywhere and leaving any time, a perpetual exit door through which countless men and women running from one thing or another flowed all of the time. The aqueduct’s route through the Antelope Valley was especially scenic, its turquoise trail winding along the white Mojave sands and providing a counterpoint to the relentless pounding of the heat and light as only water can. Perhaps the place was not landlocked, it suggested: Jump in and I’ll wash away your fears and police record, or I’ll just give you a ride outta here. . . . The messages it whispered must surely have been heard by our hermit, who lived nearby the aqueduct and had studied it well. From one of his books, he had learned about its geology and construction. He knew how it flowed and when it flowed at its highest peak, along with its intake patterns as it came down from the higher elevations, carrying replenishment out of the Owens Valley, which it had sucked dry so long ago. He also knew how many miles per hour it traveled. It didn’t look like it flowed fast, but that was deceiving; at peak flow, it traveled at 4.8 feet per second, and every now and then, in the old days when he had first arrived in the AV, he would take advantage of the twenty-four-hour font and paddle down the aqueduct in an old kayak, or maybe just float in a tire, entering it at Fort Tejon Road in the town of Littlerock, where it ran parallel to the Old Butterfield Stage Road, and then floating down to Avenue S, where he hopped out as it headed under the freeway and then south to Los Angeles. Now, while looking to escape, he could make a desperate repeat of his old course, running south from the place where he had dumped his car, trekking across the desert and back through Llano, down into Largo Wash, the arroyo that nurtured the old commune after the rains. Inside its flanks, he would have been difficult to spot, and he might have headed across the ancient animal pathway and then zigzagged down Black Butte Basin Road, past the compound belonging to Frank Baker, whose phone call had triggered the fatal visit from Deputy Sorensen and where there were a couple of ultralight and small craft airports.
A Desert Reckoning Page 14