(Hersh Hamel) I know Diane very well, or did. Diane was a waitress at jazz City, 1956, '57. It was a big club during the fifties. They struck up a relationship. Diane had a couple of children, so I understand. She claimed she gave her children up for Art. It seemed more like she wanted to give her children up. Art was the excuse.
Diane started out very pretty. She's Filipino and had those island features although she wasn't real small. But she smoked incessantly, cigarettes, which later on deformed her lip. She had to have a lot of teeth taken out, and she had a little groove in her lip from the cigarettes. She had a very pretty body when I first saw her. Of course, later on ... She didn't use anything when Art met her, and she was determined to straighten him out. Of course she became a huge junkie, worse than Art. She lost her looks.
Diane wasn't terribly bright, terribly intelligent. She was a waitress. She was very lazy. She used to just like to lay in bed. They used to, like, get stoned on horse and lay in bed a lot. I remember she got this thing from the Akron-one of those pillows with arms on them so you can eat breakfast in bed, sit up and read. And she was just thrilled over that. Just thrilled. She was trying to help Art, but she gave up somewhere along the line. She didn't know how to help him. She was really a good person; she just lost herself to dope like a lot of people do. It's very easy.
I DIDN'T know Diane had taken these pills. I'm running around East L.A. pulling burglaries and boosting and trying to get ahold of a gun, and they're going to give Diane ninety days or something like that. So what she does, in order to get out early, in order to make them like her and help her, she says, "Well, I'm Art Pepper's old lady." All the narcs had heard of me and they said, "Oh? Where is he?" She said, "He's in East L.A. robbing and stealing, just strung out like a dog."
The police can't arbitrarily stop someone and search them without a reason. If they do, their case isn't any good. But when Diane told them about me, that was the "show cause," and they went to their files and gave pictures out to the heat in East L.A., my pictures. And when I got busted, the show cause was Diane's statement. She had informed on me.
At this time I was so hung up I had no one to go with me anymore. I was just walking the streets, burglarizing houses, going into stores, no car or nothing, just carrying stuff down the street-televisions, clothes, power tools-carrying them to the connection, hiding in alleys and parks. But then I did an album for Les Koenig, Smack Up, and I got some bread, and the next day I went to Stone Street in East L.A. I went to Frank and Lupe Ortiz's house to cop, and I bought a half a piece of stuff; the house was under surveillance; and the police had my picture in their car.
I got two condoms of stuff. I had had a student of mine drive me; he was parked three blocks down, on Wabash, a busy street. I turned the corner onto Wabash; there's a Bank of America and a lot of people going and coming. I'm walking by the bank, and the car is just a few feet away, and two guys are walking toward me, I'm trying to pass them, and all of a sudden somebody grabs me from behind, around the neck, and starts strangling me, and one of the guys drops a badge and says, "Sergeant Sanchez, L.A. Narcotics."
There were four of them: MacCarville, Salazar, and this guy who had me around the neck, Solagi, and Sanchez, who's a total illiterate madman. I'm trying to get my hand to my mouth. There was no way I could have swallowed the stuff because the guy had me so I could hardly breathe, but Sanchez saw me and grabbed my arm. I fought as much as I could and screamed, "Help! Help! Robbery!" hoping some citizens would jump in and give me just enough time to get it into my mouth and swallow it, but I was dead. They had me. They were too strong. Sanchez opened my hand, and there were the two quarters.
They got me in the car and drove about three blocks. I'm handcuffed with my hands behind my back, and this ape Solagi, he's sitting on my right; Sanchez is driving; and MacCarville is sitting next to Sanchez. All of a sudden we stop; I fall forward; and Solagi smashes me in the stomach with his elbow. Sanchez whips out his gun and hits me in the head with it. He clicks it and says, "I'm going to kill you, you motherfucker! You stinking bastard! Open the door!" Then he yells, "Open the door! Throw him out! Run, you bastard! If you don't, I'm going to kill you right here!" I said, "Ohhhh, man, what are you doing?" He'd cut my head with the gun. I said, "Just take me to jail and book me, man!" He said, "We know where you got the stuff. You got it from Frank and Lupe Ortiz, and you're going to tell us that or we'll kill you!" I said, "I didn't get it from anyone. I had it. I had it before I went to the pad."
They drove me to the Hollenbeck Station. They parked in the lot and Solagi said, "Get out!" I went to get out, and he kicked me in the legs so I fell. I would have busted my teeth out because I fell on cement, but I turned and hit my head. They grabbed me and dragged me in.
They had two holding tanks in the Hollenbeck Station. They took everyone out of one of them and threw me in it. Then Sanchez pulls my belt out and hits me in the stomach and the back, and he knocks me down again. They said, "You're going to cop out on these people or we're going to kill you." I had about a hundred and eighty dollars on me. They took my money. They knocked me out and left.
When I came to, I crawled to the bars and hollered at the two bulls on the cells, "Please undo the handcuffs!" They're not supposed to put you in a cell with cuffs on. They wouldn't even answer me. I said, "You motherfuckers!" The guys in the other cell said, "Hey, putos gavachos, you motherfuckers! Why don't you help this guy?" They screamed at the bulls, but they wouldn't do anything.
This was in the afternoon. At about eleven o'clock that night two detectives came to the door. They said, "What is this?" The bulls on the cells said, "Well," and they started whispering. These were guys from downtown, from robbery detail. One of them took out his handcuff keys and undid me. I was cut. Blood was running down my wrists. My hands were swollen. There was no feeling in them. They said, "You won't try to get away, will you?" I said, "No, I can't do nothin'." They said, "We don't want to handcuff you." They put me in a car and drove me down to the Glass House, which is the jail downtown. They booked me in. They no sooner book me in than I'm dragged out of the cell, and here I am in an office with Sanchez. He put me through all kinds of shit again. He said, "You'll talk eventually."
They took me to the old county jail, and this booking in took eighteen to twenty hours. I get into the hype tank, and in the morning I'm vomiting bile, and all of a sudden here come all the dope fiends to the cell door and one of them throws a newspaper at me: "JAZZ MUSICIAN BUSTED. .. Art Pepper, renowned jazz saxophone player, was arrested by So-and-so at such-and-such place .... Pepper said he bought the heroin from Frank and Lupe Ortiz." Then I realized what Sanchez meant when he said, "You'll talk. We'll get you." They just put it in the paper that I had ratted on Frank and Lupe.
So now I'm laying there. I'm so sick I can't move. I've been in jail a lot of times. I've seen people killed. I've seen them beat to death, with thick blood running out of their ears and eyes, every bone broken. That was what was waiting for me. I looked at these guys. I said, "Man, there's nothing I can say. Sanchez told me he was going to get me. I didn't say a word. Didn't say nothing, and this is what he did. If you're going to kill me, kill me. I did not rat on them. I've never talked, ever." I laid there, and I thought I was dead. They went outside and had a conference. Then they came back. They said, "We're going to wait and find out from Frank for sure."
When Frank got busted they put him in the tank that I was in. Maybe they thought he would be so unthinking he'd believe the newspaper story and have me beat up real bad, and then, before I died, they thought I would cop out on him. But he came by the cell, and he said, "You didn't say anything, did you, Art?" I said, "No, you know that." I told him what had happened. He put the word out. "Don't let anything happen to Art Pepper." He was an intelligent guy, and we had a good friendship.
I testified for Frank at his trial. I said that when I went to his house I had the dope on me, that I had just stopped by his house to help him move, which I had done, and it helped Fran
k, and he straightened everything, and that saved my life. But to this day there are people who read that story in the papers who believe that Art Pepper is a rat. And there is nothing that ever happened to me that was more horrible.
When I went to testify for Frank, I went under cover; the narcs didn't know what was happening. Before they did know I was already in the courtroom in the custody of a deputy sheriff. When I came out, as I walked with the deputy, I told him, "I'm afraid. I'm afraid these detectives are going to kidnap me and kill me." He said, "Don't be silly. Nobody would try anything like that." We walked down the hall and around a corner. There's Solagi, Sanchez, and MacCarville. They're sort of lounging in the hallway. I tell the sheriff, "There they are!" They give me a cold look. They walk up to the deputy and flash their badges. They tell him, "We'd like to take Pepper, here. We've got permission from the jail." They made up some story. Solagi says, "It's okay. It's all clear." Now, they were going to take me out and they might have killed me, but what happened next was incredible. It was like a movie. This deputy sheriff unbuttons his holster, puts his hand on his gun, and says, "I'm sorry. He's in my custody. I brought him here; I'm taking him back. You can come along with us, and when he gets back into the jail you can present your papers and take him from there."
They tried everything. They joked with him, and they grabbed me, and I said, "No! No!" and held on to the deputy sheriff, "Don't let them take me!" And they laughed. Sanchez glared at me. But this guy realized that what I had told him was true, and he would not let them take me.
The deputy took me to the jail. He told the desk sergeant, "If anybody comes for this guy make sure it's legal and everything's in order." They took me back into the jail, and then Frank came. So I was vindicated with everybody in the tank. The way it ended up they finally got Frank for some ridiculous thing. They framed him, but it had nothing to do with me.
END OF THE ROAD by John Tynan
For detective sergeants Ed Sanchez and Ray MacCarville of the Los Angeles police department's narcotics division, it was a routine stake-out.
Inside the house that they were watching, at 1113 Stone St., Lupe and Frank Ortiz went about their business of the moment as they prepared for a visitor. The Ortiz' business was alleged to be the sale of heroin; the expected visitor was Art Pepper.
To the waiting detectives, Pepper's appearance and entry into the house was a trigger for action. For an hour they waited expectantly. Then Pepper reappeared.
"We followed him for about two or three blocks," MacCarville said later. "Then we picked him up. He had a half-ounce of heroin on him and admitted being a user."
At police headquarters on Oct. 25, Pepper was booked for possession of the drug (estimated value: $240). Bail was set at $12,000. A three-time loser, he faces a sentence of from five years to life imprisonment.
Contrary to erroneous reports in the metropolitan newspapers, the bail was not posted. Pepper was left to the agonies of withdrawal in tank 11D-2 of the county jail. ("He's hooked real bad," said an officer the day after his arrest. "He was real sick today.")
To the police, Pepper was merely bait. On Oct. 26, narcotics officers closed in on the Ortiz operation, and the house on Stone St. was crossed from their list.
The police had Pepper dead to rights. Some three months prior to his arrest for possession, the altoist had been picked up for needle marks by a county sheriff's radio car, had pleaded guilty to addiction in court, and was sentenced to serve 90 days in the county jail. Before the full term of that sentence had expired, Pepper was released. A good-behavior release of this nature is not unusual.
But it was patently clear that the "monkey" had claimed a victim, and Art Pepper's troubled career had apparently come to the end of the road. Affecting adversely an application for parole is his record as a parole violator for which he served his last prison term in the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island, Calif., in 1955-56. He was released in June of that year.
Pepper's first narcotics conviction (for heroin) was in 1953. He served some time in Los Angeles county jail at that time, then was transferred to the U. S. Public Health hospital at Fort Worth, Texas, from which he was discharged in May, 1954.
The ravages of heroin on human life have perhaps never been demonstrated more clearly than in the story of 35-year-old Art Pepper. As it does with us all, his life touched and affected the lives of others. His first wife, who divorced him during his term in Fort Worth hospital in 1954, is now happily married to a San Fernando Valley, Calif., businessman. Pepper's daughter, now a teenager, lives with her mother and stepfather. Thus, while heroin shattered Pepper's first marriage, only he was permanently scarred.
In 1956, out of prison and still on parole, Pepper was given a second chance for happiness. He met his present wife, Diane. During the ensuing four years, he repeatedly stressed his debt to her for "keeping him straight."
At the end of 1957 Pepper could say with conviction, "My wife is the one who's made me happier than I've ever been in my life" (down beat, Jan. 9, 1958). "Now I really look forward to my older years. I used to be scared of growing old-but not now. Diane has done more for mein one year than all others did in my life's entirety."
"Whatever I may do in music from now on," he continued, "and whatever credit I may get for it belongs to her. She didn't give me back just my self-respect and career. Diane gave me back my life."
And a bare seven months ago, Pepper declared just as categorically (down beat, April 14), "Diane's understanding saved me; I owe so much to her. My marriage now is permanent and so very different from before. No words can describe what it means to me."
On Sept. 22, one month and three days before the altoist was left in a county jail tank to kick his habit "cold turkey," Diane Pepper was admitted to Orange County, Calif., general hospital in a coma induced by an overdose of phenobarbital taken to combat the withdrawal symptoms of heroin.
According to the report of two medical examiners at the hospital, numerous needle marks were found on her body. In the opinion of the examiners she "had been a heroin addict for a number of years."
Acting on an affidavit filed against her for narcotic drug addiction by Detective Sergeant Robert Manning of the Orange police department, Superior Court Judge Crookshank ordered her committed voluntarily to the California state hospital at Norwalk, Calif.
To detective Manning, it was an old and ugly story. He told of finding her slumped in the back seat of a car he had pulled over because, he said, he spotted two known narcotics violators in the automobile.
Rushed to the county hospital for emergency treatment, she later told Manning she had swallowed 30 phenobarbital tablets to ward off the pain of withdrawal. At 1/4 -grain each, Manning estimated, the dose totaled 71/2 grains of the drug, "enough to kill anyone else." Why hadn't the overdose proved fatal?
Said the detective. "There was still enough reaction from heroin in her system to keep her alive."
Diane admitted to Manning, the officer said, that she had been "turned on about two years ago by her husband." She added that she had "wanted to kick, but Art wouldn't go along with her."
Manning said she told him she was "shooting about four grams a day and that Art was shooting seven."
"That's around two spoons," observed the detective. "Quite a bit of junk."
The life of fantasy in which the heroin addict exists is productive of strange, often inexplicable thought processes. In the case of Art Pepper, deep feelings of anxiety and self-pity seemed to dominate his thinking. He was given to dark moods of depression, and the persistent delusion of persecution, like the drug his system subsisted on, was never far away. And the constant stream of optimistic thinking, running like a broken thread through his life as an addict, was merely self-delusion and a stark symptom of inner despair.
Yet, for all the fantasy and inner-life induced by heroin, Art Pepper at times exposed himself to brief and brutal flashes of reality, of true consciousness about what dependence on the drug meant to him as a human being
and to those he yearned to love.
He knew what continued addiction meant. He knew it spelled death.
In the summer of 1956, when he tape-recorded a long and frank interview for this magazine on his mental illness, he said, "Of course, this (his 1954 conviction) makes me a two-time loser. If I goof again and get busted, I can get 30 to 40 years in prison under terms of a new federal law. . ."
During the same interview, he noted "I've been working with Jack Montrose. I really like his writing and he's a wonderful person to work with." Montrose at a later date was arrested for heroin addiction and possession.
Again, reflecting on what a future narcotics arrest would mean, Pepper told this writer a year and half later (down beat, Jan. 9, 1958), "I think of the progressive steps that'll result from my goofing. First of all, I consider, the narcotics detail gets the word and before long I get picked up. This has got to happen; there's no escape. Then I get sent up for maybe 30, 40 years. My record takes care of that. I think about never again seeing my wife, my friends ... never again being able to play, which is the thing I want to do more than anything else. Well, by the time I'm through with this line of thought, I'm shaking with fear, so scared that the feeling (for a fix) is gone."
Somewhere along the line this fear was conquered-by heroin.
And to the last, to the time of his final arrest on Oct. 25, Pepper's emotional defense mechanism against the outrages of the mess that had become his life went to bat for him. He told arresting officers MacCarville and Sanchez, they said, that he felt he was still a young man, and he figured when he got out of prison, he'd still have his life before him.
Earlier this year, Pepper had begun to reassert himself on record dates as the superlative musician he is. He had begun to make his own albums once more, and it was unanimously agreed by all who heard them that the altoist was expressing himself as he never had before. His horn was heard on a variety of albums recorded for several labels and on the sound track of the motion picture, The Subterrraneons. Things were at last beginning to look up for Art Pepper.
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