The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  Now, in a rare moment of harmony, Bradley and Gates agreed that getting me off the streets served their collective interests. Gates did not want the message sent to the community that a black family’s murder was not prioritized, that the police could not handle their business, and that vigilantism was acceptable. This would erode respect for law and order. And Bradley, a seasoned campaigner, understood all too well the importance of crime as a political issue. In 1982 he lost a heartbreakingly close gubernatorial campaign to George Deukmejian in which law and order, victims’ rights, and the death penalty were the lead issues. Deukmejian had cloaked himself in the mantle of crime fighter and surrounded himself with victims and their families. Bradley was hurt by the defeat, and angered at being branded soft on crime. Thus as he geared up for future campaigns, Bradley felt the emotional impact of violent crime and knew its effects on his political fortunes.

  Bradley and Gates therefore assured me that my case was a top priority, and that going forward, a “drastic change” in police protection would be seen. More officers would be assigned to divisions policing South Central and even more active CRASH units would be put into action.

  Gates explained that LAPD had linked a lot of the recent gang violence to a concert held at the Coliseum on August 18, which had been attended by hundreds of gang members wearing their colors. Since that concert, numerous gang-related killings had occurred. While Gates could not say whether the murder of my family was related to this spate of killings, he commented that the police did not feel that the majority of the attacks were random, as they once had, but represented “targeted” attacks against certain individuals.

  “But why would anyone target my family?” I asked.

  Gates wasn’t sure, but said it may have been a drug-related retaliatory hit gone awry. And he conceded that the initial police reaction was that the crime had no apparent gang connection.

  I remained unconvinced, still seeing the police as clueless. It sounded to me like Gates was spinning his wheels, simply trying to mollify me and avoid a violent confrontation. It was gang related, it wasn’t gang related, it was random, it wasn’t . . . on and on. I felt he meant well and that his heart was in the right place, but nearly a month after the killings the police just weren’t getting anywhere.

  But out of respect, I continued to listen patiently.

  As their next approach, Bradley and Gates guaranteed me that they would personally explain to my family that I had no role in the killings and was not considered a suspect. Finally, they agreed that they would keep me abreast of developments in the case going forward, and that the investigating detectives would be instructed to give me regular briefings.

  Bradley then reiterated his heartfelt feelings for my family and his commitment to bringing the killers to justice. Gates concurred and ended with some small talk, noting that he, like me, was involved with Pop Warner football, where he coached nine-year-olds. Gates reminisced over his days playing football at Franklin High, where he too lined up on both sides of the ball, at fullback and outside linebacker.

  As the meeting concluded and I worked my way toward the door, the two adversaries once again spoke as one, stressing that for the good of all, my parallel hunt must end.

  Having a long-term relationship and great respect for Bradley, and an impression that Gates was sincere in his promise of stepped-up police efforts, I nodded in agreement. However, my need to be personally involved remained. I would do my best to stay out of the way, but I could not just sit idle. I would have to be more careful, and covert.

  “Find his killers,” the mayor said to the chief as we parted, “or I’m afraid he’ll turn into one.”

  15

  AN EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE

  IT KEPT ME from being a killer. It was my savior.

  The game is colorful and fast, complex and creative, electric. But it’s brutal and fleeting. The road to the pros is one long struggle. And every player knows that every play may be his last. The average NFL career is about three years. NFL means “not for long.”

  Thousands of hours of practice, conditioning, two-a-day practices at training camps beneath the blazing summer sun, repetition, reps, reps, reps, sacrifice, knockouts, see stars, reps, reps, reps, more stars, more reps, grind it out in youth leagues, high school, practice, commitment, then more reps.

  It’s been called a “murderous sport.” That’s why people love it. The violence is seductive. A psychology professor at UCLA would come and watch practice, then marvel. “I don’t get it,” he’d say, “but I’m just fascinated by the violence.” The game is raw, played in blizzards, “Ice Bowls,” “Fog Bowls,” and subzero temperatures described as “inhumane.” It is a model for manly living: vigorous, strenuous, punishing. It’s the ultimate subculture, tribes in uniforms and helmets, with a secret language and a coded plan of attack. Vince Lombardi called it “a game for madmen,” and General Douglas MacArthur thought it ideal battlefield training. It is a war. It is fought in the trenches. Gladiators face off in the Coliseum, warriors at Soldier Field, troops at Veterans Stadium. Guys nicknamed “Tank,” battle for yards against “the Assassin” and “the Hit Man,” offenses wage an aerial assault, led by the “Mad Bomber.” Defenses blitz.

  And my day was a different world from today’s NFL. Many players in the 1960s and early 1970s made little more than the average worker. Baseball was still the “national pastime.” Our salaries didn’t come close. We all had off-season jobs. We were blue-collar, lunch pail tough, that’s why they loved us in hardscrabble towns like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Oakland. We drank at local pubs with steelworkers and machinists, plumbers and cops. We hitched a ride to practice and carpooled to games to save money on gas. Practice fields were muddy, sometimes gravel strewn. Until the mid-1970s the Super Bowl didn’t sell out.

  We didn’t call them concussions. You got knocked out. You got your bell rung. And as long as you could stand up and “answer the phone,” you got back in the huddle and ran the next play. The fear was constant: you miss time for injury, you lose your job, the world hypercompetitive, everyone behind you on the depth chart just begging you to go down, give them a shot. The pressure was intense: play hurt for your teammates. We were a unit, a battalion. Be there for them, don’t let them down. The guy next to you depends on you, trusts you. Have his back. He has yours. Play through pain. He does. Why not you? Not tough enough? Do it. Don’t worry, the adrenaline and injections will numb it just fine. It’s in the job description, it’s just part of the game, perform or go home. Life lessons on the gridiron.

  In the scrum, or battle for the loose ball, unspeakable things occur, grabbing and grappling, biting and scratching, hands to the face, eyes, mouth, and worse. Until just the last few years, TV highlights glorified hits that are now illegal, bringing suspensions and fines. In my day we played for those hits. But now the toll is there for all to see: Oiler running back Earl Campbell sits in a wheelchair at age fifty, Raider center Jim Otto has undergone forty knee surgeries and has no cartilage left, Patriot wide receiver Darryl Stingley, with broken vertebrae, became a quadriplegic at age twenty-six. On the date he was injured Stingley was to become the highest-paid player in the league. The game was in Oakland. The Patriots flew back to New England, leaving him behind, alone in the hospital with a breathing tube in his mouth. The contract was never signed.

  But that was the game. The object was to knock the best player off the field. Everyone knew that was the goal, always had been, as long as the game had been played. When I played in the 1960s and ’70s it went without saying. With the Saints of 2012, it was labeled “Bounty-Gate,” put a bounty on other teams’ best players, collect cash for injuries.

  The other major struggle in my early years was racial. When I began to play football, in the 1950s, race was still a major barrier in the sports world.

  In 1951, the University of San Francisco Dons went undefeated, but were denied a bowl bid. Two of their star players were black, Ollie Matson, a future NFL Hall of Fame
r, and Burl Toler, who would become the NFL’s first black referee. The Dons actually were invited to play in the Orange Bowl in Miami, to decide the national champion. But the bid came with a condition: the team had to leave the black players behind. Refusing to be Jim Crowed, the team unanimously declined. Without the Orange Bowl revenues, USF could not afford to continue to field a team, and like Pepperdine and other Catholic universities I had once dreamed of attending, it shut down its program.

  When I played at UCLA, our nonconference games were scheduled only in northern cities. It was too explosive to put black players into the South, where sports and race did not mix. And when black athletes from California and the North would go down south, they were shocked. They couldn’t eat meals with their team, could not stay in the same hotels, could not use the same facilities. Guidebooks existed especially for black travelers, leading them to safe places that would serve them. Often black players, unable to find accommodations, relied upon local blacks in the area to put them up for the night. When I began with the 49ers and we played in southern cities, armed guards lined the stadiums for our protection. Just a year before I entered the NFL, 1962, the Washington Redskins, playing in D.C., finally integrated, and only under stiff federal pressure.

  In my day, only certain positions were open to black players: typically running back and defensive end, but never quarterback, center, or linebacker, the positions that called the plays and directed the action.

  To play a role in challenging these conditions, I became the 49er player representative, and then in 1976, after my retirement, the president of the NFL Players Association. At the time, I was only the third president in the association’s history, and the second black, after Colts legend John Mackey, who himself was a sad reminder of what we were fighting for, as he suffered severe bouts of dementia later in life.

  And it was a fight. Our union was new and weak. We were nothing like the Major League Baseball Players Association. But we all believed in the game. We knew what we were getting into. We just demanded that we be fairly treated, compensated for the wild risks we took. We all knew that our survival as individuals, and the game’s future, depended on making the game as safe as possible, while still keeping it football. On several occasions in its early history, the game came close to extinction. In the early twentieth century, after several deaths on the field, avid football fan President Theodore Roosevelt called for reforms to keep the game alive.

  Today the racial conflicts belong to the game’s historical past. But the tension over safety remains. We condemn injuries. We crave violence.

  * * *

  High rates of violent crime were nothing new to California or Los Angeles. In the height of the Gold Rush in the early 1850s, towns in the Sierras hit murder rates fifty times higher than late-twentieth-century America. Los Angeles, in the mid-1850s, while still a sleepy and undeveloped frontier pueblo, set the all-time homicide record.

  One of the reasons for Los Angeles’s outsized murder rate was its small population, ensuring that just a handful of killings could spike the per capita rate. However, Los Angeles during the transition from Mexican outpost to major metropolis was, like the Wild West in general, a dangerous place. From 1830 to 1860 the revolver became the favorite weapon, adding to the potential for lethal violence.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Los Angeles’s homicide rate was one and a half times that of the United States and more than three times the rate of New York City. With increasing railroad access, the city’s population exploded, from 100,000 in 1900 to 600,000 by 1920. This growth, however, was not accompanied by an increase in the homicide rate. Murder in America and Los Angeles hit a low point between the Great Depression and the post–World War II years. These low rates have been attributed to the end of Prohibition, high employment, more stay-at-home parents, an increase in law enforcement, and an antiviolence attitude of returning soldiers.

  Like most American cities, Los Angeles experienced a sharp homicide increase in the tumultuous 1960s, fueled by racial tensions, civil unrest, and New Left protest movements over the Vietnam War. Over the next decade, homicides continued to rise, hitting a modern high in 1980.

  By 1984, L.A.’s overall homicide rate had declined, but a clear trend was developing: an increase in black-on-black homicide, specifically, drug- and gang-related murders, an intraracial explosion that would be termed an “epidemic” and “a black genocide.” Homicide became the leading cause of death for young inner-city black males.

  This was the issue addressed by Eighth District councilman Robert Farrell on the day of the murders. Likewise, Tenth District councilman David S. Cunningham Jr., also black, urged the chief to “do whatever you can” to clamp down on crack cocaine markets, stating that the drug was “going to destroy the black community.”

  16

  HYDE PARK

  ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1984, as part of an increased effort by the LAPD to crack down on drug-related violence, Detective Manlove, of the L.A. Narcotics Division South Bureau CRASH, supervised a fifteen-person task force assigned to the area of Sixty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Central.

  One of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Hyde Park was established in the late nineteenth century as a stop on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. In 1887 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe broke the Southern Pacific’s monopoly on transcontinental travel, cutting the cost of a railroad ticket by more than 80 percent, opening up the West to mass settlement and spurring Southern California’s boom of the 1880s.

  Originally a small independent city of a little under three square miles, Hyde Park was incorporated into Los Angeles in 1923. Like nearby districts of Westchester, Gramercy Park, and Chesterfield Square, Hyde Park was given a charming classic name to entice settlers. By the end of the twentieth century the neighborhood would become largely black, with census data showing its residents to have one of the lowest percentages of four-year degrees and highest rates of single-parent households within Los Angeles County.

  Within Hyde Park, Tenth Avenue, a residential street, ran north to south with no center divide. A strip of grass separated the street from the sidewalk, setting the homes back several yards from the curb. American cars, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, parked along the street: Valiants, Darts, Dusters, Mustangs, an occasional van or truck. Palm trees, bushes, and chain-link fences fronted many of the buildings; a mix of single-story bungalows, duplexes, and low two-story apartment complexes. Gang graffiti streaked walls and buildings.

  As officers approached Tenth Avenue, a crowd of black teens stood in front of an apartment complex. They dressed in black and blue, in baseball hats and sneakers.

  The police task force was engaged in an undercover narcotics operation. This portion of Tenth Avenue was known for drug sales, most recently a new form of cocaine, called “crack.” The police were focused on a “rock house,” a fortified residence where crack was sold. As time went on, the rock houses had ever-thicker steel doors, reinforced with multiple locks, and only a narrow slit through which the drugs and money were exchanged. The reinforced doors were to thwart desperate addicts as well as robbers. They also served to slow police entry, allowing sellers time to escape, and stash or destroy the evidence. LAPD first employed small explosives referred to as shape charges to shatter the locks, and eventually turned to armored vehicles, used as battering rams to, in the words of Chief Gates, “hit with precision the exact spot on the house they wanted to punch a hole through.”

  First hitting the streets of Los Angeles in early 1980s, crack was a form of cocaine that had been heated or cooked with bicarbonate of soda. This distilled the cocaine into a kind of rock or nugget that could then be smoked, typically in a glass pipe. As the rocks were smoked they made a crackling sound, giving the drug its name. The crack cocaine craze was the latest fad or rush to hit California, this time the nuggets white not gold.

  The small rocks were cheap, making the drug instantly popular among the poor. Additi
onally, the high from smoking the rock cocaine is extremely intense, creating feelings of euphoria and omnipotence, as dopamine, a neurotransmitter providing a sense of pleasure, is temporarily spiked. However, the high is also very short-lived, lasting between five and fifteen minutes. Once the effect dissipates, the euphoria quickly fades as dopamine levels plummet, leaving the user feeling irritable, angry, and disoriented. The user now craves the high, making crack instantly addictive. As dopamine levels take time to recover, the next hit will not bring the same result as the first, causing the addict to smoke ever more in an effort to regain the initial high. This cycle of craving became known as “chasing the ghost.”

  The effects of crack cocaine devastated inner cities across the country, as millions became addicted. Dealers quickly realized the power of the drug, with some offering free samples, as one go-around was often enough to create an addict. Desperate to recapture the magic, addicts would literally sell themselves to get another high. Females who sold their bodies for a crack hit were referred to as “crack hos” or “strawberries,” while males were called “raspberries.” Crack houses sprang up like mushrooms. Outside the houses, the most desperate groveled in the dirt, on hands and knees, foraging for the tiniest grub that may have slipped to the ground. Locals called this “kibbles ’n’ bitsing.”

  Once hooked, the addict’s life revolved around getting the dose and maniacally attempting to sustain a high. Unable to function without the drug, and often staying up for days at a time, crackheads became incapable of handling everyday responsibilities, abandoning work, family, and any semblance of a normal social life. With brains chemically damaged by the drug, they also ceased to think rationally, acting paranoid, hostile, and erratic.