by Joe Donnelly
After a close call with PIP agents in Iquitos, Padilla and Brewer acquire forged documents identifying the two as Peruvians going to visit family in Colombia. They fly to the Colombian border town of Leticia and reach a hotel owned by an expat. Padilla calls his ex-wife Eileen and she sends money on the next flight in. They pay off the Colombian equivalent of the PIP to write a temporary visa that gives them seventy-two hours to get out of the country or be arrested.
During their brief stay at the hotel, Padilla and Brewer befriend a group of college kids. One of them is a Colombian girl who rooms with Caroline Kennedy at Radcliffe. The friendship pays off in Bogota, the girl’s hometown, when Padilla and Brewer can’t get a hotel room there because they have no passports. They’re terrified they’ve come all this way only to get picked up for being indigent. Then, Padilla remembers he has the girl’s phone number. Their last night in South America is spent at the penthouse home of Caroline Kennedy’s college roommate. The next day they get a flight to Mexico City, and then it’s on to LAX.
Home.
As they exit the airport through a stream of people, Padilla puts his hand on Brewer’s shoulder, and they stop for a minute. Padilla looks uncertainly at Brewer and his look is returned. Until now, they’ve known what they were running to. Now that they’re here, they both realize the hardest part comes next.
Epilogue
Twelve years after she entered Mystic Arts World, Lorey Smith has grown into a woman already disappointed by marriage. She is cautious and jaded. To help get her out of her funk, Smith’s sister suggests she come down to Corona del Mar for a party. A friend of her uncle is going to be there, and he can show her a good time. She hesitates, but when her sister tells her that the guy used to be in the Brotherhood, she softens.
“I had this thought, okay, he’s not anybody’s who’s going to harm me,” Smith says. “I felt safe. So I said, ‘I’ll come down.’”
The party is in full howl when Smith arrives. Every time she turns around, she bumps into her uncle’s friend. His name is Eddie.
“He was following me all over the house. I thought, What is up with this guy? My sister would say, ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s fine.’ I didn’t know everybody had been partying for the last three weeks. She left that part out.”
Little by little, Smith settles in. She and Eddie start talking. They dance, despite Eddie’s obvious limp. Two days turn into four. Smith is compelled by this guy, but unsure. He seems haunted, hunted even.
“I didn’t know he was blasted on coke and had drank who knows how much by the time I got there—I just knew something was wrong. But once we actually started talking, and it did take a couple of days, then, I was like, ‘Wow, what’s his story? All this pain.’”
At some point during the partying, Smith loses track of Eddie. “All of a sudden, I heard this noise, like moaning, like pain and moaning. And I opened the front door and he’s out on the lawn, by this bush…just in this really, really bad place.”
“I tried to get him to talk a little bit about it, and he did, and he shared enough with me sitting on the grass that one particular night that I was just…fascinated that he was even sitting there having been through what he’d been through.”
Over time Eddie tells Smith more and more about what he’s been through, about Lurigancho, a prison in Peru known as La Casa del Diablo. About how he escaped with his life, but wasn’t sure about his soul.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, you’re kidding, you should write a book.’”
Smith tells this story at a small kitchen table in her small condo in Santa Rosa, California. It’s the middle of December and a relentless, cold rain has been pounding for days. Smith serves up some sandwiches as she talks. The oven is on for heat.
Padilla comes in from the living room when he hears us talking about how he and Lorey met in Corona del Mar. “I wasn’t fit for polite company,” he jokes. Lucky for him, Smith wasn’t too polite, and they kept seeing each other. It didn’t take them long to figure out they’d met before, when a wide-eyed twelve-year-old handed a handsome man a handmade necklace and that man accepted it with a smile.
Eddie Padilla and Lorey Smith have been together since 1981. It’s one of the few happy endings in this story.
Jimmy the dealer and Diane Pinnix stayed together until Jimmy beat her up badly, putting her in the hospital. Jimmy briefly went to jail before he bailed out and fled to Columbia. He was eventually gunned down in the street.
Diane Pinnix died a junkie’s death seven years ago in Jamaica. “The unfortunate thing is she died alone,” says her mother. “She was beautiful when she was younger.”
Drugs and alcohol continued to dictate the life of James Thomason, the man Padilla says did his time with more courage and grace than anyone else. I visit Thomason at the Rescue Mission in Tustin. His shoulder bears a tattoo that reads “Lurigancho 75-78.” His hard life has punched in his face. When I ask about his time in prison, he says. “I don’t know what hell is, but Lurigancho is as close as I can think of.”
Thomason tells me of the dysentery, the filth, the flies, people getting stabbed, and Padilla’s descent into despair after Pinnix betrayed him with Jimmy. “That’s when he really lost it,” says James. “He was a lowly person in that Peruvian prison, and nobody cared. He wasn’t Eddie Padilla anymore. He was a prisoner.”
When I ask about the massacre, Thomason’s eyes go distant, and his galloping speech slows to a near-halt. “They came in with rifles and the machine gun,” he says.
These days Thomason dreams of being able to afford an apartment by the beach, watch TV, drink a few beers, and live out his days. Though he seems a poster boy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he admits to no lasting ill effects from his time in Lurigancho. It occurs to me that surviving Lurigancho is both the worst thing that ever happened to him and his greatest accomplishment.
Richard Brewer died a little more than two years ago. Upon his return from Peru, he quickly went back to his old ways. But he never lost his outlaw’s code of honor. At Brewer’s memorial, friends gathered to paddle his ashes out to sea. Afterward, they had a bonfire on the beach. Everybody had stories to tell, but Padilla had the story.
“I said, ‘You guys know the story…but what you guys probably don’t know is, he came back for me. We had agreed to go our different ways. He knew I wasn’t going to be able to walk, and he came back for me.’”
We had just finished watching a documentary on Lurigancho and sifting through a kaleidoscope of memories—some better than others—when Padilla relates this. It’s late in a long day and he starts sobbing.
“All those guys called themselves the Brotherhood for so long, but you know what? Richard was a real brother. He came back for me. He carried me… I always thought that if anybody came back for anybody, it would be me coming back for them.”
As Padilla says this, embarrassed by his tears, it feels like a fresh revelation. In some ways, I think the simple fact that he wasn’t the rescuer but the one who was rescued may have turned out to be the god Eddie Padilla was looking for his entire life—the ego break that neither acid, the Brotherhood, nor his misguided idea of freedom could provide. Perhaps this newfound humility allowed him to admit, where others didn’t, that Lurigancho broke him. Maybe it gave him the strength to ask for help and to claw his way back after descending into a deadly alcoholism and drug addiction, fueled by his crippled leg and fractured psyche.
At death’s door and living on the streets, Padilla finally made it into rehab and set about on the long road back to recovery. He went to AA meetings and therapy for years. He managed to earn a degree in drug and alcohol counseling and has made a career of working with juveniles and cons. He hopes his memoir will be useful in his work, both as a cautionary tale and a story of redemption. In the end, he just might have earned the narrative he seeks.
“You know when they first started telling me about the Brot
herhood, that seems like what it was all about—it was people helping people,” says Padilla’s brother Dennis, who was instrumental in helping Padilla stay sober in those first crucial years of recovery. “It wasn’t about money and things, and I think that’s where he’s at today.”
Sergeant Delgado was killed in a shootout when a friend of one of the doomed guys in the Life article tried to bust them out. According to the report, it took eleven rounds to bring him down.
Lone Wolf
Originally published in Orion, April 29, 2013
Author’s note: I’d blown all my money on Slake and was getting ready to pull the plug on the project. My mom was in the grips of advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Occupy Los Angeles—the biggest and longest lasting of the Occupy movements—had finally fizzled. The Great Recession was hanging over life like a dark cloud and I was feeling broke, spiritually and financially. I needed something to believe in. Then came wolf OR7, insouciantly traipsing into Northern California, pissing on trees and claiming his birthright in the very place where the last wild wolf in California had been killed some ninety years prior. Bingo.
The night is dark on a narrow slip of canyon floor alongside the North Fork Feather River. The mountains are big and close, their steep, tree-covered slopes tall enough to block out the moon and stars. Flashlight in hand, I follow the sound of roiling water toward the river, though my chances of finding what I’m looking for are slim. My objective is a moving target, one that’s highly elusive by nature and even more so under the cover of a black night.
It is hard to tell at this point whether my path to California’s remote Plumas County has been one of fortune or folly. Online, the “lodge” where I’m staying in Belden, population twenty-two, is an appealing, rustic western Sierra getaway. In real life, it’s a trailer park hotel. But I may well be on the right track. When I checked in and asked about the object of my obsession, the thickly bearded innkeeper with the feral, blue eyes nodded and told me that his dog went crazy about a week ago. “I’ve never seen him like that before,” he said, gazing out the window across the river and into the forest.
I hurried to my assigned trailer, where a large buck camped out front was munching on flower bulbs, and checked my laptop. I scanned back through the reports posted online by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and sure enough he was in the area when the innkeeper’s dog went barking mad. And has been since.
Just being close to where he’s been—may still be—is enough to send me out into the night. Maybe he is up on the bluff across the highway where the hydropower pipe climbs eight hundred feet up the mountainside like a giant snake disappearing into the trees. Maybe he’s tracking that buck with eyes honed for picking up the slightest of movements from great distances, even in the dark. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll catch a glimpse of him—the first wild wolf to enter California in more than eighty years.
◆◆◆
Nearly two years ago, when I first read a small news item about the wolf with the blandly scientific designation of OR7—the seventh wolf collared in Oregon—crossing into California, I was caught off guard by the intense affinity I felt for him and his journey. It wasn’t just the grand scale of his adventure, with the late summer and fall months spent traveling the length of Oregon, his Christmastime crossing into California, the subsequent seven-hundred-mile midwinter foray through the state’s remote northern counties, only to cross back into Oregon in March before doubling back to the Golden State in April. Having logged thousands of miles in search of my own place in the world, I could relate. But the awareness OR7 sparked in me of a moment’s wild possibility had to do with something bigger, deeper, and older than all that.
It was the winter of Occupy, a time for reckoning with the past decades’ economic, spiritual, and environmental betrayals. I had hopes that bankrupt paradigms might fall and something new, better, and more honest might take their place. My own reckonings and rebellions had mostly left me out of money and ideas, and frankly I needed something to believe in. And then came this wolf—this long-toothed shadow of our bastardized best friends, a thing we tried our damnedest to eradicate—trotting insouciantly into California.
OR7’s return struck me as a singular act of defiance—by god, nature, fate, whatever words you prefer. I rejoiced at his coming south, so far that he was now howling at the backdoor of our failing civilization, forcing us by his very presence to consider the question, how are we going to live? Can we surrender some of what we’ve taken? Can we accept that OR7, nature’s foot soldier, the vanguard wolf of California from the clan of creatures we couldn’t tame but could only kill, deserves some of this, too? Or will we continue to insist the land and all that’s on it, under it, and over it is ours to do with as we please? Who better, I thought, to stalk our hypocrisies and upend our delusions than the most mythologized and demonized animal in history?
I felt compelled to try and get closer to this young wolf, formidable at 105 pounds, measuring nearly three feet at the shoulder, six feet in length, and possessing jaws that can crack an elk femur the way a nutcracker can crack a walnut. So early last September, I drove into Plumas County, California, following the North Fork Feather River, which begins auspiciously near Lassen Peak, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range. The river drains some twenty-one hundred square miles of western-slope Sierra into Lake Oroville, one of the largest reservoirs in the country. It has carried countless dreams downstream: gold dreams, ranching dreams, hydropower, rail, and timber dreams—each a tributary in the larger river of dreams that settled the American West and tamed wild California.
Many of these dreams are dead or dying, but I could still see their vestiges as I drove downslope through the Feather River Canyon where defunct railroad tracks cut into the hillsides, and shorn mountaintops peak through low clouds and fog. The occasional Sierra Pacific lumber truck rumbles along the Feather River Highway past mining cottages that dot the riverside and stare down diminishing prospects with the occasional splash of fresh paint and flower boxes.
Except for a few stubborn holdouts, the era of man seems just about done in Plumas County. It’s an eerie, forgotten landscape, and there’s a certain poetic justice in OR7’s arrival. Bounty hunters killed OR7’s last remaining California cousin near here in 1924, back when wolves were considered to be an enemy of Manifest Destiny. OR7, though, doesn’t seem to have revenge in mind. He has yet to take sheep or cow from the descendants of those who shot, trapped, poisoned, and burned his kind to extinction in the West.
But this hasn’t stopped some locals from greeting his arrival as if the devil himself were paying a visit. As soon as his epic trek signaled a wolf with Golden State aspirations, the hysteria began. To calm local fears of pending doom, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted public meetings featuring wildlife officials, celebrity wolf experts, government resources managers, and a highly agitated public—all awaiting the imminent arrival of a solitary, thirty-month-old Canis lupus.
After one meeting, Marcia Armstrong, a supervisor for Siskiyou County, where OR7 dallied briefly before moving on, told the Los Angeles Times that she would like to see all encroaching wolves “shot on sight.” Adding to the tinder were ranchers warning that a wolf repopulation would be “catastrophic.” Other folks spread rumors of conspiratorial wolf smuggling by federal agencies and of a government out to trample rights and make it harder to log, mine, and dam the rural West.
Those sympathetic to OR7’s plight had very different demands. Some even pleaded with officials to import a mate for the lone wolf, who was clearly looking for love in all the wrong places.
◆◆◆
Back along the banks of the North Fork Feather River, the water is just a moving silhouette. I turn off the flashlight and crouch down at the river’s edge, scanning the area without moving my head, trying to be as still as possible, looking for movement the way OR7 might, though at 120-degrees of arc, my visual field is only
two-thirds of his.
Wolf stories, like ghost stories, emerge through insinuation and grow into their own kind of lore: large tracks in the mud, a moonlit howling that is too resonant to be the nattering of coyotes, a tingle down the spine. Or if you’re an unlucky rancher, a hollowed-out rib cage where once was a sheep or calf. A wolf seen is a wolf seen mostly by accident, happy or otherwise.
I turn my back to the river and face the other way, toward the hillside, where that buck outside my trailer probably came from. The air is still. Nothing moves but gnats and mosquitoes. No sounds but the gurgling river. I feel exposed, not so much hunted as haunted. And I like it.
The next morning, I drive farther north, into territory OR7 may be claiming for himself. The road passes through Lassen National Forest and eventually skirts under the 14,179-feet-high Mount Shasta, just about an hour from where OR7 crossed over from Oregon. The route travels a California rarely seen by those who live within the clutches of the coastal megalopolises. Here, salmon run in the rivers and bald eagles fly so low you can almost look them in the eye.
OR7 crossed this road and others many times as he traveled south. I scan the valley floors, farms, and ranches, picturing him loping along the edge of the highway at night, filled with the curiosity and the courage of one whose only experience of fear is that which he inspires. I see him stealing through private property where easy meals and misguided liaisons with canine cousins tempt his hungry soul. I imagine all the itchy fingers waiting for a shot at his shadow.
The air feels wild and dangerous and alive in a new way. So do I. And I begin to understand even more why OR7’s incursion matters, why the land is so relieved to feel his feet pushing down into its soil once again. The land knows what I know driving into the untamed night—that we’re less than we can be without him.
◆◆◆
Karen Kovacs, the wildlife program manager for California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s northern region, has agreed to meet me at her office in the coastal town of Eureka. When I arrive, it is damp and foggy and Kovacs says she’s exhausted. OR7’s arrival has put a mountain of to-dos in her threadbare department’s inbox. Foremost among them is the petition filed by several environmental organizations to get gray wolves—this gray wolf—protected under the California Endangered Species Act. The petition triggers a taxing process of studies, peer reviews, hearings, and a series of votes, beginning with whether or not it is even warranted.