Breaking Rank (41 page)

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?

The UC Santa Barbara “assassins” were a no-show—if in fact they had ever existed. Had they shown up, locked and loaded, they would have found SDPD hopelessly ill-prepared. This was during the pre-SWAT era of policing. It was before PDs wised up and started meeting, doing joint planning with those affected by threats such as these. It was a time when kids didn't get shot on a college campus, or at a high school or a day care center.

I was happy that the only damage done that day was to the pride of a handful of cops. To this day, I can still hear a spindly little white guy in a Trotsky beard cackling about the one he pulled on some goofy undercover cop.

Toward the end of my assignment the People's Park issue exploded in Berkeley, largely the product of Governor Reagan's impatience and intransigence. The effects of the street rioting reverberated up and down the state and, like the free speech movement before it, all across the country.

At UCSD, weary of marathon teach-ins, SDS and like spirits were preparing to take over the university's administrative offices. There was no way I could not be a part of it.

About a hundred of us entered the provost's complex. Leaders of the takeover had done their intelligence gathering. They'd passed out copies of the floor plan of the warren of offices and corridors, and they knew the provost would be present at that moment. We charged into his inner office. The leaders of the pack penned him in. They jacked him around for several hours, haranguing him for the university's role in everything from the war in Vietnam to apartheid in South Africa. The university's secretaries
and other staffers were by turns intimidated and entertained by the radical proselytizers. But nobody got hurt.