Southside (9781608090563) (2 page)

Later, when the LAPD and L.A. County Sheriff's Department came around the newsroom annually to update press credentials, I'd be sure to be out of the office, not a rarity. Later, when the metro editor's assistant came by to remind me about the police press passes, I'd always say something like “Okay, I'll get on it.” But, I never did. I didn't want a background check run on me. After a while, it was forgotten. At crime scenes, just my regular
Times
photo ID did the job. On the very rare occasion a rookie or persnickety cop asked for my credentials, I'd just say I left it at the office or home. Fortunately, a lot of street cops were familiar with my byline and even my face. I was on the streets a lot.

Danny asked, “What's doin', Jack?” only half expecting an answer. Danny's about sixty, full head of black Mexican hair, thickly rimmed black eyeglasses, muscular, hairy forearms. He never drinks behind the bar and he's been calling me Jack for close to eleven years, though that's not my name.

“How many dead today?” asked Sharky Klian, the badass Armenian bail bondsman sitting at the end of the bar.

“It's dead, Shark,” I told him. “Only one.”

“When's the next big story coming out, Jack?” said Danny. “Let me know, Jack. I want to read it. But, you gotta be careful, Jack.”

“Careful? He's got a fuckin' death wish,” said Sharky, who ordered a French Connection, which is Courvoisier, Hennessy, and Grand Marnier. Cognac with sweetener. A waste of good brandy.
Sharky has three black belts, goes about six two, two forty-five and is never far from a fifteen-round 9mm SIG SAUER P226 Elite.

“Why don't you ask Danny for a French kiss while you're at it, ya fuckin'
bahduk
,” I said, using the Armenian word for fruit.

“He's not my type, Jack,” Danny quipped.

“Fuck both of you assholes.”

I never correct Danny on the Jack thing because it's good to have an alias at a bar so close to work and, besides, Jack's a cool name. Not that mine ain't.

One day he was reading this article by me that someone told him to read and he realizes Jack's not my real name. The next time Danny saw me he called me by my real name, Michael. “Danny,” I schooled him, “at the 'Wood, my name is Jack.”

I ordered another Stoli, took a few sips. It started to get my blood feeling pleasantly cool and loose.

“I'm heading tonight to interview the leader of the Hoovers.”

“At night, Jack?”

“Night's the best time to talk to a criminal. They think they can get away with anything in the dark, even stories. In the day, they ain't so colorful.”

“What'd I tell you, Danny,” Sharky said. “This guy is lookin' to die young.”

“Too late for that, Shark,” I told him. “When you gonna hook me up with the Armenian Mafia guys?”

“I told you, there's no such thing.”

“Yeah, sure, you're right.” I finished off the Stoli, feeling pretty damn good. As usual, I gave Danny a good tip, five on ten, grabbed the mints, stepped past the red phone that is the hotline to the
Times
, and walked out.

I was walking down 2nd Street about thirty feet from the Redwood, and off to my left a car slowed. That's not unusual. They all do. Broadway's coming up. But this car, a Regal or a Cutlass, stopped,
the passenger door opened and the driver got out that way, leaving the door wide open.

Black man. Medium height, medium age. A purple rag on his head. Grape Street Crips. Old for a Grape shooter. Run or charge? Charge. It was too late. He started squeezing. I don't remember a whole lot. I remember noise. I remember fire flashes. I remember searing, gut-wrenching punches, like from a horizontal high-speed pile driver ripping into me. I remember the buildings going sideways.

The Monday the reporter got shot was one of those glorious winter days in L.A. that made it easy to understand why countless, clueless masses in the rest of the planet believed the City of Angels deserved its nickname.

Looking north from the third-floor editorial offices of the
Los Angeles Times
, the view was urbane and civilized. All it took was three floors up to blot out the grime, the homeless, the graffiti, the dealers, and the horns of irate motorists. Directly across First Street was a magenta-and-gold bougainvillea-filled open space that two years earlier was a thriving heroin mart where dope fiends laid on slabs of weedy, broken concrete and numbly stared across the street at the shimmering twenty-eight-story City Hall. A Column One piece by Nora Zamichow had forced the mayor and city council members to look out their windows and clean up the embarrassment in their front yard.

Beyond downtown, just twenty-five minutes away by McLaren P-1, were snowcapped mountains beckoning skiers to call in sick and play Franz Klammer at Mt. Waterman.

In the
Times
's newsroom, a football field of pods with a core of glassy offices where editors conspired, even veterans were impressed.

“Well, the mountains came out today,” bellowed Eric Malnic, a sixty-three-year-old alcoholic who had been a reporter for forty-three years and hadn't had one sneaky gulp of his beloved 100-proof Smirnoff Blue since the Iranian hostage crisis. He didn't notice—or give a damn—that, as usual, no one paid a smidgen of attention to him.

The newsroom, as a whole, paid little attention to anything. Like the Sunday paper delivered to nearly one million people, everyone was wrapped in their own world.

It was a rare occurrence when that world opened and the entire staff was on the same page: September 11, 2001; March 21, 2003 when missiles descended upon Baghdad; April of 2004 when the paper won five Pulitzer prizes; President Obama's 2008 election and 2012 reelection; the 2013 Patriot's Day bombings at the Boston Marathon; and the day reporter Michael Lyons was shot.

At 5:55, fifty-five minutes after the first, seldom-met deadline had passed that Monday, Lyons had been walking on 2nd Street, heading back from the Redwood Saloon. He had taken two hits—upper right chest and right side—but, as the paper's LAPD reporters quickly learned from sources, Lyons was not dead and would not die from the wounds.

Still, in the newsroom there were tears, dismay, and heartache. There was real emotional unity. But even the shock and the poignant outpouring didn't last long. It was replaced by wagering faster than you could say Seabiscuit. The wager? Who finally shot Mike. The reporters put together a betting pool.

The list of potential assassins was deep. He had amassed some serious enemies over his twelve years on the staff.

There were street gangs he had outraged by writing about them, bringing extra scrutiny and harassment from police. Gangs such as the Grape Street Crips from the Jordan Downs Housing Project and the Bounty Hunter Bloods from the Nickerson Gardens Housing Project, both in Watts. The Rollin Sixties Crips in Hyde Park, the Eight Trey Gangster Crips headquartered in St. Andrews Park, Geraghty Loma and Arizona Maravilla in East Los Angeles, and Armenian Power in Hollywood and Glendale.

There were the husbands Lyons had infuriated over the years by entertaining their wives.

The gambling began.

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Morty Goldstein, the paper's old-school day cops reporter, a bespectacled, portly ex-Berkeley radical who had developed a taste for USDA prime beef and old Bordeaux. He never hit the streets, never left his desk, but had more cop contacts, more cop cell and home phone numbers than the new chief of police himself.

“Let's see,” Goldstein said. “We got all the gangs, the husbands, including that chef. Also that guy that confessed to Michael.”

“Krebs,” said another reporter within the gathering crowd.

Rex Krebs, who killed two college students, had confessed to Lyons in a jailhouse interview and landed on San Quentin's death row solely because of the interview. At sentencing, in open court, he screamed his biker pals would kill Lyons.

“The Armenian Mafia,” said ace general-assignment reporter Carly Engstrom, a foxy, temperamental thirty-five-year-old half-Korean, half-Swede who had been Lyons's pod mate for years. For over a year, Lyons had been trying to expose the Armenian Mafia in all their prey-on-their-own wickedness.

“Right, the Armenian mob,” said Goldstein, grabbing a pad off his desk, easily the most cluttered in the newsroom. He started a list as he leaned back in his chair.

Nona Yates, the newsroom's premier researcher, maneuvered to the core of the group of gathered reporters. She grimaced and shook her thick, long auburn mane. “Holy Sonny Barger. Mike's near death and you people are betting on who shot him? I can't believe this shit. Michael was the—Michael
is
the coolest motherfucker in this whole newsroom.”

“Sorry to destroy the image, Nona, but Mike was overrated,” said assistant metro editor Ted Doot, who had moseyed to the rim. “You know how many times I had reports from nightside copy editors that they smelled booze on him. He should have been suspended long ago.”

Nona Yates took a moment to size up Doot. He was a reasonably proportioned man of thirty-eight except for his incredibly tiny, shiny,
bald head and his equally freakish large buttocks, which she guessed weren't bald. She tried to shake off that image.

“If not for his cousin,” the pompous, Oxford-educated Doot continued, “he would never have been hired here. Glorifying gang members is what he did best. Killers. If there is any betting to do, I'll wager he was smashed when they finally shot him.”

Doot's stinging appraisal of a wounded reporter was further proof to the reporters that he was not human, but rather a heartless cyborg for the paper's equally heartless editor of California coverage, Harriet Tinder, a hard-working troll with no neck and the personality of dandruff, which she had in vast reserves, like the Kirkurk oil fields. Many people dismissed Doot simply as “Harriet's bitch.” But, his timing was off today. The staff, which normally put up with his put-downs, was not in the mood this time.

Carly Engstrom was first to speak. “Ted, the guy just got shot. Can you at least wait till he wakes up to write him up? And I believe the editor of this paper hired Mike, not Greg,” referring to Lyons's cousin, Greg Mahtesian, also a
Times
reporter.

Doot stared at Engstrom, but said nothing, silently calculating his revenge for that young hotshot calling him out in front of everyone. He'd just report her slutty little mouth to Harriet Tinder.

Nona Yates ignored Doot. She'd been sober for twelve years and it was times like this she got nostalgic for her old self: a twenty-eight-year-old Jack Daniel's-slugging, meth-snorting biker chick with keys to Angel clubhouses in Oakland and Ventura. Now, at forty, she had learned to ignore the ignorance. So she just muttered “mothercunter” and let it alone.

To the relief of several, Doot waddled away.

Nona started to walk away. “Betting on Mike. Shame on you.”

“Nona,” Goldstein called out, “Greg's at the hospital. Michael's going to be okay. No vital organs were hit. He got lucky. We got lucky. In a weird way, this might be a good thing for Mike. He'll come back stronger than ever and be even more a legend on his streets. In a sick way, I'm almost envious.”

“That isn't sick, Morty. That's just stupid.” Nona shook her head.

“Nona,” Goldstein said. “When Mike hears about this, everyone betting on who shot him, us making a pool. Come on. It'll be newspaper folklore. Lyons is going to love this story.”

Officers from LAPD's Central Division had responded to the shooting. Central handled calls for service in the downtown area—north past Chinatown and the Dogtown projects to the warehouses near the Pasadena Freeway; south past the Staples Center, home of the Lakers, Clippers, and Kings to the Santa Monica Freeway; east past skid row and the artist's lofts to the railroad tracks and the Los Angeles River; and west from the Figueroa Street high-rises to the Harbor Freeway.

Central Division's main responsibility was keeping a lid on the bubbling cauldron that was skid row, a twenty-block toilet of humans flushing down the drain, most of them going with the flow, only a handful struggling against the mighty, dirty tide. There was no master plan to clean up the area, just contain it, the way you let roaches roam a corner of an East St. Louis tenement hallway after giving up trying to kill them all. Let the bums run amok east of Spring Street, but keep them away from the Biltmore, the grande dame where old money still threw eighty-thousand-dollar weddings, away from the Water Grill and its sesame-crusted ahi tuna tartare and market price Santa Barbara spot prawns, away from Frank Gehry's wavy Disney Concert Hall that drew in the Hancock Park crowd.

But in the last several years, there has been a gradual subduing of the grim and colorful sidewalk culture that defined skid row. Though East Fifth Street and its tentacles still teemed with homeless, most of the cardboard condos were swept away. Long vacant office buildings were turned into lofts occupied by young, employed Caucasians who preferred mixologists to bartenders and Central
Coast craft brews to Heinekens. The Varnish, a bar modeled after a speakeasy, set the new standard for cocktails that took a few minutes to concoct, and many others followed. An Ace Hotel was going up on Broadway. Restaurants with high critical ratings, like Baco Mercat, Spice Table, and Church and State, were booked solid nightly.

Still, glamour crime was exceptional in Central. Those who died there rarely had funerals. They were just dropped in the East L.A. dirt by four illegals with a backhoe. And though the
Times
was in Central's jurisdiction, the paper hardly ever wrote about their own backyard. In 2006, there was an excellent series by columnist Steve Lopez about a skid row cellist that was made into a movie, but usually coverage amounted to the annual “Downtown is Booming” story, the goings on at city hall and the occasional celebrity trial at the Criminal Courts Building. That was about it.