Friday, September 6, 2013

LAPD/Sorry About That Jack Webb

This is an article from the May 1970 issue of Scanlan's.  While Charles Manson is mentioned a couple of times in the article it is not about him but rather about the dirty shenanigans Los Angeles law enforcement was perpetuating in the same time period.  It is no wonder that Sharon's father, PJ Tate, felt he had to do some investigating of his own to try to discover his daughter's killer.  It's a heavy reading assignment for the weekend but well worth the read. 












10 comments:

Matt said...

Thanks Deb, great reading.

Kiefer Sutherland's mother, eh? Interesting.

Although his (Fisk) efforts had been restricted to work with the Urban League and the NAACP - Parker had forbidden him to have anything to do with the Muslims…

I get the feeling Mr. Hendrickson will not find that surprising :)

The family that slays together, stays together.

So THAT'S where that line originated!

Minutemen were mentioned. Not knowing who they were, I looked it up:
The "Minutemen" was an extreme anti-Communist paramilitary group in the United States founded in 1961 by Missouri pharmaceutical company owner Robert DePugh. DePugh was a one-time member of the John Birch Society who quickly decided the Birchers were a bunch of letter-writing wimps...

I never heard of Luke McKissack (attorney for the Black Panthers in Southern California and chief counsel in the Dow Chimical case, who has done work for the defendants in the Sharon Tate murders and has a number of other colorful clients.). Have any of you?

McCowan was the investigator for the defense in the Panther case, as well as in the Charles Manson case...

I'll need to do some re-reading of the books. This name has fallen out of my head. Anybody?

cielodrivecom said...

Early on, Manson was trying to defend himself with two attorneys, Luke McKissack and Lawrence Steinberg, as his co-council. This was denied because in California, at least at that time, you couldn't have co-council if you were representing yourself.

brownrice said...

Fascinating reading... a great post Deb. Given the LAPD's obsession with the Panthers, Charlie's claim (to both the Inyo County cops and various LE types monitoring Spahn) that he was as deadset against the Panthers as they were looks like a fairly clever strategy really... it certainly would have taken some of the heat off him.

There was a police informant & agent provocateur called Louis Tackwood who worked for the LAPD at the time and then outed himself and got a lot of underground publicity talking about what racist, evil corrupt bastards they were. He was a bit of a congenital fabricator (even his lawyers admitted that "what he doesn't know, he makes up") but once again it helps to show the context of the times...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jmKj_TVRp4

Yes, yes... I know... Mae Brussell...

Matt said...

As long as the people NEED cops to protect them from themselves, NOTHING will change!!!!

BUT recently - in LA the politicians got smart- they inacted a trash collection sur-charge in order to hire more cops-which doubled the already monthy fee. So now every time someone puts their old smelly pieces of leftover fish in the garbage barrel-they can't help but think of the word "POLICE."

NOW, everytime I see a cop beat the shit out of some kid on the nightly news-I actually smell shit. It's amazing, JUSTICE for ALL!!!

Robert Hendrickson

starship said...

anyone know how any of this all ended up? Kiefer is conservative, no? His mother and father seem to be lefty types.

Matt said...

I just googled Kiefer. He says he leans left.

brownrice said...

Back in the '80s, a film I enjoyed very much was Flashback starring Kiefer Sutherland (as a commune-raised kid turned FBI agent) and Dennis Hopper (as an on-the-run '60s activist 20 years later).

The full movie is here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y3ozzvqKGc

A 13 min highlights vid is here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuMiDEat6xM

The general gist of the film is that "you can take the boy out of the hippy commune but you can't take the hippy commune out of the boy" :-)

Somehow it left me with the impression that even though Kiefer knows how to play a very believable cop, he shares his parents' politics...

starship said...

I don't know, guys. Ever watch 24?

brownrice said...

Yes, good point, Starship. Though I always assumed that was just an attempt to keep working in a post-911 world. As the son of noted lefties, he may have felt that becoming the poster boy for extraordinary rendition, torture and such was a safe way of ensuring a gig in the early 21st century. I never watched the show much. Were the ethical quandaries in such things ever explored in the series or was it just straight good guys/bad guys stuff?

starship said...

I only ever watched it by accident, so I really shouldn't be the one to paint them into any particular corner, but the episodes I saw always had the heroics come at the expense of our constitution so to speak.