Rat-Lines and Stakeouts
Carlson, Richard
Rat-Lines and Stakeouts My life under cover in 1960s San Francisco By Richard Carlson The tone of girlish shock that permeated the news coverage of the Hewlett-Packard "spying scandal" was...
...He didn't have any specific cases in mind...
...I had run an on/off switch into her pocket...
...They were open and friendly and kind of innocent in their own way...
...By noon, sitting in a chair in the lobby, I had watched three different single women and two men take the elevator up...
...He had a face like a British bull-dog, round and flat, with a wattled neck and a plop of curly hair on top...
...Myers's chief Richard Carlson is an occasional contributor to The Weekly Standard...
...Some kind of alarm system out there I imagine...
...Hal had bugged the table because the coin collector was so nervous about being caught wearing a wire...
...There was a large crowd on the sidewalk in front...
...It was a demonstration on behalf of Newton...
...I watched Larry hail a cab...
...Hal Lipset had left-wing political sympathies...
...The trouble with surveillance based on one photograph is that everybody you see starts looking very much like your man, in this case a fellow named Larry...
...No luck...
...Resisting the magnifier earlier, our man said a real buyer would use an electromagnetic microscope...
...She was sitting in an upholstered chair near the bed...
...I thought he had been shot...
...He had been a private dick all his adult life, beginning as a criminal investigator in the Army in World War II...
...The man was due out of the New Montgomery Street entrance of the hotel around 9 a.m...
...He took a table with some henchmen and ignored Marilyn, leaving after a couple of drinks...
...But the detectives who worked for Hal were a clever group, and ballsy, and I liked them...
...By tilting it I could see Larry's stocking feet...
...He is coming back Saturday night late for his first payment and the liquor...
...Mackin and his extortion demands were as clear as a bell, a bell that would save Jesse James from immediate pursuit...
...Hal Lipset died of cancer at age 78 in 1997...
...The two headed in my direction, walked into the bar, and, of twenty empty stools, picked the ones next to mine...
...The Free Los Siete crowd galvanized Bay Area liberals and leftists...
...The men fled...
...The DA claimed he was serving as a lookout and had planned to accompany the safecrackers after the heist to make sure the money was divided evenly...
...The Panthers had brought a busload of black school children, little kids, from Oakland...
...I said okay...
...I arrived at 433 Alvarado, in a working class neighborhood in the Mission District, in just a few minutes...
...The point was to get Visnick on tape with his charges against Charlie Myers, as legal backup for any KGO stories...
...Joe had left his own gun, wrapped in a towel, beneath the seat in their truck...
...Marilyn apologized for not getting James on tape...
...Lance and I promised Visnick we would come back the next night after the news show and bring Roger Grimsby to meet him...
...Telephone linemen's pole-climbing equipment and hard-hats for wire-tapping forays hung from hooks...
...Oh," she said, "I already did...
...We had scouted the area, looking for a safe spot for the bulky reel-to-reel recorder and Fargo receiver...
...I pictured her running down the hall screaming for the guards...
...Two locked rooms contained Hal's broad collection of uniforms and disguises: mailman, security guard, waiter, dozens of conventioneer's badges ("Hi, I'm Kurt...
...Marilyn, I said, Would you be willing to tape him...
...The men of Los Siete dispersed and faded away...
...Pat Buckman gained international fame as a private detective for his skill in retrieving American children who had been kidnapped and taken abroad by noncustodial parents, usually fathers, often to the Mideast...
...The price was a tad low since there were only five known specimens in the world and four of them were accounted for...
...It came from your tie," said Visnick...
...They were immediately chatty, and Larry bought my next beer...
...Steve died...
...But they knew Marilyn and had offered to sit at the bar separately and watch over her in case there was any trouble with James...
...A portable ultraviolet light turned his hands purple...
...and after Pat's lawyer put them on the stand to testify under oath as to what Buckman had said—a phrase happily characterized by the lawyer as "a reaction only an innocent man would make"—the jury set Pat free...
...I scribbled a note to Lance warning him of the nurse and stepped into Visnick's room...
...But they couldn't decide which of the suspects had done it, so they acquitted them all...
...Garry was a loud, obnoxious man who became emotionally involved with his clients, many of whom were very creepy...
...Al Bullock, the cameraman, pulled up behind me with a KGO reporter named Steve Huss...
...As I approached the bed a buzz began from Grims-by's necktie and turned into an electronic scream as I stepped closer and feedback sprang from the receiver in the valise and erupted from his shirt front...
...Jim Jones of Jonestown fame was one of them...
...We had dinner...
...Francis Hospital with a broken hip and leg...
...Hal thought Pat's "life-saving" statement in front of the cops who arrested him was a "great rat-line," meaning he figured Pat had thought it up ahead of time in case he needed it...
...Suddenly, the door opened behind me...
...I don't think so," said Grimsby, "I think it came from the window," and he pointed at it, as if that would make it so...
...I could hear voices inside the room...
...They had gone to high school together, and their romance had been rekindled a few years back at a high school reunion...
...I don't know about that...
...Sitting on a stool, I could watch the elevator doors behind me in the mirror...
...I walked quietly towards the chair where Lance was sitting, the note in one hand, the valise in the other...
...Hal came over and sat down...
...His source, a Marin County sheriff's sergeant, who soon became our source, charged Hal a couple of dollars for vehicle registrations, a few more for copies of driver's licenses, and $5 to $10 a copy for criminal records and mug shots, depending on the sergeant's mood—all payable on a monthly bill...
...But I was being paid to watch Larry and take pictures, not become his buddy and then encourage his friendliness to betray him...
...On my haunches, facing the machine, I could hear Grimsby pretty clearly, but his necktie was muffling Vis-nick a bit...
...It was more than a little disconcerting...
...She was 78...
...Stand by, he said, I'll call you when I have something interesting...
...I don't think so...
...I reminded Hal of his rat-line advice...
...ambassador and director of the Voice of America...
...Two plainclothesmen from Internal Affairs were hiding behind a dumpster in the alley...
...There was no money in the safe anyway...
...He was 82 years old...
...Visnick had been on the losing side of an argument in Mike's Pool Hall...
...said Al...
...They spray painted "Free Los Siete" on McGoran's house and on Jessie Brodnik's garage...
...It was the business he was in, he said...
...KGO had been tipped that a popular San Francisco state assemblyman, a buffoonish character named Charlie Myers, was being accused of petty graft...
...Lance and I used the man for a while but soon developed enough SFPD sources of our own to obtain these useful services free...
...He seemed to accept what Grimsby said and settled back on his nest of pillows, mollified...
...I walked straight to the desk clerk, a guy about my own age...
...Hal Lipset ran a police-record check on the seller...
...Visnick refused to be interviewed on camera but otherwise blabbed at length about Charlie Myers's alleged crookery...
...Sgt...
...The aide's name was Bob Visnick...
...His face and head were covered with blood, his jaw was broken, and his front teeth were gone...
...Paul McGoran retired from the SFPD after the trial...
...Roger was a Bay Area celebrity...
...Visnick and Grimsby were on the bed talking about Charlie Myers...
...I once was assigned by Hal to tail a fellow when he left the Palace Hotel downtown in the morning, follow him, and photograph him...
...Jack Mackin came out of Augie's back door and got into her car, which was now wired for sound...
...McGoran and Brodnik helped Lance and me with another bugging effort when we were trying to catch a crook named Jesse James, a former heroin addict and current alcoholic who affected both a red beret and the title "Reverend...
...I believe he said it twice...
...I came around the end of the counter and shook the clerk's damp hand...
...He stood there as she signed for the medicine...
...I borrowed the electronic gear from Hal Lipset...
...I palmed him the bill, though no one else was around...
...Hal had made a lot of dough from snooping, particularly wiretapping...
...He was very popular...
...Al Bullock, Hal Lipset, and I knocked on the door of an old lady who lived in a walk-up apartment directly across from the Chinese bistro...
...Then he grabbed his TV news camera and taped the medics and firemen arriving, as they worked on Steve, and when the ambulance hauled Steve away...
...He had been well known in the city as a star high school basketball player, despite his height...
...The power of celebrity at work, I thought...
...I was driving away when the police radio under the dash jumped to life...
...She knocked on Larry's door, and I heard him greet her by name—"Frances"—as he opened it...
...Had I ever done any surveillance, Hal asked...
...I photographed Larry, click, click, click, as he stood at the curb and kissed the girl full on the mouth...
...Paul McGo-ran was on a gurney, being loaded into an ambulance...
...She said yes...
...Buggery was not foreign to Huey, who, according to David Horowitz, had forcibly sodomized Bobby Seale in front of other Panthers after Seale kept annoying him...
...Our evening news show, hosted by our boss, Roger Grimsby, was wildly popular with the local audience...
...A rabbit warren of rooms and a squad-bay in the basement were where operatives typed reports or hung out...
...He had recently been arrested for carrying a concealed pistol...
...Pat Buckman was grabbed on the sidewalk...
...A fellow we knew, an amateur numismatist, had been approached by a man who offered to sell him a 1913 liberty head nickel for $50,000...
...Visnick nodded like this made sense...
...His police partner, Sergeant Sal Polani, was himself a hard case, which would be useful since he was on his way to San Quentin Prison...
...Polani and Officer Buckman believed the large walk-in safe at her Pacific Heights home was crammed with cash, claimed the authorities...
...My news partner, Lance Brisson, and I regularly tracked one weird person or another in real or imagined pursuit of news...
...If the gin didn't short it out, there was always the fear someone might pull it from the glass, bite down, and maybe electrocute their lips...
...But, I shouldn't have been caught at all...
...He then explained that he had once been arrested for bugging a hotel room in New York City...
...I didn't know whether that was true, but, if it was, Pat was a clever fellow...
...She didn't recognize him...
...It is a matter of importance, and you can help me...
...He was trying to get bail for Newton, who had been convicted of manslaughter for killing a young policeman, John Frey, in Oakland, and this was his way of going about it...
...In the course of shooting film of weird and violent people, including at the Watts riots in L.A., the student riots in Berkeley, the draft riots in Oakland, the race riots in San Francisco's Fillmore and Hunters Point Districts, hippie riots in Haight-Ashbury, and dozens of drug raids, murders, shootings, "love-ins," "be-ins," arsons, horrendous rapes, and a documentary on prostitution for ABC called The Streetwalkers, we had been shot at a half-dozen times, crashed into the ocean in a helicopter off Point Reyes, been punched, threatened with knives and a sickle, bitten, kicked, and hit with boards and kitchen appliances, chair legs, bricks, and bottles...
...When Mackin stepped from the car they pounced on him...
...It had been emptied of valuables and held just three mason jars of strawberry jam, stewed by Sally's maid...
...I donned the earphones and checked sound levels...
...For a couple of years we supplied almost all of KGO's (and sometimes the ABC network's) blood and guts stories...
...Marilyn had gone home but would return for the late shift if I needed the equipment back...
...I was still mad at him about Joe Brodnik...
...If he hadn't left his gun under the seat of his truck and faced all those guys without it, he might be alive today, and some of those Los Siete people would be dead, not him...
...A helicopter was hovering above...
...James was soon forced out of the Mission Rebels...
...My neighbors seemed upset by it, but, hell, I figured it was news, and Steve would have thought it was great...
...The previous year he had been named chief investigator of the Senate Watergate Committee...
...In 1971, he became a partner with former KGO reporter Steve Huss in a home-remodeling business...
...We had told Roger to sit as close as he could so the hidden mike would pick up Visnick's voice...
...He died instantly...
...He was well read and charming, a widower, as homely as a cement berm but a big hit with the ladies...
...We had helped make them famous in the Bay Area—as "Mission Eleven," their SFPD call letters—by filming more than a dozen lengthy stories on their exploits...
...When he fled the building a few steps ahead of a fellow trying to brain him with a pool cue, he ran into North Beach traffic and was hit by a city bus, or maybe a taxi—I can't recall...
...Gary Lescallet, who killed Joe Brodnik, according to witnesses, was convicted eight years later of the kidnapping and murder of an elderly school teacher named Edith Jackson and has been serving a life sentence in a California prison since 1979...
...Hal even used Pat Buckman to dig up a bitter ex-wife of McGoran's who came to court to talk about how awful her former husband actually was...
...A police sergeant named Mackin came in...
...Hal and I ran into each other one night at Enrico Banducci's cafe on Broadway in North Beach...
...His friend from KGO, Steve Huss, was visiting Al at his home in Belmont, California, last year when he fell to the floor with a heart attack...
...Jesse James had arrived at 9 a.m...
...The tip that Jesse James was stealing federal funds to buy a weekend house near Lake Tahoe came to me from a vice cop named Al DeBrunn...
...I got my ordination on the streets," he told me...
...Joe Brodnik called me later that day...
...James ran a federally funded group called the "Mission Rebels in Action," the most expensive War on Poverty program in San Francisco at the time...
...about the smearing of Joe's name, the harassment of his widow and family, and the shameful acquittal of his killers...
...Lance and I visited the hospital room where he lay in traction...
...It was only a con job for the press and Congress...
...I was out of the closet...
...Hal was unapologetic...
...I went in and closed the closet door...
...I back-peddled and it receded...
...It was top-heavy with thugs and rip-off artists...
...The San Francisco newspapers lionized "The Reverend," even though most reporters privately acknowledged that James, who had done 16 years in Attica and Sing Sing for violent crimes, was a charlatan...
...Hal was recording the restaurant conversation on a canasta table in the apartment...
...Pat and Sal had been arrested in the spring of 1965 with two European safe crackers outside of Sally Stanford's imposing Pacific Heights mansion, two blocks from Lipset's house...
...Jessie Brodnik, Joe's widow, had a rough time after the killing and spent years estranged from her family...
...I'm sure of it," Grimsby added for reinforcement...
...Reporters surprised to learn about pretext phone calls...
...I moved to Los Angeles to head the ABC investigative unit...
...Deputy Chief of Police Al Nelder and a captain from Internal Affairs were crouched a few feet away in a dark stairwell...
...My friendship with Hal Lipset was destroyed...
...deputy had testified to a grand jury that Charlie had used state funds to pay $250 a month to his family babysitter, had "phantom employees" whose salaries he kept for himself, and had settled a campaign public relations bill with $300 in taxpayer-owned postage stamps...
...James had collected close to one million dollars in federal money in the previous three years, plus as much from foundations...
...Everything about Pat was big, he even had big teeth...
...I'm a detective, I said...
...I have it all on tape...
...I had done a little over the past two years, I told him...
...I had my Nikon with a big telephoto lens, the guy's name, age, and description, and an 8 x 10 color portrait that I figured came from either his wife or his business partner, whichever was the paying client...
...Hal Lipset's office and home was a four-story, 25-room Victorian mansion at the top of San Francisco's Pacific Heights...
...He slumped to his knees in despair as we filmed him being handcuffed...
...He was in St...
...I also worked for one of the most successfully sneaky private dicks in America, the king of deception, stings, and wiretapping, the man who invented the transmitter in the martini olive: Harold Lipset...
...It was Paul McGoran...
...He was divorced, had four kids, and also lived in the Mission...
...We went to Hal Lipset and borrowed some bugging equipment, a small wireless mike, a Fargo transmitter, and a reel-to-reel recorder...
...Paul McGoran was a few years older and big, well over six feet...
...He died of pneumonia in San Francisco in the summer of 2005...
...I could hear the elevator doors ding, so I was watching when Larry and his friend Frances stepped off...
...I clipped a wireless mike under Roger's rep-stripe tie before we left the car...
...She had been running fancy San Francisco whorehouses for 40 years and now owned the lucrative Valhalla restaurant on Sausalito's waterfront, named after her finest San Francisco bordello...
...When the valet brought the girl's car, I pulled a tight shot of its California license plate...
...I read a newspaper and talked to the bartender...
...I wish I could tell you what it's about, I whispered, but I can't...
...Sal Polani became a delivery boy for a pharmacy after his release from San Quentin...
...His son Bob is now an SFPD homicide detective...
...Her shoes disappeared and she was gone...
...She agreed that we could film from her living room window...
...I saw McGo-ran's white Dodge truck at the curb...
...The defense turned Joe Brodnik and Paul McGo-ran into racist bullies by hammering the theme daily in the media...
...Lance and I were the "investigative team" for KGO-TV, the ABC-owned station in San Francisco...
...That's what I'm talking about," he said...
...He and Paul wore jeans and sports shirts and drove various trucks and old cars...
...Larry and Frances were a goldmine of info...
...When a Mission District citizens' group planted a tree with a memorial plaque to Joe, the plaque was defaced and the tree was cut down...
...On it was an ID plate which said, "Auto-Clave—The Best Bed Pan Flusher, Washer & Sterilizer...
...Joe Brodnik seldom carried a gun because it aggravated his stomach ulcer, rubbing as it did against his side...
...The stuff had been taken in a burglary in the Sunset District...
...Sometimes the cobbler's kids don't have shoes," he said...
...Rev...
...he was hooked...
...I had the microphone clipped between her large breasts and had secured the recorder in the small of her back with gaffer's tape...
...Visnick was pleased...
...Rat-Lines and Stakeouts My life under cover in 1960s San Francisco By Richard Carlson The tone of girlish shock that permeated the news coverage of the Hewlett-Packard "spying scandal" was something to behold...
...and then throwing up their hands—even our guy threw up his hands, forgetting that he was innocent—when the Secret Service agents stepped out into the sun and collared the con man in time for our evening news...
...Mackin, was walking to her car a few weeks after Mackin's trial (he was sentenced to San Quentin) when she was confronted by a large man wearing a mask and carrying a baseball bat...
...I've thought a lot about rat-lines and your friend Joe Brodnik...
...Sgt...
...He was 61 years old...
...When a new one was planted, the same thing happened to it...
...Paul died of a heart attack in 1987...
...I waited motionless until she removed the pan and reset the machine...
...Garry was parading with a bullhorn in the midst of demonstrators...
...said Visnick...
...The last woman, middle aged with auburn hair and glasses, wearing a pants suit, got off on his floor...
...They marched and demonstrated, held dozens of news conferences, always with Charles Garry at the center, and raised much money, some of it by extorting Mission District businesses with threats of violence...
...I bowed out, to go down to the cafeteria for coffee, I said...
...Marilyn said that James was usually in the place for his first vodka rammer by 9 a.m...
...They said the policemen had enlisted the aid of the two professional burglars to crack Sally's old-fashioned vault...
...Joe Brodnik and his partner, Paul McGoran, came in...
...I saw him one day...
...The fact that he had his arm tightly around the waist of a pretty blonde about 30 confirmed in my head that his wife was the client, unless, of course, the blonde was his business partner's daughter...
...Larry, if that's who the client was, got the report and photos...
...She was dancing around the room with excitement...
...We took Grimsby with us as promised...
...for a couple of months, covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping...
...I have no idea," said Grimsby...
...I dropped to my knees and pushed my small pocket mirror into the carpet along the bottom of the door...
...The old lady was clad in flannel pajamas and a hairnet...
...I must have been out the day the intellectuals arrived...
...Hal had his own problems...
...A heavy young neighborhood woman ran up and threw a striped bedspread over Joe's body...
...Pat was friendly and outgoing, and he was a natural intriguer and adventurer...
...Jesse James didn't know them...
...You didn't always apply it to yourself, you once told me...
...Patrick Buckman, a former San Francisco cop, was one of the more interesting of them...
...I looked straight up and watched her pull down the long handle of the autoclave, almost to the top of my head...
...They titled the suspects "Los Siete de La Raza," and propelled the phrase "Free Los Siete" into daily media use, first locally and then nationally...
...San Francisco police had been tipped off and were waiting...
...Police cars were parked in different directions on the street, lights flashing...
...The author of this piece became a U.S...
...Hal's office (and his wire and tape room) was on the main floor...
...One returned to his native El Salvador, another is a day laborer...
...It was a lengthy smooch and looked postcoital to me...
...He threw a blanket over her and beat her to the ground...
...On some of the cases with Hal, I could only guess about the end game...
...Charles Garry hired Hal Lipset to work on the case...
...What saved Pat with the jury was a question he had asked loudly of the wounded Sgt...
...I said, there's another $10 in this for you if you write down the phone number of every outgoing call he makes, and another $10 if you listen to those calls and take notes of what is talked about...
...I was glad Larry was having so much fun because his life was going to fast turn into a drek-storm when Mrs...
...He was 76 years old...
...Pat never said whether he was guilty of the Sally San-ford heist...
...I jammed the receiver and the rest of the stuff in the leather bag...
...I went over and introduced myself to Marilyn...
...Marilyn, the brave woman who helped catch Sgt...
...From the front window, Al filmed the coin collector, and then the con man, going into the restaurant, and finally the two of them in front of the place peering into the large Marx Brothers-style magnifying glass...
...Among other enthusiasms, she had been an ardent supporter of the Marin County Little League...
...He said he needed to talk with me in private...
...Hal was the model for the Coppola film The Conversation and once owned his own Pacific Telephone truck...
...Al Bullock had given our man a ridiculously large magnifying glass with instructions to get the seller out on the sidewalk to check out the coin in the sun—really so we could get a clear shot of them squinting at the altered nickel...
...Then he said, "Mission Eleven...
...I couldn't understand him...
...Joe Brodnik was about 40, small and wiry...
...Larry introduced Frances as his girlfriend, off and on, he said bluntly, for about twenty years...
...I am not making this up...
...When I looked confused, he said, "Figure out how you're going to get off the ship before you get on board...
...We could have dancing without a license if we pay him $200 a month plus a case of booze...
...He responded with a room number in a whisper...
...Visnick was propped in bed in his tiny room, his leg suspended from the overhead by pulleys and wires...
...In a much earlier life I was a reporter...
...I asked her if she would wear a wire when James came in...
...Beyond that, many folks are natural-born snitches, willing to tell on someone else to a stranger...
...The nurse remained for endless minutes...
...Alteration of money, even a nickel, was a federal crime...
...The jury later said they never believed Paul McGoran had shot Joe Brodnik...
...He had recently taken a package of medicine to Sally Stanford's house...
...he was a detective and he worked for the fellow who paid the bills, even if it was someone I didn't like—meaning Charles Garry...
...Demonstrators paraded outside of Joe Brodnik's house, while his children cowered inside...
...No rat-lines...
...Lance Brisson is the CEO of a successful international public affairs company in Los Angeles...
...Hal liked to give his clients details and times, no matter how mundane...
...When cops with shotguns leaped from a closet in the darkened mansion, surprising Polani and the two burglars at Sally's safe, the three intruders bolted for the front door...
...I did learn something interesting this afternoon," she said...
...I know about these things...
...Garry's slavish devotion to Huey P. Newton, a drug addict and multiple-murderer whose heroic public image was a media creation, was thoroughly weird and, I thought, homoerotic...
...Now, he had been publicly fired when the White House and the press learned about his old New York State wiretapping conviction...
...A man was screaming...
...Polani at the moment they were grabbed by police...
...I kept the match there so periodically I could check to see if anyone had opened the door while I was in the lobby...
...But all the milling, excited cops had heard Buckman, including the brass, Inspector Tom Fitzpatrick and the deputy chief, Al Nelder...
...Hal asked if Lance and I would like to do some surveillances and an occasional investigation for him...
...It was 8 a.m...
...Hal Lipset's obit in the New York Times said he hired many intellectual operatives...
...On May 1, 1969, I walked out of the federal building in San Francisco...
...Lance and I took off...
...TV cameras and reporters were covering it like a blanket...
...I could see the woman's feet as well...
...If this fellow had one it would be worth a million dollars or more, not $50,000...
...I met Hal in San Francisco in 1965, and we hit it off over dinner and a bottle of red wine...
...They followed suspected criminals both day and night...
...Polani had just lost a mouthful of teeth and wasn't answering...
...He is now vice chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C...
...Lance Brisson was my cohort at KGO News...
...He got some work from an old Stalinist lawyer named Charles Garry, the "chief counsel" and propagandist for the Black Panther party...
...An hour before, I perched at a table in the extruding window of the coffee shop across the narrow street from the Palace...
...He looked like Damon Runyon's idea of a successful race track habitue...
...A policeman has been shot," on Alvarado Street, he shouted repeatedly...
...I was learning that most people will help you if you just ask them...
...It had a clear view of the restaurant entrance...
...We were friends with both of them...
...Lance and I didn't ask...
...It was: "Sal, what did you get me into...
...The detective's estranged wife, Marilyn, worked as a bartender at Augie's Hideaway, a saloon at 19th and Cap Street in the Mission District, a few blocks from the Mission Rebels Headquarters...
...She told me that as the man began striking her, he said, "This is for Sgt...
...Although Old Horn Dog Larry never said anything about the young blonde at the Palace Hotel, who by then I had decided was probably an escort service hooker...
...Sally was a seasoned tax-evader...
...You could never be sure about these things...
...She was badly hurt...
...Lance and I went back to visit Bob Visnick, Assemblyman Myers's chief deputy and principal accuser, in the hospital...
...I didn't know what to do so I just squatted like any other weirdo in a ratty trench coat and earphones would, a four-foot antenna sticking straight up from the mass of equipment at my feet...
...He was already drunk...
...Al said Marilyn listened almost daily to Jesse James brag about ripping off federal money as he sat at her bar in the mornings tossing down straight vodkas...
...Joe Brodnik would be 77 years old...
...We pointed out that a real seller and a real buyer wouldn't be meeting in a restaurant that served duck enchiladas and kept its Christmas lights up all year, either...
...The man then shot Joe directly in the heart with a big .41 caliber magnum bullet...
...When my guy actually came through the revolving doors, after being preceded one at a time by a troupe of doppelgangers, I recognized him immediately—Hey, it's Larry...
...Police were shooting into the rundown pink stucco house behind him where the killers were believed to be holed up...
...He is writing a book about San Francisco in the sixties...
...Inspector Tom Fitzpatrick, head of Police Intelligence, ran up the walk, caught Polani by the throat, and, pulling his own pistol back, accidentally shot Polani in the face...
...He had the marked money in his coat pocket...
...Even with my earphones, I could hear the hissing rush of steam and watched it bubble from the rubber seals of the machine...
...He worked repairing office equipment and as a security guard for many years...
...A nurse was standing there...
...I did see Hal again...
...Coda The martini olive with the toothpick transmitter...
...I followed each of them until they got off on a floor other than Larry's...
...It was empty except for a steel machine, about five feet high, against the back wall...
...one, Danilo Melendez, was sentenced to prison for armed robbery in the mid-70s and was stabbed to death in 1977...
...Our coin collector arranged to meet the seller in a shabby Chinese restaurant, run by a Mexican family, at 18th and Mission Streets...
...She died of a heart attack six years later...
...Marilyn tugged at her sweater as she poured me a beer...
...Lance and I showed up at closing time, 2 a.m...
...The numismatist was waiting when the ex-con arrived with the coin...
...I knew it was more than that, but I finally let it go...
...Spoken like a true KGO alum...
...He was convicted but avoided publicity after paying a fine...
...Al Bullock is 84 years old and still an active TV cameraman...
...etc...
...The clerk took it...
...Al Bullock, a cameraman for KGO, and I were joined by Lipset and two plainclothes detectives, Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran...
...She slammed a steel bedpan into the machine's maw and threw back the handle, locking it, and then opened a big valve...
...He had been a cop for a dozen years...
...I returned to the lobby and changed my vantage point...
...He films fishing shows...
...there are worlds out there about which we know nothing...
...I'm following that fellow you just checked in, and I need to talk with you...
...None of your business, Hal would sometimes say if I asked...
...Joe coached neighborhood basketball and baseball in the Mission, where he and his wife Jessie and their kids lived...
...Polani survived the shooting and was convicted, along with the safe crackers, and sentenced to San Quentin...
...Next to Vis-nick's room was a narrow closet with a sign on the door that said "Bed Pans Only...
...Sally Stanford, whose real name was Mabel Busby, became mayor of Sausalito in 1976...
...Jesse James beat the concealed weapons charge...
...Cops with guns were running around...
...My God, what was that...
...I caught up with it and followed him over to Fisherman's Wharf, where he checked into the Villa Roma, a garish, completely circular hotel...
...He claimed he was carrying the revolver to City Hall to turn it in under the "Mayor's Gun Amnesty Program...
...Hal would get the owner's name and address with one phone call...
...Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran had spotted a half-dozen young Latin men carrying TVs and furniture into the Alvarado house...
...There was an electrical outlet, and I set up the recorder at the base of the machine...
...We listened, and Sgt...
...Pat was tall and muscular, a spiffy dresser in dark pinstripe suits and starched white shirts with large monogrammed French cuffs and huge gold links...
...They claimed that somehow McGoran had injured himself and then had shot his partner, Joe, in the confusion while he and Joe, the two "racist cops," were trying to intimidate and brutalize the innocent Latino boys...
...I'll give you $5 to tell me what room the guy just went to...
...After the men were captured—some of them had kidnapped and held a young couple before robbing them in a town south of San Francisco—Charles Garry and other leftist lawyers took up their case with burning zeal, turning it into a cause and a political platform...
...I visited her in the hospital...
...A shooting...
...He had a bullet hole over his heart and blood soaked his sports shirt...
...We introduced Grimsby and perched him on the edge of Vis-nick's rack...
...Over the years, he has thrown out a few rat-lines...
...Mackin, you bitch...
...Lance pulled a chair alongside...
...They were carrying white picket signs with a large red star around a picture of Huey Newton in his beret and waving small copies of Thoughts of Chairman Mao, a collection of political inanities popular at the time...
...Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white shoe...
...He'd pay by the hour and match our Time magazine stringing fee—we always had side jobs—which was a hefty $10 an hour...
...We also took Hal's Fargo bugging equipment...
...Pat denied everything and said he just happened to be in the neighborhood...
...Frances sat down next to me...
...Hal was in his mid-forties...
...Charles Garry died in Berkeley in 1991...
...I watched them from my car across the street...
...He offered Pat Buckman as an example...
...I went into the bar...
...I never found out what it was for...
...I decided not to tell Hal I had talked with them or even give him Frances's name...
...He was dead...
...I walked past the room, picked up a paper match from the floor where it had fallen when the door had opened, and reinserted it into the door hinge at ankle level, where I had put it after the clerk gave me the room number...
...Al called 911...
...As Paul and Joe talked with the men, one of them grabbed McGoran's long-barreled revolver from his waistband and clubbed McGoran in the face with its butt, breaking his jaw and knocking him to the ground...
...She had answered the door...
...KGO was famous for a lack of decorum and taste...
...Buckman, who claimed he didn't know what was going on, was acquitted...
...Joe Brodnik was lying on his back on the sidewalk...
...at Augie's Hideaway, and Lance was sitting at a table gnawing on a pickled egg and peering through the wooden window blinds in case Jesse James showed up early...
...I was in San Francisco in 1974, up from L.A...
...Hal once said to me, as part of a general PI tutorial, "When you plan something, first set your rat-lines...
...He was sitting on the edge of the bed...
...Garry had the Black Panthers and their newspaper join the media fray...
...The man was never caught...
...I went to Hal and tried to dissuade him...
...A few nights later, as a light snow fell, Marilyn DeBrunn and Sgt...
...I shook his hand again, always important...
...He was an ex-con who had done time for white-collar crimes like bad checks and embezzlement...
...McGoran and Brodnik and two Secret Service agents were sitting in the restaurant near the table under which Hal had clamped a wireless listening device as we ate Chinese-style Huevos Rancheros that morning...
...We used Hal, or Hal and his gear, more successfully at other times...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 18
