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Posts Tagged ‘LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT’

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART FIVE (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 14, 2013 at 12:05 am

The Witness Security Program owes its creation to one of the most-feared assassins the Mafia has ever produced: Joseph Barboza, who took pride in his underworld alias, “The Animal.”

It was a nickname he had lived up to.  “I was an enforcer,” he boasted to the House Select Committee on Crime in 1972, “who kept the other enforcers in line.”

Barboza had done so as a top hitman earning $900 a week from the most powerful Mafia family in New England.  Ruling that family was Raymond Patriarca, based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Joseph “The Animal” Barboza

But even before entering the Mafia, Joseph Barboza had spent most of his life as a career criminal.  He was born in 1932, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Portuguese immigrant parents.

By the time he was thirty, he had served two prison sentences—one for burglary, the other for assault with a deadly weapon.

Even his jailers couldn’t restrain him.  At Norfolk Prison Colony, he got drunk on illicit “hooch” and led an inmates’ riot, culminating in a short-lived escape-attempt.

When Barboza wasn’t serving time in prison, he made his living as a boxer (winning three professional matches and earning a rating in Ring magazine).  He supplemented his income through a career as a freelance loanshark and extortionist.

By 1963, his growing notoriety had brought him to the attention of Enrico Henry Tameleo, the underboss, or second-in-command, to Raymond Patriarca.

Since 1948, Patriarca had been “the policymaker, judge and overlord of organized crime” throughout New England, according to a 1966 FBI report.

Raymond Patriarca

Tameleo offered a Barboza a job and fulltime income as an enforcer for the Patriarca Family.  Barboza instantly agreed.  He had always dreamed of becoming a “made man” of the Mafia.

(Tameleo didn’t warn him that this was impossible.  Barboza was of Portuguese descent, and only full-blooded Sicilians and Italians could hold Mafia membership.)

Tameleo sent Barboza to shake down 20 nightclubs whose owners had refused to pay “protection insurance” to the mob.

The owners changed their minds after one or two visits from Barboza and his wrecking crew.  Furniture would be smashed and customers terrorized until the owners began paying $1,000 a month to Patriarca’s collectors.

Meanwhile, the always fragile peace of the New England underworld was being shattered by an escalating wave of gangland violence.

In 1961, the two most powerful factions of the region’s “Irish Mafia” had gone to war.  On one side was the Charleston mob of Bernard McLaughlin.  On the other was the Winter Hill gang of James “Buddy” McLean.

The “Irish Gang War” triggered a police crackdown on all the New England organized crime groups—including Patriarca’s.  That was when Patriarca demanded that the fighting stop.

To ensure that it did, he sent his underboss, Tameleo, to arrange a peace conference between the McLeans and McLaughlins.  Both sides agreed to a truce because Tameleo was widely respected for his skills as a negotiator.

But when the conference opened in January, 1965, Tameleo was outraged to find the McLaughlins had come armed–a direct violation of the “rules of order.”  Patriarca also grew furious at this spurning of his efforts as underworld peacemaker.

As a result, the Patriarca Family threw its full weight behind the McLeans.

During 1965, Joseph Barboza moved from being a “mere” legbreaker for the Patriarca Family to becoming its top assassin.  His first important victim was Edward Deegan, a McLaughlin member who had raided several Patriarca gambling dens.

Barboza invited Deegan to join him in a burglary of the Lincoln National Bank in Boston.  Unaware that he had been marked for death, Deegan agreed.

On the night of March 12, 1965, the burglars struck.  As the four men emerged from the bank, Barboza and two cronies emptied their pistols into Deegan.

This killing proved a turning point for Barboza.  He became the top hitman for the Patriarca Family and the McLean mob.  He carried out more  hits than any other assassin during the war.  Later, in a hastily-written autobiography, he would boast of his string of killings.

(But he was always careful to describe his actions in the third-person, as though someone else had actually been responsible.  In this way he protected himself against prosecution for murder, where no immunity existed.)

In June, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi, a close friend of Barboza’s, was gravely wounded by a shotgun blast.  Barboza soon learned that the attackers had been Steve Hughes and Edward “Punchy” McLaughlin.

Swearing vengeance, Barboza quickly set out to claim his next victim.  He was especially intent on disposing of Hughes, who had become the top triggerman of the McLaughlins.

On October 20, 1963, Edward McLaughlin was waiting at a bus stop when Barboza casually walked up behind him.  Disguised in a wig and glasses, Barboza drew his pistol and pumped five bullets into McLaughlin.

Less than a month later, on November 11, the hitman visited the Mickey Mouse Club, a tavern in Revere Reach.  This time his intended target was a bartender and McLaughlin member named Ray DiStassio.

Talking with DiStassio at that moment was an innocent bystander, John R. O’Neill.  Barboza simply drew and shot both men dead.

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART FOUR (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 8, 2013 at 12:05 am

Joseph Valachi was the first member of the Mafia to talk publicly about its secrets.

But before that happened, he had to be persuaded to open up.  The men who first got that assignment were agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

But the sessions between him and the agents went badly.  He blamed them for his imprisonment on drug charges in 1960.  And he believed they had deliberately created a rift between him and his cellmate, “Boss of all Bosses” Vito Venovese.

Then the FBI intervened.  Under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to combat the crime syndicates, the Bureau took an aggressive interest in Valachi.

Seeing him as a potential breakthrough in organized crime intelligence, the FBI cited its greater area of jurisdiction and successfully lobbied the Justice Department to take charge of the new informant.

Valachi’s disclosures proved worthless as prosecution evidence.  They were too dated, and too many of the leading mobsters who figured in them were now dead or retired.

But as strategic intelligence, they were invaluable.

Valachi provided federal lawmen, for the first time, with an insider’s account of the history, membership and operations of organized crime.

Many veteran law enforcement agents were shocked: The shadowy world of the Cosa Nostra was far more extensive and powerful than they had dared imagine.

More important, in Joseph Valachi himself, the Justice Department finally had tangible proof of an organized crime network.  The very existence of the Mafia had long been hotly debated within law enforcement.

Chief among the believers in such a criminal empire had been Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Anslinger’s certainty that the Mafia existed grew out of his agents’ constant struggles against mobsters importing narcotics into the United States.  His agency had compiled elaborate dossiers on many of these mobsters, and had sent many others to prison.

By far the most important “debunker” of this belief was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Hoover insisted that there was no “national crime confederation,” only loosely-knit groups of criminals whose apprehension was best left to local law enforcers.

J. Edgar Hoover

Hoover’s refusal to admit the existence of the Mafia has long been the subject of heated debate.  Some theorists believe he feared that his “Boy Scout” agents would be corrupted by Mafia bribes.

Others argue that he had been compromised by Mafia bribes or blackmail (the latter through his alleged homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson, his second-in-command at the FBI).

Still others claim that Hoover simply couldn’t accept that other federal, state and local police agencies had discovered a criminal empire that his own agents had somehow overlooked.

A major reason for the continuing debate over the existence of organized crime lay in the refusal of mob informants to testify as courtroom witnesses.  Abe Reles had been an exception, but he had given his testimony twenty years ago, and only for the State of New York.

More importantly, Reles never appeared before a Senate investigating committee—and on live television.

Joseph Valachi did.  In September, 1963, he became the Senate’s star witness in its hearings on organized crime and narcotics trafficking.

By that time, the mob was offering $100,000 for his life.  To guarantee that no one collected on this contract, federal lawmen turned the Senate Caucus Room into a bodyguards’ convention.

Before Valachi entered the room, FBI agents and deputy U.S. marshals screened the audience for suspicious types or known underworld figures.  While Valachi testified, marshals and capital police filled most of the first eight rows behind him.  Other lawmen were scattered throughout the building.

Joseph Valachi

Whenever Valachi left the witness chair, twenty deputy marshals accompanied him everywhere—even  during trips to the restroom.  And after each day’s proceedings, a fast-moving caravan of police cars returned him to his heavily-guarded cell at the District of Columbia Jail.

During the nearly three years that federal agents interrogated Joseph Valachi, the Justice Department spent more than $167,908 guarding, transporting and maintaining him.

But the money was well-spent: when Valachi died in 1971 at La Tuna Federal Prison, near El Paso, the cause was a heart attack.  And federal lawmen had proven they could guarantee protection for those who betrayed the secrets of the Mafia.

Other organized crime witnesses for the Justice Department didn’t fare so well.

In 1965, two years after Valachi’s appearance before the Senate, Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who had succeeded Robert Kennedy, informed a shocked Congress: “We must dismiss [organized crime cases] because key witnesses or informants suffer ‘accidents’ and turn up, for example, in a river wearing concrete boots.

“Such accidents are not unusual.  We have lost more than twenty-five informants in this and similar ways in the last four years.  We have been unable to bring hundreds of other cases because key witnesses would not testify for fear of the same fate.”

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART THREE (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 7, 2013 at 12:03 am

Eight years after the death of Arnold Schuster in 1952, the lack of a witness security program cost the life of James V. Delmont, a member of the Stefano Magaddino Mafia Family of Buffalo, New York.  After slipping from underworld grace, Delmont went on the run for his life.

On June 25, 1959, he appeared at the Miami field office of the FBI, offering a rare trade: Mafia secrets for any intelligence the Bureau had on his pursuers.  But the FBI didn’t know what to do with its would-be informant.  One agent advised Delmont to re-enter the Mafia as an FBI plant.  Delmont angrily rejected that idea, and again took flight.

On May 25, 1960, he made a similar offer to agents of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.  They wrote him off as a crank.

Ten days later, Delmont’s body, bearing the marks of a classic Mafia execution (several bullets fired directly into the back of the head), turned up in a field in East Los Angeles.  The Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department conducted a vigorous probe into the slaying, but couldn’t positively identify Delmont’s killers.

Commenting on the significance of the Delmont case, LAPD Sergeant Peter N. Bagoye, an expert on organized crime, noted: “If any police officer still doubts the existence and power of the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, or whatever you want to call it, just let him read this case.

“This man Delmont spent a year and traveled thousands of miles to escape the vengeance of the Mafia.  He left a trail of letters and conversations behind-the first known case in which there is any existing blueprint of how the Syndicate works.”

In 1961, after Robert F. Kennedy became Attorney General, the Justice Department mounted the first effective campaign in its history against organized crime.  As part of this effort, the agency began wrestling for the first time with the complex difficulties of creating a protection program for organized crime witnesses.

Robert F. Kennedy

By September, 1963, Kennedy—appearing as a witness during Senate hearings on organized crime and narcotics trafficing—could  cite a number of successes by federal lawmen in safeguarding witnesses.

“How long,” asked Maine Senator Edmund S. Muskie, “can the Justice Department protect people who agree to testify?”

“We have taken steps, Senator, to even move people out of the country,” answered Kennedy.  “We have provided them with positions and work in other cities where nobody will really have any contact with them.  We have arranged to move their families and have their names changed.

“I think we have procedures now where, if an important individual comes forward and is willing to testify, we can give him that kind of protection.”

Such an individual proved to be Joseph Valachi, an aging Cosa Nostra hitman and narcotics trafficker.  In 1962, Valachi was an inmate at Atlanta Federal Prison, serving two concurrent sentences totaling thirty-five years for narcotics trafficking.  His cellmate was Vito Genovese, then the most powerful Mafia boss in the country.

Vito Genovese

Genovese had been convicted of narcotics conspiracy in 1959 and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.  Now he began suspecting—wrongly—that Valachi was an informer.  The reason: After Valachi’s second trial for narcotics trafficking, he had been repeatedly interviewed—against his will—by federal narcotics agents.

One night, in a scene right out of a B-grade Mafia movie, Genovese summoned Valachi to his cell for a private talk.

“You know,” said Genovese, “we take a barrel of apples.  And in this barrel of apples, there might be a bad apple.  Well, this apple has to be removed.  And if it ain’t removed, it would hurt the rest of the apples.”  Then he gave Valachi the fabled “kiss of death,” signifying that he was now marked for murder.

Valachi survived what he believed were attempts to poison his food and lure him alone into a shower where he could be stabbed to death.   But he knew his luck could not last forever.  He decided to take at least one of his enemies with him.

On June 22, 1963, he beat another inmate to death with an iron pipe.  Only later did he learn that he had killed the wrong man: John Joseph Saupp, a forger without ties to the mob.  It had been Saupp’s bad luck to bear a striking resemblance to another prisoner whom Valachi believed had the contract to kill him.

Valachi grew depressed over having killed the wrong man.  He also knew he couldn’t spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.  Desperate, he offered himself as an informant to Robert Morgenthau, the New York U.S. Attorney.  Morgenthau, in turn, put him in contact with agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The agents quickly transferred Valachi from Atlanta Federal Prison to the first of a series of military bases.  But the sessions between him and the agents went badly.  He still blamed them for his imprisonment in 1960.  And he believed they had deliberately created a rift between him and Geno

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART TWO (OF TEN)

In History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 5, 2013 at 12:00 am

The testimony of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles’ propelled seven Mafia assassins or lieutenants into the electric chair—a feat never before or since equaled.  Among these was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose execution, in 1944, makes him to date the only mob boss to suffer the fullest penalty of the law.

Reles’ career as a witness earned him the hatred of mobsters throughout the nation.  The Mafia put out a $100,000 contract on him and hoped that one of its hitmen proved lucky or skillful enough to collect on it.  But no hitman ever tried, for Reles was too carefully guarded, and the mobsters knew it.

When he wasn’t testifying in court, Reles was quartered in a secured room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island.  There he dined on thick steaks and cold beers and listened to ballgames on the radio.  Eighteen officers of the NYPD, working in three, eight-hour, six-man shifts, protected him at all times.

Despite these precautions, the witnessing career of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles ended abruptly on November 12, 1941.  Sometime around dawn, Reles “fell” to his death from one of the windows of his sixth-floor room.

Abe Reles in death

The sudden death of the prosecution’s star witness scandalized the NYPD.  Local newspapers questioned the integrity of the officers on the Reles security detail.  Both the police and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office launched investigations to learn whether Reles had died as the result of an accident—or  murder.

But the NYPD quickly moved to protect itself from blame.  Its final report shifted blame for Reles’ death from his bodyguards to the victim himself.  According to this version: Reles, a “notorious” practical joker, had tied two bedsheets together and slipped out of his window to play a trick on his guards.

He intended to enter a vacant room, just below his own, and then walk back upstairs to surprise his protectors.  Unfortunately, his makeshift rope snapped, and he plunged to his death forty-two feet below.

Two bedsheets, knotted together, were in fact discovered near Reles’ corpse.  That seemed to support the police theory of the rope-ladder escape attempt.  But the police could not explain why Reles had landed twenty feet from the wall.

More than twenty years later, Joseph Valachi, an aging Mafia hitman, became the Justice Department’s own version of Abe Reles.  Before dying—of a heart attack—Valachi offered his own view on what had happened to Reles: “I never met anybody yet who thought Reles went out that window on purpose.”

The next important organized crime witnesses to die while under “protective custody” by local police was Peter La Tempa, a cigar store salesman with rackets connections.

His testimony could have supported that of another witness, Ernest “The Hawk”  Rupollo.   Rupollo’s  testimony  linked  Vito Genovese, one of the nation’s most-feared Mafia bosses, with the murder of a Genovese henchman, Ferdinand Boccia, in 1934.

But La Tempa never got the chance to testify.  On January 15, 1945, he swallowed what he thought were pain-killers for his gallstones.  A New York toxicologist later reported there was enough poison in La Tempa’s bloodstream “to kill eight horses.”  At the time of his death, he was being held under police guard in a Brooklyn jail cell.

The circumstances behind La Tempa’s murder were never satisfactorily explained.  The police claimed they couldn’t determine how poison pills had been substituted for the victim’s regular medication.  Nor was anyone ever indicted—exactly the scenario that had followed the equally mysterious death of Abe Reles.

With La Tempa dead, the testimony of Ernest Rupollo could not be corroborated.  The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office dropped the murder charge it had leveled against him to compel his testimony.  Prosecutors declared him a free man, but the Mafia declared him a hunted one.

For eighteen years, Rupollo somehow eluded his pursuers.  Finally, on August 17, 1964, his bullet-riddled body, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, washed ashore in New York.  Four Mafia figures were later fried for the murder, but were acquitted.

Yet another witness to come forward—and die for it—was Arnold Schuster, a shoe salesman. One night in early 1952, he spotted Willie “The Actor” Sutton, a notorious bank robber, on the New York subway.  Schuster tipped off police, who arrested Sutton.

For several days, the mild-mannered Schuster became a minor celebrity.  Then he became a dead one: on March 8, 1952, two gunmen shot him down on the street.

The murder baffled police; Sutton was known as a loner without ties to killers or organized crime.

More than ten years later, the truth finally emerged.  According to Joseph Valachi, the man responsible for Arnold Schuster’s murder was Albert Anastasia, the former boss of Murder, Inc.

Only the untimely death of Abe Reles had prevented Anastasia’s own in the electric chair.  In 1952, he was still one of the most-feared Mafia chieftains in the nation.

Albert Anastasia

Anastasia had seen Schuster being interviewed on television and had flown into a rage.  “I hate squealers!” he had screamed to three of his executioners who were in the room at the time.  “Hit that guy!”

As Valachi saw it, the killing of Arnold Schuster was simply Anastasia’s way of doing a favor for a fellow criminal, even though he had never met Sutton.

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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WITNESS-SECURITY: A BLOODSTAINED HISTORY: PART ONE (OF TEN)

In History, Law, Law Enforcement on June 4, 2013 at 12:03 am

Witness-protection has a long and bloodstained history–with the blood belonging to early witnesses against the Mafia.

Fortunately, that has since changed.  Today the Witness Security Program, operated by the U.S. Marshals Service for the Justice Department, is the world’s most sophisticated and effective means of protecting organized crime witnesses.

But before there was the Program (otherwise known as WITSEC), witness-security was provided by local police departments.

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles became the first important mobster to betray the secrets of the Mafia—and the first to die for doing so.

Abe Reles

Since his first arrest at sixteen in 1924, Reles had been in almost constant trouble with the law.  His police record listed forty-two arrests, including six for murder.  He had been sent to prison six times.

What his police record failed to disclose was that, for the last ten years, he had been a highly-paid assassin for Murder, Inc., the execution squad of the New York Mafia.

Then, in early 1940, Reles and two of his fellow killers were arrested and indicted for the 1936 gangland slaying of Alex “Red” Alpert.  Now facing almost certain conviction and death in the electric chair, Reles decided to cut a life-saving deal, even if it came at the Mafia’s expense.

On March 31, 1940, more than forty days after his arrest, Reles sent his wife to the office of Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer.  Her message: “My husband wants an interview with the law.”

The politically-ambitions O’Dwyer ordered Reles’ immediate release from his cell in the Tombs in Manhattan.  Guards then rushed the killer to the office of the district attorney.

There Reles demanded a private interview with O’Dwyer to propose a nonnegotiable deal: he would tell the prosecutors everything they wanted to know about the Mafia.  More importantly, he agreed to testify in court against his fellow mobsters.

In exchange, he demanded the immediate dropping of all charges against him.  He also insisted on immunity from prosecution on the basis of any testimony that he or anyone else might give.  Finally, once his career as a witnesses ended, he must be granted his complete freedom.

O’Dwyer quickly agreed to these conditions.  Then he ordered that his new prize witness be placed under heavy, constant police guard.

Abe Reles opened his confessions with the details of 50 gangland murders.  His photographic memory cited the names of the victims—and their killers.  He also remembered the names of those who had ordered the killings.  And he supplied names of others who could corroborate his testimony.

Altogether, Reles’ first  gush of testimony lasted 12 days and filled 25 stenographic notebooks.

For the first time, prosecutors learned how the Mafia had turned murder into a lucrative, smoothly-operating business.

In 1930, the chiefs of the five most powerful Mafia “families” in New York had created an execution squad to enforce underworld discipline. Its targets were informers and rival mobsters.

Commanding this squad were the dreaded labor racketeers Albert “The Lord High Executioner” Anastasia and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.

For ten years, the squad’s killers roamed the nation, carrying out perhaps as many as 9,000 executions.  Police were baffled; there didn’t seem any motive for the killings.  The victims lacked any known ties to their killers, and the assassins usually lived far from the scenes of their carnage.

“Lepke” Buchalter not only turned murder into a business, he adopted business terms to serve as an underworld code.  An assignment to murder was a “contract”; a “hit” was the actual murder; and the “bum” or “mark” was the victim.

Each killer was known as a “hitman,” and earned $1,000 to $5,000 per hit.  The amount depended on the status of the victim and the risks involved in his execution.

The killers drew on their own expense accounts and coverage by generous injury insurance and family-care funds.  In the rare event of their arrest, highly-paid attorneys rushed to their defense.  And they could count on their fellow assassins to remove any troublesome prosecution witnesses.

The Mafia not only had its own execution squad; it also ran a “hideout network” for mobsters on the run from the law.  Such fugitives could quickly obtain jobs—and even new identities—through organized crime groups in other cities or states.

If necessary, they could go permanently underground as “legitimate” employees of mob-owned unions or businesses.  As a result, organized crime boasted a “new identities” program vastly superior to anything existing for organized crime witnesses until 1967.

Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain

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EXIT THE GECKO, ENTER THE PIG AND BULLY

In Bureaucracy, Business, Social commentary on March 4, 2013 at 11:53 pm

There’s been a changing-of-the-guard at GEICO insurance.

Exit the understated, British-accented gecko.

Enter the pig–and the grunting black bully.

For years GEICO has taken a light-hearted, humorous approach to its advertising.

The company that designed these ads accomplished the seemingly impossible:  It recruited a friendly reptile as its spokesman and, in doing so, turned a dull subject like insurance into something fun.

Remember the ad about the towering GEICO executive who tells the gecko: “GEICO is about trust.  So let’s demonstrate how that trust works.  I’ll fall backward–and you catch me.”

And as the man starts to fall back, the gecko mutters, “Oh, dear.”

But apparently GEICO wanted something more than humor in its advertising–something that would shake up those who watched it.

And the ads the company is now running will definitely do that.  But GEICO may wind up regretting it.

Enter the new GEICO spokesman: a pig–porcine, hairless, goofy-voiced.  And he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a stalled car next to a beautiful brunette.

And it’s clear the woman is clearly feeling aroused and wants to do something romantic.  Or, maybe the word for it is perverted.

But the pig is–fortunately–nervous, and just wants to talk about how wonderful GEICO is.

Now, think about this for a moment.

If you’re Jewish, Hindu or Muslim, eating pork is strictly forbidden.  The meat is considered “unclean” because pigs don’t sweat–thus trapping all the impurities within.

So if you’re an adman who wants to design commercials that will appeal to the widest number of viewers, you’ve already flunked out.

And if eating pork is verboten to millions of Jews, Muslims and Hindus, having a romantic tryst with a pig is off-limits to anyone outside the confines of a porno theater.

After all, how twisted do you have to be to date out of your own species?

So what is the message GEICO is trying to send here?  That if you buy GEICO insurance, you can make it with a beautiful chick even if you’re a pig?

Then there’s the bullying black basketball player as GEICO sales rep–played by real-life former basketball star Dikembe Mutombo.

Mutombo is a Congolese American retired professional basketball player who once played for the Houston Rockets.  He was an eight-time All-Star and a record-tying four-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year.

Outside of basketball, he has become known for his humanitarian work.

But you’d never know it by the GEICO ad.

First, clad in basketball attire, he darts into an office and throws something at a startled executive and his secretary.

Then, grunting, he appears in a laundromat and prevents a woman from tossing clothing from a dryer to her cart by knocking it out of the air as she throws it in.  Then he wiggles his finger at her.  Thus the woman ends up with a clean garment made dirty.

Finally, he charges into a supermarket and knocks a cereal box out of the hands of a little boy as he’s about to toss it into a shopping cart.  The box explodes, spilling cereal onto the floor and the little boy as the grunting black man races off.

GEICO Dikembe Mutombo Commercial – Happier Than Dikembe Mutombo Blocking a Shot

What is the message GEICO is trying to send here?  That violence and intimidation are fun?  That you’d better buy GEICO insurance–or else?

Even more ominous: This ad premiered during the week that another bullying black man was making headlines across the nation.

From February 3 to 12, Christopher Dorner, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department, waged war on the LAPD.

Dorner blamed the agency for his firing in 2008.  First he published a “manifesto” on his Facebook page and then set about a killing spree that killed four people.  Two police officers died, and three others were wounded.

The rampage ended on February 12, in an isolated cabin near Big Bear Lake, California.  Surrounded by lawmen from several police agencies, the cabin set ablaze by pyrotechnic tear gas, Dorner shot himself in the head rather than surrender.

It’s likely that these ads will join a parade of others that produced results other than those intended:

  • Pepsi’s slogan, “Come alive with Pepsi” bombed in China, where it was translated into: “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”
  • The Dairy Association’s slogan, “Got milk?” became–when translated into Spanish–“Are you lactating?”
  • Purdue Chicken thought it had a winner with: “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”  But the Spanish mistranslation came out: “It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.”

Clearly the executives at GEOCO need to ask themselves two questions:

  1. What are we trying to achieve with these commercials?
  2. What messages are these ads sending to our targeted audiences?

More often than not, there is a disconnect between the two.

As in the case of the latest GEICO commercials.

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“THE JACKAL” COMES TO L.A.: PART FOUR (END)

In Bureaucracy, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 15, 2013 at 12:05 am

The unprecedented manhunt for cop-killer Christopher Dorner has important–and brutal–lessons to teach.

First, above everyone else, police look out for each other.

Robert Daley bluntly revealed this truth in his 1971 bestseller, Target Blue: An Insider’s View of the N.Y.P.D.  A  police reporter for the New York Times, he served for one year as a deputy police commissioner.

“The murderers of all patrolmen almost invariably were identified at once and caught soon after,” wrote Daley. “Organized crime was too smart to get involved in the type of investigation that followed a cop killing.

“A great many solvable crimes in the city were never solved, because not enough men were assigned to the case, or because those assigned were lazy or hardly cared or got sidetracked.

“But when a cop got killed, no other cop got sidetracked.  Detectives worked on the case night and day….Cops were all ears as far as murdered patrolmen were concerned; they heard details all over the city…and fed all this into the detectives who had the case.

“In effect, the citizen who murdered his wife’s lover was sought by a team of detectives, two men.  But he who killed a cop was sought by 32,000.”

Although Dorner targeted only local police officers, the Federal Government quickly poured resources into the manhunt.  These included the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and even unmanned military drones.

Second, don’t expect the police to do for you what they’ll do for one another.

The LAPD assigned security and surveillance details to at least 50 threatened officers and their families.  A typical detail consists of two to five or more guards.  And those guards must be changed every eight to 12 hours.

And those details stayed in place long after Dorner was killed in a firefight on February 12.

That was a lot of manpower and a lot of money being expended.

But if your bullying neighbor threatens to kill you, don’t expect the police to send a guard detail over.  They’ll claim: “We can’t do anything until the guy does something.  If he does, give us a call.”

And if your loved one is murdered, don’t expect the mayor’s office to offer a $1 million reward or the military to deploy drones to find the killer.

Third, the more status and wealth you command, the more likely the police are to address your complaint or solve your case.

Police claim to enforce the law impartially, “without fear or favor.”  But that happens only in TV crime shows.

If you’re rich, your complaint will likely get top priority and the best service the agency can provide.

But if you’re poor or even middle-class without high-level political or police connections, your case will almost certainly wind up in “the round file” (a wastebasket).

And it works the other way, too.  Anthony Bouza, former chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, notes in his 1990 book, The Police Mystique: “When cops deal with the poor (blacks, Hispanics, the homeless and the street people) the rubber of power meets the road of abuse.”

Fourth, don’t expect your police department to operate with the vigor or efficiency of TV police agencies.

“I want this rock [Hawaii] sealed off,” Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) routinely ordered when pursuing criminals on “Hawaii Five-O.”

Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett

But in San Jose–a city close to bankruptcy–residents can’t get police to respond to break-ins because the police department is dangerously understaffed.

And neighbors in Oakland, fed up with a slow police response, or none at all, are banding together to protect their properties by hiring private security officers.

In San Francisco, if you’re assaulted and can’t give police “a named suspect,” they won’t assign the case.  As far as they’re concerned, the solvability rate is too low.

Fifth, the result of all this can only be increased disrespect for law enforcement from a deservedly–and increasingly–cynical public.

Surveys reveal that those who don’t need to call the police have a higher opinion of their integrity and efficiency than those who are the victims of crime.  Among those reasons:

  • Many police departments lack state-of-the-art crime labs to analyze evidence.
  • Files often get lost or accidentally destroyed.
  • Some officers are lazy, indifferent or incompetent.
  • Police are notoriously competitive, generally refusing to share information with other officers or other police departments–and thus making it easier for criminals to run amok.
  • Even when police “solve” a crime, that simply means making an arrest.  The perpetrator may cop to a lesser offense and serve only a token sentence–or none at all.  Or he might be found not guilty by a judge or jury.

But it is the witnessing of blatant inequities and hypocrisies such as those displayed in the Christopher Dorner manhunt that most damages public support for police at all levels.

When citizens believe police care only about themselves, and lack the ability–or even the will–to protect citizens or avenge their victimization by arresting the perpetrators, that is a deadly blow to law enforcement.

Police depend on citizens for more than crime tips.  They depend upon them to support hiring more cops and  buying state-of-the-art police equipment.  When public support vanishes, so does much of that public funding.

The result can only be a return to the days of the lawless West, where citizens looked only to themselves for protection.

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“THE JACKAL” COMES TO L.A.: PART THREE (OF FOUR)

In Bureaucracy, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 14, 2013 at 12:08 am

Christopher Dorner–33, black, powerfully-built, standing 6 feet and weighing 270 pounds–seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

This despite an unprecedented manhunt by local and Federal law enforcement agencies and the lure of a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

LAPD SWAT team

But Dorner made several major errors in his one-man crusade for vengeance against the agency he blamed for ending his “dream job” police career.

First, shortly before or after he began his murderous rampage, Dorner posted an 11-page “manifesto” of his intentions on his Facebook page.

In this, he spewed contempt for the LAPD and declared his intention to wage war against it.

I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty….You will now live the life of the prey….You have misjudged a sleeping giant.

Dorner’s online rant forewarned police that he intended to put them literally in the cross-hairs of his anger.  As a result, his intended targets remained on hair-trigger alert for his attacks.

Second, in that “manifesto,” he specifically named many of the officers he intended to kill.

This allowed the LAPD to rush bodyguards to the homes of those he had threatened.  The LAPD would have been at a great disadvantage if it hadn’t known where he might strike next.

Third, Dorner boasted of the weaponry he had available.

In my cache you will find several small arms. In the cache, Bushmaster firearms, Remington precision rifles, and AAC Suppressors (silencers)….As you know I also own Barrett .50′s so your APC are defunct and futile.

A Barrett .50 is a sniper’s rifle whose five-inch bullets can penetrate bulletproof vests, steel and concrete.  An APC is military shorthand for Armored Personnel Carrier.

Dorner should have kept this information to himself–and allowed the LAPD to discover the truth only in a firefight.  By bragging about it, he allowed his enemies to design strategies and deploy resources (such as unmanned drones) to neutralize his powerful weapons.

Fourth, he posted not simply his biography but his psychology for his enemies to exploit.

He sees himself as all-powerful:

I am here to change and make policy…I am here to correct and calibrate your morale compasses to true north….

I know your TTP’s, (techniques, tactics, and procedures). Any threat assessments you generate will be useless…. I will mitigate any of your attempts at preservation.

Besides assailing the LAPD, he plays political analyst–Wayne La Pierre is “a vile and inhumane piece of shit”–and even movie critic, calling Charlie Sheen “awesome.”

And fashion critic: Off the record, I love your new bangs, Mrs. Obama.

He clearly has a high opinion of himself:

I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North. I didn’t need the US Navy to instill Honor, Courage, and Commitment in me but I thank them for re-enforcing it. It’s in my DNA.

And he reveals a clear history of anger at what he considers racial animosity directed against him, citing incidents as far back as high school.

No doubt psychologists who design behavioral profiles thoroughly analyzed Dorner’s self-portrait and advised police on the best ways to counter his threats.

Fifth, Dorner, sought refuge in a mountainous, snow-covered tourist resort.

This made it impossible for him–a black–to blend in against an almost totally white population. 

And once his truck broke down, he was at a severe disadvantage.   He was temporarily stranded and forced to abandon many of the high-powered weapons and other supplies he had brought.  This gave him less firepower to use in his war on police.

He would have blended in with the majority black population had he fled to South Central Los Angeles.  And he might well have found allies there to supply him with tips or equipment. 

More importantly, police would have been hard-pressed during a firefight with him in a congested urban setting: They would have had to worry about civilian casualties. 

And the proximity of the site to local TV stations would have meant far greater media scrutiny of police tactics.

Sixth, Dorner set fire to his Nissan Titan truck when it broke down near snow-covered Big Bear Lake, California, on February 7. 

This quickly attracted the attention of an army of lawmen who were searching for any clue to his whereabouts.

There was no need to burn the vehicle.  If Dorner had covered the truck with snow it might well have stayed concealed for days or longer.  This would have given him more time to evacuate the area.

Seventh, he took refuge in a cabin when police closed in.

Once he did this, the game was over. Dorner, of all people, should have known how “barricaded suspect” sieges always end: With the death or surrender of the besieged. 

His best bet for at least temporary safety was to stay in the open and on the move. 

If his skills as a marksman had kept police at a distance long enough, the coming of night could have allowed him to escape their dragnet–at least for the moment. 

In the end, however, his death or capture was certain.  There were simply too many lawmen determined to hunt him down.

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“THE JACKAL” COMES TO L.A.: PART TWO (OF FOUR)

In Bureaucracy, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 13, 2013 at 12:03 am

The LAPD’s leadership were terrified after they read Christopher Dorner’s 11-page “manifesto” published on his Facebook page.

Clearly, he intended to take revenge on the agency he blamed for the 2008 termination of his police career.

Christopher Dorner

As a result, the LAPD rushed to provide security and surveillance details to more than 50 endangered police officers and their families.

The agency also declared a “tactical alert,” forcing officers to remain on their shifts as long as needed.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on February 7, in Corona, California, Dorner fired at Los Angeles police officers who had been assigned to protect someone connected to threats he had posted in an online “manifesto.”

One officer was grazed in the head, but the wound was not life-threatening.  The officers returned fire, and Dorner fled.

Then, at about 1:35 a.m., Dorner struck again, shooting two Riverside police officers who had stopped at a red light during a routine patrol.  One officer was killed and the other wounded.  The injured officer was taken to a hospital and was reported to be in stable condition.

Word instantly spread through the police grapevine about the shootings.  And officers decided it was better to shoot first and ask questions later.

At 5:30 a.m. on February 7,  LAPD officers were patrolling a Torrance neighborhood to guard yet another target named in Dorner’s manifesto.

They spotted a car they thought was Dorner’s and opened fire, injuring two women.  One suffered a minor bullet wound, and the other was shot twice.  Taken to a hospital, the latter was reported to be in stable condition.

Sometime after the Torrance shooting, a passer-by found a wallet with an LAPD badge and a picture ID of Dorner on a street near San Diego International Airport.

This was only a short distance from the naval base motel where he had reportedly checked in on February 7–but had never checked out.

Amid frantic TV news reports that Dorner was barricaded inside, police swarmed the hotel.  But the soon learned that he hadn’t been there after all.

The FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, meanwhile, were seeking the public’s help in providing information about Dorner or his whereabouts.

At about noon on February 7, a burning truck was located in the snow-covered woods near Big Bear Lake, 80 miles east of Los Angeles.

The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department later confirmed that the vehicle was Dorner’s Nissan Titan.  No one was in the truck.

SWAT teams from the LAPD, San Bernardino Sheriff’s deputies, FBI agents and deputy U.S. marshals flooded the area.  All were heavily armed, carrying assault rifles or machine guns.

Dorner, in his manifesto, had boasted of owning assault rifles and even a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle whose bullets can pierce bulletproof vests and even tanks, airplanes and concrete.  A marksman with a Barrett could easily hit a target from a mile away.

Police initially searched 400 homes in the area, but found no trace of Dorner.

The manhunt was slowed down by a heavy snowfall, but police, determined to find Dorner, pressed on.

Meanwhile, FBI SWAT teams and local police served a search warrant at a Las Vegas home belonging to Dorner.  The lawmen carried out boxes of his possessions. No weapons were found.

After issuing a search warrant, Irvine police combed through the La Pama house belonging to Christopher Dorner’s mother. Investigators removed from the home seven grocery bags of evidence and several electronic items.

On February 9, at a late afternoon press conference, authorities announced the creation of a joint task force to search for Dorner.  The task force comprised the Los Angeles, Irvine and Riverside police departments, the FBI and U.S. Marshals, and other affiliated law enforcement agencies.

“We will look under every rock, around every corner, we will search mountain tops for him,” said Riverside Police Assistant Chief Chris Vicino at the press conference.

Underscoring this point, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said: “This is an act–and make no mistake about it–of domestic terrorism.  This is a man who has targeted those that we entrust to protect the public. His actions cannot go unanswered.”

Besides manpower and technology, police employed psychology.  That same day, the LAPD announced that it would reopen the investigation into Dorner’s firing.

“I do this not to appease a murderer,” LAPD Chief Beck said in a statement. “I do it to reassure the public that their police department is transparent and fair in all the things we do.”

Clearly police hoped this would lead Dorner to back off or even surrender.

On February 10, at 11:46 a.m., Los Angeles County Supervisors Michael D. Antonovich and Mark Ridley-Thomas announced they were offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Dorner.

Later that day, at 1 p.m., a joint task force offered a $1 million reward for information leading to Dorner’s arrest.

Federal authorities were also relentlessly hunting Dorner–and not only through the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service.  The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection deployed unmanned drone aircrafts to find him.

As in The Day of the Jackal, despite a widespread dragnet and all-out search, law enforcement’s Number One fugitive had vanished.

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“THE JACKAL” COMES TO L.A.: PART ONE (OF FOUR)

In Bureaucracy, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 12, 2013 at 12:00 am

The Day of the Jackal is a 1971 thriller by the English writer Frederick Forsyth.  Its intricate plot centers on the efforts of a professional assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.

His motive: A reward of $500,000, paid by the OAS, a right-wing French paramilitary organization determined to that France should retain its Algerian colony.

The actual name of the assassin is never revealed.  He is simply known by his code name: The Jackal.

But a great deal else about him is revealed before the novel reaches its shattering climax:

He is calculating, a crack shot, skilled in unarmed combat, quick-witted in emergencies and utterly ruthless in pursuing his goal of eliminating his chosen targets.

In 1973,  director Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) brought Jackal to the big screen.  Edward Fox starred as the assassin, and Michael Lonsdale played Claude Lebel, the police inspector who leads the hunt for him.

The book and movie proved commercial successes.

Then fate lifted the fictional Jackal into the world of real-life international terrorism.

In 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the international terrorist now known as “Carlos,” gained notoriety by shooting two French detectives and an informer in Paris.

Barry Woodhams, an Englishman whose girlfriend had once dated Carlos, found a bag of weapons belonging to the terrorist in their London apartment.  Not trusting the police, he called The Guardian newspaper, whose reporter Peter Niesewand quickly showed up.

Rummaging through the apartment, Niesewand found a copy of The Day Of The Jackal on a bookshelf, and assumed that Carlos had read it. The next day, in its front-page world scoop, the Guardian dubbed Carlos: “The Jackal.”

Only one thing was wrong: The book didn’t belong to Carlos at all; it belonged to Woodhams. “Carlos The Jackal” had probably never even read the book he was named after.

Nevertheless, the nickname stuck.

(In 1994, the government of Sudan betrayed Carlos–then seeking refuge there–to French intelligence agents.  He was flown to France, tried for murder, and given a life sentence.)

But The Jackal is far from dead.  In fact, he has taken up residence in Los Angeles.

This time his name is known: Christopher Jordan Dorner.

And his target isn’t the President of France–or the leader of any other country.  It’s the officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

It’s an organization Dorner knows well, since he had belonged to it from 2005 to 2008.

In July, 2007, he reported excessive force by a fellow police officer against a handcuffed prisoner.

The LAPD charged that he had slandered the accused policewoman in a falsified report and relieved him of his duties.

Dorner claimed he was the victim of police retaliation for breaking the “code of silence.”

Dorner tried to reclaim his job in 2008, but LAPD’s Board of Rights rejected his appeal. He took the case to court, but a judge ruled against his appeal in October, 2011.

That seemed to be the end of Dorner’s association with the LAPD.

Then, on February 3, 2013, Dorner’s long-suppressed rage exploded.

Monica Quan, 27, and her fiancee, Keith Lawrence, were shot dead in Irvine, California, while sitting in their white Kia in the parking lot of their new apartment building.

Quan was the daughter of former LAPD officer Randal Quan, who had represented Dorner at his termination appeal.

At the time, there seemed to be no motive for the murders.  But on February 6, police named Dorner a suspect in the Irvine murders.

He had posted an 11-page “manifesto” on his Facebook page, implicating himself in the slayings.  He accused  Randal Quan of bungling his termination appeal.

And he repeatedly complained about his treatment in the LAPD.

I lost my position as a Commanding Officer of a Naval Security Forces reserve unit at NAS Fallon because of the LAPD, wrote Dorner.

I’ve lost a relationship with my mother and sister because of the LAPD. I’ve lost a relationship with close friends because of the LAPD.

In essence, I’ve lost everything because the LAPD took my name and new I was INNOCENT!!!

And he vowed vengeance on those he believed had wronged him:

I will conduct DA operations to destroy, exploit and seize designated targets. If unsuccessful or unable to meet objectives in these initial small scale offensive actions, I will reassess my BDA and re-attack until objectives are met.

I have nothing to lose. My personal casualty means nothing….You can not prevail against an enemy combatant who has no fear of death.

An enemy who embraces death is a lose, lose situation for their enemy combatants.

It wasn’t enough for Dorner to attack police officers.  He would target their families as well:

I know your significant others routine, your children’s best friends and recess. I know Your Sancha’s gym hours and routine.

For police generally, it was their worst nightmare come true.

A cop-killer was on the loose.  Worse, he had once been one of their own.

He knew their tactics, and now threatened to use that knowledge to murder not only cops but even their families.

For the LAPD, it was a declaration of war.  And the department responded accordingly.