My Dark Places

4

The L.A. Sheriff’s Office hailed from the Wild West days. It was a modern police agency suffused with 19th-century nostalgia. The LASO embraced Wild West motifs wholesale. It made for brilliant PR.

The Sheriff’s manned county lockups and patrolled county turf out of twelve substations. Said turf ran through the city of Los Angeles and out into the north-, south- and eastbound boonies. Deputies worked the desert, the mountains and a swanky stretch of beach. Their jurisdiction took in hundreds of square miles.

Malibu was plum duty. West Hollywood was good—the Sunset Strip was always percolating. East L.A. was full of rowdy Mexicans. Firestone was wall-to-wall colored. Temple City and San Dimas were out in the San Gabriel Valley. Deputies could drive up into the foothills and shoot coyotes for kicks.

The Sheriff’s Detective Bureau investigated criminal actions county-wide. Sheriff’s Homicide handled murders for numerous Mickey Mouse police departments. The Sheriff’s Aero Bureau flew county skies and supplanted rescue operations.

The Sheriffs Office was expanding full-tilt. 1958 L.A. was a boomtown.

Los Angeles was always rough-and-ready. The place was built from land grabs and racial grief. The L.A. Sheriff’s Office was chartered in 1850. It was meant to bring rule to an unruly slice of land.

The first string of County Sheriffs were elected to one-year terms. They dealt with marauding Indians, Mexican bandits and Chinese tong wars. Vigilantes were a significant threat. Drunken white men loved to lynch redskins and dusky bandidos.

L.A. County grew. Elected Sheriffs came and went. The sworn deputy force grew, concurrent with county expansion. Civilian help was often required. The Sheriff would deputize men and form them into mounted posses.

The L.A. Sheriff’s Office modernized. Cars replaced horses. Larger jails and more substations were built. The L.A. Sheriff’s Office grew to be the largest of its kind in the continental U.S. of A.

Sheriff John C. Cline resigned in 1920. Big Bill Traeger served the remainder of his term. Traeger was elected to three four-year terms of his own. He ran for Congress in 1932—and won. The County Board of Supervisors appointed Eugene W. Biscailuz Sheriff.

Biscailuz joined the Sheriff’s Office in 1907. He was half Anglo and half Spanish-Basque. His people came from money. His California roots went back to the Spanish land-grant days.

Biscailuz was a brilliant administrator. He was politically deft and likable. He was a public relations genius with a huge love of Wild West lore.

Biscailuz was a half-assed progressive. Some of his views were near-Bolshevik. He expressed those views in an avuncular manner. He was rarely accused of spouting heresy.

Biscailuz mobilized forces to fight fires and floods and developed the county’s “Major Disaster Plan.” Biscailuz built the Wayside Honor Rancho and shaped its rehabilitative policy. Biscailuz launched a juvenile crime deterrence program.

Biscailuz intended to hold his post for a good long time. Wild West rituals helped assure his re-elections.

He reinstated the Sheriff’s Mounted Posse. The Posse rode in parades and searched for occasional lost kids out in the boondocks. Biscailuz was often photographed with the Posse. He always rode a palomino stallion.

Biscailuz sponsored the annual Sheriff’s Rodeo. Uniformed deputies sold tickets all over the county. The rodeo usually sold out the L.A. Coliseum. Biscailuz appeared in western garb, replete with twin six-shooters.

The rodeo was a moneymaker and a goodwill extravaganza. Ditto the annual Sheriff’s Bar-B-Q that fed at a rate of 60,000 a year.

Biscailuz took the Sheriff’s Office out to the people. He seduced them with his very own myth. Mythic show-and-tell perpetuated his power. It was blue-ribbon disingenuousness.

Biscailuz knew that a lot of his boys called Negroes “niggers.” Biscailuz knew that phone book beatings assured rapid confessions. Biscailuz rounded up Japs and locked them down at Wayside after Pearl Harbor. Biscailuz knew that one shot with a beaver-tail sap could knock a suspect’s eyes clean out of his head. Biscailuz knew that police work was an isolating profession.

So he gave his constituents the Wild West as Utopian Idyll. It got him re-elected six times. He backed his ritualistic bullshit up to an ambiguous degree. His boys were less suppression-minded than their cross-town rivals in blue.

William Parker took over the LAPD in 1950. He was an organizational genius. His personal style was inimical to Gene Biscailuz’s. Parker abhorred monetary corruption and embraced violence as an essential part of police work. He was an alcoholic martinet on a mission to reinstate pre-20th-century morality.

Biscailuz and Parker ruled parallel kingdoms. Biscailuz’s myth implicitly stressed inclusion. Parker co-opted a TV honcho named Jack Webb. They cooked up a weekly saga called Dragnet—a crime-and-severe-punishment myth that ordained the LAPD with a chaste image and godlike powers. The LAPD took their myth to heart. They stuck their heads up their asses and isolated themselves from the public that Gene Biscailuz embraced. Bill Parker hated Negroes and sent goons down to Darktown to lean on club owners who admitted white women. Gene Biscailuz liked to schmooze with his Mexican constituents. He was sort of a taco-bender himself.

Gene Biscailuz’s myth was strictly local stuff. Bill Parker’s myth was marketed nationally. The Sheriff’s resented the LAPD’s celebrity. The LAPD considered the Sheriff’s a bush-league outfit and hogged the credit for their joint operations.

Ideology divided the two agencies. Topography divided them more. The LAPD pointed to their densely packed jurisdiction and racial demographics as proof of their superiority and the justification for their state-of-siege mentality. The Sheriff’s pointed to the county spreading out at a boom rate.

They had new turf to learn. New cities were signing up for contract services. They simply couldn’t afford to kick indiscriminate ass.

Bill Parker turned 56 in 1958. His sensibility was on the rise. Gene Biscailuz turned 75 and planned to retire at the end of the year.

Biscailuz joined the Sheriffs Office 50 years before. He saw horses replaced by flivvers and “Grey Ghost” sedans and Ford black & whites. He saw his Wild West Los Angeles grow and reinvent itself—way outside the borders of his myth.

He probably knew that white settlers raped Indian squaws. He probably knew that Wild West lawmen were psychopaths and drunks. He might have conceded that his myth was mostly wishful thinking and moonshine.

He might call nostalgia an indulgence. He probably knew that the Wild West played hell on women—then and now.

He probably knew that Wild West Saturday Nights comprised a myth of their own. He might have written that red-haired nurse off as a mythic casualty.