October 19, 2022 • 52 mins
In the 1960's, a group of deputies at the East Los Angeles Sheriff's station formed a gang called the Little Red Devils. It was the beginning of a 50 year history of deputy gangs that has led to brutal beatings, illegal detentions, and even death.
A Tradition of Violence is hosted and executive produced by Cerise Castle. She's an award winning journalist who wrote the first ever history of deputy gangs for Knock LA, available at lasdgangs.com
Music by Yelohill and Steelz.
For breaking news and updates on deputy gangs, follow @lasdgangs on social media.
To support Cerise’s reporting, and for exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the patreon.com/lasdgangs.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Morning. This podcast contains explicit language and details acts of violence.
Listener discretion is advised. There is a longstanding urban legend
in Los Angeles County the Sheriff's Department is the biggest
gang on the streets. I'm not talking about a metaphor
(00:20):
for a police violence. I'm talking about a real gang.
Members have matching tattoos. They get together and have meetings
about the different crimes that they will get up to,
stealing from people, utily, beating them and even killing them.
But this gang is even worse. They've got a badge,
(00:42):
unlimited resources, paid for by taxpayers, and the blessing of
the courts and local government. And it's all true. My
name is Cerre's Castle, and I'm a local l a reporter.
I grew up out here, and I've been curious about
Deputy gang since I was a kid. I heard stories
about them from my older brother, teachers and kids at school.
(01:05):
It never made sense to me that the people with
badges who warned me about dangerous neighborhood gangs and went
after people I knew for just associating with them, We're
actually part of their own powerful criminal organization. A few
journalists before me like Sabrina Steele and Marie O'Connor, Tina
(01:25):
dont and my Allow uncovered stories confirming that these gangs existed,
but they only scratched the surface. I thought about deputy
gangs for years. I wanted to know who they were,
what exactly they got up to, and that never went away.
After George Floyd was murdered on May, the world had
(01:45):
a lot of questions about police. While I was covering
a protest in response to his death, I was shot
by a police officer with a rubber bullet, even though
I was wearing a press badge, carrying a bunch of
equipment and yelled out to the officers that I was
a member of the media. I watched a cop turn,
make eye contact with me and shoot me. The impact
(02:09):
made me fall into the street. Yeah, I was hurt
pretty badly. I was bruised up and my ankle was
in a cast for the next few months. The doctors
told me to stay on the couch, but I didn't
feel right just sitting still, so I decided to use
the time to finally investigate, and what I found deeply
disturbed me. This is a traditional violence. A history of
(02:42):
deputy gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Elice
Want Gangs, Bang Elize. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
(03:18):
has at least twenty gangs amongst its members. Officials at
various government agencies from the local level here in l
A County all the way up to the California state
and federal agencies have known about the presence of these
gangs for at least thirty years, and the first ever
investigation was opened after Knock l A published my fifteen
(03:40):
part series laying it all out in October. The l
A County Sheriff's Department is led by Sheriff Alex Vianueva.
Here's one of his campaign videos. While Steally is my
home and my community. As you're Sheriff, I'll use my
experience both with the community and with the department to
mend the relationships with our immigrant communities, increase resources for
(04:02):
training our deputies, make this shriff to part more effective,
and make sure that every person while Sanders County could
leave their life safely. I'm Alex Vigenueva. In an election day,
I hope I can count your boot. The Los Angeles
County share to reform, rebuild and restore our shriffs depart
Alex Vianueva is about five ft seven with heavily lighted
blue eyes and shortly cropped gray hair. He's usually wearing
(04:25):
a gray suit with an official green Sheriff's Department name tag.
If there was such a thing as a deputy gang,
understanding the full knowledge what a gang means, we'd fire him,
playing and simple. I've yet to find one. In fact,
if someone can find one or a gang member who
wears Tannon Green, please let me know. And they just
don't exist. Viennueva was elected in after campaigning as a
(04:49):
progressive Democrat, but as the years have gone on, he's
overseen the resurrection of band deputy gang logos. He's rehired
deputies fired for violating depart policy, defied subpoenas. This stuff
didn't start out of nowhere, Alex Vianueva wasn't made in
a vacuum. All of this is a symptom of a
(05:10):
larger problem with the culture of the l A. Sheriff's Department.
So what evidence we have says that they founded the
l A Sheriff's Department in eighteen fifty. That's Jessica Pisco,
a lawyer and writer. She researches sheriff accountability and is
currently working on a book about sheriff's And so I
want to caveat all the discussions about history with this
(05:32):
sort of broad brush, which is that everything we have
about the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and most other early
police departments are written by law enforcement officers. So either
it's information from media of the time, which I think
people are now more aware of how law enforcement excuse media,
(05:54):
but it was the same then. So it's either media
at the time. It's either law enforce ment or law
enforcement fans who go back and write these histories. And
then we have some contemporary accounts, but most of those
contemporary accounts are also written by law enforcement. You know,
the vast majority of these histories are written by white
(06:16):
Anglo settlers who moved to California to establish various forms
of government, and one of those forms of government was
the sheriff's department. The sheriff's department started out as a
group of white male landowners. The first l A sheriff's
department had Jeff Brell and then two deputies, so he
really didn't have a lot of people working for him. Now. Again,
(06:40):
as southern California's population began to grow, law enforcement sort
of grew with it, So the l A p D
and the l A Sheriff's Department with both grow immensely.
I think when you think about changes to the l A.
Sheriff's Department over sort of a long term, the two
things to think about. One the fact that a lot
(07:01):
of law enforcement activity was still being done by vigilantes
and vigilance committees, which in a sense they were like
parts of the Sheriff's department, just just expanded posse system
in which folks volunteered their time, did some of the work,
and then would go back to whatever their regular job was.
(07:22):
Those vigilantes would often commit crimes against people of color
in the area. In October of eighteen seventy one, the
largest mass lynching in American history was carried out here
in l A against nineteen Chinese residents. Deputies stepped into
action after the crime happened. The Sheriff's department itself was
(07:42):
responsible for carrying out racist practices like renting out indigenous
people to landowners for labor. Despite all of this, many
people wanted to be part of the department. So Peter
Pitches was appointed basically by his predecessor to take over
the department, and until he became sheriff, the department was
(08:02):
really still very like quote unquote wild West. The sheriffs
are very proud of being wild West. Peter Pitches was
a former FBI agent. He joined the Sheriff's department under
Sheriff Eugene Biskuylouse and eventually became under sheriff the second
in command when Peter Pitches took over. This was also
at the same time as the sort of quote war
(08:25):
on crime ramped up, right, so we had a whole
you have to sort of also look at it at
this whole backdrop of all these things passed by L B. J.
And Nixon to give money to police departments to buy
military equipment, to equip people with uniforms and riot gear
and helicopters and all sorts of goodies that they would use.
(08:48):
And of course a lot of the impetus for this
and how it would culminate was because in the nineties
sixties there were so many you know, there were lots
of street actions, so you know, especially in Los Angeles,
that was a time in which many groups of people
held various actions, so civil rights actions and gay and
(09:09):
lesbian actions and Latino actions. So there was this idea
that the l A Sheriff's part was also get to service,
kind of like riot control. Because this was a big problem,
the department got bigger, the weapons got more powerful, all
on the dime of l A County residents. Deputies became
increasingly physically violent, sometimes ending in death. A local journalist
(09:33):
started to pay attention Reuben Salazar, and it may have
just gotten him killed. Ruben Salazar was born in Ciudad Guarez, Mexico,
(09:56):
and immigrated to El Paso as an infant. I wanted
to get a better sense of who Reuben was, so
I took a trip out to northeast l A to
meet Philip Rodriguez. Philip makes documentaries, and he directed a
film looking into Ruben's life and his untimely mysterious death.
According to my sources, Reuben was raised by kind of
(10:17):
Mexican nor Daniel people who ultimately harbored probably white supremacist
ideas about things and believe that whiteness and affiliation with
whiteness and imitation of whiteness was was the proper way
to go about things, would would lend, what would make
(10:41):
your life easier. Certainly, um and um was maybe a
more respectable way to live and become an American. A
recent study from the Pure Research Center found that millions
of people who previously identified themselves as Hispanic change their
racial identity to white. Some researchers are concerned that some
(11:03):
people treat whiteness as the ideal and social baseline of
American life. His mother was strongly discouraged any affiliation of
Reuben from kind of Ruffians or maybe even dark skinned
indigenous kind of Mexicans, and suggesting and and and and
had him aspire to again being an assimilated, mainstream, get
(11:30):
along American boy. Ruben a medium bill guy with dark hair.
Once a high school at El Paso High started college
at the University of Texas at El Paso, which was
then called Texas Western College. He started writing for his
campus newspaper, The Prospector, but left school after his sophomore
year to work with his father. After two years, he
(11:52):
enlisted in the U. S. Army. He served in the
Korean War from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty two, then
came home to tech exists. He returned to school and
the Prospector as the managing editor, and landed a job
at the El Paso Herald Post. For one of his
first assignments, he pretended to be drunk and was arrested
(12:13):
and ordered a report on jail conditions. Because he's good
at his job and because he's passionate, he ends up
at at the biggest newspaper on the West Coast at
the time, Los Angeles Times, and becomes a reporter, and
becomes a columnist, and eventually ends up as the news
director of the fledgling channel thirty four k m e
(12:34):
X Spanish language flagship for what was to become Univision
on TV network in Los Angeles. He was a columnist
at the Los Angeles Times. That's a great hustle. That's
a great platform from which to communicate news and uh
and ideas too, to two pieces of the l a
(12:54):
PI that usually don't meet up to have every little
in comment. Even to this day, the Spanish language Latino
and the Los Angeles Time reading non Latino are living
in two different realities. At some point amidst this kind
of ideological shift that occurs in his middle in his
mid career, he starts to move away from the assimilated
(13:18):
idea of himself that that that he that he had embraced,
and and take to the ideas that the young people
had been pushing, expousing of of of kind of Chicindo nationalism,
and in doing that becomes kind of intimate and becomes
an ultimately the chronicler of the Chicano Revolution rebellion that
(13:44):
occurs in that period. What was this relationship. I think
that the relationship with the cops, it was rather fluid
one uh. And I think as he became more critical,
or as he became more uh fearless, and as his
power grew um, I think that he received pushback from
(14:05):
law enforcement. Reuben developed a wariness at the very least
about cops and what how cops interpret reality and how
they and how complicit the press would tend to be
with cops. Reuben's friends say that attitude made him a
target for police violence. Here's Philmontez, a friend of Reuben's
(14:30):
and a member of the U. S Commission on Human Rights.
Ruben said, I have a problem with the l A
p D. I said, what's the problem? He says, Well,
they came to see me, and they said that Mexicans
aren't ready for my kind of reporting, and they want
me to stop. Bill Drummond, a former Los Angeles Times reporter.
(14:51):
He had a right to be alarmed, and that's part
of the price you pay. You know, when you stick
your head out of the foxhole, there's somebody this is
going to take a shot at you. Verbally certainly, maybe
they might even do it for real. Deputies started to
create their own systems of policing and rewarded other deputies
who went along with those violent tactics. I'm Roger Clark.
(15:14):
I'm a retired l A County sheriff. I did twenty
seven and a half years of service active service on
the department. I came on during the Peter J. Pitches era.
I came on after they completed my background December of sixty.
Is there a culture of violence inside the Sheriff's department? Well,
these guys are violent, I mean, no kill you. Roger
(15:34):
started out in the county jail in downtown l A.
So my first night I had reported in, they gave
me my keys and my badge. You know, I put
on my uniform period main control. Here's your badge, Clark,
here's you and I reported to a module. Roger was
there as relief for the deputies already working on that floor.
(15:57):
They can't leave and go to chow unless they have
somebody watching these guys. They're asleep. We did the count
and we did uh breakfast, fed him and broke him
out for court. The deputy in charge of the module
or unit told Roger to follow his lead. So he says, uh,
go in there and go sit down and watch us.
(16:18):
Watch me. My dad as a captain on the department,
he just you know, I was a little life, you know,
a new guy, and they treated me a setch. I
didn't care, you know, as happy as a clam. So
so this goes on for about two days and then uh,
and I see these guys show up, about four of them,
and they and Clark watched the module. We'll be back later,
(16:41):
and they disappeared to come back. This happened again and again,
so the about third night and they say come with us.
They get so I go to a day room and
they've got two guys braced against the wall and they
just beat the pooh out of him and U we're
walking back. I just stood there I was stunned, but
(17:02):
I was convinced of two things at that point. The
sergeant and the lieutenant absolutely knew this was going on,
and that this is the way they run the jail.
I mean just assumed it. Of course, this is the
way they run the jail. Roger was disgusted. So I
go back and they said, what do you what do
you think? I said, you know, I guess this is
my last day here. Why because I can't do this.
(17:23):
You know, I'm talking from this is the way you
guys run this place. I can't do it. I won't
do it. And there's a mumble mumble. Go home, tell
the wife. They're going to call me in the lieutenant's
office tomorrow tonight when I report for duty. Tell me
they can't use me, and thank me very much. And
I'm going back to the phone company. And you know
(17:44):
that is that was it. So I show up, they
give me my badge. No one says a word, not
a word, but word eventually got out. January, I report
to the academy. Across the front page of the l
A Times are all eleven of these guys, the entire shift,
(18:04):
almost They've all been arrested and fired. For cruelty to inmates.
So I'm sitting at the academy in my desk thinking,
waiting for the tap on my shoulder. Obviously they're going
to come and talk to me because I was on
the shift. Never said it, never touched me. And the
(18:27):
only conclusion is when they ask who does this, Clark
would not do it. And they never came to me
from then on, regardless of rank, regardless of where I
was or what I was doing, never allowed it. Never,
you know, and I should have at that point said
you're going to do this, I'm here. You've got to
(18:47):
do it through me, because you're not going to do
it while I'm here. How did that incident affect you
and your outlook? Well, it's profound because the fact that
they did not try to recruit me or pressure me
because I was pretty blunt. I was twenty five years old,
you know, I wasn't a babe in the woods like
(19:08):
a lot of these guys. So I mean it was clear.
I mean I didn't leave any wiggle room there. I'm
not going to do this. But I always assumed it
was an anomaly. Were those officers part of a deputy gang?
They were the beginnings they didn't tattoo, at least well,
I don't know if they had a tattoo or not.
When I went to the academy, I was only aware
(19:30):
of one type of a problem, and that was in
East l A, a tattooed group called the Little Red Devils.
And uh, they made a big deal of it in
the academy to tell me and all the everybody else.
An academy was rigorous in those days. I mean, we
started with seventy, we ended with twenty. That in East
(19:53):
l A there's a problem. The sheriff does not sanction,
it does not allow, it is critical of it. And
they are called Red Devils, and if you're smart, you'll
not be part of it. I mean that was I
knew that right from the time I was in the academy.
The Red Devils appeared to be the first ever gang
inside the l A County Sheriff's Department. On August the
(20:18):
Deputy gang took their tactics to the streets of East
Los Angeles in an incident that would change the relationship
between l A residents and the department forever. The Chicano
Moratorium and Ruben Salazar was there watching more after the break.
(20:46):
By the mid nineteen seventies, the Vietnam War had been
raging for several years. Wealthy Americans could afford to not
think about it, but the draft was responsible for the
decimation of the population of young men in community of color.
A study from cal State l A found that Latinos
made up twenty percent of US troops killed in Vietnam.
(21:08):
Chicanos in Los Angeles were one community seeing an astronomical loss.
Dr David Sanchez is a civil rights activist and founding
member of the Brown Berets Approach Chicano political organization. The
Brown Berets organized around many issues. One issue was the
war in Vietnam. We wanted to bring an end to
(21:29):
the war in Vietnam, and we did. We did bring
an end to the war in Vietnam by these demonstrations,
but also know it's because of police matality. We were
organizing demonstrating against the police with chality in East Los
Angeles and other places. Doctor Sanchez was one of the
organizers of the Chicano Moratorium, a march through East l
(21:49):
A calling for an end to the war. We were
trying to organize a peaceful, peaceful march at peaceful rally. UH.
We're trying to organize a peaceful demonstration. About people marched
through East l A. That day, about seven thousand people
stayed in Belvedere Park to listen to speakers. Some witnesses
(22:12):
say around this time, people left a liquor store without
paying for their stuff. The Sheriff's deputies nearby responded and
began making their way into the park. Then the scene exploded.
Most people tried to get away, some fought back. Dr
Sanchez was nearby watching and then all of a sudden,
the gangs got into a fight with the sheriff. What
(22:34):
happened was at the park, uh, where we had our rally.
It resulted in about uh two thousand people going out
in the middle of the park and fighting with five
policemen and to hand combat fist to fist, and the
police were hitting everybody to put times and people were
throwing rocks and stones and it was just a big,
(22:56):
big physical fight. The deputies brought in reinforcements from around
the county into the East l A area. Suddenly the
community was under occupation. Deputy has made their way through
the streets beating people. Fires erupted from buildings, people were
shot down in the street, then the fire. After they
finally broke up the fight in the middle of the park,
(23:19):
he went into the streets and turned into riots. And
there was like about three riots going on at one time,
and uh I was rooting sols are facing one of
the riots. Reuben was at the Chicano Moratorium with his
km X colleague Guermasta, who was getting very dangerous during
the last walking down. We're starting the left hand side
(23:43):
street going down, and he's someone that stays let's go
back to the other inside. He did it twice, he says,
more than once. Somebody is following us. Reuben and Guerma
into a bar called the Silver Dollar to try to
get away from the melee outside. They pulled up some
(24:06):
bar stools and ordered beer. Outside, witnesses reports seeing a
man in a red vest talking to sheriff's deputies nearby.
The man has never been publicly identified. Philip Rodriguez interviewed
the man for his documentary on Reuben Salazar neighborhood. Dude.
I think he was a former cb UM World War Two.
(24:29):
He had some patriotic notions and the most kind of
underdeveloped way and um I cop bass kisser. I think
he had some alcohol issues, um abuse allegations, a bit
of a record, and he was, you know, like a
(24:52):
lot of scoundrels, um trying to be helpful too to
the guys with the guns and misinformed them about suggest
that they were three men with rifles over their shoulder. Uh,
(25:13):
kind of marched militantly into the Silver Dollar Bar and
the cops followed up on that allegation and then did
what they did. Why would you say something? People tell
kinds of stories to get attention, to feel important, to
(25:34):
rectify and wash away their own sins, their own personal shame.
Why do people grandstand? Maybe he was mad, maybe he
had drunk too much. Maybe I I can't I can't
know why he made an allegation, but it was completely false.
Sergeants Tom Wilson was standing nearby the Silver Dollar when
(25:56):
a deputy ran up to him and said three men
had just entered the bar with guns. Wilson and a
group of deputies started to make their way towards it
as a crowd of protesters and journalists gathered to watch.
Wilson was armed with a projectile gun loaded with a
Federal Flight right projectile capable of punching through a wall
(26:18):
and explicitly labeled not to be used against crowds. Witnesses
did not hear a warning before Wilson fired. The canister
rocketed into the bar, spreading smoke everywhere. People poured out
of the back entrance. Garma made it outside and looked
(26:38):
around for Reuben. He never came out. He had been
hit in the head with the canister and was lying
dead on the bar floor. Ellie's Chicano community was devastated
by Reuben's death. The line for his wake was so
long it stretched throughout the streets of East l A.
People wanted to know why he had been killed. The
(27:02):
Los Angeles County Corner launched an inquest into the shooting.
An inquest is a fact finding court procedure that looks
and sounds a lot like a trial, but the verdict
is for the manner of death, natural, accidental suicide, or murder.
There might be a criminal prosecution, but it isn't guaranteed.
(27:24):
Dozens of people were called to testify, including Tom Wilson,
the sergeant who killed Reuben. I testified In the morning.
A man jumped up and started screaming, Ruan was a
little purgury knowing, and he had pointed directly at me
like that. Wilson almost shot another unarmed man with the
(27:48):
same projectile gun right there at the inquest looked like
a fort I had the tear gas gun and I
loaded the weapon because I figured if he was gonna
shoot me, I was gonna get him at least launch,
you know, somebody hate him and turned him sideways, and
I could tell that he had a magazine rolled up
instead of a gun. That's how quick I usually react
(28:15):
to things. Wilson testified that he did not know and
was not concerned about the type of projectile he fired
into the bar. The jury eventually returned with a split
verdict between murder and accidental. No charges were ever filed
against Wilson. Salazar's family eventually settled a legal claim against
(28:38):
l A County for seven hundred thousand dollars about five
point three million dollars today, which was paid for by taxpayers.
Wilson and the Sheriff's department were off the hook. Sheriff
Pitches said there was absolutely no misconduct on the part
of deputies involved or the procedures they followed. Deputy is
(29:00):
working at the East Los Angeles station appeared to take
pride in the terror they inflicted on the community during
the Chicano Moratorium. They created the so called Fort Apache
logo to commemorate that day, and you can see it
on pins, hats and other swag deputies rock in the
streets of East l A today. The logo is named
after a nineteen forty eight john Ford Western centered on
(29:23):
a remote U. S. Cavalry outpost surrounded by enemies whom
the white officers regard as dangerous savages, and that is
said to be the attitude harvard by many deputies working
at the East Los Angeles station. The image shows a
nineteen seventies style police riot helmet over a boot. It
(29:44):
sits inside a circle of models that say cemprea and
los bantolones, which translates to always a kick in the ass.
The other motto, low profile, is a tongue in cheek
reference to shareff pitches, is instruction to the deputies at
the Chicono Moratorium. The logo was banned by Sheriff Jim
(30:04):
McDonald in tween because he found it to be disrespectful
to the East l A community. Current Sheriff Alex Bianueva
revived the logo shortly after he took office in but
declined to comment on why. At one point he kept
a model of the logo in his office. He worked
(30:27):
at the East Los Angeles station earlier in his career
and even met his wife there. The Little Red Devils
and the Fort Apache logo were cemented into l A
s de Lore. Deputies with tattoos were celebrated by the
department and went on to choice positions. Other stations wanted
to form their own gangs too. Here's retired Lieutenant Roger Clark.
(30:51):
I did not consider that the department was under was
going through this metamorphosis and that was spreading so old.
But once it took off, um, every station you want
to do one upsmanship and that's it. You know, we're
(31:12):
tougher than you guys. You know, let's just got off.
Roger Clark was right, and a lot of those deputies
got away with it. I know a lot of cops
that have gotten away with out and out murder that
are in their retirement right now, drawing their retirement checks
and living in Idaho and Arizona left. That's David Lynn.
(31:35):
He's an intriguing guy with a resume out of a
Superhero movie. He's a former marine tank commander who served
in the Vietnam War. He worked for the United Nations
as a homicide investigator looking into death squad murders. He
went undercover in apartheid South Africa to document horrific working
and living conditions of black South Africans. He was in
(31:58):
a rack during the First US and bade in March
of two thousand and three. He worked in units refugee
camps in darfour. I met up with David and Baja California, Mexico,
where he had been living for the past few years.
The day before we met was actually his last day there.
He was moving to Ukraine to volunteer with humanitarian efforts
(32:19):
against the Russian invasion. He says that no matter where
he goes, there is brutal state violence against citizens. It
was all the same thing whether you go to Iraq
or South Africa. I had a right here in my
hometown in Los Angeles, South Central I don't need to
travel the world to see this kind of stuff and
documented it's right here in my home state. So I
(32:43):
became a private investigator and made a career out of
documenting police misconduct, police abuse cases, and doing criminal defense
as well. In the nineteen eighties, David was living in
l a and working for an organization of attorneys called
the Police Misconduct Lawyers Preferral Service or p m l
(33:03):
r S. It's no longer around today, but the group
was behind several big civil rights cases in the nineteen
eighties and nineties. Carol Watson was one of the lawyers there.
At the time. P m l r S was run
by a civil rights attorney named Humanus. Humanus was an
amazing individual. He basically trained a cadre of civil rights lawyers.
(33:31):
He took on cases that were impossible and just kept
at it and at it. He or for the a
c l U for a while. Uh he took a
couple of a case to the Supreme Court. He has
numerous cases that he won an appeal that are now
(33:54):
still precedent and important cases in civil rights litigation. Back
in it was really hard to find someone to represent
police misconduct cases. Juries in those days didn't believe that
the police did anything wrong. The police are the most
adept perjurors that exists. They come into court and they
(34:19):
look like boy scouts and they look you right in
the eye and lie to you. I think there is
a huge amount of corruption, not in the form of
bribe taking, but a culture of violence and thuggery. The
lack of oversight by the sheriff for generations has been
(34:45):
drastic to the community. I think there is a culture
of violence and the gang problem, the deputy gang problem
is a big part of it. After Carol started working
with you, he m l r S started to grow.
More people began to call the office looking for help,
and more attorneys wanted to lend a hand. Carol hired
(35:08):
an executive director for the organization, David Lynn. When I
took the job, it was just in a box. There
was no staffing. There was just a box of files
and names of attorneys and that was it. I started
separating it by department and by type of complaint, and
to see which departments had the biggest problems, and of
(35:31):
course the Stars department. Carol got a huge tip about
the Sheriff's department from the inside. There was insider in
the county who took Hugh and me to lunch and
told us that he had information about the vikings. And
(35:53):
then he had seen their tattoo and he told us
where it was and that was the first we heard
about the Vikings. What's going through your head while you're
sitting at this lunch here in this pretty shocked I
had never heard this before. Shocked in one way that
(36:14):
they would be as organized as affiliating themselves with a gang,
but not surprised that the person who was the source
for our source um was a violent person and involved
(36:35):
with other violent people. Carol didn't know it yet, but
she and the team at p mL r S were
about to begin a year's long fight against the gang.
At that point, no one knew about them except for
other people inside of the Sheriff's department. Who were the Vikings.
There were primarily let's say white. They were a lot
(37:01):
of them veterans, a lot of them Vietnam veterans, a
lot of them Marines, a few token minority deputies. So
they can't nobody could say that there were a racist gang.
How did someone become a member of the Vikings. It's
proved yourself and then you gotta kill somebody, and you
gotta kill somebody of your own race, if human minority,
(37:25):
a Viking of color may have killed someone to prove
themselves worthy of a tattoo in the early morning of
March eighth, before sunrise, twenty one year old Hung Pio
Lee was driving his white Audie through the Compton area.
Hung Pio was about to start auto mechanic classes and
an l A Area trade school, and was balancing that
(37:45):
with the fifty to sixty hour work week at his
parents liquor store in Anaheim. Some l A. Sheriff's deputies
claimed that they saw hung Pio run a stop sign
as he drove. They got behind him and started to
pursue his car. Hung Pio stayed on surface streets and
never got above forty five miles per hour. Yeah, it
was a slow pursuit. Um, they said. He like, I
(38:11):
can't remember California stopped or something. You know, it didn't
come to app he says, something petty, and he didn't
pull over because, um, he had a hash pipe in
the car. So he's scared to death, so he just
kept driving. Didn't know what to do. Two officers from
the Long Beach Police Department joined in the pursuit. Hung
Pyo came to a stop in a rail yard in
(38:31):
Long Beach and he wound up in a dead end
industrial area. Turned in and it was another dead end,
he was trapped. So uh, four deputy cars and the
Long Beach p D car and they all lined up
like a firing squad and twur Vikings. Deputies Robert Peppini,
(38:57):
Daniel McLeod, Brian Lee, and Sergeant Paul Tanaka, who would
eventually become number two in the department, stopped their patrol
vehicles about fifteen feet behind Hong Pyo's car. Chapman claims
to have approached and ordered him to surrender. Ben out
of nowhere, all the deputies opened fire. Hong Pyo was
(39:20):
hitting nine times in the back, really shot once, which
means he knew it was wrong, but he wanted to
be part of it, so he shot once. But they
claimed that he was backing up into them, so they
opened up on him to protect themselves. But we proved
where his car wound up. I wound up forward. He
wasn't backing up. He was calling forward and nine to
(39:45):
the back. Yeah, so we saw that it's just as
a Long Beach training officer who witness it and said
to his partner and his trainee, we just wished us
a execution and and uh, that's what it was. So
we suited him like we always do, and they settled
like they always knew. Settlements are approved by the Los
(40:08):
Angeles Board of Supervisors and historically come out of the
county's general fund, and Tanaka got promoted by the Sheriff's
department always does. It's just business as usual. And this
kid who was guilty of having a hash five Pennis
car paid the ultimate press for at the hands of
the Vikings. Two Vikings, and then Tanaka became one, so
(40:28):
technically three Vikings. And after Hong Kyo's death, the l
A County District Attorney Ira Rehiner decided the deputies acted
in self defense. Two years later, in April of nineteen nine,
Lee's family accepted a nine hundred and ninety nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety nine dollars settlement that didn't come
(40:49):
from the Sheriff's Department, though that was paid for by
l A County taxpayers. Lee's father, sunk Qu Lee, set
at a press conference, I hope now my son's name
has been cleared. Now it's time to take care of
the rest of the family more. After the break, white
(41:22):
supremacist displays were becoming more frequent inside of the l
A County Sheriff's Department, several operated inside of the jails
in A criminal defense attorney and member of the p
MLRS decided to take them on with the help of
David Lynn George God bless him, incredible human being and
(41:43):
lawyer former d A you never know when you met
him and more name. But yeah, he was one of
those guys. But so he knew all the ins and out.
He knew how works. He was good. George had uncovered
deputies burning crosses in the style of the Ku Klux
and inside of the Downtown Men's Central Jail. Later, he
(42:04):
was contacted by the family of a young man who
had been horribly beaten by deputies gang banging for the
Wayside Whitey's Gang. On December two, one year old Clydel
Crawford was incarcerated at the Wayside Honor Rancho or the
Pitch's Detention Center as it's known today. He had a
pretty idyllic childhood. His parents were preachers who raised him
(42:28):
and his siblings in West Covina, a fast growing suburb
in the nineteen seventies. When he was a kid, he
wanted to be a police officer. He took criminal justice
classes in college, even though, his uncle, who was a policeman,
told him that it was not a good working environment
for black men. After he was pulled over by a
cop as a teenager, his relationship with the police shifted
(42:51):
and started off thirty years worth of negative interactions with
the police. This incident at the Honor Ranch, though, would
change his life forever. I spoke to Clyde all about
the incident a few months ago in a local park.
They put me in a place back then it was
called the auto Match, and you can there was a
(43:12):
place where lord custody inmates would be. He got into
an argument with another inmate who was white. The man
didn't pay Clyde for some cigarettes he sold him. Then
a fight started. So he stands up and swings and
I got the better of my head. Him flies and
he felled when he failed. He was shaking and he's
(43:37):
bouncing around, and I'll run over to him. I didn't
mean I heard the guy, that man, but so I'm
trying to get him stable, you know, And when that
at me. The officer passed by, and the officer seeing
everyone around him, and he looked, and he looked, and
he hits the button. He says. Everyone on your box
on your box. So they finally the guy comes to him.
(43:59):
Were all sitting in our bombs waiting and so now
they're investigating. They bring about four officers and they're all
walking around talking to everyone. So when I came up
to my box, they and said, yeah, you stand up,
put them behind your back. So someone had told him
it was me, right, so I thought, oh my goodness,
So I put my hands behind my back and hand
(44:21):
Customer Clyde was escorted by an officer, not unusual in
County jail, but something was off. He tells me to
walk to the back door, and uh, I monke to
the back door, and I thought maybe I was going
that's the wrong way to walk. First of all, I
never did you know. I'm nervous about that one from
(44:41):
the very beginning, because step the way to wherever you're going,
see the sergeant, the whole wherever you're going, it's out
the front door, the back doors. You know, there's no
where no, we're really no way to get to the places.
They still happened taking me so kind like pushes me
against the wall, and I remember he pushes me in
(45:04):
my head hits and he says, I'm gonna teach you
about beating up in white guys. Then he was brutally beaten.
Remember he takes me, he hits my face against the window. Man.
Then I'm like, oh man, when the world's going on,
And he takes the handcuffs and I'll never he took
the handcuff and he grabbed my arm and he pushed
(45:24):
it up with highst he can push it and and
I'm like, what are you doing? What are you doing now?
I remember two more officers calm and they run about
of the corner and they're white officers and they they
don't say nothing. They just come pulled their flashlights out.
And one hit me in the shoulder first, I remember,
(45:47):
and the other one hit me in the back of
the leg. And I knew I was going down because
the other one swinging at me and then he hit me.
I'll got the ball. And while while I'm like on
the ground, I see a couple more run around the corners. Yeah.
They they they had their minds made up. They had
no idea where happened. They didn't here. And I remember
(46:12):
hearing wayside white these and I didn't understand what's that
man at that time? And he understand who he he
must not know about the wayside, why these It was
a little things they were saying, and they said it
more than a dozen times. And I was like, there
was a black guy standing there, and there was probably
(46:34):
three more came so things are total I think eight
and the black guys. But the black guy he didn't
jump in. There was another white guy. He didn't do nothing.
And they were just standing there. I looked at the
black guy and asking the help, you know, black officer,
and he shook his head and you know, done like
short this old shoulders and and then they just took me.
(46:56):
And if you said why king video, I think it
was way worse than I mean, I've never seen um.
I can't say. They broke my jaw, uh, andrew my braves,
really messed up all the cards in my face. The
officers continued to humiliate and punish Clyde. I'm yelling and
screament on my life, and I can see in bays
(47:18):
out the wind in the windows, and some of those
nbays're yelling, uh, they don't go, but they couldn't do
too my stock and they're yelling trying to get you know,
trying to help the best way they can. They couldn't
do much, so I remember feeling my legs snap. I
was really breathing bad. But they tell me they stand up.
(47:40):
I still have the handcufs on and he told me
to hop up this hill. So I stood up. When
I felt man, I'm like, something's wrong. Should you better
get up? I'm like, my legs broke. He said, I
don't care. So I'm like hunt and he hits me in.
So I'm hopping up the hill on one leg and
I can't make it. I think maybe Chen hops and
(48:03):
I'm like, I can't do it, and I followed, you know,
I sorry, you know, I'm telling him I can't do this. Man.
I thought they're going to kill him now. I thought
that was my last game. Once inside a treatment area,
the officers left Clyde laying in a gurney underneath the
row of pay phones. He took a chance, reached up
and called his parents. He told them where he was,
(48:27):
and they came the following morning. The family hired attorney
George V. Denny the Third and investigator David Lynn. Clyde's
case never made it to trial. That's usually what happens
with deputy gang cases. The lawyers like s alone because
they don't have to go to that trial, and it's
kind of easy money. They threw a million dollars at you,
and the clients are thinking, and this sappens a lot.
(48:49):
The lawyers sometimes talked the clients into taking a settlement
when they don't want to, and it's it's just all
part of that game. It's played with these lawsuits. And
the reason why on the sheriff's side, the county side,
where they settle them, is because they do not want
to go to trial. They do not These deputies sworn
(49:12):
in on the witness stand in front of juries and
the press and everybody else, um lying or exposing extra
what they did. So to avoid all of that and
getting all this on the record and all this evidence
in on the record today set them and it just
goes away. Everybody goes away, and next day there's another one.
(49:34):
There's another million dollar, two million dollars, thirteen million dollars settlement,
you know, just and then supervisors keep signing the checks
and the deputies keep doing their thing. And I don't
know what other word to you is except that it's institutionalized.
Clyde settled for just sixty dollars and signed an affidavid
(49:58):
saying he wouldn't pursue any action on residual injuries. He
says he settled because his dad was gravely ill with
colon cancer, and with no insurance, the family would lose
their home. He never considered that over thirty years later,
he'd still suffer from splitting headaches and a never ending
(50:18):
aching pain in his leg, which makes it incredibly difficult
to find work. He didn't know how long this experience
would reverberate inside of him. Well, I made mistakes, but
I think we all do. And to be so cool
to people, you know, they don't know what anything lily
(50:39):
the inside and they wonder why people rebuilding us him.
I don't like him. They don't like us. You know,
it's like, uh, why did the why the bad? If
you're gonna do something wrong with it, make room for
those who want to do the right thing, you know.
And it's so cool up and it's so everything's hit
(51:03):
and he covered up so far as too. You know,
it was they would you kill me? They wouldn't even kids,
you know, great care. It was a joke to all
the injurs I have induced that following into day. Thirty
years later, I'm still gonna compared for about that. But
(51:27):
the deputy gangs were just getting started. Next week, Robert
takes his leg, rolls up his sleep brights to the tattoo.
So that was the one and only time I thought
I was going to throw up in my entire career.
The Rise of the Linwood Vikings. I used to BELDI
(51:56):
the whole hood. Fuck the police. I'm a fucking hood trumph.
Better keep a pistol in the fill with the ship,
keep automatic recognize golf ships Wood, You've been listening to
a tradition of violence. The history of deputy Gangs in
the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department hosted an executive produced
by Series Castles, music by Yellow Hill and Steels. For
(52:18):
breaking using updates and deputy gangs. Follow at Las D
Gags on social media. The support series is reporting and
for exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the l s D
Gangs Patrio
Morning. This podcast contains explicit language and details acts of violence.
Listener discretion is advised. There is a longstanding urban legend
in Los Angeles County the Sheriff's Department is the biggest
gang on the streets. I'm not talking about a metaphor
(00:20):
for a police violence. I'm talking about a real gang.
Members have matching tattoos. They get together and have meetings
about the different crimes that they will get up to,
stealing from people, utily, beating them and even killing them.
But this gang is even worse. They've got a badge,
(00:42):
unlimited resources, paid for by taxpayers, and the blessing of
the courts and local government. And it's all true. My
name is Cerre's Castle, and I'm a local l a reporter.
I grew up out here, and I've been curious about
Deputy gang since I was a kid. I heard stories
about them from my older brother, teachers and kids at school.
(01:05):
It never made sense to me that the people with
badges who warned me about dangerous neighborhood gangs and went
after people I knew for just associating with them, We're
actually part of their own powerful criminal organization. A few
journalists before me like Sabrina Steele and Marie O'Connor, Tina
(01:25):
dont and my Allow uncovered stories confirming that these gangs existed,
but they only scratched the surface. I thought about deputy
gangs for years. I wanted to know who they were,
what exactly they got up to, and that never went away.
After George Floyd was murdered on May, the world had
(01:45):
a lot of questions about police. While I was covering
a protest in response to his death, I was shot
by a police officer with a rubber bullet, even though
I was wearing a press badge, carrying a bunch of
equipment and yelled out to the officers that I was
a member of the media. I watched a cop turn,
make eye contact with me and shoot me. The impact
(02:09):
made me fall into the street. Yeah, I was hurt
pretty badly. I was bruised up and my ankle was
in a cast for the next few months. The doctors
told me to stay on the couch, but I didn't
feel right just sitting still, so I decided to use
the time to finally investigate, and what I found deeply
disturbed me. This is a traditional violence. A history of
(02:42):
deputy gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Elice
Want Gangs, Bang Elize. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
(03:18):
has at least twenty gangs amongst its members. Officials at
various government agencies from the local level here in l
A County all the way up to the California state
and federal agencies have known about the presence of these
gangs for at least thirty years, and the first ever
investigation was opened after Knock l A published my fifteen
(03:40):
part series laying it all out in October. The l
A County Sheriff's Department is led by Sheriff Alex Vianueva.
Here's one of his campaign videos. While Steally is my
home and my community. As you're Sheriff, I'll use my
experience both with the community and with the department to
mend the relationships with our immigrant communities, increase resources for
(04:02):
training our deputies, make this shriff to part more effective,
and make sure that every person while Sanders County could
leave their life safely. I'm Alex Vigenueva. In an election day,
I hope I can count your boot. The Los Angeles
County share to reform, rebuild and restore our shriffs depart
Alex Vianueva is about five ft seven with heavily lighted
blue eyes and shortly cropped gray hair. He's usually wearing
(04:25):
a gray suit with an official green Sheriff's Department name tag.
If there was such a thing as a deputy gang,
understanding the full knowledge what a gang means, we'd fire him,
playing and simple. I've yet to find one. In fact,
if someone can find one or a gang member who
wears Tannon Green, please let me know. And they just
don't exist. Viennueva was elected in after campaigning as a
(04:49):
progressive Democrat, but as the years have gone on, he's
overseen the resurrection of band deputy gang logos. He's rehired
deputies fired for violating depart policy, defied subpoenas. This stuff
didn't start out of nowhere, Alex Vianueva wasn't made in
a vacuum. All of this is a symptom of a
(05:10):
larger problem with the culture of the l A. Sheriff's Department.
So what evidence we have says that they founded the
l A Sheriff's Department in eighteen fifty. That's Jessica Pisco,
a lawyer and writer. She researches sheriff accountability and is
currently working on a book about sheriff's And so I
want to caveat all the discussions about history with this
(05:32):
sort of broad brush, which is that everything we have
about the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and most other early
police departments are written by law enforcement officers. So either
it's information from media of the time, which I think
people are now more aware of how law enforcement excuse media,
(05:54):
but it was the same then. So it's either media
at the time. It's either law enforce ment or law
enforcement fans who go back and write these histories. And
then we have some contemporary accounts, but most of those
contemporary accounts are also written by law enforcement. You know,
the vast majority of these histories are written by white
(06:16):
Anglo settlers who moved to California to establish various forms
of government, and one of those forms of government was
the sheriff's department. The sheriff's department started out as a
group of white male landowners. The first l A sheriff's
department had Jeff Brell and then two deputies, so he
really didn't have a lot of people working for him. Now. Again,
(06:40):
as southern California's population began to grow, law enforcement sort
of grew with it, So the l A p D
and the l A Sheriff's Department with both grow immensely.
I think when you think about changes to the l A.
Sheriff's Department over sort of a long term, the two
things to think about. One the fact that a lot
(07:01):
of law enforcement activity was still being done by vigilantes
and vigilance committees, which in a sense they were like
parts of the Sheriff's department, just just expanded posse system
in which folks volunteered their time, did some of the work,
and then would go back to whatever their regular job was.
(07:22):
Those vigilantes would often commit crimes against people of color
in the area. In October of eighteen seventy one, the
largest mass lynching in American history was carried out here
in l A against nineteen Chinese residents. Deputies stepped into
action after the crime happened. The Sheriff's department itself was
(07:42):
responsible for carrying out racist practices like renting out indigenous
people to landowners for labor. Despite all of this, many
people wanted to be part of the department. So Peter
Pitches was appointed basically by his predecessor to take over
the department, and until he became sheriff, the department was
(08:02):
really still very like quote unquote wild West. The sheriffs
are very proud of being wild West. Peter Pitches was
a former FBI agent. He joined the Sheriff's department under
Sheriff Eugene Biskuylouse and eventually became under sheriff the second
in command when Peter Pitches took over. This was also
at the same time as the sort of quote war
(08:25):
on crime ramped up, right, so we had a whole
you have to sort of also look at it at
this whole backdrop of all these things passed by L B. J.
And Nixon to give money to police departments to buy
military equipment, to equip people with uniforms and riot gear
and helicopters and all sorts of goodies that they would use.
(08:48):
And of course a lot of the impetus for this
and how it would culminate was because in the nineties
sixties there were so many you know, there were lots
of street actions, so you know, especially in Los Angeles,
that was a time in which many groups of people
held various actions, so civil rights actions and gay and
(09:09):
lesbian actions and Latino actions. So there was this idea
that the l A Sheriff's part was also get to service,
kind of like riot control. Because this was a big problem,
the department got bigger, the weapons got more powerful, all
on the dime of l A County residents. Deputies became
increasingly physically violent, sometimes ending in death. A local journalist
(09:33):
started to pay attention Reuben Salazar, and it may have
just gotten him killed. Ruben Salazar was born in Ciudad Guarez, Mexico,
(09:56):
and immigrated to El Paso as an infant. I wanted
to get a better sense of who Reuben was, so
I took a trip out to northeast l A to
meet Philip Rodriguez. Philip makes documentaries, and he directed a
film looking into Ruben's life and his untimely mysterious death.
According to my sources, Reuben was raised by kind of
(10:17):
Mexican nor Daniel people who ultimately harbored probably white supremacist
ideas about things and believe that whiteness and affiliation with
whiteness and imitation of whiteness was was the proper way
to go about things, would would lend, what would make
(10:41):
your life easier. Certainly, um and um was maybe a
more respectable way to live and become an American. A
recent study from the Pure Research Center found that millions
of people who previously identified themselves as Hispanic change their
racial identity to white. Some researchers are concerned that some
(11:03):
people treat whiteness as the ideal and social baseline of
American life. His mother was strongly discouraged any affiliation of
Reuben from kind of Ruffians or maybe even dark skinned
indigenous kind of Mexicans, and suggesting and and and and
had him aspire to again being an assimilated, mainstream, get
(11:30):
along American boy. Ruben a medium bill guy with dark hair.
Once a high school at El Paso High started college
at the University of Texas at El Paso, which was
then called Texas Western College. He started writing for his
campus newspaper, The Prospector, but left school after his sophomore
year to work with his father. After two years, he
(11:52):
enlisted in the U. S. Army. He served in the
Korean War from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty two, then
came home to tech exists. He returned to school and
the Prospector as the managing editor, and landed a job
at the El Paso Herald Post. For one of his
first assignments, he pretended to be drunk and was arrested
(12:13):
and ordered a report on jail conditions. Because he's good
at his job and because he's passionate, he ends up
at at the biggest newspaper on the West Coast at
the time, Los Angeles Times, and becomes a reporter, and
becomes a columnist, and eventually ends up as the news
director of the fledgling channel thirty four k m e
(12:34):
X Spanish language flagship for what was to become Univision
on TV network in Los Angeles. He was a columnist
at the Los Angeles Times. That's a great hustle. That's
a great platform from which to communicate news and uh
and ideas too, to two pieces of the l a
(12:54):
PI that usually don't meet up to have every little
in comment. Even to this day, the Spanish language Latino
and the Los Angeles Time reading non Latino are living
in two different realities. At some point amidst this kind
of ideological shift that occurs in his middle in his
mid career, he starts to move away from the assimilated
(13:18):
idea of himself that that that he that he had embraced,
and and take to the ideas that the young people
had been pushing, expousing of of of kind of Chicindo nationalism,
and in doing that becomes kind of intimate and becomes
an ultimately the chronicler of the Chicano Revolution rebellion that
(13:44):
occurs in that period. What was this relationship. I think
that the relationship with the cops, it was rather fluid
one uh. And I think as he became more critical,
or as he became more uh fearless, and as his
power grew um, I think that he received pushback from
(14:05):
law enforcement. Reuben developed a wariness at the very least
about cops and what how cops interpret reality and how
they and how complicit the press would tend to be
with cops. Reuben's friends say that attitude made him a
target for police violence. Here's Philmontez, a friend of Reuben's
(14:30):
and a member of the U. S Commission on Human Rights.
Ruben said, I have a problem with the l A
p D. I said, what's the problem? He says, Well,
they came to see me, and they said that Mexicans
aren't ready for my kind of reporting, and they want
me to stop. Bill Drummond, a former Los Angeles Times reporter.
(14:51):
He had a right to be alarmed, and that's part
of the price you pay. You know, when you stick
your head out of the foxhole, there's somebody this is
going to take a shot at you. Verbally certainly, maybe
they might even do it for real. Deputies started to
create their own systems of policing and rewarded other deputies
who went along with those violent tactics. I'm Roger Clark.
(15:14):
I'm a retired l A County sheriff. I did twenty
seven and a half years of service active service on
the department. I came on during the Peter J. Pitches era.
I came on after they completed my background December of sixty.
Is there a culture of violence inside the Sheriff's department? Well,
these guys are violent, I mean, no kill you. Roger
(15:34):
started out in the county jail in downtown l A.
So my first night I had reported in, they gave
me my keys and my badge. You know, I put
on my uniform period main control. Here's your badge, Clark,
here's you and I reported to a module. Roger was
there as relief for the deputies already working on that floor.
(15:57):
They can't leave and go to chow unless they have
somebody watching these guys. They're asleep. We did the count
and we did uh breakfast, fed him and broke him
out for court. The deputy in charge of the module
or unit told Roger to follow his lead. So he says, uh,
go in there and go sit down and watch us.
(16:18):
Watch me. My dad as a captain on the department,
he just you know, I was a little life, you know,
a new guy, and they treated me a setch. I
didn't care, you know, as happy as a clam. So
so this goes on for about two days and then uh,
and I see these guys show up, about four of them,
and they and Clark watched the module. We'll be back later,
(16:41):
and they disappeared to come back. This happened again and again,
so the about third night and they say come with us.
They get so I go to a day room and
they've got two guys braced against the wall and they
just beat the pooh out of him and U we're
walking back. I just stood there I was stunned, but
(17:02):
I was convinced of two things at that point. The
sergeant and the lieutenant absolutely knew this was going on,
and that this is the way they run the jail.
I mean just assumed it. Of course, this is the
way they run the jail. Roger was disgusted. So I
go back and they said, what do you what do
you think? I said, you know, I guess this is
my last day here. Why because I can't do this.
(17:23):
You know, I'm talking from this is the way you
guys run this place. I can't do it. I won't
do it. And there's a mumble mumble. Go home, tell
the wife. They're going to call me in the lieutenant's
office tomorrow tonight when I report for duty. Tell me
they can't use me, and thank me very much. And
I'm going back to the phone company. And you know
(17:44):
that is that was it. So I show up, they
give me my badge. No one says a word, not
a word, but word eventually got out. January, I report
to the academy. Across the front page of the l
A Times are all eleven of these guys, the entire shift,
(18:04):
almost They've all been arrested and fired. For cruelty to inmates.
So I'm sitting at the academy in my desk thinking,
waiting for the tap on my shoulder. Obviously they're going
to come and talk to me because I was on
the shift. Never said it, never touched me. And the
(18:27):
only conclusion is when they ask who does this, Clark
would not do it. And they never came to me
from then on, regardless of rank, regardless of where I
was or what I was doing, never allowed it. Never,
you know, and I should have at that point said
you're going to do this, I'm here. You've got to
(18:47):
do it through me, because you're not going to do
it while I'm here. How did that incident affect you
and your outlook? Well, it's profound because the fact that
they did not try to recruit me or pressure me
because I was pretty blunt. I was twenty five years old,
you know, I wasn't a babe in the woods like
(19:08):
a lot of these guys. So I mean it was clear.
I mean I didn't leave any wiggle room there. I'm
not going to do this. But I always assumed it
was an anomaly. Were those officers part of a deputy gang?
They were the beginnings they didn't tattoo, at least well,
I don't know if they had a tattoo or not.
When I went to the academy, I was only aware
(19:30):
of one type of a problem, and that was in
East l A, a tattooed group called the Little Red Devils.
And uh, they made a big deal of it in
the academy to tell me and all the everybody else.
An academy was rigorous in those days. I mean, we
started with seventy, we ended with twenty. That in East
(19:53):
l A there's a problem. The sheriff does not sanction,
it does not allow, it is critical of it. And
they are called Red Devils, and if you're smart, you'll
not be part of it. I mean that was I
knew that right from the time I was in the academy.
The Red Devils appeared to be the first ever gang
inside the l A County Sheriff's Department. On August the
(20:18):
Deputy gang took their tactics to the streets of East
Los Angeles in an incident that would change the relationship
between l A residents and the department forever. The Chicano
Moratorium and Ruben Salazar was there watching more after the break.
(20:46):
By the mid nineteen seventies, the Vietnam War had been
raging for several years. Wealthy Americans could afford to not
think about it, but the draft was responsible for the
decimation of the population of young men in community of color.
A study from cal State l A found that Latinos
made up twenty percent of US troops killed in Vietnam.
(21:08):
Chicanos in Los Angeles were one community seeing an astronomical loss.
Dr David Sanchez is a civil rights activist and founding
member of the Brown Berets Approach Chicano political organization. The
Brown Berets organized around many issues. One issue was the
war in Vietnam. We wanted to bring an end to
(21:29):
the war in Vietnam, and we did. We did bring
an end to the war in Vietnam by these demonstrations,
but also know it's because of police matality. We were
organizing demonstrating against the police with chality in East Los
Angeles and other places. Doctor Sanchez was one of the
organizers of the Chicano Moratorium, a march through East l
(21:49):
A calling for an end to the war. We were
trying to organize a peaceful, peaceful march at peaceful rally. UH.
We're trying to organize a peaceful demonstration. About people marched
through East l A. That day, about seven thousand people
stayed in Belvedere Park to listen to speakers. Some witnesses
(22:12):
say around this time, people left a liquor store without
paying for their stuff. The Sheriff's deputies nearby responded and
began making their way into the park. Then the scene exploded.
Most people tried to get away, some fought back. Dr
Sanchez was nearby watching and then all of a sudden,
the gangs got into a fight with the sheriff. What
(22:34):
happened was at the park, uh, where we had our rally.
It resulted in about uh two thousand people going out
in the middle of the park and fighting with five
policemen and to hand combat fist to fist, and the
police were hitting everybody to put times and people were
throwing rocks and stones and it was just a big,
(22:56):
big physical fight. The deputies brought in reinforcements from around
the county into the East l A area. Suddenly the
community was under occupation. Deputy has made their way through
the streets beating people. Fires erupted from buildings, people were
shot down in the street, then the fire. After they
finally broke up the fight in the middle of the park,
(23:19):
he went into the streets and turned into riots. And
there was like about three riots going on at one time,
and uh I was rooting sols are facing one of
the riots. Reuben was at the Chicano Moratorium with his
km X colleague Guermasta, who was getting very dangerous during
the last walking down. We're starting the left hand side
(23:43):
street going down, and he's someone that stays let's go
back to the other inside. He did it twice, he says,
more than once. Somebody is following us. Reuben and Guerma
into a bar called the Silver Dollar to try to
get away from the melee outside. They pulled up some
(24:06):
bar stools and ordered beer. Outside, witnesses reports seeing a
man in a red vest talking to sheriff's deputies nearby.
The man has never been publicly identified. Philip Rodriguez interviewed
the man for his documentary on Reuben Salazar neighborhood. Dude.
I think he was a former cb UM World War Two.
(24:29):
He had some patriotic notions and the most kind of
underdeveloped way and um I cop bass kisser. I think
he had some alcohol issues, um abuse allegations, a bit
of a record, and he was, you know, like a
(24:52):
lot of scoundrels, um trying to be helpful too to
the guys with the guns and misinformed them about suggest
that they were three men with rifles over their shoulder. Uh,
(25:13):
kind of marched militantly into the Silver Dollar Bar and
the cops followed up on that allegation and then did
what they did. Why would you say something? People tell
kinds of stories to get attention, to feel important, to
(25:34):
rectify and wash away their own sins, their own personal shame.
Why do people grandstand? Maybe he was mad, maybe he
had drunk too much. Maybe I I can't I can't
know why he made an allegation, but it was completely false.
Sergeants Tom Wilson was standing nearby the Silver Dollar when
(25:56):
a deputy ran up to him and said three men
had just entered the bar with guns. Wilson and a
group of deputies started to make their way towards it
as a crowd of protesters and journalists gathered to watch.
Wilson was armed with a projectile gun loaded with a
Federal Flight right projectile capable of punching through a wall
(26:18):
and explicitly labeled not to be used against crowds. Witnesses
did not hear a warning before Wilson fired. The canister
rocketed into the bar, spreading smoke everywhere. People poured out
of the back entrance. Garma made it outside and looked
(26:38):
around for Reuben. He never came out. He had been
hit in the head with the canister and was lying
dead on the bar floor. Ellie's Chicano community was devastated
by Reuben's death. The line for his wake was so
long it stretched throughout the streets of East l A.
People wanted to know why he had been killed. The
(27:02):
Los Angeles County Corner launched an inquest into the shooting.
An inquest is a fact finding court procedure that looks
and sounds a lot like a trial, but the verdict
is for the manner of death, natural, accidental suicide, or murder.
There might be a criminal prosecution, but it isn't guaranteed.
(27:24):
Dozens of people were called to testify, including Tom Wilson,
the sergeant who killed Reuben. I testified In the morning.
A man jumped up and started screaming, Ruan was a
little purgury knowing, and he had pointed directly at me
like that. Wilson almost shot another unarmed man with the
(27:48):
same projectile gun right there at the inquest looked like
a fort I had the tear gas gun and I
loaded the weapon because I figured if he was gonna
shoot me, I was gonna get him at least launch,
you know, somebody hate him and turned him sideways, and
I could tell that he had a magazine rolled up
instead of a gun. That's how quick I usually react
(28:15):
to things. Wilson testified that he did not know and
was not concerned about the type of projectile he fired
into the bar. The jury eventually returned with a split
verdict between murder and accidental. No charges were ever filed
against Wilson. Salazar's family eventually settled a legal claim against
(28:38):
l A County for seven hundred thousand dollars about five
point three million dollars today, which was paid for by taxpayers.
Wilson and the Sheriff's department were off the hook. Sheriff
Pitches said there was absolutely no misconduct on the part
of deputies involved or the procedures they followed. Deputy is
(29:00):
working at the East Los Angeles station appeared to take
pride in the terror they inflicted on the community during
the Chicano Moratorium. They created the so called Fort Apache
logo to commemorate that day, and you can see it
on pins, hats and other swag deputies rock in the
streets of East l A today. The logo is named
after a nineteen forty eight john Ford Western centered on
(29:23):
a remote U. S. Cavalry outpost surrounded by enemies whom
the white officers regard as dangerous savages, and that is
said to be the attitude harvard by many deputies working
at the East Los Angeles station. The image shows a
nineteen seventies style police riot helmet over a boot. It
(29:44):
sits inside a circle of models that say cemprea and
los bantolones, which translates to always a kick in the ass.
The other motto, low profile, is a tongue in cheek
reference to shareff pitches, is instruction to the deputies at
the Chicono Moratorium. The logo was banned by Sheriff Jim
(30:04):
McDonald in tween because he found it to be disrespectful
to the East l A community. Current Sheriff Alex Bianueva
revived the logo shortly after he took office in but
declined to comment on why. At one point he kept
a model of the logo in his office. He worked
(30:27):
at the East Los Angeles station earlier in his career
and even met his wife there. The Little Red Devils
and the Fort Apache logo were cemented into l A
s de Lore. Deputies with tattoos were celebrated by the
department and went on to choice positions. Other stations wanted
to form their own gangs too. Here's retired Lieutenant Roger Clark.
(30:51):
I did not consider that the department was under was
going through this metamorphosis and that was spreading so old.
But once it took off, um, every station you want
to do one upsmanship and that's it. You know, we're
(31:12):
tougher than you guys. You know, let's just got off.
Roger Clark was right, and a lot of those deputies
got away with it. I know a lot of cops
that have gotten away with out and out murder that
are in their retirement right now, drawing their retirement checks
and living in Idaho and Arizona left. That's David Lynn.
(31:35):
He's an intriguing guy with a resume out of a
Superhero movie. He's a former marine tank commander who served
in the Vietnam War. He worked for the United Nations
as a homicide investigator looking into death squad murders. He
went undercover in apartheid South Africa to document horrific working
and living conditions of black South Africans. He was in
(31:58):
a rack during the First US and bade in March
of two thousand and three. He worked in units refugee
camps in darfour. I met up with David and Baja California, Mexico,
where he had been living for the past few years.
The day before we met was actually his last day there.
He was moving to Ukraine to volunteer with humanitarian efforts
(32:19):
against the Russian invasion. He says that no matter where
he goes, there is brutal state violence against citizens. It
was all the same thing whether you go to Iraq
or South Africa. I had a right here in my
hometown in Los Angeles, South Central I don't need to
travel the world to see this kind of stuff and
documented it's right here in my home state. So I
(32:43):
became a private investigator and made a career out of
documenting police misconduct, police abuse cases, and doing criminal defense
as well. In the nineteen eighties, David was living in
l a and working for an organization of attorneys called
the Police Misconduct Lawyers Preferral Service or p m l
(33:03):
r S. It's no longer around today, but the group
was behind several big civil rights cases in the nineteen
eighties and nineties. Carol Watson was one of the lawyers there.
At the time. P m l r S was run
by a civil rights attorney named Humanus. Humanus was an
amazing individual. He basically trained a cadre of civil rights lawyers.
(33:31):
He took on cases that were impossible and just kept
at it and at it. He or for the a
c l U for a while. Uh he took a
couple of a case to the Supreme Court. He has
numerous cases that he won an appeal that are now
(33:54):
still precedent and important cases in civil rights litigation. Back
in it was really hard to find someone to represent
police misconduct cases. Juries in those days didn't believe that
the police did anything wrong. The police are the most
adept perjurors that exists. They come into court and they
(34:19):
look like boy scouts and they look you right in
the eye and lie to you. I think there is
a huge amount of corruption, not in the form of
bribe taking, but a culture of violence and thuggery. The
lack of oversight by the sheriff for generations has been
(34:45):
drastic to the community. I think there is a culture
of violence and the gang problem, the deputy gang problem
is a big part of it. After Carol started working
with you, he m l r S started to grow.
More people began to call the office looking for help,
and more attorneys wanted to lend a hand. Carol hired
(35:08):
an executive director for the organization, David Lynn. When I
took the job, it was just in a box. There
was no staffing. There was just a box of files
and names of attorneys and that was it. I started
separating it by department and by type of complaint, and
to see which departments had the biggest problems, and of
(35:31):
course the Stars department. Carol got a huge tip about
the Sheriff's department from the inside. There was insider in
the county who took Hugh and me to lunch and
told us that he had information about the vikings. And
(35:53):
then he had seen their tattoo and he told us
where it was and that was the first we heard
about the Vikings. What's going through your head while you're
sitting at this lunch here in this pretty shocked I
had never heard this before. Shocked in one way that
(36:14):
they would be as organized as affiliating themselves with a gang,
but not surprised that the person who was the source
for our source um was a violent person and involved
(36:35):
with other violent people. Carol didn't know it yet, but
she and the team at p mL r S were
about to begin a year's long fight against the gang.
At that point, no one knew about them except for
other people inside of the Sheriff's department. Who were the Vikings.
There were primarily let's say white. They were a lot
(37:01):
of them veterans, a lot of them Vietnam veterans, a
lot of them Marines, a few token minority deputies. So
they can't nobody could say that there were a racist gang.
How did someone become a member of the Vikings. It's
proved yourself and then you gotta kill somebody, and you
gotta kill somebody of your own race, if human minority,
(37:25):
a Viking of color may have killed someone to prove
themselves worthy of a tattoo in the early morning of
March eighth, before sunrise, twenty one year old Hung Pio
Lee was driving his white Audie through the Compton area.
Hung Pio was about to start auto mechanic classes and
an l A Area trade school, and was balancing that
(37:45):
with the fifty to sixty hour work week at his
parents liquor store in Anaheim. Some l A. Sheriff's deputies
claimed that they saw hung Pio run a stop sign
as he drove. They got behind him and started to
pursue his car. Hung Pio stayed on surface streets and
never got above forty five miles per hour. Yeah, it
was a slow pursuit. Um, they said. He like, I
(38:11):
can't remember California stopped or something. You know, it didn't
come to app he says, something petty, and he didn't
pull over because, um, he had a hash pipe in
the car. So he's scared to death, so he just
kept driving. Didn't know what to do. Two officers from
the Long Beach Police Department joined in the pursuit. Hung
Pyo came to a stop in a rail yard in
(38:31):
Long Beach and he wound up in a dead end
industrial area. Turned in and it was another dead end,
he was trapped. So uh, four deputy cars and the
Long Beach p D car and they all lined up
like a firing squad and twur Vikings. Deputies Robert Peppini,
(38:57):
Daniel McLeod, Brian Lee, and Sergeant Paul Tanaka, who would
eventually become number two in the department, stopped their patrol
vehicles about fifteen feet behind Hong Pyo's car. Chapman claims
to have approached and ordered him to surrender. Ben out
of nowhere, all the deputies opened fire. Hong Pyo was
(39:20):
hitting nine times in the back, really shot once, which
means he knew it was wrong, but he wanted to
be part of it, so he shot once. But they
claimed that he was backing up into them, so they
opened up on him to protect themselves. But we proved
where his car wound up. I wound up forward. He
wasn't backing up. He was calling forward and nine to
(39:45):
the back. Yeah, so we saw that it's just as
a Long Beach training officer who witness it and said
to his partner and his trainee, we just wished us
a execution and and uh, that's what it was. So
we suited him like we always do, and they settled
like they always knew. Settlements are approved by the Los
(40:08):
Angeles Board of Supervisors and historically come out of the
county's general fund, and Tanaka got promoted by the Sheriff's
department always does. It's just business as usual. And this
kid who was guilty of having a hash five Pennis
car paid the ultimate press for at the hands of
the Vikings. Two Vikings, and then Tanaka became one, so
(40:28):
technically three Vikings. And after Hong Kyo's death, the l
A County District Attorney Ira Rehiner decided the deputies acted
in self defense. Two years later, in April of nineteen nine,
Lee's family accepted a nine hundred and ninety nine thousand,
nine hundred and ninety nine dollars settlement that didn't come
(40:49):
from the Sheriff's Department, though that was paid for by
l A County taxpayers. Lee's father, sunk Qu Lee, set
at a press conference, I hope now my son's name
has been cleared. Now it's time to take care of
the rest of the family more. After the break, white
(41:22):
supremacist displays were becoming more frequent inside of the l
A County Sheriff's Department, several operated inside of the jails
in A criminal defense attorney and member of the p
MLRS decided to take them on with the help of
David Lynn George God bless him, incredible human being and
(41:43):
lawyer former d A you never know when you met
him and more name. But yeah, he was one of
those guys. But so he knew all the ins and out.
He knew how works. He was good. George had uncovered
deputies burning crosses in the style of the Ku Klux
and inside of the Downtown Men's Central Jail. Later, he
(42:04):
was contacted by the family of a young man who
had been horribly beaten by deputies gang banging for the
Wayside Whitey's Gang. On December two, one year old Clydel
Crawford was incarcerated at the Wayside Honor Rancho or the
Pitch's Detention Center as it's known today. He had a
pretty idyllic childhood. His parents were preachers who raised him
(42:28):
and his siblings in West Covina, a fast growing suburb
in the nineteen seventies. When he was a kid, he
wanted to be a police officer. He took criminal justice
classes in college, even though, his uncle, who was a policeman,
told him that it was not a good working environment
for black men. After he was pulled over by a
cop as a teenager, his relationship with the police shifted
(42:51):
and started off thirty years worth of negative interactions with
the police. This incident at the Honor Ranch, though, would
change his life forever. I spoke to Clyde all about
the incident a few months ago in a local park.
They put me in a place back then it was
called the auto Match, and you can there was a
(43:12):
place where lord custody inmates would be. He got into
an argument with another inmate who was white. The man
didn't pay Clyde for some cigarettes he sold him. Then
a fight started. So he stands up and swings and
I got the better of my head. Him flies and
he felled when he failed. He was shaking and he's
(43:37):
bouncing around, and I'll run over to him. I didn't
mean I heard the guy, that man, but so I'm
trying to get him stable, you know, And when that
at me. The officer passed by, and the officer seeing
everyone around him, and he looked, and he looked, and
he hits the button. He says. Everyone on your box
on your box. So they finally the guy comes to him.
(43:59):
Were all sitting in our bombs waiting and so now
they're investigating. They bring about four officers and they're all
walking around talking to everyone. So when I came up
to my box, they and said, yeah, you stand up,
put them behind your back. So someone had told him
it was me, right, so I thought, oh my goodness,
So I put my hands behind my back and hand
(44:21):
Customer Clyde was escorted by an officer, not unusual in
County jail, but something was off. He tells me to
walk to the back door, and uh, I monke to
the back door, and I thought maybe I was going
that's the wrong way to walk. First of all, I
never did you know. I'm nervous about that one from
(44:41):
the very beginning, because step the way to wherever you're going,
see the sergeant, the whole wherever you're going, it's out
the front door, the back doors. You know, there's no
where no, we're really no way to get to the places.
They still happened taking me so kind like pushes me
against the wall, and I remember he pushes me in
(45:04):
my head hits and he says, I'm gonna teach you
about beating up in white guys. Then he was brutally beaten.
Remember he takes me, he hits my face against the window. Man.
Then I'm like, oh man, when the world's going on,
And he takes the handcuffs and I'll never he took
the handcuff and he grabbed my arm and he pushed
(45:24):
it up with highst he can push it and and
I'm like, what are you doing? What are you doing now?
I remember two more officers calm and they run about
of the corner and they're white officers and they they
don't say nothing. They just come pulled their flashlights out.
And one hit me in the shoulder first, I remember,
(45:47):
and the other one hit me in the back of
the leg. And I knew I was going down because
the other one swinging at me and then he hit me.
I'll got the ball. And while while I'm like on
the ground, I see a couple more run around the corners. Yeah.
They they they had their minds made up. They had
no idea where happened. They didn't here. And I remember
(46:12):
hearing wayside white these and I didn't understand what's that
man at that time? And he understand who he he
must not know about the wayside, why these It was
a little things they were saying, and they said it
more than a dozen times. And I was like, there
was a black guy standing there, and there was probably
(46:34):
three more came so things are total I think eight
and the black guys. But the black guy he didn't
jump in. There was another white guy. He didn't do nothing.
And they were just standing there. I looked at the
black guy and asking the help, you know, black officer,
and he shook his head and you know, done like
short this old shoulders and and then they just took me.
(46:56):
And if you said why king video, I think it
was way worse than I mean, I've never seen um.
I can't say. They broke my jaw, uh, andrew my braves,
really messed up all the cards in my face. The
officers continued to humiliate and punish Clyde. I'm yelling and
screament on my life, and I can see in bays
(47:18):
out the wind in the windows, and some of those
nbays're yelling, uh, they don't go, but they couldn't do
too my stock and they're yelling trying to get you know,
trying to help the best way they can. They couldn't
do much, so I remember feeling my legs snap. I
was really breathing bad. But they tell me they stand up.
(47:40):
I still have the handcufs on and he told me
to hop up this hill. So I stood up. When
I felt man, I'm like, something's wrong. Should you better
get up? I'm like, my legs broke. He said, I
don't care. So I'm like hunt and he hits me in.
So I'm hopping up the hill on one leg and
I can't make it. I think maybe Chen hops and
(48:03):
I'm like, I can't do it, and I followed, you know,
I sorry, you know, I'm telling him I can't do this. Man.
I thought they're going to kill him now. I thought
that was my last game. Once inside a treatment area,
the officers left Clyde laying in a gurney underneath the
row of pay phones. He took a chance, reached up
and called his parents. He told them where he was,
(48:27):
and they came the following morning. The family hired attorney
George V. Denny the Third and investigator David Lynn. Clyde's
case never made it to trial. That's usually what happens
with deputy gang cases. The lawyers like s alone because
they don't have to go to that trial, and it's
kind of easy money. They threw a million dollars at you,
and the clients are thinking, and this sappens a lot.
(48:49):
The lawyers sometimes talked the clients into taking a settlement
when they don't want to, and it's it's just all
part of that game. It's played with these lawsuits. And
the reason why on the sheriff's side, the county side,
where they settle them, is because they do not want
to go to trial. They do not These deputies sworn
(49:12):
in on the witness stand in front of juries and
the press and everybody else, um lying or exposing extra
what they did. So to avoid all of that and
getting all this on the record and all this evidence
in on the record today set them and it just
goes away. Everybody goes away, and next day there's another one.
(49:34):
There's another million dollar, two million dollars, thirteen million dollars settlement,
you know, just and then supervisors keep signing the checks
and the deputies keep doing their thing. And I don't
know what other word to you is except that it's institutionalized.
Clyde settled for just sixty dollars and signed an affidavid
(49:58):
saying he wouldn't pursue any action on residual injuries. He
says he settled because his dad was gravely ill with
colon cancer, and with no insurance, the family would lose
their home. He never considered that over thirty years later,
he'd still suffer from splitting headaches and a never ending
(50:18):
aching pain in his leg, which makes it incredibly difficult
to find work. He didn't know how long this experience
would reverberate inside of him. Well, I made mistakes, but
I think we all do. And to be so cool
to people, you know, they don't know what anything lily
(50:39):
the inside and they wonder why people rebuilding us him.
I don't like him. They don't like us. You know,
it's like, uh, why did the why the bad? If
you're gonna do something wrong with it, make room for
those who want to do the right thing, you know.
And it's so cool up and it's so everything's hit
(51:03):
and he covered up so far as too. You know,
it was they would you kill me? They wouldn't even kids,
you know, great care. It was a joke to all
the injurs I have induced that following into day. Thirty
years later, I'm still gonna compared for about that. But
(51:27):
the deputy gangs were just getting started. Next week, Robert
takes his leg, rolls up his sleep brights to the tattoo.
So that was the one and only time I thought
I was going to throw up in my entire career.
The Rise of the Linwood Vikings. I used to BELDI
(51:56):
the whole hood. Fuck the police. I'm a fucking hood trumph.
Better keep a pistol in the fill with the ship,
keep automatic recognize golf ships Wood, You've been listening to
a tradition of violence. The history of deputy Gangs in
the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department hosted an executive produced
by Series Castles, music by Yellow Hill and Steels. For
(52:18):
breaking using updates and deputy gangs. Follow at Las D
Gags on social media. The support series is reporting and
for exclusive bonus content, subscribe to the l s D
Gangs Patrio
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com