Blood's a rover

DOCUMENT INSERT: 1/12/69. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

January 12, 1969

I’m being courted. The pace is slower than Mr. Holly would like. Both the BTA and MMLF have found me, along with the Panthers and US. Eldridge Cleaver invited me to lunch. He brought with him a dubious literary agent, who wanted me to Write a memoir entitled Brother Pig: An Ex-Cop Tells It Like It Is Within the Genocidal LAPD. I declined. Mr. Cleaver looked at me suspiciously. The ghetto rumor is that Mr. Cleaver is a very well-placed informant himself and reports to cutouts at various Federal crime commissions that no longer trust Mr. Hoover to rationally assess information. Brother Cleaver had the look of informant/arriviste, and I think he may have seen it in me.

I’ve nixed the Panthers and US. My relationship with Jomo Clarkson has me leaning toward the MMLF. Jomo is rumored to be heisting liquor stores; if I come across anything more specific on that, I’ll report it to Mr. Holly.

The southside clubs are the chief recruiting arms of both organizations. If one spends time at Sultan Sam’s Sandbox, Rae’s Rugburn Room, Nat’s Nest, Mr. Mitch’s Another World, the Snooty Fox, Tommy Tucker’s Playroom and the Carolina Pines on Imperial Highway, one will be approached by BTA/MMLF brothers, who will speak injudiciously, suck up a bit and urge you to attend rallies and other pla

Both groups front programs to feed wholesome breakfasts to impoverished ghetto children. White liberals find this fetching and donate money that the MMLF and BTA spends on hate-lit supplies, guns and dope. The breakfasts are homey affairs, often written up and photographed by a doting media. The breakfast food is extorted from local merchants and the children are fed sugar-packed concoctions like Fruit Loops, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Crispy Critters and Puff-and-Stuff Pals. Sunday breakfasts are often followed by “media mixers,” featuring Bloody Marys, soul food and reefer. These are hilarious, mixed-message, mixed-race moments. Yeah, we wants to kill all de pigs and destroy de white power structure, but we thinks you cool.

And these dumb white motherfuckers think they are cool. And these dumb white motherfuckers feel exalted in the presence of swinging black militants.

So, the BTA and MMLF are rivals, and I bop between both groups and keep my eyes open. Individuals are viciously bad within both groups, but I do not see a percolating or slowly assertive group viciousness in ascent. Both groups have guns stashed in safe houses (Joan Klein allegedly holds guns for BTA members), but both groups are primarily in love with guns for their implied statement of masculinity and rarely carry them, for fear of LAPD street rousts. There is much talk of dealing heroin to finance revolution, but “revolution” is a comic-book, racist-polemic pipe dream to these people, and I doubt if they could put together the seed money necessary to buy heroin in significant quantity.

So it’s pamphlet sales, parties, pub crawls, rallies and big talk in great quantity. Both groups peddle bootleg editions of Mao’s Little Red Book and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I’ve read both books. They both contain wisdom. Given my life in Los Angeles, my parents’ horrible tales of life in the South, my own LAPD experience and my two auspicious beatings by LAPD, I empathize as much as my compartmentalized psyche and soul will let me. But revolution? Accomplishing anything other than a glancingly ephemeral social good? These people are lost in the overall puerile, selfish, ride-the-zeitgeist game of it, things will go wrong in the end, and my efforts of suppression and interdiction may provide my own brand of glancingly ephemeral social good.

I can only allot “social good” a smidgen of ink. I’m here for the adventure and to solve the armored-car heist case and accrue all financial benefit.

I’m being courted. I’m listening, I’m learning. I think I’ll be specifically recruited for criminal enterprises-based on misreadings of my ex-cop status-before too long.

I see Scotty Be

I’ve got both beatings in perspective now, I think. I sense that they are bringing me closer to the money, the emeralds and the secrets of 2/24/64.

Mr. Holly and I continue to talk via phone drop every third or fourth day. He’s looking for a cutout to work me on a more regular basis, while he continues to run the operation. I’ve indulged the Bent at Queen A

Mr. Holly continues to trouble me. I find myself thinking about him much more than I should.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 1/16/69. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

January 16, 1969

Eleanora is squalling and keeping me up all night and I’m realizing that the joy of Dina as a full-fledged child and a developing moral being had blunted me to the debilitating regime of new motherhood, this time at age forty-three. I’m not sleeping, W.H.N. is staying in L.A. full-time to help, his constant presence hinders my internal life and in no way compensates for the assistance he’s giving me with Ella. I haven’t seen Dwight since Ella was born; W.H.N.’s presence has effectively quashed that. Dina misses Dwight and asks about him when W.H.N. is out of earshot; I assure her that he’ll be back soon, to tell her wonderfully sanitized tales of his adventures with the FBI.

She was asking me questions about J. Edgar Hoover last night. Her father had told her (too vividly) stories of Hoover’s cowardly actions during the 1919-1920 Red Scare. Dina asked me (again, out of earshot of What’s-His-Name) why her father hated Hoover so much, while Dwight held him in such high regard. I did not tell her that Dwight and Hoover share a complex moral history, that her father is an intractably aggrieved ideologue and that Dwight is punch-drunk behind all his conflicting notions of authority and considers it best to tell little children comforting tales. Dina wouldn’t get it, and I wouldn’t blame her. I keep wondering just how far Dwight has gone to appease Mr. Hoover in repayment of the debt he carries for the man.