Los Angeles Magazine

“Drakeo was 28 with an incandescent future ahead: He was supporting his son, mother, and paying his sister’s college tuition. Whoever bears responsibility for his murder did more than kill one man. They’ve deprived hip-hop and pop culture of a rare creative vanguard pushing sound and style forward in a landscape glutted with pastiche and revival. They snatched away a living symbol, who triumphed over incommensurable abuses dealt by the system. But perhaps that was part of the point.”

A 70-year old retired detective started robbing banks in his free time. Now his time’s no longer free. They call him the Snowbird Bandit. Why did he turn to crime?

In her final feature for Los Angeles Magazine, Amy Wallace tells the incredible story of Jonathan Koch, “one of Hollywood’s great closers,” who lost several limbs and nearly his life to septic shock before receiving a revolutionary hand transplant.

Explore all your post-death options in a macabre but fascinating (and strangely jaunty) essay that reveals all the post-death details you wanted to know — and some that you probably didn’t.

A family spends 10 weeks in Mexico and Argentina trying to learn Spanish.

Inside the Department of Children and Family Services’s emergency response team.

From the archives: Celeste Fremon’s 2014 feature detailing former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca’s fall from grace.

In the April 2008 issue of Los Angeles magazine reporter Mark Arax wrote about Los Angeles’ beloved Zankou Chicken chain, and how one owner tore the founding family apart by murdering two of its members and killing himself. The story is a compelling mix of family dynamics, fast food and the complex American dream.

A profile of Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s longtime trainer.

Revered Californias architects Greene & Greene built the house in Hollywood just four years into the twentieth century. So how did it end up being rediscovered in Canada in the early 1970’s, derelict and abandoned?