Former Black Panther Patches Together Purpose in Africa Exile
Pete O’Neal, 70, founded the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther party and once threatened to “shoot my way into the House of Representatives.” He fled the country in 1970, eventually landing in Tanzania:
“Exile was supposed to be temporary. O’Neal corresponded with other Panthers and planned to return home to help lead the revolution. He watched from abroad as the party collapsed from infighting, arrests and an FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage. People stopped talking about revolution. Radicals found new lives.
“O’Neal’s exile became permanent. His fury abated. Some of it was age. Some of it was Tanzania, where strangers always materialized to push your Land Rover out of the mud, and where conflicts were resolved in community meetings in which everyone got to speak, interminably.”
Without a Country: Immigrant Tries to Get Back to the Life He Knew
A man, brought to the U.S. as a toddler, is suddenly deported to Mexico. He’s now trying to get back:
“The train had covered 10 miles through the high desert when it stopped at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. An inspector and his canine walked by on the gravel path. Luna stifled his breath and prayed. Then he felt a sharp tug and a dog’s hot breath.
“A German shepherd sank its teeth through Luna’s two shirts, locked onto his ribs and dragged him out from under the train. He clutched his side.”
Paradise (1933)
Cain, writer of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” on the pros and cons of living in L.A. and Southern California in the 1930s:
“There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human imagination cannot stand. It withers, or else, frantic to make itself felt, goes off into feverish and idiotic excursions that have neither reason, rhyme, nor point, and that even fail in their one, purpose, which is to attract notice.
“Now, in spite of the foregoing, when you come to consider the life that is encountered here, you have to admit that there is a great deal to be said for it.”
Coming clean on ‘dirty DUIs’ in Contra Costa County
Dutcher had been duped.
The women who’d ogled him worked for Butler’s detective agency. Sharon, who told Dutcher she was a divorcee employed by an investment firm, actually was a former Las Vegas showgirl.
A man who once worked for Butler had blown the whistle. He told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds.
Hostages of Child Prostitution
Maria had nothing of her own besides socks and a blouse, potentially giving a pimp an opening to woo her with niceties. So Quintero pawed through V-necks, corduroys and bags of underwear at an on-site donation center. She packed a bag: hair spray, razors, lavender shampoo-conditioner, “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul,” and a flowered journal because Maria liked to write poems. Quintero tried to shake off her misgivings: With a bag of stuff, was it easier for Maria to run? A week later, in Voy’s courtroom, the judge was grim. The night after Maria’s hearing, she ran off. Quintero never found out if she took the bag.
Crash Kills 4 Teens, but There Are Other Casualties
James Patterson rolled over his father’s Chevrolet Suburban during a desert road trip with friends. Four of his friends were killed in the crash, and police determined he was drunk. Then-Times staff writer J.R. Moehringer spent nearly a year looking at how the 1995 crash altered so many lives. “He dreams that they are driving again, all eight boys cruising along the unpaved back roads of his mind. He begs them to pull over and let him out, he should get home, but they tell him to shut up and relax, everything will be fine. Reluctant, he sits back and lets himself be chauffeured across the stark landscape of his subconscious, past low-flying clouds of blame and guilt. He lets himself be ferried through the long night, until morning comes and the alarm goes off. Time to go to school. Time to face what happened.”
A Holocaust Survivor Raised a Fist to Death
She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. “The little one must make it,” Leon Weinstein told his wife. “We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive.” He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: “I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.”
American Dream Lives in the Barrio (1983)
After 18 years, I went back to 812 N. Record Ave., to the house where I once lived, at the Belvedere Gardens barrio where I grew up. My barrio is unique in this megalopolis that is Los Angeles, an obscure corner of an affluent society, a place seldom visited by progress. For example. sidewalks and curbs were installed only recently. English is heard only occasionally.
Emilio Franco’s Tragedia in the Southland: The Killing of a Cultural Icon
In 1991, Franco bought a small club in a Lynwood shopping center and renamed it El Farallon, Spanish for “the cliff by the sea.” It became one of the southeast county’s first Mexican nightclubs, serving food, alcohol and music. Hilda Portillo, a friend and fellow bar owner, said she urged Franco to hire groups from Sinaloa, a Mexican state known both for drug trafficking and for its deep musical tradition. Many Lynwood-area residents were from Sinaloa. Franco welcomed amateur singers and those who’d privately recorded albums but were ignored by Mexican radio stations or record labels. They often sang of tragedias, the killings and family feuds common in the ranchos back home. One of them was a thin, steely-eyed Sinaloan ranchero named Chalino Sanchez.
A Man’s Nightmare Made Real
(Part One of Two) He kept thinking that there had been a mistake, that he’d be out in no time. That the system, set into motion by some misunderstanding or act of malice, would soon correct itself. That was before the detective informed him of the charges, and before the article in the Ventura County Star. “Man held after woman found raped and tortured,” read the headline, and there was his name, along with a quote from a police officer: “In 19 years of police work, this has to go down as one of the most brutal attacks I have ever seen.”