Rat-Lines and Stakeouts

I met Hal in San Francisco in 1965, and we hit it off over dinner and a bottle of red wine. Hal was in his mid-forties. He had been a private dick all his adult life, beginning as a criminal investigator in the Army in World War II. He had a face like a British bull-dog, round and flat, with a wattled neck and a plop of curly hair on top. He was well read and charming, a widower, as homely as a cement berm but a big hit with the ladies.

Had I ever done any surveillance, Hal asked? I had done a little over the past two years, I told him. My news partner, Lance Brisson, and I regularly tracked one weird person or another in real or imagined pursuit of news.

Hal asked if Lance and I would like to do some surveillances and an occasional investigation for him. He’d pay by the hour and match our Time magazine stringing fee–we always had side jobs–which was a hefty $10 an hour. He didn’t have any specific cases in mind. Stand by, he said, I’ll call you when I have something interesting.

Lance and I were the “investigative team” for KGO-TV, the ABC-owned station in San Francisco. Our evening news show, hosted by our boss, Roger Grimsby, was wildly popular with the local audience. KGO was famous for a lack of decorum and taste.

KGO had been tipped that a popular San Francisco state assemblyman, a buffoonish character named Charlie Myers, was being accused of petty graft. Myers’s chief deputy had testified to a grand jury that Charlie had used state funds to pay $250 a month to his family babysitter, had “phantom employees” whose salaries he kept for himself, and had settled a campaign public relations bill with $300 in taxpayer-owned postage stamps.

The aide’s name was Bob Visnick. He was in St. Francis Hospital with a broken hip and leg. Visnick had been on the losing side of an argument in Mike’s Pool Hall. When he fled the building a few steps ahead of a fellow trying to brain him with a pool cue, he ran into North Beach traffic and was hit by a city bus, or maybe a taxi–I can’t recall.

Lance and I visited the hospital room where he lay in traction. Visnick refused to be interviewed on camera but otherwise blabbed at length about Charlie Myers’s alleged crookery.

Lance and I promised Visnick we would come back the next night after the news show and bring Roger Grimsby to meet him. Roger was a Bay Area celebrity. Visnick was pleased. We went to Hal Lipset and borrowed some bugging equipment, a small wireless mike, a Fargo transmitter, and a reel-to-reel recorder.

Lance Brisson was my cohort at KGO News. For a couple of years we supplied almost all of KGO’s (and sometimes the ABC network’s) blood and guts stories.

In the course of shooting film of weird and violent people, including at the Watts riots in L.A., the student riots in Berkeley, the draft riots in Oakland, the race riots in San Francisco’s Fillmore and Hunters Point Districts, hippie riots in Haight-Ashbury, and dozens of drug raids, murders, shootings, “love-ins,” “be-ins,” arsons, horrendous rapes, and a documentary on prostitution for ABC called The Streetwalkers, we had been shot at a half-dozen times, crashed into the ocean in a helicopter off Point Reyes, been punched, threatened with knives and a sickle, bitten, kicked, and hit with boards and kitchen appliances, chair legs, bricks, and bottles.

Hal Lipset’s office and home was a four-story, 25-room Victorian mansion at the top of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Hal had made a lot of dough from snooping, particularly wiretapping. Hal’s office (and his wire and tape room) was on the main floor. A rabbit warren of rooms and a squad-bay in the basement were where operatives typed reports or hung out. Two locked rooms contained Hal’s broad collection of uniforms and disguises: mailman, security guard, waiter, dozens of conventioneer’s badges (“Hi, I’m Kurt.”), etc. Telephone linemen’s pole-climbing equipment and hard-hats for wire-tapping forays hung from hooks. (Hal was the model for the Coppola film The Conversation and once owned his own Pacific Telephone truck.)

Hal Lipset’s obit in the New York Times said he hired many intellectual operatives. I don’t know about that. I must have been out the day the intellectuals arrived. But the detectives who worked for Hal were a clever group, and ballsy, and I liked them.

Patrick Buckman, a former San Francisco cop, was one of the more interesting of them. Pat was tall and muscular, a spiffy dresser in dark pinstripe suits and starched white shirts with large monogrammed French cuffs and huge gold links. Everything about Pat was big, he even had big teeth. He looked like Damon Runyon’s idea of a successful race track habitué. Pat was friendly and outgoing, and he was a natural intriguer and adventurer. His police partner, Sergeant Sal Polani, was himself a hard case, which would be useful since he was on his way to San Quentin Prison.

Pat and Sal had been arrested in the spring of 1965 with two European safe crackers outside of Sally Stanford’s imposing Pacific Heights mansion, two blocks from Lipset’s house. Sally was a seasoned tax-evader. She had been running fancy San Francisco whorehouses for 40 years and now owned the lucrative Valhalla restaurant on Sausalito’s waterfront, named after her finest San Francisco bordello.

Sgt. Polani and Officer Buckman believed the large walk-in safe at her Pacific Heights home was crammed with cash, claimed the authorities. They said the policemen had enlisted the aid of the two professional burglars to crack Sally’s old-fashioned vault.

San Francisco police had been tipped off and were waiting. When cops with shotguns leaped from a closet in the darkened mansion, surprising Polani and the two burglars at Sally’s safe, the three intruders bolted for the front door. Inspector Tom Fitzpatrick, head of Police Intelligence, ran up the walk, caught Polani by the throat, and, pulling his own pistol back, accidentally shot Polani in the face. Pat Buckman was grabbed on the sidewalk. The DA claimed he was serving as a lookout and had planned to accompany the safecrackers after the heist to make sure the money was divided evenly. Pat denied everything and said he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Polani survived the shooting and was convicted, along with the safe crackers, and sentenced to San Quentin. Buckman, who claimed he didn’t know what was going on, was acquitted.

What saved Pat with the jury was a question he had asked loudly of the wounded Sgt. Polani at the moment they were grabbed by police. It was: “Sal, what did you get me into?” I believe he said it twice. Polani had just lost a mouthful of teeth and wasn’t answering. But all the milling, excited cops had heard Buckman, including the brass, Inspector Tom Fitzpatrick and the deputy chief, Al Nelder; and after Pat’s lawyer put them on the stand to testify under oath as to what Buckman had said–a phrase happily characterized by the lawyer as “a reaction only an innocent man would make”–the jury set Pat free.

There was no money in the safe anyway. It had been emptied of valuables and held just three mason jars of strawberry jam, stewed by Sally’s maid.

Pat never said whether he was guilty of the Sally Sanford heist. Lance and I didn’t ask.

Hal once said to me, as part of a general PI tutorial, “When you plan something, first set your rat-lines.” When I looked confused, he said, “Figure out how you’re going to get off the ship before you get on board.” He then explained that he had once been arrested for bugging a hotel room in New York City. He was convicted but avoided publicity after paying a fine. “But, I shouldn’t have been caught at all. No rat-lines. That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. He offered Pat Buckman as an example. Hal thought Pat’s “life-saving” statement in front of the cops who arrested him was a “great rat-line,” meaning he figured Pat had thought it up ahead of time in case he needed it. I didn’t know whether that was true, but, if it was, Pat was a clever fellow.

On some of the cases with Hal, I could only guess about the end game. None of your business, Hal would sometimes say if I asked. I once was assigned by Hal to tail a fellow when he left the Palace Hotel downtown in the morning, follow him, and photograph him. I never found out what it was for.

The man was due out of the New Montgomery Street entrance of the hotel around 9 A.M. An hour before, I perched at a table in the extruding window of the coffee shop across the narrow street from the Palace. I had my Nikon with a big telephoto lens, the guy’s name, age, and description, and an 8 x 10 color portrait that I figured came from either his wife or his business partner, whichever was the paying client.

The trouble with surveillance based on one photograph is that everybody you see starts looking very much like your man, in this case a fellow named Larry. When my guy actually came through the revolving doors, after being preceded one at a time by a troupe of doppelgängers, I recognized him immediately–Hey, it’s Larry.

The fact that he had his arm tightly around the waist of a pretty blonde about 30 confirmed in my head that his wife was the client, unless, of course, the blonde was his business partner’s daughter. You could never be sure about these things. I photographed Larry, click, click, click, as he stood at the curb and kissed the girl full on the mouth. It was a lengthy smooch and looked postcoital to me.

When the valet brought the girl’s car, I pulled a tight shot of its California license plate. Hal would get the owner’s name and address with one phone call. His source, a Marin County sheriff’s sergeant, who soon became our source, charged Hal a couple of dollars for vehicle registrations, a few more for copies of driver’s licenses, and $5 to $10 a copy for criminal records and mug shots, depending on the sergeant’s mood–all payable on a monthly bill. Lance and I used the man for a while but soon developed enough SFPD sources of our own to obtain these useful services free.

I watched Larry hail a cab. I caught up with it and followed him over to Fisherman’s Wharf, where he checked into the Villa Roma, a garish, completely circular hotel.

I walked straight to the desk clerk, a guy about my own age. I came around the end of the counter and shook the clerk’s damp hand. I’m a detective, I said. I’m following that fellow you just checked in, and I need to talk with you. I wish I could tell you what it’s about, I whispered, but I can’t. It is a matter of importance, and you can help me. I’ll give you $5 to tell me what room the guy just went to. I palmed him the bill, though no one else was around. The clerk took it; he was hooked. He responded with a room number in a whisper. I said, there’s another $10 in this for you if you write down the phone number of every out going call he makes, and another $10 if you listen to those calls and take notes of what is talked about.

I shook his hand again, always important. I was learning that most people will help you if you just ask them. Beyond that, many folks are natural-born snitches, willing to tell on someone else to a stranger.

By noon, sitting in a chair in the lobby, I had watched three different single women and two men take the elevator up. I followed each of them until they got off on a floor other than Larry’s. The last woman, middle aged with auburn hair and glasses, wearing a pants suit, got off on his floor. She knocked on Larry’s door, and I heard him greet her by name–“Frances”–as he opened it. Hal liked to give his clients details and times, no matter how mundane.

I walked past the room, picked up a paper match from the floor where it had fallen when the door had opened, and reinserted it into the door hinge at ankle level, where I had put it after the clerk gave me the room number. I kept the match there so periodically I could check to see if anyone had opened the door while I was in the lobby.

I could hear voices inside the room. I dropped to my knees and pushed my small pocket mirror into the carpet along the bottom of the door. By tilting it I could see Larry’s stocking feet. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. I could see the woman’s feet as well. She was sitting in an upholstered chair near the bed.

I returned to the lobby and changed my vantage point. I went into the bar. Sitting on a stool, I could watch the elevator doors behind me in the mirror. I read a newspaper and talked to the bartender. I could hear the elevator doors ding, so I was watching when Larry and his friend Frances stepped off.

The two headed in my direction, walked into the bar, and, of twenty empty stools, picked the ones next to mine. Frances sat down next to me. They were immediately chatty, and Larry bought my next beer. It was more than a little disconcerting.

They were open and friendly and kind of innocent in their own way. (Although Old Horn Dog Larry never said anything about the young blonde at the Palace Hotel, who by then I had decided was probably an escort service hooker.)

Larry introduced Frances as his girlfriend, off and on, he said bluntly, for about twenty years. They had gone to high school together, and their romance had been rekindled a few years back at a high school reunion. Larry and Frances were a goldmine of info.

I was glad Larry was having so much fun because his life was going to fast turn into a drek-storm when Mrs. Larry, if that’s who the client was, got the report and photos.

But I was being paid to watch Larry and take pictures, not become his buddy and then encourage his friendliness to betray him. I decided not to tell Hal I had talked with them or even give him Frances’s name.

Lance and I went back to visit Bob Visnick, Assemblyman Myers’s chief deputy and principal accuser, in the hospital. We took Grimsby with us as promised.

We also took Hal’s Fargo bugging equipment. I clipped a wireless mike under Roger’s rep-stripe tie before we left the car. The point was to get Visnick on tape with his charges against Charlie Myers, as legal backup for any KGO stories.

Visnick was propped in bed in his tiny room, his leg suspended from the overhead by pulleys and wires. We introduced Grimsby and perched him on the edge of Visnick’s rack. We had told Roger to sit as close as he could so the hidden mike would pick up Visnick’s voice. Lance pulled a chair alongside. I bowed out, to go down to the cafeteria for coffee, I said.

We had scouted the area, looking for a safe spot for the bulky reel-to-reel recorder and Fargo receiver. Next to Visnick’s room was a narrow closet with a sign on the door that said “Bed Pans Only.” It was empty except for a steel machine, about five feet high, against the back wall. On it was an ID plate which said, “Auto-Clave–The Best Bed Pan Flusher, Washer & Sterilizer.” I am not making this up; there are worlds out there about which we know nothing.

I went in and closed the closet door. There was an electrical outlet, and I set up the recorder at the base of the machine. I donned the earphones and checked sound levels. On my haunches, facing the machine, I could hear Grimsby pretty clearly, but his necktie was muffling Visnick a bit.

Suddenly, the door opened behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white shoe. A nurse was standing there. I looked straight up and watched her pull down the long handle of the autoclave, almost to the top of my head. She slammed a steel bedpan into the machine’s maw and threw back the handle, locking it, and then opened a big valve. Even with my earphones, I could hear the hissing rush of steam and watched it bubble from the rubber seals of the machine.

I didn’t know what to do so I just squatted like any other weirdo in a ratty trench coat and earphones would, a four-foot antenna sticking straight up from the mass of equipment at my feet. The nurse remained for endless minutes. I waited motionless until she removed the pan and reset the machine. Her shoes disappeared and she was gone. I pictured her running down the hall screaming for the guards.

I jammed the receiver and the rest of the stuff in the leather bag. I was out of the closet. I scribbled a note to Lance warning him of the nurse and stepped into Visnick’s room.

Visnick and Grimsby were on the bed talking about Charlie Myers. I walked quietly towards the chair where Lance was sitting, the note in one hand, the valise in the other. As I approached the bed a buzz began from Grimsby’s necktie and turned into an electronic scream as I stepped closer and feedback sprang from the receiver in the valise and erupted from his shirt front. I back-peddled and it receded.

“My God, what was that?” said Visnick. “I have no idea,” said Grimsby. “It came from your tie,” said Visnick. “I don’t think so,” said Grimsby, “I think it came from the window,” and he pointed at it, as if that would make it so. “I’m sure of it,” Grimsby added for reinforcement. “Some kind of alarm system out there I imagine.”

Visnick nodded like this made sense. He seemed to accept what Grimsby said and settled back on his nest of pillows, mollified. The power of celebrity at work, I thought.

We used Hal, or Hal and his gear, more successfully at other times. A fellow we knew, an amateur numismatist, had been approached by a man who offered to sell him a 1913 liberty head nickel for $50,000. The price was a tad low since there were only five known specimens in the world and four of them were accounted for. If this fellow had one it would be worth a million dollars or more, not $50,000. Hal Lipset ran a police-record check on the seller. He was an ex-con who had done time for white-collar crimes like bad checks and embezzlement.

Our coin collector arranged to meet the seller in a shabby Chinese restaurant, run by a Mexican family, at 18th and Mission Streets.

Al Bullock, a cameraman for KGO, and I were joined by Lipset and two plainclothes detectives, Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran. We were friends with both of them. We had helped make them famous in the Bay Area–as “Mission Eleven,” their SFPD call letters–by filming more than a dozen lengthy stories on their exploits.

Joe Brodnik was about 40, small and wiry. He had been well known in the city as a star high school basketball player, despite his height. Joe coached neighborhood basketball and baseball in the Mission, where he and his wife Jessie and their kids lived. He was very popular. He had been a cop for a dozen years. Paul McGoran was a few years older and big, well over six feet. He was divorced, had four kids, and also lived in the Mission.

Joe Brodnik seldom carried a gun because it aggravated his stomach ulcer, rubbing as it did against his side. He and Paul wore jeans and sports shirts and drove various trucks and old cars. They followed suspected criminals both day and night.

Al Bullock, Hal Lipset, and I knocked on the door of an old lady who lived in a walk-up apartment directly across from the Chinese bistro. She agreed that we could film from her living room window. It had a clear view of the restaurant entrance.

McGoran and Brodnik and two Secret Service agents were sitting in the restaurant near the table under which Hal had clamped a wireless listening device as we ate Chinese-style Huevos Rancheros that morning. Hal had bugged the table because the coin collector was so nervous about being caught wearing a wire.

The numismatist was waiting when the ex-con arrived with the coin. Al Bullock had given our man a ridiculously large magnifying glass with instructions to get the seller out on the sidewalk to check out the coin in the sun–really so we could get a clear shot of them squinting at the altered nickel.

Resisting the magnifier earlier, our man said a real buyer would use an electromagnetic microscope. We pointed out that a real seller and a real buyer wouldn’t be meeting in a restaurant that served duck enchiladas and kept its Christmas lights up all year, either.

Hal was recording the restaurant conversation on a canasta table in the apartment. The old lady was clad in flannel pajamas and a hairnet. She was dancing around the room with excitement.

From the front window, Al filmed the coin collector, and then the con man, going into the restaurant, and finally the two of them in front of the place peering into the large Marx Brothers-style magnifying glass; and then throwing up their hands–even our guy threw up his hands, forgetting that he was innocent–when the Secret Service agents stepped out into the sun and collared the con man in time for our evening news. Alteration of money, even a nickel, was a federal crime.

McGoran and Brodnik helped Lance and me with another bugging effort when we were trying to catch a crook named Jesse James, a former heroin addict and current alcoholic who affected both a red beret and the title “Reverend.” (“I got my ordination on the streets,” he told me.)

James ran a federally funded group called the “Mission Rebels in Action,” the most expensive War on Poverty program in San Francisco at the time. It was top-heavy with thugs and rip-off artists.

The San Francisco newspapers lionized “The Reverend,” even though most reporters privately acknowledged that James, who had done 16 years in Attica and Sing Sing for violent crimes, was a charlatan. He had recently been arrested for carrying a concealed pistol.

The tip that Jesse James was stealing federal funds to buy a weekend house near Lake Tahoe came to me from a vice cop named Al DeBrunn. James had collected close to one million dollars in federal money in the previous three years, plus as much from foundations.

The detective’s estranged wife, Marilyn, worked as a bartender at Augie’s Hideaway, a saloon at 19th and Cap Street in the Mission District, a few blocks from the Mission Rebels Headquarters.

Al said Marilyn listened almost daily to Jesse James brag about ripping off federal money as he sat at her bar in the mornings tossing down straight vodkas. I went over and introduced myself to Marilyn. I asked her if she would wear a wire when James came in. She said yes. I borrowed the electronic gear from Hal Lipset.

It was 8 A.M. at Augie’s Hideaway, and Lance was sitting at a table gnawing on a pickled egg and peering through the wooden window blinds in case Jesse James showed up early. Marilyn said that James was usually in the place for his first vodka rammer by 9 A.M.

Marilyn tugged at her sweater as she poured me a beer. I had the microphone clipped between her large breasts and had secured the recorder in the small of her back with gaffer’s tape. I had run an on/off switch into her pocket.

Joe Brodnik and his partner, Paul McGoran, came in. Jesse James didn’t know them. But they knew Marilyn and had offered to sit at the bar separately and watch over her in case there was any trouble with James. Lance and I took off.

Joe Brodnik called me later that day. Jesse James had arrived at 9 A.M. He was already drunk. He took a table with some henchmen and ignored Marilyn, leaving after a couple of drinks. Marilyn had gone home but would return for the late shift if I needed the equipment back.

Lance and I showed up at closing time, 2 A.M. Marilyn apologized for not getting James on tape.

“I did learn something interesting this afternoon,” she said. “A police sergeant named Mackin came in. He said he needed to talk with me in private. We could have dancing without a license if we pay him $200 a month plus a case of booze. I said okay. He is coming back Saturday night late for his first payment and the liquor.”

Marilyn, I said, Would you be willing to tape him?

“Oh,” she said, “I already did. I have it all on tape.” We listened, and Sgt. Mackin and his extortion demands were as clear as a bell, a bell that would save Jesse James from immediate pursuit.

A few nights later, as a light snow fell, Marilyn DeBrunn and Sgt. Jack Mackin came out of Augie’s back door and got into her car, which was now wired for sound.

Deputy Chief of Police Al Nelder and a captain from Internal Affairs were crouched a few feet away in a dark stairwell. Two plainclothesmen from Internal Affairs were hiding behind a dumpster in the alley. When Mackin stepped from the car they pounced on him. He had the marked money in his coat pocket. A portable ultraviolet light turned his hands purple. He slumped to his knees in despair as we filmed him being handcuffed.

Hal Lipset had left-wing political sympathies. He got some work from an old Stalinist lawyer named Charles Garry, the “chief counsel” and propagandist for the Black Panther party. Garry was a loud, obnoxious man who became emotionally involved with his clients, many of whom were very creepy. (Rev. Jim Jones of Jonestown fame was one of them.)

Garry’s slavish devotion to Huey P. Newton, a drug addict and multiple-murderer whose heroic public image was a media creation, was thoroughly weird and, I thought, homoerotic. (Buggery was not foreign to Huey, who, according to David Horowitz, had forcibly sodomized Bobby Seale in front of other Panthers after Seale kept annoying him.)

On May 1, 1969, I walked out of the federal building in San Francisco. There was a large crowd on the sidewalk in front. It was a demonstration on behalf of Newton. Garry was parading with a bullhorn in the midst of demonstrators. He was trying to get bail for Newton, who had been convicted of manslaughter for killing a young policeman, John Frey, in Oakland, and this was his way of going about it.

The Panthers had brought a busload of black school children, little kids, from Oakland. They were carrying white picket signs with a large red star around a picture of Huey Newton in his beret and waving small copies of Thoughts of Chairman Mao, a collection of political inanities popular at the time. TV cameras and reporters were covering it like a blanket. I watched them from my car across the street.

I was driving away when the police radio under the dash jumped to life. A man was screaming. I couldn’t understand him. Then he said, “Mission Eleven. A shooting!” It was Paul McGoran. “A policeman has been shot,” on Alvarado Street, he shouted repeatedly.

I arrived at 433 Alvarado, in a working class neighborhood in the Mission District, in just a few minutes.

Al Bullock, the cameraman, pulled up behind me with a KGO reporter named Steve Huss. I saw McGoran’s white Dodge truck at the curb. Police cars were parked in different directions on the street, lights flashing. Cops with guns were running around. Paul McGoran was on a gurney, being loaded into an ambulance. His face and head were covered with blood, his jaw was broken, and his front teeth were gone. I thought he had been shot.

Joe Brodnik was lying on his back on the sidewalk. He was dead. He had a bullet hole over his heart and blood soaked his sports shirt. Police were shooting into the rundown pink stucco house behind him where the killers were believed to be holed up. A helicopter was hovering above. A heavy young neighborhood woman ran up and threw a striped bedspread over Joe’s body.

Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran had spotted a half-dozen young Latin men carrying TVs and furniture into the Alvarado house. The stuff had been taken in a burglary in the Sunset District. As Paul and Joe talked with the men, one of them grabbed McGoran’s long-barreled revolver from his waistband and clubbed McGoran in the face with its butt, breaking his jaw and knocking him to the ground. The man then shot Joe directly in the heart with a big .41 caliber magnum bullet. He died instantly. Joe had left his own gun, wrapped in a towel, beneath the seat in their truck. The men fled.

After the men were captured–some of them had kidnapped and held a young couple before robbing them in a town south of San Francisco–Charles Garry and other leftist lawyers took up their case with burning zeal, turning it into a cause and a political platform. They titled the suspects “Los Siete de La Raza,” and propelled the phrase “Free Los Siete” into daily media use, first locally and then nationally. Garry had the Black Panthers and their newspaper join the media fray.

The Free Los Siete crowd galvanized Bay Area liberals and leftists. They marched and demonstrated, held dozens of news conferences, always with Charles Garry at the center, and raised much money, some of it by extorting Mission District businesses with threats of violence.

The defense turned Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran into racist bullies by hammering the theme daily in the media. They claimed that somehow McGoran had injured himself and then had shot his partner, Joe, in the confusion while he and Joe, the two “racist cops,” were trying to intimidate and brutalize the innocent Latino boys.

Demonstrators paraded outside of Joe Brodnik’s house, while his children cowered inside. They spray painted “Free Los Siete” on McGoran’s house and on Jessie Brodnik’s garage. When a Mission District citizens’ group planted a tree with a memorial plaque to Joe, the plaque was defaced and the tree was cut down. When a new one was planted, the same thing happened to it.

Charles Garry hired Hal Lipset to work on the case. I went to Hal and tried to dissuade him. No luck.

Hal even used Pat Buckman to dig up a bitter ex-wife of McGoran’s who came to court to talk about how awful her former husband actually was.

The jury later said they never believed Paul McGoran had shot Joe Brodnik. But they couldn’t decide which of the suspects had done it, so they acquitted them all.

My friendship with Hal Lipset was destroyed.

I moved to Los Angeles to head the ABC investigative unit.

I did see Hal again. I was in San Francisco in 1974, up from L.A. for a couple of months, covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Hal and I ran into each other one night at Enrico Banducci’s café on Broadway in North Beach.

Hal came over and sat down. We had dinner. I was still mad at him about Joe Brodnik; about the smearing of Joe’s name, the harassment of his widow and family, and the shameful acquittal of his killers.

Hal was unapologetic. It was the business he was in, he said; he was a detective and he worked for the fellow who paid the bills, even if it was someone I didn’t like–meaning Charles Garry. I knew it was more than that, but I finally let it go.

Hal had his own problems. The previous year he had been named chief investigator of the Senate Watergate Committee. Now, he had been publicly fired when the White House and the press learned about his old New York State wiretapping conviction.

I reminded Hal of his rat-line advice. You didn’t always apply it to yourself, you once told me.

“Sometimes the cobbler’s kids don’t have shoes,” he said. “I’ve thought a lot about rat-lines and your friend Joe Brodnik. If he hadn’t left his gun under the seat of his truck and faced all those guys without it, he might be alive today, and some of those Los Siete people would be dead, not him.”

CODA

The martini olive with the toothpick transmitter? If the gin didn’t short it out, there was always the fear someone might pull it from the glass, bite down, and maybe electrocute their lips. It was only a con job for the press and Congress.

Joe Brodnik would be 77 years old. His son Bob is now an SFPD homicide detective.

Jessie Brodnik, Joe’s widow, had a rough time after the killing and spent years estranged from her family.

Paul McGoran retired from the SFPD after the trial. In 1971, he became a partner with former KGO reporter Steve Huss in a home-remodeling business. Paul died of a heart attack in 1987. He was 61 years old.

Al Bullock is 84 years old and still an active TV cameraman. He films fishing shows. His friend from KGO, Steve Huss, was visiting Al at his home in Belmont, California, last year when he fell to the floor with a heart attack. Al called 911. Then he grabbed his TV news camera and taped the medics and firemen arriving, as they worked on Steve, and when the ambulance hauled Steve away. Steve died. “My neighbors seemed upset by it, but, hell, I figured it was news, and Steve would have thought it was great!” said Al. Spoken like a true KGO alum.

Charles Garry died in Berkeley in 1991. He was 82 years old.

Pat Buckman gained international fame as a private detective for his skill in retrieving American children who had been kidnapped and taken abroad by noncustodial parents, usually fathers, often to the Mideast.

Sgt. Sal Polani became a delivery boy for a pharmacy after his release from San Quentin. I saw him one day. He had recently taken a package of medicine to Sally Stanford’s house. She had answered the door. He stood there as she signed for the medicine. She didn’t recognize him.

Sally Stanford, whose real name was Mabel Busby, became mayor of Sausalito in 1976. She died of a heart attack six years later. She was 78. Among other enthusiasms, she had been an ardent supporter of the Marin County Little League.

Hal Lipset died of cancer at age 78 in 1997.

Marilyn, the brave woman who helped catch Sgt. Mackin, was walking to her car a few weeks after Mackin’s trial (he was sentenced to San Quentin) when she was confronted by a large man wearing a mask and carrying a baseball bat. He threw a blanket over her and beat her to the ground. She was badly hurt. I visited her in the hospital. She told me that as the man began striking her, he said, “This is for Sgt. Mackin, you bitch.” The man was never caught.

Jesse James beat the concealed weapons charge. He claimed he was carrying the revolver to City Hall to turn it in under the “Mayor’s Gun Amnesty Program.” James was soon forced out of the Mission Rebels. He worked repairing office equipment and as a security guard for many years. He died of pneumonia in San Francisco in the summer of 2005. He was 76 years old.

The men of Los Siete dispersed and faded away. One returned to his native El Salvador, another is a day laborer; one, Danilo Melendez, was sentenced to prison for armed robbery in the mid-70s and was stabbed to death in 1977. Gary Lescallet, who killed Joe Brodnik, according to witnesses, was convicted eight years later of the kidnapping and murder of an elderly school teacher named Edith Jackson and has been serving a life sentence in a California prison since 1979.

Lance Brisson is the CEO of a successful international public affairs company in Los Angeles.

The author of this piece became a U.S. ambassador and director of the Voice of America. He is now vice chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. He is writing a book about San Francisco in the sixties. Over the years, he has thrown out a few rat-lines.

Richard Carlson is an occasional contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.