Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  The whole thing had been fucking stupid, a dustup during a party at deputy Fred Chisholm’s house two weeks before. Chisholm was a tall, good-natured, and deceptively tough transplant from a blue-collar town just outside Boston who still retained his thick regional accent. Andy had been his training officer, and the two had become friends. Chisholm had managed to get hold of a video of the movie Animal House and invited a bunch of the boys over to his new house one afternoon to throw back some beers and watch the movie. When Andy got to the party around three o’clock, it was mostly a bunch of bleary-eyed deputies from the graveyard shift who had come straight off the overnight and had been pounding beers since. Andy did not know these guys well and what little interaction he had had with them was not always good.

  There was one deputy Andy especially did not like, one of those on the force for whom every black man was a “jungle bunny,” every Mexican a “beaner,” and every Asian a “gook.” There were too many guys in the department like that. “Do you not see me standing right here?” he had snapped after a fellow deputy dropped a few too many “spics” and “wetbacks” into a story about an encounter with a group of Mexican migrant workers. If Delgado had any triggers—and he certainly did—one was his Mexican heritage and the other was his size, a generous five foot four, 145 pounds.

  Andy had not been at the party long before the slurring deputy from the night shift was working both of Andy’s triggers. Delgado tried to deflect the confrontation but eventually the man—a solid six-footer who outweighed Delgado by sixty pounds—extended an invitation for Andy to step outside. Andy did not want to cause Chisholm and his young wife any trouble in their new home. “If this wasn’t Fred’s house,” Andy told the guy, “I’d give you that opportunity.” By then, Fred had enough of the asshole too. “Don’t let that bother you, Andy. Kick his ass, or I will.”

  The smart money was on the bigger man when the two Riverside deputies took their disagreement to Chisholm’s backyard to settle it once and for all. What most did not know was that Andy had been a star wrestler on the high school team and in the Marine Corps and a judo black belt by age sixteen. Andy tackled the man, tossed him, twisted his limbs, pinned him in wrestling holds, and even punched him clean off Fred’s porch before another deputy stopped it.

  There had been an ominous silence from the department brass for the two weeks following the incident as news of the fight spread among deputies. The higher-ups had to know all about it, but so far none of them had said a word. Maybe they never would. Then again, maybe they were preparing Andy’s termination papers.

  Delgado knew he must be getting close to a promotion to detective. Seven years of service, with a reputation for dedication, honesty, dependability, and effective policing. If Andy was told to go into an area and suppress crime, Andy did it. Along the way he had a number of big arrests and had even saved a woman trapped inside her car in a torrent of rising floodwaters. He was also taking a full course load at Cal State San Bernardino and closing in on a degree in public administration and criminal justice. The promotion was important to Andy, not just for the additional pay and status, but also for the recognition that he was a damn good cop.

  Andy was starting to think the whole thing was just going to blow over until Bickmore intercepted him in the pit. That night he went home and told his wife, Lucretia. “I’m in trouble,” he said, preparing her for the worst. “I’m never going to make detective.”

  THE SUN HAD CRESTED OVER THE SOARING SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS ON THE morning of Friday, May 9, when the rest of the deputies on the 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. “two-shift” began arriving at the Riverside Sheriff’s Office. The RSO, as the men who worked there called it, inhabited offices within a larger municipal complex in the center of the city of Riverside that included the county jail and courthouses. The Riverside Police Department occupied another municipal building directly across the street from the RSO. Other than geographical proximity, the two law enforcement agencies could not have been further apart.

  The officers of the Riverside PD were city cops, their jurisdiction confined within the borders of a modern and mostly suburban city. Most of the larger cities in Riverside County had their own self-contained police departments. The California Highway Patrol ruled the freeways. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department got what sheriff’s departments always got: everything else.

  For the RSO, “everything else” meant responsibility for most of a county larger than the state of Delaware. Covering more than 7,200 square miles, Riverside County is a crude rectangle of arid land running west to east from the edge of the Los Angeles metro area to the Arizona border. Within this area, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was responsible for operating county jails, guarding county courthouses and municipal buildings, and patrolling all wilderness areas, unincorporated population centers, and “contract” cities too small or too poor to take on the cost of maintaining a police force themselves.

  Other than the resort town of Palm Springs, the area east of the San Gabriel and San Jacinto Mountains consists of vast and forbidding wildlands, Indian reservations, and a few small desert towns sprinkled over thousands of square miles of the barren Colorado Desert. While this area contained three-quarters of the land mass of Riverside County, three-quarters of its population was centered in an area west of the mountains known as the Inland Empire.

  The Inland Empire was the brand name given by early real estate developers and civic leaders to promote the collection of cities occupying the far western end of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. “Inland” because it is, “Empire” because it just sounded good. The I.E., as locals call it, was a rather ill-defined contiguous sprawl of residential housing, agricultural land, dry washes, factories, fast-food restaurants, taco stands, and distribution centers. Without road signs announcing you had passed into one city from another, you wouldn’t even know it. Air pollution generated by the entire Los Angeles metro area was pushed by westerly winds into the I.E. where it backed up against the San Gabriels, obscuring the mountains in a brown haze. First- and second-degree smog alerts were the norm, the toxic air burning the lungs upon each deep inhale.

  The I.E. of May 1980 was a dusty, hot, and smoggy land populated by a blue-collar, redneck, ragweed-smoking, hard-rocking population as tough as that of any Pennsylvania steel or Texas cow town, of which it was a little of both. While trends, fashions, and fads were being created by designers and movie stars just a few dozen miles down the road in Los Angeles, they were going mostly unnoticed in the Inland Empire. Disco was hated, punk rock unknown. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, and Lynyrd Skynyrd ruled the airwaves.

  The area had always been a rough place, and with unemployment rising along with the proliferation of gangs and street drugs throughout the 1970s, it only got rougher. Cops were increasingly coming up against weapons they had never seen before. Methamphetamine addiction was savaging the local population, its manufacture and distribution controlled by murderous rival motorcycle gangs.

  There were already rumblings among the RSO deputies about their need for more powerful, high-capacity weapons to combat the firepower emerging on the streets. But arming the average patrol cop with anything more than a sidearm and shotgun was a step very few law enforcement agencies in the country had been willing to take. Most viewed it as an unnecessary, expensive, and dangerous escalation in weaponry. Those who did make the jump to high-powered rifles kept them tightly under the control of SWAT teams.

  Riverside sheriff Ben Clark deflected the issue, seeing no reason to increase the firepower within a force that still relied on SWAT teams from neighboring departments. Clark had come out of the administrative side of the house and had a more sociological approach to the modernization of the force. Few of the deputies had the balls to put their concerns in writing to the sheriff, but one did. He was a veteran deputy named James Bernard Evans.

  DEPUTY JIM EVANS CAME INTO THE BRIEFING ROOM WEARING HIS BROWN-and-olive patrol uniform and a Stetson cowboy hat, as usual
. Evans was a Texan, a Special Forces Green Beret who had seen combat on some of the riskiest deep-jungle missions in the Vietnam War. At thirty-nine, Evans was one of the older deputies on the force, easygoing and highly respected by the other deputies. If you got into trouble on the streets, Jim Evans was the guy you wanted backing you up.

  Evans was handsome, six feet tall, and trim, with sandy-blond hair and mustache and hazel eyes that looked out at the world through the thick lenses of sixties-era tortoiseshell eyeglasses. He had a soft West Texas drawl and countrified vocabulary. He was never without his John B. Stetson and cowboy boots while off duty and even sometimes behind the wheel of a sheriff’s department cruiser. Fred Chisholm had been surprised to come upon Evans on the side of the road one afternoon writing a motorist a ticket, the cowboy hat still perched proudly on his head.

  Deputy Dave Madden entered the room. Evans looked him over. “Are those new boots you got on, Brother Madden?” he said.

  “Indeed, they are,” Madden replied with a smile, taking a seat next to Evans.

  Dave Madden was a curiosity to his fellow deputies. He always wanted to be a cop and had the temperament for it, but he was also a seeker. He was a big fan of science fiction, not for the rocket ships or aliens, but for the philosophical exploration and social commentary contained within. Raised a Roman Catholic, he could nevertheless quote the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, reference Kabbalah, and speak intelligently on the teachings of Buddhism and Hindu polytheism. From the ancient Greeks to the Beatles to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Madden had quotes up his sleeve for almost any situation. He spoke fluent Klingon, responded to calls with the theme to Star Wars blasting from a handheld tape player, shaved his head on a whim, and consistently confounded his colleagues. They shook their heads in dismay, called him a hippie, and nicknamed him “Mad Dog” Madden.

  Madden’s best friend on the force was Andy Delgado, a pairing that on the surface made no sense at all. But the two men found common ground in their views of the world around them. It did not hurt that the intense Delgado found Mad Dog’s eccentricities and antics massively entertaining.

  Hey, man, how’s J.B. Jr. doing? Madden asked Evans. Born on Christmas day, the four-month-old James Bernard Evans Jr. was just getting over the measles and still running a fever.

  I guess he’s all right, Evans said. Gonna stop by the house on my way out to Moreno Valley and check in on him.

  Giving Evans a ride home the night before, Madden was surprised to see the impressive collection of military decorations mounted in a case in the living room, including two Bronze Stars and a Medal of Valor. Although they had been on the force together for four years, Evans had never mentioned anything about his military career. “I should stop calling you Jimmy,” the much-younger Madden said, “and start calling you sir.” Evans laughed it off with his usual modesty. He was more interested in introducing Madden to his new son. Evans held the baby and told Madden his plans for teaching the boy to ride horses by the time he was three.

  Jim Evans had been a city cop but felt penned in by its urban landscape and made the move to the more far-ranging sheriff’s department. In every way, being a sheriff’s deputy fit the personality of a Texan like Evans. The mystique of the Old West sheriff lingered deep in the consciousness of every American boy, especially the men of the RSO. Sheriffs were cowboys, lawmen, savers of damsels in distress, gunslingers in white hats. They roamed the range fearlessly handing out American-style justice to rustlers, bandits, murderers, and train robbers with a sock on the jaw or from the barrel of a gun. Sheriffs and deputies had patrolled the mean streets of Deadwood, Tombstone, Dodge City, and the brawling boomtowns of Nevada. They guarded the pony express, Oklahoma Territory, and the Alamo. Wild Bill Hickok was a sheriff. So were Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp. Gary Cooper was the sheriff in High Noon. Clint Eastwood played one, too. And, of course, John Wayne. Especially John Wayne.

  Shift sergeant Ed Giles set a folder down and took a seat at the head of the table. “All right, men,” he said. “Listen up.” The men wrapped up their conversations and turned their attention to the briefing. It was routine: watch the numbered streets in Mira Loma, lots of car break-ins lately, keep up the traffic patrol in Norco, the town is grumbling about ticket revenues again, same old shit in Moreno Valley. The only notable issue on the briefing list was the trouble brewing at Rubidoux High School. Rubidoux was one of the roughest areas in the county, one of its few African American communities. It was poor, plagued by drugs and gang activity, and made up mostly of run-down single-family homes and subsidized housing projects. Giles told the men to expect trouble there. He used the word riot. The men groaned. Patrolling Rubidoux was bad enough and none of them wanted anything to do with a riot. Giles assigned Rubidoux to the youngest deputy in the department, A. J. Reynard, along with one of his veterans, Ken McDaniels, and told them to keep a high visibility around the school.

  With the assignments made, Giles shifted to one of his periodic briefings on a crime that had been skyrocketing to epidemic proportions over the last four years: bank robbery.

  If you had robbed a bank in the greater Los Angeles metro area on May 9, 1980, you would not have been alone. Los Angeles had long been labeled “Bank Robbery Capital of the World” among FBI agents responsible for investigating the crime. It was a title well earned. For decades, one-quarter of all bank heists in the United States fell under the geographical jurisdiction of the Los Angeles field office of the FBI, which included Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. By 1980, an average of six banks were being robbed each business day. More than fifteen hundred a year. The reason was simple: freeways.

  The Southern California car culture had resulted in a physical landscape ideal for bank robbery. A relative latecomer to the ranks of the big cities, the Los Angeles area’s population exploded 117 percent between 1940 and 1960 to more than six million inhabitants. With the automobile age in full swing, the second great American western migration flooding the region with newcomers, and a vast coastal basin within which to put them, Los Angeles did not grow up; it grew out. By 1980, the total population of the Los Angeles metro area was more than ten million people spread out over five thousand square miles.

  The great enabler of this mass suburbanization was the automobile and a vast network of freeways that, rush hour aside, allowed the population to move long distances in a short period of time. And nobody wants to move farther and faster than a bank robber. By hitting a bank near a freeway on-ramp, a holdup man could jump on and off and be anonymously cruising side streets five miles away in a completely different police jurisdiction before the cops even arrived at the crime scene. Have the foresight to park a second “cold” getaway car a few miles away and you are gone-baby-gone. Try putting that kind of distance between yourself and the bank you just hit in New York City, Philadelphia, or San Francisco and you would likely find yourself bogged down in crosstown traffic or standing on the nearest subway platform waiting for the No. 6 train to show up before the cops did.

  It did not take long for the word to get out. Follow a few simple rules and you could rob a bank in Los Angeles with little chance of getting caught: Don’t rob locally where people might know you, never stay inside a bank too long even if it means a shitty take, and always hit a bank close to a freeway on-ramp.

  With a consumer market in love with convenience and the newly deregulated savings and loan industry eating their lunch in the lucrative home mortgage market, the traditional retail banks began locating branches closer and closer to freeway on-ramps throughout the 1970s, making the L.A. sprawl a target-rich environment for bank thieves. In Riverside County, the cities straddling the 60 and 91 freeways such as Corona, Moreno Valley, and Riverside were particularly hard hit. Less so, the areas located farther away from the major freeway corridors.

  While not immune to bank heists, the small town of Norco had no major freeways running through it. (The existing segment of Interstate 15 bisecting Norco had
not yet been built in 1980.) Geographically speaking, one of the safest locations for a bank in the entire Inland Empire was the intersection of Fourth Street and Hamner Avenue, right in the center of town. From there, it was four miles south to the 91 and nine miles north to the Pomona Freeway, much of it through heavy traffic areas. Not surprisingly, a bank was located at that exact intersection: the Norco branch of the Security Pacific National Bank.

  AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE BRIEFING, THE DEPUTIES OF THE TWO-SHIFT went to the board, grabbed a radio and keys to one of the available cruisers, checked out a shotgun for the day, and then headed out to the vehicle yard to pick up a patrol unit. Unlike many local police forces, the RSO was strictly one officer per vehicle.

  Ken McDaniels was a veteran with all the confidence that goes with having a half dozen years on the street. He had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease a year before and had worked half shifts every Friday for the past year to make his weekly radiation treatments. Ready for a riot? McDaniels said to deputy A. J. Reynard as they walked together to the vehicle lot.

  Fuckin’ Rubidoux, Reynard said, shaking his head. At least you’re off early today.

  Nope, McDaniels said, smiling. Today was supposed to be my last treatment, but they called me up yesterday and canceled it. Said they had counted wrong and my final one was actually last week. For the first time in months, Ken McDaniels would work a Friday shift until four o’clock in the afternoon, just like every other deputy on the two-shift.