Nurse: “You have to move, and the people that are standing there in the aisle, go stay in the radio-room yard. So everybody get behind the table and back this way, okay? There’s nothing to worry about. So everybody keep calm, and try to keep your children calm. And the older children are to help lead the little children and reassure them. They aren’t crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting, but that’s—they’re not crying out of any pain.”
Unidentified woman: “I just wanna say something to everyone that I see that is standing around and, uh, crying. This is nothing to cry about. This is something we could all rejoice about. We could be happy about this.”
Jones: “Please, for God’s sake, let’s get on with it. We’ve lived—let’s just be done with it, let’s be done with the agony of it. [There is noise, confusion and applause.] Let’s get calm, let’s get calm. [There are screams in the background.] I don’t know who fired the shot, I don’t know who killed the congressman, but as far as I’m concerned, I killed him. You understand what I’m saying? I killed him. He had no business coming. I told him not to come. Die with respect. Die with a degree of dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialistic communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity.
“Children, it’s just something to put you to rest. Oh, God! [Crying in the background] I tell you, I don’t care how many screams you hear, I don’t care how many anguished cries, death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you’ll quit telling them they’re dying, if you adults will stop this nonsense—I call on you to quit exciting your children when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest. All they’re doing is taking a drink they take to go to sleep. That’s what death is, sleep. Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhuman world …”
Those who refused to drink the grape-flavored punch laced with potassium cyanide were either shot or killed by injections in their armpits. Jim Jones either shot himself or was murdered.
The Black Panther newspaper editorialized: “It is quite possible that the neutron bomb was used at Jonestown.”
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, former policeman Dan White had resigned from the Board of Supervisors because he couldn’t support his wife and baby on a salary of $9,600 a year. He obtained a lease for a fast-food franchise at Fisherman’s Wharf and now planned to devote himself full time to his new restaurant, The Hot Potato. He felt great relief.
However, White had been the swing vote on the Board, representing downtown real-estate interests and the conservative Police Officers Association. With a promise of financial backing, White changed his mind and told Mayor George Moscone that he wanted his job back.
At first, Moscone said sure, a man has the right to change his mind.
But there was opposition to White’s return, led by Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was openly gay. Milk had cut off his ponytail and put on a suit so that he could work within the system, but he refused to hide his sexual preference. Now he warned the pragmatic Moscone that giving the homophobic White his seat back would be seen as an anti-gay move in the homosexual community. White had cast the only vote against the gay rights ordinance.
Even a mayor who wants to run for re-election has the right to change his mind.
On Sunday evening, November 26, a reporter telephoned Dan White and said, “I can tell you from a very good source in the mayor’s office that you definitely are not going to be reappointed. Can you comment on that?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” White replied. “I don’t know anything about that.” And he hung up.
He stayed on the couch that night, not wanting to keep his wife awake. He didn’t get any sleep, just lay there brooding. He decided to go to City Hall on Monday morning.
When his aide, Denise Apcar, picked him up at at 10:15 a.m., White didn’t come out the front door as he normally would; he emerged from his garage. He had gone down there to strap on his service revolver, a .38 special, which he always kept loaded. He opened a box of extra cartridges, which were packed in rows of five, and he put ten of them, wrapped in a handkerchief so they wouldn’t rattle, into his pocket.
Because of rumors that People’s Temple assassins had been programmed to hit targets back in the States, metal detectors were now set up at the front doors of City Hall. When White went up the stairs to the main entrance, he didn’t recognize the security guard monitoring the metal detector, so he went around to the side of the building. He entered through a large basement window and proceeded to the mayor’s office.
After a brief conversation, Dan White shot George Moscone twice in the body, then two more times in the head, execution-style, as he lay on the floor. The Marlboro cigarette in Moscone’s hand would still be burning when the paramedics arrived.
After murdering Moscone, White hurriedly walked down a long corridor to the area where the supervisors’ offices were. His name had already been removed from the door of his office, but he still had a key. He went inside and reloaded his gun. Then he walked out, past Supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s office. She called out to him, but he didn’t stop.
“I have to do something first,” he told her.
Harvey Milk was in his office, thanking a friend who had just loaned him $3,000. Dan White walked in.
“Can I talk to you for a minute, Harvey?”
White followed Milk into his inner office. White then fired three shots into Harvey Milk’s body, and while Milk was prone on the floor, White fired two more shots into Milk’s head.
Meanwhile, Abbie Hoffman had gone underground, and I was scheduled to be a guest on Tom Snyder’s late-night TV talk show, Tomorrow, on November 30.
“That’s my birthday,” said Abbie, calling from somewhere or other. “Would you wish me a happy birthday on the show?”
Andy Friendly, producer of the Tomorrow show, phoned me to explore areas that the interview might cover. The subject of drug use came up.
“Well,” I said, “maybe we could talk about my old psychedelic macho. I’ve taken LSD in all kinds of unusual situations: when I testified at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial; on the Johnny Carson show—Orson Bean was the guest host—I was sort of a guide for Groucho Marx once; and while I was researching the Charles Manson case, I took acid with a few of the women in the family, including Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good. It was a kind of participatory journalism.”
I didn’t tell him that I planned to ingest magic mushrooms before my appearance on the Tomorrow show.
They flew me down to Los Angeles, and a chauffeured limousine delivered me to a fancy hotel, where I proceeded to partake of those magic mushrooms. My mood was soon intensely sensual. What I really wanted was an exquisite, deep-tissue massage. I called an old friend who was a professional masseuse. Since she was also an old lover, it wasn’t totally surprising that we began fucking on the bed before she even set up her table. She finally broke the sweet silence of our post-coital afterglow.
“But,” she said, “I’ll have to charge you for the massage.”
The mushrooms were still coming on strong when Tom Snyder began the interview. He had an FM mind in an AM body.
“You’re from San Francisco” he said. “What the hell is going on there? First, this guy Jim Jones has nine hundred people commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Then the next week this other guy goes to City Hall, kills the mayor and a gay supervisor.”
It seemed as if he was asking me to justify San Francisco as the cause of such sequential horror.
“Nyah, nyah,” I chanted, “my city is more violent than your city.”
Snyder looked askance at Andy Friendly, as if to say, “What kind of flake did you book for me?”
“Actually,” I said, “I believe that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment that got out of control.”
“Oh, so you’re paranoid, h
uh?”
“Well, conspiracy and paranoia are not synonymous, you know. But I’ll tell you a good conspiracy theory. Remember that famous race-horse, Ruffian? She broke her leg in a race, and they had to shoot her. Well, do you know why they really shot Ruffian?”
“No, Paul,” Snyder said, knitting his impressive eyebrows in mock consternation. “Why?”
“Because she knew too much.”
Snyder did a double-take, then started laughing as though he were doing his impression of Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live doing his impression of Tom Snyder. I could see Snyder’s staccato laughter parading before me like musical notes.
Just before the show ended, I remembered to wish Abbie Hoffman a happy birthday.
“Where is he?” Snyder asked. “Can we get him on the show?”
“He’s right there, under your chair.”
• • •
When San Francisco District Attorney Joe Freitas learned of the City Hall killings, he was in Washington, DC, conferring with the State Department about the mass suicide-murder in Jonestown. He immediately assumed that Moscone and Milk had been assassinated by a People’s Temple hit squad. After all, George Moscone was number one on their hit list.
Freitas had been a close friend of Jim Jones. After the massacre in Guyana, he released a previously “confidential” report, which stated that his office had uncovered evidence to support charges of homicide, child abduction, extortion, arson, battery, drug use, diversion of welfare funds, kidnapping, and sexual abuse against members of the sect. The purported investigation had not begun until after Jones left San Francisco. No charges were ever filed, and the People’s Temple case was put on “inactive status.”
Busloads of illegally registered People’s Temple members had voted in the 1975 San Francisco election, as well as in the runoff that put George Moscone in office. Freitas appointed lawyer Tim Stoen to look into possible voter fraud. At the time, Stoen was serving as Jim Jones’s chief legal adviser. Freitas later piously accused him of short-circuiting the investigation, but after Stoen left the case, the D.A.’s office assured the registrar that there was no need to retain the voting rosters, and they were destroyed.
Several former members of People’s Temple had heard about this fraudulent voting, but the eyewitnesses all died at Jonestown. In addition, the San Francisco Examiner reported that Mayor Moscone had called off a police investigation of gun-running by the Temple, which had arranged to ship explosives, weapons and large amounts of cash to South America via Canada.
George Moscone’s body was buried. Harvey Milk’s body was cremated. His ashes were placed in a box, which was wrapped in Doonesbury comic strips, then scattered at sea. The ashes had been mixed with the contents of two packets of grape Kool-Aid, forming a purple patch on the Pacific. Harvey would’ve liked that touch.
• • •
In 1979, I covered the Dan White trial for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. There was a certain sense of being back in elementary school. Reporters received written instructions: “Members of the press are asked to line up in the below order to facilitate courtroom entry. You must be in the below order or you will be sent to the rear of the line.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that I said “Thank you” to the sheriff’s deputy who frisked me before I could enter the courtroom. These official friskers each had their own individual style of frisking, and there was a separate-but-equal female frisker for female reporters. But this was a superfluous ritual, since any journalist who wanted to shoot White was prevented from doing so by wall-to-wall bulletproof glass. It was sort of like sitting in a giant New York City taxicab.
At the pre-trial hearings, White had worn standard jailhouse fashion, an orange jumpsuit, so that the first time he walked into court wearing a regular suit and tie, his mother was pleasantly surprised and said, “Oh, my goodness.” There was almost an air of festivity, but when the jury selection began next day, White’s mother could be observed uttering a silent prayer to herself.
Defense attorney Douglas Schmidt objected to the dismissal of potential jurors because they were opposed to the death penalty. He cited studies showing that those “who do not have scruples against capital punishment tend to favor the prosecution.”
Prosecutor Tom Norman claimed that he did not “subscribe to the accuracy of those studies.” Judge Walter Calcagno ruled in favor of Norman, and Schmidt was reduced to asking such conscientious objectors if they might at least make an exception in a trial where, say, someone “tortured two or three children to death, for money.”
Nor did the defense want any pro-gay sentiment polluting the verdict. Schmidt wasn’t allowed to ask potential jurors if they were gay, so instead he would ask if they had ever supported controversial causes—“like homosexual rights, for instance.”
There was one particular prospective juror who came from a family of police—ordinarily, Schmidt would have craved for such a person to be on this jury—but when the man mentioned, perhaps gratuitously, “I live with a roommate and lover,” it allowed for Schmidt to phrase his next question.
“Where does he or she work?”
The answer began, “He”—and the ballgame was already over—“works at Holiday Inn.”
Throughout the trial, White would just sit there as though he had been mainlining epoxy glue. His sideburns were shorter than they used to be. He stared directly ahead, his eyes focused on the crack between two adjacent boxes on the clerk’s desk, Olde English type identifying them as “Deft” and “Pltff” for defendant and plaintiff.
When White left the courtroom, there seemed to be no real contact with his wife, save for a glance reminiscent of that time she served the wrong brand of coffee. The front row was reserved for his family, being filled on different days by various combinations of his sixteen brothers and sisters. It felt like I was in the middle of a situation comedy that was morphing into a tragic soap opera.
Although it was stipulated that Dan White had killed George Moscone and Harvey Milk, his defense would be, in effect, that they deserved it.
• • •
The day before the trial began, the Assistant District Attorney slated to prosecute the case was standing in an elevator at the Hall of Justice. He heard a voice behind him speak his name.
“Tom Norman, you’re a motherfucker for prosecuting Dan White.”
He turned around and saw a half-dozen police inspectors. He flushed and faced the door again. These cops were his drinking buddies, but now they were all mad at him.
“I didn’t know who said it,” Norman confided to the courtroom artist for a local TV station, “and I didn’t want to know.”
One could only speculate about the chilling effect that incident had on him, conceivably engendering his sloppy presentation of the prosecution’s case. For example, in his opening statement, Norman told the jury that White had reloaded his gun in the mayor’s office, but not according to the transcript of White’s tape-recorded confession.
Q. “And do you know how many shots you fired [at Moscone]?”
A. “Uh, no, I don’t, I don’t, I out of instinct when I—I reloaded the gun, ah—you know, it’s just the training I had, you know.”
Q. “Where did you reload?”
A. “I reloaded in my office when, when I was—I couldn’t out in the hall.”
Which made it slightly less instinctive. Norman sought to prove that the murders had been premeditated, yet ignored this evidence of premeditation in White’s own confession. If White’s reloading of his gun had been, as he said, “out of instinct,” then he indeed would have reloaded in Moscone’s office. And if it were truly an instinctive act, then he would have reloaded again after killing Milk.
One psychiatrist testified that White must have been mistaken in his recollection of where he reloaded. The evidence on this key question became so muddled that one juror would later recall, “It was a very important issue, but it was never determined where he reloaded—in Moscone’s office or just prior to sayi
ng, ‘Harvey, I want to talk with you.’”
In his confession, White had stated, “I don’t know why I put [my gun] on.” At the trial, psychiatrists offered reasons ranging from psychological (it was “a security blanket”) to practical (for “self-defense” against a People’s Temple hit squad)—this was one week after the Jonestown massacre. But, as a former police officer and member of the Police Commission told me, “An off-duty cop carrying his gun for protection isn’t gonna take extra bullets. If he can’t save his life with the bullets already in his gun, then he’s done for.”
Dan White’s tearful confession was made to his old friend and former softball coach, Police Inspector Frank Falzon. When Falzon called White “Sir,” it was a painful indication of his struggle to be a professional homicide inspector. Now, while Falzon was on the witness stand, one reporter passed a note to her colleague, suggesting that Falzon was wearing a “Free Dan White” T-shirt under his shirt.
At one point in his confession White claimed, “I was leaving the house to talk, to see the mayor, and I went downstairs to—to make a phone call, and I had my gun there.” But there was a phone upstairs, and White was home alone. His wife had already gone to the Hot Potato. But Falzon didn’t question him about that. Moreover, he neglected to pose the simple question that any school-kid playing detective would ask: “Dan, who did you call?”—the answer to which could have been easily verified.
Prosecutor Norman simply bungled his case and allowed the defense to use White’s confession to its own advantage. The mere transcript could never capture the sound of White’s anguish. He was like a little boy sobbing uncontrollably because he wouldn’t be allowed to play on the Little League team. When the tape was played in court, some reporters wept, including me, along with members of White’s family, spectators, jurors, an assistant D.A.—who had a man-sized tissue box on his table—and Dan White himself, crying both live and on tape simultaneously.
Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders Page 5
