The Mayor of Castro Street

by Randy Shilts

  * * *

  Denise Apcar told Dan White she had seen Harvey leave the mayor’s office when she picked White up, about 10:15. Dan told her he wanted to see both George and Harvey once he got to City Hall. Denise noted he was rubbing his hands together and blowing on his fingertips as he talked. “I’m a man. I can take it,” he told her. “I just want to talk with them, have them tell me to my face why they won’t reappoint me.”

  Denise dropped White off at City Hall and left to gas up her car. William Melia, a city engineer with a lab overlooking the supervisors’ parking lot, first noticed a nervous young man pacing by his window at about 10:25. The man walked back and forth, anxiously glancing into the window where Melia was working. The phone rang and Melia stepped briefly into another room to take the call. As soon as he left the room, he heard the lab window open and the sound of someone jumping to the floor and running out of the lab and into the hall.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Melia shouted. He knew such an entrance was a sure way to avoid passing through the metal detectors at the public entrances of City Hall.

  “I had to get in,” White explained. “My aide was supposed to come down and let me in the side door, but she never showed up.”

  “And you are—”

  “—I’m Dan White, the city supervisor. Say, I’ve got to go.” With that, White spun on his heel and left the office.

  Mildred Tango, a clerk-typist in the mayor’s office, saw White hesitating near the main door of the mayor’s office as if he didn’t want to use that entrance. Inside sat the mayor’s police bodyguard; White knew that, since he had once worked the relief shift as the mayor’s police bodyguard during the Alioto administration. White saw Tango unlocking a side door to the mayor’s office on her rounds to collect the morning mail. She recognized White and let him follow her into the hallway that led to the mayor’s suite. White presented himself at Cyr Copertini’s desk at about 10:30 A.M.

  “Hello, Cyr. May I see the mayor?”

  “He has someone with him, but let me go check.”

  Moscone grimaced at the news. He was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of a confrontation on what promised to be such a splendid morning.

  “Give me a minute to think,” the mayor said. “Oh, all right. Tell him I’ll see him, but he’ll have to wait a minute.”

  Cyr asked if George wanted someone to sit in on the meeting. Press secretary Mel Wax often served such duty to make sure disgruntled politicos did not later lay claim to specious mayoral promises.

  “No. No,” George said, “I’ll see him alone.”

  “Why don’t you let me bring Mel in,” Copertini persisted.

  “No, no. I will see him alone.”

  Copertini told White the mayor would be a few minutes. Dan seemed nervous.

  “Would you like to see a newspaper while you’re waiting?” Copertini asked.

  He didn’t.

  “That’s all right. There’s nothing in it anyway, unless you want to read about Caroline Kennedy having turned twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-one? Is that right?” White shook his head. “Yeah. That’s all so long ago. It’s even more amazing when you think that John-John is now eighteen.”

  Moscone buzzed for White.

  “Good girl, Cyr,” Dan White said.

  * * *

  An aide told Dianne Feinstein that he had just seen Dan go into the mayor’s office. She sent her administrative assistant, Peter Nardoza, to find White. As an extra precaution, Feinstein opened her office door so she could see him if he slipped into the long hallway on which the supervisors’ offices were clustered.

  * * *

  Around the same time Dan White walked into George Moscone’s office, Harvey Milk was stepping up the marble staircase to his aides’ offices. Dick Pabich was working on correspondence. Jim Rivaldo was talking to a gay lawyer, who, Harvey knew, had a fondness for leather during his late-night carousing.

  “Well, where are your leathers?” Milk asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Jim joked. “He’s got leather underwear on.”

  Milk excused himself to go to the bank. He was expecting Carl Carlson with the cashier’s check. Jim and Harvey agreed to get together again at 11:30 so they could go to the swearing-in of the new supervisor.

  Harvey walked to his office, but Carlson hadn’t arrived yet. Harvey was on the phone when he came in, about 10:50; Carl sat down to do some typing until Harvey was finished.

  * * *

  Dan White and Moscone hadn’t been in the mayor’s large ceremonial office more than five minutes before Cyr heard White’s voice raised, shouting at Moscone. George hated scenes and decided to try to mollify the former supervisor by inviting him to a small den off his office where he kept a wet bar. He lit a cigarette, poured two drinks, and turned to see White brandishing a revolver. White pulled the trigger and fired a bullet into Moscone’s arm, near the shoulder, and immediately shot a second slug into the mayor’s right pectoral. Moscone sank to the floor as the second bullet tore into his lung. Dan White knelt next to the prostrate body, poised the gun six inches from the right side of Moscone’s head, and fired a bullet that ripped through Moscone’s earlobe and into his brain. He pulled the trigger again and another bullet sped from the revolver, through Moscone’s ear canal and into the brain.

  White methodically emptied the four spent cartridges and the one live bullet from his Smith & Wesson and crammed them into the right pocket of his tan blazer. He had special bullets for his next task; the hollow-headed dum-dum bullets that explode on impact, ripping a hole into the victim two to three times the size of the slug itself. White slipped the five bullets into the revolver’s chamber, stepped out a side door, and dashed toward the other side of City Hall where the supervisors’ officers were.

  The four dull thuds sounded like a car backfiring, Cyr thought, so she looked out her office window, but saw nothing. Rudy Nothenberg, Moscone’s top deputy, had an 11 A.M. appointment with the mayor. He was ready to cancel it when he noted that George’s meeting with White was taking longer than expected. He was relieved when he saw White hurriedly leave the office; he’d get his chance to talk to the mayor after all.

  * * *

  Dick Pabich saw White dashing toward the supervisorial offices. What a jerk, Pabich thought, running around here like he’s still somebody important.

  Peter Nardoza saw him rushing into the hallway outside Dianne Feinstein’s office.

  “Dianne would like to talk to you,” Nardoza said.

  “Well, that will have to wait a couple of moments,” White answered sharply.

  Feinstein heard the exchange, then saw White flash by her office door.

  “Dan,” she called.

  “I have something to do first,” White said.

  Harvey and Carl were getting ready to go to the bank when White stuck his head into Milk’s office.

  “Say, Harv, can I see you?”

  “Sure.”

  White took Harvey to his old office across the hall. He noticed that his name plate had already been removed from the door. Once Milk stepped inside, White planted himself between him and the door. He drew his revolver and fired. A sharp streak of pain sped through Harvey.

  “Oh no,” Milk shouted. “N—” He reflexively raised his hand to try to protect himself.

  White knew that bullets went through arms, and he fired again, cutting short Harvey’s cry. The slug tore into Harvey’s right wrist, ripped into his chest and out again, finally lodging near his left elbow. Another dum-dum bullet pounded Milk in the chest. He was falling now, toward the window. As he crumpled to his knees, Dan White took careful aim from across the office. The first three bullets alone would not have killed Harvey. White took careful aim at the staggering figure and fired a fourth bullet which sliced into the back of his head and out the other side, spraying blood against the wall. The shots sounded so loud they startled White; louder than the shots in Moscone’s office. Harvey had fallen to the floor. White gripped the revolver
’s handle and pulled the trigger once more. The bullet left only a dime-sized wound on the outside of Harvey’s skull, but shards from its hollow tip exploded when they struck Harvey’s skull, tearing and ripping into his brain. Harvey Milk died at approximately 10:55 A.M. on the dark gray morning of November 27, 1978, a year and a half short of his fiftieth birthday.

  * * *

  Dianne Feinstein had heard the first shot and known exactly what it was—Dan White had committed suicide. Then she heard more shots and felt an unspeakable horror. She had to get up from her desk. She had to force her brain and body to function together, to move her out of her chair, out of her office. But she felt she was going too slow, too slow, she had to go faster. She saw White walk by her door. She couldn’t move fast enough as she smelled the odor of gunpowder that wafted down the hall.

  Carl Carlson thought at first maybe the sounds were firecrackers, but he had heard Harvey shout and knew it was not firecrackers. Carlson stepped out of Harvey’s office in time to see White walk out of his office, pull the door shut behind him, glance coldly at Carlson, then walk calmly down the hall. Feinstein joined Carl at the door to White’s office.

  Feinstein shoved the door open and saw Harvey’s body sprawled out, his face toward the window, lying in a spreading pool of blood. Feinstein’s mind shifted into automatic. All her emergency medical training told her to take the injured man’s pulse. She knelt to take Harvey’s arm; she put her finger to Harvey’s wrist and it quickly oozed into the wound left by the second bullet. Blood and tissue engulfed her finger.

  * * *

  White ran into Denise Apcar’s office. “Give me the keys,” he shouted to her. “Give me the keys.”

  Apcar nervously handed White her car keys and he dashed out the door.

  * * *

  Only two or three minutes had passed since Dan White had left the mayor’s office. Rudy Nothenberg was waiting for George to buzz him for their 11 A.M. appointment. It didn’t make sense—Rudy had seen Dan White leave. What was taking George so long? Tentatively he stuck his head in Moscone’s main office, then walked into the adjoining den and saw George’s feet. He figured Moscone had fainted until he got closer and saw the blood flowing from his head onto the carpet. Moscone still held a lit cigarette in his right hand; it was burning a hole into the back of his tie.

  “Get in here,” he shouted to Cyr. “Call an ambulance. Get the police.”

  * * *

  Dianne Feinstein bounded into Harvey’s office with Carl. She grabbed a phone, frantically calling the police chief. The chief’s lines, however, were all busy with calls from the mayor’s office, but Feinstein didn’t know that and kept dialing desperately. What’s the matter she thought. Why can’t I get through?

  * * *

  A few blocks away, Dan White was at a fast-food joint calling Mary Ann. Something happened, he said. He needed to meet her right away at St. Mary’s Cathedral.

  * * *

  Carl Carlson was on Harvey’s other phone, buzzing Dick Pabich. Dick had just come into his office telling Jim Rivaldo how weird White had looked. He answered Carl’s call.

  “Harvey’s been shot. Call an ambulance.”

  “Oh, sure,” Pabich answered sarcastically.

  “No time for messing around. I’m serious.”

  “What?”

  Pabich jumped from his desk and raced toward Harvey’s office. Rivaldo followed him into the corridor and saw a cadre of armed police racing toward the mayor’s office. He followed them, thinking that was the best way to find the source of the ruckus, when Pabich ran back and shouted at the officers, “No, no. It’s not the mayor’s office. It’s down here.” Several officers split off and followed Pabich to the supervisors’ offices. Chief Gain arrived shortly after and sought out Feinstein, telling her the mayor had been killed too.

  “Oh, no,” Feinstein gasped.

  Aides now circled Dan White’s office door. Dick Pabich remembered seeing White rush by and arrived at the obvious conclusion. “Dan White did it,” he said. A conservative board clerk who had never had much use for either Milk or his gay entourage scolded Dick: “How can you say such a thing?”

  * * *

  Mary Ann White left the cab and hurried across the wide brick terrazo that stretches in front of the modernistic St. Mary’s Cathedral. She quickly spotted her husband in the chapel.

  “I shot the mayor and Harvey,” he told her.

  They talked for a few minutes. Mary Ann said she’d stand by him through any ordeal. They started walking the few blocks to Northern Station, the police station where White had once worked as a member of the San Francisco Police Department. As they walked, Mary Ann kept her hand around Dan White’s waist, holding firmly onto the revolver in the belt holster, fearing he might suddenly grab the gun and shoot himself.

  * * *

  Hundreds of reporters were rushing to City Hall. Stories were muddled. Was the mayor shot? Was he dead? No, it was Harvey Milk. Milk and one of his aides? Were they dead? And, of course, the question that immediately came to all the reporters’ minds: Were the shootings the work of a Peoples Temple hit squad? Jim Jones’s code word for the suicide rituals—“white night”—was also supposed to trigger cadres of Peoples Temple assassins, according to reports from Jonestown. Had they started doing their bloody work?

  At 11:20 A.M., a shaken Dianne Feinstein stepped from the supervisors’ offices to make the announcement. Her face looked haggard; Police Chief Gain had to support her as she spoke.

  “As president of the board of supervisors, it is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.”

  The reporters recoiled with a collective gasp that nearly drowned out Feinstein’s next words.

  “Supervisor Dan White is the suspect.”

  Across City Hall, outside the mayor’s office, press secretary Mel Wax made the same announcement to another knot of reporters. Wax added that under the provisions of the city charter, Board of Supervisors President Feinstein was now acting mayor.

  * * *

  Doug Franks easily found the book he sought in the library, checked it out, and walked the five blocks back to the senior center where he worked. When he arrived, he saw that somebody had taken a portable television to the living room where the seniors now huddled, murmuring in shock. He heard the announcer’s raspy voice: “Again, Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone have been killed.”

  Doug stumbled; he felt he was going to faint; he had just hugged Harvey, checked out a book, walked five blocks and now Harvey was dead. That’s all the time it took—and someone you love is dead.

  * * *

  At 11:25 A.M., Dan and Mary Ann White arrived at Northern Station.

  “It’s there,” White said, pointing to his right hip.

  The officer took the revolver from White’s belt and the four spent .38 special casings and one bullet from his blazer pocket. White wanted to turn himself in at Northern Station because his friend, Paul Chignell, the vice-president of the Police Officers’ Association, worked there. White asked Chignell to make sure the press stayed away from his wife. White seemed calm and detached, not particularly distraught, Chignell noted. White asked, “Is he dead, Paul?”

  * * *

  Police and officials from the coroner’s office busily snapped pictures of the two undisturbed bodies for nearly an hour. Cleve Jones and Scott Smith arrived at City Hall shortly after the shootings. At first, wary supervisors’ aides would not admit Smith to Harvey’s office; nobody recognized him. Jones finally pulled Scott into the secured area, where grim-faced police mixed with sobbing board clerks and the small group of Harvey’s stunned aides.

  “It’s over. We’ve lost it,” Jim Rivaldo kept muttering to no one in particular. He felt drawn to the door of Dan White’s office where Harvey still lay. The police officer at the door warned him away from the grisly sight, but Rivaldo felt he needed to connect with the physical reality of Harvey’s death. He stood outside the door as
policemen were turning the corpse over to put it in the black rubber body bag. Jones stepped up and peered over Rivaldo’s shoulder as the officers struggled with Milk’s lanky frame. Harvey was blue now, his discolored head rolling limply, his suit and thick dark hair stained with clots of blood. Jim stared at the bloodstained wall and tried to retrace the path of Harvey’s stumble to calculate what Milk had seen last. Harvey had fallen facing the window, so that before Dan White had pumped the last bullets into his staggering victim, Harvey could have looked out the window and seen the grand facade of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House across the street.

  The police finally succeeded in getting Harvey’s body into the bag, which was then put on a gurney, covered with a crisp, creased hospital sheet and pushed down the hallway past his old office. At noon, the doors of the supervisors’ offices opened and police wheeled the gurney into a nearby elevator—the elevator Harvey had always forsaken in favor of the grand staircase—then out a side entrance of City Hall into a waiting coroner’s ambulance.

  * * *

  At about the same time Milk’s body was being slipped on a rack beneath the stretcher bearing George Moscone, Dan White was sitting down with homicide inspectors Ed Erdelatz and Frank Falzon. Falzon had attended St. Elizabeth’s Grammar School with White and later coached him on the police softball team; Dan had been his star player. Falzon read White his Miranda rights and then taped his twenty-four-minute confession. The interrogation of White—or, some said, the lack of it—would later prove to be one of the most controversial aspects of the murder case.

  * * *

  By noon, a small silent crowd was gathering outside City Hall, standing below the dome, staring dumbly at the police, reporters, and city officials who scurried up the wide stairs. The golden-bordered city flag above the portico was pulled to half-mast as the crowd grew. Some dropped flowers on the steps. Before long, a mound grew and an angry young man put a hand-lettered sign amid the blossoms: “Happy, Anita?”

  * * *

  The EXTRA editions were hitting the newstands on Castro Street with their bold headlines: “Mayor, Milk Slain; Dan White Seized.” Knots of Castro residents clustered on the corners, reading the newspapers in disbelief. Many of the bars and businesses quickly closed their doors and hung black bunting at their entrances. Black-bordered pictures of Harvey appeared in shop windows, store clerks slipped on black armbands. People started coming to Castro Street, to gather where they had so many times before in past crises.