Let’s Get It On! (11 page)

I asked for the double lucky number seventy-seven; Ron liked putting on my uniform.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

—Albert Einstein

When people tell me they want to become police officers to help people, I recommend firefighting instead. People like firefighters because they come to their aid when they’re sick and can’t get out of bed or when they’re stuck inside a burning building or a mangled car that’s just hit a telephone pole.

But police officers usually come on the worst days of people’s lives, when something bad has happened to them or someone they love. Sure, police officers are protecting and helping them, but that’s usually hard for people to put into perspective when the most traumatic event of their lives is flashing before their eyes. Sometimes they want you to deliver instant justice, which is almost always impossible to do.

Being a police officer can be a thankless job. I once broke a guy’s car window and pulled him out of his burning vehicle. He sued me for tearing his Ralph Lauren shirt. The city had to pay him $75 to make him happy.

Something I gradually learned as I moved through different units during my twenty-two years on the force was that you will do positive things in life that no one will ever see or recognize. And then you will perform seemingly small acts that mean the world to others. Accolades may be few and far between. You don’t get to choose the value of what you do in others’ eyes, so you have to take stock in knowing that doing the right thing is enough, no matter who notices.

After I worked for Southwest and Hollywood patrols for about the first year and a half, Captain Taylor transferred me in September of 1987 to the Prostitution Enforcement Detail (PED) in the Vice Unit of Hollywood Division. Captain Taylor thought it would be fun for me, and at first I thought so too. Instead of handling general radio calls, we’d be out observing illegal activities and making arrests, which was called “snooping and pooping.” After sixteen months of being chained to the calls screen, that sounded refreshingly liberating to me.

A vice is defined as a practice or habit that is considered immoral, depraved, or degrading in normal society. That includes what we consider the public order crimes, such as prostitution, pornography, gambling, and a little drug trafficking sprinkled in for good measure, though Narcotics is really a separate unit unto itself. When I thought of Vice, I thought of Las Vegas. Later, I referred to it as the “crap crimes” because in my mind it never really amounted to much in the way of getting the true bad guys off the street.

My main job in Vice was to find ways to pull prostitutes off the streets for whatever amount of time I could. We had to catch them accepting money for their services, but they were usually smart enough to wait until they were out of sight to do that. Without the transaction, it was just consensual sex.

So we had to get creative. We busted them for breaking city ordinances like jaywalking or soliciting too long in front of a particular store or on a certain street corner—anything we could do to get them off the streets, even for just a few hours.

A prostitute’s job is to manipulate, not only to get people to accept services but to get more money out of them. That’s how they make a living. Sometimes they’d put up a fight when we’d try to arrest them, because having to get an angry pimp to bail them out or sitting in a jail cell until they got a court date equaled minutes ticking away without pay.

When I confronted prostitutes, my goal was to find a reason to either take them in or let them walk. Prostitutes’ ears were always to the street. If they had some type of information that could help us in bigger cases, such as local murders or robberies, we’d let them go.

The offer of sex in exchange for freedom was always there, but no sane officers would do that. If they did, they’d become the john and could be arrested themselves.

My first partner in Hollywood Vice was Maria Gonzales, a five-feet-two bodybuilder who scared all the female prostitutes to death. They knew if they didn’t listen to her, she’d make their lives miserable. Even though they weren’t afraid of any of the male officers, they feared Maria.

I couldn’t help feeling for some of the women. I thought they were simply trying to get on with their lives, make money, and survive. They weren’t bad people. One girl I met was a crack addict who’d been in a few porn films. Her mom contacted me through the station, and I told her where her daughter was and tried to reunite them to get her off the street. In the end, it didn’t work. Prostitutes were what they were, and the problem was that they were addicted to the lifestyle. It didn’t matter what was right or best for them; they had to fuel that addiction.

My second Vice partner was Danny Molieri. Danny had already worked in Southwest with me. One of the sergeants had been impressed with him and plucked him out to come work in Hollywood Division.

Danny had an unshakable confidence, and I swear he thought he was the best-looking guy in the world. He wasn’t, but he did have the gift of gab, which came in handy when we were out working together. Danny and I gradually became friends. This bothered Elaine because she thought he was a player with the ladies, and she didn’t want that rubbing off on me.

I couldn’t blame Elaine for being worried. Many marriages fail when one or both spouses are in law enforcement. When I was coming home at 8:00 a.m. and had just enough time to kiss my wife on the cheek as she rushed out the door to her day job, it was taxing. And none of the other shifts were any better, especially when I was pulling double duty to make court appearances for my arrest cases when I wasn’t on duty.

We also met a lot of women, and not all of them could resist a man in uniform. Unfortunately, a lot of police officers don’t know how to say no in the face of temptation either. I wasn’t one of those officers, though.

Danny and I worked Vice together, so we spent a lot of time around the Hollywood prostitutes. I have to tell you, I wasn’t tempted in the least. Everybody thinks when you work Vice, you’re in contact with a lot of women, and you are to a certain degree. But in Hollywood, there are about five male prostitutes to every female working the streets.

Sometimes I would work in plainclothes pretending to be a john looking to try something new. In my Mercedes rental car, I’d pull up wearing a suit and my wedding ring and tell a male prostitute I was from out of town and just wanted to experience a different side of me.

They’d climb into the car every time. The ones that groped first and asked questions later got crushed into the floorboard of the car. I have to admit, in those situations, I much preferred the females.

And then there were the transvestites. We called them Dragons, and I didn’t like any of them. Dragons never hit on officers when they were in uniform, but they’d stand around taunting us with “Oh, jou are so good-looking” or “Oh, jou so fine.” It made my skin crawl.

During one of my least favorite arrests, I was sent into a porn theater on Santa Monica Boulevard to look for lewd activity. I hated those places because of the sticky floors. You wanted to think you didn’t know what you were walking in, but you always knew. That wasn’t the worst of it. What I saw in places like that would turn my stomach. Once a priest was on his knees in front of another man, and, trust me, he wasn’t praying.

On this occasion, I found my suspect in the far corner. I flashed my light and had to look twice because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Under the cover of dark, wearing a little lace bra, a pink baby doll nightgown, red fishnet stockings, and brown Oxford walking shoes, a man was whacking his meat to the movie.

I didn’t want to touch him but still managed to get him outside, where my partner, Maria, and Sgt. Rick Webb were waiting. They started laughing and elected me to search the guy, who started sobbing uncontrollably, but I just couldn’t make myself touch someone who’d been doing what he had just a few minutes before. On top of that, I later found out this guy was a teacher.

Transvestites weren’t my cup of tea, but you’d be surprised which people were interested in them. I used to follow one of the biggest celebrities of all time through Hollywood as he picked up Dragons and drove them back to his Beverly Hills home—and there was nothing we could do about it. I did stop him and question him about his activities and acquaintances once, but since we didn’t see any public sexual activity or money transactions, I never had the legal justification to arrest him or the Dragons he’d picked up.

For the next year, Danny and I usually had the highest recap, or number of suspects put in jail, during each twenty-eight-day deployment. We actually made a ton of narcotics arrests because, surprise, surprise, drugs and prostitution often seemed to go hand in hand. Our supervisors called us in frequently because, though narcotics wasn’t really our detail, I couldn’t help but sniff out a drug deal going down. I knew where to go, and I knew what to look for.

Aside from the drug busts, I hated every aspect of Vice and was ready to do some work that counted for something. My prayers were answered after one year, when the department busted me for working a second job, one of many off-duty jobs I’d have over the years because my family needed the extra cash. On this occasion, I’d been working as a bouncer at a nightclub called Fantasia. I was supposed to work the parking lot only but would often get pulled inside to man the floor. One night, I took an inebriated customer to the manager’s office when he got a little out of control. He decided it would be a good idea to grab my sweater, and when he wouldn’t let go, I blasted him with one punch. He went down and out, and I cut his face in the process.

The guy ended up suing me, and the department got wind of it. They didn’t really care that I’d punched the guy, but they were upset that I hadn’t gotten the necessary permit to take on the second job. The truth was that working as a bouncer was considered a no-no for an officer, and I hadn’t applied for a permit because I’d known I wouldn’t get it. I was suspended for five days and removed from Vice, which suited me just fine.

I returned to Hollywood patrol but for less than a month. Word of my knack for narcotics busts must have preceded me, and I was quickly offered a position on the buy-bust team with West Bureau, which covered the Hollywood, Wilshire, Pacific, and West Los Angeles Divisions.

West Bureau Narcotics was one big search and destroy mission, and we were always doing one of those two things. We were the undercover buyers or chase team members waiting to pounce on the sellers. Either way, we were arresting the bad guys, and I thrived on that.

You could say I was pretty zealous when it came to my busts. Drug dealers tend to run when they know they’re about to get arrested, and this was one situation when I didn’t mind pounding the pavement. If you were running from me and I was after you, I wouldn’t just grab you. I’d tackle you into the concrete.

Rather than being known only as Ron McCarthy’s son, I started to make a name for myself on the force, though my dad’s presence was still everywhere. When I mentioned that my dad revolutionized a lot of programs inside the LAPD, I wasn’t just referring to procedural or tactical advances. To win a bet, my old man had started the LAPD football program, which is still running to this day.

The bet had stemmed from what used to be called the Death Valley Relay, another scheme my dad had concocted in 1978 when he’d taken his SWAT team running across the famed southwestern desert to set a world’s record. That race later became the Challenge Cup/Baker to Vegas Relay, beginning in Baker, California, and stretching across the highways through the desert for about 120 miles into Sin City. In 2009, 247 teams made up of about 8,000 runners from all over the world passed the finish line. The race has become so well-known that NBC’s
CSI
shot an episode around the race.

Back in 1979, the Arizona Department of Public Safety had been one of the first teams to enter the Death Valley Relay. The Arizona DPS and LAPD started arguing over which state had better high school football players. In the end, Arizona DPS challenged the LAPD football team to a game. My dad gladly accepted on the spot, but there was one small problem: at the time, the LAPD didn’t have a football team.

A little detail like that wasn’t going to stop my dad, though. He recruited his first team from Metropolitan Division’s flag football team, and on May 5, 1979, the first LAPD Centurions football team stormed the Jackrabbit Stadium in Mesa, Arizona. The Arizona DPS team didn’t know what hit them, as the Centurions took home the 21—0 victory.