Reel San Pedro: That Time Columbo Stopped a Gun-Running Ring at the Port of Los Angeles

By Rosie Knight

There have been many dramatic moments in San Pedro’s cinematic and televisual history and that’s why this column exists, but for its inaugural appearance I had to go for an episode of the best television series ever made Columbo, season 7, episode 5 .”The Conspirators” features two of San Pedro’s most iconic locations the Vincent Thomas Bridge and the Port of Los Angeles in its breathtaking finale that sees Peter Falk’s bedraggled detective race to our lovely hometown to catch a killer. 

Like the best of Columbo, “The Conspirators” saw Columbo strike up a friendly rapport with the lead suspect in a strange murder. Here that new frenemy was Joe Devlin (played beautifully by Clive Revill) a poet and writer who was on the surface a charitable man raising money for people affected by the Troubles in his homeland of Ireland. The only issue was that he was actually raising money for guns for the Irish Republican Army better known as the IRA. In traditional, complex, and ahead-of-its-time-Columbo fashion, Devlin is represented as warm, intelligent, and beloved in his community even after he kills a fellow gun-runner. It’s that crime that sets him on a cozy collision course with Columbo that sees the pair become friends, smoke, drink, and even play darts together as Columbo investigates the crime and realizes the truth. 

It’s that truth — that his friend is the killer and is planning to ship more guns to his IRA pals — which sends Columbo to the Port of Los Angeles, breezing over our iconic Vincent Thomas Bridge in all its 1978 glory in his famed 1959 Peugeot 403 trying to stop Devlin and his newest shipment of 300 MAC-10 machine guns. It is of course ironic that almost fifty years ago Columbo was trying to stop guns coming into and leaving the port when now the Port Police regularly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on military guns and ammo each year. 

While this was the only episode of Columbo to feature San Pedro prominently, the bedraggled detective and our city feel like a natural fit. Peter Falk lived in LA and owned a house in Newport Beach in the 70s, and though Columbo was a police detective he was always on the side of the working class, of the workers, the people who are often overlooked and ignored and fought to bring his own unique kind of justice on those more well off folks who would harm or exploit them. His rough and ready looks and working class roots meant that he was always underestimated, much like the city of San Pedro, the Harbor Area, and the brilliant people who live within it. 

“The Conspirators” was a landmark episode for the series as it marked the end of the seventh season, its final entry on NBC, and the last time the show would air for 11 years until it was picked up by ABC. And of course for those of us who live in Pedro and love to spot our town on film, it marked an early starring role for Pedro and its unique skyline which would go on to become a major part of Hollywood’s vision of what Los Angeles — and many other major cities it would go on to fill in for — looks like on screen.