By Timothy Watkins, President and Chief Executive Officer Watts Labor Community Action Committee
This summary is written for the benefit of elected officials, journalists, reporters and anyone who cares about the future of a community under siege and searching for help.
I have taken the initiative as a long-time resident of Watts to defend its interest in a local development scheme that would undermine the future of Watts and the full potential of its people to harness economic development strategies that lead to self-sufficiency.
The problem revolves around a major development in Watts scheduled to be built on cherished public space. The project involves three major landmarks; the federally registered historic Train Station, the Cultural Crescent Parkland and the world famous Watts Towers.
Although successive administrations have promised a passive parkland, the city council unilaterally decided to relinquish the project to the County of Los Angeles without any public engagement. We have sought answers on how a site of such important cultural and historic magnitude could be sold without full public disclosure and engagement. Neither Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilman Joe Buscaino, nor [former] Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the City Planning Department, or any of their representatives have answered this question. In a direct conversation with Thomas Safran about the possibility of selling the project back to the community, he first told me he was open to the idea; however, immediately afterward, he decided to forge ahead without further discussion.
What I am recommending as a solution is that the mayor direct a small portion of the $88 million taken from the police budget to pay the $3 million currently invested by the developer in the property to recapture it for ownership and management by a new nonprofit Watts Historic Land Trust, set up with help from the Neighborhood Land Trust and The Trust for Public Land.
Watts is deep in the throes of gentrification: proposed affordable housing that provides majority moderate-income units (over 70%) are not meant for the current residents. In a community that is home to one of the most critical domestic uprisings in American history and to the world-famous Watts Towers, it is unconscionable that publicly elected officials would approve the sale of historically and culturally relevant public land without any public discourse, town hall, Zoom meeting, or any other form of suitable community engagement — all during a pandemic that severely restricts many ordinary forms of public engagement.
In conclusion, amidst our elected leaders embracing and hailing this moment in history as an awakening for social and racial justice, a historically and structurally disenfranchised community should have the opportunity to determine its own destiny, regardless of the legality or procedural legitimacy of recent decisions. The marginalization of the community’s voice in its own future is the real issue. One cannot credibly claim solidarity with the movement, while at the same time permitting structural culpability and supporting the kinds of decisions that prevent the Watts community from controlling its own destiny. As the nation grapples with how to stop yet another innocent youngster from being shot in the back, we simply say stop pulling the trigger. This is no different. It can be reversed.
Why this project hurts Watts:
• It takes away acreage of open green space in a community that already has among the lowest per capita green space in the city.
• According to the City Health Atlas, life expectancy rates in Watts are among the lowest in the city.
• Infant mortality rates are among the highest in the city and county.
• Watts already has a density rate higher than most other parts of Los Angeles.
• More housing only advances the exploitation of renters in perpetuity.
• The absence of California Environmental Quality Act reporting requirements exposes the community to additional health consequences without its knowledge.
• Losing healthy green space in an already impacted neighborhood further decreases positive health consequences.
What can be done by the city to make it right:
• Buy land back from the developer and fund design and implementation of public redevelopment for the entire Cultural Crescent from 103rd Street to Wilmington Avenue.
• Designate additional area icons for ownership by a community-controlled nonprofit heritage trust.
• Provide funding for CEQA analysis.
• Allow the community to plan its own destiny through standard community engagement methods.
• Provide a master plan for Watts that enhances the visitor’s experience to the Watts Towers and improves cultural tourism possibilities along with new economic development initiatives.
• Provide protected class status for long-time underserved Black residents.
Experts discuss aquaculture in four-part AltaSea Series
The tending of underwater plants for human uses does not need to be destructive — in fact, it can be just the opposite. On May 6, a panel of environmental experts discussed regenerative aquaculture in the first of a series of four webinar discussions on the topic by AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles.
Regeneration improves ecosystems, typically done by using seaweeds. These seaweeds are grown as part of an aquaculture system but support the whole system.
“When you have lots of parts in the system that are being fed by what you’re doing, then the whole thing becomes more resilient to climate change, to any kind of small or large disaster” said Dr. Janet E. Kübler, who works in the biology department at California State University Northridge.
Just as the land has agriculture, the ocean has the seaweed industry. More than 99% of the industry is dominated by Asian countries, said Dr. Charles Yarish, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. However, seaweed’s many uses have caught the attention of western countries within the past decade. These include food, feed, fertilizers, medicine, cosmetics, textile, paper, leather and biofuels.
While other species are struggling because of climate change, seaweed is doing fine, Kübler said.
“I have spent decades studying how seaweeds respond to climate change, how they’re affected by climate change,” Kübler said. “The answer is: not that much. Except seaweeds generally thrive in a wide range of conditions and they can adjust their physiology to changes in their environment around them. Many seaweed species are actually pretty good at compensating for things that people do in coastal waters.”
For example, if people put nutrients into coastal waters, the seaweeds will use them to grow. When carbon dioxide is put into the water, the seaweeds benefit from it.
“In most parts of the world right now, seaweed abundance is increasing,” Kübler said. “Seaweeds are doing better under these conditions.”
There are exceptions, such as in places where the upper thermal limit has forced seaweeds out. And in some parts of California, diseases from other species have prevented kelp from returning to their natural habitat. But in general, seaweeds provide a solution to a current ecological problem — providing more food in a less ecologically demanding way.
Yarish said that seaweed is very nutritious, and some are high in vitamin C, while others have more protein than steak on a weight basis.
“In the next year or two years, you’re going to see more of the plant-based products that are coming to market that are going to include seaweed,” Yarish said.
Seaweed can also help reduce carbon dioxide, as they incorporate it into their biomass.
Yarish has grown seaweed in the East River in New York City, including kelp. Along the river’s path to the Atlantic Ocean, there was a nitrogen gradient that caused major problems, because there were too many nutrients. In addition, ocean acidification was also a problem, and fish and shellfish were dying.
“We developed a solution: grow seaweeds, grow shellfish, grow them together, and you are using organisms that are extracting nutrients from the water,” Yarish said. “We call this nutrient bio-extraction.”
The experiment was held for a full year. The seaweeds saw tremendous growth, and the nutrients were reduced, removing both nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Not only that, the nitrogen and carbon can be recycled, and used on land.
“This was such a simple system, it caught the attention of the U.S. EPA,” Yarish said. “They gave us a shoutout about sea farming … saying this may be a valuable tool for coastal managers.”
In addition to absorbing excess nutrients, seaweeds make compounds that they put back into the ecosystem, Kübler said. These compounds feed microscopic animals in the water, contributing to the food web.
“They give back to the ecosystem, and that’s regeneration,” Kübler said.
Finian Makepeace, co-founder of environmental group Kiss the Ground, argued that humanity needs to move out of the mindset of conserving what is left of the environment, and instead move into the mindset of regeneration.
“At the very core of it is a fundamental question of how we’re viewing what humans are going to contribute to in the coming years,” Makepeace said. “Are we moving from a force that is degenerating our land, and our oceans, or are we going to be a force that’s regenerating it?”
Makepeace said that when people simply blame environmental problems on climate change without diving deeper into them, they miss out on what humans can do as a contribution for good. Every year, 32 million acres of land undergoes desertification, meaning it becomes so destroyed it can no longer be farmed.
Makepeace said there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but that carbon is the solution to building back a functioning soil ecosystem. He argued that similar solutions can be used for aquaculture — such as planting seaweeds to bring back keystone organisms that may have left certain areas.
“Humans have the wherewithal to think about what we are doing to practically help this ecosystem come back to its highest functioning state,” Makepeace said.
The reason why the regenerative aquaculture industry has not had more success is because there is still a lot of caution on doing it correctly.
“This kind of conversation that we’re having about what is good for the ecosystem or not good for the ecosystem is being considered at many levels of government,” Kübler said.
Much of the worry comes from the way fish farming used to be done, even though such methods are rarely used today. Fish were overfed, kept in shallow water, and spread diseases to other fish.
“In current practices, we’ve learned a lot of the ills of the wild west mentality of aquaculture, where you really degraded the environment,” Yarish said.
While coastal regulators were not as careful in the past, they have changed their standards.
“The most successful operations in fish aquaculture are the ones that are the cleanest,” Yarish said.
To anyone who is naïve or just not paying attention, the recent Joe Buscaino Community Grants initiative that was launched recently would not seem like an obvious campaign ploy charading as a community engagement. What is getting lost in his rather self-serving ploy in branding it with his own name is that this $3 million grant comes directly from the $150 million “defund the police” budget realignment approved by LA City Council last year in the wake of the protests against police abuse. The original idea was to address underlying social and economic injustice issues that cause crime and to invest in non-police solutions, like responding to mental health crises or domestic abuse calls, a responsibility of which the police themselves would just as soon shed themselves. Clearly, Joe’s community grants don’t address much of this. And the $3 million isn’t even the lion’s share of the $12.5 million proportioned to the 15th Council District.
Now I’m not saying that there isn’t a need amongst the numerous nonprofits vying for their share of this largess from the city’s police budget, but the idea of making it a social media popularity contest does really annoy me. If there was any real justice in the city’s $10.53 billion budget, (two-thirds of which, $6.68 billion, goes to General Fund revenues) a significant portion — probably double the current $12.5 million — would be spent annually for all the viable charities and community programs in each council district annually. You might also ask what’s up with the rest of the budget? There’s some $3.85 billion, which goes into a few hundred special purpose funds. You can see more of the LA Controller’s dashboard at lacontroller.org/financial-reports. The special funds are yet another matter that should be addressed and/or reallocated.
Clearly there is a growing need to deter crime in the Harbor Division, as there has been an upswing in the number of shootings and homicides in the past few months involving young men of color. The hotspots appear to be located in the low-income areas of San Pedro, Harbor City and Wilmington, with no known connection between them that the Los Angeles Police Department will admit. And yet there is no clear evidence that the rise in violent crime is connected in any way whatsoever to the size of the LAPD budget. Some would even argue that if we relieved the police from enforcement on homeless, mentally ill and addicted populations that we would get more crimes solved and possibly fewer officer involved shootings. See the current crime stats for your area here www.lapdonline.org/crime_mapping_and_compstat.
All of this discussion of what the intent of the transfer of money was for has become moot in that it ended up in Buscaino’s community grants pocket and is now conveniently ignored by the majority of the charities competing to curry votes. This, while the soon-departing councilman merrily goes about capturing voters’ email addresses to potentially be used for his mayoral campaign. That clearly would seem like an ethics violation — using public monies to create a database of emails for a political campaign?
This gives a kind of Trumpian flavor to a seemingly innocent giveaway.
So I’d just like to engage all of these charities, community programs and civic organizations at this point in a different challenge. What if all of this money, $12.5 million annually, had to be spent on programs that addressed social injustice issues? What if you actually had to come up with community based solutions to reimagine the LAPD budget that took some burden off of the police and then cured some part of the systemic injustices of our city? Just what would your non- profit do for that allotment?
Clearly some of our most successful non-profits do this now, but are often stretched to their limits by budgets and facilities. They spend precious resources holding fundraisers to bolster their finances and often many hours of volunteer time chasing large donors.
The answer to this question deserves a town hall meeting, not a social media footrace to be first with the most “stakeholder” followers voting. We don’t need a community grants charade and a campaign ploy. What is needed is a sustainable source of funding for our most engaged nonprofits who are actually doing some heroic work in our communities. Turning this into a competition is demeaning and trivializing in a very deceitful way.
And my last complaint about the Buscaino competition is that he never once consulted with any of the seven neighborhood councils in his district for any advice on what priorities they might have for these public monies. It’s all too obvious that if it were left to him, the $150 million would never have been transferred out of the LAPD budget in the first place as he was one of two votes on the city council opposing it.
It was 2:20 p.m. on June 6, 2020, and Steven Carrillo, a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant who belonged to the anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement, was on the run in the tiny mountain town of Ben Lomond, California.
With deputy sheriffs closing in, Carrillo texted his brother, Evan, asking him to tell his children he loved them and instructing him to give $50,000 to his fiancée. “I love you bro,” Carrillo signed off. Thinking the text message was a suicide note from a brother with a history of mental health troubles, Evan Carrillo quickly texted back: “Think about the ones you love.”
In fact, Steven Carrillo had a different objective, a goal he had written about on Facebook, discussed with other Boogaloo Bois and even scrawled out in his own blood as he hid from police that day. He wanted to incite a second Civil War in the United States by killing police officers he viewed as enforcers of a corrupt and tyrannical political order — officers he described as “domestic enemies” of the constitution he professed to revere.
Now, as he texted with his brother and watched deputies assemble so close to him that he could hear their conversations, Carrillo sent an urgent appeal to his fellow Boogaloo Bois. “Kit up and get here,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message that prosecutors say he sent to members of a heavily armed Boogaloo militia faction he had recently joined. The police, he texted, were after him.
“Take them out when they [are] coming in,” the text read, according to court documents.
Minutes later, prosecutors allege, Carrillo ambushed three deputy sheriffs, opening fire with a silenced automatic rifle and hurling a homemade pipe bomb from a concealed position on a steep embankment some 40 feet from the deputies. One deputy was shot dead, and a second was badly wounded by bomb shrapnel to his face and neck. When two California Highway Patrol officers arrived, Carrillo opened fire on them, too, police say, wounding one.
“The police are the guard dogs, ready to attack whenever the owner says, ‘Hey, sic ’em boy,’” Carrillo said in an interview, the first time he has spoken publicly since he was charged with murdering both the deputy sheriff in Ben Lomond and, a week earlier, a federal protective security officer at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland.
When Carrillo was finally subdued on June 6, cellphone footage captured him shouting at deputies as they led him away, “This is what I came to fight — I’m sick of these goddamn police.”
For Carrillo, that final frenzied expression of rage marked the culmination of a long slide into extremism, a journey that had begun a decade earlier with his embrace of the Tea Party movement, libertarianism and Second Amendment gun rights, before evolving into an ever-deepening involvement with paramilitary elements of the Boogaloo Bois. The militant group is known for the distinctive Hawaiian shirts its members wear at protests, often while brandishing AR-15s and agitating for the “Boog” — the group’s shorthand for civil war.
Carrillo’s arrest was also an omen of something larger and even more ominous: the rise of a violent insurrection movement across America led by increasingly extreme and aggressive militias that seek out opportunities to confront and even attack the government. Examples of this broader insurrection abound, from October’s foiled plot to abduct Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to the leading role militia groups such as the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers played in the violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
While militias have long been active in the United States, groups tracking extremist violence have reported notable increases in paramilitary activity over the past year, and the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence have all issued stark warnings in recent months about an elevated threat of violence from domestic extremist groups.
ProPublica, FRONTLINE and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program also uncovered new evidence that some military service members have embraced extremist ideology. The news organizations identified 15 active-duty members of the Air Force who, like Carrillo, openly promoted Boogaloo memes and messages on Facebook. On April 9, the Pentagon announced new measures to combat extremism inside the military. President Joe Biden’s administration, meanwhile, is increasing funding for the prevention of attacks by militias, white supremacists and other anti-government groups, the New York Times reported recently.
“These groups want to be instigators, the frontline of the civil war that is going to happen in this country,” said John Bennett, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Division at the time of Carrillo’s arrest.
“The scary thing,” he added, “is a lot of people in these groups that we’re seeing now are your neighbors.”
An examination of Carrillo’s life and his path to radicalization, based on extensive interviews with him, his family, his friends and his fiancée, along with a review of hundreds of pages of court records, previously undisclosed text messages and internal militia documents, revealed startling new details about the threat posed by the Boogaloo Bois.
Experts in extremist militia groups have long regarded the Boogaloo Bois as having no real hierarchy or leadership structure. But in piecing together Carrillo’s activities and militia contacts, law enforcement officials were stunned to discover the extent of coordination, planning and communications within the group.
Not only was Carrillo in regular contact with a wide range of prominent Boogaloo Boi figures around the country, records and interviews show, but two months before his arrest Carrillo had joined up with a heavily armed, highly organized and extremely secretive Boogaloo militia group in California that called itself the “Grizzly Scouts.”
“This group was different,” Jim Hart, the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, where Ben Lomond is located, said in an interview. “There was a definite chain of command and a line of leadership within this group.”
In a federal indictment unsealed this past April, prosecutors said Carrillo and four members of the Grizzly Scouts, including its leader, “discussed tactics involving killing of police officers and other law enforcement.” The indictment also alleges that the same four Grizzly Scouts tried to thwart a criminal investigation into their activities by destroying evidence of their communications with Carrillo and each other.
In nearly two hours of interviews conducted in Spanish and English, as well as in a letter dictated to his fiancée from Santa Rita Jail east of Oakland, Carrillo talked about the evolution of his anti-government ideology. While he would not discuss any of the criminal charges against him, Carrillo spoke at length about his continuing allegiance to the Boogaloo Bois and patiently explained how the movement’s “revolutionary thought” could offer a rationale for attacks against law enforcement officers who he or any other Boogaloo Boi thinks are violating the Constitution. “I pledged to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said.
Not once did Carrillo express pity or remorse over the deaths of Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller, the deputy sheriff, whose wife was pregnant with their second child, or David Patrick Underwood, the security officer at the Oakland federal building, who made a habit of donating to local baseball youth organizations.
Steven Carrillo is charged with murdering a Santa Cruz County deputy sheriff and a security officer guarding Oakland’s federal courthouse. Photo by FRONTLINE.
Becoming a Boog
Born in Los Angeles in 1988, Carrillo had an early childhood marked by episodes of domestic violence. According to family members, his father, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who worked as a tree trimmer, repeatedly assaulted his mother, who was from Burbank, California. Given up by his parents as a toddler, Carrillo and Evan, his older brother, were taken in by other members of their family, and at age 5 he was sent with his brother to a tiny rural village in Jalisco, Mexico, where they lived on their grandparents’ farm. A couple of years later, the Carrillo boys returned to California to live with their father, eventually settling in Ben Lomond, a remote two-stoplight town in the Santa Cruz Mountains. After graduating from San Lorenzo Valley High School, Carrillo said he joined the Air Force in 2009, the same year he married his childhood sweetheart. In an interview, Carrillo’s father denied the family’s allegations of domestic violence, but otherwise declined to comment. Carrillo’s mother would not speak on the record for this article.
According to Carrillo, his ideas about politics and the role of government began to take shape in the Air Force. “Before, I was confined to a little bubble,” he said in an interview, referring to his upbringing in Ben Lomond, population 7,000. Once he joined the Air Force and met others from around the world, “talking to people changed my whole views,” he said. He followed a well-worn path that began with a fierce attachment to gun rights, which in turn led him to libertarianism, and then an enthusiastic embrace of the Tea Party movement.
By 2012, Carrillo was a registered Republican who supported Gary Johnson, the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, and Ron Paul. He attended Second Amendment rallies and advocated for expanded gun rights on a Facebook page set up for a group of self-described Christian “patriots.”
In 2015, while stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, Carrillo was in a car accident that left him hospitalized with a concussion and head lacerations. Family and friends said the crash affected his mental health. “He wasn’t himself,” Evan Carrillo said in an interview. “He was usually very talkative, very social. I was the quiet one. And now it was like talking to a wall.”
At the time, Carrillo was a security forces officer in the Air Force. According to his siblings, his mental health issues were serious enough that the Air Force took Carrillo’s gun away for several months. (The Air Force said it could not immediately locate the records it needed to comment about this incident.)
He became even more withdrawn, family members said, after his wife committed suicide in 2018 shortly after he confessed to cheating on her yet again. He spoke of wanting to kill himself and started living out of a van, leaving it to his in-laws to look after his two young children. “He was just in complete disconnect of how people should live and who he was,” said his sister, Ruby.
And yet months after his wife’s suicide, Air Force records show, Carrillo was serving as an apprentice in Phoenix Raven, an elite Air Force security unit that is dispatched to protect aircraft and air crews in global hotspots. At the time, Carrillo was stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, but his apprenticeship with the Ravens also gave him special training in combat techniques, explosives and advanced firearms proficiency at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst near Trenton, New Jersey.
According to the Air Force, Carrillo completed the 24-day Phoenix Raven qualification course in New Jersey in late 2018, then returned to Travis Air Force Base to become “fully mission qualified as a Raven.” From July to November of 2019, Carrillo served as a Phoenix Raven Team Leader in Kuwait and other countries in the region, the Air Force said.
In an interview, Carrillo said he was introduced to the political ideology of the Boogaloo Bois through friends in the Air Force and on the Internet. The 15 active-duty airmen identified by the news organizations as openly promoting Boogaloo content on Facebook worked at bases around the world, including eight who, like Carrillo, served in the Air Force security branch.
When asked about these active-duty airmen, the Air Force said in a statement that personnel who participate in extremist groups are in “direct violation” of Defense Department regulations. “Supporting extremist ideology, especially that which calls for violence or the deprivation of civil liberties of certain members of society, violates the oath every service member takes to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the Air Force statement said.
On April 9, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Pentagon to take a series of immediate steps to counter extremism in the military.
It is unclear precisely when Carrillo began associating with the Boogaloo Bois, but according to a sworn statement from an FBI agent he was in direct contact with prominent figures in the group by December 2019.
The next month, prosecutors allege, he bought a $15 device that converts AR-15 semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic machine guns, making the purchase through a website that advertised to Boogaloo Facebook groups and promised to donate some of its profits to the family of Duncan Lemp, who became a Boogaloo martyr after he was killed in a police raid. Carrillo also began incorporating popular militia memes and imagery into his Facebook posts, and was in touch online with a growing circle of Boogaloo Bois. “A lot of people in the movement knew who Steve was,” Mike Dunn, the leader of a Boogaloo faction in Virginia that calls itself the Last Sons of Liberty, said in an interview.
Carrillo’s girlfriend, Silvia Amaya, said she noticed a distinct shift in Carrillo’s behavior at around this time. He struggled with insomnia and was increasingly “shut off in his own world,” she said in an interview. He talked frequently about how “a war would start soon,” echoing the core belief of Boogaloo followers.
The Grizzly Scouts
On March 14, 2020, prosecutors allege in court filings, Carrillo received a text message from Ivan Hunter, a Boogaloo Bois leader in Texas. The message reads like an instruction to get ready for action. “Start drafting that op,” Hunter wrote to Carrillo. “The one we talked about in December. I’ma green light some shit.” In response, Carrillo wrote, “Sounds good, bro!” Soon after, Carrillo sought to join the Grizzly Scouts, a newly-formed California militia group that had proclaimed its “affinity for Hawaiian shirts,” the best-known symbol of the Boogaloo Bois, in its profile page on mymilitia.com.
The Grizzly Scouts, also known as the 1st Detachment of the 1st California Scouts, are based in Turlock, a small city about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco. According to federal prosecutors, the Grizzly Scouts had a Facebook group called “/K/alifornia Kommando” that proclaimed their desire “to gather like minded Californians who can network and establish local goon squads.” (Among the Boogaloo Bois, the word “goon” refers to a single member.)
On April 10, 2020, according to records obtained by the news organizations, a member of the Grizzly Scouts who goes by the alias BoojerBro1776 emailed Carrillo an extensive packet of application materials, 31 pages in all. (“On boarding,” read the email’s subject line.) The documents, never before publicly disclosed, are an odd blend of corporate instruction manual and chilling playbook for armed military action.
New recruits were asked to abide by a social media policy and to sign both a non-disclosure agreement and a release of liability. The application itself offered this bit of corporate boilerplate: “If this application leads to employment, I understand that false or misleading information in my application or interview may result in my release.”
At the same time, the documents make clear that the Grizzly Scouts intended to do more than simply meet up in the woods for occasional target practice. A policy on the Grizzly Scouts’ dress code begins this way: “Since the time man realized we could kill each other to gain something, men have donned uniforms and have gone to battle.” The documents, which describe the Grizzly Scouts as an “armed Constitutional militia,” go on to decree that black will be worn “while conducting covert/clandestine operations,” and stress the importance of wearing approved Grizzly Scout uniforms “to mitigate any potential battlefield confusion.”
“Our Areas of Operations can take us from the dirt to downtown in a blink of an eye,” the document states.
Onboarding Documents
A policy memo on the Grizzlies’ dress code describes enforcing “discipline within ranks” for warfronts “anywhere you can think of.” A “Scout Selection Assessment” scores candidates on their training in “unarmed combat,” “firearms,” “first aid” and “specialties.”
The documents also make clear that Carrillo’s military background, in particular his advanced combat and weapons training, provided exactly the qualities the Grizzly Scouts wanted in its recruits. The Grizzly Scouts’ members — law enforcement officials say the group had attracted 27 recruits — were given military ranks and roles based on their level of military training and prior combat experience. Some Grizzly Scouts were designated “snipers,” others were assigned to “clandestine operations,” and some were medics or drivers. Whatever their role, all were expected to maintain go kits that included “combat gauze” and both a “primary” and “secondary” weapon.
Two weeks after receiving his application materials, Carrillo joined the Grizzly Scouts for a weekend of training — or “church,” in the group’s vernacular. In keeping with the Grizzly Scouts’ desire for secrecy, Carrillo was vague with Amaya, his girlfriend, about where he had been and whom he was with. Aware of his history of cheating, Amaya imagined the worst and insisted he take her along the next time he planned to meet with his mysterious new friends. “I was very angry and jealous,” she said.
On May 9, the couple loaded their car with guns and bulletproof vests and headed toward a ranch in Mariposa County, not far from Yosemite National Park, to meet the Grizzly Scouts for another training session. Along the way they met up with Jessie Rush, the “detachment commander” of the Grizzly Scouts, whose LinkedIn profile says he is a U.S. Army veteran now employed by a private security company. Rush, also known as “Grizzly Actual,” reminded them not to take photos, but otherwise raised no objections to Amaya’s presence as the Grizzly Scouts went through various shooting drills.
Rush, one of the four Grizzly Scouts now charged with concealing evidence of their communications with Carrillo, declined to comment.
When asked in an interview about his involvement with the Grizzly Scouts, Carrillo responded evasively. “How did you figure that out?” he asked in Spanish when first pressed about his ties to the group. Later, Carrillo professed little understanding of either the aims or activities of the Grizzly Scouts. “We were just getting to know each other,” he said.
According to prosecutors, however, Carrillo held the rank of “staff sergeant” in the Grizzly Scouts, and, as with other members of the group, he was given an animal nom de guerre: “Armadillo.”
Combat Mode
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25, 15 days after Carrillo’s last training session with the Grizzly Scouts, galvanized the Boogaloo faithful. In online postings, they spoke of Floyd’s death not only as an example of egregious police misconduct but as an opportunity to stoke chaos that could be blamed on the Black Lives Matter movement. The resulting racial unrest, they hoped, would accelerate the long-awaited “Boogaloo” — the final conflict, a second Civil War.
Two days after Floyd’s death, Carrillo’s Boogaloo friend Ivan Hunter drove from Texas to Minneapolis. Armed with an AK-47-style semiautomatic rifle, Hunter fired off 13 rounds into an abandoned Minneapolis police precinct where hundreds of protesters had gathered, prosecutors allege. Prosecutors say Hunter yelled, “Justice for Floyd!” before disappearing into the night with several other Boogaloo Bois who had come to Minneapolis to provoke civil strife. Hunter, eventually arrested in San Antonio, was charged with participating in a riot and is being held without bail; his defense lawyer declined to comment.
For Carrillo, Floyd’s death confirmed his view of the police as little more than willing instruments of a corrupt and tyrannical political order bent on destroying the Constitution. “I felt hate more than anything,” he said in an interview when asked about Floyd’s killing.
“The Boogaloo revolution is against the government,” he explained, “but the police is basically the government’s dog on a leash.”
Amaya said Floyd’s killing “unleashed the worst” in Carrillo, who in the days that followed behaved, she recalled, like a man who was preparing for battle. “It’s a great opportunity to target the specialty soup bois,” Carrillo wrote on his Facebook page on May 28, using Boogaloo slang for federal law enforcement agencies. That night he shocked Amaya by proposing marriage, presenting her with a $25 turquoise blue silicone ring and promising to replace it with a diamond ring later.
The next day, Carrillo left Amaya’s house. According to prosecutors, he picked up another Boogaloo Boi, Robert Justus Jr., and drove to downtown Oakland. It was 9:15 p.m., and crowds had gathered on Oakland’s streets to protest and mourn Floyd’s death. Meanwhile, blocks away, the two men drove a white Ford van around Oakland’s federal courthouse, where David Patrick Underwood, a federal protective security officer, staffed a two-person guard hut. Prosecutors say Carrillo was in the back seat near the sliding door, carrying a short-barreled rifle, a “ghost weapon” with no serial number, making it almost impossible to trace. According to the FBI, it was an illegal machine gun optimized to fire bursts of shots automatically, with an added silencer.
Hours before, Carrillo had posted on Facebook that if “it’s not kicking off in your hood then start it.” Now, according to prosecutors, Justus drove toward the guard hut while Carrillo slid the van’s door open and fired multiple bursts, killing Underwood and seriously wounding a second guard. “Did you see how they fucking fell?” Carrillo said as the van drove off, according to an account Justus gave investigators after turning himself in.
“In his mind, Steven was on a mission just like in the Air Force, except the enemy was the police,” Amaya said.
A lawyer for Justus, who has been charged with aiding and abetting Underwood’s murder, declined to discuss his client’s alleged involvement with the Boogaloo Bois. Instead he pointed to court filings that describe what Justus told investigators. According to those records, Justus insisted to investigators that he felt he had to participate because he was “trapped in the van.” He also claimed he told Carrillo, “I am not cool with this,” and tried to think of ways to “talk Carrillo out of his plan,” only for Carrillo to respond by pointing a rifle at him and asking if he was “a cop or a rat.”
The shooting of both guards aligned neatly with Boogaloo ideology. “Use their anger to fuel our fire,” Carrillo had written on Facebook that morning. “We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.” Sure enough, some conservative commentators rushed to blame Underwood’s murder on antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.
Four hours after Underwood’s death, Carrillo received a text message from Hunter urging him to attack police buildings, court records show.
Carrillo’s response: “I did better lol.”
That weekend, when Carrillo returned to Amaya’s house, he seemed “on edge and distracted,” she recalled. He asked for a week’s leave at Travis Air Force base and sent $200 to Hunter, congratulating him for “doing good shit out there.” Most of the time, she said, Carrillo was glued to Facebook, following the news and commenting on viral videos of police clashing with protesters. “Who needs antifa to start riots when the police do it for you,” read one of his posts.
In the days after the Oakland shooting, Carrillo communicated regularly with Rush and other members of the Grizzly Scouts on a WhatsApp group they called “209 Goon HQ,” prosecutors say. (The area code for Mariposa County, home turf of the Grizzly Scouts, is 209.) Via WhatsApp, they repeatedly made references to the “Boog” and “discussed committing acts of violence against law enforcement,” prosecutors allege.
On Saturday, June 6, Carrillo drove to his father’s house in Ben Lomond. It was about 2 p.m. when Damon Gutzwiller, a sergeant in the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, and two more deputies arrived at the property, which was guarded by a dog wearing a bulletproof vest and monitored by security cameras. They were responding to a call from a passerby who had spotted a suspicious white Ford van loaded with what appeared to be firearms and bomb-making material. When the deputies learned the van was registered to Carrillo’s father, they pulled up to his house to question him.
The deputies did not realize Carrillo was above them, perched just 40 feet away in a covered, well-concealed position up a steep embankment, aiming the same “ghost” weapon that prosecutors say he had used in Oakland.
Based on the WhatsApp text messages that prosecutors say he sent at this time, Carrillo appeared to be trying to guide his fellow Grizzly Scouts on how they could join forces with him in a coordinated attack on the law enforcement officers gathering to search for him.
“Theyre waiting for reenforcements,” he texted.
And this: “Theres inly one road in/out. Take them out when theyre coming in.”
According to police, Carrillo “sniped” Gutzwiller, killing him with a single shot to the chest. Another deputy was also shot in the chest, but was saved by his bulletproof vest.
During the mayhem and bloodshed that followed, Carrillo engaged in a running gun battle with law enforcement officers, hurling pipe bombs and hijacking vehicles. In his own blood, he scrawled “BOOG” and “I became unreasonable” and “Stop the Duopoly” — all common Boogaloo slogans — on the hood of a car he had stolen. And at some point, he sent one more WhatsApp message to his fellow Grizzly Scouts: “Dudes i offed a fed.”
For all of Carrillo’s urgent appeals for reinforcements, there is no indication any Grizzly Scout tried to come to his aid. While questioning Carrillo’s fiancée in August, Henry Montes, an investigator for the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office, offered a possible explanation. Some members of the Grizzly Scouts, he said, had told investigators that Carrillo was too extreme for them. “The things that he was saying made them think he wants to kill policemen,” Montes told Amaya, according to a recording of the interview obtained by the news organizations.
“We spoke with some people who were no longer part of that group because they were afraid of Steven,” Montes said.
A Jailhouse Wedding
In interviews, Carrillo’s siblings describe a brother who suffered from years of severe mental health problems and didn’t get the support and medical treatment he needed from the Air Force. “I could see his pain,” Carrillo’s sister, Ruby, said.
Over two hours of interviews, Carrillo himself did not attribute any of his actions to mental illness. Instead, he forthrightly proclaimed his support for the Boogaloo Bois and repeatedly challenged what he views as misconceptions about the group.
“I just want to say, the Boogaloo movement, you know, there’s a lot in the paper that I feel like people don’t understand,” he said. “And that is the Boogaloo movement, it’s all inclusive. It includes everyone. It’s not a thing about race. It’s about people that love freedom, liberty, and they’re unhappy with the level of control that the government takes over our lives. So it’s just a movement, it’s a thought about freedom. It’s just a complete love for freedom.”
Meanwhile, as Carrillo sits in jail awaiting trial, his political evolution continues. In a letter he wrote to reporters in October, he referred to Joe Biden as a man who “sniffs kids,” echoing QAnon, a pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theory that falsely accuses the Democratic Party of running a Satan-worshipping child sex-trafficking ring.
Carrillo’s defense lawyers declined to comment.
Amaya continues to stand by Carrillo. “I know him, and I think he can change,” she said.
On Christmas Day the couple exchanged vows through a video call from the Santa Rita Jail. “I love your lips, baby,” Carrillo told her.
From the famous to the infamous, San Pedro has always been a place people come to blend in and disappear — writers, artists, gangsters, fraudsters, accused war criminals and apparently, accused murderers.
Paul Flores didn’t exactly have the luxury of anonymity when he escaped to San Pedro trying to flee the cloud of suspicion over the disappearance of Kristin Smart 25 years ago. Flores arrived to find the telephone poles hung with wanted posters that featured side-by-side photos of him and Smart and a $75,000 reward for information about Smart’s disappearance or Flores’ involvement.
Jason Herring saw the posters and recognized Flores as a nearby neighbor. Concerned, he kept his distance. “I mean the guy is two doors down,” Herring said, “so [the flyer] really doesn’t want you to welcome someone to the neighborhood, right? Who knows what’s going on in his head.” Prompted by that uncertainty, Herring responded to the email address on the poster. In reply, he was told to stay aware and keep a lookout for anything unusual.
Herring never got to know Flores, deciding he’d rather mind his own business than play detective in a potential murder investigation.
Being friendly with Flores struck him as problematic.
“Maybe he is a nice guy, you could become biased, so I just maintained a disconnected [distance],” Herring said.
Nonetheless, Herring and Flores occasionally crossed paths. “He’d say hello. He was always pleasant,” said Herring. “He was never a crazy, never a bad kind of seeming person. Just kind of quiet. He would walk his dogs in the trails behind the houses here. That’s it.”
When Cal Poly University student Kristin Smart disappeared in 1996, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff considered Paul Ruben Flores merely “an avenue of investigation.” In a story about the case, the Five Cities Times Press Recorder published what looked like a high school yearbook photo of Flores during his senior year of high school — a fresh faced, bright-eyed teen with a bright future ahead of him. This was a complete contrast to the drunken, misogynistic creature with a reputation of preying on women he was portrayed as by those who encountered him in the years that followed.
A team of sheriff’s investigators searched Flores’ rural Arroyo Grande home. Flores initially cooperated with campus police during the early stages of the investigation. He was also questioned by investigators at the county’s district attorney’s office.
During the second interview, Flores walked out before investigators from the district attorney’s office finished questioning him.
People who attended Arroyo Grande High with Flores remembered him as a friendly student, and one girl who said she knew him only casually mentioned that he always greeted her by name.
Those same students doubted Flores had anything to do with Smart’s disappearance. One girl noted the physical differences between them — that Smart was 6 feet-1 inch tall and weighed 145 pounds while Flores was 5 feet-10 inches with a slight build.
But Flores was apparently witnessed showering at 5 a.m. on the morning of Smart’s disappearance and campus police noted he was sporting a black eye and cuts on his knee.
Flores reportedly told investigators he received the injuries while playing basketball but admitted he lied when confronted with his friends’ recollections that he had those injuries when he arrived to play.
About a month after Smart’s disappearance, detectives searched Flores’ dorm room with two cadaver dogs. Two dogs led police to a corner of Flores’s mattress indicating a dead body had been there. Authorities said at the time they didn’t know if Smart died there or if she was placed there for an undetermined period of time.
This was enough to get a warrant to search Flores’ Arroyo Grande home. Investigators were looking for evidence that would allow them to arrest Flores, perhaps Kristin’s dorm key or bloodstained clothing. Instead, the items they recovered included a police baton, three copies of the San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune containing articles about Kristin’s disappearance and a receipt for Flores’ dormitory room.
In October 1996, Flores was called before a grand jury to answer questions regarding Kristin Smart. He remained as tight-lipped as he’d been since walking out on an interview with sheriff’s department investigators. When the Smart family filed a $40 million wrongful death suit in November 1997, Flores invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The suit was not allowed to move forward until Smart was declared legally dead in 2001.
But without a body or enough evidence to directly connect Flores to Smart’s disappearance and presumed murder, investigators ultimately turned to psychics. The psychics didn’t seem to agree on the location of Smart’s body at the time, but they all agreed that Smart was sexually assaulted by a young man on the night of her disappearance and was killed.
Although he had not been charged with a crime, Flores has been living the life of a fugitive, unceasingly trailed by news clippings of Kristin Smart’s disappearance from the Smart family’s supporters. He tried to join the Navy. It said, “No, thanks.” He moved to Irvine and found work at a video store, a restaurant and a fast food joint. He was let go every time when the dark cloud of Smart’s disappearance emerged around him.
In 2006, Paul Flores’ mother, Susan, filed a lawsuit against the Smart family, but that only created an opportunity for the authorities to get a warrant to dig up the backyard of her Arroyo Grande home. If the Smart family and their supporters weren’t able to find peace, they made sure Flores didn’t have peace, either.
An international online community numbering in the tens of thousands has continued hashing and rehashing the details of the Kristin Smart case and keeping tabs on Flores, from his collection of DUI convictions to his latest living quarters in Southern California. One of them, an amateur sleuth with a podcast called In Our Backyard, recently breathed new life into the case by retracing events and interviewing retired reporters, detectives and witnesses, which eventually led to new search warrants. Finally, on April 21, almost 25 years after Kristin Smart disappeared, Paul Flores was charged with her murder and his father, Ruben Flores, was charged as an accessory. Paul was denied bail and had to await trial in a San Luis Obispo jail while his father was released on reduced bail from $250,000 to $50,000.
Kristin Smart’s parents sued the elder Flores accusing him of intentional infliction of emotional distress, alleging that he moved Smart’s body from beneath his deck last year to try to cover up her 1996 killing.
James Murphy, attorney for Stan and Denise Smart, filed the lawsuit within hours of Ruben Flores’ release from San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s custody.
Perhaps, in a twist of fate, Flores charges and potential conviction could lie in three sexual assault cases involving him in which charge were never brought.
Last month the Los Angeles Times detailed a case 14 years ago in which police in Redondo Beach were called to a hospital where a woman had come after waking up in a stranger’s bed, naked and with no memory of what had happened. She believed she had been raped.
“An examination confirmed she’d had sex with a man. Police uploaded his DNA profile to a law enforcement database and, a few years later, it matched to a name: Paul Ruben Flores,” the report stated. The story went on to document Flores’ struggles with alcohol and awkward if not aggressive interactions with women. Flores is being taken down by a narrative formed 25 years ago about how and why Kristin Smart was killed.
San Pedro Reaction
When Flores’ house was raided last year, Herring said it seemed as if everyone in the neighborhood read up on it more and was expecting the other shoe to drop.
“We just assumed they finally have gotten enough evidence to press charges because of last time,” Herring said, likely referring to the Feb. 5, 2020 search that was executed on his San Pedro home. Detectives had also served search warrants on the homes of Flores’ father, mother and sister. They returned to Flores’ home two months later with another warrant. During that search, they found physical evidence “related to the murder of Kristin Smart,” the sheriff said, without elaborating.
“They raided the house, inspected his house, his cars and they held him overnight, then he was back,” said Herring “So all of us in the neighborhood were kind of like, ‘Well, okay. They don’t have enough yet, but when they do, they’ll probably come get him.’ Sure enough, when [they came the next time], we were like, ‘Oh I guess they got it.”
When the authorities came back to arrest Flores, there was no shock, said Herring
“You knew the guy was accused, but without further evidence you know the person’s innocent until proven guilty. You know it was a long time ago. Who knows what really happened?” he said.
“You don’t have the right to imprison a person over innuendo, but when they came and started doing a deeper investigation, you knew there was some trail of evidence they were following.”
Herring doesn’t think there will be any relief until there is a verdict in the case and justice is properly served.
Herring believes Flores’ dogs were taken in by one of the neighbors because they were just left in the house.
“No one was taking care of them,” Herring said. “Last week, someone broke into [Flores’] house. The police came again, we were curious if it was another raid.”
It turned out the police were responding to a report of a break in.
“I guess [I] saw on the news his [house] was empty so it became a target,” said Herring. “[The police] were here for about a half an hour and left.”
Paul and Ruben Flores entered not guilty pleas on behalf of their clients during an arraignment hearing last month. Both defendants waived their right to a speedy preliminary hearing.
A pre-preliminary hearing was set for May 17 at 1:30 p.m. and a preliminary hearing date was tentatively set for July 6.
“As through this world I travel, I meet lots of funny men.Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
—Woody Guthrie, Pretty Boy Floyd The Outlaw
Almost 3 million people were victims of serious violent crime in 1994. But seven years later, that number had been cut in half, and it’s been less than that ever since, even as the U.S. population has grown by 70 million. The burglary rate in 2019 was one-third of what it was in 1994. Yet, that’s not how most Americans see things, according to John Gramlich, a senior writer/editor at Pew Research Center. And the magnitude of crime is just one of many ways we fail to understand it properly.
“In 20 of 24 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before,” Gramlich wrote last November. The misperception that crime continues running rampant is a key component of Trumpism, Gramlich noted: “Trump vowed to end ‘American carnage’ in his inaugural address in 2017. This [time], he ran for reelection on a platform of ‘law and order.’”
Of course, serious violent crime actually increased under Donald Trump, though still far below 1990s highs. Misperceptions about crime — how much there is, even what it is, who does it, who’s victimized — have been central to Trump’s politics, and remain central to the GOP today, with its laser focus on the virtually non-existent crime of voter fraud. At the same time, Democrats have been taking steps to fight two examples of crimes not commonly perceived as such — wage theft (targeting low-income workers most frequently) and high-income tax evasion — both white collar crimes that Republicans have helped to enable.
While violent crime and property crime dominate most public discussions, criminologists commonly recognize at least three other major categories: white-collar crime, organized crime, and “moral,” consensual or victimless crime. The common fixation on violent and property crime presents a distorted picture. But even in this regard, police aren’t terribly effective. “Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. are not reported to police, and most of the crimes that are reported are not solved,” Gramlich reported. Across the years he considered — 1995 to 2015 — police “solved” 18% to 25% of violent crimes, and 5% to 8% of property crimes. But conviction rates (even with plea deals) are even lower.
“Crime” as rationale for social division
To help understand where we are, Dr. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann’s book, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America shows how mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and the roll-back of the welfare state were intertwined phenomena, which helped create today’s sharpened political divide, fueled in part by a narrowed focus on violent and property crime. “Advancing tough policies helped absolve government of responsibility for marginalized people’s well-being and accountability to their voices,” she wrote.
The divide between “worthy” and “unworthy” citizens is perhaps best captured in the realm of consensual, victimless, or so-called “moral crimes,” like drug or alcohol use, gambling, prostitution, etc. For example, Blacks and whites use drugs in similar proportions, but Blacks are far more often arrested, charged, tried and imprisoned. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.” While just over 10% of people over 12 were victims of a property crime in 2019, 11.7% of them used an illegal drug in the previous month in 2018, according to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse (lifetime use was 49.2%). Even ignoring multiple uses, this makes drug use alone 12 times more common than all property crimes, however minor. When such commonplace acts are criminalized, selective criminalization is inevitable. The fact that it’s racially selective reflects broader systemic racism — which is the broader focus of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I do believe that the social organizing, particularly the Movement for Black Lives, has profoundly unsettled the assumptions that masqueraded for so long as ‘commonsense’: that policing and prisons are the inevitable response to social harm,” Kohler-Hausmann told Random Lengths News. “While there were always voices challenging the exponential growth in the penal system, calls for defunding the police and prisons are now being heard and debated even in Congress and mainstream media outlets. This is remarkable historically and a testament to power of recent organizing and mobilization.”
The case of wage theft
Such calls also raise the basic question of what qualifies as a crime, and why. In 2019, there were 122,641 incidents of domestic violence, compared to 192,610 incidents of stranger violence, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. Yet, for most of American history, domestic violence wasn’t even regarded as a crime, unless it reached the level of homicide, and parents hitting children is commonly seen as “discipline,” not “violence,” so that incident figure is surely too low (children under 12 are not included).
Property crimes are far more common than violent crimes — there were three times as many serious property crimes from 2015 to 2019, according to the NCVS. But what qualifies as serious? Or even a crime? A 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, based on data from 2013 to 2015, found that employers stole an estimated $15 billion through one form of wage theft alone: paying less than the legal minimum wage. The number of victims was about 4.5 million — roughly equal to the number of victims of all serious crimes in the NCVS for that year. That works out to roughly $3,300 per victim, well above the threshold for felony theft in every state. (It runs from $200 in New Jersey to $2,500 in Texas and Wisconsin. It’s $1,500 or less in 46 states.) So going by money alone, this would almost double the number of serious crimes.
There’s just one thing. Wage theft isn’t even considered a crime, outside of two states — Colorado and Minnesota — that made it a crime in 2019. It’s a tort — something you can be sued for, but not sent to jail, or even fined for. A bill introduced in the California Assembly by Lorena Gonzalez (AB 1003) would bring the number of states to three — but it has yet to pass.
After the EPI study was published, Amy Traub, an associate director at Demos, a progressive think tank, wrote a report comparing the scope and impact of wage theft with that of shoplifting in the retail industry. The losses due to minimum wage theft and shoplifting are virtually identical, she noted: $15 billion vs. $14.7 billion. But the penalties are wildly disproportionate.
While shoplifting can land you in prison, “The greatest civil federal penalty for wage theft is repaying the amount in stolen wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages,” the report stated. “Even for repeat or willful violations, the maximum penalty is $1,100.”
The amounts spent on crime deterrence are similarly lopsided. “Even though wage theft is more prevalent than shoplifting and can have catastrophic consequences for working people, their families, and communities, we devote far fewer resources to combatting it than to surveilling and punishing people suspected of shoplifting,” Taub said.
As for the broader implications, she said, “One powerful example of structural racism in our economy is the difference between how our society treats the crimes committed by powerful corporations against working people — especially Black and brown workers who are more likely to have wages stolen — and how we treat much smaller infractions like shoplifting, where people of color are more likely to be racially profiled.
Dark side of white collar crime
Wage theft is just one example of corporate white collar crime. The online book, Social Problems: Continuity and Change, published by the University of Minnesota Libraries, provides a broader overview:
The toll of white-collar crime, both financial and violent, is difficult to estimate, but by all accounts it exceeds the economic loss and death and injury from all street crime combined. These figures compare to an economic loss of less than $20 billion from property crime and a death toll of about 17,000 from homicide.
Such comparisons are rarely made in discussions of crime, in large part because of the agenda-shaping processes described in Getting Tough. But it actually vastly understates the case. Consider just one unsafe product: cigarettes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.”
None of those deaths are considered a homicide, of course. But they are just as dead, anyway. And there are so many more of them. And tobacco companies have been knowingly pushing them despite evidence of their deadly impact from as early as 1938. As for economic costs, the CDC places them as “more than $300 billion a year,” in medical costs and lost productivity. What’s more, state governments are only spending a small fraction of what they should to prevent these deaths and losses.
Democrats are trying to do something about another significant form of white collar crime: tax evasion. Since 2010, Congressional Republicans have slashed the Internal Revenue Service’s budget, reducing its number of auditors below 10,000 for the first time since 1953, when our economy was one seventh its current size. The number of audits dropped 42% from 2010 to 2017, and even basic functions — like pursuing people who don’t file returns — have plummeted.
It’s now estimated that the tax gap — the amount owed, but not paid — will be anywhere from $7 to $10 trillion over the next 10 years. “Right now, the wealthiest one percent are responsible for roughly 70 percent of the ‘tax gap’ — the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid. It’s time every American pay their fair share.” Rep. Ro Khanna said in a Feb. 17 press statement. He was announcing the Stop CHEATERS Act that he said would “raise an estimated $1.2 trillion in revenue over 10 years, by investing $100 billion into the IRS over the next decade.”
That would still leave an enormous tax gap, but it would reverse a decade of GOP complicity in helping wealthy tax cheats break the law. What’s really needed, though, is a much more expansive understanding of crime, focused on proactive protection from harm — whatever form it takes.
Recently, I interviewed journalist/author Mike Sager, discussing his writing process. Sager had published two books in quick succession in September 2020 and February 2021. The first book was Shaman: The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda and the other, Hunting Marlon Brando: A True Story.
Sager and I go back some years. The last time we met was at a conference for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies about a decade ago in San Francisco. Sager got his start at Creative Loafing, a monthly alt-weekly serving the Atlanta metropolitan area covering local news, politics, arts, entertainment, food, music and events. His temperament and sensibility as a writer has been tuned in that direction ever since, despite the hallow halls of journalism he found his way into.
Sager is a best-selling author and award-winning reporter, he is a former Washington Post staff writer and contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. He has written for Esquire for more than 30 years, and he is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including anthologies, novels, biographies and textbooks in 2010. He won the national magazine award for profile writing and many of his stories have inspired films and documentaries. He is now the editor and publisher of his own publishing house, Sager Group, LLC, in which many titles such as Shaman and Hunting Marlon Brando are now available.
Back when we had talked at the altweekly conference in 2012, I read a 6,000-word profile of television personality Brooke Burke he had published in Esquire magazine under the headline, “The Secret Life of a Beautiful Woman.” The writing was such that it caused me to scratch my head and say to myself, “My, this writer certainly has a curious appetite for strange stories.”
The hardest part about writing is sitting down and just doing it. I’m reminded that even John Steinbeck, the famous novelist, struggled with writing and you can see it in a lot of things. Some of his novels were just brilliant and well-crafted and some of his other stuff is difficult. You can see him struggling with it and then documenting the struggle in some ways.
It was in this space I wanted to engage Sager about Shaman and then continue it on with the rather oddly funny Marlon Brando book. For me, the thing that sort of connected Sager’s two recent books was the fact that in both instances, he never actually got to interview the subjects of the books.
For the first 20 years of his career, Sager said he basically wrote about dead people.
“Everyone I ever wrote about was dead,” he said. “One of my most famous stories, ‘The Devil and John Holmes’ [the famous porn star] became Boogie Nights and Wonderland movies. You know, he was dead when I started and, you become, as a journalist, well acquainted with writing about people who are no longer with us.”
Sager recounted the initial assignment that led to his writing his first profile of Carlos Castaneda, the Mexican American author of The Teachings of Don Juan. Castaneda wrote a series of books describing his training in shamanism, particularly with a group whose lineage descended from the Toltecs. Sager explained that he got assigned the Castaneda story because Castaneda’s adopted son went to the Los Angeles Times and published a little story. This was during a period of time Sager was freelancing for Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire magazines at any given time where he was earning $6 or $7 a word for a feature story.
Sager explains that the editors at these magazines weren’t “silk-stocking folks.”
“And so by a series of circumstances that are too long to go into, I was working at GQ in the mid 1990s and the second-in-command guy left and went to Esquire and it caused all these dominoes to fall — one of which was me getting shit-canned for no reason by the powers that be,” Sager said.
“I started from nothing, but at some point I was making kind of like what a small town internist would probably make for doing these stories, which is like amazing,” Sager said.
Sager explained that he moved to LA, to California City, to San Diego, and got shit-canned (fired) and was in need of work. His old Rolling Stone editor, Bob Love, said, “We’d like you to do a 30,000 word story … investigative thing on this story,” Love just hands him, this was still the early days of the internet, an emailed clip, something that so often happens with many stories Sager explained.
“And so I agreed to do this massive story for like 30 grand and I had a wife and a small kid and a new house and I just did a bunch of landscaping, and I just got fired…”
Sager would have just continued on if I didn’t just remember what I wanted to know from him.
“Yeah, but what about the writing process?” I asked him.
As a fellow writer, I was curious because it’s evident that there was a significant amount of research done about Carlos Castaneda before Sager even started. That sense was even more evident in the Brando book. But what I wanted to know was, what was Sager’s actual process in terms of research and then locating subjects to interview who would not necessarily be the obvious suspects?
Sager finally comes back around and says, “I like to teach. When I teach kids … Whenever I teach, I try to curse as much as possible and use a bunch of esoteric ways of speaking because they’re bored and they don’t listen.”
“So I have this thing,” Sager said. “I call it the ‘Toilet Bowl Theory of Journalism,’ which I think beautifully explains what I do. I kind of jump into the bowl and, I guess I flush and jump in because there’s no one helping me, or maybe the flush is symbolically the magazine. But I jump into the bowl, I swirl around and then eventually I go down into where Nemo is, you know, swimming with the fishes. He’s … underwater in the world I’m trying to get to. I’ve never been that guy who’s a big internet person. I do a shit ton of background research and reading, but usually my work starts with someone or I track someone down. And then it’s always a version of one person telling another person and then telling another person. I honestly cannot remember how I found the followers [of Carlos Castaneda]. I honestly just cannot remember how I found them. Somebody must have just told me about them and I was like talking and people I knew probably talked to the LA Times guy, but somehow I found them and that was my technique of journalism.
“It was like, I’ve never been that person who writes a bunch of questions before I get there. I just like, go there and then I like to shut up. And I look around or I just love to follow somebody like I don’t know what to do. It’s like if you’re a waiter or a server at a restaurant. You train with another server and you learn your job, but when you’re a reporter, it’s like they just send you out there. And, you know, you use your wiles and I somehow had an affinity for this sort of anthropology. I have an affinity for being with others in a non-judgmental sort of way.”
If you want to see the interview in its entirety, visit the main page of www.randomlengthsnews.com, the video is reflected there from our Youtube channel.
Starting May 13, children 12 and older will now be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine in Long Beach.
Youth, ages 12 to 17 years old, will need parental consent in order to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, which is available at longbeach.gov/vaxlb. Those 12 and older seeking to be vaccinated can do so, without an appointment, at the following City-run vaccine sites:
Times: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays, at Long Beach Convention Center, 300 Ocean Blvd. Both drive-through and walk-up options are available.
10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays Cabrillo High School, 2001 Santa Fe Ave.
Gov. Newsom Announces $20 Billion in Investments for Transforming Public Schools
See recent RLn Briefs highlighting the Governor’s actions under California Roars Back here;
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom May12, unveiled another component of his $100 billion California Comeback Plan: transforming California public schools into gateways of equity and opportunity. Governor Newsom’s plan represents the highest level of state school funding in California history, investing an additional $20 billion to support the potential of every California student and make the structural change necessary to reduce barriers while increasing opportunities across the board, including massive investments in K-12 public schools, creating universal Pre-K and college savings accounts for 3.7 million low-income children in public schools.
Under the California Comeback Plan, the state will make targeted investments of $20 billion into public education to transform every public school into a complete campus every parent would want for their child: before- and after-school instruction, sports and arts, personalized tutoring, nurses and counselors, and nutrition – paired with new preventative behavioral health services for every child in California. This includes $3 billion to create thousands of full-service community schools, with wraparound mental health, social and family services; $4 billion over five years to transform the youth behavioral health system to identify and treat behavioral health needs early; and additional billions more toward investments in accelerated learning and teachers and school staff.
To make college more accessible to low-income children, the Governor proposes investing $2 billion to seed college savings accounts for vulnerable students currently enrolled in K-12 public schools, including a $500 base deposit for students from low-income families, English learners and foster youth, and a $500 supplemental deposit for foster and homeless youth. The savings account can be used later in life for higher education or to start their own business. California will also finally achieve universal Pre-K, providing high-quality, free transitional kindergarten to all four-year-olds in California, regardless of income or immigrations status. The Comeback Plan also adds 100,000 child care slots and subsidies to bring down the cost of child care.
COVID-19 presented a crisis without precedent this century, especially for school communities throughout California and the nation. The Newsom Administration is investing in a safe return to full in-person instruction for all schools, with $2 billion to implement health and safety measures, including improved ventilation and measures to expand access to vaccines and testing.
California Launches the Largest Small Business Relief Program in the Nation
SACRAMENTO — Gov.Gavin Newsom, May 12, unveiled another component of his $100 billion California Comeback Plan: making historic investments in small business relief. Governor Newsom’s plan expands the state’s COVID-19 Small Business Relief Grant program to a total of $4 billion, representing the largest such program in the entire country. That’s in addition to the Governor’s $6.2 billion tax cut for those businesses hit hardest by the pandemic, the largest state tax cut of its kind in history.
These grants are already supporting diverse small businesses throughout California, with 88.3 percent of grants in rounds one and two going to minority/people of color-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses and businesses located in low to moderate income communities. To date, approximately 198,000 small businesses and nonprofits either have been or will be awarded grants, which includes finalized awards for 43,874 small businesses and nonprofits representing all 58 California counties for a total of $475,001,244.
In addition, Gov. Newsom has taken action to invest in those sectors of the economy that are crucial to California’s recovery, including:
Estimated $895 million investment in the State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), which works to strengthen state programs that support financing of small businesses.
Increasing the CalCompetes tax credit program to $360 million, and establishing a one-time $250 million grant program, to incentivize businesses to relocate to California.
$250 million investment in California’s ports to address revenue loss and bolster future economic activity.
$200 million to expand sales tax exclusions through the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority (CAEATFA) to promote, grow and incentivize green manufacturing in California.
$147 million for the Main Street Small Business Tax Credit to assist small businesses that have hired and retained workers since the second quarter of 2020.
$95 million to jumpstart California’s tourism industry, one of the largest economic drivers in the state that was particularly impacted by the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, May 12, affirmed the recommendation by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration or FDA to expand the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for adolescents 12 to 15 years of age.
Starting May 13, Los Angeles County vaccination providers may begin offering the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds at vaccination sites that offer the Pfizer vaccine. All eight county-run sites will be open tomorrow and able to vaccinate children 12-17; teens should be accompanied by a parent, guardian or responsible adult, and present a photo ID and verification of age. For a full list of sites across the county offering Pfizer vaccines, please visit http://bit.ly/PfizerSites. To schedule an appointment, visit www.VaccinateLACounty.com beginning this evening; walk-ins are welcome at all 8 county-run sites. Parents or teens with questions about the vaccine should contact their healthcare provider or visit the Public Health website for more information on vaccine safety and efficacy.
To date, Public Health identified 1,236,243 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County and a total of 24,041 deaths.
To find a vaccination site near you, to make an appointment at vaccination sites, and much more, visit: www.VaccinateLACounty.com (English) and www.VacunateLosAngeles.com (Spanish). If you don’t have internet access, can’t use a computer, or you’re over 65, you can call 1-833-540-0473 for help finding an appointment or scheduling a home-visit if you are homebound. Vaccinations are always free and open to eligible residents and workers regardless of immigration status.
