Joe Domanick

The Insiders

It‘s hard to decide which was the more humiliating moment for the members of the Los Angeles Police Commission on the day, early this month, that LAPD Chief Bernard Parks presented his long-awaited report on the Rampart Division scandal to the press and public. Moment number one came immediately after......

Straight Time

Photo by Slobodan DimitrovKERRY WOODS COMMITTED HIS LAST STICKUP ON A Saturday morning in 1994, after a long night snorting crystal meth and guzzling three pints of peppermint schnapps. Sitting in his pickup, not far from his home on the Mexican border, the apple-cheeked, wholesome-looking, 38-year-old Woods had watched the......

Sick and Mired

Photo by Ted Soqui Christina Brown was in the bedroom of her Signal Hill home on a July day in 1997 when she heard a crash. Dressed only in a T-shirt, she ran into her living room, where she saw the front door broken in and a large, heavyset man......

The Pace of Reform

Photo by Ted Soqui As soon-to-be-ex–LAPD Inspector General Katherine Mader reads her prepared statement to the members of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, Herbert Boeckmann laughs loudly. He’s sitting in the audience, behind Mader, enjoying a joke with a bent, palsied man in a wheelchair. Boeckmann, a gray-haired, born-again......

Man With a Mission

AP/Wide WorldAs Mike Reynolds and I enter his rambling Fresno home, he gestures for me to take a seat in one of the several antique barber chairs that furnish his living room. Then the founding father of California’s 1994 "three strikes" law steps over to his VCR and pops in......

California Scheming

Abortion is just one of a series of issues where Lungren is potentially at odds with moderate voters this year. He knows that, much as he would like to, he can't readily conform 1998 California to the moral certitudes of his youth. He knows that it's chiefly on the issue......
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California Scheming

Standing before an audience, Dan Lungren cuts a congenial figure. Wavy-haired, twinkle-eyed, the veteran attorney general of California is unfailingly described by friend and foe alike as "amiable." Though he's 52, his racquetball game and his strict devotion to tae kwon do have maintained his 6-foot-2 frame well enough to......