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Larry Hendricks, a teacher of English, aged twenty-seven, lived on the top floor of the Teacherage. He wanted to write, but his apartment was not the ideal lair for a would-be author. It was smaller than the Kidwells’, and, moreover, he shared it with a wife, three active children, and a perpetually functioning television set. (“It’s the only way we can keep the kids pacified.”) Though as yet unpublished, young Hendricks, a he-mannish ex-sailor from Oklahoma who smokes a pipe and has a mustache and a crop of untamed black hair, at least looks literary—in fact, remarkably like youthful photographs of the writer he most admires, Ernest Hemingway. To supplement his teacher’s salary, he also drove a school bus.


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“So I did,” said Susan, in a statement made at a later date. “I called the house and let the phone ring—at least, I had the impression it was ringing—oh, a minute or more. Nobody answered, so Mr. Ewalt suggested that we go to the house and try to ‘wake them up.’ But when we got there—I didn’t want to do it. Go inside the house. I was frightened, and I don’t know why, because it never occurred to me—Well, something like that just doesn’t. But the sun was so bright, everything looked too bright and quiet. And then I saw that all the cars were there, even Kenyon’s old coyote wagon. Mr. Ewalt was wearing work clothes; he had mud on his boots; he felt he wasn’t properly dressed to go calling on the Clutters.


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Especially since he never had. Been in the house, I mean. Finally, Nancy said she would go with me. We went around to the kitchen door, and, of course, it wasn’t locked; the only person who ever locked doors around there was Mrs. Helm—the family never did. We walked in, and I saw right away that the Clutters hadn’t eaten breakfast; there were no dishes, nothing on the stove. Then I noticed something funny: Nancy’s purse. It was lying on the floor, sort of open. We passed on through the dining room, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Nancy’s room is just at the top. I called her name, and started up the stairs, and Nancy Ewalt followed. The sound of our footsteps frightened me more than anything, they were so loud and everything else was so silent. Nancy’s door was open. The curtains hadn’t been drawn, and the room was full of sunlight. I don’t remember screaming. Nancy Ewalt says I did—screamed and screamed. I only remember Nancy’s Teddy bear staring at me. And Nancy. And running . . . ”

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The Teacherage, which stands opposite the Holcomb School, is an out-of-date edifice, drab and poignant. Its twenty-odd rooms are separated into grace-and-favor apartments for those members of the faculty unable to find, or afford, other quarters. Nevertheless, Susan Kidwell and her mother had managed to sugar the pill and install a cozy atmosphere in their apartment—three rooms on the ground floor. The very small parlor incredibly contained—aside from things to sit on—an organ, a piano, a garden of flowering flowerpots, and usually a darting little dog and a large, drowsy cat. Susan, on this Sunday morning, stood at the window of this room watching the street. She is a tall, languid young lady with a pallid, oval face and beautiful pale-blue-gray eyes; her hands are extraordinary—long-fingered, flexible, nervously elegant. She was dressed for church, and expected momentarily to see the Clutters’ Chevrolet, for she, too, always attended services chaperoned by the Clutter family. Instead, the Ewalts arrived to tell their peculiar tale.


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Holcomb is twelve miles east of the Mountain Time zone, a circumstance that causes some grumbling, for it means that at seven in the morning, and in winter at eight or after, the sky is still dark, and the stars, if any, are still shining—as they were when the two sons of Vic Irsik arrived to do their Sunday-morning chores. But by nine, when the boys finished work—during which they noticed nothing amiss—the sun had risen, delivering another day of pheasant-season perfection. As they left the property and ran along the lane, they waved at an incoming car, and a girl waved back. She was a classmate of Nancy Clutter’s, and her name was also Nancy—Nancy Ewalt. She was the only child of the man who was driving the car, Mr.


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Clarence Ewalt, a middle-aged sugar-beet farmer. Mr. Ewalt was not himself a churchgoer, nor was his wife, but every Sunday he dropped his daughter at River Valley Farm in order that she might accompany the Clutter family to Methodist services in Garden City. The arrangement saved him “making two back-and-forth trips to town.” It was his custom to wait until he had seen his daughter safely admitted to the house. Nancy, a clothes-conscious girl with a film-star figure, a bespectacled countenance, and a coy, tiptoe way of walking, crossed the lawn and pressed the front-door bell. The house had four entrances, and when, after repeated knockings, there was no response at this one, she moved on to the next—that of Mr. Clutter’s office.
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Here the door was partly open; she opened it somewhat more—enough to ascertain that the office was filled only with shadow—but she did not think the Clutters would appreciate her “barging right in.” She rang, knocked, and at last walked around to the back of the house. The garage was there, and she noted that both cars were in it: two Chevrolet sedans. Which meant they must be home. However, having applied unavailingly at a third door, which led into a “utility room,” and a fourth, the door to the kitchen, she rejoined her father, who said, “Maybe they’re asleep.”

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“This is it, this is it, this has to be it, there’s the school, there’s the garage, now we turn south.” To Perry, it seemed as though Dick were muttering jubilant mumbo-jumbo. They left the highway, sped through a deserted Holcomb, and crossed the Santa Fe tracks. “The bank, that must be the bank, now we turn west—see the trees? This is it, this has to be it.” The headlights disclosed a lane of Chinese elms; bundles of wind-blown thistle scurried across it. Dick doused the headlights, slowed down, and stopped until his eyes were adjusted to the moon-illuminated night. Presently, the car crept forward.


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Before saying her prayers, she always recorded in a diary a few occurrences (“Summer here. Forever, I hope. Sue over and we rode Babe down to the river. Sue played her flute. Fireflies”) and an occasional outburst (“I love him, I do”). It was a five-year diary; in the four years of its existence she had never neglected to make an entry, though the splendor of several events (Eveanna’s wedding, the birth of her nephew) and the drama of others (her “first real quarrel with Bobby”—a page literally tear-stained) had caused her to usurp space allotted to the future. A different tinted ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue.


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But, as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily—as though she were asking, “Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me?” (Once, Mrs. Riggs, her English teacher, had returned a theme with the scribbled comment “Good. But why written in three styles of script?” To which Nancy had replied, “Because I’m not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature.”) Still, she had progressed in recent months, and it was in a handwriting of emerging maturity that she wrote, “Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at 11:00.”

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Before the campaign was over—in that single month, October, 1940—Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas, and had distributed to congressional candidates, campaign funds on a scale seldom if ever before given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source. The documents in those boxes of Johnson’s House papers made that clear.


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As I turned the pages in those boxes, I found other documents. “General—Unarranged” contained another list. There were two typed columns on each of its thirteen pages, typed by either John Connally or Walter Jenkins; each of these Johnson assistants later told me that he had been the one who had typed them. In the left-hand column were the districts of congressmen who had asked the Congressional Committee for money. In the second column were the names of the congressmen and the amount that each had asked for—tiny amounts, in the terms of later eras—and what, in the congressman’s own words, he needed it for. “must have $250 by thursday night for last issue advertising,” for example. Or “$350 by thursday. have set up machinery to reach 11,000 additional voters.” Others wanted five hundred dollars “for workers in spanish and italian districts” or “$1,000 on november 1 to hire poll watchers,” or wrote, “chances bright . . . if we can get right away $14 for each of five county papers and $20 for titusville herald.”


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And there was a third column on the page, or, rather, handwritten notations in the left-hand margin, notes dealing with each congressman’s request. The handwriting in that column was Lyndon Johnson’s. If he was arranging for the candidate to be given part or all of what he’d asked for, he wrote, “OK—$500,” or “OK—$200,” or whatever the amount was he had decided to give. If he did not want the candidate to be given anything, he wrote, “None.” And by some names he wrote, “None—Out.” (What did “None—Out” mean? I later asked John Connally. “It meant he”—the candidate—“was never going to get anything,” Connally said. “Lyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.”)


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Johnson had identified a source of financing for congressional races across the United States, a source that in the past had been used principally on behalf of Presidential or senatorial candidates: Texas money. Using the power of the mighty Speaker, Sam Rayburn, he had made sure the money came only through him. When, in 1940, officials of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attempted to go around him, to the source, writing directly to the oilmen to request contributions, the oilmen had asked Rayburn whom to send the money to, and then, following the Speaker’s instructions, had replied not to the committee but to Lyndon Johnson, writing, in the words of Charles Roeser, “i have decided to send my contribution . . . to you. . . . i am . . . leaving it up to . . . you, to decide in what districts these funds can be best used.” And Johnson was not only deciding which candidates would get the money; he was making sure the candidates knew they were getting it from him. “I want to see you win,” he said to them in his letters and telegrams. And here is some money to help. By the time the congressmen got back to Washington in November, after the elections, and talked to one another, the word was out. There was a lot of gratitude for what Johnson had done, Walter Jenkins said: “He was the hero.”


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I had known that wasn’t going to be easy. George and Herman had been proud of their attitude toward interviewers; they had often boasted, with some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an interview, and that neither of them ever would. I had been trying to talk to George ever since I started on Lyndon Johnson, with no results, or indeed response. When I telephoned and left a message with his secretary, he never called back; when I wrote him letters, there was no reply. After I became friends with Brown & Root’s longtime chief lobbyist, Frank (Posh) Oltorf, I asked Posh to intercede, and he did, several times—after which he told me quite firmly that Mr. Brown was never going to talk to me. And, if he didn’t, I was going to have a hard time proving in my book why Brown & Root had given the money—or, indeed, why in the decades after 1940 it had given Lyndon Johnson such an immense amount of financial backing.

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So the recipient was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a moribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a lot of file folders in Boxes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Johnson House papers labelled “Democratic National Committee.” Those boxes contained thirty-two hundred pages. Some of the folders had less than inviting titles. “General—Unarranged,” for example, was a thick folder, bulging with papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it out, I remember asking myself if I really had to do “General—Unarranged.”

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But Alan might possibly have been proud of me—and I wasn’t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. One of the six people George Brown said had sent checks was named Corwin. In “General—Unarranged,” not in alphabetical order but just jammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root subcontractor, saying, “I am enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” Five thousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown’s letter sent that amount?

The “Unarranged” file contained letter after letter with details I knew I could use. And in other folders I came across letters in which that same amount was mentioned: for example, from E. S. Fentress, who was the partner of Johnson’s patron, Charles Marsh. I knew that one of the biggest and the most politically astute of the oilmen was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name “Richardson” in file folder after file folder in different collections, without any luck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had heard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation—“Perry R. Bass, $5,000”—in yet another box in the House papers.

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Letters from many big Texas oilmen of the nineteen-forties—who needed guarantees that Congress wouldn’t take away the oil-depletion allowance, and that other, more arcane tax breaks conferred by the federal government wouldn’t be touched—were scattered through those boxes. And all the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must be. I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered earlier. Under federal law in 1940, the limit on an individual contribution was five thousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got it now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, funnelled through the company’s business associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, a substantial amount in the politics of that era, and, in fact, more money than the committee had received from the D.N.C., its parent organization. And there were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from Texas!


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But there was a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no title or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but had been rebuffed.


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I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had had George Brown instruct each of the Brown & Root contributors, and had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose with their checks a letter stating, “I would like for this money to be expended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for Congress as per the list attached.” Johnson had, of course, compiled the list, and, while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each candidate received a telegram from Johnson, saying that the check had been sent “as result my visit to congressional committee few minutes ago.”

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Corcoran had said that the answer to my question was money, and if money was involved the place to start looking was Brown & Root, the Texas road-and-dam-building firm, whose principals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had been the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career; by 1940, Brown & Root had already begun receiving federal contracts through Johnson’s efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer associates than Herman and George. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in writing, but their files were files in which I should nonetheless have been turning every page.


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I started doing that now. I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life.

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And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “you were supposed to have checks by friday . . . hope they arrived in due form and on time.”

It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks—six of Brown & Root’s business associates. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had for once put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. “all of the folks you talked to have been heard from,” it said. “i am not acknowledging their letters, so be sure to tell all these fellows that their letters have been received . . . your friend, lyndon b. johnson.” Johnson had added by hand, “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements.”

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So there was the proof that Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “the Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). But how much had the six donors sent? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And, more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had contributed, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen—in Texas parlance, “big oilmen.”


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I started calling for the big oilmen’s folders. And, sure enough, there was a letter, dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison. Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, the leader of the Texas delegation; he hardly knew the young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name “Linden.” But he was evidently following Brown & Root’s lead. “We are enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co. . . . for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,” his letter said. Another big oilman was Charles F. Roeser, of Fort Worth: the amount mentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the payee the same.

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This is in fact the tacit dissonance at the center of every moment in Lakewood, which is why the average day there raises, for the visitor, so many and such vertiginous questions: What had it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class? Who paid? Who benefitted? What happens when that class stops being useful? What does it mean to drop back below the line? What does it cost to hang on above it, how do you behave, what do you say, what are the pitons you drive into the granite? One of the ugliest and most revelatory of the many ugly and revelatory moments that characterized the television appearances of Spur Posse members this spring occurred on “Jane Whitney,” when a nineteen-year-old Lakewood High graduate named Chris Albert (“Boasts He Has 44 ‘Points’ for Having Sex with Girls”) turned mean with a member of the audience, a young black woman who had tried to suggest that the Spurs on view were not exhibiting what she considered native intelligence.


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“What education does she have?” Chris Albert then snarled, and tensed against his chair, as if trying to shake himself alert. “Where do you work at? McDonald’s? Burger King?” A third Spur tried to interrupt, but Chris Albert, once roused, could not be deflected: “$5.25? $5.50?” And then there it was, the piton, driven in this case into not granite but shale: “I go to college.”


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For a while this spring, they seemed to be there every time we turned on a television set, these blank-faced Lakewood girls, these feral Lakewood boys. There were the dead eyes, the thick necks, the jaws that closed only to chew gum. There was the refusal or inability to process the simplest statement without rephrasing it. There was the fuzzy relationship to language, the tendency to seize on a drifting fragment of something once heard and repeat it, not quite get it right, worry it like a bone.


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The news that some schools distributed condoms had apparently been seized in mid-drift, and was frequently offered as an extenuating circumstance, the fact that Lakewood High School had never distributed condoms notwithstanding. “The schools, they’re handing out condoms and stuff like that, and, like, if they’re handing out condoms, why don’t they tell us you can be arrested for it?” one Spur asked Gary Collins and Sarah Purcell on “The Home Show.” “They pass out condoms, teach sex education and pregnancy-this, pregnancy-that, but they don’t teach us any rules,” another told Jane Gross, of the New York Times.

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“Schools hand out condoms, teach safe sex,” the mother of a Spur complained on “The Home Show.” “It’s the society, they have these clinics, they have abortions, they don’t have to tell their parents, the schools give out condoms, jeez, what does that tell you?” the father of one Lakewood boy, a sixteen-year-old who had just admitted to a juvenile-court petition charging him with lewd conduct with a ten-year-old girl, asked a television interviewer. “I think people are blowing this thing way out of proportion,” David Ferrell, of the Los Angeles Times, was told by one Spur.

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“It’s all been blown out of proportion as far as I’m concerned,” he was told by another. “Of course, there were several other sex scandals at the time, so this perfectly normal story got blown out of proportion,” I was told by a Spur parent. “People, you know, kind of blow it all out of proportion,” a Spur advised viewers of “Jane Whitney.” “They blow it out of proportion a lot,” another said on the same show. A Spur girlfriend, Jodi, offered her opinion by telephone: “I think it’s been blown way out of proportion, like way out of proportion.”


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All these speakers seemed to be referring to a cultural misery apprehended only recently, and then dimly. Those who mentioned “blowing it out of proportion” were complaining specifically about “the media,” and its “power,” but more generally about a sense of being besieged, set upon, at the mercy of forces beyond local control. “The whole society has changed,” one Spur parent told me. “Morals have changed. Girls have changed. It used to be, girls would be more or less the ones in control. Girls would hold out, girls would want to be married at eighteen or nineteen and they’d keep their sights on having a home and love and a family.”

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Part of what made such conversations seem slightly inchoate at their center was a kind of disconnect: there was an insistence that “Lakewood,” the story, was the result of a society gone awry, and that this warp or perversion was new in the world. Yet the story, as told, was not new at all: nothing the girls and the boys were saying about one another could have surprised anyone who ever passed through a big public high school. The language was the common stuff of high-school sexual skirmishing, the novel element being that this particular skirmishing was taking place on national television. The girls said they had been raped, intimidated, “used.”
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The boys said the girls “wanted it.” “Like, you know, for example, I can remember one night, you know, a girl was home by herself, eight of my friends went over and each of them took their turn. And she—you know, she wanted it.” The girls said the boys were keeping score, calling them “points.” The boys said, “Everybody in life knows how many sex partners they’ve had and it’s just a nicer way of putting it.” The girls said they had been victimized, “ruined.” The boys said, “We’re a bunch of guys that are—I mean, better than decent-looking. We don’t have to go out raping girls. That’s not us, you know.”


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All the dismal proprieties of being in high school seemed to be on rewind here. There was among both the boys and the girls an abhorrence of female sexuality, a shared willingness to define the act of sex as either forced or a bargaining chip, to divide girls into “good” and “bad” on the basis of whether they “held out.” “Why would a girl sleep with a guy on the first date,” a Spur asked rhetorically on “Maury Povich,” and in due time he provided the answer: “They’re whores.” Another said, “If a girl sleeps with a guy on the first night, that’s not somebody that you can respect.” A third, in response to a question about how these Spurs would want their sisters treated, said that his sister was “probably one of the only virgins left in the whole city,” and “she’ll stay that way.”

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Sex was, in this view, an essentially commercial transaction, the transfer of a commodity with depreciable value. One Lakewood mother, on “The Home Show,” reported telling her daughter that “she is her most precious gift,” the same dispiriting assessment of the female condition I heard in the gym at C. K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento in perhaps 1952. She had told her daughter, she said, “not to let anybody take it, and not to give it away like it’s something to get rid of.” A caller on “Jane Whitney” echoed this, once again explaining the difference between “good” and “bad” girls: “A good girl is the one who waits and is with a guy and sees if the guy wants just one thing from her or if the guy loves her.”


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“He cornered me and he tried to kiss me, then he started taking off my pants,” a sweet-faced seventeen-year-old told us, first on “20/20” and then on “Montel Williams.” “He did his business and stood up, began to walk away. And I sat there crying, scrounging for my pants, and he says, ‘Don’t say you didn’t want to’ and he walked away.” “They were downright crude,” a girl in a wig and dark glasses told us on “Donahue.” “They did not want to date me. They did not want to get to know me. . . . They went out of their way to touch me. They went out of their way to bump me. . . . Physically run into me. Grab me.” “It’s always, you know, we’re the sluts, but they’re the big studs,” a sixteen-year-old told us on “20/20.” “I felt used. . . . I don’t have any respect for myself. I have no self-esteem left in me at all.”


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“Self-esteem” was a frequently mentioned deficit, at least among the girls, all of whom either claimed to be or were said to be lacking it. The boys seemed to have heard about self-esteem, most recently at the “ethics” assemblies (date rape, when no means no) the school had hastily organized after the arrests, but, hey, no problem. “I’m definitely comfortable with myself and my self-esteem,” one said on “Dateline.” “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? I mean, what’s not to like about me?” another said when asked on “Maury Povich” if he liked himself. “A lot of girls find us attractive, star athletes,” the boys said. And: “The good-looking girls that are around our age would definitely be with us, because maybe some pie-in-the-sky dream, they could get a commitment. . . .

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Maybe they could win the lottery, too.” And: “I don’t consider myself a normal person, you know. I think I’m a step above everyone else.” And: “We go out, all of us go out to parties or go out to a club or whatever, we come home at like two in the morning, call a girl, and, you know, if she wants us to come over, we’ll come over.” And: “There’s the girls that, you know, that you have respect for and that you’ll romance, you know, you’ll take them out and it’s like the romance scene, it’s not like, you know—and then there’s these other girls, you know, you’re going to drive over there, you already know what’s going to happen, you know, it’s no romance, you know, it’s just—wham. You know, three and out.”

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Most adults to whom I spoke in Lakewood shared a sense that something in town had gone wrong. Many connected this apprehension to the Spur Posse, or at any rate to certain Spur Posse members who had emerged, even before the arrests and for a variety of reasons, as the community’s most visible males. Almost everyone agreed that this was a town in which what had been considered the definition of good parenting—the encouragement of assertive behavior among male children—had for some reason got badly out of hand. What many people disagreed about was whether sex was at the center of this problem, and some people felt troubled and misrepresented by the fact that public discussion of the situation in Lakewood had tended to focus exclusively on what they called “the sex charges,” or “the sexual charges.”

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“People have to understand,” I was told by one plaintive mother. “This isn’t about the sexual charges.” Some believed the charges intrinsically unprovable. Others seemed simply to regard sex among teen-agers as a combat zone with its own rules, a contained conflict from which they were prepared, as the District Attorney was, to look away. Many seemed unaware of the extent to which the question of gender had come to occupy the nation’s official attention, and so had failed to appreciate the ease with which the events in Lakewood could feed into a discussion already in progress, offer a fresh context in which to recap Tailhook, Packwood, Anita Hill.

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This was not exactly what was going on in Lakewood. What happened this spring had begun, most people agreed, at least a year before, maybe more. There had been incidents, occurrences that could not be reconciled with the community’s preferred view of itself. There had been burglaries, credit cards and jewelry missing from the bedroom drawers of houses where local girls were babysitting. There had been assaults in local parks, bicycles stolen and sold. There had even been, beginning in the summer of 1992, felony arrests: Dana Belman, who is generally said to have “founded” the Spur Posse, was arrested on suspicion of stealing nineteen guns from the bedroom of a house where he was said to have attended a party. Not long before that, in Las Vegas, Dana Belman and another Spur, Christopher Russo, had been detained for possession of stolen credit cards. Just before Christmas of 1992 Dana Belman and Christopher Russo were detained yet again, and arrested for alleged check forgery.


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Much of what got talked about was, for a while, less actionable than plain troubling. Young children in Lakewood had come to know among themselves whom to avoid in those thirty-seven playgrounds, what cars to watch for on those hundred and thirty-three miles of No. 2 macadam. There had been threats, bullying tactics, the systematic harassment of girls or younger children who made complaints or “stood up to” or in any way resisted the whim of a certain group of boys. “I’m talking about throughout the community,” Karin Polacheck, who represents Lakewood on the board of education for the Long Beach Unified School District, told me. “At the baseball fields, at the parks, at the markets, on the corners of school grounds. They were organized enough that young children would say, ‘Watch out for that car when it comes around,’ ‘Watch out for these boys.’ I’ve heard stories of walking up and stealing baseball bats and telling kids, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll beat your head in.’ . . . I’m talking about young children, nine, ten years old. You know, it’s a small community. . . . Younger kids knew that these older kids were out there.”


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“You’re dead,” the older boys would reportedly say, or “You’re gonna get fucked up,” “You’re gonna get it,” “You’re gonna die.” “I don’t like who she’s hanging with, why don’t we just kill her now.” There was a particular form of street terror mentioned by many people: invasive vehicular maneuvers construed by the targets as attempts to “run people down.” “There were skid marks outside my house,” one mother told me. “They were trying to scare my daughter. Her life was hell. She had chili-cheese nachos thrown at her at school.” “They just like to intimidate people,” I was repeatedly told. “They stare back at you. They don’t go to school, they ditch. They ditch and then they beg the teacher to pass them, because they have to have a C average to play on the teams.” One young woman told me, “They came to our house in a truck to do something to my sister. She can’t go anywhere. Can’t even go to Taco Bell anymore. Can’t go to Jack in the Box. They’ll jump you. They followed me home not long ago, I just headed for the sheriff’s office.”


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There were odd quirks here, details that might not have seemed entirely consistent with normal adolescent acting up (the nineteen guns in the bedroom, the high-school trips to Vegas and to Laughlin, which is a Vegas spinoff on the Colorado River below Davis Dam), but they seemed for a while to go unconnected. People who had been targeted by the older boys believed themselves, they said later, “all alone in this.” They believed that each occasion of harassment was discrete, unique. They did not yet see a pattern in the various incidents and felonies. They had not yet made certain inductive leaps. That was before the pipe bomb.


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The pipe bomb exploded on the front porch of a house not far from Lakewood High School between three and three-thirty on the morning of February 12th. It destroyed one porch support. It tore holes in the stucco. It threw shrapnel into parked cars. Susie Hipp remembers that her husband was working the night shift at Rockwell and she was sleeping light as usual when the explosion woke her. The next morning, she asked a neighbor if she had heard the noise. “And she said, ‘You’re not going to believe it when I tell you what that was.’ And she explained to me that a pipe bomb had blown up on someone’s front porch. And that it had been a gang retaliatory thing. ‘Gang thing?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about, a gang thing.’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, Spur Posse.’ And I said, ‘Spur Posse, what is Spur Posse?’ ”