Southside (9781608090563) Read Free

world opened and the entire staff was on the same page: September 11, 2001; March 21, 2003 when missiles descended upon Baghdad; April of 2004 when the paper won five Pulitzer prizes; President Obama’s 2008 election and 2012 reelection; the 2013 Patriot’s Day bombings at the Boston Marathon; and the day reporter Michael Lyons was shot.
    At 5:55, fifty-five minutes after the first, seldom-met deadline had passed that Monday, Lyons had been walking on 2nd Street, heading back from the Redwood Saloon. He had taken two hits—upper right chest and right side—but, as the paper’s LAPD reporters quickly learned from sources, Lyons was not dead and would not die from the wounds.
    Still, in the newsroom there were tears, dismay, and heartache. There was real emotional unity. But even the shock and the poignant outpouring didn’t last long. It was replaced by wagering faster than you could say Seabiscuit. The wager? Who finally shot Mike. The reporters put together a betting pool.
    The list of potential assassins was deep. He had amassed some serious enemies over his twelve years on the staff.
    There were street gangs he had outraged by writing about them, bringing extra scrutiny and harassment from police. Gangs such as the Grape Street Crips from the Jordan Downs Housing Project and the Bounty Hunter Bloods from the Nickerson Gardens Housing Project, both in Watts. The Rollin Sixties Crips in Hyde Park, the Eight Trey Gangster Crips headquartered in St. Andrews Park, Geraghty Loma and Arizona Maravilla in East Los Angeles, and Armenian Power in Hollywood and Glendale.
    There were the husbands Lyons had infuriated over the years by entertaining their wives.
    The gambling began.
    â€œOkay, okay, okay,” said Morty Goldstein, the paper’s old-school day cops reporter, a bespectacled, portly ex-Berkeley radical who had developed a taste for USDA prime beef and old Bordeaux. He never hit the streets, never left his desk, but had more cop contacts, more cop cell and home phone numbers than the new chief of police himself.
    â€œLet’s see,” Goldstein said. “We got all the gangs, the husbands, including that chef. Also that guy that confessed to Michael.”
    â€œKrebs,” said another reporter within the gathering crowd.
    Rex Krebs, who killed two college students, had confessed to Lyons in a jailhouse interview and landed on San Quentin’s death row solely because of the interview. At sentencing, in open court, he screamed his biker pals would kill Lyons.
    â€œThe Armenian Mafia,” said ace general-assignment reporter Carly Engstrom, a foxy, temperamental thirty-five-year-old half-Korean, half-Swede who had been Lyons’s pod mate for years. For over a year, Lyons had been trying to expose the Armenian Mafia in all their prey-on-their-own wickedness.
    â€œRight, the Armenian mob,” said Goldstein, grabbing a pad off his desk, easily the most cluttered in the newsroom. He started a list as he leaned back in his chair.
    Nona Yates, the newsroom’s premier researcher, maneuvered to the core of the group of gathered reporters. She grimaced and shook her thick, long auburn mane. “Holy Sonny Barger. Mike’s near death and you people are betting on who shot him? I can’t believe this shit. Michael was the—Michael
is
the coolest motherfucker in this whole newsroom.”
    â€œSorry to destroy the image, Nona, but Mike was overrated,” said assistant metro editor Ted Doot, who had moseyed to the rim. “You know how many times I had reports from nightside copy editors that they smelled booze on him. He should have been suspended long ago.”
    Nona Yates took a moment to size up Doot. He was a reasonably proportioned man of thirty-eight except for his incredibly tiny, shiny,bald head and his equally freakish large buttocks, which she guessed weren’t bald. She tried to shake off that image.
    â€œIf not for his cousin,” the