for HIV.”
“That’s a regulatory issue, not a criminal offense. Doctors routinely prescribe off-label uses for drugs. Are you going to bust them?”
“These drugs were not prescribed by doctors.”
“Because they’re nonprescription drugs.”
“In Mexico, not here. You could be charged with conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs.”
I’d had it. “Go to hell. You and your boy should be ashamed of working for a government that would rather let my friends die than have access to drugs that might save their lives. If you have probable cause I’ve broken any law, arrest me. As for searching my house without a warrant, fuck you. Now move your goddamn car. I have to get to court. Or didn’t you know I’m a criminal defense lawyer?”
Her face had gone red, but she maintained her bureaucratic monotone and said, “We will be back, sir.”
I wanted to shout at her something about it being 1986 and not 1984, but I figured the George Orwell allusion would be wasted on her. I started the car. She and her partner walked down the driveway to their own car, got in, and drove away.
As soon as they were gone, I cut the engine again and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. Grief and fury surged through my body like electrical shocks. It was moments like this that I most missed Larry Ross, my friend and AA sponsor.
It was a clear, mild day in May. The sun warmed my face. Birds chirped in the trees. A vine of deep red bougainvillea crept up the wall that enclosed the back yard of Larry’s hillside house. Well, my house, technically. Without telling me Larry had put the place into joint tenancy with me. When six months earlier an aneurysm had burst in his brain in a hotel room in Mexico City, I became the owner of his fifteen-room, 1925 Spanish mission residence in a canyon above Franklin Avenue, at the edge of Griffith Park. Far too much house for me, and I couldn’t enter a room without expecting to find him there, but I couldn’t bear to leave it yet, either. It was my last physical connection to him.
In his late forties, Larry’d been a hugely successful partner at the most successful entertainment law firm in LA. He was also an alcoholic, a coke addict, and a closeted gay man. Forced from the closet when a trick he’d picked up at a bathhouse tried to blackmail him, he’d come out to his law partners who had had no problem with his homosexuality but forced him into rehab. When he emerged, he had poured the same energy and tough-talking empathy that had made him a preeminent entertainment lawyer into helping other people get and stay sober. Two years earlier, he’d found me in a halfway house in San Francisco with three months of shaky sobriety, feeling hopeless and desperate, and had steered me back to sanity and a new life in Los Angeles where I was slowly rebuilding my criminal law practice.
He invited me to stay at his house until I got on my feet, but even after I could have found my own place, I stayed on. We got along as roommates and, by then, Larry had been diagnosed as HIV positive. He’d suffered a bout of PCP, the virulent strand of pneumonia that was often the first of the opportunistic diseases that attacked the compromised immune systems of people with the virus. After that, there was no question of my moving out.
The near-death experience of PCP changed his priorities. He had cashed out of his law practice and thrown himself into the battle against AIDS. He took as his motto Mother Jones’s axiom: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Not content to be a checkbook activist, he looked for a way to fight on the front lines. He heard about two drugs that, when used together, had bolstered the immune system of some people with HIV. The catch: the drugs weren’t authorized for HIV treatment in the United States, and the Federal Drug Administration had rejected requests to begin trial of them for that purpose. They were, however, available over the counter in Mexico.
An underground already existed of people crossing the border, smuggling the drugs in bulk and distributing them at cost to anyone who wanted to try the regimen. But it wasn’t enough to keep up with demand. Larry bought a Cessna, hired a gay pilot, and began flying all over Mexico to scour pharmacies for the drugs. I had once helped him unload the boxes in the big storage facility where he stored the drugs but only that one time.
“You need to keep your hands clean,” he said, rejecting my further offer to help with the operation. “Because if I’m arrested, I’ll need you to represent me.”
So I knew little about the Mexican operation and nothing about the mysterious activities that had him flying to Israel, France and Japan except that he was pursuing leads about drugs and treatments that might be effective against the virus but which the FDA refused to consider. I worried that he was pushing himself too hard and would get sick. In the end, the brain aneurysm that killed him was a completely unexpected and yet, maybe merciful end considering the death he might otherwise have suffered from AIDS.
He’d left me a letter to open after he died. It contained the combination to a safe he had installed in his home office where I found a quarter-million dollars in cash. The letter provided detailed instructions about to whom and in what amounts I was to deliver the money. I visited a half-dozen cities across the country delivering bundles of cash to various people. I asked few questions, and they volunteered little information. Had I broken the law? Not as far as I knew. It was Larry’s money, and he could give it to whomever he wanted. I was simply the courier. What they did with the funds was not my concern. Nonetheless, the appearance of the FBI agents had me rattled. I’d been a defense lawyer a long time and I knew that insulating myself through ignorance of possibly illegal activity went only so far.
I started up my car and headed off to court.
••••
The Santa Monica courthouse was one of those ubiquitous institutional, International Style buildings of the 1960s— straight lines, square corners, glass fenestration, a gleaming white façade— that could have been a bank, a school, or for that matter a church; all the architect would have had to do was add a cross. The hearing in People v. Woods, et al., however, was not being conducted in one of the building’s austere courtrooms but in a trailer behind the courthouse pressed into service to handle the court’s overflow.
I was not an attorney of record in Woods. A friend had asked me to stand in for him because he was in trial elsewhere. Woods involved the arrests of some UCLA students at an anti-apartheid demonstration at the federal building for trespassing. A few of the demonstrators had scuffled with the cops and were then also charged with resisting arrest and with battery on a police officer. The kids said the cops started the fracas. I and the lawyers representing the other defendants were here on a Pitchess motion. Pitchess was a defense request to examine a cop’s personnel records for prior citizen complaints of misconduct that could be used against the cop at trial. We wanted to know if any of the officers in this case had been subjects of prior complaints of excessive force to buttress the kids’ claim that the cops started the fight and the protestors acted in self-defense.
••••
Despite attempts to invest the trailer with some kind of judicial dignity— there were wooden benches in the gallery and an elevated dais for the judge— it was unmistakably a trailer, windowless, cramped, and poorly ventilated. My fellow defense counsel— six of us in all, for each of the six defendants, Lewis Woods being the lead defendant— were huddled around one of two counsel tables at the front of the room. As was typical of pretrial hearings, the defendants themselves were not present. At the other table sat the solitary DA assigned to the case, and in the gallery was another lawyer I recognized but was surprised to see here, Marc Unger.
Marc was an Assistant Los Angeles City Attorney. He ran the division of the office that represented the police departments
