Gates Has Contract to Write Memoirs

Daryl F. Gates, author.

The outspoken Los Angeles police chief may be able to add that line to his resume in early 1992, when a major New York publishing house expects to release Gates’ autobiography.

Gates was out of town Thursday and unavailable for comment.

But police spokesman Cmdr. William Booth confirmed that the chief has received an advance, “in the ballpark” of $300,000, from Bantam Books for his memoirs.

According to Booth, Gates was approached by New York literary agent Angela Miller a year ago and eventually signed a contract.

“In a sense, he agreed with the persons who came to him that he had something to say,” Booth said. “And you know Chief Gates--he does have things to say.”

The police chief’s shoot-from-the-lip style has frequently made headlines and raised the hackles of his critics--from his comment shortly after becoming chief in 1978 that some Latino officers were not being promoted because they were “lazy,” to his testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing this year that casual drug users should be shot.

Booth said that a considerable part of the book will deal with Gates’ experiences as a field commander during the Watts riots in 1965, but that it probably also will touch on many other major events involving the department since Gates joined it in 1949.

Bantam spokesman Stuart Applebaum said Gates’ story is expected to have national appeal because of the “glamour and charisma” of the department.

“To most of North America, the LAPD is a place they know only from the enormously successful TV series of the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Applebaum said. “For a national book-reading audience, there is more than a little curiosity about what it really was like under one of its most provocative and well-known leaders. . . .”

Applebaum said it will be a first-person narrative.

Gates is working with Los Angeles writer Steve Delsohn, whose previous books include former pro football star Jim Brown’s controversial 1989 autobiography, “Out of Bounds.”