The L.A. 4: Is Their Case Beyond Hope of Justice?

Attention conspiracy buffs:

It finally may be time to let go of the J.F.K. puzzle, and focus on a newer but already numbingly convoluted conundrum: Who started the Los Angeles riots?

As detailed by a dubious source in the March 15 New Yorker, the diabolical scheme allegedly starts with the Clinton campaign, and then careers across the country, entangling or endangering a diverse cast that includes (take note, Oliver Stone) Ronald H. Brown, then Democratic National Committee chairman and now Secretary of Commerce; Clinton campaign guru James Carville; Congressman Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and radio host Rush Limbaugh. And maybe, just maybe, Jesus Christ.

Titled “Looking for Justice in L. A.” the story, by Peter J. Boyer, examines how the so-called L. A. 4 case evolved. Many pieces of this nutty story have been reported elsewhere. But Boyer, a former Los Angeles Times staffer, pulls the threads together in an accessible package.

It focuses on defendant Damian Williams and the original defense team that recruited him as a client--and, Boyer asserts, may have damaged that case “beyond the hope of justice.”

The story begins with the events on April 29 at the corner of Florence and Normandie, but the conspiracy scenario might be said to have begun when attorney Dennis Palmieri’s resume arrived at the offices of the Center for Constitutional Law and Justice in Los Angeles.

Fred Sebastian, the center’s founder, tells Boyer that he read Palmieri’s resume--in which the attorney made reference to his advocacy of, among other projects, lunar mining colonies. “We hired him lickety-split,” Sebastian says.

Palmieri, as it happens, had already been involved in some very high-level affairs. The Reagan and Bush administrations, along with Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, had stolen his thoughts, using them to bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall and breakup of the Soviet Union, asserts Palmieri, who was once found to have paranoid schizophrenia and says he cannot deny the possibility that he is Jesus Christ.

Sebastian sent his new hire out to find Damian Williams’ mother. She agreed to let the center represent her son, who remains a defendant in the beating of trucker Reginald Denny.

Sebastian then coined the term “L. A. 4” for the defendants and began shaping public opinion on the case, the article says.

The center later pulled Palmieri from the defense, in the middle of his “loquacious” summary at the preliminary hearing. Eventually, Georgiana Williams hired a new attorney, unattached to the center.

But that didn’t end the center’s moment in the spotlight.

Last fall, federal agents arrested Sebastian in Little Rock, Ark., for his alleged participation in a big bucks scam, unrelated to the case. They quickly determined that he is really Frederick George Celani, an ex-convict and a masterful con artist.

At his detention hearing, Celani said he was acting under immunity granted by the congressional Committee on Oversight and Investigations, of which, he said, his Center for Constitutional Law and Justice is a part.

In a prison interview, Celani added to the story, telling Boyer that after helping the government solve the mysteries behind the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 7, the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case and the Charles Keating scandal, he went to work for the Democratic National Committee to sabotage the Republicans.

It was James Carville, he says, who ordered him to start the Los Angeles riots. With the help of LAPD officers, he says, he did just that.

Finally, he took on the L. A. 4 case, under orders to make a mess of it.

A 1976 evaluation by a prison official called Celani, “a consistent liar who attempts to manipulate and exploit others for self gain . . . his past record strongly indicates that virtually everything the inmate says must be verified before it can be believed.”

Rush Limbaugh was so tickled by the story that he opened his Tuesday morning radio show by revealing details Boyer left out of the article: i.e. that the “conspiracy” supposedly included efforts to paint Limbaugh and representative Bob Dornan as homosexual lovers (a romance Limbaugh laughingly denied).

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Boyer said that while Celani had masterfully woven into his story bits and pieces of credible evidence, as a whole, it is “pure, utter, remarkable, amazing bull----.”

Still, given the edgy climate of post-riot L. A., and the odd occurrences that surround recent events, there is no shortage of people willing to believe that at least part of it is true.

Many rational Angelenos already are perplexed. Boyer’s story is likely to leave them even more disoriented, wondering if some cult of terrorist goofballs hasn’t slipped powerful hallucinogens into the city’s water supply?

The whole affair might read like a hilariously lunatic Lewis Carroll tale if there weren’t so many real victims.

Which leads--not quite as abruptly as it might at first seem--to another remarkable article: Darcy Frey’s “The Last Shot,” in the April issue of Harper’s magazine.

In that novella-length true story, Frey follows the lives of three very talented teen-age basketball players as they struggle to survive, and plot to escape, the Coney Island housing projects into which fate has deposited them.

“Like most of New York’s impoverished and predominantly black neighborhoods,” Frey writes, “Coney Island does not exactly shower its youth with opportunity.”

One way out is college basketball. But to get a sports scholarship, they need to get a certain grade on the college Scholastic Aptitude Test, and they haven’t exactly thrived in New York’s public schools.

Frey’s descriptions of the game these boys play so well is poetic, the story of their heroic efforts to transcend the world of drugs and gangs, heart-wrenching.

“I been through certain things other teen-agers haven’t,” Russell, one of the young hoopsters, tells Frey. “I learnt that part of success is failure, having hard times smack you in the face, having to go without having.”

Even with that attitude, though--even for a kid like Russell who plays by all the complex rules and confronts the circumstances that hobble him--even moderate success is a long shot.

The sad similarities between the fragile dreams of the Coney Islanders and those of young Angelenos such as Damian (Football) Williams are obvious.

In Los Angeles, as in New York, society has abandoned staggering numbers of its African-American children, leaving them even more susceptible to the forces that now twist the values of children across the ethnic and socioeconomic spectrum.

“When we was kids, we didn’t think about what we wanted to be,” Williams tells Boyer. “We just thought about what we wanted to have. We was idealists.”

After acquiring what are alleged to be gang tattoos, Williams attended three Los Angeles high schools before dropping out. One of his few remaining hopes was football, and he landed a position on the semi-pro L. A. Mustangs. Eventually, though, “he apparently got discouraged and quit . . . “ the New Yorker article says.

His Mustang coach next saw Williams on television, in police custody for his alleged role in beating Denny.

Required Reading

As a rule, magazine round-table discussions--such as Harper’s Forum--are a drag. Mother Jones may have broken out of the rut.

The first MoJo Forum, in the March/April issue, continues the debate on urban poverty that began two issues back.

Like Harper’s, this forum brings together an exceptional array of contributors, but not in the same room at the same time. Rather, the remarks are gathered as if in conversation, and then forcefully edited into the most stimulating “conversation” you’re likely to hear on the subject.

Here are some fragments of one exchange between Tony Brown, host of PBS’s “Tony Brown’s Journal”; Price Cobbs, a psychiatrist and the co-author of the book “Black Rage”; Jacqueline Jones, a Brandeis University historian, and Derrick Bell, author of “Faces at the Bottom of the Well”:

Cobbs: I think the middle class too often gets trashed for leaving the ghetto . . .

Jones: As a white suburbanite, am I supposed to be responsible for the white poor in Kentucky? Nobody would ever say that, and I’m always shocked when people say the black middle class is responsible for the black poor . . . .

Brown: The black community has to shift from an obsession with racism to an obsession with education. We have to say, ‘I really don’t care whether you like me or not. I can still fly this jet plane better than you.’ . . .

Bell: Whites have a stake in solving these problems just as much as blacks . . .

Cobbs: This is a survival issue for the United States . . . In almost every community, we are building up Third World cities, surrounded by a series of First World suburbs, and economies . . . I see tinderboxes waiting to explode . . . “