High Crimes and Misdemeanors

The video image dips and joggles as the cameraman from “True Crime Tonight” hurries to keep up with the plainclothes vice squad. They burst in from everywhere at once, it seems--from the swimming pool patio, from the lawn, from between the pool tables.

The suspects at the two card tables look up, startled. They are surrounded. The exits are covered. A voice off-camera tells them, you’re under arrest for gambling.

The camera zooms in on the pile of illicit cash at Jim Herd’s elbow--illegal pinochle winnings, all 30 cents of it.

If reality TV had in fact videotaped last week’s bust in the rec room at Colony Cove Mobile Estates in Carson, it would have canceled the show and substituted a rerun. The youngest of the pinochle desperadoes was 64, the highest stakes a buck.

The law, however, does not have a TV programmer’s options. Dura lex, sed lex: The law is hard, but it is the law.

The defensiveness of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department press release on the matter anticipated the laughingstock Lenoisms about a vice raid on a $4 pinochle pot in an old folks’ trailer park: “. . . once a peace officer becomes aware of an offense, he or she is obligated to respond appropriately.”

Doesn’t matter that the game is penny pinochle. Book ‘em.

Doesn’t matter that the accused attempted robber is a 71-year-old grandma whose house in West Covina is being foreclosed on and her husband’s pension is being garnished. She allegedly goes to stick up a gas station with a 50-year-old handgun that’s not even loaded. Use a gun, go to jail, remember? Book ‘er.

Now that the sheer shock and embarrassment of being busted have worn off a bit, the Carson 8, as they have jauntily taken to calling themselves, are having something of a lark.

TV has eaten this up, and so, in fleeting Warholian fashion, the Carson 8 are famous.

Olga Schellhorn, the park manager, cited for permitting gambling, got recognized at Radio Shack. Someone buttonholed Jim Herd at the carwash. A guy named Morty called from Vegas to say he’d be bringing everyone in his mobile home park to court for support.

Get a few of the eight together and they banter like the lunch crowd at the Friars Club:

“I bet they have bigger games at the police station.”

“Juries have been letting off murderers, why wouldn’t they let a pinochle player walk?”

“My defibrillator could’ve gone off.”

“My aorta could’ve bust.”

“I think we’re too old for a chain gang.”

“How about casino night for our defense fund?”

When David Quaintance got to church on Sunday, pinned to his usher’s jacket was a sign: “Bugsy Quaintance.” And there was no end to the ribbing about the collection plate.

The pinochle game has been going here almost as long as the park itself--20 years. Players die, players move on, the game stays. The clubhouse is everyone’s extended living room, when TV gets too boring and reading too solitary and an ailing spouse is napping.

Until somebody in one of the 404 trailer spaces got peeved and tipped off the vice cops, Olga was thinking about having the game tables re-covered. Maybe now she won’t. Everyone--the canasta crowd, the mah-jongg ladies who came down in the evenings--has been scared off.

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LAPD vice busted a ladies’ bowling league in Granada Hills seven years back. It found $15.50 in bets.

My father taught us poker at a tender age, using his cache of silver dollars. Chelsea Clinton plays pinochle with her parents, for stakes unknown.

Quaintance just visited his mother in her Long Beach retirement home, and guys were playing cards with money right there on the table in front of God and everyone.

And surely every office in America gets up a Super Bowl pool.

Bill Plaisted admits they were gambling, but “Why not just bawl us out? The law is a good law, but you gotta use sense; we don’t want floating poker or crap games. There is a gray area.”

Not in the law; not anymore. That squeeze you feel is the law of unintended consequences, hardening like cement around our feet.

We holler for law and order, we vote for it, we vote for representatives who vote for it. What we get with it, like a side dish, is inflexibility, zero tolerance, no exceptions, “three strikes,” up and down, the same for a panicked grandma and a junkie with a loaded Glock. Mandatory expulsion for weapons at school means the 7-year-old who thinks the gun is a toy, and the gangbanger who knows very well it isn’t.

There is money and sympathy aplenty for the gas station grandma. News coverage of the Carson 8 is barely able to suppress a giggle; the county can’t afford to open its new jail, and here it’s busting a pinochle club. Your tax dollars at work.

What makes a law strong? We don’t need parables about oaks and willows to figure that out. We need only look at our skyscrapers, strong in an earthquake because they can bend with it.