Angelenos Look Back at Days and Nights of ‘Anarchy’

Mixed Messages 10 Years After The Riots

Here’s how several Angelenos remember the night of April 29, 1992.

By DARRELL SATZMAN

Staff Reporter

Former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates

“That night is burned in my memory forever.

“I had been scheduled to go to an event. There was a measure to change the way the police chief was selected. I was very much opposed to it, so I promised I would come and say a few words.

“While I was there, I was in radio contact and phone contact. When I came back to Parker Center the situation had worsened. I went to the command center, which was in City Hall East, and I got a briefing about what was going on. It wasn’t a great picture. I went back to Parker Center and jumped in a helicopter. We flew over the south part of the city and I couldn’t see any police officers or fire people on the streets.

“We flew over the Southern command (center), and I was very unhappy with what I saw. Nobody was leaving. So I told the pilot to land right there, but there was a problem with the radio and he said he couldn’t land. We flew back and I jumped into a car and starting driving around South Central and I couldn’t find a police officer. I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ At one point, my driver said, ‘People are starting to recognize you. Let’s get out of here.'”

Linda Breakstone, political editor at KCBS 2 news, was a reporter for KABC 7 in 1992.

“I was up for 36 hours. I ended up falling asleep on the air, live. We were set up to go live in a conference room at City Hall and we were waiting for (Mayor Tom) Bradley and Gates. When I was doing the live shot my cameraman kept moving from side to side and I was trying to stay in the frame. When the shot was over I said, ‘Why were you doing that?’ And he said, ‘Linda, you were moving back and forth and I was trying to keep you on camera.’ I was literally falling asleep on my feet. The adrenaline keeps you going. I finally fell apart at City Hall, which I guess is symbolic for the whole thing.

“I remember one thing, it must have been the third day, and we were standing on a corner, I think it was Third and Vermont. In the parking lot there was a dead body in a car. Two blocks down the street a gang had just broken into a liquor store and you could hear gunshots going off. About four blocks away there was a major fire burning. From every vantage you had this unbelievable scene.”

Kathy Parsons, public information officer for the city of Long Beach, was a circulation sales manager for the Daily Breeze newspaper in 1992.

“The night of the (verdict), I was in Long Beach with my husband. We were signing the papers on a new house. At the time, we were living near Farmer’s Market. I had to go back up to Los Angeles that first morning and my husband said, ‘Kathy, no matter what you do, don’t get off the freeways.’ But the freeway became a parking lot. I had visions of never moving on the freeway, so I had to get off.

“I got off at La Cienega. I could see the burning in South Central at a distance. Then I came down (from Baldwin Hills) and I saw the looting at Fedco. People were coming out of the store with baskets, all types of people.

“The police department was just sitting there watching it happen. It was total anarchy.”

Television reporter Ron Olsen had just arrived at KTLA 5 in Hollywood to prep for a talk show he was hosting when the verdicts came in.

“I went into the makeup room and Wanda Moore, who was going to be on the talk show was in there. She’s African-American. The verdicts had just come in and there were tears streaming down her face.

“A lot of that day is a blur, but I ended up at Parker Center. There were people who were instigating the crowd, yelling and trying to incite the crowd. And then there were the organizers of the protest trying to get them to back off. The contrast sticks in my mind.

“We were under a big tree on the Parker Center lawn and I was live to New York when someone tried to grab my microphone. I got in a wrestling match with this guy, but he never got the mike away. So then he goes around and he blind-sides me. He knocked me out of the camera frame but I stayed on my feet. I regained my composure and finished the live shot. It made for pretty dramatic TV.”

Jong Min Kang, president of the Korean American Business Association, was president of Korean Young Adult Team of L.A., when the riots erupted.

“There was a lot of activity to protect Korean businesses, especially in Koreatown. A lot of young Korean people had weapons. There was every kind of weapon, AK-47s and Uzis.

“I have two businesses, one downtown, which is general wholesale merchandise, and another in South Central, a discount retail shop. My store in South Central is in a strip mall and there were more than 100 merchants there and more than 20 security guards to protect the Korean stores. So (the rioters) couldn’t come in. Nothing happened to those stores but a lot of other stores were burned. It was a terrible situation.”

As vice chairman of the American Jewish Committee, former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg was hosting a group of German government officials.

“We were at Olvera Street. We wanted to give the officials a flavor of Los Angeles. I was trying to explain to these government officials what was going on. They were shocked. They couldn’t believe what was happening.

“At one point, I wanted to go downtown to see what was happening, but the people I was with convinced me not to and it was probably a good thing. It wasn’t safe.

“The next day I was in my office in mid-Wilshire near Koreatown. We ended up evacuating because a number of buildings around us went up in flames.”

In 1992, the Los Angeles Business Journal’s offices were in Koreatown. Todd Frankel, chief editorial photographer, remembers the scene.

“Looters entered the Big 5 store a half a block away from our offices at Wilshire and Kenmore and carried away clothing, guns, everything. I heard a loud boom and ducked out of sight behind some bushes in front of the Equitable building across from Big 5. I photographed the looters and the taxi cabs that pulled up in front of the Big 5 to cart away the looters and their loot. One image that I will never forget was a young boy, maybe 10, looking startled as a young man walked by him carrying an arm full of rifles.

“The day after the verdicts, I got as far as Venice Boulevard and spotted a large retail store that was being looted. I turned my camera from the driver’s window of my car toward the looting at the retail store across from the Korea Town Mall when another driver sitting in her car across the street yelled at me to stop photographing. She drove straight at me at high speed and I flipped a U-turn in the middle of Western Avenue.”

Kerry Morrison, executive director of the Hollywood Entertainment District Property Owners Association, was working for the California Association of Realtors in 1992.

“The day of the verdicts I was at work. Our offices were at 5th and Virgil. I went home and I was riveted to the TV most of the night. I remember sobbing in front of the television, feeling so helpless about everything that was happening.

“The next morning, as the city was beginning to implode, people from my staff were calling and asking if they should go in. It was my judgment that they shouldn’t. I called my boss and he had just come in from Washington and I don’t think he had an appreciation of what was happening. He told us to go to work. So we all came to work, but by 11 a.m. we were all sent home because there were burning buildings all around us.”

WHERE ARE THEY NOW:

Ira Reiner

Then: District Attorney

Now: Partner, downtown law firm Riley & Reiner. Reiner, a former City Attorney and City Controller whose office oversaw the prosecution of the four officers charged in the Rodney King beating, announced one month before the November 1992 election he was withdrawing from the race. Had he won, it would have been his third term as DA. He joined the L.A. office of New York-based Phillips Nizer Benjamin Krim & Ballon, leaving after a year with partner Raymond Riley to form Riley & Reiner. The 66-year-old Reiner has no designs on a return to public life. “Twenty five years was enough,” he said.

Daryl Gates

Then: Chief of Police

Now: Gates is in semi-retirement, working for three police-related entities. He is a senior advisor to San Clemente-based PropertyBureau.com, a police auction site, where he is responsible for business development. He holds the same position with Sun Badge & Leather Co. of San Dimas, a supplier of badges and other items to the LAPD and other police departments. Team International, a Texas firm developing a replacement for the police baton, also has retained Gates. The work is “ruining my golf game, which wasn’t very good to begin with,” said Gates, who declined to give his age. He served 43 years in the Los Angeles Police Department, including 14 as chief.

Rodney King

Then: A parolee whose videotaped beating by police led to the trial that sparked the L.A. riots.

Now: King, who has been arrested eight times since the riots, was sentenced in Pomona last October to a year in a live-in drug treatment center after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of being under the influence of PCP and indecent exposure.

King’s run-ins with the law continued even after receiving $3.8 million in a settlement reached after a suit against the city of Los Angeles because of the beating. In the past decade, King, 36, has been arrested for allegedly driving under the influence, assaulting his wife with a deadly weapon (his car), beating his wife and running over two cops who busted him for soliciting a transvestite prostitute.

Peter Ueberroth

Then: President of Rebuild L.A.

Now: Ueberroth is chairman of Contrarian Group Inc., a Newport Beach-based business investment and management company, a firm he founded before the riots. He also serves on the board of several corporations and organizations, including Coca-Cola Co. and Hilton Hotels Corp. In 1999, he headed a group of investors who purchased the Pebble Beach Co., which owns the famous golf-course resort.

George Holliday

Then: Lake View Terrace plumber who captured on video the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers (and first aired by KTLA Channel 5).

Now: Holliday, 42, continues to run his Granada Hills-based plumbing company, Irooter. He lost his lawsuit attempting to collect residuals from several television networks for running the footage of King’s beating without permission. Holliday, who since 1992 has divorced his wife, has a 5-year-old son and lives in Granada Hills.

Reginald Denny

Then: Truck driver who was dragged from his semi and severely beaten at the start of the riots.

Now: Denny works as a boat mechanic in Parker, Ariz., according to a documentary television producer who recently contacted him.

Reported by Jonathan Diamond, Jason Schaff

and Jeremiah Marquez