Hella Nation - Evan Wright [74]
Britney mulls her father’s comment. She points out that she hasn’t auditioned for a commercial since she was very little. It’s been at least six years— long before the current difficulties. “Dad, you spoiled my acting when we moved to Germany,” Britney says, referring to a period in the mid-1990s when Southland joined the Army and was posted in Europe.
“You were a fireman or something,” Brandon says.
“No, you were a cop,” says Britney.
“No, baby,” says Southland. “I was working for the government.”
“You’ve had so many jobs,” his son says. He makes it sound like an accusation.
Southland casts a worried glance at my tape recorder, then warns his kids, “You guys have got to be quiet, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
After our meal I ask Southland about the statement he made to Britt that he worked for the CIA. Southland sighs and shakes his head. “Wow,” he says. “He’s not supposed to say things like that. He should know better.” Southland levels his gaze at me. “It’s against the law for me to tell you what I did for the government.”
You can’t blame Southland’s kids for being confused about their father’s past. His autobiography is a mixture of bald lies shaded with subtle deceptions and rounded out by a few essential truths.
Southland was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1969. By his own account, his “father was a millionaire. He owned a ball bearing factory.”
Southland’s parents divorced after he was born, and his mother married a man named Harold Short. I interview Harold to fact-check Southland’s version of his father’s career. For instance, did he own a ball bearing factory?
Short laughs. “His father was a bookie. He was a salesman for a ball bearing company.” But, Short claims, Southland’s father quit his sales job to work full-time as a bookie. “In his apartment he had, like, numerous TVs and telephones and he would take bets on all kinds of sporting stuff.”
Southland tells me, “I wanted to be a cop since I was fifteen. I had Britney and did the whole marriage thing when I was nineteen, then went to college to become a cop. The chief of the L.A. Harbor police was my mentor.”
Expecting this to be another of Southland’s tall tales, I track down Los Angeles Harbor police chief Noel Cunningham. He confirms that in 1990 Southland was enrolled in a community college in Walnut Valley, California, earning an associate’s degree in criminology. Cunningham was his instructor in a seminar on criminal justice. He says, “Sean was probably one of my best students. He had charisma, beautiful children, and an attractive wife. My wife and I socialized with his family often.”
In 1991, Southland became a police officer in Azusa, a middle-class bedroom community near Los Angeles. His tenure lasted eighteen months. Southland says he was fired after arresting the son of the mayor, or the son of the governor of California. His account varies. No record of that arrest exists, and an Azusa Police Department official only confirms that Southland worked there as a police officer and was “terminated.”
Cunningham says, “Sean became kind of a strange guy after he left the Azusa police force. He joined the Army and went into some kind of high-powered elite military unit. He spoke Russian and worked for a clandestine group.”
When Britt looked into Southland’s past he discovered that he had in fact successfully completed advanced Russian training and cultural immersion at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Britt had completed the same course.
After his training at Monterey, Southland was stationed in Augsburg, Germany. In the mid-1990s, when Southland was stationed there, the U.S. military base in Augsburg was a primary intelligence center for debriefing Russian government and military personnel fleeing the collapsing Soviet empire. For reasons that remain unknown, Southland’s deployment to Augsburg