Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [30]
During one of my least favorite arrests, I was sent into a porn theater on Santa Monica Boulevard to look for lewd activity. I hated those places because of the sticky floors. You wanted to think you didn’t know what you were walking in, but you always knew. That wasn’t the worst of it. What I saw in places like that would turn my stomach. Once a priest was on his knees in front of another man, and, trust me, he wasn’t praying.
On this occasion, I found my suspect in the far corner. I flashed my light and had to look twice because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Under the cover of dark, wearing a little lace bra, a pink baby doll nightgown, red fishnet stockings, and brown Oxford walking shoes, a man was whacking his meat to the movie.
I didn’t want to touch him but still managed to get him outside, where my partner, Maria, and Sgt. Rick Webb were waiting. They started laughing and elected me to search the guy, who started sobbing uncontrollably, but I just couldn’t make myself touch someone who’d been doing what he had just a few minutes before. On top of that, I later found out this guy was a teacher.
Transvestites weren’t my cup of tea, but you’d be surprised which people were interested in them. I used to follow one of the biggest celebrities of all time through Hollywood as he picked up Dragons and drove them back to his Beverly Hills home—and there was nothing we could do about it. I did stop him and question him about his activities and acquaintances once, but since we didn’t see any public sexual activity or money transactions, I never had the legal justification to arrest him or the Dragons he’d picked up.
For the next year, Danny and I usually had the highest recap, or number of suspects put in jail, during each twenty-eight-day deployment. We actually made a ton of narcotics arrests because, surprise, surprise, drugs and prostitution often seemed to go hand in hand. Our supervisors called us in frequently because, though narcotics wasn’t really our detail, I couldn’t help but sniff out a drug deal going down. I knew where to go, and I knew what to look for.
Aside from the drug busts, I hated every aspect of Vice and was ready to do some work that counted for something. My prayers were answered after one year, when the department busted me for working a second job, one of many off-duty jobs I’d have over the years because my family needed the extra cash. On this occasion, I’d been working as a bouncer at a nightclub called Fantasia. I was supposed to work the parking lot only but would often get pulled inside to man the floor. One night, I took an inebriated customer to the manager’s office when he got a little out of control. He decided it would be a good idea to grab my sweater, and when he wouldn’t let go, I blasted him with one punch. He went down and out, and I cut his face in the process.
The guy ended up suing me, and the department got wind of it. They didn’t really care that I’d punched the guy, but they were upset that I hadn’t gotten the necessary permit to take on the second job. The truth was that working as a bouncer was considered a no-no for an officer, and I hadn’t applied for a permit because I’d known I wouldn’t get it. I was suspended for five days and removed from Vice, which suited me just fine.
I returned to Hollywood patrol but for less than a month. Word of my knack for narcotics busts must have preceded me, and I was quickly offered a position on the buy-bust team with West Bureau, which covered the Hollywood, Wilshire, Pacific, and West Los Angeles Divisions.
West Bureau Narcotics was one big search and destroy mission, and we were always doing one of those two things. We were the undercover buyers or chase team members waiting to pounce on the sellers. Either way, we were arresting the bad guys, and I thrived on that.
You could say I was pretty zealous when it came to my busts. Drug dealers tend to run when they know they’re about to get arrested, and this was one situation when I didn’t mind pounding the pavement. If you were running