Straight Life - Art Pepper [140]
They tried everything. They joked with him, and they grabbed me, and I said, "No! No!" and held on to the deputy sheriff, "Don't let them take me!" And they laughed. Sanchez glared at me. But this guy realized that what I had told him was true, and he would not let them take me.
The deputy took me to the jail. He told the desk sergeant, "If anybody comes for this guy make sure it's legal and everything's in order." They took me back into the jail, and then Frank came. So I was vindicated with everybody in the tank. The way it ended up they finally got Frank for some ridiculous thing. They framed him, but it had nothing to do with me.
END OF THE ROAD by John Tynan
For detective sergeants Ed Sanchez and Ray MacCarville of the Los Angeles police department's narcotics division, it was a routine stake-out.
Inside the house that they were watching, at 1113 Stone St., Lupe and Frank Ortiz went about their business of the moment as they prepared for a visitor. The Ortiz' business was alleged to be the sale of heroin; the expected visitor was Art Pepper.
To the waiting detectives, Pepper's appearance and entry into the house was a trigger for action. For an hour they waited expectantly. Then Pepper reappeared.
"We followed him for about two or three blocks," MacCarville said later. "Then we picked him up. He had a half-ounce of heroin on him and admitted being a user."
At police headquarters on Oct. 25, Pepper was booked for possession of the drug (estimated value: $240). Bail was set at $12,000. A three-time loser, he faces a sentence of from five years to life imprisonment.
Contrary to erroneous reports in the metropolitan newspapers, the bail was not posted. Pepper was left to the agonies of withdrawal in tank 11D-2 of the county jail. ("He's hooked real bad," said an officer the day after his arrest. "He was real sick today.")
To the police, Pepper was merely bait. On Oct. 26, narcotics officers closed in on the Ortiz operation, and the house on Stone St. was crossed from their list.
The police had Pepper dead to rights. Some three months prior to his arrest for possession, the altoist had been picked up for needle marks by a county sheriff's radio car, had pleaded guilty to addiction in court, and was sentenced to serve 90 days in the county jail. Before the full term of that sentence had expired, Pepper was released. A good-behavior release of this nature is not unusual.
But it was patently clear that the "monkey" had claimed a victim, and Art Pepper's troubled career had apparently come to the end of the road. Affecting adversely an application for parole is his record as a parole violator for which he served his last prison term in the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island, Calif., in 1955-56. He was released in June of that year.
Pepper's first narcotics conviction (for heroin) was in 1953. He served some time in Los Angeles county jail at that time, then was transferred to the U. S. Public Health hospital at Fort Worth, Texas, from which he was discharged in May, 1954.
The ravages of heroin on human life have perhaps never been demonstrated more clearly than in the story of 35-year-old Art Pepper. As it does with us all, his life touched and affected the lives of others. His first wife, who divorced him during his term in Fort Worth hospital in 1954, is now happily married to a San Fernando Valley, Calif., businessman. Pepper's daughter,