The Beat Goes On

He is the icon of old cops. He knows their jokes and their language. His humor covers the short, lively spectrum from off-color to black. He drinks beer, has little use for lawyers and no shortage of opinions. He is of the Los Angeles Police Department, and once was its messenger to the world.

Joseph Wambaugh changed the way readers think of cops. Twenty-five years ago, he sat down at his portable Royal typewriter and told the stories of his beat, of the grime and drugs and booze and tedium and raw fear of policing America’s second-largest and fastest-changing city. His characters were his colleagues. Wambaugh wrote “The New Centurions” in his spare time; his day job was working the detective desk in the Hollenbeck Division.

These days, Wambaugh has traded in his Royal for an electronic typewriter. His spacious home sits behind a security gate and overlooks San Diego’s grand harbor. The view flows off an immaculate green lawn, past a swimming pool and fountain and sharply down to the horizon. He still drinks beer, but he likes the good ones and occasionally downs them in places like the San Diego Yacht Club, which bears as much resemblance to an L.A. cop bar as it does to an all-night doughnut shop.

And yet, despite his new company and new digs, Wambaugh is what he always has been: irascible, opinionated and perceptive, his ear tuned to the cadence and language of the beat, his eye focused on the essential elements of a tale. His new book, “Floaters” (Bantam), is set around the America’s Cup--a long way from South-Central, but it’s still about cops and criminals at work. At 59, Wambaugh is older and long gone from policing, but he knows his business.

“A novel about the America’s Cup would be boring,” he says as he and a friend, Dick Gant, negotiate a choppy swell in Wambaugh’s powerboat, the Bookworm. “But throw in some murder and some masseuses, and that’s a story.”

Joe Wambaugh, a married ex-Marine with no clear career in mind, joined the LAPD in 1960 because it paid better than teaching school and because it was the LAPD.

“That was Jack Webb’s police department,” he says.

It wasn’t long before Wambaugh saw chaos up close. In 1965, while assigned to Juvenile Division, he was told one day to throw on a uniform and ship out to 77th Street. A few miles away, the Watts riots were smoldering, violence flaring in spots but the full fury still held in check.

That afternoon, Friday the 13th of August, Wambaugh and about 30 other cops were trying to keep a crowd at Manchester and Figueroa under control when gunshots ripped through the scaldingly hot afternoon.

“I don’t know who the hell fired,” he says. “Probably us.”

Whoever started it, it was now the police’s job to end it. Over the next few days, Wambaugh would watch some rise to that task and others falter before it. Police radio operators would burst into tears, overwhelmed by the onslaught of calls and by sheer exhaustion. One officer would break down into peals of hysterical laughter as he stared at the shattered butt of his shotgun. Over and over, cops would reel at the sound of gunshots and search in vain and in fear for the shooters.

“That was not police work,” Wambaugh says. “Police are not trained for that. We shouldn’t be. That was work for the military.”

After hours of mounting tension and violence, Wambaugh and his partner spotted a looter and Wambaugh’s partner ended up shooting the perpetrator in the ankle.

“I was never so relieved,” he remembers. “That meant we would take him down to the hospital and get off the street, at least for a few hours.”

*

In those days, Wambaugh was wending his way through the ranks of the LAPD. He would eventually do tours in all four of what cops back then called the “ghetto divisions”: University, Wilshire, Newton and 77th.

He earned promotions to sergeant and detective. His old partner, Richard Kalk, remembers him as a solid, common-sense investigator who cracked more than his share of tough cases.

In the mid-1960s, for instance, a school custodian was murdered, and it was Wambaugh who remembered that a local kid had burglarized that same school. The police went and found the kid and turned up the custodian’s keys. Case closed. Years later, Kalk arrested the same guy again and found a newspaper clip of his arrest by Wambaugh in his wallet.

Off hours, Wambaugh went to school, eventually earning his master’s degree in English from Cal State Los Angeles in 1968 and then setting out to turn himself into a writer.

“All English majors get that idea. You read all these great books and start thinking you can do it by osmosis,” he says. “Most 22-year-olds set out to write the great American novel, and it inevitably turns out to be ‘My First Lay.’ At least I waited until I had some life experience. I waited until I was 30, until I had seven years on the job, before I wrote one line.”

Encouraged by an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Wambaugh worked quietly and diligently, a few hours every day. He kept his work so private that Kalk didn’t know his partner had written a book until Wambaugh asked him to take his picture for the jacket.

“The New Centurions” hit the stores in early 1971. Police writing would never be the same.

From its opening passages about LAPD training to its grim observations of police debauchery and its climactic ending in the Watts riots, “The New Centurions” was about cops who would never have been recognized in the squad rooms of “Adam 12.” They were gritty, incisive, foul-mouthed and fallible. They were real. They were Wambaugh and his colleagues.

“Do you like cops? Read ‘The New Centurions,’ ” a New York Times critic wrote. “Do you hate cops? Read ‘The New Centurions.’ ”

Not everyone was so impressed. Then-Chief Edward M. Davis was barely settling into the LAPD’s top job when the book was released. Urged on by his senior staff, Davis went so far as to write to Wambaugh’s publishers suggesting changes; predictably, they ignored him.

“My top staff was just outraged,” Davis recalled in a recent interview. “But the book had raves . . . and when I got to reading it, I liked it. The language was different than I heard on the street. His language was sometimes adventurous. But there were real scenes in there, and I enjoyed it.”

Davis’ eventual appreciation for the book did not translate, however, into a friendship between the LAPD’s chief and the man who was fast emerging as its most famous officer.

“He was always rather distant, cold,” Davis said. “He never came to see me. Maybe I should have gone to see him. I mean, who was the real big shot?”

*

Wambaugh published two more books while wearing LAPD blue, but it became harder and harder to be a cop and a writer at the same time. Command officers were jealous, and colleagues, deferential, Wambaugh recalls.

“Jealousy is easier to deal with than deference,” he says. “You can’t fight back against deference.”

The phones at Hollenbeck would ring off the hook for him, Kalk recalls. “It was one call for the police, three calls for Wambaugh, the author,” he says.

In 1974, Wambaugh submitted his resignation, bowing out of police work six years before qualifying for a pension. But his work has continued to borrow heavily from his network of cop sources and his ear for cop language.

His latest novel is populated by the canny, quirky cops who meander through all his works. There is Norman G. “Letch” Boggs, who chomps raw garlic, screens porn movies as part of his vice job and has “the instincts of a ferret.”

There are harbor cops, lifeguards and detectives, including the much-married “Anne of a Thousand Names.” There are hookers and a memorable Keeper of the America’s Cup, who basks in his job and schemes to keep it. Wambaugh stresses that there’s no relation between his Keeper of the Cup and the real one, but each of his cops borrows characteristics from the real police Wambaugh knows, in part because of the efforts of Tony Puente, a veteran San Diego officer who introduces Wambaugh to cops on the beat.

*

It’s been 22 years since Wambaugh checked in his badge and gun. But he talks to officers around the country, and he tracks the doings of his former department with particular interest. Like almost any other subject, he does not lack for opinions about the LAPD of yesterday or today.

When it comes to police chiefs, he ranks yesterday’s far better than today’s. Of current Chief Willie L. Williams he says, “Now there’s an empty suit. . . . They wanted a guy they could manipulate, and they got him.”

Wambaugh also dismisses community-based policing as overrated public relations. He believes the cops who struck and kicked Rodney King were “beating up a helpless drunk,” but he also thinks it was wrong to subject them to a federal trial once they’d been acquitted in state court. He calls Stacey C. Koon, the sergeant in charge at that incident, a “peculiar guy” who adorned his letters to Wambaugh with smiley faces in the O’s of his signature.

And as for today’s LAPD rank and file? Wambaugh brands them a “mutinous band of malcontents.”

“There is not one iota of respect for the chief, for any of the brass, and even less for City Hall,” Wambaugh says. “That is not the department I served with.”

*

Today, Wambaugh works in a coolly lit and warmly decorated office inside his home. The walls are lined with a few mementos and a lot of books. He reads humorists and novelists. One favorite is Tom Wolfe, whose facility with quirky characters resembles Wambaugh’s.

Wambaugh is happily between books. When he gets an idea, it takes three to four months to pound out a novel; he has produced 15 books in 25 years.

Although some of his best work has been nonfiction--”The Onion Field” was both a literary hit and a successful movie--three of his four nonfiction books prompted lawsuits. He prevailed, but the headaches and expenses were too much to make another worthwhile.

Instead, Wambaugh bides his time between novels, waiting for inspiration. He takes in the view of the harbor, plays a little golf, makes an occasional trip to the desert with his wife, Dee, and keeps an eye on his dogs.

He does not seem to need the company of many friends, but he keeps in touch with a few. And although he hears from police officers all around the country, he says his reputation among them has shifted over the years.

“It used to be that everywhere I went, cops would know me and would have read my books,” says Wambaugh as he pilots his polished black Volvo up the hill to his house. “Now, the younger cops, they’ve heard of me, but they haven’t read the books. They don’t read anymore.”

That hardly seems to trouble Wambaugh. He’s graduated from police work to writing in a grand and celebrated fashion. He has a body of work to make any author proud, a marriage that has lasted his entire adult life. And yet, even now, the legacy of the police department he left behind still tugs at him.

“I still dream about it,” he says. “I have this stress dream where I have gone back to the job and my uniform is totally outdated, and I’m sort of just showing up and working part time. I’m desperately trying to get my uniform straight and my Sam Browne straight, and I’m running around, out of place. . . . Here I am, 59, and I’m still having that dream.”