Which story is better?
Two young Spanish guys were bothering him at the bar, calling him an old man, harassng the shit out of him. He turns around and shoots the two of them. Kills one right there in the bar. The guy drops. The other guy staggers out into the street. He follows that guy, puts one in his head right in the street, walks back in the bar, puts his gun on the bar.
He was drinking a bottle of Heinikein when the cops come. It was a ground ball murder for us.
We get an interpreter and sit down with him.
Here’s a guy who spent twenty five years in a Castro jail in Havana. What are we going to do to this guy?
He told us flat out, “Hey, they bothered me, so I killed them. Yeah, I’ll go to jail here. It’s better than being in a dungeon in Cuba.”
This was a great big muscular kid, in for assault with a deadly weapon and robbery. It was in the LA riots, in Pasadena.
This guy walks into a little Mama-Papa Korean-owned liquor store, carries out a bunch of stuff, puts it in his car, walks back in, pushes the old man out of the way, a little old Korean guy, carries more stuff out.
The Korean guy stops him at the door.
The guy lifts up a beer bottle, says, “Get out of my way or I’ll crush your skull, you little (racist remarks) and got arested.
In the courtroom this guy came up out of his chair, up over the counsel table. He got nailed by a Pasadena policeman and my fill-in baliff Brianwho used to pitch for the White Sox.
They had him pinned on counsel table. Brian, who is left handled, is leaning over him holding his arm so his gun’s on his left side. I don’t like guns in the courtroom.
This guy’s on his back, and really built.
That arm that Brian is leaning over and holding keeps coming up toward his gun. Every time it came up it was getting closer and closer to the gun. I’m watching this hand getting closer and closer.
So I stood up on my bench and jumped into the well. My robe is flying. I happened to be wearing tennis shoes that day. I jumped down and grabbed the guy’s arm and cranked it behind his back until Brian could get over the railing. It took all of three seconds.
There was somebody there from the Pasadena Star News at the time; the headline said, “Whoosh! Batman Judge.”