Daryl Gates, Spymaster
When Daryl Gates ran the LAPD from 1978 to 1992 he also ran a worldwide political spying operation. And he lavished time on it, sometimes several hours each day, including all the dossiers and reports he got on the lawful activities of L.A. leaders, elected and not, as well as political and religious groups he suspected were up to no good. To those reading this who doubt I invite you to carefully read Gates's 1992 autobiography where he boasts about some of this...
On Page 72 of "Chief: My Life in the LAPD," Gates tells about
Lt. Carl Abbott, who spent years undercover posing as a communist, including time in Moscow...Locally, people of interest had their homes, offices and cars burglarized. Some were tailed, sometimes quite openly to intimidate them, to make sure they knew they were being watched. None of that is in the generally solid obituary of Gates in the L.A. Times today. But there was much more to the story...
There were undercover officers assigned to sleep with women to gather political information that went to Gates, who spent 45 minutes to several hours each week on his spy files. That last detail Gates admitted to under oath and was reported by an L.A. Times colleague and me in late 1982...
When Zev Yaroslavsky, then on the City Council, finally worked up the nerve to ask at a hearing how many undercover political officers the LAPD had, and how much they cost, the response was not subtle.
A deputy chief told the councilmen that if he did that and any undercover officer turned up dead, the council members would all become murder suspects...
http://www.laobserved.com/visiting/2010/04/daryl_gates_secret_legacy.php
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