I met my best friend Alex Jacinto in the most extraordinary of ways. The fact that it was extraordinary had nothing to do with either of us. Nor even with the business that brought us together one autumn afternoon at a table in the darkened, near empty side room of the famed Hollywood Mexican restaurant Lucy's El Adobe Cafe.
Alex Jacinto
The owner Frank Casado, a behind-the-scenes politico and close friend of then Gov. Jerry Brown, wanted us to meet. Jacinto, his longtime pal and lawyer, was about to file a landmark civil rights lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department that was bound to ruffle feathers in the city. And me? Well, Casado had taken to calling me the "New Kid in Town," the title of a hit song in the Eagles' great Hotel California album. This was 1978, and the Eagles, the hottest name in music, were regarded as extended family by Casado and his wife Lucy who had fed and sheltered them during their days as struggling artists.
I was the new kid because I had only recently arrived in Tinseltown to write a three-times-a-week column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a strike-crippled afternoon newspaper attempting to resurrect itself from near ruin through splashy New Journalism: hiring a big name editor, Jim Bellows, who was among those who had given birth to the New Journalism back East, and show-boating aggressive advocacy reporting and columns by journalists like Denis Hamill, the legendary Pete Hamill's younger brother, and myself, the author of a recent bestselling Latino civil rights manifesto titled Chicano Power.
