Oakland · Anthony Palladino · Murf the Surf
Plus: Our true-crime weekend
the true crime that's worth your time
I loved how many of you were on the same The Traitors journey I was last weekend. I finished it last night, and without spoiling anything will happily say that the final episode was bizarre and fascinating in that special way the first seasons of a reality show often are. The second season, which was just picked up by Peacock, might not have that magic, but it appears Alan Cumming will remain as the host, which is perhaps the most magical part of all. Now, on to this week:
As Sarah noted late last year, RJ Cutler’s Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus, and Mayhem in the USA is the marquee property intended to launch new streaming service MGM+, which is what we’re calling Epix now. Something changed along the way, though; though the name change happened as planned, the headlining draw was a fictional property, the second season of crime drama Godfather of Harlem. Murf, we noted, was nowhere to be found.
Instead, the docuseries on longboard-riding jewel thief Jack Roland Murphy won’t arrive until this Sunday — and I’ll be damned if I can figure out if all four episodes will be released at once or if this is a weekly drip scenario. Regardless, here’s a little reading list to help you decide if you need to do whatever you need to do to access MGM+, sigh.
How a Champion Surfer Became a Notorious Jewel Thief and Murderer [The Daily Beast]
‘Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus and Mayhem in the USA’ Review: A Dashing Thief’s Darker Side [Wall Street Journal]
MGM+’s true-crime docuseries ‘Murf the Surf’ chronicles the fascinating life of an infamous jewel thief [About Amazon] (This is a marketing outlet for the retail giant, but it’s actually a perfectly fine “interview” with Cutler so not not worth a skim)
Available starting today on Showtime (which, speaking of streaming platform shuffles, will merge with Paramount+ in an as-yet-unannounced fashion late this month) is Murder In Big Horn, which Sarah briefly mentioned last month:
The three-parter from Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin (Kevorkian) “dives deep into Big Horn County, Montana, where dozens of young Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations have disappeared.” This class of case has seen a spike in coverage over the last few years, which is good, and Showtime’s documentary product is also very good IME.
Deadline has a first-look clip from the series, which just made its premiere at Sundance last week. That’s why you’ll see a lot of movie reviewer bylines in the show’s coverage:
Native American Women Keep Turning Up Dead. Why Is Nothing Being Done? [Rolling Stone]
Murder in Big Horn [RogerEbert.com]
'Murder in Big Horn' illuminates challenges families of missing and murdered Indigenous women face [WBUR]
Murder In Big Horn review: True-crime docuseries spotlights a tragic pattern [AV Club]
The reviews are largely positive, with the phrase “must-watch” used by more than one critic. So, if you had to choose one new streaming platform to deal with this weekend, Showtime just might be it.
And now I turn the podium to you. What true crime is on your agenda this weekend? — EB
Note: I’ve worked with Darwin BondGraham, one of the authors of The Riders Come Out at Night, since 2021: he’s the news editor of the Cityside Journalism Initiative publication The Oaklandside, while I run East Bay Nosh, Cityside’s food outlet. I’m planning on interviewing Darwin about his book in the coming days; in the meantime, Dan Cassino independently pitched us a review of TRCOaN. I didn’t have any influence on Dan’s take on the book, and other than editing for style made no alterations to his work. — EB
The Crime: The Riders Come Out at Night chronicles the long and ongoing process of trying to reform a police department rife with abuse and corruption, and while it has a positive message — real reform is possible — the path to it is paved with human misery. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham’s book is littered with deeply reported examples, but that’s not what the book is about. BondGraham is a reporter, but also has a doctorate in sociology, and the book is a study of the culture of police departments, how it’s transmitted, how it resists reforms, and how that resistance can be overcome.
It’s easy to say that the problem with trying to reform the police in Oakland, or anywhere, is the culture of the police, but it’s harder to try and pinpoint exactly what that’s supposed to mean. In the case of Oakland, Winston and BondGraham identify four major drivers of the resistance to change: the prevalence of internal norms that have little or nothing to do with official policy, distrust of civilian authority, disdain for the people that they police, and the lack of accountability for violators.
Holding police accountable means that politicians are punishing them for doing exactly what the people in charge wanted them to do.
Sometimes, the transmission of internal norms is explicit, as in the opening chapters of the book, which detail the ways in which “The Riders,” a group of corrupt cops play-acting Training Day before that was a thing, teach rookies about what it means to be an Oakland cop. This involves beating up suspects, falsifying reports, and putting loyalty above all else. It also means that it’s difficult for anyone to rebel, as they’re complicit in the corruption from day one, unable to turn in others without ending their own careers.
Other times, it’s just a misunderstanding or ignorance — perhaps willful — of the rules. In Oakland, for instance, monitors were pleased to see that officers were reporting pulling their weapons much less frequently than in the past. But body camera footage revealed that the officers had just decided that it didn’t count as pulling your weapon as long as you kept it pointed at the ground, or if you only pointed it at the lower half of a suspect. If the cops believe, often correctly, that everyone is falsifying reports of violence against suspects, or drawing their weapon, why would anyone want to be the one person reporting accurately, and making themselves look bad?
Winston and BondGraham also demonstrate the Oakland Police’s complete lack of trust in civilian oversight, based partly in the belief that outsiders can’t possibly know what they’re facing, and partly in a real sense of betrayal. As far as the officers are concerned, the politicians want them to bust heads, because, as the historical background makes clear, for most of the last 150 years it’s been true, whether the heads in question belonged to Chinese immigrants or labor unionists or Black Panthers or drug dealers. So, holding police accountable means that politicians are punishing them for doing exactly what the people in charge wanted them to do. The cops are following their sometimes unspoken instructions, so any punishment is necessarily unfair.
Also clear from their work is the extent to which the Oakland Police tended to despise the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving. In years past, the force seemed to be made up largely of recently demobbed soldiers from Korea or Vietnam; later, it was people from the surrounding suburbs, brought in to police Oakland like soldiers from the provinces brought in to quell riots in an authoritarian capital. The perception among them is that the people of Oakland — especially those who are Black or poor — are their enemies, dehumanized in order to allow the officers to justify the beatings and killings they inflict.
If Winston and BondGraham didn’t have a keyboard macro for “reinstated with full back pay,” they should have.
But even when it becomes clear that the officers have crossed a line already drawn far from common decency and constitutionality, they’re seldom held accountable. Time after time in the book, officers are caught engaging in brutal, unthinkable and unthinking acts of violence, and either face no consequences, or have the consequences reversed on appeal.
If Winston and BondGraham didn’t have a keyboard macro for “reinstated with full back pay,” they should have. Sometimes, the officers avoid penalties because they can plausibly claim that they weren’t properly trained, or supervised; other times, because the one year limit on Internal Affairs investigations has run out. Most often, the Department simply doesn’t invest the time and money and effort necessary to compete with the lawyers from the Oakland Police Officers Association.
And why should they? Leaders who hold officers accountable are in turn rejected by the rank and file, and even politicians seen as being as reliably liberal as once and future California Governor Jerry Brown succumb to the logic of backing the blue once they arrive in Oakland.
These dynamics are hardly limited to Oakland, and all this makes it seem like the internal logics of the police effectively insulate them from any attempts at reform, which presents a puzzle for Winston and BondGraham.
Oakland, while not meeting the goals of reform as laid out in a judicially supervised Negotiated Settlement Agreement, has indeed made real progress, especially in areas of openness and transparency. In Winston and BondGraham’s telling, reform isn’t a linear path, but rather one of punctuated equilibrium: nothing happens until the police engage in behavior that’s so shocking, so indefensible, that a push for change is irresistible.
Gradually, that impulse fades, and the improvements slow, or even regress, until another scandal pushes it forward. The reason, it seems, why Oakland has been able to reform is that the tattoo of the indefensible beat so quickly that there wasn’t time to fully revert.
It is these moments of indefensible behavior that form the set pieces of the book, and Winston and BondGraham give enough detail to satisfy detail-hungry true crime readers. Any of these incidents could be a book in itself: the shooting of two officers that led to a botched raid and even more officers killed, the shooting of an armed sleeping man inexplicably carrying a fortune in cash, the absurd overreactions to Occupy Oakland or the protests at Fruitvale Station, the sex scandal that linked seemingly dozens of officers with an underage girl.
Inevitably, this means that the arc of the story Winston and BondGraham are telling isn’t triumphal. Sure, Oakland has made major reforms, and the department is in a far better place than it was 20 years ago, but these changes only came on the backs of horrific abuses. The idea that the only way to reform a department is to wait for them to do something utterly indefensible is awful, but given how often the indefensible happens, it means that the possibility of reform is alive and well. — Dan Cassino
While we’re on the Bay Area…It’s been almost exactly two years since we talked about Jack Palladino, the high-profile San Francisco private eye who was killed in a fight outside his San Francisco home in 2021. From our piece back then:
Palladino, who was 76, basically retired last year, though he was still taking on the occasional case. This, after a 40-year-long career working on some of the splashiest cases ever (more on that in a minute), often on the most problematic side.
According to his business partner and wife, Sandra Sutherland, Palladino “must have seen or heard something” from inside their Haight-Ashbury area home last Thursday afternoon. He ran out with his camera, the SF Examiner reports, snapping photos of whatever he saw going down. He struggled with two suspects, and was critically injured in the fight. After days on life support with no hope of recovery, he died.
But before he died, police say they tracked down both suspects, arresting them on Sunday. “I said, ‘Guess what Jack, they got the bastards, and it was all your doing,’” Sutherland said.
Palladino’s client list — and methods — were not without their issues. The NYT has a clear-eyed accounting of some of his highest-profile cases, including his work during the 1992 presidential claim to discredit Gennifer Flowers’s claims that she’d had an affair with Bill Clinton. (It’s worth reading this 2016 report on the misinformation campaign Palladino headed up.)
That wasn’t the only case of sexual misconduct (or worse) Palladino and Sutherland worked on. According to Ronan Farrow, Palladino “created dossiers on both journalists and accusers” in the Harvey Weinstein rape case, and helped to catch and kill evidence against R. Kelly, the New Yorker reports.
Other cases include work for an alleged sexual abuse victim of Michael Jackson’s, and if you remember The Insider — that Russell Crowe movie about the cigarette business — you have Palladino to thank. He’s the guy that protected whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, work that this 1996 Vanity Fair story goes into in depth.
“I am somebody you call in when the house is on fire, not when there’s smoke in the kitchen,” Palladino said in an interview with the SF Examiner back in 1999. “You ask me to deal with that fire, to save you, to do whatever has to be done to the fire — where did it come from, where is it going, is it ever going to happen again?”
Palladino died on Feb. 1, 2021, and it took prosecutors in San Francisco two years to decide against charging the men accused of his death. According to the Associated Press, “the district attorney’s office dismissed the case Tuesday after a witness admitted he never saw one of the men, in the passenger’s seat, attempt to steal the camera through the car window, the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office said in a statement. Also, the suspect’s DNA was not found on the camera, the office said.”
In a statement, a Palladino family attorney (and a longtime friend of Jack’s) said, “There’s no question in our minds, and it’s our opinion the two defendants were in fact the killers of Jack Palladino. We understood the decision by the district attorney. We don’t necessarily agree with it.”
Also via statement, a spokesperson for the SF Da’s office said that “When the witness recanted, the case was re-evaluated and after determining we could no longer meet our burden of proof, we were ethically obligated to dismiss this case.” — EB
Ugh, I feel like this is kind of a bummer issue! I hate to leave you for the weekend on a down note, so I’m going to conclude with a silly little morsel from The Onion. “Woman Puts On True Crime Podcast To Entertain Herself While Cleaning Up Husband’s Entrails” heads the piece, which is almost enough.
But the lead photo, and the kicker line to this item, is worth the click, and will give you a bit of sugar to go with some of the slightly more bitter medicine we might have swallowed today. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Why true crime will be better with Dr. Phil off the air.
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