Good and Evil Know No Color

Nothing, we are told, is new under the sun. But if there is a correlation between sunshine and not-newness, then this must be especially true in sunny, cliche-hardened Southern California.

Here in the city that made Jack Webb say, “This is the city,� the televising of true crime long ago eclipsed make- believe as a source of . . . well, not entertainment exactly, but certainly dreadful fascination.

The helicopter video you have just seen is true. The names, once available, will not be changed to protect the innocent.

Last Friday morning was another one of those occasions when L.A. seemed like a wreck at the side of the freeway that makes motorists slow down and gawk. We’d eventually learn that the bank robbers with the AK-47s were named Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. and Emil Matasareanu. But that wasn’t the first bit of ID broadcast. At first they were identified simply as “white males.�

A North Hollywood woman first learned that fact by seeing their pictures. “Unfortunately, when I saw these guys were Caucasian, I breathed a sigh of relief,� Ruth Zalduondo, who is 40 and Latin, told Times correspondent Dade Hayes at a neighborhood meeting Sunday night at a neighborhood elementary school.

“If they had been black or anything else, there would have been a big deal made about that. This was about good guys versus bad guys. Crime knows no color.�

When Hayes phoned in his notes, the reporter doing rewrite didn’t use that quote. A good call: Race wasn’t relevant to this crime story. Yet Zalduondo’s comments are still revealing about life in Los Angeles, where racial and ethnic tension is often just beneath the surface. Yours truly, a white male, felt a similar impulse: They’re white? Good.

After the Rodney King years and then the O.J. Simpson years, the fact that race was irrelevant suddenly, paradoxically felt relevant. It almost felt like something new.

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The vast majority of crime, as Zalduondo suggested, is just about good guys and bad guys. If those masks had come off to reveal Asians or Latinos or blacks, would there have been any big controversy? That seems highly unlikely; the videotape revealed evil. But the gut feeling here is that it would have been a small deal. It would have reinforced ugly stereotypes and given perverse comfort to the racist souls who send anonymous letters to reporters.

I saw one the other day: “The only good�--here you may fill in the blank--�is a dead one.�

So today I’ve decided to make a small deal about the fact that the bad guys are white. Fair is fair. And now that we’ve done that, let’s shift our focus to the good guys.

They’re white too. And Latino and black and Asian. This is not an unusual cross-section of multicultural, multilingual Los Angeles, and a reflection of that East Valley neighborhood in particular. They were the customers and the employees of Bank of America who were the initial victims of the crime. They were people who lived nearby and others who happened to be passing through. And they were, of course, the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department, heroically rising to the occasion, giving the people of the city reason to cheer.

The blessing was that, amazingly, none of the good guys were killed. Thanks to their valor and no small amount of luck, tragedy was averted. To watch the drama unfold on TV, to read the newspaper reports, was to be reminded of the sense that we’re all in this together.

That feeling was unavoidable for Bill Capizzi, a 59-year-old actor who lives in North Hollywood. He had dropped into his neighborhood bank Friday morning to exchange a roll of quarters for a $10 bill en route to breakfast when the gunmen came in blasting away. Capizzi and all the others were herded into the bank vault.

There was a variety of people in there, including a Sikh wearing a turban. There was some screaming and crying inside the bank. But, Capizzi added: “There was a friendship there that isn’t in the community.�

Capizzi, for the record, is a native-born American of Italian ancestry. Inside the bank that morning he got to know a variety of people, like Lupe, John, Mildred, Dave and a man who was carrying an infant son.

Lupe “looked like a pachuco,� Capizzi said. To some people, that would have made him look threatening. But Capizzi saw him comfort an elderly woman, a stranger, and heard him talk about his two kids. John, also Latino, was a bank employee who somehow helped calm people even though flying glass had left his shirt bloodied. Mildred was an 80-year-old woman--Irish, Capizzi thinks--who kept her spirits up but also talked about children she had outlived. Dave was the blues musician with a Jewish last name who invited Capizzi to his band’s next gig.

As for the man who held the baby, Capizzi never learned his name. But he learned that the boy weighed just 1 1/2 pounds at birth. That was one reason why, when the gunmen ordered everybody to the floor, this father took care to gently set his child down. One of the bad guys thought he moved too slowly. He whacked the young man with the butt of his gun.

I forgot to attach the ethnic label to this young man.

But it doesn’t really matter, does it?

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Look at the photos, read the names of the LAPD officers injured in the line of duty. Almost five years have passed since we watched in horror as a truck driver was nearly killed by a mob at Florence and Normandie. The question then was: Where the hell are the cops? This time, we knew precisely where they were--at the wrong end of AK-47s. We watched them put their lives on the line for all the good guys. So flowers and treats have been filling the police stations.

It seemed miraculous that only two wounded officers needed to remain in the hospital. LAPD photos released to the media show that Officer Martin Whitfield is African American. The image of Officer Martin Guy, with a smile made for Hollywood, is more ambiguous.

“His room looked like a wedding, with all the flowers,� City Councilman Richard Alarcon said after visiting Guy at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. “He was in great spirits.�

I explained to Alarcon the premise of my story. I asked him: So is Guy white? Latino? Filipino? Black? Any or all of the above?

“I don’t know for sure,� Alarcon said, laughing. “I have a guess.�

A guess he wouldn’t share.

“As far as I’m concerned, he’s all blue.�

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at [email protected] Please include a phone number.