Tonight I watched a movie called "Saddle The Wind" (1958), which - as you can probably tell by the title is a Western. I needed a Western Fix, and it was a good one, starring the handsome Robert Taylor (one of my favorite actors from Old Hollywood), John Cassavetes (again, yay!) and the beautiful Julie London, who we recently saw in "The Red House". Robert Taylor plays a cattle rancher who owns one third of the land in a large valley in Montana. The other 2/3rds is owned by the distinguished Donald Crisp, an English actor who made his name in American movies including classics like "How Green Was My Valley". In "Saddle The Wind", he owns most of the valley, and is a no-nonsense man who wants no trouble on his land, and especially no gun violence, which was so prevalent in the Old West.
Crisp is aware that his minority owner and fellow rancher Taylor was a former gunfighter, but Taylor has long since retired from that profession, so all is well....before the movie starts, that is.
By the time it has started, a tough looking dude has come into town looking for Taylor. This dude is also a gunfighter, not retired, and he has a grudge he wants to settle. He busts up the local bar to get answers about where Taylor lives.
But before he can find Robert Taylor, he encounters Taylor's younger brother, played by John Cassavetes. This encounter takes place the next day in the same bar. The thing about John Cassavetes - and here we go with the "production aspect" of casting again - is that, when he is in a movie, at least one that he did not direct, you know he is gonna play a bad guy, or at least an unstable guy. That is casting for you, and in general, the Hollywood casting agents knew what they were doing. They cast actors according to what they did best, and John Cassavetes was great at playing complicated bad guys who were psychologically disturbed.
That is all the plot I am gonna tell you, but the story goes a long way down the road from there. The screenplay was written by the great Rod Serling, and with his dialogue he gets into the mind of the Cassavetes character, which leads to a final showdown that I'll not describe, but I will recommend the movie with a big Thumbs Up.
I am super tired tonight, but I do wanna get into a primary question regarding 1989, and that is : Why were Federal agents so quickly on the scene of what began as a domestic dispute at an ordinary apartment building in the San Fernando Valley?
In the course of this dispute, there was a heated argument involving three people, and at one point, one of the people brought the argument out into the open, in the courtyard of the apartment building. It is well known, and has been reported and dissected for years, that two young thugs came to the door of the apartment in response to the disturbance. Not police, but thugs. White guys that looked like low class toughs. One guy had a switchblade and pulled it on me, and stuck the tip of it in my stomach, just barely, not enough to cut me but enough so that I would feel it. Enough to scare the daylights out of me.
I have figured, in the decades since, that those guys were associated with Howard Schaller and the drug deal that X and T were involved in, and that I had placed in jeopardy by causing a scene at the apartment complex. Perhaps there was a load of cocaine in the apartment, I don't know.
But much bigger than that - and I mean much much bigger - was the presence, maybe an hour later, two hours tops, of Federal Agents at the same apartment building, responding to the same disturbance.
Keep this in mind : Federal Agents. Not police.
Who would normally be called - what authority would normally be called - in the event of a domestic disturbance, even a very loud one in which one of the participants has created a lot of noise in the middle of a large apartment complex?
I would think that in 100% of such cases, a local police department would be called.
Would any citizen, upon hearing a neighboring apartment erupt in noise and fighting, call the FBI instead of 911, instead of the local police?
Would the instinct of a neighbor be : "Oh shit! The people next door are fighting! I'd better call the FBI"!
Hmmm........for some reason I think not. I think most people, in fact 100% of people, would instead think to themselves, "I'd better call 911. I'd better call the police".
So why didn't the police show up?
Why instead did Federal Agents show up, and not only show up, but arrive so rapidly, within one to two hours (and closer to one hour).
We have already established that no neighbor would think to call the FBI (the agency most familiar to the public) about a domestic dispute.
The question therefore becomes why did they show up? How did they show up? How did they know about a domestic dispute in an average apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley?
Using logic, there are only a couple of answers to that question.
If no neighbors called them (and why would anyone call the FBI for a domestic dispute, or the CIA), then the only possibilities are that one of the people on scene in the apartment called them, either X or T. And that makes no sense, especially if they were involved in a drug deal. I have considered the remote possibility that X was in some way working undercover for the Feds. Sometimes when people are busted by the FBI in some major league scam, they are given a choice ; to become an informer or to go to jail. But in the case of X, that makes no sense. I will go into the finer points of why at a later date. X may have alluded to advance knowledge of the events of 1989, in a letter, but I will leave that aside for now as well.
The point is, that it is unlikely that anyone on scene at the apartment complex called a Federal agency to respond to the fight in the apartment. Therefore, the only other possible answer for their arrival is that they had someone or someone(s) under surveillance.
If a Federal Agency had been following a situation, or a person, and had kept that person and/or situation under surveillance for a time, then they would have known exactly what was happening in the apartment. Modern electronic surveillance, even in 1989, was very sophisticated.
Now, the FBI (or CIA) would not have been interested in a drug deal, unless it was a really big haul. And I cannot imagine X being involved in anything remotely of that magnitude. X was an Honors Student and a non-drug user, though it is clear that X was involved with Howard Schaller, a violent drug dealer. But none of that would merit - by itself, unless it was a huge deal - Federal surveillance.
I have just been watching the Unabomber movie, and in it, we are shown the intricate and very definite and deliberate ways in which the Feds operate. They don't just jump into things willy nilly. There is massive planning and organised work involved. Massive investigation.
So if they had involvement beforehand in the situation that erupted at the apartment house, it likely involved pre-investigation that led to surveillance.
Surveillance is the only way, in my opinion, that they could have responded to the scene so quickly, especially when it is clear that nobody at the apartment building would have called them.
So, the Feds must have been surveilling someone, or surveilling an overall situation.
But it couldn't have been a mere drug deal between X, Mr. D, and Howard Schaller.
That must have been a side issue.
So what was the real issue? What was the real reason for the surveillance?
And who was being surveilled?
We will continue with our examination tomorrow night, so stay tuned.
See you in the morn. :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment