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Slow Burn
The L.A. Riots | 8. Damages
00:47:27
How Rodney King and the city of Los Angeles tried to reckon with everything they’d suffered.
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A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The Colonel made his $10 Tuesday bucket so full with eight pieces of juicy crispy chicken or tenders that it might just last you till Wednesday. If you've got that kind of self control. I mean some people want leftovers, others are more into right nowers. The Colonel lived so we could chicken 10 bucks 8 pieces. One big deal with KFC. $10 Tuesdays prices and participation may vary. Taxes, tips and fees extra. This episode contains some explicit language welcome to the opening ceremonies of the games of the 23rd Olympiad at Los Angeles. 150 TRUMPETS Eight years before the riots on July 28, 1984, Mayor Tom Bradley stood at the center of the LA Coliseum in coverage of the opening ceremony. Bradley looks about a foot taller than everyone around him. He's handed the Olympic flag. As the crowd of 88,000 cheers. Tom Bradley had to sneak in to see the 32 Olympics. He was a 14 year old kid and he hopped over the fence and he made it. And now he accepts the flag. Mayor OF Los Angeles Age 66 Politically, this was the high point of everything Tom Bradley had ever done. That's Rafe Sonnenschein. He's the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public affairs at Cal State Los Angeles. It was amazing. It was cosmopolitan, it was global. He got all the local companies to stagger their work hours. There was very little traffic. Los Angeles bid to host the Olympics have been met with a lot of skepticism. The last North American city to host the Summer Games, Montreal, had ended up in financial ruin. Tom Bradley helped organize a bid that would make 1984 different. Bradley was determined that the Olympics would not cost LA money. And they really got it into the city law that no public, additional public money could be spent and it would all be privately financed. And then they went out and raised a ton of money for the Olympics. And they organized the Olympics brilliantly. In the end, the Los Angeles Games posted a $223 million profit. The success of the 1984 Olympics was the work of two men. One was Bradley. The other was Peter Ueberoff. During the opening ceremony, it was Ueberroth who oversaw the lighting of the torch. The Olympic torch will enter this stadium and the games of the 23rd Olympiad will begin. Peter Ueboroth was a very successful businessman and a corporate leader. And in those days in la, corporate leaders were seen as having a real special kind of skill and ability in a city where the politicians are not so dominant. Tom Bradley had brought the Olympics to la. Ueberoff had wooed the corporate sponsors that made them profitable. United is the official airline of the 1984 Olympic Games by the Coca Cola Company and your Coca Cola Butler at the 1984 Olympic Games. Coke is it by Arco. Ubroth did a fantastic job. He became like a phenomenon in la. And LA is the kind of place where if you can pull something off, people are pretty excited about you. They don't even have to know that much about you. But if you pull something off, people think, wow, it got done. So Bradley, turning to you, Barroth, and his endorsement of this general sort of approach of, you know, bringing in a, a corporate titan, does that say anything about his beliefs when it came to large scale public works then? Well, it did. And sometimes it was to his political detriment. I was in a high rise Wednesday night when this began. On the first night of the riots, Barry Sanders was at a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper near downtown Los Angeles. And from that building you could survey the whole city. And you looked around and it was a war zone. There were flames in all directions. It was horrible. It was horrible. Sanders was an attorney who helped organize the 1984 Olympics. He lived in LA, but far away from the fires and violence. The weekend after the riots began, with the National Guard patrolling the city and the uprising fizzling out, he was spending some time with his family. I was at my son's school play and got a call that I needed to come down to City Hall. And I came down to City hall and into the mayor's office with Peter. Peter was Peter Ueberroth. After the Olympics, Ueberroth had been the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Sanders had worked with him for years. Now the two of them were being summoned to meet with Tom Bradley and the Governor of California, Pete Wilson. Tom Bradley, he was always soft spoken, but that belied a very determined man. He knew how to prevail in a fight. But now, three days after his city had caught fire, the mayor was badly shaken. Tom Bradley was just so deeply dismayed and almost in tears at what was happening to his city, he was dissolved. Just despondent is the right word for it. By the time of the riots, Bradley had been in office for almost two decades. The city's first black mayor. He'd brought together a broad coalition of white liberals, business interests, and racial and ethnic minorities. Bradley saw Los Angeles as a diverse commercial and cultural powerhouse. Now, in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the verdict and the riots, he feared that vision was going up in flames. But Bradley had a plan, one that he hoped would salvage both his city and his legacy. He discussed it with Ueberroth and Sanders and the governor and then led them into the press room where he announced it to reporters. This city has been involved in, in a strong effort now to contain the riots in the city. We're making progress, but at the same time we deal with the current situation and the tragedy in this city, we have to begin to think beyond the end of this incident and what we can do to rebuild the figure at the center of Bradley's plan to rebuild Los Angeles. Peter Uburoff I yesterday afternoon called upon an old associate and friend to take on the responsibility of organizing a private, not for profit committee that would involve the public, private sector and organized labor in developing a strategy and implementation of a plan to rebuild those areas of Los Angeles that suffered devastation during these riots. When Ueberoff stepped to the podium at City hall, he was straightforward and confident. He sounded like a man who got things done. The project will be called Rebuild L. A. The task is rebuilding the communities, rebuilding the physical structures. Right now, kind of busting through red tape. Get things going in a community that's been suffered a great deal. Make it a place that is a blueprint for inner cities in our country. Barry Sanders, again. The real key from the mayor's point of view is that he was taking this magician, Peter Ueberoff, and saying he is going to work on this. That was the message Bradley hoped that he and Ueberroth could do for Los Angeles. Riot torn neighborhoods what they'd done with the Olympics. Harness the money and clout of the private sector to achieve what seemed impossible. Community pride is already being restored and we're determined to bring the sparkle back to the city of Los Angeles. This is slow burn. I'm your host, Joel Anderson. At the end of the largest civil disturbance in American history, Tom Bradley faced a daunting task. Dozens of people had been killed and thousands injured. The city had sustained more than a billion dollars in property damage, most of it on the south side. And the riots had exposed that. Much of the city lived in grinding poverty, lacked opportunity, and was oppressed by hostile policing. It was clear that Los Angeles needed to be rebuilt in more ways than one. Bradley's political career was almost over, but he had one last chance to do something great to help his city recover from the worst crisis in its history. Could Tom Bradley rebuild la? Would the riots change the LAPD and policing in America? And how did Rodney King weather the storm? This is the Final episode of slow burn Season 6 damages. Selling Los Angeles came easy to Peter Ueberoff. He had done that before. But pitching companies on post riots LA was more difficult than asking them to invest in the Olympics. Now he was appealing to corporate America's sense of obligation to communities it had largely ignored. He told potential sponsors that he wasn't looking for philanthropic contributions, but for the kind of sustained investments that would create jobs and economic development. The investment will be there. You know, there's some people are going to back away and there's some people going to throw verbal stones. But I think that that's. I don't worry about that part. Maybe that's one of the skills I bring to the picture. I know the corporate community and I know the good corporate citizens in this country. And Bernard Kinsey was one of the most prominent black businessmen in Los Angeles. He believed in Peter Ueberoff and he believed in the potential of South Central. We had like five supermarkets for 2.3 million people. I mean, it was just ridiculous. Same thing with pharmacies and grocery stores. You name it. This area had been allowed to just be choked and choked and choked to death. After retiring from an executive role at Xerox, Kinsey started up a consulting firm. One of his clients was developing electric cars. He thought Ueberoff might help get that project off the ground. What I wanted to do was to have this new manufacturing capability which was mostly assembly done in the black community so that we could get jobs for brothers and sisters, which I'm always trying to do. Ueberoff was happy to meet with him, but not about electric cars. I mean, I could tell he wasn't that interested in that. He was more interested in talking to me. And long story short, he basically said that Mayor Bradley had called him and said that he should look at hiring me for a co chair job. Kinsey agreed to serve as the day to day operations chief of Rebuild la. Ueberoff also recruited a who's who of power players to join the group's board. Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz, actor Edward James Olmos, and executives from corporations like bank of America and Kaiser Permanente. Well, let me just say it this way. Peter Uevorov probably had one of the biggest black books I've ever seen. I mean, he has an extraordinary reach. At first the board was criticized for being heavily white and white collar. In response, Ueberroth added a diverse group of local officials and activists. Rafe Sonnenshine I started to get the impression that if you complained about Rebuild la, they would add you to the committee. The Rebuild LA board eventually grew to 67 members. Over the next few months, the organization announced a series of major financial commitments. Bernard Kinsey still has that list in alphabetical order. You know. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles confirmed yes on $18 million American Savings Bank, 1,275,000. Arco 7,035,000 bank of America, 25 million. Vons committed $100 million for the construction of supermarkets in areas affected by the riots. The telephone company GTE California said it would spend $30 million on contracts with women and minority owned businesses in those areas. IBM pledged $31 million for job training programs, learning centers and computer equipment. This was exactly what Mayor Bradley had hoped for. The money seemed to be pouring in. Well, you know what, it was really interesting. I would say for a month we had the attention of the world. That's Karen Bass in 1992. She was the leader of a community organization based in South Central la. She's now one of the city's representatives in Congress. Everyone was here and yes, for a minute it felt hopeful. And then we were, especially those of us that have been around the block knew that the cameras would go away. And the question would be what would happen after the cameras went away? What happened when the cameras went away? Not much. Six months after the riots, Rebuild LA distributed a list of 68 companies that it said were planning to invest in neglected parts of the city. Ueberoff said he expected to raise a billion dollars, conservatively. Reporters for the LA Times contacted the companies on the list and found that more than a quarter of them, including Walmart, Dow Chemical, Ford and Apple, had no plans to invest in the blighted parts of Los Angeles. Many of them said they had no idea how they'd ended up on Rebuild LA's list. Rebuild LA made a lot of promises about pledges they were getting from all these companies that were gonna do this and that. And the one thing I've learned is pledges from companies for urgent public issues usually last about as long as the public issue is on the front page. Ueberroth insisted to the Times that Rebuild LA had talked with every company on the list. He declined to explain how he came up with the $1 billion figure. He was a legend in his own mind. He could be very persuasive. That's Dan Garcia. He was a member of Rebuild LA's board. You know, they had big names associated with, but all these big names who are entrepreneurs, really wealthy people, a lot of them. And, you know, I'm Sorry, it didn't seem to me that they really understood what it was like to deal with those areas and they had no knowledge of government. And like I said, their whole approach was private investment, which was fine as one part of a, you know, multi pronged attack. But it wasn't the only one complicating the group's efforts. A recession was taking its toll on Southern California and on Rebuild LA's corporate partners. California had lost 333,000 jobs in 1991. Nearly 2/3 of those losses were in LA County. Karen Bass and so all of the jobs, the good jobs in South LA left and nothing replaced them. Facing a struggling economy and scrutiny in the media, Rebuild LA hemorrhaged support. Bernard Kinsey When Rebuild LA started getting hit, we started losing commitment. So everything was being looked at through this lens of Rebuild LA is not doing enough or where is the money going? When we had no money other than operating money, it was a tough time and it really cost and hurt us in terms of our credibility, you know, going forward. Ueberroth had said he expected to stay on for up to five years, but now the job started to wear on him. As the one year anniversary of the riots approached, Ueberroth no longer sounded like the confident corporate titan who'd promised $1 billion of investment. He sounded annoyed. Well, you know, first of all, you burn the damn place down. You know, burning it down means it's going to get better. You don't burn something down and say that's going to make it better, makes it worse. On May 21, 1993, just over a year after his appointment, Ueberroth walked away. Peter Ueberroth today resigned as co chairman of Rebuild Los Angeles. That's the relief organization formed after last year's riots. He had helped attract business investment in the destroyed area. But critics say this group has not done enough for the hardest hit neighborhoods. It took a lot out of him, let me say it that way. It took a lot out of him. So I wasn't surprised that he left because it was probably one of the few things that he's tried to do in his career that he didn't accomplish. We reached out to Peter Ueberroth and he didn't get back to us. Bernard Kinsey followed Ueberroth out the door. In January 1994. In our interview he, he tried to convince me that Rebuild LA had actually been a success. People, they wouldn't want to know the facts if it hit them in the head. As we talked, he paused several times to refer to an itemized list of accomplishments. So I got this right here and I've kept this in my RLA file because it says everything you want to know about the impact that RLA has had. Among the items, a dozen new supermarkets, 18 job training programs, 60 vans for community organizations and $5.5 million to three black owned banks. He also cited as much as 585 million in financial commitments, though that figure can't be verified. All of those accomplishments have involved zero cost to the taxpayers of this city. Again, RLA has been the gift to this city. I'll stand on that right now. Okay. They were trying. They were trying to do something. Rafe. Sun and shine. And it just felt like hearing a song out of tune. Because as perfect as it was in 1984, it was utterly unsuited for 1992. Now, I'm here to tell you I'm not sure anything was going to have a real good chance of success except facing up to policing. More on that after the break. Most people in la, across all demographic groups, thought the verdicts in Simi Valley were indefensible. Just as large a majority thought the violence that followed was totally uncalled for. As the city cooled down, there was an open question after the riots, would Los Angeles focus on making the police accountable? Or would it crack down on the people who'd set the streets ablaze? Rafe Sonnenschein. History shows that after huge events like the disorder of 1992 and Watts in 65, politics goes in two directions simultaneously. There's an energizing for progressive forces and a counter reaction from conservative forces. On the progressive side, there was real momentum to check the LAPD in July 1991, the Christopher Commission had recommended a comprehensive series of reforms. In June 1992, those changes were on the ballot as Charter Amendment F. This commission's report calls for eliminating the chief's civil service protection, calls for the resignation of Daryl Gates, calls for the creation of an inspector general, calls for adding civilians to the police review boards of shootings. This is huge stuff. This is a fundamental revolution. Gates and his allies fought hard against the package of reforms. The police union tried to air a commercial with footage of the beating of Reginald Denny, but two stations refused to air it. Regardless, the fires and the looting weren't going to erase what was on George Holiday's videotape or excuse the acquittals of the officers who'd beaten Rodney King. Charter Amendment F passed by a 2 to 1 margin. The reformers had won. It was a victory for Mayor Tom Bradley and a final convincing rebuke of Daryl Gates. He stepped down a few weeks later. Gates was shown the door and out with him went a whole couple generations of commitment to a certain kind of policing. Jim Newton covered the LAPD for the LA Times. In terms of the contest of wills over the direction of the Police Department, I would say that Tom Bradley prevailed and Darrell Gates lost. Gaetz's replacement, Willie Williams, was a different kind of leader. Williams was the first black chief in the history of the department and the first in decades to get hired from the outside. Like Bradley, he believed the LAPD needed to change. He was the first chief selected under the reform rules that the Christopher Commission recommended. His hiring sent the signal certainly to the people in the upper ranks of the department that the city didn't have competence, that the leadership could continue. Williams appointment and the passage of Charter Amendment F seemed like progress. The mayoral election the following year showed the limits of that progress. Tom Bradley was 74 and the past year had taken a toll. In September, he announced he wouldn't run for reelection. Michael Wu, a member of the LA City Council, looked like the best choice as Bradley's heir. Michael Wu was almost like Tom Bradley, though. You know, his mild manner, his personality, his Persona wasn't threatening and all of that. That's Derek Mims. He lived in South Central and worked for members of Congress who represented that area. I thought at the time that if he could get in there that he could keep the train going. Michael wu's chief opponent was a Republican, Richard Reardon. He was the founder of a private equity firm and he used that wealth to support causes all over Los Angeles. Bernard Kinsey, again, everybody needs a Richard Reardon in their town because he's a guy that had enormous money and reach and did not mind sharing it. And he and I had a very good relationship. I mean, some of the programs that he had developed we brought in to rebuild our life. In the mayoral race, Reardon drew on his hundred million dollar fortune to outspend his competitors. He pushed a law and order message. LA is considered to be a war zone throughout this world. Headlines say Louisiana on fire. Vigilantes roam streets of la. A result of this is businesses are not coming to la. Businesses don't want to move into a war zone. Tourists aren't coming to la. Families are leaving L. A. That message earned him the support of the LAPD Officers Union and of voters worried about crime and lawlessness. He was able to win the support of the whole right of la. A lot of the center and even some of the left by saying he was going to fix the city. We've got to get tough. We must make LA safe. Reardon FOR MAYOR Tough enough to TURN la MICHAEL WU the tough part was a way of raising a question about whether I was tough enough to do the job. So yes, it was a very, a very effective slogan. We never figured out anything good enough to really counter it. For the first time in 20 years, Los Angeles has a new mayor. He's Republican. Richard Reardon, the millionaire businessman said that he would work to unify Los Angeles. Battered by racial divisions and a miserable economy, Louisiana now had a new mayor and a new police chief. And thanks to Charter Amendment F, there were new rules governing the police. But to people in non white communities like Derrick Mims, it felt like Los Angeles was still in the exact same place. Measure F on the street meant nothing to folks. I mean, Measure F only meant something to policy people. The police chief, Willie Williams, tried to change the culture of the lapd, but he never won over the department's rank and file. He lasted only one five year term. @ the end of the decade, the department was rocked by revelations of corruption and brutality in its anti gang unit. The LAPD was placed under federal oversight. We are just treated like a crime zone. When you're treated like a crime zone, you're not treated like a person. And so until they start treating us like people and not a crime zone, no Measure F, D, Z or whatever is going to make a difference. I can care less about a measure of F. Only thing I care about is who's driving in that police car and when they get out, how are they going to talk to me? Richard Reardon's victory marked the end of the political coalition that Tom Bradley had built for two decades. Bradley had brought together white liberals and racial and ethnic minorities. He'd sold them all on his vision of LA as a socially progressive, financially booming hub of culture and commerce. Rafe sun and Shine A lot of people thought that Mike Wu would inherit the Bradley coalition and make it a broader coalition. That it would be more of a four part coalition of African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans. And that, you know, that was a very good prospect, except that it was not a very good time to run as a Bradley type candidate. Talking about understanding among communities in the wake of the riots, an alliance built on mutual respect and political convenience was looking more and more unstable. There was a lot of conflict between African American residents and Korean American store owners in South Central la. There was an increasing Latino migration into South Central LA that was creating tensions between blacks and Latinos. Tom Bradley was a former cop, a centrist and a deal maker. But after the riots, few people were in the mood for a low key political leader. Not progressives and not law and order types. In the end, Bradley and his political coalition didn't rebuild Los Angeles. And as the 90s dragged on, what Bradley had stood for came to feel like a distant fantasy. Beyond the city limits, national politicians looked to Los Angeles to advance their agendas. Some drew attention to police abuses and inequality. We need hope, and that's what this is about. Fundamentally desperate people. Desperate people do desperate things. Some pushed a more conservative message. What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you, I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order. The next Democratic presidential nominee took the opportunity to triangulate. On May 4, 1992, he visited South Central LA and Koreatown. Bill Clinton is already there, walking a fine line, saying he wants to heal racial divisions, but advocating only modest financial. Financial assistance, mostly loans. Clinton does not want to sound like an unelectable bleeding heart liberal. I have a good law and order record and I condemn the violence along with the verdict. As the governor of Arkansas, Clinton was accused of being soft on crime. As his national ambitions grew, his rhetoric got more punitive. After the LA riots, an obscure rapper gave him the perfect opening to take a side. While LA riot victim Reginald Denny lay near death, Sister Soldier was telling the Washington Post, quote, I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? End quote. Clinton seized on the Sister Soldier controversy in a speech to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Soulja. I defend her right to express herself through music. But her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. I know she is a young person, but she has a big influence on a lot of people. And when people say that, if you took the words white and black and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech. Jackson called out Clinton for being opportunistic. The civil rights leader told reporters Perhaps he was aiming for an audience that was not here. From a political perspective, Clinton's aim had been spot on. He convinced skeptical white voters that he wouldn't be beholden to the Democratic Party's base of black supporters without losing that base of black support. In his general election victory over George H.W. bush, Clinton won 83% of the black vote. During the campaign, Clinton had pledged to provide federal money for 100,000 more police officers. His 1994 crime bill did just that, along with funding prisons and establishing tougher penalties for repeat offenders. If the LA riots were a protest or a cry for help, then this was the response from the new mayor of Los Angeles and the next President of the United States. More prisons, more punishment, more police. Derek Mims. We never said we didn't believe in law and order. Never, ever I heard anybody say, don't believe in law and order. What they don't believe in is injustice and brutality. We are just like you. We are. You're just not giving us what you have. You know, you keep acting like we different. We're not a different creature. We're not a different species. We're the same species. We want police officers doing their jobs right. We just don't want what we got. The profiling, the, the stigma, you know, that's what we don't want. The inhumanity. That's what we get. Let's take another break. The beating of Rodney King started a national conversation about police reform. As that conversation became more urgent, King felt he had to speak out about what happened to him. Here's Johnny Kelly, one of King's best friends. I knew that he really wanted to tell his story about what happened that night. King had been denied the opportunity in the criminal trial of the four officers who'd brutalized him. But he'd get another chance. Three months after that verdict, a federal grand jury indicted the four men on charges of violating King's civil rights. Finally, in March 1993, Rodney King would get to tell his story. The day he was set to testify, people lined up in the federal courthouse in downtown la. It was King's first public appearance since his desperate plea for peace during the riots. He showed up to the courthouse noticeably thinner in a tailored suit. Rodney King testified for the first time today against four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating him. He said he awoke in a hospital jail ward after the 1991 beating with a foggy memory. But he said he knew for sure he had been attacked by the officers earlier. Lawyers. There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom, so King's testimony wouldn't be broadcast to the world. On the witness stand, he had to answer for discrepancies in his statements about the night of the beating. In an interview with investigators, he had said he wasn't driving drunk and that he hadn't fled from police. King admitted that he'd lied because he was worried about going to prison. He also added new details to his account. King testified that the police taunted him with racial slurs, but he said he didn't report it because his mother had warned him not to make race an issue. King said he wasn't sure if the officers called him killer or nigger as they beat him. The defense attorneys countered that King had never mentioned any of this, not even while testifying before a federal grand jury. King, who suffered brain damage in the beating, responded, sometimes I forget things that happened and sometimes I remember things. On April 17, 1993, almost a year after the riots, this second jury was ready to deliver its verdict. The barricades were in place, Federal marshals, national guards, troops, la police at the ready. Then Saturday morning at 7, the verdict. The jury in the federal trial was drawn from seven counties throughout Southern California, not exclusively from a lily white suburb. Unlike the Simi Valley jury, it included two black people and one Latino. She is all around. At the First AME Church in central Los Angeles. Angeles. In court, Officer Lawrence Powell turned pale as his conviction was announced. Sergeant Stacy Coon looked straight ahead as the clerk declared guilty. Officer Theodore. One of the officer's attorneys, Russell Cole, told us that this jury had been influenced by the riots of the previous year. It's clear, the public has made it clear that if we acquit them again, they're going to burn LA to the ground. Sergeant Stacy Coon and and Officer Lawrence Powell were sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, much less than the time recommended by federal guidelines. Timothy Wynn and Ted Brasino were found not guilty, but they were still fired by the lapd. King had wanted all four men to get convicted. He wrote, I felt that justice was half served, but I was at peace after the verdict. But King wasn't done with the courts. Rodney said you wanted to sue for $56 million for every. Every blow, right? I came up with that one. That's my deal. That's Steve Luhrmann, King's civil attorney. Three weeks after King's beating, Luhrmann filed a claim against the city of Los Angeles for $83 million. That included $1 million for each of the 56 blows the officers landed on him, plus an extra 25 million for future damages and 2 million in additional damages for King's wife, Crystal. That was just Luhrmann's opening bid. He and the city attorney's office negotiated for more than a year. They landed on a number close to 6 million. They just needed the city council to approve it. City attorney calls me up that was handling it. Deputy city attorney said, steve, I have bad news for you. Bad news? What do you mean? What bad news? The city council didn't approve the settlement. What? But they are willing to offer a million dollars. What? That's not gonna go over very well. Luhrmann started planning to take the case to trial, but Johnny Kelly says that King grew frustrated. Some people got in Rodney's ear and said, you need a black attorney. How can a white man understand what a black man is going through? So Rodney ended up switching attorneys and going to Milton Grimes. Milton Grimes was a prominent black criminal attorney in Orange County. We reached out to him for this podcast, but he didn't respond. Getting replaced at the last possible moment was one of Lerman's biggest fears come true. He'd lost his star client. Any lawyer who's doing anything in LA knows that this is a predatory environment and the lawyers are sharks. Lerman had tried to downplay the racial aspect of King's case. Grimes took the opposite approach. When the trial started in March 1994, he argued the beating was a clear case of racist police brutality. Once again, King took the witness stand. In this trial, he offered his most graphic account of the beating. He told jurors, I felt like I had been raped. I felt like a cow that was waiting to be slaughtered like a piece of meat. The city had accepted liability for the beating. The only question was how much King would be awarded in damages. The jury made its decision on April 19, 1994, three years and six weeks after the assault. A jury in Los Angeles today awarded Rodney King $3.8 million in compensatory damages in his civil lawsuit against the city. King's 1990. For King, that figure was a disappointment. But at least the case was over. In his autobiography, he wrote, it had been a rough run for me, but finally I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Steve Lerman says he warned King about what was coming next. And I said to him, man, you know, one of these days your case is going to close, but you're going to have to spend the rest of your life being Rodney King. And for that, I feel a little sorry for you, because people are going to look to you for things, and now that you got the money, they're going to do more than just look to you. They're gonna take from you. King spent the next few years trying to sort out his financial obligations to his attorneys. It chipped away at him. It certainly did. That's on Tresia Averett, Rodney King's cousin. At the end, he did feel that they turned on him. And they did. And it was painful. It really was, because he trusted them. The conflict with his attorneys started as soon as King won 3.8 million from the city of Los Angeles. The jury's verdict included payments for attorneys fees, and it wasn't clear who should receive them. Eventually, Grimes sued King and King sued Grimes. King later sued Lerman, too, and at least two other attorneys who represented him. As many as 27 lawyers worked on King's cases. So he found himself going from attorney to attorney to attorney, having this attorney watch this attorney. It was crazy. And he really couldn't trust anyone. King later claimed his attorneys had cheated him out of as much as a million dollars. But the courts didn't agree. They all put their hands in the cookie jar and took more than what they should have, every last one of them. And it created a lot of stress. It really did. In the years that followed, Rodney King's name surfaced in the news on only when something went wrong, which it often did. Johnny Kelly, he was deteriorating still. He was, you know, he's kind of still going downhill. It didn't get better. It got worse. Were you worried about him? Every day. Every day. It was the toughest thing, was working with Rodney after the beating. That was the toughest thing ever. King was arrested at least 12 more times. The criminal charges included spousal abuse, possession of PCP, indecent exposure, and several DUIs. There are people that just catered to his weakness or invited him into environments, you know, that were just very destructive. And because he was at weak and vulnerable point in his life, that's where he ended up. At one of his lowest points, King did something out of character for a man who shied away from publicity. I'm stuck in time. I mean, I'm not your lavish celebrity. If I can wake up to a beer, I'm in a Good Life. In 2008, King joined the cast of the reality TV show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. King was one of nine celebrity addicts, including actors Gary Busey and Tawny Kitane. I thought the Celebrity Rehab was good for him. I thought it would clean him up. King's storyline on the show revolved around him making peace with the beating. I know who I am, but since the world knows me like that and the way I got beat like that, it's a fine memory. Every day I wake up to let me know, you know, who I really am in this world, you know, a part of some of our country's bad baggage, you know, but even if it made for good television, it didn't help King's issues with substance abuse. Rodney had been through rehab many a times, and it didn't work for him. And maybe there was really no help for that. You know, how could you explain to someone what happened to them wasn't their fault and that it's gonna be okay? I mean, especially if you never been. You never been through that. Away from the rehab center, it didn't take long before King was struggling again. One day, he reached out to Luhrmann about meeting up in Pasadena. He wanted me to go to lunch with him. So we're having lunch, and we're kicking it, you know, because we. We spent a lot of time having fun. So he said, Steve, I need $2,000. I need to borrow two grand. I said, you know, Glenn, right now we're. I have to put a lot of money into this case. We have to hire experts for this other case, and I just don't have two grand floating around. I wish I could help you. And then. So we had the lunch. I paid for the lunch, and then he looked at me, and this is where the bottom dropped out of my emotions. He said, can you at least help me get my car out of the parking building? Get your car out of the parking building for $3. King was always trying to make money. He started a hip hop label, which released one album. He fought in a handful of celebrity boxing matches. He appeared on a celebrity rehab spinoff called Sober House. In 2012, he published his autobiography, the Riot My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption. He went on a media tour. He even had an interview with Oprah. King wanted people to know he had forgiven the cops who'd beaten him. And he still wanted everyone to get along. That's how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like I left something for my country to always think about. After I'm dead and gone, can't we all just get along? And hopefully we won't even have to. Hopefully one day we won't even have to say that. We'll just be getting along. A few weeks into that promotional push, King's friends and family started to worry about him. He was doing book tours and promoting this, and he was having a hard time getting up. Cause, you know, in the morning and stuff, he just was trying to get motivated. On Tricia Averett. I got home that evening, and we were talking, and he says he was like, cuz. Can you just keep calling me and motivate me? He had called me, I think, I guess it had to be like a couple days before that, and told me he got lost. Johnny Kelly. I'm like, dude, what do you mean you got lost? He's like, I was riding my bike and I got lost and I was like, okay. I said, I'm gonna come look for you. So I went. But by the time I did find him, he was back at home. And I. I just knew then, you know, he is deep. You know, he's going through it and it might not be no pulling out of it. You know, whatever it was that Rodney King was going through, he didn't pull out of it. Rodney King, please is Rodney King. I mean, Rodney Glen King drowned accidentally in a swimming pool on June 17, 2012. He was 47. He was engaged to Cynthia Kelly, who you heard on that 911 call. He was a father to three girls. He had a boxing match scheduled for that summer against former baseball star Jose Canseco. After 20 years of grappling with the worst moment of his life, he was trying to find his way through the world as a broken man. Rodney King didn't die on March 3, 1991, but he didn't survive that night either. He tried to put his time to good use and he tried to work hard, and I think he just experienced just too much rejection. I think the journey was just for him. I think he was sent here on this earth for this journey. Slow Burn is a production of Slate plus, Slate's membership program. You can sign up for Slate plus to listen to the show without ads, and you'll get a bonus episode each week of the season with behind the scenes stories and tape that got cut from the show. And in this week's bonus episode, you'll be hearing from Congresswoman Karen Bass. One way to sign up for Slate plus is directly through your Apple podcast app. Just go to Apple co Slow Burn. We couldn't make Slow Burn without the support of Slate plus, so please sign up if you can head over to Apple co Slowburn. Slow Burn is produced by Jason De Leon, Ethan Brooks, Sophie Summergrad, Jasmine Ellis and me, Joel Anderson. Editorial direction by Josh Levine and Gabriel Roth. Artwork is by Jim Cook. Our theme song was composed by Don Will. Mixing by Merritt Jacob. Some of the audio in this week's episode comes courtesy of Archivist Michael Holland in the Los Angeles City Archive Office of the City Clerk. We have a million people we want to thank for helping us make this season happen. So Here we go. Thanks to all the people we talked to for this series. A big thanks to Stan Mizrahi and Devin Schwartz, who helped us get interviews recorded all throughout LA. Absolute pros. Special thanks to everyone at Slate 2 Jared Holt, Allison Benedict Lo and Liu Alicia Montgomery, June Thomas, Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Derek John, Amber Smith, Asha soluja, Bill Carey, Chow2cleo Levin, Derek Johnson, Meredith Moran, Sophie Worthen and Katie Rayford. Also to Seth Brown and Rachel Strom. And a special thanks to Janae Desmond Harris and Leah Campbell. If you enjoyed this season, please be sure to share it far and wide with your friends and family. And as always, thanks for.