The Library Book Page 25

  By McVicker, Steve

  364.92 R967Mc

  In 1973, more than fifteen hundred library staff members signed a petition complaining that Central Library was a hazardous work environment. Shortly after the petition was delivered to management, the Los Angeles Fire Department cited twenty-six fire code violations in the building. Barton Phelps told me that he knew the building was dilapidated, but he was suspicious of some of the violations. “Someone was always leaving carts and boxes in the fire exits, and then somehow the fire department got called,” he said. “It felt like they were doing it on purpose, to argue in favor of tearing the building down.” The pro-teardown people and the preservationists were knotted up over how to proceed with fixing the library, but no one was budging, and each faction doubted the other’s intentions.

  One morning, a real estate developer named Robert Maguire came for a meeting at the ARCO offices. He stood by a window and looked down on the library and the shambles it was becoming. At that moment, he made a decision to do what he could to fix it. Not long ago, he described to me what that view from ARCO looked like: “A big horrible wall on Fifth street . . . a horrible narrow stairway that took you to the street above—really nasty. All the drunks were peeing down the stairwell.” I wondered what he thought of the parking lot. “Oh, God, yeah,” he said with a groan. “To sum up, you had a really interesting but ratty building with a really horrible parking lot. But still, I thought it was critical to protect it.”

  Maguire is one of the most successful real estate developers in the city. Many of his biggest projects were downtown. Like many people, including the architectural preservationists who had been so instrumental in keeping the library intact so far, Maguire hoped Los Angeles would develop a city center that actually felt like a city center. A blighted library in the middle of it wouldn’t do. He was used to building new things, but he loved the Goodhue Building and was committed to the idea of saving and rehabilitating it. He also knew that ARCO, then a major corporate and philanthropic force in Los Angeles, favored saving the original building. Lodwrick Cook, the ARCO chairman, didn’t want a skyscraper replacing the library and blocking his view, and Robert Anderson, ARCO’s CEO, was a devotee of vintage architecture.

  The sticking point was money. Economics favored the plan of sacking the old library, selling the land, and building a new one elsewhere with the proceeds. When downtown began percolating as a business district in the 1980s, the land under the library became more valuable by the minute; if sold, it probably would cover almost all the costs of a new library somewhere on cheaper land. Repairing and expanding the current building would cost close to $150 million. Bonds and fancy financing might pay for some of it, but that certainly would not be enough.

  At that time, on the East Coast, people began tinkering with a new way of getting permission to put up buildings that were taller than what zoning allowed. Every city has height restrictions. Not every building is as high as it is legally allowed to be, but the building owns the rights to airspace above it, up to the permitted height. In the early 1960s, a Chicago developer first proposed the concept of air rights. Once the precedent was set, air rights became a salable commodity. For instance, if you had a building that was only seven stories high, which was the case with the Goodhue Building, and zoning would have allowed it to be sixty stories high, you could sell its “right” to fifty-three more stories to a neighboring building project that wanted to build higher than its allowance. Air rights withstood court challenges and were becoming a common instrument in urban development. No one, though, had tried it in Los Angeles.

  It took eight years to orchestrate the sale of the library’s air rights. By 1986, the transfer of the rights was approved, and the project was “going like mad,” according to Maguire. His company bought the library’s air rights for $28.2 million; he planned to use it to build two towering skyscrapers across from the library, one of which would be the tallest building on the West Coast. He also bought the land underneath the library’s former garden to build a huge underground garage, with the hope that the old garden could be restored. Architect Norman Pfeiffer was hired to renovate the original building and design a new wing that would more than double the size of the library. At that moment, the Goodhue Building contained five times as many books as it was built to hold. The new wing would finally provide enough space for them. The original building would be polished and buffed—and returned, wherever possible, to the way Goodhue intended it. Everyone who advocated tearing down the old building accepted the fact that the Goodhue Building would endure.

  The sales of the space underground and the air above raised almost two thirds of the money needed to restore and expand the library. The tobacco company Phillip Morris offered to pay the remaining third—with the intention of collecting a healthy tax deduction for investing in a historic building. The city council almost accepted the offer but, on second thought, decided it wouldn’t look good to have Los Angeles Public Library financed by cigarettes. The remaining funds would have to come from somewhere else.

  26.

  True Stories of Crime from the District Attorney’s Office (1924)

  By Train, Arthur

  364.973 T768-1

  Tom Bradley’s Impossible Dream: The Educational Documentary (2014)

  DVD 92 B811To

  In Praise of Litigation (2017)

  By Lahav, Alexandra D.

  347.90973 L183

  Hold Your Tongue!: The Layman’s Guide to Libel and Slander. A Fascinating Exploration of the Realm of Defamation, Including an Analysis of Ideological, Racial, and Religious Libels (1950)

  By Ernst, Morris L.

  347.5 E71a

  Robert Sheahen is a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles who has collected a stable of interesting clients, including the president of the Hells Angels; singer Rick James, who was accused of torturing a woman with a crack pipe; and the woman who was charged with giving John Belushi his fatal drug dose. Sheahen has a strong jaw, an intense stare, and a disarming way of making fun of himself. I never entirely understood how he first met Harry Peak, but their connection dated back to 1983, when Sheahen sent one of his investigators to find someone to testify for the defense in a murder trial, and somehow, the investigator found Harry. Even though Harry blew his testimony by talking to the jurors and saying he was an actor, his ingenuousness charmed Sheahen. He knew Harry needed work, so he hired him from time to time to run errands. Over the years, though, they fell out of touch, so Sheahen was surprised when Harry called, asking for representation in the arson case. “I knew the city had nothing on him, so I decided to take the case,” Sheahen told me one day at lunch. “It was the kind of case lawyers call ‘flam-bono.’ ” He started laughing and waited to see if I got the joke. When I didn’t, he said patiently, “That means you do the case for no money, but you know it will get you a lot of attention. Flamboyant. And pro bono. Flam-bono. Get it?”

  Sheahen said he was stunned when he heard Harry’s name in association with the library fire. “To be honest, I almost drove off the freeway when I heard it on the news,” Sheahen said. “He sure didn’t strike me as an arsonist.” From the beginning, Sheahen believed that the city was overreaching because the fire had happened almost a year earlier and the public was itching to have someone arrested. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that Harry couldn’t account for his whereabouts that morning, or that he kept reshuffling his alibis like a deck of cards. “Harry was just a little nuts,” Sheahen said, putting his sandwich down. “He loved attention. He wanted to be famous.”

  Harry spent three days in jail before he was released. His family was mortified. “I never cried like that in my life,” his sister Brenda told me. “I felt like people were staring at him like he was nothing but a gay motherfucker. Yes, he likes to make stupid comments, but that doesn’t mean he did it.” Brenda’s own house burned down shortly before the library fire; she was living in a hotel at the time of Harry’s arrest. Her fire was attributed to an electric
al problem, but she was worried that someone might suggest there was a connection between the two fires. She was afraid it would be used against Harry, so she kept her distance from him, just in case.

  After the paperwork for his release was complete, the jailers kept Harry cooling his heels for two hours, for no apparent reason, before they let him go. Sheahen believed they were just being vindictive because, like everyone in the city, they wanted to blame someone for the fire, and Harry was now that person. A scrum of reporters and camera crews waited at the door of the jail. Instead of looking downcast or remorseful, Harry walked out wearing a broad, bright smile. Maybe he was smiling nervously. Maybe it was a reflex for him, a burst of delight at being noticed, regardless of the reason. Maybe when he saw a camera, the aspiring actor in him couldn’t resist smiling. Whatever his reason, the smile was featured in every story about his arrest, and it made him look brazen and shameless, like he had gotten away with something.

  The local papers were ravenous for the story, especially after word got out that Harry confessed the crime to several friends. Sheahen fended them off, saying Harry’s behavior was dumb but innocuous, the equivalent of people who joke about bombs in airports and nothing more. “He likes to joke,” Sheahen told the Los Angeles Times. “He made a few jokes he shouldn’t have. He has a different sense of humor.” Harry was a people pleaser, he added, and if it tickled his friends to have him say he was the arsonist, he would do it. Sheahen praised the investigators as “top people doing a top job.” But this time, he said, they got the wrong guy.

  According to Sheahen, Harry’s day on April 29, 1986, started at nine A.M., when Harry delivered papers to a downtown courtroom for Leonard Martinet. At ten A.M., he went to a podiatrist appointment in Hollywood, followed by brunch with Reverend Smith and the podiatrist, Stephen Wilkie. As soon as he finished brunch, Harry drove to his parents’ house in Santa Fe Springs and arrived there by eleven A.M. While this was orderly, it sounded to me like an impossibly tight schedule. Anyone who has spent time in Los Angeles knows that rarely, if ever, has anyone done a chore downtown and then made it to Hollywood in just an hour, and rarely, if ever, has anyone had brunch in Hollywood and then made it to Santa Fe Springs, twenty heavily trafficked miles away, in an hour.

  In the end, the credibility of Harry’s schedule didn’t matter. On March 3, 1987, Stephen Kay, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, held a press conference to announce that Harry would not be charged. “Though there is strong probable cause to believe the suspect is responsible for the Central Library arson fire,” Kay said, “the admissible evidence is insufficient to warrant criminal prosecution at this time.”

  The fire investigators were livid. Dean Cathey, a fire department battalion chief who’d spent countless hours running the investigation, gave a statement to reporters after Kay’s announcement. “We still believe Peak is the perpetrator of the fire,” Cathey said. “There is no doubt in our minds. I believe a guilty man is going free.” As reporters shouted questions at him, Cathey continued, “It’s frustrating. We’ve expended five hundred hours internally on our investigation of this man . . . It’s difficult on the investigators, and the people of Los Angeles are going to be wondering why we can’t have this individual.”

  Kay did imply that if more evidence surfaced, Harry might still be charged, saying, “The case is not closed.” But the investigation didn’t advance after Harry was released. No new witness ever came forward, and no physical evidence was found. Nothing definitive linked Harry to the crime. There was also no hard proof of what had caused the fire; there was just an area in the stacks where investigators believed the fire began. The most powerful case for charging Harry consisted of the confessions he had made to a number of friends, but he’d unconfessed more often than he had confessed. Kay also acknowledged that Harry’s confessions might not be admissible in criminal court. The investigators, convinced that Harry was the arsonist, found it hard to attack the case with fresh energy, to look for new suspects, when they were so sure Harry was their man. Once Kay announced he wasn’t charging Harry, the momentum of the investigation thudded to a stop.

  Many investigators suspected that Kay didn’t pursue the case for other, strategic reasons. At that moment, the city’s district attorney was in the middle of a sexual abuse case against the owners and staff of the McMartin Preschool, which expanded into being one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in the history of the United States. The city’s case was beginning to disintegrate, and in the end, the jury came back with no convictions. The last thing the district attorney’s office wanted was to lose another prominent case like the library fire. The wobbliness of the evidence against Harry was just too big a risk.

  Harry walked out of jail and went back to his life. He looked for work with no luck. His sister Debra told me no one wanted to hire him because of his notoriety. “They’d say, ‘Oh, aren’t you the library fire guy?’ And that was that,” she said. Then, suddenly, the case was back in the news. At a press conference in January 1988, Harry appeared with his occasional employer Leonard Martinet, who was now representing him. To the assembled reporters, Martinet said, “It is hard to believe a totally innocent individual [like Harry] could . . . be beaten and imprisoned by government agents for the purposes of trying to extort a confession. It was a Gestapo technique.” As a consequence, Martinet said, Harry Peak was suing the City of Los Angeles in civil court. Martinet said Harry suffered “soft-tissue injuries to the back and neck, requiring medical treatment . . . injury to his mind and shock and injury to his nervous system” during his three days in jail, and was “prevented from working, sustaining a loss of earnings and/or earning capacity . . . and believes he will be prevented from working for a period in the future.” Harry sued the city for false arrest, slander, negligence, emotional distress, invasion of privacy, and assault and battery. The price tag was $15 million. He also sued arson investigator Dean Cathey individually for $5 million, on the grounds that Cathey slandered him when he told reporters that Harry was guilty. Harry was always short on money, so a civil suit that might bring him $20 million probably intrigued him. But I bet one of the things that pleased him most was that the complaint included the sentence “At the time of his arrest, Plaintiff was a part-time actor.”

  This development in the story perplexed me. Harry had been shaken up by his arrest, and might well have experienced rough handling in jail, but he simply didn’t seem like the sort of person with the resolve to sue the city. The only thing that seems like Harry is that the suit was a way for him to revive the attention he had gotten when he was a suspect. Still, I sensed an invisible hand in the civil case. Harry knew a number of lawyers from his errand work. Did one of them encourage the idea of filing a civil suit? Once the criminal case was dismissed, Robert Sheahen was no longer involved. But I wondered about Leonard Martinet, about whether he’d encouraged Harry to pursue the suit. Martinet was in and out of this story, always a day player, but I knew little about him and found little about him everywhere I looked. I tried tracking him down, but all I found were disconnected phone numbers, and one working number under his name in Palm Springs. I called repeatedly, but no one ever answered, and the outgoing message said the phone didn’t accept incoming calls.

  The arson team who investigated Harry was outraged by the civil suit, especially Dean Cathey, who sweated until he was assured that his union would handle the individual charges against him. The firefighters weren’t satisfied to merely defend themselves and the city against Harry. A group of them approached a city attorney they admired named Victoria Chaney. She is now an associate justice in the court of appeals, but in 1988, Justice Chaney was in the civil liability unit of the city attorney’s office and often worked with fire department staff. Chaney told me she’d been struck by how sure the investigators were that Harry was the arsonist. She reviewed their material and proposed a new tactic. Instead of waiting to see if the criminal case would be reinstated, she suggested suing Harry
in civil court, just as he’d sued the city. In criminal court, a verdict has to be unanimous, and the evidence has to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil court, a case only has to be proved by the preponderance of evidence, and verdicts are decided by a majority vote. The case against Harry could well have unraveled under criminal court scrutiny, but Chaney believed it would withstand the gentler prodding of civil court.

  The fire department signed on, and Chaney began developing her case. The city would match Harry’s demand for $15 million, and it would go a few million dollars better. Three weeks after Harry filed his lawsuit, the City of Los Angeles filed its cross-complaint in superior court, demanding that Harry compensate the city for the cost of replacing the library’s destroyed books; the cost of repairing the damaged ones; the cost of the water used to extinguish the fire; the cost of fixing the damage to the building; and the cost of worker compensation for the firefighters who were injured on the job. The city was suing Harry Peak for $23.6 million.

  27.

  The Conservation of Books and Documents (1957)

  By Langwell, W. H.

  025.7 L287

  The McDonnell Douglas Story (1979)

  By Ingells, Douglas J.

  338.78 M136IN

  Salvage of Water Damaged Books, Documents, Micrographic and Magnetic Media: A Case History, Dalhousie Univ. Law Library, Aug. 1985; A Case History, Roanoke Virginia Flood, Nov. 1985 (1986)

  By Lundquist, Eric G.

  025.8 L962

  After two years of being frozen, the books were ready to be thawed, dried, fumigated, sorted, cleaned, repaired, and rebound. The aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas, which had a division just south of Los Angeles, offered to try drying the first batch of twenty thousand books. The McDonnell engineers researched the nature of water-soaked paper and decided to use their space simulation chamber to defrost and dry. They placed a selection of books spine-down on an aluminum tray, and then flattened them with a rigid aluminum plate. The plated books were stacked six tiers high. The entire rig was secured with bungee cords and placed inside a forty-foot-wide vacuum chamber used to test satellites under different atmospheric and meteorological conditions. The temperature in the chamber was raised to 100 degrees, and the books were left inside it for five days. Then the air pressure in the chamber was dropped until it equaled the pressure found at 140,000 feet above earth. The pressure was increased and decreased in intervals, and the temperature was raised and lowered in wild swings. When the first small batch of books was run through the process, six hundred gallons of water seeped out.