DEATH OF THE COMMUNICATOR

Thirty-five years ago I never thought that I would be writing this. You see, I was one of the many cops from several agencies that were trying to put him back in prison. It was amongst other things that I thought this man was what I termed the "Communicator" for the eMe. Some of our informants agreed. I was told that he was using his agency for criminal activities. Most of the investigators, including myself agreed on this point. I know that the Prison Gang Task Force did everything in it's power to discover all we could about his agency and most of his employees, in fact I even had an inside man (an ex-con) who passed on anything he heard.

As we assembled the various pieces of the puzzle, we could not come up with enough to arrest him. We, (law enforcement) made several arrests of employees, and investigated the deaths of some of the employees but could not connect him directly to any of these activities. He had political clout, as did a few other similar agencies.

We went so far as to include the media, but this too was not enough, until the Get Going Project started to catch heat. I was there on the day this man's project closed, so was a young Lieutenant and his Sergeant from LAPD. We were indeed happy, why not, we had taken down one of what we considered the eMe's strongholds. (It was actually the LA City Councilman, Arthur Snyder whose relentless pursuit that made it official.)

I could go on and on, but I will bring it to a close in the next few paragraphs.

It was around 2002 that I was asked by CIA, an informant of mine (Not the Central Intelligence Agency), to meet with this man. I was leery at first for good reasons. This man certainly knew who I was, even my former boss COP Jon Elder told me he thought it was a bad idea, I wouldn't be the first man that this guy had murdered.

We met in a Denny's Restaurant in Newport Beach, California. The man was as awesome then as when I first started pursuing him. It took about 1/2 hour to clear the air, and we both agreed that what happened in the past should be put behind us. He told me that he had became a born-again Christian and was trying to change the attitudes of not only the kids on the street that were leaning to get into the gang life, but also going inside the prisons to talk to gang members telling them there was a better life through Jesus Christ. He seemed sincere, and I tended to believe him. We talked about how this action was needed and must have talked for a couple of hours.
We met several times after this meeting. We never discussed eMe business per say, if I knew something about a person or incident he would just look at me and smile. From this, I knew it must be true.
He was in the process of writing a book, which I never had a chance to see, because he died before it was published.
I had given him a copy of my book and his comment was that it was written by someone who knew what he was talking about, one who would have had to have lived it to tell it as accurate as portrayed. He even liked the fact that I corrected the part about "Pie Face" being his Padrino. He was not, but when asked, he said that he swore never to divulge that information, and he would take it to the grave; he did.
His name is Rafael "Chispas" Sandoval, ex-director of the COMMUNITY CONCERN CORPORATION. As Paul Harvey says, "now you know the rest of the story".