The Vicodin Thieves

Brace yourself for the unexpected, the maddening and the heartbreaking. The articles here range from Tommy Koulax's litigious hamburger empire, Lockheed's super-secret Skunk Works defense plant and the deadly 1913 construction accident at Pasadena's famous Colorado Street Bridge-to the hazy first casualty of Operation Desert Storm, chromium-6-pollution controversies, violent bus drivers and profiles of heavyweights former-mayor Richard Riordan, the firebreathing Danny Bakewell and the enigmatic Richard Alatorre, among others.The Vicodin Thieves-which draws its title from pharmaceutical poachers who raid medicine cabinets during real estate open houses-includes expanded pieces on a high flying smog emissions broker who fell in with shadowy, ex-CIA and military-intelligence operatives to "repatriate" forgotten U.S. government aid from around the globe, and the unsolved, execution-style murder of one of America's most electrifying young mayors blocks from his childhood home.Two new stories grace this compendium, too. One explores the inspiring life and horrendous killing of an early Universal Pictures prodigy (the author's great uncle, Nat Ross) by a sociopath who'd die in the San Quentin Gas Chamber. The other is about a pair of photographs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probably captured hours before he was assassinated in the kitchen of Los Angeles' old Ambassador Hotel. Few outside of Kennedyphiles know how close he came to not being there the night America's trajectory changed forever, or the cursed Hollywood connection to RFK's last days.