Dick was married to my father’s sister. Carol was a San Francisco supervisor.
Uncle Dick had his own advertising agency and hired me to work when I was in college. It lasted a week. One job he gave me was to write radio copy for a Japanese restaurant. Part of the copy I wrote was “Savor the cloying aroma of the succulent sukiyaki.” Dick fired me for that sentence and he was right. Dick didn’t live long enough to read my best selling book, 25 years later, Marketing Without Advertising. (Co-author was Salli Rasberry.)
Fifteen years after I was fired, Dick and I were still on good terms. By then I was a well known hippie business leader and Dick was tight with the San Francisco police crowd. I ran into him at Sansome and Bush around lunch. Dan White had recently murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, both friends of mine. Dick asked what punishment I thought White would get and I said ‘The electric chair.’ Dick said “No,” the deal had already been worked out by the DA. Joe Freitas and White’s defense lawyer, Doug Schmidt, agreed to an 8 year sentence. Dick probably got the insight from his friend Doug Schmidt. The sentence turned out to be 7 years and White got out after 5 years. (photo George Moscone)
The trial was in late May. I was dating Carol at the time, One of six women I was dating then. Carol was a supervisor. She had gone to the University of Chicago, which we had in common, she was very bright and lots of fun. As a supervisor Carol carried a pistol on her all the time, on the right front of her belt. Sexy from my point of view. She drove a pick-up truck and usually wore pants with a belt.
We had a date the day before the Dan White trial started and I told her what Dick had told me. She immediately told DA Frietas and the judge she wanted to testify. Which she did.
She testified that on his way out of City Hall, after killing Harvey, he went into Carol’s office to kill her. She hid under her desk. Like most people, even with a gun in her waist, she hid and he left.
Frietas lost his reelection later that year.
I’ve never told that story in print. Most of it can not be found anywhere else.
On my blogs I’ve told what Margo St. James told me. She repeated what Dan White’s two close police buddies told her. They had coffee near City Hall with Dan before he went to crawl in a window in the basement of City Hall. He came by to talk to them after the murders and told them what he had done. He asked what he ‘should do next.’ They told him to go to the nearby St. Mary's Cathedral and confess to a priest and then call their friendly police detective. (photo Harvey Milk)
The context, that we all knew at the time, was that the police were furious at the Mayor for appointing Charlie Gain as police chief. Gain was a reformer and an outsider in a very inbred police force. To keep from being murdered by other cops, he never carried a gun and had all press conferences in front of a U.S. flag, a California flag and the San Francisco Flag.
You now know more of this specific history than anyone else alive. There is one more silent piece no one knows. On the night before Mayor Moscone was shot, my close friend Bob Gnaizda visited him to make sure he didn’t reappoint Dan White to the Board of Supervisors because the legal court order to integrate blacks into the hierarchy of the police department still had to be voted on by the Board and White was sure to vote against it. Bob told me about that visit only two years ago, shortly before he died.