Ep. 3 - Shattering The System: "Sympathy for Who?"

In this podcast, we're going to talk frankly but sensitively about some tough issues including sexual abuse, drugs, and suicide. Check out this podcast notes page for information on mental health resources in the queer community.

This is Shattering the System. I'm Sinari Glinton. In our previous episode, we learned that a twenty six year old gay black man, Jamel Moore, was found dead in the apartment of Ed Buck at one two three four North Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. Buck, who is white, was sixty two years old at the time, and he had kind of turned his home into a sort of drug or sex dungeon on the street. They called it the

It has been three months since twenty six year old Will Moore found dead the West Hollywood home wealthy democratic.

Donor at Buck.

Initially, his death was ruled accidental, but they better mean overdose.

Moore's mother, Letitia Nickson, has pressed police to continue the investigation into worse On Jamil's or theorious death.

Jamel Moore is dead. Then five days later the case is closed, ruled an accidental overdose. Now that's despite Jamel Moore's diary. That's despite a bag of evidence. That's despite other victims who'd been in this very apartment and have stories to tell. Ed Buck was out in the streets and he was becoming kind of a local news celebrity. Jamel Moore's mother would begin a campaign not only to get ed Buck put in jail, but to get the

Office, the lord to cover this family with club and peace even in this difficult times.

Now, this is Letician Nixon, Jamel Moore's mother speaking to reporters.

This is something that shouldn't have happened. It just shouldn't have happened. My son fouled police reports. It's crazy how the whole entire situation was handled. My son's dead, and five days later the case is closed.

I'm standing in the spot where Letitia Nixon spoke those very words literally across the Street. A few years later, on the fourth anniversary of her son's death, she would get a measure of justice for her son. Ed Bud would be convicted of federal charges, including the death of

And that's what I saw ed Buck as being in this case. He was an offender who had acted with impunity for nearly a decade. And I was made aware through the course of this case that ed Buck is not alone and he is not the only person victimizing underserved populations in Los Angeles. So this was a really important bell weather and deterrent for other people who would victimize these populations.

This is shattering the system, the rise and fall of ed Buck. That's after this breaking years ago, when I was a young local public radio reporter, I went to a local journalism awards banquet. Didn't have a car, so a newspaper reporter offered to give me a ride home. Her name was Linda Lutton. She'd been the big star of the evening. Actually, she won the prize for investigative journalism. She had won that award because she helped to put

He was a troublesome kid.

His mother, interviewed over the years, said she knew when the phone would ring it would be the school reporting another problem. But her son, she'd pick up the phone saying, now, what's he doing? So he was a little bit difficult. He was a very handsome young man. He became a model.

Hank Scott reported extensively on that book, his political connections and the deaths in his home. Scott started the local website Wehillville, which covers West Hollywood. And I always think the names are important, So let's begin. Edward Bernard Peter Buck Milter. That's Ed Buck was born in August twenty fourth, nineteen fifty four, in Steubenville, Ohio, which is just about a half an hour or so from Pittsburgh. Other famous

He spent a number of years in Europe modeling and touring work, living in Paris and other places.

And then he came back and he had friend of his had a small business, an odd business that involved documenting driver's license information for an insurance company, strange things, and the business was struggling. Ed stepped in to help the guy. He bought it from me, and it took off, and.

Then sold it and he ended up at.

The age of thirty maybe thirty two, he ended up a million dollars times pocket and that, you know, that changed his life.

It was this money that would allow Buck to launch a recall campaign against the then governor of Arizona, Evan Meetcha. Now, at the time, Buck was a registered Republican and the Republican governor, among other things, was opposed to the Martin Luther King Holiday. Meechim even defended the use of the word Picaninny. Anyway, Buck would lead a campaign to get Meetum recalled. Now, this was alongside of an impeachment and

Ed Buck was arrested at one point for using a fraudulent prescription to get some drugs from pharmacy. Ed Buck got in trouble in an adult store when a cop saw him grabbing the crotch of another man nearby. So you know there were those sorts of issues at the time.

And he slowly got involved in civic life.

Can you discuss, So what is a gay man, an out gay man getting involved in civic life. Tell me what that looks like in West Hollywood.

For ed Buck, Oh, it looks great West Hollywood.

I mean, you know, out came in with money, getting involved in civic life. I mean it made him a welcome figure. There were a couple of causes he cared about. One was building Terra. You know about that. It's an old, old building. Who's owner. You didn't sign a written contract with you orally it gave it to the City of West Hollywood as long as it would preserve it.

The city decided it.

Wanted to turn it into the apartments and build housing for low income seniors. And of course the neighbors who owned their own homes bought that and launched a campaign. Terror took the City of West Hollywood at court. Ed Buck supported it, and Taror won.

So let's think about this for a minute. There's a building called Tara in ed Buck's neighborhood. Now this is Hollywood, so they call it that because it looks like the Tara, you know, the one from Gone with the win well Ed Buck was living in a rent stabilized apartment on the same street, actively working against and helping to stop a plan to convert the building into housing for low income seniors. And he was living again in a rent stabilized apartment.

It now remains an empty building. While there's a struggle for people to find housing in West Hollywood, terras, it there empty, and so he got involved in that. And then he had a passion for animal rights and this was his big, big thing. So he was involved in an animal rights group, and he decided to form an organization.

That campaigned for a band and the sale of Furr in West Hollywood.

Furr was not something most West Hollywood residents went out and bought, but a section of West Hollywood adjacent to Beverly Hill, the design district, was full of very affluent stores like those in Beverly Hills, and somebody flying in from.

New York might go by for a.

Code and had led a campaign to stopped the sale of her and West taller Wood became the first city in the nation to ban you know, I haven't been a resident of West Holloway for a long time, and I will tell you that I'm so proud of my city right now.

Ed Buck clearly saw the fur band as a badge of honor. We'll hear more about his animal rights activism later. Hank Scott, the journalist, says ed Buck early on developed a reputation for being difficult.

Also said he was a really difficult guy.

So, uh, you know a number of people.

Steve Martin, who ran for city council long city council, talked about the difficulty of feeling with it.

Book, A number of people who difficult difficult.

He would get angry, he would get nasty, he would get semi violent. There were a couple of instances where he appeared at city council meetings and made statements, and they were one city council member who asked that I not declared her name, but I think everybody knows.

She actually had the sheriff.

Steputies escort with the car after the city now council meeting to hear the Dead Book to attack her. I met someone else who was very involved in the animal rights movement. With that who's no one even lives in the United States, but she told me that she feared violence from Medoc. They would get in what she thought of as a minor disagreement and he would get violent. So this was a part of his personality, and I think maybe it.

Got worse when the drug used took all. But he was known as a difficult guy to deal with.

West Hollywood can look on the outside as if it's some harmonious gighborhood, but there is a long history of racism and sexism in West Hollywood. Just for example, it was long a practice that black men would have to show multiple forms of ID to get into bars, and the city can be incredibly unwelcoming to lesbians. Also, the city can be very much a not in my backyard kind of place, which ed Buck fit right into. Henry Scott says, there are a lot of divisions in West Hollwood.

Then the other division that I've found fascinating his division between what I call the work gays and the old gay boomers. There's plight a division there that we see, particularly on the city council right now.

Ed Buck made friends and some enemies in his early career, getting involved in democratic clubs and donating money. He gave nearly half a million dollars doing it mainly at one grand to five grand at a time. One of the people who benefited was John Duran, a former city council person and former wehome here.

When I first met at, he was very talkative, he had intelligence, but the fact that he'd run for office and almost took Governor Meetrom of Arizona out made him interesting to me. But he was out as a gay man, and if you move into West Hollywood either gay or presumed to be possibly gay, and so I think by the time ed got here, he intended this destination to explore his sexual element.

I first met ed Buck when I got involved in city politics.

Lindsay Horvav was a second woman mayor in West Hollywood's history. She's currently on the LA County Board of Supervisors, and she began volunteering in West Hollywood in two thousand and seven.

I volunteered on campaigns for city council he had run at the time. I did not volunteer on his campaign, to be very clear, but that's how I met him. He was running and some of his friends were running against people I was supporting.

So what would you say? What was your impressive him?

At the time, I wasn't politically aligned with ed Buck. I didn't see I didn't share his worldview, and my experience was that any bud who was on the other side of him, he made an enemy.

It's not clear when ed Buck began using meth, but there was an influx of drugs into West Hollywood at the end of the nineties. Again, John Durant, former mayor of West Hollywood.

He was very involved with the Democratic Party, the Democratic Clubs, the Stonewall Democratic Club, but his role in West iod government has been primarily as a agitator.

You know.

He'd come to council meetings on occasion and scream and yell about development issues.

That's what I recall.

Now I'm wondering whether some of those appearances before council were under the influence of myth because that sort of anger and agitation, and the sweaty brow, the clenched fists, the teeth being gritted. I mean, now I recognize all of that to be the symptoms of somebody under the influence of amphetamine.

Crystal meth has had an incredible impact, negative impact on West Hollywood and other gay communities because West Hollywood is so much of a quote gay community thirty percent of the population that's gay. I have lost friends to meth, and I have seen friends lose their careers. I had someone I lived with for three years in New York and was very close to who lost his job almost committed suicide.

Amost everything he am.

And one of the challenges I found in West Hollywood was the unwillingness for the gay community to acknowledge the horrors of men.

It's not clear when Ed Buck began using meth, but there was an influx of math into West Hollywood at the end of the nineteen nineties. Over time, Buck began to become involved in fetish play. His fetish focused on black men dressed in white underwear. He enjoyed humiliating men, and according to prosecutors, there were thousands of videos of Buck smoking up with and eventually slamming or shooting men up with meth. Neighbors began noticing the parade of black

My name is Ludlow b. Query the Second. I am a Los Angeles based lawyer. I was co counsel as Edward Buck's defense.

Council, this is shattering the system. I'm snari Clinton at this part of the story, we thought we needed to understand what ed Buck was thinking besides his statements at trial. What possible excuse would ed Buck have for his behavior now, so that you all know at the start of the process for doing this podcast, we reached out to ed Buck and his family. They declined. We did speak to one of his lawyers, Chris Darden and Ludlow B. Query. The second were ed Buck's lawyers. You might remember Chris

It depends on obviously, if you look at this case you were talking about the ed Buck case. Obvious, Yes, if you look at it outside of the criminal justice sphere or the criminal justice space, then I can understand why people would say that. Yes, I mean ed Buck is accused of court doing horrible things that resulted in the deaths of two black men. He's accused of exploiting

Society, they're looked at is throwaway.

And to people who are advocating that black lives matter, and particularly and in this particular insin black gay lives matter, I can understand how it would be perceived that me and Chris are on the wrong side yet again. But lawyers and the criminal justice system doesn't operate, it's not supposed to operate under the influence of public opinion. You cannot get justice if you prosecute or don't prosecute, or convict or don't convict based on what the masses want.

But our justice system is based on testable evidence. You know what I mean.

You can't bring in a mob.

A crowd and say to the jury, well, the mob says they're guilty, so you better convict.

Now, this wasn't necessarily a mob action. Prosecutors would eventually find thousands of videos of ed Buck in his victims, both ed Buck injecting them and smoking meth with them. In addition to that, there was the actual evidence that was found inside of his apartment, as well as the willingness amongst his victims to testify if they got immunity.

Well, you know, I mean, I'm not going to comment on.

On his assets, you know, but that was certainly what the public, the public perception of him.

Was one of the things regardless of what you think about this case, I think about, who's no one to think of him as a boogeyman?

Okay, right, so right, this is not a boogeyman. He's just not.

He was portrayed as a boogeyman by the prosecution and by the press.

But he's not a boogeyman.

So humanize him for me helped me understand.

Ed book was.

In my opinion, ed Buck was a meth amphetamine addict that is a diction and had gotten control of him and as a human, as a person, you know, apart from this horrible drug, he is a compassionate, you know, civically active, caring man. I mean he howso because you know, as intent always is to help people. Now it got twisted by an addiction. Yeah, it got twisted by an addiction. And you know, doing drugs with people is definitely not helping him.

And another thing I mean this is does ed Buck have a history of victimizing black men?

No?

I mean you go back and back in time in his life, there's none of there's no history of him abusing and victimizing black men.

You know.

So, how do you explain the thousands and hours of hours of tape that I mean, like.

How do you make people that is all well, that's.

All within the context of this crazy world that he was living in under the influence of this addiction. I think that the thousands of hours of tape really didn't speak to what the charges were in the sense that the things that he was that were the picture of him that was being painted with the thousands out of hours of tape was that he was sexually assaulting people, that he was torturing them.

Well, he wasn't charged with any of that.

He was charged with distribution, causing death and bringing somebody from another state.

For the purposes of prostitution. That's what he was charged with that as well.

But so.

To prove that he distributed meth amphetamine to these two gentlemen who passed away, you didn't need thousands of hours of what I called shit show evident that just made him look horrible, made him look like a monster, but it didn't.

It wasn't relevant to the actual charges. It made him look like a sexual assaulter.

It made him look like a torturer, evil man, but the charges did not reflect.

Any of that.

That was just poured on.

To make the jury hate him.

Think about what it says that this person, let's say, in some crazy world that doesn't actually exist, there had never been any ill will. Two terrible tragedies, two terrible accidents. Many you find more people ever sick. That's sick. The best case scenario is almost unimaginably sick.

In my opinion, it unduly prejudiced the jury against our client, and so it wasn't even about what he was charged with. It was just like a monster. Whatever he's charged with, find him guilty. But we're going to find him guilty. I'm really just doing my job, you know. I just happen to be a black lawyer, you know, But I've represented white supremacists. I have represented white supremacists. Now, does that mean I believe in white supremacy. No, not by any means do I believe.

In white supremacy. So that gets to.

The your clients, Aret, your friend's trope Again, I'm not going to go to the clan rally just because I'm representing somebody who might be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood or.

The klu Klux Klan.

I'm not gonna like join the clan or start espousing their hate speech.

No.

But my job is to make sure that criminal defendants get due process. So I'm not here to judge him. I'm here to make sure his rights are protected. Doesn't mean I'm buddies with him, doesn't mean I agree with anything he says, doesn't mean I agree with any of his beliefs, doesn't even mean I like him.

Doesn't even mean I like him. You know what I mean. I'm doing my job now.

I do care about it, Buck, because I got to know it, Buck, and and and how I feel about it Buck, and how I feel like he was sort of portrayed as something that he Wasn't you know that's true?

You should you cared about uh Ed fuck, and I'm not. I'm not asking this question in a flippant way.

Why Because I got to know. I got to know him.

You know, I have to be careful what I say because I can't, you know, divulge our conversations, you know, but I got to know him.

What's he like as a client?

He's you know, he's he's easy going. Really, you know, he's not he's not a person. He's not.

He's respectful, he's highly intelligent, he's very practical, and he wasn't he wasn't a problem on any level.

As a client.

Now, can I tell you that one of the most surreal things is to hear the lawyer for Ed Buck getting misty eyed about gay black men. I talked to Query for two hours in downtown Hollywood. Aside from defending that Buck, because that's your job. Yes, what do you say to the young man who's moving to West Hollywood and Jamelle Moore of today, the young person who's comes to Hollywood. What advice do you give to that young person who's arriving today?

The la is a jungle.

You gotta be careful.

I would just, you know, hope that you don't get involved in anything that involves you, you know, doing drugs, because that's just a bad it's a cliche path.

In Hollywood.

It's a it's an la cliche and it just leads to nothing good.

And you matter. You matter.

The vigor with which you defend mister Bob. Do you think that that's in the message to gay black men that they matter?

I think that I in doing my job. And this again is the This is where you compartmentalize as a lawyer. This is what makes this is one of the hard parts about being a lawyer, and what's so unique about being a lawyer is you have to compartmentalize because.

All I had to focus on defending my client. I couldn't.

Focus on the message I was sending to young gay black men. I couldn't focus on that and do the job I was supposed to do. This was not about callousness or uncaring for young black gay men. This was about me doing my job for my client and nothing more.

As a black man, I love all of my brothers.

But you know what, we know that America did not love these brothers, the gay black men. Even after Jamal Moore was found dead in the apartment of a white man with a troublesome pass ed, Buck continued to walk free. He had the privilege and he had power, and he used that to continue to stop his prey, and the system did not protect them. Later in the series, we look at what it finally took to get ed Buck arrested.

I initially reviewed all of the reports and immediately saw that we had a disturbing pattern of what I later learned to be party and play, which was Buck luring his victims to his apartment to inject them with methamphetamine and then on some occasions sexually assault his victims.

The team gathers to take down ed Buck. This is Shattering the System. I'm Snari Glinton. Stick around for the next episode. Shattering the System is a production of Macro Studios and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host, Snari Glenton. You can follow me on Instagram at Snari plus the Number One. Our executive producers are Charles D. King, Asha Corpus, Win Royal Reccio, Jonathan Unger, Lindsay Hoffman, and Sonari Glinton. That's Me. Our podcast is co written and produced by Ralph Cooper