LA Monthly

The National Magazine of Los Angeles

True Crime

  • LA (Not So) Confidential

    LA (Not So) Confidential

    For decades, we’ve watched scandals unfold and corrupt Los Angeles, City Hall public servants fall prey to private greed and done nothing about it.


  • Leaving L.A., Will the Last Person Here Turn Out the Lights?

    Leaving L.A., Will the Last Person Here Turn Out the Lights?

    Any new LA Metro security forces are overwhelmed. There is a literal scourge of drugs, crime, homelessness, filthy, stinking people, one of those filthy long-term homeless ladies with a reeking cat in a cage and a huge pile of basically trash, and it’s horrifying.


  • Murder on the Metro, LA’s Dangerous Orient Express

    Murder on the Metro, LA’s Dangerous Orient Express

    With the LA Metro system now staffed with an array of guards — from police to armed security to ambassadors — riders can definitely feel more self-assured while jumping on and off.


  • ‘People Used to Stare at Me Because I Was So Beautiful, and Now They Stare at Me Because…’

    ‘People Used to Stare at Me Because I Was So Beautiful, and Now They Stare at Me Because…’

    Roberta Dos Santos Busby, a Brazilian-born exotic dancer, gets too choked up with emotion and can’t finish the thought: That people now stare at her because of the extensive scar tissue from burns on her face, neck and arms.  “My life,” Busby said, “will never be the same.”  In an interview after a guilty verdict…


  • Gypsy Untethered

    Gypsy Untethered

    The stranger than strange saga of the famous, or infamous, diminutive Gypsy Rose Blanchard, victim of her mother’s cruel deception and manipulation or just possibly a manipulator herself of her mother’s violent death.


  • Pete Rose and Baseball’s Sheer Utter Stupidity

    Pete Rose and Baseball’s Sheer Utter Stupidity

    Pete Rose and Baseball’s Sheer Utter Stupidity in banning the greatest living baseball player from the Hall of Fame.


  • IS L.A. THE MOST CORRUPT CITY IN AMERICA?

    IS L.A. THE MOST CORRUPT CITY IN AMERICA?

    That’s a lot of bad behavior – criminal and otherwise – for a 15-member body over the span of a few years. And it naturally raises the concern that something deeper is happening at City Hall. By JIM NEWTON, CalMatters There’s a question on a lot of minds in Los Angeles these days: What is…


  • There is Scum of the Earth, and Then There Is Johnny Ray Gasca

    There is Scum of the Earth, and Then There Is Johnny Ray Gasca

    A Bronx man dubbed “The Big Apple Bandit” back home and the “Prince of Piracy Scams” in Los Angeles has been sentenced to nearly 26 years in federal prison for kidnapping a 68-year-old woman with dementia at the West L.A. Veterans Affairs Medical Center in July 2021, then obstructing an FBI investigation into the abduction. Johnny Ray…


  • José Huizar’s Last Words & What a Waste of a Princeton Education

    José Huizar’s Last Words & What a Waste of a Princeton Education

    The disgraced City Councilman’s letter to U.S. District Judge John F. Walter seeking a reduced sentence failed to win any leniency even as it underscored how far he had come and how high he had risen only to lose everything by squandering it all like some greedy barrio Mexican Mafiosi organized crime boss.  By JOSÉ…


  • A Murder in Hollywood: Obsessed Film Extra Guns Down Producer’s Son in Cold Blood

    A Murder in Hollywood: Obsessed Film Extra Guns Down Producer’s Son in Cold Blood

    Movie stand-in Jameelah Elena Michl fell so madly in love with her film’s beautiful director that she began stalking her — even brandishing a Glock — and when the director didn’t return her affection, the extra shot to death the Hollywood social justice do-gooder she believed to have gotten in her way. By TONY CASTRO…