Pitchess did not identify any “known dissidents,” but he insisted that they had committed “hundreds of provocative acts.” For some reason the sheriff failed to mention that his deputies had already jailed one of the most prominent Chicano militants in the nation. “Corky” Gonzales had been arrested during Saturday's riot on a variety of charges that the police never really explained. Gonzales, fleeing the combat zone on a flatbed truck with 28 others, was arrested first for a traffic violation, then on a concealed weapons charge and finally for “suspicion of robbery” when police found $300 in his pocket. Police Inspector John Kinsling said it was a “routine” booking. “Any time we stop a traffic case and find that there is a weapon in the car and that its occupants have a sizeable amount of money,” he said, “we always book them for suspicion of robbery.”

Gonzales ridiculed the charge, saying, “Anytime a Mexican is found with more than $100 he's charged with a felony.” The police had originally claimed he was carrying a loaded pistol and more than 1000 rounds of ammunition, along with many spent cartridges -- but by Wednesday all felony charges had been dropped. As for “robbery,” Gonzales said, “Only a lunatic or a fool could believe that 29 people would rob a place and then jump on a flatbed truck to make their getaway.” He had climbed aboard the truck with his two children, he said, to get them away from the cops who were gassing the rally, to which he'd been invited as one of the main speakers. The $300, he said, was expense money for himself and his children -- for meals in L.A. and three round-trip bus tickets from Denver to L.A.

That was the extent of Corky Gonzales' involvement in the Salazar incident, and at a glance it seems hardly worth mentioning -- except for a rumor on the Los Angeles lawyers' grapevine that the robbery charge was only a ruse, a necessary holding action, to set Gonzales up for a “Chicano Seven” conspiracy bust -- charging that he came from Denver to Los Angeles with the intention of causing a riot.

Both Sheriff Pitchess and Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis were quick to seize on this theory. It was the perfect tool for this problem: not only would it frighten the local Chicanos and hamstring nationally-known militants like Gonzales, but it could also be used to create a sort of “red menace” smokescreen to obscure the nasty realities of the Ruben Salazar killing.

The sheriff fired the first salvo, which earned him a giant banner headline in Tuesday's L.A. Times and a heavy pro-police editorial in Wednesday's Herald-Examiner. Meanwhile, Chief Davis launched a second blast from his listening post in Portland, where he had gone to vent his wisdom at the American Legion convention. Davis blamed all the violence, that Saturday, on a “hard core group of subversives who infiltrated the anti-war rally and turned it into a mob,” which soon ran wild in a frenzy of burning and looting. 'Ten months ago,“ he explained, ”the Communist Party in California said it was giving up on the blacks to concentrate on the Mexican-Americans."