ABSTRACT
On a May morning in 2006, I learned of an untimely death, one that made the completion of this book a personal obligation. Below the front-page fold and with the blunt diction of James Ellroy, that day’s Los Angeles Times announced “A Death in Lockup.” According to the Times, a forty-two-year-old Compton auto mechanic named Ramón Gavira had died in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail under suspicious circumstances almost four years earlier. He had been picked up for drunk driving in 2002, fallen off medication for depression and diabetes, run afoul of at least one guard (a boxer in her off time) and some fellow inmates, and was found dead in his cell, an apparent, but by no means certain, suicide by hanging.
