Okay, we are alive.

Hi, this is William Ramsey.

Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show.

I have a very special guest.

His name is Nils Revelius.

His last name is spelled g ri v i lli Us, and he was involved in one of the most terrific crimes of really La history.

It's commonly known as the Wonderland murders and I pulled up a article about it here.

It took place in Laurel Canyon in nineteen eighty one, and it involved some pretty shady figures and it's a very graphic, brutal story.

It's a true crime story.

It's a lot of Hollywood is taking the story and integrated into films and things like that.

But mister Gravilius is a private investigator here in California.

It's had a long and storied career.

His website, if you're watching this is GRAVILLIUSPI dot com.

You'll see this and this is his bio.

He was first licensed as a private detective in nineteen ninety two.

He started as a soldier conducting cland to stuff and security, border and counterinsurgency operations in the Pacific mediterrane in Latin America on a contractual basis.

Gravilli is conducted private clandestant operations in various nations.

Is an agent of the Pinkerton organization.

He's also conducted kidnapping, robbery, homicide, assault, hijacking, extortion, workplace, the mass work conflict of interest investigations for a variety of clients including industry, private trust, law firms, financial institutions, and select private parties.

And I will put a link to his website you can check it out.

But like I said, we're going to talk about a pretty graphic crime, so I would just be aware, you know, people are in the background.

It might be sensitive to this.

It's a pretty graphic story.

But Nil's Gravelius.

Welcome to the show.

Well, good morning, Bill.

I'm very pleased to be on Excellent.

Thanks for having being, you know, flexible with your time for people who may not have heard your name.

Maybe you could talk about your background.

I did the brief bio, but your background and then your involvement in this Wonderland murders investigation.

I've been a private detective for a while.

I was in the Pinkerton Service.

I was in the US Army.

I've had a good career.

I got interested in the Wonderland Avenue murders when I was working with Bob Susa, who was retired from LAPD Robbery Homicide Division.

He and I were working jointly at security and investigations company in Glendale that was low key at high profile at the same time.

It was owned by LAPD command staff guys, and the sort of things we did was like when they were getting ready to reopen the Getty, I set up their pre employment background screening program.

We also took on a lot of high stakes criminal investigation like robbery and hijacking, suppression for a liquor distribution company, things like that.

So we were essentially functioning as a private police force in Los Angeles.

I attended Riohando Police Academy and took two levels of academy training, but never worked at a municipal police agency.

I was a counterintelligence agent in the Army, which means under US Code eighteen eleven, you're a federal peace officer, but it's very specialized and esoteric, if you will.

I don't like using the term, but that defines esoteric.

So Bob, Bob Sussan was talking about the single most frustrating case he had ever worked as a homicide investigator.

He was in the elite of the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division and his partner was Tom Lang.

Tom Lang is justifiably famous as the man who brought Oj Simpson in for murder.

I don't want anybody in this audience to ever talk shit about Lang or Sousa.

Tom Lang and Bob Susa sacrificed a lot protecting the citizens of Los Angeles.

They risked their own freedom in this particular case because of the level of corruption in Los Angeles City government and the ties that the man who ordered the murders had into city government.

Mac McLain too, Lang's subsequent partner, who helped him in the late eighties bring Nash in the first time on the murder case.

But really, what you need to know about the Wonderland Avenue murders is it started off as a very simple drug ripoff.

There was an adult film star named John Holmes who was a cocaine addict, and for the proper context of all this bill in the late seventies through the late eighties, cocaine was cryptocurrency in Los Angeles.

That's there's no other way to characterize it.

Deals were sealed with cocaine, Bribes were paid with cocaine.

Cocaine was used as payola in the record industry.

Things like that.

It can't be overstated.

So Holmes is a drug addict.

Holmes runs out of credit with his favorite drug dealer, Ed Nash.

Ed Nash was first identified as an organized crime figure in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Police Department nineteen fifty two.

It took from nineteen fifty two to nineteen eighty one for any LAPD officer ever to arrest at Nash for any crime.

So long time, three decades, right, Yeah, so credit cut off.

One of his other suppliers were the guys at the Wonderland Avenue House in the film of Bill Deverel, Ron Lonneus, David Lynde, and a few other characters who were filtering in and out.

Now, they were not cocaine addicts.

They were heroin addicts, and cocaine being cryptocurrency, was something for them to steal from other people.

And they were involved in a whole series of takeover robberies of small dealers around Los Angeles, and that's how they'd get the cocaine that they would sell to support their heroin habits, and they were pretty hard men.

Bill Deverell was a veteran construction engineer, crane operator, that sort of thing, and Heroin took him down.

He was an otherwise decent guy.

Joy Miller, his girlfriend was practically a prep school girl, grew up in Hollywood from a Jewish family, and a heroin addict, and it ruined her.

I mean it took her down.

Ron Launius, many people have characterized him as a gangster's gangster, but you know Ron Lonneus, you know, was an enforcer from one of the motorcycle gangs.

He was from the Sacramento Delta.

He was a genuine tough guy.

He was a suspect and a few organized crime hits.

I don't want to get into that.

Today.

There's a legend built up around Ron Lorneus, some of it justified and some of it fictional.

But so that that's the Wonderland gang.

So Holmes is out of cocaine and out of money, and there's only so much work that he can do in the adult film industry because he was, you know, his performance was flagging, and I don't want to get any more graphic than that.

You've got an adult audience with an adult imagination.

They know what all this means.

So Holmes goes to the boys on Wonderland and he says, I know where you can make a good score, but I want half of it, And so they agree to this.

Holmes goes over with a little bit of money to buy a little bit of cocaine from Ed Nash in July of nineteen eighty one and or June of nineteen eighty one, and leaves the sliding door unsecured, and first thing in the morning, first first thing in the morning, lynd Deverell and Lorneus burst in and humiliate Nash and pistol whip his bodyguard, Greg Dials.

And they knew where a floor safe was in the closet of Ed Nash's house, which was on the other side of the canyon in the San Fernando Valley, and they made Nash open the floor safe and beg for his life and beg for the lives of his children.

And I think Dave Lynde cranked off around accidentally and nick Greg in the butt.

And so it was this panoply right, and some of this was re enacted loosely in a film entitled Boogie Knights, but not reenacted.

Well, so that's Mark, uh, what's his name?

What's that Mark Wohlberg?

And so they make off with a quantity of heroin, a larger quantity of cocaine, and some money, and the amounts of all these things is subject to some conjecture.

Also some guns.

They wrapped some guns up in a shower curtain, which is typical burglary thing.

Burglars leave with pillowcases and shower curtains full of your possessions when they leave the house.

And their driver was this guy named Tracy Ray McCourt who was too timid to participate in the robbery but wanted to share by doing the driving.

So they go back to Wonderland.

They cut up all the goods.

Now, Holmes didn't participate in the robbery, so they chop up the cocaine, up up the heroine.

They divide up the money, and they give Holmes two thousand dollars and two ounces of cocaine.

My information is from the braggadocio of David Lynn, who a close high school friend of his, was that it was at least two kilos of cocaine which is a decent amount if you're a with Hound, I guess, and Holmes wanted more, and he wanted more of the money.

So Holmes is thrown out of the house by Launius.

And Launius had a tendency to point his pistol at holmes crotch and threaten Holmes moneymaker with his pistol.

Right, And so Holmes goes out dejected and smokes the cocaine that he has, and he takes the two thousand dollars and buys more cocaine.

And when he's out of money and out of cocaine, Holmes gets with Nash.

Now there's one version of the story where Nash has the Dials brothers stake out Holmes answering service and they kidnap him.

And the other version is that Holmes just goes to Nash and says, I know who robbed you.

Knowing Holmes character, I'm inclined toward the latter.

Okay, Now, Nash, in order to make Holmes prove his loyalty, probably made Holmes participate, you know, in the robberies and murders.

So a team of men was assembled.

I know the names of the men who were assembled, you know, based on the testimony of a woman who was there whom I interviewed once before the grand jury was impaneled, and she identified these four men plus Holmes, and they went over there and holmes job was to get on the intercom and say, Hey, it's John.

I've got some money.

I want to buy some blow.

Please let me in.

And that was late night June thirtieth, nineteen eighty one, or very early in the morning July first, nineteen eighty one.

And this is like a party house too, right, Like people are coming and going and the neighbors.

Typical drugs set up.

You know, they're dealing dope, they're using dope, they don't care.

You know, they're taking life low and whatever.

So Holmes gets them in and they're all high.

They're all gagged on heroin because they've been living launch with this score from Ed Nash.

You know, they don't have to go out and exert themselves on the street to bring in more dope.

And you know, the men were armed with one inch steel water pipe with threaded ends.

And they know this from the striations on the broken skulls of Barbara and Joy and Bill Deverell, the only one who was conscious enough to fight back was Bill Deverell, and they beat him to death.

I mean he had defensive wounds on his hands and arms, and they were all beaten to death.

Susan Launius was believed to be dead, but it wasn't.

And it was her her moaning and crying that alerted the neighbors in the early morning that something was going on now after the murders.

And you know, the Holmes Holmes handprint was found on the bedstead above ron Lorneus's body, you know, like he was bracing himself while he hit Loneus Holmes partisans.

There are a lot of people who want to romanticize this man as an iconic hero of the adult film industry.

They want to say, oh, well, you know, Holmes Holmes didn't participate in the murders.

I say, bullshit, Okay.

I talked to his ex wife once in a long time ago when I worked for Ed Opperman, another PI, and she said he beat her all the time.

He's not a nice person, and he was smoking coke all the time.

Just I forgot what they call it, but like, yeah, you know, he wasn't a good guy.

I knew Sharon, his ex wife, very well, the same information.

So I've lost my train of fo Well, we were just talking about him about this kind of hero eye.

The scene, the scene of the crime.

The scene of the crime.

So there's four dead bodies and a very badly wounded Susan Loneus and their customers are coming in and picking up drugs that are laying all over the furniture and floor that have been scattered around by the killers.

That sort of thing.

I know the names of at least two of them.

Just an ugly, ugly scene.

None of them called for help, and one of the neighbors finally heard the moaning and called summoned.

Ems.

Ems arrived, they saw the scene.

LAPD comes and late afternoon, Susan Lang had gone home.

They get summoned by Robbery Homicide Division and they go over and work the scene.

Tom Lang narrates the video.

It's the first murder scene videotape by LAPD, going from room to room and just showing you know, death and mayhem.

That that the sort of things that Bob and Tom had to deal with all the time as homicide investigators.

That are shocking to view for civilians, that sort of thing, and.

The bodies were rolled out and it was really personal and graphic too, right, like it was.

Just right, I mean, total revenge, get back for something.

And that night they were introduced by a snitch named Fat Howard, and Fat Howard was a fence who operated in West Hollywood fencing stolen property.

And David Lynn had missed being murdered because he was in Sacramento for a court date.

And Barbara, the young woman murdered on the sofa, was his girlfriend, so he was terrified of getting murdered.

He went and got with a friend of his first who was a member of the band the Surfaris in Arcadia.

David Lynne grew up in Arcadia and was class of fifty eight from Monrovia High School.

So Lynd goes to Fat Howard knowing that Fat Howard has connections to the police department.

A fence makes a great snitch to, you know, the police, and that's how he protects himself in Los Angeles.

In other words, instead of getting mob protection fences in Los Angeles, we'd get their protection from the police, and the police department filters him to Bob and Tom.

Bob and Tom introduce, you know, interview David Lynne.

They meet at the crime scene, okay, and Lynde has broken in and is stuffing his pockets with pills off of the floor things like that.

So Lynde lays out the whole story for them about how they robbed ed Nash and that John Holmes had set the whole thing up, the robbery, and so immediately Ed Nash is the primary suspect and John Holmes is a suspect.

It takes a bit of work to finally get with Holmes.

They interview Holmes, Holmes will only speak generally rather than specifically.

Holmes makes wild demands.

They put him up in a hotel with his wife and with his girlfriend, and they're trying to get him to make a definitive statement, which he will never do.

And they finally kick him loose and he flees to Florida with his girlfriend and then they get an arrest warrant for him.

Now, before that all that occurs, Bob and Tom on the basis on the strength of what lind said about the drug rip off, they decided to file a PC two eleven report with LAPD on Nash's behalf.

If you are robbed of your narcotics in Los Angeles, you've been the subject of PC four five nine, which is burglary PC two eleven, which is defined by force and fear, that sort of thing.

So they filed a crime report on behalf of Nash and then went over and on the basis of that had a search warrant for Nash's house.

They you tossed Nash's house and in his safe was the cocaine.

And so they arrested ed Nash like days later for distribution of cocaine, hoping to lean on him get more information.

They didn't get more information.

They filed fellon in narcotics charges against Nash and went up on charges for the first time in his life for narcotics trafficking.

Now, contemporaneous with all of this, there's another layered investigation of Nash by a federal Organized Crime Strikeforce which included LAPD's you know, Organized Crime Intelligence Division, the FBI, and most importantly the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Now why would ATF be interested in Nash.

Well, Nash had a business model which included by a restaurant, a cafe over insure restaurant, borrow cafe, firebomb restaurant, borrow cafe, and collect insurance money.

And so that's how the ATF got involved in this.

So it was a federal investigation at that level, and then the murder investigation was state level.

So all of these things are going on, and then they go to Florida, they get homes, they bring homes back, homes goes up on Fell the need murder charges and they could Bob and Tom.

When I talk to them about this case, one of the things they told me multiple times was it always seemed as if there was a hidden hand while they were conducting the investigation, thwarting them.

Every time they would get close to Nash, something would occur when they'd say, well, we want to file charges against Nash for murder or something like that, they would say, well, you don't have enough evidence yet, or that sort of thing.

So in Nashville, who was Palestinian, right, his name was like Nozrala or something like that.

He kind of anglicized his last name right correct.

He was originally from Milwaukee and moved to Los Angeles in the early fifties.

Adel Nosrala was as true incorrect name shortened to Eddie Nash.

What we need to understand about Eddie Nash as a gangster is there is no proper La cos on nostra family structure in Los Angeles build But to the bent Noses from New York City in Chicago, Eddie Nash was definitely mister Nash.

They respected him, you know.

Yeah, he had all kinds of holdings and all kinds of like nightclubs.

And right well it was also ties on.

One of your viewers was talking about the Odyssey Club.

The Odyssey Club was a gay disco in Los Angeles late seventies early eighties which he co owned with a character named Chris Cox.

And Chris Cox was from Boston, had come out to Los Angeles to be a cop and then decided he'd liked the gay you know, disco scene, you know, cocaine and disco scene far more so.

He was running the Odyssey for ed Nash and he was the head of what was called the Lavender Hill Mob humorously, but it was like the gay mafia in Los Angeles.

They were involved in prostitution, loan sharking, extortion, burg robbery, drug dealing, anything you could think of.

And all of them were gay men.

So that is the stuff that was going on.

And so yeah, Holmes's girlfriend was Don Chiller, Right, that's the one that I talked to or was communicating.

Yeah, Don was his girlfriend, and she was a young kid when she took up.

She was fifteen or sixteen when she started dating him, and then her her life changed in the negative sense for all of her involvement with Holmes.

And so they get brought back to Los Angeles.

Holmes goes up on charges, and Ron Cohen was the district attorney who prosecuted Holmes for murder.

And I want you to understand something.

When they pulled the jury that acquitted Holmes of murder, what they said was, we didn't believe that he was necessarily in us.

And what we kept wondering was where are the other people involved in this case?

Because they were named numerous times in the presentation of the evidence, and Holmes was very well represented.

I believe Earl Hanson represented him.

I may be incorrect.

Tom Tom has an encyclopedic memory for all of this.

Is that Tom Lang right to Nosrawla is left here?

Is that him?

Can you know that that is?

That's that's another detective.

I think I know who that is, But so no, that's not Tom Tom.

Tom was already going bold like me.

Contemporaneous with the Wonderland Avenue murders, Tom and Bob were both remarkably handsome men, though you should know that princes of the city.

They did a good job.

They were very dedicated police officers.

Now, the reason I mentioned the ATF is contemporary with all of these things.

Somebody made a complaint to the chief's office that Lang and SUSA were corrupt, that they were secretly protecting ed Nash.

Ed Nash was in federal custody at that point, and Hal Glickman, a bailbamsman who was ed Nash's partner in several of his enterprises, was running the whole show.

The person who made the complaint was an ATF agent on the Strikeforce named Henry Hoskins.

All right, Henry Hoskins wound up getting fired by the ATF in nineteen eighty three, and ATF would never disclose to anyone why he was fired.

I have a source in lafd Arson who was interviewed just before Hoskins was fired.

He was interviewed by ATF internal affairs, and they said to never mention the interview, you know, what was going on sort of thing, And the belief is that the ATF fired Hoskins for being corrupt, for being tied in with organized crime.

Hoskins' next move was to file for a private detective's license, and the address for his private detectives license was sixty one twenty one Hollywood Boulevard, which was ed Nash's seven Ce's nightclub and restaurant.

So Hoskins was obviously working for Hal Glickman and Ed Nash that sort of thing, and that's why he made the complaint.

The chief had no recourse except to launch an internal special investigation of Lang and SUSA called the Chief Special.

It was above even you know, internal affairs.

They were cleared than the Chief Special.

But that can be incredibly demoralizing, if you know, when you're charged with the responsibilities the two you know, detectives three in Robbery Homicide Division hadn't It just slowed everything down.

So SUSA eventually retired and the case sort of went cold.

And then in the late eighties, Lang was contacted to say that there was a person in Scott Thorson, Liberaci's boyfriend who had been there when the murders were ordered by Nash, and so he so Lang and his then partner Mac McClain start running a new case on Nash based on Thorson's information.

The problem with Thorson is Thorson is a notorious liar.

He's a thief, he's a drug addict, you know, all of these things.

I don't know Scott Thorson personally.

I tried to interview him a couple of times.

I could never get him to respond to my queries that sort of thing.

Maybe he's changed his life and he's a good guy now.

I don't know, but I will say that he was not a credible source.

And then there were two trials.

The first trial ended in a hung jury, and there was one juror who hung the jury.

She just refused to convict ed Nash of the murders.

And then later on much later in two thousand, with the federal grand jury proceedings then Rico case, it was revealed that her brother had negotiated a payoff for her to hang the jury, and it was negotiated with Greg Diles, who was up on charges with Nash.

He was one of Nash's bodyguards.

He was in a high power and this other black gang member had negotiated the dealer and was supposed to get a cut of the payoff.

Well, this juror's brother was found shot like forty eight times in an alley in south central Los Angeles, and the juror and her mother went running to LAPDE after claiming that they hated the police, that the police always did bad things to black people in the ghet all of this, and wanted LAPD to protect them of all crazy things.

And they both testified in front of the federal grand jury.

And that was sort of the ingredients for the Rico case against Nash.

Now in the second case, you know, having had a hung jury, they launched a second murder trial out of at Nash in nineteen eighty nine, I believe, and the judge disallowed much of the evidence based on prior rulings and things like that.

The minutia and craziness of case law.

And it's Los Angeles where men like Robert Blake and OJ Simpson get acquitted regularly because we have stupid people we impanel on our juries present company notwithstanding so well, I can attest to that.

I can't say it right now due to ethical reasons, but wow, I was kind.

Of that was the state of play as of you know, nineteen ninety two, the second the second case concluded, and that was that at Nash was a free man and never paid a price for anything that he had done.

And so nineteen ninety seven I took it up.

I was going to write a book with Lang and SUSA about the murders.

And eventually we had some disagreements about strategy of the book and that sort of thing, and I walked away from it.

And I'll be frank, I was a little bit bitter at the time about it, not at Bob and Tom, but at Hollywood itself.

You know, every time we would try to sell this thing, we would wind up in a situation with whomever we were sitting down with was trying to pry away Tom Lang's life rights because he was so famous from the OJ case, and OJ Simpson was considered the most important murder case in the history of old time at that moment, and in retrospect, it's just one of the just evidence of the stupidity of Los Angeles.

This city is a yard widen an inch deep, and everybody running it is on the make, on the take, or baked.

That's all I can say.

Bill, Wow, it's amazing.

Yeah, I bet you can tell stories if you've been to PI there since what eighty two or something like that.

I've had my detective's license since ninety two and eighty two.

I was in the US Army.

In fact, the first I ever read of the Wonderland murders, I was on the DMZ in Korea, were running ambush patrols at night of North Korean infiltration and things like that, and the Stars and Stripes was delivered.

It was.

It was on my cot when I got in from patrol.

And it compared the Wonderland murders to the Manson murders because of the bloody crime scene and all of these other things.

And it's odd to juxtapose Bill Deverell's son, Kevin, whom I still count as a friend.

He was a sailor at sea on an aircraft carrier when he learned that his father had been murdered, and it shattered him.

You know, the things that the Deverell family went through, the Miller f We can be sure that the Loniest family.

You know, it's a horrible crime, and then popular media characterized them as discounts and losers and you know whatever, just terrible stuff, just like going through a tough head.

They may have changed their ways or got out of heroin or doing drugs or whatever.

Who knows every single one of these people.

You know, if they had recovered from their addiction, could have been so much more.

And it's a horrible thing to even contemplate.

Maybe Scott Thorson's clean and sober.

Now, who knows.

The witness that I interviewed, I'm going to keep her name under my belt was a recovering drug addict when I interviewed her, and she had no pending criminal charges to dispose of like Thorson had in nineteen eighty eight, nineteen eighty nine when he was introduced to McLean and Lang as their new witness.

So she testified as to what she saw, and she was there when the when the hit was ordered by Lang by by Nash to his assembled men, one of the suspects, huh go ahead, go ahead, No, you go ahead.

One of the suspects being involved in the murders has been sentenced to quite a bit of federal time for other organized crime activity because he's never been charged with these murders.

I'm reticent to provide the name.

I will say that there's much more to this.

The murders speak for themselves.

It's a drug rip and revenge for a drug rip.

The more interesting thing to me was always the level of corruption in the city of Los Angeles.

Okay, So my source in L A.

F.

D Arson, who was braced by the ATF.

Okay, he said, one of the reasons that they could never bring our charges against Hal Glickman was the attorney representing the enterprise that Glickman and Nash was in.

Was a city fire commissioner.

Interesting dominic rubel Kava and Mayor Bradley was once confronted about this by the Herald Examiner in the LA Times, and Bradley said, I see no corruption here.

I don't see a conflict of interest between my city fire commissioner representing a known arson suspect, you know, in an organized crime situation.

That sort of thing very interesting, and that kind of those kind of stories of maybe the authorities being too close to gangsters in LA are not rare.

Let's talk a little bit about Henry Hoskins, our ATF agent friend, who by you know, private detective.

Right, I talked to somebody and sure Sheriff's Department Major Crimes, who was retired, And what he said was that Hoskins arrived in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty two from Chicago with kind of a cloud hanging over his head which he couldn't properly quantify, and immediately started making liaison with Sheriff's Major Crimes.

And the ATF's mission is guns and drugs, drugs, secondly explosives, things like that, and Hoskins was driving a yellow Corvette that was unregistered and within a month of arriving in Los Angeles, Henry hoskins yellow Corvette has been burned to the axles and he has an insurance policy on it even though it's not registered.

That was the first thing that kind of lit off alarm bells with this guy from Sheriff's Major Crimes.

And then they had been trying to make buys of weapons, stolen guns from a kind of a shadowy organization that operates in and out of the prison system like the Aryan Brotherhood, only it's called the Black Gorilla Family.

It's exclusively black.

They recruit their members from gang members, whether it's the Gangster Disciples out of Chicago or the Crips out of Los Angeles, that sort of thing, and it's an elite organized crime organization.

And within just a few weeks, you know, after working on this group for seven years, the sheriff had barely made a dent in them.

Hoskins is claiming to have informants in the group, and he made two buys of illegal weapons and took a couple of minor players down that sort of thing, and they're like, Oh, that's interesting.

He can immediately do all this now.

I read in an intelligence bulletin that was given to Chief Tracy at Beverly Hills Police Department by his organized crime desk.

He had one detective assigned to organize crime intelligence in Beverly Hills, and this informant was possibly tied to a high profile black criminal lawyer.

This informant was a member of the crips.

This informant said that he met Henry Hoskins at a party where another crip was introducing Hoskins around as his pet, fed with Hoskins smoking freebase cocaine with all of these gang members and Hoskins even showed them his badge and his gun at this party in nineteen eighty two.

Okay, I was like.

The Diddy type stuff for the cops.

Are around, there's a liaison between the kind of criminal activity and the cops for them.

So Hoskins, after getting fired, becomes a private detective and then gets his bail bondsman's license, and he's working very closely with Harold Glickman, the bail bondsman who was at Nash's bussiness partner in many of these enterprises.

And Henry Hoskins, after all these people kind of fade that sort of thing.

He moves down to the South Bay area of Los Angeles to a place called Low Meta, and as of about fifteen years ago, Henry Hoskins became a suspect in the looting of the Low Meta Chamber of Commerce.

Lo Meeta is a small town, you know, it's an industrial town close to Torrance and Redondo Beach and all this.

And he was heavily involved with a female down there.

And eventually Henry Hoskins allegedly ate his own gun, committed suicide, stuck his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Now, I haven't you reviewed the crime scene photos, the autopsy, any of that sort of thing.

It could be entirely possible that this was Henry Hoskins Golden parachute just to check out like this.

But Henry Hoskins, from start to finish was a crook.

And that's the greater story of the Wonderland Avenue murders is the level of corruption.

Now.

When I was doing my investigation from nineteen ninety seventy two thousand and then occasionally I would dabble in it.

After that, somebody would come to me with a lead.

Somebody alerted me that ed Nash did in fact have an officer in Organized Crime Intelligence Division who was reporting to him and would let him know when there was a wire tap or a pending search warrant and that sort of thing.

And I know that officer's name.

He was never charged.

He was allowed to retire discreetly rather than besmirch the reputation of LAPD.

LAPD used to be probably the premier municipal law enforcement agency in this entire name, and the quote unquote reforms that have been strapped onto LAPD since have not made it a more effective law enforcement agency.

They've just overburdened the men and women who have to work the streets for that agency to protect the bastards and suits running the city.

I had a former cop on he was there with ramparts and all that stuff.

He told the whole story from the inside, so I'm somewhat familiar with that.

You know.

A couple of years ago, you know, a friend of mine who's a filmmaker, came to me.

He was going to make the book Labyrinth by Russell Poole, who was a detective who died in the jail interviewing an inmate in the jail on a situation involving Tupac and Biggie Smalls, those murders.

So he wanted me to figure out where David Mack is, you know, just to you know, get some background.

That's what I was going to help him stylize his film.

David Mack went to prison for bank robbery.

He was an l APD officer in the Rampart crash unit and it was part of the Nino Durden Raphael Perez situation.

I discovered he was living exactly one hundred and seventy five yards away from Bernard Parks, the former chief of police and city councilmen in Los Angeles.

Pretty interesting, you know.

Very interesting, very close to be a coincidence, you know, I'm sure it is a coincidence.

But you know, if you if you want to, if you want a Rosetta stone for the current level of corruption in the city of Los Angeles, read read Labyrinth by Russell Poole.

It's very interesting.

One of your posters said that LAPD has always been corrupt.

Let's let let's put some texture to that.

Okay, Bill, Yes, he's going back back a long time ago.

LAPD was corrupt from the inception of Los Angeles Police Department up until Bill Parker and Bell Parker decided, you know, four thousand, four thousand officers, you know that sort of thing.

The best way to get them under control is to institute a policy, and it goes like this, I will back your play if you wind up killing somebody in the line of duty, if you have to make a judgment call that people may maybe disagree with.

And it was one of these killings that sparked the Watts riots if you were called.

But Bill Parker that was his policy.

I will back your play.

But if you steal one nickel, I will burn you to the ground, I'll put you in prison, I'll take your pension everything if you take one nickel.

All right, So the way that men like ed Nash would bribe the LAPD officers that they interacted with, like in Hollywood, division was with free booze, free meals.

You know, come on over to the to the stripper club and let the girls sit in your lap with her club, you know all that stuff.

That that was how it was accomplished.

Did you ever see any black sorry interrup but did you ever see a blackmail or anything with Nash?

Because he said that there was Supposedly one of the commenters said, the Odyssey Club in the Nash boy ring.

Does that sound familiar to you?

Well, your your poster is correct.

There was a there were young teenage boys being trafficked out of club Odyssey, and there was an allegation that senior studio official, this is a company town and instead of there being a mill or a coal mine or something in Los Angeles, there's the film industry.

And so there was a lot of male prostitution, and many of the males being who were prostituting themselves were teenagers.

And that's no great secret in Los Angeles.

Now.

The other thing that he referred to was the Cotton Club murder, you know, Roy Raid and that sort of thing.

That's an interesting case that started out as a missing person's case and then ultimately there's some consanguinity and it is this Bob Susan's older brother, Glenn Susa, also justifiably famous as an intelligence detective in administrative vice and organized crime intelligence, was working missing persons when that case came in.

And that was Glenn Susan's last case as an l APD detective was the Roy Raiden missing person.

Well, Roy Raiden was found murdered.

And to answer Uncle Ted's question ed, Nash and Laney are not connected in anything other than how it is that they operated in Los Angeles.

Did you see any connection with Flint?

I know Larry Flint had a place on Law Lociena, I think his headquarters was there.

Did you see anything connecting Flint to any of these other cases Larry Flint.

No.

And I'm gonna I'm going to defend Larry Flint a little bit here.

Larry Flint was an iconoclassed of a unique type.

Larry Flint was a pornographer, a civil libertarian, that sort of thing.

Heavily involved in Democrat politics contemporaneous with the Clinton administration.

He put out a bounty on information on Republican congressman, that sort of thing.

I knew Larry, and at first I thought, yeah, he's just a filthy smut peddler or whatever I mean.

But whatever, I had several conversations with him.

I wound up liking Larry.

He never suborned me to anything illegal.

And I was ever a private detective working for Larry Flint.

He had Larry businesses, guys.

He he had like regular magazines for like automobiles and stuff like that.

If I remember correctly, he was he was a publisher, and he was a huckster and he he he did a lot of interesting things.

A good friend of mine, Evan Wright, was employed by Larry Flint at what time.

At one time, Evan also wrote for Rolling Stone.

Evan is now dead, very sadly.

But Larry Flint doesn't tie up to Ed Nash at all.

Now, some of the women dancing in Nash's clubs might have made it into the pages of Larry Flint's various uh, you know, stroke magazines, if you you know whatever, but there was no consanguinity.

Larry Flint was not involved in narcotics peddling, or money laundering or any of that stuff.

He was a guy from Ohio who had been busted over and over again for you know, vice violations related to pornography and that sort of thing, and he took it upon himself to wage sort of a civil libertarian's war against you know, the blue laws of the day.

Some people regard him as heroic for this, and other people regard him as a as a terrorist for doing it.

I noticed before he died, before the two of them died, he and Jerry Folwell buried the hatchet and made peace with each other.

And Flint gets credit for that, just as Jerry Folwell does.

Yeah, I don't think public.

Yeah, Flint was bizarre, but not evil.

Ed Nash was evil.

Ye.

Interesting.

I just remember when I first moved to LA, the Flint Industries building was right there on Los Sienna kind of crossed over I don't know what it was, Wilshire or something like that.

Well LOSSI and again Wilshare.

You know, I'm very close friends with Peyton Miller, the former editor of Guns and Ammo, and Richard Vanola who edited Guns and Ammo.

And I'd go over there and have lunch with these boys, and we'd walk right past the Flint Enterprise LFP.

Yeah, yeah, you know that sort of thing.

Interesting guy Maverick, I guess you could call him a Maverick either way, bad or good.

He was.

He was the Elon Musk of Stroke magazines.

Let's call it.

Let's call it as it is, Neils.

We are at the fifty minute mark.

Great talk, I mean so much information.

I didn't know some of the details about that or some of the background of the Wonderland murders.

But you also have something coming up next year, right this book, The Last law Man True Story.

And June of twenty twenty six.

Yeah, The Last law Man will will hit the scene.

You'll be You can pre order it now.

It's my true to life memoirs a private detective.

And because Bob Bob Susan and Tom Lang have executed their own book on the Wonderland murders, I have not touched on the Wonderland Murders in this book, just out of respect to them, but you should order if you if you're if you were viewers or that interested in the Wonderland Avenue murders, I would order their book.

And Dawn Shiller's book is quite interesting as well.

Uh, It's it's worth a read and it's really a tale about corruption in Los Angeles.

Lang Susan McLain deserve all of the praise that has been heaped upon them.

They sacrificed a lot to protect the city of Los Angeles, the citizens of Los Angeles, and sometimes it looks like a thankless task.

They're fine men and have my unending respect.

I think the Lang book is malice in Wonderland.

I try to invite him on my show, but I think he signed a contract with somebody where he can't pull There might be something in the work with films or something.

That's what he told me so I was in contact with a couple of years ago.

I hope he makes one hundred million dollars.

Him and Bob Sussa.

They're good guys.

Where can people reach out to you, Nils?

I know you have a website.

If people want to follow up with you or maybe contact you, what's the best place to do at social media website?

Well, I'm on x formerly Twitter at Detective Nils.

If they must contact me, my website gets bombed with spam and the inbox has destroyed.

You know, GREVELIUSPI dot com.

What people don't understand about private detectives in a big city like La or New York or San Francisco is you can advertise till you're blue in the face, and the public won't hire you, because no one in a serious problem is going to make a decision about hiring a detective, a lawyer, whatever without a recommendation from somebody that they truly trust.

So it's more about branding than anything else.

If you're in a small market, like I have a friend in Mississippi who's a private eye, but he's also a volunteer fireman and a taxidermist.

You know, it's a small market.

He doesn't get that much work, but when he does get work, he's good at it.

You know, he's a great surveillance guy, interviewer of that sort of thing.

And you know, that's just how it is in a small town.

I was in Des Moines for four years.

I could have starved to death there.

The only criminals in Iowa are their politicians.

Everybody else is as straight as an arrow.

Do you ever feel like the detective in Chinatown while you've been practicing as a pi in La.

Well, there's a great soliloquy at the beginning of the Two Jakes, which is the sequel to Chinatown, where Jack Nicholson says, you know, private eyes in LA have a dicey reputation.

Mine's not so bad.

I guess I'm the leper with the most fingers left.

Eh.

Wow, the leper with the bulls fingers.

Incredible.

I mean you can probably tell stories.

So I'm looking forward to the book.

People check it out again.

The title of it is The Last law Man, True Stories of a Private Detective Neil's Gravellius and you can check him out on Twitter.

I'll put a link to his Twitter account and his website.

Is there anything you'd like to add or anything else before we wrap it up?

Oh, I've had a fantastic time.

It's a pleasure meeting.

And Bill, I'd like to be on a game once the book is you know a landing on.

An open invitation considered an open invitation.

Well, I'm happy to promote it anytime.

Yeah.

If you have any other things you've studied you want to talk about too, or been involved in it, you're allowed to talk about you let me know, send me an email.

Thanks everybody for listening to one hundred and seventy five live listeners, great comments.

Thanks Uncle Ted, all the comments are really appreciated in the quot question, so thanks everybody, and again the guest is Neil Grevillius.

His new book that's coming out in twenty twenty six is The Last law Man.

And check him out there and I'll put a link to his website and social media.

Thanks so much, everybody.

All right, stay there, stay there, and Neil's oh, he's gone.