Gary Wean’s Preposterous Life – Part 4
The end of his career and the battle
I’ll relate one last anecdote on the JFK hit before moving on to Ventura County. Not long before JFK’s murder, Gary Wean tailed Mickey Cohen and Menachem Begin to a meeting at Melvin Belli’s house, after they had been talking about JFK’s “wasting” money on the Peace Corps. Belli wanted $250K up-front to defend Dennis Lee, but defended Ruby for free. Cap Weinberger also attended the meeting. Weinberger was the secretary of defense under Reagan. Belli became Ruby’s attorney after he murdered Oswald. It is easy to construct all sorts of scenarios around JFK’s murder from events that Gary witnessed, except for the official one of Oswald the lone gunman. Gary moved back to Ventura County in 1966, where he became the chief investigator for the public defender’s office.
Dennis’s first attorney in Ventura described Gary’s book as a who’s who of Ventura County. The second edition sells for $4K a copy at Amazon – I wonder what my original printing goes for, but those early versions were cheaply printed and my copies are mostly falling apart, but the recent hardback copy will outlive me. Gary was not shy, and named names. In my neighborhood was a family whose children were my age and dressed fashionably, from the expensive clothing store that my family never shopped in. My clothes came from K-Mart and the swap meet. One of the many shocks of reading Gary’s book was his account of how his career ended. The father of those fashionably attired kids took huge bribes from the gangsters who ran Ventura County – one bribe was substantially higher than my father ever earned in a year. They basically framed and otherwise wiped out people who stood in the way of the gangsters, including judges, some of whom came to untimely ends. That man told Gary to get in on the action. It was one of those offers that you can’t refuse. When Gary refused to participate, he was framed instead, which ended his career.
As Gary’s wife once told me, Gary was a fighter, not a lover. Gary did not take it lying down and began filing lawsuits, but he could not find an attorney to represent him. Eventually Audie Murphy had his attorney meet with Gary. When I met with Gary, he said that no attorney is going to take on a client who is fighting the corruption. If they ever do, they quickly get a call, advising them to drop the client if they want to still have a career. Gary eventually had to become his own attorney.
Gary’s book is a parade of names of the rich and famous, politicians, judges, attorneys, policemen, gangsters, and a chronicle of untimely deaths of people who got in the way of the people who ran Ventura County. One of the many amusing anecdotes in his book was when Gary was contacted by a Chicago mobster who retired and moved to the sunshine in Ventura County. They met for lunch, and the mobster told Gary of how he planned to dabble in real estate in Ventura County, but he soon discovered that the real estate racket in Ventura County, run by corrupt officials, was a sweeter rigged game than the Chicago mob ever had. The mobster was truly impressed by the corruption in Ventura County.
Gary started his own newsletter, chronicling the corruption, and he waged lawsuits, trying to block land grabs and raids of the public coffers. One of his lawsuits was holding up bond issuance for the County Center that was going to be built only a few miles from my home. The day before his lawsuit delayed the bond-issuance (and a big payday for the gangsters), an assassin tried to kill Gary in his yard. Like Dennis, Gary was not easy to kill, and he exchanged gunfire with the assassins and drove them off (which the police decided was a case of fireworks going off). If they had killed Gary, his lawsuit would have been dismissed the next day and the bonds would have sold without a hitch.
The night that I met Gary, he stopped so kindly and met with me for hours, on his way home from a meeting a few miles from my home, where he was trying to organize people to resist a maneuver by the local officials, on behalf of their patrons, to steal their land. But the people flew off in all sorts of directions and became easy prey.
When Gary lost his career, he took his life’s savings and bought a gas station with an attached store and bar. Gary eventually wrote his book there between customers. The ordeal ruined his life. What those same officials did to us was a very high-profile takedown of our company. Gary met with Dennis’s wife and gave her his book.
The lowest part of my journey was in December, 1988, less than two years after I became Dennis’s partner. Visions of murder danced in my head, and the year ended with Dennis in solitary confinement. By the New Year, I was over my rage and dismay, and decided that I would do whatever I could to save Dennis’s life. I visited Dennis’s wife, who was living with her two daughters with my professor, and I asked her what I could do. She handed me Gary’s book, and that is how we met.