The caravan of Klansmen crept to a stop around midnight in front of the home of David and Lizzie Milder on Nov. 17, 1932. Their quaint bungalow in the Carroll Park neighborhood of Long Beach had just ...

Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars.

To properly orient infamous talk-show host Wally George within the history of Orange County, it's best to paraphrase the introduction of a fellow pop-culture icon with a cult following. So, with ...

As he walked briskly along a downtown Santa Ana sidewalk for our first meeting on a toasty, cloudless February 2014 afternoon, criminal defense attorney Scott Sanders’ brain generated waves of ...

Decades later, long after federal authorities deported the last of her students, Arletta Kelly still remembered the cactus. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kelly had worked as an Americanization teacher in ...

Bassist, composer and arranger Jack Prather's tribute band made jazz history come alive, whether he was touting obvious choices like Count Basie or less familiar giants like Coleman Hawkins. His ...

For the past five years, I’ve made multiple trips to Texas, from El Paso to Houston, Shamrock to Laredo, all in the search for and praising of Tex-Mex food (hell, I even wrote a book about it). One ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

Every morning, Joe Gruppie makes himself a cup of coffee at his Buena Park home of five years before heading out to work. And when he opens the front door, he’s greeted by a drab wall with four ...

The gleaming black Cadillac Escalade trembles at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Cerritos Avenue in Stanton. Four young Mexican men inside, all buzz cuts and oversized white T-shirts and ...

The story of the 1990 New Music Seminar brawl has been whispered about for decades but never fully told—until now. This excerpt comes from Ben Westhoff's upcoming book Original Gangstas: The Untold ...