Memorable Images and Time (Jesse Owens)

Heavyweight boxer Joe Louis puts his arm around Jesse Owens, Ohio State University track star and holder of three world's records. They were introduced during a boxing program sponsored by the Colored Elks. Washington, D.C., August 27, 1935.


Vice President Richard Nixon met with Illinois Republicans here 10/14/1958 to open a 6-day campaign tour in behald of GOP congressional candidates. With Nixon is famous track star Jesse Owens, left, now running for county commissioner. Nixon said the GOP campaign is picking up and "we have every chance to upset those who predict defeat." Date: October 14, 1958. Location: Chicago, Illinois


Jesse Owens, sensational track star of the Olympic games, waving to crowds during the "ticker-tape" parade up Manhattan in honor of the Olympic athletes. Fifty-two members of the Olympic squad, last of the 150 American athletes to return from Germany, arrived in New York, Sept. 3 on the liner Manhattan. Others of the squad who arrived last week joined them in the parade. Date: September 03, 1936.

This One For My Lakers

What a game!

It's vibrating in East Los Angeles.

It's the talk all around town.

Los Angeles is burning, man!

What a game!

Cars are being rolled over on the streets

In East Los Angeles

Oh, my Lakers, what a game!

Why is Los Angeles burning?

Lakers won!

"Did they?"

It was too loud and the entire city was locked in when I walked in to Dynasty Restaurant and Lounge in Inglewood, to watch the Lakers show some skills in the company of 1984 Olympic Heavyweight Gold Medalist Henry Tillman and my partner in crime Basil Nwonwu. Tillman with casts on his knees from surgery wants the Lakers to "kill em all mutchafuckers... and bring back the game to LA." I wasn't really paying attention to the game on many grounds. My blood pressure had gone up and it's Lakers fault. The headache pops up too and the city is burning, and it's Lakers fault. The two previous games had changed the mood of Lakers fans in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, in East Los Angeles, on the Westside and all over the place.

And the game is on.

Well, Lakers had been behind on a 12-point deficit by the time they checked in to the locker room at half-time. The pub had been quiet and Lakers seems to be "evening" the game at a terrible cost. But no, that was not going to happen. There was another kid in town to save us from our sorrows. His name is Trevor Ariza. He's the man. He got it straight. I still dunno.

What a game!

We've seen magic, the real magic.

And the game was tied by regulation time.

And there was another magic.

Who else?

None other than my man

Derek Fisher

An amazing shot

Overtime

A victory

99-91

It's all over

Is it?

[Photo courtesy of Wali Skalij/Los Angeles Times]

Nigerian gangsters get a foothold in a violent Italian landscape

As the African gangs gain clout, conflict with the Neapolitan mafia known as the Camorra intensifies, made brutally clear by an attempted hit that left six Ghanaians dead.

By Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Castel Volturno, Italy -- Soaring on cocaine, guns smoking, the Camorra hit squad sped down the Via Domitiana, the road built along the Bay of Naples during the Roman Empire.The gangsters had just killed an arcade owner. Now they were hunting an African drug dealer.

Bulky in bulletproof vests, they scanned the dim main drag of this no man's land by the sea, a 16-mile strip of a town where Naples blends with Nigeria. They saw African prostitutes wearing miniskirts and multicolored braids, a wild night parade of silhouettes posing, strutting, staggering in search of a few euros. The sedan passed storefront churches, neon motel signs and garbage-strewn lots. It stopped at a low white structure housing Ob-Ob Exotic Fashions.The drug dealer wasn't there. But the gunmen opened up anyway, strafing a group of Ghanaians at the store with an AK-47 assault rifle and semiautomatic pistols. Then they fled to a squalid hide-out and celebrated with lobster and champagne, leaving behind six people dead, one wounded and an uproar that spread across Italy.The killings in September, recounted in interviews by senior antimafia officials, were gory evidence of conflict between the Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, and Nigerian gangsters who play a growing role in Italy's drug and prostitution rackets.

This landscape of change and fear has been shaped by a singular juxtaposition: One of Europe's biggest concentrations of African immigrants has risen in the heart of Camorra turf."After the shooting, my wife said: 'Let's pack and leave this place,' " said Nsangu "Sammi" Kagutta, a Tanzanian father of three who owns a nearby Internet center. "They were just poor people trying to get their daily bread. If it was about drugs, they shot the wrong people."Most of the victims were illegal immigrant laborers, though one or two may have been low-level drug pushers, investigators say. The fusillade of 130 bullets was apparently an indiscriminate message from a Camorra clan aimed at terrifying its junior partners into obedience."It was not about racism at all," said Jean-Rene Bilongo, a community mediator from Cameroon who speaks French, English and Italian with the broad Neapolitan accent. "It was about business."Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. In the 1990s, demand boomed here for African prostitutes -- prosecutors call it "the Naomi Campbell phenomenon." Camorra clans "rented" turf to Nigerian pimps, a line of work that Neapolitan gangsters disdain.And as cocaine flows increasingly to Europe through West Africa, Nigerians have graduated from their previous role as smuggling "mules" and pay the Camorra for a cut of street trafficking action."The Camorra worked well with the Nigerians at first," said Antonio Laudati, a top Justice Ministry official who led a major prosecution of the Nigerian mafia last year. "They were low-cost labor. They were well-received because they were cheap and very loyal. But then the Nigerians started to rise to a new level."That coincided with the disarray of the region's dominant clan from the nearby town of Casal di Principe. As older Casalesi bosses went to prison, a new generation of swaggering, hard-partying gunslingers stepped up. During the last year, they embarked on a punitive campaign against Italian turncoats and foreign rivals, killing nine people.Those deaths were in addition to the violence on Sept. 18, which came about because the Casalesi gunmen were looking for an African drug dealer who had crossed them, said a senior antimafia official who requested anonymity for security reasons. They gunned down a mob-connected Italian they suspected of protecting the African, then attacked the clothing shop in a drug-fueled frenzy, officials say."Behind the massacre is a question of territory," Laudati said.

"They were killed in a symbolic manner. It was an ethnic warning to rebellious Africans. This is a new reality, a work in progress, and we are trying to figure it out."Since the killings, the government in Rome has cracked down, arresting suspects and deploying 500 soldiers in the region. Local leaders want Italians and immigrants to work together against an entrenched outlaw culture.In Castel Volturno and elsewhere in southern Europe where crime, immigration and economic crisis converge, an uncertain future is under construction."We need to deal with the social problems, and not just using the police," said Mayor Francesco Nuzzo, who estimates there are 15,000 undocumented immigrants here.

"This is a world. There are 50 different ethnicities in Castel Volturno."The faded stucco motels on the Via Domitiana are relics from 30 years ago, when the town aspired to become a tourism capital. Instead, the pollution and helter-skelter architecture attest to neglect and rapacity. Camorra clans got rich off the unlicensed construction of vacation complexes, concrete monstrosities that served as refuge for victims of the Naples earthquake in 1980, then an influx of immigrants.Africans first came to work in tomato fields made bountiful by the climate of the Caserta region and subsidies from the European Union. In recent years, many arrived on a new flow of ragged smuggling flotillas from Libya to Sicily.

Like the fugitive local gangsters who dodge police for years in the mob-dominated towns north of Naples, newcomers find this a good place to lie low."It attracts illegal immigrants because there is a generalized culture of lawlessness," the senior antimafia official said. "People don't pay taxes, they build illegally, they dump garbage illegally, they buy contraband, they work off the books. People in this part of Italy have a problem with rules."

But jobs are scarce. Employers prefer Eastern Europeans to work in hotels and South Asians to clean up after the herds of buffalo whose milk is used to produce the region's acclaimed mozzarella.Hard times may have aggravated the extraordinary reaction the day after the killings. A march by Africans erupted into a riot on the Via Domitiana. They vandalized cars and shops and scuffled with police. In response, there was an anti-immigrant demonstration that Mayor Nuzzo blames partly on manipulation by the Camorra.More trauma came in early November. Local governments invited Miriam Makeba, a beloved South African singer, to a benefit concert here. The idea was to defy the Camorra and promote tolerance. The 76-year-old performed, but suffered a heart attack and died backstage.

"It was very sad," said Kagutta, the Tanzanian businessman, who met Makeba before the concert. "She seemed a little frail, not healthy. But she talked and sang normally. She was dancing on stage. What a very bad day."In an immigrant community bereft of leaders, the quiet Kagutta, 42, has made a mark. Dressed casually but carefully, he talks over an espresso in a glass-walled office at the back of his Internet shop. The place seems an oasis: well-kept, rows of modern computers, signs announcing DHL delivery service and computer repairs.On the night of the killings, Kagutta rushed to the area with other Africans. He saw the dead, some of them men he knew, sprawled in the store and a bullet-shredded Alfa Romeo.Fear spread. Several African businesses shut their doors. Nonetheless, Kagutta said, the quick response of Italian law enforcement reassured him. He said he also had good experiences since he arrived here in his late 20s, a laborer with dreams of opening a business."There are people who give you a hand," he said. "I have an Italian friend who is my brother. He says that and he means it, with no self-interest."The nationwide attention to Castel Volturno could have a positive result, he said."I think right now there is more understanding," he said. "The door of integration will be more open."The door closed forever, though, for six Ghanaians on Sept. 18. It took more than two months for authorities to identify them and complete the procedures to send the bodies, traveling this time with papers, back to their homeland.

Dramatic Images Of Southern California Fires

Irfan Khan of the Los Angeles Times captures the above image of a firefighter pouring water on a structure at the Sky Terrace Mobile Lodge in Lake view Terrace.

Francine Orr of the Los Angeles Times captures the above image where firefighters 'attempt to keep flames from crossing' Sesnon Blvd. east of Balboa Blvd in the San Fernando Valley.

Firefighters protect homes late Monday night on Beaufait Ave., south of Sesnon Blvd. and north of the 118 in Porter Ranch. A mandatory evacuation was ordered on Beaufait.

Fire lights up the hills of Camp Pendleton as strong winds sweep flames toward Fallbrook in the Marek and Senson fires.

Los Angeles Times Irfan Khan captures Kenny Wilson as he 'uses a garden hose to wet the dry brush behind his home in Granada Hills.'

As smoke, dust and dirt is whipped up by harsh winds, animal care technician Jacob Miller walks by the many horses that were brought to the Hansen Photo by Karen Tapia-Anderson

Al Seib of Los Angeles Times captures Maribel Miramontes and her son Adrian evacuate their home in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Mugabe's Grip On Zimbabwe Still Tight

Despite economic chaos, the authoritarian president looks likely to be reelected. A challenger from his party has gained some traction.

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 25, 2008


HARARE, ZIMBABWE -- It takes 55 million Zimbabwean dollars to buy a single American one. Schools have no teachers. Hospitals have become mortuaries. And inflation has topped 100,000%.

As President Robert Mugabe, 84, seeks a sixth term in elections Saturday, Zimbabwe's financial catastrophe takes the words "It's the economy, stupid," to a new level.

Yet even with a crisis so intractable it would finish off any leader in a genuine democracy, Mugabe is expected to maintain his grip on power.

His tools are the same ones that have worked before: gerrymandered electorates; an electoral roll full of ghost voters; tight control of state television and radio; preelection gifts of tractors, plows and cattle to the rural chiefs who will get in the ruling party vote; pay raises for public servants and the military. And, above all, fear.

The major streets of this capital city are lined with posters bearing an old photograph of Mugabe, fist raised, and the slogan "Behind the Fist." To most, it conveys little beyond the fear associated with his rule, from Operation Gukurahundi in the early 1980s, when as many as 20,000 political enemies were slaughtered, to Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, when at least 700,000 people were driven from urban opposition strongholds into the countryside. Many have not recovered.

A party divided

But even when elections are not real elections, they raise hopes. And one thing has changed this time around: A charismatic presidential challenger from within the ruling ZANU-PF has divided the party and thrown Mugabe's campaign off balance. Former Finance Minister Simba Makoni, whose first name means "power" or "strength" in Zimbabwe's Shona language, announced his bid last month and was promptly ejected from the party.

Mugabe, whose grip on power has never weakened since independence from Britain in 1980, needs 51% of the vote to avoid a runoff against Makoni and the other main challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was savagely beaten by police last year and whose opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, has split into two main squabbling factions.

There are signs Mugabe is rattled by the challengers. In the weeks before the election, he signed a law forcing foreign- and white-owned companies to sell black Zimbabweans a 51% interest, a move that will send investors fleeing and further undermine the economy, but enable him to dole out plum favors to loyalists.

The Information Ministry warned that white foreign journalists would be barred from covering the election. And in case anyone was in doubt about the regime's determination to cling to power, the police and army chiefs announced that they would never work under the opposition.

At rallies, Mugabe rails bitterly against people such as Makoni, calling them enemies and traitors. Yet Makoni, 58, has much in common with Mugabe. He comes from a similar traditional rural African background, rose through education (both got degrees in Britain) and was politicized in the liberation struggle and in ZANU-PF. Even now, Makoni does not directly attack either Mugabe or the party.

But there is a heady exhilaration about his campaign. Part of it is the sheer novelty of hearing a ZANU-PF stalwart proclaiming what everyone thinks but most are afraid to say: "We got corrupted by power. We started serving ourselves. . . . We've destroyed our own country," he said at his launch rally in Harare early this month.

'Power to the People'

Makoni's slogan, "Simba Kuvanhu," or "Power to the People," is a famous old refrain from the liberation struggle, a Mugabe favorite that the president has not quite gotten out of the habit of using at campaign rallies.

Even some opposition figures see a reform ZANU-PF candidate as the best and only hope of change. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one faction in the opposition MDC, recently declared that no one in the opposition could beat Mugabe.

"Makoni is the only person who can defeat Mugabe. Not Tsvangirai, not Mutambara," he said at a recent rally, campaigning for Makoni instead of running for president himself.

But Makoni waited until late in the game to enter the race, convinced that popular discontent with Mugabe was so deep that it needed only one credible candidate to sweep away both the president and the disappointing opposition.

He claims to have many heavyweight ruling-party backers, but few ZANU-PF bigwigs have defected to his camp, making it difficult for him to muster enough ruling-party support to sweep Mugabe aside.

Makoni, boyish-looking and articulate, is from a large and powerful clan and has dozens of cousins and hundreds of close relatives. In his childhood village, nearly every shop and business was owned by a Makoni.

He faced the first real test of his support on a recent balmy Sunday at the Zimbabwe Grounds in Harare, the sports fields where big political rallies are held.

The crowd of a few thousand consisted mainly of educated men, including bureaucrats and professionals.

Many of those in attendance were former opposition supporters, disillusioned over Tsvangirai's letting his party split and failure to capitalize on popular anger after previous elections.

"People are impatient. They now want Makoni to be president," said university lecturer Simba Matsika, 36.

"People will support anyone and any program that opposes the incumbent party and president. People need change at any cost."

Makoni impressed the sports-facility crowd; the problem was the modest turnout. Even the riot police were halfhearted: One small police van made a desultory sweep and retreated to wait by the gate.

'Getting a crowd'

"If you are going to launch an attack against Mugabe, you really have to find a way of getting a crowd by hook or by crook," said Lovemore Madukhu, director of the National Constitutional Assembly, a nongovernmental organization lobbying for reform.

"You don't go to the Zimbabwe Grounds and get a crowd of three to four thousand. It was a crowd smaller than Mugabe addressed and smaller than Tsvangirai addressed. I think that blunder will eat into perceptions of his capacity to divide Mugabe's support."

Makoni's daily meet-the-people walks in towns across Zimbabwe connect him with hundreds of voters, but not the thousands he needs. Tsvangirai may be discredited, but he still has a broader reach, with a strong urban support base that Makoni lacks.

Building a profile and swinging the electoral tide in a few short weeks is a tall order for Makoni, especially with no access to television and radio.

Many analysts believe Makoni will poll third after Mugabe and Tsvangirai. A recent opinion poll put Mugabe's support well behind Tsvangirai's, but the electoral boundaries have been redrawn to give rural voters (among whom Mugabe's support is highest) a much greater weight than residents of pro-opposition urban areas.

As finance minister from 2000 to 2002, Makoni stood up to Mugabe and called for the devaluation of the ailing Zimbabwean dollar as the economy went into free fall after the president's seizures of white-owned farmland. He was removed as finance minister but stayed in the powerful politburo, and some opposition supporters see Makoni as just an ambitious member of the party that has destroyed the country.

"I was part of the system. I was in the leadership of this country for quite a long time and in public office for quite a long time. But collective responsibility does not mean that everyone agrees with every decision all of the time," Makoni said in an interview in Harare after returning late from a day's campaigning. "I strove for change from within. Throughout the time I was in the leadership, I kept trying to show my colleagues that there were better ways than we were doing."

If Makoni fails, he and his supporters could be isolated and made examples of by the ruling elite, a move that might discourage others in the ruling party from defying Mugabe.

But Makoni argues that his presidential bid is having the opposite effect, saying, "Many Zimbabweans are feeling emboldened and encouraged that you can actually speak your mind and Armageddon will not befall you."