On the Beat
Thursday, July 9, 2009
JESSE JAMES: As of this writing, the jury was still out in the murder case of the eerily named Jesse James Hollywood, but I’m finding him guilty of arrogance in the first degree.
Did he really think, back on August 6, 2000, that he and his brainless buddies could snatch a 15-year-old boy off the street and haul him 100 miles to Santa Barbara, and there wouldn’t be consequences? Prosecutors claim he was holding Nicholas Markowitz as a hostage, using the kid to squeeze the boy’s brother to pay a measly $1,200 drug debt. This, at a time when Hollywood admittedly was hauling in $10,000 a month selling dope.
On the Beat
Then, two days later, hours after an attorney warned Hollywood that kidnapping for ransom could send him to the slammer for life, Markowitz ends up in a shallow grave. Ryan Hoyt, one of Hollywood’s obedient (according to the prosecution), knuckle-dragging pals, pumped nine bullets into Nicholas, using Hollywood’s TEC-9 machine pistol.
Incredibly, Hoyt then tossed the gun into the grave. Hey, here’s some handy evidence, cops. Couldn’t he at least have thrown it off Stearns Wharf, just to make it a wee bit harder for authorities to link Hollywood to the killing? Hoyt now sits on death row.
As for the charges against Hollywood, the jury likely will bring in a conviction for kidnapping. Jesse James has already admitted that. In a way, Hollywood was throwing a bone to the jury: Okay, convict me of simple, stupid kidnapping. With luck and reasonable doubt, he might wind up with a hung jury on aggravated kidnapping for ransom, and the murder rap. (I was just a dumb 20-year-old, angry at this kid’s thuggish brother, and wasn’t thinking. I was really preoccupied selling drugs, you know. And I wasn’t even there when for some crazy reason my errand boy-stooge Hoyt and two others dragged the kid up to El Camino Cielo and Hoyt shot him.)
Hollywood was in L.A. with his girlfriend at the time and says he was shocked, shocked to learn what Hoyt had done. Just look what those idiots pulled off behind my back. Well, you just can’t get good help anymore, can you?
As for truth, it’s the first victim of war and murder trials.
You don’t see many murder defendants taking the stand, but there Hollywood was, neat and clean, wearing a dark suit, hair nicely clipped, looking like a young executive. During final arguments last week, he sat calmly, his back to what Superior Court Judge Brian Hill called the “audience.” When noon recess was called, he yawned and remained seated, facing away as the audience filed out and lawyers got up. As the courtroom cleared, only Hollywood remained seated, a lonely figure but head up, still facing away. He was the alpha dog all right, and all his accused conspirators were either in prison or had been. “Thugs,” prosecutor Joshua Lynn sneered during his summation. And Hollywood, he added, was “king of thugs.” Hollywood, he told the jury, orchestrated the murder, “But he’s too cowardly to do it on his own.” As for Hollywood’s pals who might have prevented the senseless killing, “They were scared,” Lynn said. As for the Santa Barbara teens who partied with Markowitz in Room 341 of that Upper State Street motel, drinking and smoking dope with him, they were concerned but managed to convince themselves that he was going to be alright. They’ll have to live with that. As for the witnesses, it was sad to see so many young people with bad memories. As for truth, it’s the first victim of war and murder trials.
People get slain every day in L.A.: gang drive-bys, robberies gone wrong, and occasional murder-for-hires, even old-fashioned outbursts of murderous passion. (“If I can’t have you, no one will.”) But this one caught the always-fickle public’s attention, even spawned a movie, Alpha Dog. This was partly because it involved a group of baseball-playing suburban kids, not ghetto gangstas, and because it was so casually cold-blooded, taking the life of an innocent boy who’d done them no harm. You bind up a kid with tape part of the time, let seemingly half the teenagers in Santa Barbara see him in a motel room, then bury him in a shallow grave at a favorite hikers’ hangout in the dead of night, dust off your hands, and think that’s the end of it?
Simple kidnapping would earn Hollywood three to eight years in prison. But the sentence could be life if the jury also finds that the kidnapping was aggravated, for ransom, or extortion, and led to Markowitz’s murder. Parole is possible after seven years. He’s also charged with first-degree murder. If the jury convicts him of that, it could tag on a special circumstance that the killing was committed during the kidnapping. That brings a life term without possibility of parole, or a death sentence.
On the other hand, Hollywood is innocent unless proven guilty, and the defense has raised plenty of questions aimed at increasing doubts in the minds of jurors. He could walk. Either way, there’s plenty of pain to go around among all the families involved.
Barney Brantingham can be reached at barney@independent.com or 805-965-5205. He writes online columns throughout the week and a print column on Thursdays.