Free Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone by Hunter S. Thompson

scrubbed my face with a hot towel and went across the street to the Sweetheart Lounge.
    Oscar Acosta, the Chicano lawyer, was there; leaning on the bar, talking idly with some of the patrons. Of the four people around him—all in their late twenties—two were ex-cons, two were part-time dynamite freaks and known fire-bombers, and three of the four were veteran acid-eaters. Yet none of this surfaced in the conversation. The talk was political, but only in terms of the courtroom. Oscar was dealing with two hyperpolitical trials at the same time.
    In one, the trial of the “Biltmore Six,” he was defending six young Chicanos who’d been arrested for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel one night about a year ago, while Governor Ronald Reagan was delivering a speech there in the ballroom. Their guilt or innocence was immaterial at this point, because the trial had developed into a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system. In the preceding months, Acosta had subpoenaed every superior court judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them at length, under oath, on the subject of their “racism.” It was a wretched affront to the whole court system, and Acosta was working overtime to make it as wretched as possible. Here were these 109 old men, these
judges
, compelled to take time out from whatever they were doing and go into another courtroom to take the stand and deny charges of “racism” from an attorney they all loathed.
    Oscar’s contention, throughout, was that all Grand Juries are racist, since all grand jurors have to be recommended by superior court judges—who naturally tend to recommend people they know personally or professionally. And that therefore no rat-bastard Chicano street crazy, for instance, could possibly be indicted by “a jury of his peers.” The implications of a victory in this case were so obvious, so clearly menacing to the court system, that interest in the verdict had filtered all the way down to places like the Boulevard, the Silver Dollar, and the Sweetheart. The level of political consciousness is not normally high in these places—especially on Saturday mornings—but Acosta’s very presence, no matter where he goes or what he seems to be doing, is so grossly political that anybody who wants to talk to him has to figure out some way to deal on a meaningful political level.
    Acosta has been practicing law in the barrio for three years. I met him a bit earlier than that, in another era—which hardly matters here, except that it might be a trifle less than fair to run this story all the way out to the end without saying at least once, for the record, that Oscar is an old friend and occasional antagonist. I first met him, as I recall, in a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen, when he lumbered up to me and started raving about “ripping the system apart like a pile of cheap hay,” or something like that ... and I remember thinking, “Well, here’s another one of those fucked-up, guilt-crazed dropout lawyers from San Francisco—some dingbat who ate one too many tacos and decided he was really Emiliano Zapata.”
    Which was okay, I felt, but it was a hard act to handle in Aspen in that high white summer of 1967. That was the era of
Sgt. Pepper’s, Surrealistic Pillow
, and the original Buffalo Springfield. It was a good year for everybody—or for
most
people, anyway. There were exceptions, as always. Lyndon Johnson was one, and Oscar Acosta was another. For entirely different reasons. That was not a good summer to be either the president of the United States or an angry Mexican lawyer in Aspen.
    Oscar didn’t hang around long. He washed dishes for a while, did a bit of construction work, bent the county judge out of shape a few times, then took off for Mexico to “get serious.” The next thing I heard, he was working for the public defender’s office in L.A. That was sometime around Christmas of 1968, which was not a good year for