A Bad Indicator

For decades, Palos Verdes surfers have used vandalism, physical violence and intimidation to discourage non locals from surfing the hill. Last Friday at Indicators, Hermosa Beach surfer Tim Banas refused to be intimidated.

Reprinted from Easy Reader, issue of January 10, 2001.
Easy Reader is a weekly, community newspaper serving the South Bay area of Los Angeles.
Story by Kevin Cody, Easy Reader

The hill. Off limits?

Tim Banas was 100 feet from the top of the cliff above Indicators when he became fearful that he wouldn’t make it to the top. Moments earlier he had re-injured his right knee in a fight at the bottom of the 300-foot cliff. The 44-year-old painting contractor had only recently been able to go back to work. A year ago he had re-constructive, ACL surgery on the knee.His front, left tooth was also causing pain. Half of it broke off in the fight. Rolling onto his back, he used his hands and good leg to inch his way up the final distance of the nearly vertical trail. He reached the bluff shortly before dusk and collapsed.

Several Palos Verdes Estates firefighters approached and asked Banas if he wanted to be taken to the hospital. He said he didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford to go. "They asked where I parked and if I could walk. I said I’d try. One of the firemen picked up my board and another fireman who seemed to be in charge asked me how I got up the hill. I told him I crawled. He promptly told me I wasn’t dirty enough to have crawled," Banas wrote in his journal the following day.

A source at the scene said that a policeman, not a fire fighter, told Banas he looked too clean to have crawled up the hill. Two Palos Verdes Estates police officers approached and began questioning him. Banas said he asked if they were going to arrest the kids who had allegedly assaulted him. He said he pointed out a blond kid and his friend who he claimed threw rocks at Banas and his 19-year-old son Tommy when the two had started down the path to Indicators an hour earlier.



"I told the officers people get beat up here every day and asked why the police don’t do anything about it. One of them said to me, ‘What do you want us to do. Go down there. With your attitude you probably deserved to get beat up.’ I was dumbfounded. I said I thought the job of the police was to offer hope and comfort. He said, ‘You won’t get either from me.’" Banas said he asked the officer’s name. "He puffed himself up and said, ‘It’s on my tag.’" Banas thought the tag said Delaney. (Palos Verdes Estates police do not have an officer Delaney. According to the police report, an officer Delmot was at the scene). The firefighter who was carrying Banas’ surfboard put it down and walked away, Banas said. Banas walked over to several other police officers. He told them their fellow officer had said he deserved to be beat up and asked if that was their consensus, also.

The officer who allegedly made the remark said, "I don’t know what you’re talking about," Banas said.
Another officer told Banas to bring his son to the police station because he was under investigation for assault with a deadly weapon. During the fight Tommy Banas had thrown a rock at the head of one of the local surfers who was fighting his father. Paramedics, fearing his skull might be fractured, had the surfer transported to the hospital.

Banas asked the officers if the people who had allegedly assaulted him were being arrested.
"An officer told me I could make a citizen’s arrest. But if I did I would go to jail," Banas said. The people he made citizen’s arrests against would make a citizen’s arrests against him, the officer explained, Banas said.

"I said I might need help to get to my truck and that I was worried about the attackers still being in the area. They were sitting together, flipping me off when officers weren’t looking. I was denied help and told to walk," Banas said.

Next, he said, he approached a motorcycle officer who was at the curb with another, younger officer. He told them he was worried that if he brought his son to the police station he wouldn’t be treated fairly.
"The younger officer said, ‘There’s your story, there’s their story, and there’s the truth,’" Banas said.
Banas asked for the officers’ cards. The motorcycle officer gave him a card with the department’s phone number and address, but not the officer’s name.

A firefighter who was at the scene said afterwards that Banas was "mouthy and cussing. We tried to help to help him and all he did was bad mouth the guys. He was impossible to work with." Banas acknowledged directing his anger at the firefighters, and said he apologized to them after they told him they were just trying to help him.

Palos Verdes Estate Police Chief Timm Browne, said shortly after the Banas incident, that it was premature for him to comment on Banas’ account of the treatment he received from PVE officers. He said the matter would be investigated.

Tim and Tommy Banos

A father-son surf trip
Banas and his son had arrived at the cliff above Indicators about 3 o’clock that afternoon. He had surfed the secluded spot perhaps 100 times in his nearly three decades of surfing in the South Bay and around the world. He was familiar with Indicators’ reputation for localism. To reduce the likelihood of his truck being vandalized, he had parked several blocks from the trailhead, in a neighborhood of multimillion dollar homes.
He and his son had packed their wetsuits in backpacks. Wearing a wetsuit down the cliffs in Palos Verdes is a sure giveaway that a surfer is not a local.

At the trailhead, Banas said, he and his son were confronted by a blond kid he estimated to be about 18 years old. "He demanded to know where we were from. I told him I had surfed the hill all my whole life and I was going surfing with my son. As we started down the trail, he started throwing rocks, and yelling ‘Kooks’ coming down.’"

The steep, clay trail down the cliff at Indicators was slippery because of the recent rain. Locals frequently wear old soccer cleats to keep from slipping. Banas and his son repeatedly slipped while trying to dodge rocks being thrown, he alleged, by the blond kid and a second local surfer he and his son had crossed paths with near the top of the trail. One rock flew close enough to his head for him to hear it whiz.
At the bottom of the trail, local surfers have built a platform from local stones and logs. It sits eight feet above the rocky beach and features a fire pit, a trash barrel and a sign that says "No Surfing. Private Property." They call it the hut. The surfers who built it call themselves the Dirty Underwear Gang. On occasion, local surfers live there.

When Banas rounded the final turn in the trail he came upon a half-dozen locals who appeared to be in their 20s, drinking at the hut. Indicators offers one of the best, left breaking waves in Southern California, which makes it particularly attractive to goofy-footers like Banas. The lava finger reefs that jut out from the bottom of the cliff into the ocean also make it one of the most beautiful surf spots in Southern California. A fun, perfectly shaped four- to five-foot swell was breaking. "Killer waves," Banas called out to the group as he approached them, hoping to break any tension. His son was still working his way down the cliff. According to Banas, the locals immediately began screaming obscenities at him, telling him he couldn’t surf there and ordering him back up the cliff. "I told them I had a right to surf there, and wasn’t leaving. I told them I had probably surfed with their parents," Banas said.



One of the group stepped forward and pushed him and punched him in the side of the head, Banas said.
Banas said he grabbed the guy and spun him around, causing both of them to fall off the hut.
When he landed on the rocky beach below, Banas said, he felt a white, searing pain as his reconstructed knee blew apart. He tried, but was unable to get to his feet. He said he felt two people on top of him, beating him.
Tommy Banas reached the bottom of the trail moments later. "I saw two fools swinging on my dad. I yelled, ‘Get off my dad.’ One of them came at me. I grabbed a rock and threw it at him and hit him in the head. He went down and I started hitting him and the other guy came at me. I picked up more rocks and yelled, ‘I’d kill all of you if you come at me.’ I threatened to smash one of their boards. They were afraid. They said they’d call the cops on me."

Tim Banas said he got to his feet and saw a surfer he recognized from previous sessions at Indicators coming out of the water. Banas said he called to him for help. Then he told his son to run. Tommy grabbed his board and ran along the rocky shoreline, through Boneyards, around the point to Bluff’s Cove, across Bluff’s Cove to Haggerty’s and down the beach to Rat’s, where he found a pay phone and called his mother collect.
After his son left, Banas said at least one more local surfer tried to attack him. "He started to swing. I popped him with a left and he backed off. I told them I figured that’s how you guys are when it’s one on one" Banas said. "I was afraid for my life. I told them I was a LA County sheriff. It was all I could think to do," Banas said.

In 1973, Banas was jumped in a parking lot at LAX by Crips. They stabbed him in the kidney with an ice pick, beat him beyond recognition and left him for dead. Banas said the locals appeared cowered by his claim to be a Sheriff. But they continued with threats to kill him if he didn’t leave, he said. "I said I didn’t think I could make it up the trail and the surfer who came out of the water said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to leave.’" Banas retrieved his backpack and began a slow, torturous climb back up the cliff.
At the point where he thought he wouldn’t be able to make it, he used the cell phone in his backpack to call 911.The dispatcher told him police and fire were already on the scene, assisting other victims.

The police report
Robert Johnson, 20, told police he was walking up the trail from Indicators when he saw the Banas’ and asked where they were from. The father, according to Johnson, became agitated and began pushing Johnson before continuing down the trail. "Hey, someone’s coming down, he’s crazy," Johnson told officers, according to the police report.

"Paul Hamilton, 21, said he was with Johnson the entire time and gave me the same statement," the police report states. Luke Millican told police, "He [Millican] was walking up the trail…when Timothy Banas started yelling at him for no reason. When Millican asked what his problem was, Timothy attempted to hit him with a close fist, but missed." A scuffle ensued, according to the police report, during which "[Tommy] Banas threw a large rock at his [Millican’s] head…"

Nicholas Sinclair, 21, told police that he "approached the two [Tim Banas and Millican] and, while attempting to break up the fight, got punched in the nose by Timothy." Efforts to reach the seven Peninsula surfers named in the police report were unsuccessful. The Investigating Officer’s Statement makes no reference to Tim Banas’ injured knee or broken tooth. "I observed a laceration on the right side of Millican’s head that was approximately two inches in length. I looked at Timothy [Banas] and he appeared to be dirty, breathing heavy, and his clothes were disheveled, however, I could find no signs of injury," the report states.

The police report lists Millican as "victim-1" and Tommy Banas as "suspect-1."
In contrast, the fire department’s report describes Timothy Banas as the victim. The report states: "One of the assaulties was complaining of right knee pain…one of the assaultors received a two-inch laceration to the head and was transported by American Medical Response to Torrance Memorial Hospital.Linda Banas said she found her husband in a state of semi-shock sitting in his truck. "My knee. I can’t work," he told her.

More stories
The following morning, Saturday, Luke Millican showed up for work at Just Long Boards in Hermosa Beach. The Peninsula High School graduate had a nasty, stitched up gash in his hairline. He said he had an accident at Indicators and the fin of his board had cut him, according to another Just Long Boards employee, Dave Hatten.

Hatten lives in a unit attached to the Banas family home. He told Millican he knew about the fight. He told Millican it was Tim and Tommy Banas he had fought. Hatten said Millican appeared shocked and remorseful. Hatten said he asked if he should apologize to the Banas’. Millican had been a visitor in their home.

Pat Ryan shapes surfboards for Just Long Boards. He likes Millican, and has enjoyed a decades long friendship with Tim Banas. The Ryans' and Banas’ youngest sons are in the same grade at Hermosa Valley School and are on the school surf team. When their kids played Little League, Banas was the Little League president.

Ryan heard firsthand, both Banas’ and Millican’s sides of the story. Millican told Ryan that Banas attacked him because he thought Millican had been throwing rocks up the trail at Banas and his son, Ryan said. Ryan sees the fight as a tragedy that could have been avoided if the Palos Verdes Estates police did their job.

"School’s out for Christmas vacation and the surf has been big every day. Palos Verdes police had to know there would be problems and they should have been doing something about it," Ryan said.
A local tradesman and longtime local surfer said he was coming up the trail after surfing at Indicators on the day after Christmas when locals on the bluff began throwing rocks at him. They yelled at him that they would kill his dog and vandalize his car if he ever returned. The hail of rocks was so dangerous, he said, that he was forced back down the trail. To return to his car, parked at the top of the trail, he had to walk north to the Cove, up the bluff and then back along Palos Verdes Drive West -- a two and a half-mile walk.

When he reached his car he used his cell phone to call police. Two officers responded. The kids who had hailed him with rocks were still at the top of the trail, he said."I asked them to take down the kids’ names and numbers. The cops refused. My dog’s leash is a surfboard leash. They told me my leash wasn’t adequate.

"When the kids knew nothing was going to happen to them, they started laughing at me.
"The police said, ‘You’re upset, you’re causing trouble. It’s best you leave.’ That’s what they told me. I didn’t want my car and my dog impounded. I left."The tradesman submitted a written complaint with the officers’ names to City Hall. He said he has not received a response.He asked that his name not be used in this article. "Most of my work is on the hill," he said.

Another local tradesman traces his distrust of the Palos Verdes Estate police back to the Christmas of 1991."I was surfing with two friends at Indicators when kids on the top of the cliff started hitting golf balls at us."We got out of the water and called the police from a pay phone. When the police arrived they said, ‘We don’t see anyone in the water,’ and refused to do anything. When we left the cops were shaking hands with the kids who were hitting the balls.

"Last year I told a PV cop there were problems at Indicators. He said surf somewhere else. I’ve surfed Indicators since the 1960s. I’ve pick-axed that trail. And when I surfed there over Thanksgiving, the kids there told me to get out of the water."Don’t use my name. I work on the hill. The cops impound my truck because my tires are under-inflated and I’m just like Banas with a bad knee – I can’t work," he said.

Matt Calvani, a shaper for Becker Surfboards in Hermosa was surfing Indicators last Thursday, the day before the Banas’ went there.He walked in from the Cove and was surfing alone when four locals paddled out."’Hate to bum out your solo session, but my friends and I are coming out. You have to go in,’" Calvani said he was told by one of the locals"I said ‘What’s the problem. There are plenty of waves.’"
"He said, ‘You’re an outsider you’ve got to get out of the water.’I said, ‘What if I don’t want to.’
He said, ‘There’s going to be a problem. Leave it at that.’"Calvani said he caught a few more waves and then the swell shut down and he left the water.

Tyler Hatzikian is an El Segundo surfboard maker and one of the most respected big wave riders in the South Bay. He was surfing Boneyards, a break just north of Indicators last week when he saw a local rifling through his backpack. He paddled ashore and confronted the kid, who was wearing a Peninsula High T-shirt. The kid said he was looking for his keys, which he found in his pocket as Hatzikian spoke to him.

Will Weston is a Hermosa Beach resident with a dental practice in the Hollywood Riviera. He surfs Indicators regularly."I’ve never seen niceness from anyone there. They threaten, they say you can’t surf here, they deliberately drop in on you."What kills me is that no matter how well you surf, if they don’t know you, they will try to chase you out. But their buddies can be lousy and allowed to surf.
"Their parents think they’re little gems. They don’t realize what thugs they are. Read The Tribes of Palos Verdes. PV gangs are no different than the gangs you read about in the LA Times."
What offends Weston the most, he said, is that the gang mentality is carried on by the Palos Verdes surfers into adulthood.

"I can forgive teenagers. But surfers in their 20s and 30s, absolutely not."In March 1995, Bay Boy Peter McCollum, 34, was videotaped by a Channel 13 news team making an alleged physical and verbal assault against Hagin Kelley, a young professional surfer from Torrance, and several of Kelley’s friends at Lunada Bay in Palos Verdes.

Torrance attorney Michael Sisson filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Kelley and his friends against McCollum and the City of Palos Verdes.

"The suit was based on the anti Klu Klux Klan laws. Following the Civil War, municipalities in the South showed ‘deliberate indifference’ toward civil rights violations committed by the KKK. So Congress passed laws holding municipalities liable for ‘deliberate indifference.’"
In November 1996, McCollum was required to pay $15,000 to the young surfers he intimidated. Sisson said he had anecdotal evidence of the City of Palos Verdes Estate’s "deliberate indifference" towards harassment by the Lunada Bay Boys. But he lacked hard evidence, so he settled for an agreement with the city in which it expressed "its commitment to equal access for everyone wishing to use its beaches or surf in the area." The statement went on to say, "Any person who feels that he or she has been a victim of a crime is encouraged to notify the police department immediately."

The winter 2002 issue of Surfing magazine is subtitled "Travel Advisory Issue." It lists "five surf Meccas to avoid." The five are Pakistan, Java, Morocco, Maldives and Lunada.

Six months after the Lunada Bay Boys Agreement, Bob Wyler, a Manhattan Beach surfer and teacher at Hawthorne High School took several visiting Australian friends to surf at Lunada Bay. Wyler has climbed five of the world’s seven highest peaks. In the water he and his friends were verbally abused, and forced into the rocks by local surfers, he said.

Recalling that surfers who were harassed at Lunada were encouraged to file complaints with the police, Wyler and his friends drove to the police station.

Wyler said Officer Mark Velez, one of the officers who responded to the Banas-Millican incident, listened to the three surfers’ complaint in the station lobby."Then the officer left the lobby for about five minutes. When he returned I asked what the holdup was. He said, ‘I just got a call from the Bay Boys, and they confirmed what you said they said – that you need to show respect and that you had a nice car."Wyler also said the Officer Velez told him that if they filed their report their names, home addresses and phone numbers would become public record and available to the Bay Boys. Wyler and his friends decided against filing the report.

The following year, in April 1998, the Palos Verdes Police Department got a new chief of police. Timm Browne was a surfer. He posed on the July 1998 cover of Peninsula People magazine wearing a wetsuit and holding a surfboard. One of his first actions as chief was to purchase a 12-foot Zodiac for the department to use in patrolling against poaching and localism. "I know we’re never going to break localism in surfing. But this just gives us another way to access the surfers’ territory, to let them know that we’re serious about curtailing that type of [violent] behavior," he said in an interview with the magazine.

Four months later Browne spoke in Hermosa Beach to the South Bay chapter of Surfrider Foundation.
When asked what action he planned to take to stop localism in Palos Verdes, he answered, "We need to know what’s happening down there. Give us a chance to stop that kind of action. Our job is to serve the community and its visitors."

On Monday, Browne was asked how many arrests for localism his department has made since his arrival in Palos Verdes three and a half years ago. He answered, none."We’ve done quite a bit. We have a bike detail, quads and a boat. I encourage officers to stop and talk to people. "We don’t have the manpower to police all of the beaches. But if people make complaints we will take action. The problem is no one comes here to tell us of problems," Chief Browne said."I understand the Peninsula has a reputation for localism. I made a pledge when I became chief to stem these problems and I am still committed to doing that," he said.

The way it is
Sunday morning, two days after Tim Banas and his son Tommy fought with the Dirty Underwear Gang, one surfer was in the water at Indicators and one surfer was standing at the trailhead at the top of the cliff. The weather was clear and warm, but the holiday swells had all but faded.

The surfer at the top of the path was a high school local who lives a block from Indicators and has been surfing there since he was 7 years old, he said. He was surfing Boneyards the day of the fight.
"This stuff happens all the time. But usually it doesn’t escalate like this one did. Usually, when we tell people they have to leave, they leave. This old guy wouldn’t leave. I guess he wanted to stand on principle or something." ER

Banas’s attorney has asked that the following, or words to this effect, appear with the story. He handled the Hagin Kelley lawsuit in 1995, which is mentioned in the story
The attorney is Mike Sisson. His number is : (310) 719-8894.

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