WEST WORDS; A life on the noir side; To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw; Ernie Lopez and Rafael Perez- Torres; University of Texas Press: 268 pp., $22.95 paper HOME EDITION

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Kirsch, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 21.08.2005
• Subjects: Autobiographies; Books-titles; Lopez, Ernie (criminal); Nonfiction; Perez-Torres, Rafael; To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw
• ISSN: 0458-3035

WHEN a guard at Alcatraz threatened to throw a convict named [Ernie Lopez] into an isolation cell soon after his arrival in 1945, Lopez was reminded of the closet in which his father used to lock him up after a beating or a forced dose of castor oil during his early childhood. His ordeal in the California criminal justice system, so compellingly and movingly recalled in "To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back," was prefigured, in his telling, by the cruelties of an angry and brutal parent. Lopez was back on the streets in 1956 on a conditional release but was soon arrested again, this time on a bank robbery charge. He asserts his innocence of that accusation, which was later dropped, but he ended up back in Alcatraz on a parole violation. Out again in 1959, he was promptly arrested on a weapons count and then charged with a bungled discount-store robbery in West Los Angeles that ended with the death of the store manager -- all false charges, he insists. "Given my past record and my reputation with the cops," writes Lopez, "they were only too happy to charge me with murder and robbery." A jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Then too, we cannot know how much credit should be afforded Lopez's co-writer for the good impression that Lopez makes in his memoir. [Rafael Perez-Torres] reveals that he wrote the book on the basis of tape-recorded interviews from which he tried to extract "the flavor and tenor of Ernie's vivid stories," as he explains in a brief introduction. But he readily attributes the "grace, irony and humor" of the narrative to Lopez himself.