Tustin High School tennis courts, 1171 El Camino Real, Tustin. On Super Bowl Sunday night in 1996, 24-year-old Thien Minh Ly was practicing in-line skating on the Tustin High School tennis courts near his parents' home. The next morning, Ly's body was discovered there—stabbed more than 50 times, his throat slashed. Police named white supremacist Gunner Lindberg the murderer. During the murder trial and at the reading of his guilty verdict, Lindberg marked the occasion of Orange County's first officially recognized hate crime by wearing a 1996 Super Bowl Champion Dallas Cowboys jersey.
Trinity Broadcasting Network, 3150 Bear St., Costa Mesa. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” No demons bring to mind William Butler Yeats' “blood-dimmed tide” more starkly than the garishly outfitted Paul Crouch, his “fund-raising tears” wife Jan, and their bogus-Christian cronies at TBN. As Yeats said—and TBN confirms—”the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Illustration by Matt Adams
Black Star Canyon, Black Star Road, Santa Ana Mountains. “No Trespassing” signs and bullet holes in mailboxes mark the approach to this scene of a bloody racist massacre. In 1831, prosperous citrus rancher William Wolfskill and a posse intent on catching rustlers decided the next best thing to the guilty parties was a group of local Native Americans. Wolfskill and associates pursued the innocents into their Black Star Canyon village and, one by one, executed them. To this day, evil-chasers visit this location to watch the spirits of the wrongly executed prowl the hillsides.
Nixon's birthplace, near the corner of Yorba Linda Boulevard and Imperial Highway, Yorba Linda. This tiny hovel of a shanty of a shack at the back end of nowhere is the spot where Richard Milhous Nixon entered the world, learned to play the piano and adopted his dogged pursuit of power. His most sympathetic biographer, filmmaker Oliver Stone, suggested the source of Nixon's power hunger was his loveless mother. He just wanted us to love him.
Arnel Management Co. headquarters, 949 South Coast Dr., Ste. 600, Costa Mesa. Owned by George Argyros, Orange County's answer to Snidely Whiplash. OC district attorney investigators claim Arnel's decades-long practice of bilking thousands of mostly minority apartment tenants out of their security deposits earned Argyros millions of dollars.
The Santa Ana Country Club, 20382 Newport Blvd., Santa Ana.Site of the monthly breakfasts of the Lincoln Club, a group of wealthy Republicans who have given untold millions over the years to scumbags ranging from Richard Nixon to Bob Dornan. Critics contend the shadowy club's power has waned since the 1980s, but insiders insist they're influential as long as people fear them.
The end of Newport Harbor, Corona del Mar.From tiny West Jetty View Park in Corona del Mar, you can see the breakwater extending out of the Wedge that appears in the opening credits of Gilligan's Island, among the most evil television shows ever.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, Old Highway 101, 10 miles south of San Clemente. Since the federal government isn't sure whether San Onofre can withstand a direct hit from an airliner, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made potassium iodide available to anyone living within 10 miles of this potential ground zero. If one of these radioactive beehives cracks open, 175,000 people in San Onofre's ring of hell would take a radioactive shower. Of course, their thyroids may be protected by potassium iodide, but inhaling plutonium and cesium would still do the devil's bidding.
The Boeing Co., 2201 Seal Beach Blvd., Seal Beach. Terrorists around the world agree that a Boeing employee is no better than a shoe bomber. After all, whether they're working on stuffing explosives into the sole of a Nike, designing the $200 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project, or even researching the ultimate evil—Star Wars—collateral damage is just another word for a 10-year-old with his body scattered over a 100-yard radius.
