Lions of Los Angeles

It was drizzling and gray, late fall, on the old Rickards Movie Ranch, high in the Santa Monica Mountains, in rural, red-state western Malibu. Bleached skulls were tacked to the outside wall of a stage-set saloon; rusting wagon wheels leaned at angles. A hand-painted sign announced a “Public Hanging, 5PM.” Inside the saloon—the shooting location of TV Westerns and Gravy Train commercials and Playboy spreads—a secret meeting was under way.