The Los Angeles Vanguard was a weekly newspaper published in Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

 and established in 1976 after the closure of the Los Angeles Free Press

Los Angeles Free Press

The Los Angeles Free Press , also called “the Freep”, was among the most widely distributed underground newspapers of the 1960s. It is often cited as the first such newspaper...

. Dave Lindorff

Dave Lindorff

Dave Lindorff is an investigative reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com...

 was a founder and editor. According to Lindorff, the Vanguard was infiltrated by an undercover member of LA's Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) squad, under Daryl Gates

Daryl Gates

Daryl Gates was the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1978 to 1992.-Early life:...

. Lindorff also attributed the paper's collapse to a PDID effort to sabotage its advertising revenues:

"We had, after about six months’ operation, hired a person at a considerable cost to sell advertising space in the paper. We learned from this person, only much later after the paper had to shut down, that she had been told by her boss, an advertizing agency executive, to only pretend to try and sell ads. It turns out that the executive had a son who had been busted by the LAPD for drugs, and the police had extorted the father, saying if he prevented our paper from getting advertising, they’d get the charges dropped against his son."

The lawsuit CAPA v. Gates, with the Coalition Against Police Abuse

Coalition Against Police Abuse

The Coalition Against Police Abuse is a currently active community organization in Los Angeles with the stated aim of organizing marginalized groups such as the poor, homosexuals, blacks, and Latinos to prevent, expose, and resist abuse by police and seek legal redress for such abuse.-History and...

 (CAPA) as one of two dozen or so plaintiffs, later sued the Los Angeles Police Department

Los Angeles Police Department

The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...

 (LAPD) on First Amendment

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...

 grounds, exposing unlawful harassment, surveillance, and infiltration of the progressive movement in Los Angeles by LAPD agents. The lawsuit against Gates and the LAPD proved successful. A police commission ordered the disbandment of the PDID, which took place in January 1983.
In February 1984, an out-of-court settlement awarded $1.8 million dollars to the named plaintiffs, individuals, and organizations who had sued the City of L.A.

External links

• Dave Lindorff
  Dave Lindorff
  Dave Lindorff is an investigative reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com...
  
  , CounterPunch
  Counterpunch
  Counterpunch can refer to:* Counterpunch , a punch in boxing* CounterPunch, a bi-weekly political newsletter* Counterpunch , a type of punch used in traditional typography* Punch-Counterpunch, a Transformers character...
  
  , 19 April 2010, Good Riddance, Daryl Gates