Compelled by Charlie’s demands for cash to fund the Family’s move to the desert, Tex came up with a plan: Why not set up a drug burn and steal from dealers, who would never report the theft to police?
Tex asked his girlfriend, Rosina Kroner, with whom he’d lived during his months away from the ranch, to help him. He told her he wanted to get some drugs for a dealer client and resell them for a profit, but in reality he intended to take the client’s money and run out the back door, burning Rosina and the client. Trusting her boyfriend, Rosina reached out to a friend named Del, who had a specific dealer in mind.
Bernard Crowe was a big black man, five feet eleven inches tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds, hence his nicknames: Lotsapoppa, or Poppa for short. Although he was only twenty-seven, he liked to say that friends came to him for advice, like their Poppa, although he wasn’t so good at taking his own counsel.
His buddy Del had arranged a buy with a female dealer in Hollywood he didn’t know named Rosina, promising that Crowe would get some weed to sell out of the deal. While Del and another buddy went into the woman’s apartment around 11:00 p.m., Crowe sat in his car in a nearby lot, next to the Magic Castle on Franklin Boulevard.
Crowe was a little surprised when his friends came out with the woman and a man.
“This is Poppa,” Del said, as he introduced Crowe to the couple and got into the back seat with them. “Poppa, this is Tex, Rosina’s old man.”
Tex and Crowe said hello and shook hands, then Crowe turned on the radio, which sparked a conversation about their musical tastes as they drove to El Monte to get the drugs.
When they pulled up to the dealer’s duplex, Crowe was surprised again. “Give me the money and I’ll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes,” Tex said.
Crowe looked at Del, Del looked at Crowe, and Crowe smiled.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like that,” Crowe told Tex, explaining that he thought Tex would buy the drugs, bring them out to the car, then collect Crowe’s money. “You didn’t say we had to [give the money] to you and leave you.”
“What do you want to do?” Del asked Crowe.
“Well, it’s up to you,” Crowe replied. “You know these people and I don’t.”
As Del hesitated, Rosina jumped in to vouch for Tex.
“I know him. I mean we’ve been together for six months,” she said, adding that they were planning to get married and live on a ranch.
Crowe grudgingly agreed to go along with Tex’s plan, but he laid the money end of it at Del’s feet. “It’s your responsibility, Del,” Crowe said as he handed his friend $2,400.
Del took the cash and gave it to Tex, who was supposed to buy a large quantity of marijuana and bring it back to the car.
As Tex was walking toward the building, Crowe got a bad feeling. Having only just met Tex and Rosina, he hopped out and ran up to the duplex to see for himself that the tall man had gone inside with the money.
But he was too late. Tex was nowhere to be seen. Crowe climbed back into the car and tried to be patient. “It probably will be okay,” he said.
From their vantage point out front they couldn’t see that Tex had run out the back, where TJ, a fellow Family member, was waiting in a car to drive him to the ranch.
Over the next half hour, tensions rose among the crew waiting in the car. What was taking Tex so long? Everyone but Rosina got out to see if they could hear anyone talking or arguing inside, or find a window shade open to confirm that the deal was going down. They looked in the bushes, too, in case Tex was hiding out. But there was no sign of him.
They waited one more hour before giving up and heading back to Rosina’s around 1:00 a.m. Crowe was not happy, and he felt bad for Rosina. She seemed to have trusted this man, Tex, and he’d burned her too.
“I can call out to the ranch and see if I can shake him up,” she said, clearly upset.
Back at her apartment, she dialed a number and asked to talk to Charlie.
“Do you know what Tex has done?” she asked him. “He ripped off twenty-four hundred dollars from these people, and these people mean business.”
After talking to Charlie for about five minutes, Rosina handed the phone to Crowe. Charlie didn’t introduce himself, but he said he’d had nothing to do with the events of that night. And although Tex was standing right next to him, Charlie told Crowe that Tex had run off someplace and that he didn’t know where.
When Crowe recounted the scene in court later, he said he’d simply stated, “All I want is the weed or the money,” then handed the phone back to Rosina.
But Charlie and Tex claimed that Lotsapoppa had threatened to come to the ranch with his crew and kill everyone there if he didn’t get his weed or his money. The threat prompted Charlie and TJ to immediately jump in the car and head over to Rosina’s apartment.
Charlie believed that he had to take care of his people—to protect the Family and clean up Tex’s mess—just as he’d done six days earlier when he’d gone over to Gary Hinman’s house to try to straighten out that situation.
After Crowe hung up with Charlie, he left Rosina’s to pick up his friend Steve, who had been waiting for him to finish up his business. Crowe hadn’t expected any trouble that night, so he was curious to get Steve’s take on the deal.
Steve told him to just let it go. “Shine it on, man,” he said.
In fact, Steve tried to discourage Crowe from going back to Rosina’s at all, saying that was just looking for more trouble. But Crowe wanted to see if he could learn more about Rosina and Tex, and suss out what had happened.
As they walked into the second-story apartment about forty-five minutes later, Crowe saw two men there with Rosina and Del. The one with shoulder-length brown hair, sitting on the bed, seemed to be in charge. The other one stood nearby, like a soldier or bodyguard.
The main man introduced himself as Charlie Manson and got up to shake Crowe’s hand. Then they both sat down—Charlie on the bed, Crowe in a chair next to him—to talk it out.
“It doesn’t sound like Tex would do something like that,” Charlie said. “That is my brother, you know.”
Charlie did most of the talking, and even complimented Steve on his shirt, a rust-colored suede top with fringes. Then he stood up. “Of course, I came ready,” Charlie said.
Taking a step or two away from Crowe, he reached behind his back, pulled a .22-caliber Buntline revolver from his belt—the same gun Tex would use in a violent set of murders a week later—and squeezed the trigger. It held nine bullets, but it didn’t fire.
Click.
He tried again, but the gun still didn’t go off.
Click.
“Why do you pull a gun on me?” asked Crowe, who was not carrying that night.
Click.
As Crowe leaned forward to get up and disarm his assailant, Charlie fired again.
“This one is loaded,” he said.
Charlie was right. This time the gun went off. The bullet hit Crowe in the gut, hurtling him into the chair.
When Crowe tried to get up, he fell to the floor. He wanted to go after Charlie but his intuition kicked in.
Play possum, he told himself. So he lay still and held his breath.
It worked.
“Give me your shirt,” Charlie told Steve.
Steve handed it over. “Sure, brother,” he said.
“Awareness through fear is where it’s at,” said Charlie, who got down on the floor and kissed Del’s foot. “Now we’re even.”
As Charlie walked toward the door, he said, “If you people know what is good for you, you won’t say anything.” Then he and his man walked out, leaving Crowe for dead.
Crowe’s buddies rushed over to see if he really had stopped breathing. When he opened his eyes he saw that Steve was bare-chested.
“Shush,” Crowe said softly, “let him get down the steps first. Call the ambulance and you all go ahead and get out of here.”
The police and the ambulance arrived at 4:00 a.m. and rushed him to General Hospital, where his heart stopped twice on the operating table.
“They sent telegrams to my family, telling them they didn’t think I’d make it,” Crowe told reporters later.
The doctors didn’t remove the bullet for fear of paralyzing him, because it was lodged right next to his lower spine. They also thought it might move on its own.
After eighteen days in the hospital, spent mostly in critical condition and collapsing when he tried to move around, Crowe went into hiding. But like Charlie, he was no snitch and he wouldn’t tell the cops or the media who had shot him.
“I always say it takes more courage to die than it does to live,” he said.
Charlie grew more paranoid after the shooting, especially after hearing a news report that the body of a Black Panther was found near UCLA that same night. Thinking it was Crowe, Charlie was convinced that the black people who showed up at Spahn Ranch asking to ride the horses were Crowe’s people—Black Panther spies—watching them. He was also worried that Crowe’s associates would carry out his threat to kill everyone at Spahn Ranch.
Charlie increased security even more after the shooting, making sure that the bikers and Family members were armed and stationed around the property, night and day.