California is Manson country. From heat blasted
lairs in the desert-- This is the secret entrance
into the Manson camp. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): --to
the wealthy suburbs he painted with blood, Charles Manson
is just one dark chapter in this city's story. So the underworld of this
place might be graves. From a downtown ghost terminal
to a World War II super bunker that defended against
mysterious invaders. This is the world's largest
mass UFO sighting in history. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The greatest menace to LA is its underground. A 7.8 earthquake could likely
cause hundreds of fatalities, thousands of injuries. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): We're
peeling back the layers of time on "Cities of the Underworld-- Los Angeles-- Land of Manson." [theme music] Hey, I'm Don Wildman. The city beneath me-- Los Angeles, California-- or
one small part of it, anyway. The greater LA area sprawls
out 5,000 square miles. It's home to nearly
13 million people who speak over 200
different languages. And so how did a
tranquil desert valley mutate into a
monster metropolis, and how does it
manage to survive? The city is constantly on
the edge of destruction. So no wonder greed,
corruption, fervor, and madness have all too often
filled the streets. In 2007, lawmen, forensics
experts, and police dogs were digging into the
barren underground of the desert outside LA. They were hunting
for dead bodies, previously undiscovered victims
of the notorious mass murderer Charles Manson. If they had been able
to dig up new evidence, it could have sent
him to death row. The search failed, but
Manson is still rotting in prison for life for the
senseless slaughter of seven innocent Angelenos in 1969. Putting Manson on trial
again would reopen a wound in this city that has
never really healed. The Manson Trial was one of
the most expensive LA had ever seen. It was also one of the
craziest, so 1960s. You had witnesses having
acid flashbacks on the stand. Charles Manson also tried to
stab a judge with his pencil. It was a media
circus, basically. But 1969 wasn't the only time
LA went into a state of panic. Go back 27 years and there's
a whole other untold story. Back then, the city was
bracing for a deadly air raid. On December 7,
1941, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor in
what was at the time the worst attack ever
on American soil. It decimated the Pacific fleet. America's West Coast, especially
its biggest port here in LA, was now vulnerable to attack. If the Japanese could
take out this harbor, the results would be devastating
to the entire country. The US was now involved
in a world war, with enemy submarines lurking
in the waters off both coasts. So when an unidentified aircraft
was spotted over the city in the months
after Pearl Harbor, the little known
Battle of Los Angeles began from a top secret
military base deep underground. About 25 miles from
Downtown LA, Fort MacArthur is situated atop a hill
overlooking San Pedro, the nation's largest working
port, and a strategic position on the edge of
the Pacific Ocean. I'm meeting this guy
named Steve Nelson. He's the director and curator
of the Fort MacArthur Museum. He's an expert on the
Battle of Los Angeles and knows all the tunnels
that riddle this entire area. Hi, Don.
How are you? - Nice to meet you.
- Good to see you. Take me for a ride?
- Absolutely. All right. Fort MacArthur was
constructed in 1914 during the military buildup
surrounding World War I. Its massive guns could shoot
a 1,500 pound shell over 14 miles. But for two decades,
the cannons were silent. Then the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor, and the entire nation
began to mobilize. This quiet base was suddenly
the front in an all-out war for the Pacific. We're going up to take a look
at one of the two batteries that comprised this
fort, and we're going to take a look
at what's underground. These subterranean
batteries are the key to a 60-year-old mystery. Did someone or something attack
LA or was the city actually the victim of the most elaborate
ruse in military history? STEVE NELSON: And off we go. Wow. Look at this. STEVE NELSON: So we're in
basically the-- the oldest battery on the hillside. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Hidden away from the California sunshine is a super
bunker as well protected as any Nazi shelter in Berlin. And in 1942, it was packed
with nervous soldiers waiting for a deadly Japanese air raid. STEVE NELSON: There are dozens
and dozens of rooms down here. Whoa. Look at that hole. And here we've got one. What is this? Well, that's someplace
that I've never been before. Can I get down there?
STEVE NELSON: Absolutely. Really? If you're so inclined. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): This tunnel once ran to the
mechanical plotting room, where the guns could be
locked on an enemy target 14 miles at sea. I'm in ground zero for
the Battle of Los Angeles. This tunnel was the lowest level
of the battery, one of three defending the fort from attack
by sea, two rifle batteries on the ocean side. And on the backside of the
fort was a mortar battery with guns designed to fire
at a higher trajectory and take out enemy ships at sea. In addition to housing
guns and storing ammo, this battery became a barracks
when World War II began. We're walking right underneath
of the barracks-- the, uh-- the entire battery above. 50 guys over my head, in the
dark, waiting for the Japanese to attack. As the weeks after
Pearl Harbor dragged on, more and more
American servicemen were crowded into the
fort to bolster defenses. A base that held as few
as 23 men in peacetime now had 7,000 soldiers crammed
into dank rooms like this. It's almost impossible
for us now to understand how a soldier living
down here, stationed here would have to think. I would say the
closest thing that you could compare it to is
maybe 9/11, you know, that sick feeling--
- Yeah. --that we all had after. When-- the soldiers
that I've interviewed, they were all very jittery. For years, the propaganda
that had been pumped into us was saboteurs and attack
from the east and this-- and so when Pearl Harbor
comes, it makes it real. Yeah. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
30,000 Japanese-Americans living in Los Angeles'
Little Tokyo immediately fell under suspicion. Air raid drills began,
and the tension only grew when a Japanese sub
surfaced off the coast and torpedoed an
American cargo ship. Well, we have the submarine
attack on Christmas Eve, 1941, right off the coast
here, two miles out. The ship was outside the harbor
and it was struck by a torpedo. Where? Right out there? Two miles on. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The cargo ship was towed back into the harbor
with a huge hole in its side. More Japanese subs were spotted
off the coast of San Francisco, and another fired at an oil
refinery near Santa Barbara. Then the subs disappeared. Many feared this small
naval raid was just the prelude to a
massive air attack and braced for the worst. People of that time
felt like this was war and it had come to
Southern California. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Finally, the months of growing hysteria came to a head
on one fateful night-- February 24, 1942. The day starts pretty
much like every other day since the attack-- rumors, words of-- of, you know,
my gosh, the impending doom that's coming.
- Mm-hmm. Then the Navy issues
an order that there's an impending attack. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): At 7:18
PM, a yellow warning signal was sent from the Army's interceptor
command to the city's police, meaning "enemy
planes approaching." Civil defense ordered a blackout
and Los Angeles went dark. But was it the beginning of
an assault, a bizarre hoax, or something else? All the same time--
sirens are going off, search lights are
criss-crossing the sky, some search lights actually
lock in on an object up there. Again, what is it? Nobody really knows. Eyewitnesses say airplanes,
other eyewitnesses say smoke, others say a spherical object. [guns shooting] DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammo were fired
from this battery and its two guns, but no enemy
planes were brought down and no Japanese fleet
loomed on the horizon. Two hours after it began, the
Battle of Los Angeles was over, and 60 years of
controversy began. My eyewitnesses
that I've interviewed, a very strong proportion of
them say they saw aircraft. Mm-hmm. OK. I think the officers
and those in power say that there was nothing. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
After the war, the Japanese stated they sent
no planes to LA that night. So if there was something in the
skies, where did it come from? It has been argued that this
is the world's largest mass UFO sighting in history. So it takes on a
whole new dimension that's beyond my grasp. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Some
believe the unidentified flying objects that night didn't
descend from outer space but from a nearby US air base. Why would the government
be-- the military be sending military
aircraft over LA? Well, some of the
more suspicious people tend to think that maybe
the United States was trying to force the community to sort
of realize we're at war now. Some have even gone so far as
to say that, actually, the air raid was engineered
or was designed to validate the internment
of the Japanese from-- I see. --from the Los Angeles area. If you scare the population,
they'll look the other way. Yeah. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Within the year, 120,000 Japanese-American
citizens were stripped of their rights
and locked away in camps for the duration of the war. The fear and paranoia
that led to that outrage were ratcheted up by the
mysterious aerial incident that played out here. 34 years after the
base was decommissioned and the last soldier
was shipped out, these empty decrepit tunnels
are the only reminders of the battle that never was. In 1974, a document was
declassified that quite likely, enemy agents had operated
commercial aircraft in the skies of Los
Angeles that night in order to spread general alarm
and disclose the location of anti-aircraft batteries. So a good idea-- you set out
a decoy, provoke a response. Well, maybe what they learned
was because of installations like Fort MacArthur,
attacking Los Angeles would be a very bad idea. Los Angeles is sunny
about 200 days a year, but there's a dark shadow
hanging over it 24/7-- the threat of a
disastrous earthquake. The Northridge quake
in '94 knocked down freeways like these, flattened
buildings, killed 57 people, and cost $40 billion in damages. Not only is LA the nation's
second biggest city, it's also its largest trade
center and its busiest port. If this place is annihilated,
the whole country is crippled. Now, you can't
prevent an earthquake. But engineers are working on
developing high-tech systems to deal with the chaos
and panic in the streets and they're burrowing
underground to do it. With more than 300 lethal faults
lurking just beneath the sand, sun, and palm trees, a
catastrophic earthquake could hit at any time
and wipe LA off the map. So what happens when
doomsday strikes? Few Angelenos realize that
the city's survival depends on a secure super bunker hidden
100 feet below LA's City Hall. I'm in the heart of Downtown
Los Angeles, City Hall, where the mayor and all the city
departments have their offices. But underneath this
famous building is a restricted access bunker
called the Emergency Operations Center. It's the city's nerve center
when any kind of disaster strikes. I met with EOC facility
manager, Rob Freeman Good to see you.
Welcome to City Hall East. Thank you very much. To see what the city is doing
to prepare for the big one. In times of crisis, the US
president has a secure bunker. The mayor of Los
Angeles has the EOC. Access is tightly restricted,
but we were given rare access to the facility and
its vast network. We're going to give you
a special entrance here-- OK. --that we don't make available
to members of the public. This is kind of the
back door to the EOC. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
This is the door that the mayor rushes through-- Here we go. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): --when
the city goes on lockdown. When you're going
four levels down, you have to have
the right card key to get down into this level. Oh, right away. Look at that. In 1974, LA leaders created
a state of the art command and control center to protect
the city against disaster, and they found an
ideal structure right below their feet. Four stories under City Hall was
an 1,800 square foot Cold War bunker, protected by four-foot
thick concrete walls and blast doors made of steel. Designed to withstand
a nuclear assault, it was easily adapted to survive
an all-out assault by mother nature. You're in a bomb shelter. This area with these
heavy vault doors was designed to withstand
a nuclear attack. So in case of that
kind of event, our EOC would be activated
and we'd close ourselves in. Let's go in. Hey, Don, here we
are, finally, at the-- [beep] --door to the Emergency
Operations Center. And here we are. Here we go. So there's nobody
down here right now. Right now we're all quiet. No actual disasters today. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
In a code red situation, it takes just moments for
this ordinary looking office to transform into a war room
some call the "ant farm." If an earthquake hit right
now, what would this place look like? Well, within an hour
it'd get pretty chaotic. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): On
January 17, 1994 at 4:30 AM, the Northridge earthquake
hit Los Angeles. Five minutes later, this
underground fortress moved into high gear. Within the hour, 100
people, including the mayor, were down here trying to put
the city back together again. So Northridge earthquake
hit out here in the valley and then spread all the way down
here and through all the rest of the town. All this space has to
be managed from in here? Absolutely. The entire city of Los Angeles. That jurisdiction--
that's our responsibility. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Over the next 24 hours, there were 466
fires in the city. In a normal day, there
are usually less than 40. But roadsides were blocked
by thousands of landslides and over 100 damaged
freeway bridges. The people in this room
dispatched water tanker trucks to help the fire department. Traffic was rerouted. Even the Goodyear blimp
was recruited to fly over heavily damaged areas displaying
safety messages in English and Spanish. In the end, 57 people were
killed, 9,000 injured, and the total cost of
damages was $40 billion. And it could have
been much worse. How bad was the
Northridge earthquake? Well, it was a 6.7
magnitude earthquake. Simply put, it was a
moderate earthquake. OK. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): The
devastating Northridge quake was just a warm-up
act for the big one. Experts estimate that there's
a 97% chance of a major quake striking the greater LA area
within the next 30 years. A 7.8 earthquake could likely
cause hundreds of fatalities, thousands of injuries,
widespread damage, could well exceed $100 billion. DON WILDMAN: Multiple building
collapses, multiple freeway collapses, everything times 10. In Northridge, we
had about 30,000, 40,000 people that were
in our public shelters. What if you had 400,000 people
that needed to be sheltered? DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
How would those hordes of homeless injured
people get to a safe haven when the streets are destroyed? We're on our way
down to the Department of Transportation's-- OK. --ATSAC facility-- Automated
Transit, Surveillance, and Control Center for
the city of Los Angeles, run by the LA Department
of Transportation. These are all
the streets of LA. 350 DOT cameras feed in here,
as well as LAPD and fire department helicopter
cameras and sensors embedded in the roadways. When experts here
see trouble, they have the power to control the
4,400 stoplights in the city, clear a path for emergency
vehicles, and save lives. Basically, in the
event of an emergency, this is the eyes for the
brain back there in the EOC. So when they need
to affect traffic-- and they can right from
here with traffic lights and so forth-- they can make things
flow and open up so emergency vehicles
can go through, and they can do it this way. This guy over here, Maurice. Hello, Maurice. - Hey, how are you doing?
- How are you doing? - Good.
- Sorry to disturb you. No problem. DON WILDMAN: Oh, wow. So you can actually zoom in
and pan around and everything? MAURICE: That's correct. Yeah, I can see what's going on
on 2nd Street at that location. I can come back and see
what's going on 1st Street and how one affects the other. And then if there's a
problem on 2nd Street, we can divert traffic over
to 1st Street [inaudible].. Wow, you're a
very powerful man. [chuckle] Yeah. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Even with all the high-tech tools
money can buy, Los Angeles is always at
risk of utter annihilation. And no one knows that better
than the men and women manning these stations. 24/7, 365 days a
year, the big one could strike and strike hard. Officials anticipate that
buildings built before 1994 could sustain major damage. That's a major
amount of casualties. If you live here and you
think about this all the time, you might go crazy. Fortunately, the guys
working down here in a bunker over 100
feet below City Hall are doing the watching, the
worrying, and the preparation for everyone else. 90 years ago, Los
Angeles, California was covered with orange groves,
and cowboys rode their horses down Hollywood Boulevard. Today, it's America's second
largest city, with 7,200 miles of asphalt roadway. It's almost impossible to
imagine LA without the cars. Millions of them jam the
roads and freeways every day, creating some of the
country's worst pollution-- not to mention some
violent cases of road rage. And with gas prices
rising higher, things are only going to get
worse, here and everywhere. But it wasn't always this way. Buried under the streets is a
commuter transportation system that once rivaled
that of New York. Los Angeles even
had its own version of Grand Central, The Los
Angeles Subway Terminal Building. But this massive
subterranean train station vanished, a victim of greed
and short-sightedness. Today, Angelenos trapped
in gridlock downtown have no idea what's right
under their streets. I'm meeting with
Christopher Price. He's the assistant
manager of the condo space that's being developed
in this building, and it's over LA's
ghost terminal. Christopher.
CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Don. Welcome to the LA Subway
Terminal Building. Thank you very much. So subway-- this
refers to those days? - The original days.
- So this is the big terminal? This is the big
terminal itself. So let's go take a look. This is the Grand Central
Station of Los Angeles back then. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): At
its peak, 65,000 people a day passed through this entrance
level, commuters paying a nickel for a ticket
to anywhere in the city. Unbelievable. It's vast, isn't it? It-- oh, it gets bigger. This is-- this is
just the first level. All right. Wow. We're down one level here? We're down just one level. This was just the ramps just to
get people out of this space. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The Subway Terminal Building covered almost an entire
downtown city block and stretched down 50
feet below the surface. At street level was the
main lobby and waiting area. Below that was a sub-level
with three ramps leading from the street directly to the
lowest level, the train tracks and platforms. This vast network was privately
owned by the Pacific Electric Railway. After World War II, as cheap
automobiles began to lure away riders, the railway's
profits dropped. The company began to sell
off chunks of itself, sections of track, tunnels, and
stations to tire, automobile, and oil companies. Within a decade, all the
trains stopped running. It's kind of sad when
you think about it. We're going to now take a look
at the platforms themselves. Look at this. Track 5. This way, please. So here we are. These are the original
platforms of the Subway Terminal Building. Incredible. Just went on and on. So the street's
right up there? The street's above us, and
then what used to happen-- we're actually standing
physically on what would be the original track. Right here. Oh, yeah. OK. Take a look-- track 4-- we're now standing on track 3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is pointing down to-- essentially these
are long platforms next to railroad tracks.
CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Yeah. DON WILDMAN: Like any
railroad station [inaudible].. CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Like
any railroad station that you would see today. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
From here, the subway tunnels connected to a
web of surface street line commuter railways that
spread out over the city, covering 1,150 miles. Many cities still have this
kind of system in place. Correct. LA Is unique in
that it lost it. It lost it, unfortunately. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
The railway's new owners-- businesses with a big financial
stake in getting people out of the trains and into cars-- bought up their competition
to get rid of it. MAN: New assembly plants are
now operating in Los Angeles. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Above ground tracks were ripped up to make
room for more roads. The subway tunnels
were sealed off. This station, purchased by
General Motors and Firestone Tires in 1955, was
shuttered and is now covered with a condo complex. And as Los Angeles lost its
best hope for a clean, more fuel efficient future, most
Angelenos were oblivious. They had discovered the joy
of cars and suburban living. CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Los
Angeles is so spread out, people started going into
suburban areas to start living and also being able
to purchase a car. The common man no longer needed
to ride the subway system. DON WILDMAN: Sure. CHRISTOPHER PRICE: He now
could purchase a vehicle. The Angelenos of the
time just no longer needed the system anymore. Or so they thought. The people of Los
Angeles paid a high price for their vision of
a suburban paradise. Today, LA has the heaviest
traffic and some of the worst air in the nation. And the train system that could
have prevented all of this is long gone. This is the original space. Wow! CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Nothing's
been touched since 1955 when they stopped the train tracks. DON WILDMAN: So they
shut down the building and shut down the system.
CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Exactly. The automobile companies just
simply purchased the property to get rid of it. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Today,
taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to rebuild
a subway system, and almost all that's
left of the original is this building and
a few yards of track. So the tracks go off this way? CHRISTOPHER PRICE: Actually,
they go even further than the eye can see. Really? The tunnels actually
barricade all the way down. DON WILDMAN: All right,
let me get my boots. This was an integral part
of life in Los Angeles, that there was a full scale
railway system in place, and now there is isn't. Somewhere in this
mud buried beneath are the last remnants of a
major transportation system. Here's a-- a grim
statement, huh? A cement wall where there
used to be a train track. Boom. And a story. So the trains stopped
running, literally. Today, Los Angeles is
famous for its sprawl. A city without a center. But in the 1920s and '30s,
downtown was the heart of it all, and the banks and bars
stayed open all night long. When prohibition hit,
the party kept going, they just moved it underground
into a secret network of speakeasies. There were no worries
about getting busted because crooked cops and big
time politicians were running the show. Back in the 1920s, the
place to be in Los Angeles was around 5th and Main. Palatial hotels, swanky saloons,
and million dollar theaters were all crowded into
a 10 block radius. Downtown LA is the
original Los Angeles with all these vintage
hotels and theaters. I'm meeting with Richard Schave. He's an expert on everything
downtown, everything underground. Richard, how are you doing? Good to see you, Don. You too. Welcome to old
Downtown Los Angeles. Right. This is the-- the glory
days right down here. Main Street was where
everything happened. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
If you peeled up this modern intersection,
you'd find the remnants of a vast subterranean hive
dating back to 1910, when horse drawn wagons
crowded the dusty streets. To avoid the chaos above ground,
70 miles of service tunnels were built, connecting
the basements of all the major hotels. But just 10 years later,
they became the perfect setup for illegal drinking dens. The basement of this modern day
bar, the King Edward Saloon, was the center of
LA's seedy underworld. This saloon, in-- in
prohibition, what was it? Well, it-- it wasn't a
saloon because it was illegal-- OK. --to run a bar. It became a piano store, so-- Which was a front? The-- the speakeasy
was downstairs, so you'd go in to look at a
piano and go through the back and down the stairs. This way. OK. Once a speakeasy,
always a speakeasy, huh? A lot of these places,
these speakeasies would le-- use their delivery chutes as
the entrances to the place. So that's how people
got down sometimes. And this is the entrance
here, the cloak room. You would have talked
to this guy here, and then back here you
would have maybe used a special knock. Who knows? And in you go. 90 years ago, this
shabby basement was crowded with LA's
elite thrill seekers breaking the law. This is a bar like other bars,
but they're all underground. They're are all underground. They're pretty makeshift. Mm-hmm. They painted these murals
to give a little decor. You would come in and there'd
be, of course, a police officer down here to make sure you
didn't bring your own liquor. DON WILDMAN: What do you
mean, a police officer? The police in Los Angeles
ran the racket for bootleggers. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
In most East Coast cities, the mob cashed in on
prohibition and made a killing serving booze. But in Los Angeles,
the chief of police functioned more as the
chief of the rackets. Most cops were in on the
action, and the corruption went all the way to city hall. RICHARD SCHAVE: Several
mayors throughout prohibition were absolutely knee-deep
to-- to the point where Mayor Frank Shaw's
brother was the one in charge of-- of receiving all the monies
for gambling, prostitution, bootlegging. DON WILDMAN
(VOICEOVER): In 1929, revenue from bootleg liquor
sales in Los Angeles County was $35 million. It was common practice
for the mayor's office, the chief of police, and the
cops to take a 15% to 20% graft. The big wigs would
kill to protect their piece of the action,
and that brought them down. The chief of police was arrested
after he tried to murder the man investigating
his dirty department. The scandal toppled
the mayor, who was recalled from
office for his part in these criminal enterprises. After prohibition ended in 1933,
many of the tunnels were sealed and the scandal
forgotten for decades. But almost 90 years
later, Richard could still point
me towards evidence of high powered corruption. What is this all about? They store the beer
and they store the food. Look, it's a drink. RICHARD SCHAVE: It's a keg. The foam on a beer. Whoa, look at that. And there's a cop on it. RICHARD SCHAVE: Making
sure that you're not bringing your own liquor in.
- Look at this. You got a cop talking to a
guy right here saying, no, that's a bad idea. You've got to drink
my booze, not yours. Because they were used
for nefarious purposes, no one kept a detailed map
of the downtown tunnels. But the basement of
this Skid Row bar was definitely connected
to that shadowy world. Look at this. I mean, this is wild. This is the decoration for this
entire place, all a big painted mural, and down below
are all these tunnels all throughout Los Angeles. So this particular one-- this door here may very
well go through to one of those tunnels, but he's going
to get the building manager to see if he can open it up. Don, this is Bill. - How you doing, Bill?
- [inaudible] He's-- he's the manager. DON WILDMAN: Do
you know this door? I've been here
30 years and it's the first time I've seen it.
- No kidding. Do you mind if I give it a shot?
BILL: Give it a shot. Well, you may be running
across a brick wall. Yeah.
OK. [laughter] That's not moving. All right. That is stuck. The door was a dead end. But after 80 years,
the walls themselves are crumbling and revealing
a bootlegger's paradise. Hold that, would you? Oh, yeah, there it goes. So you can see the whole-- the next basement
is right there. And there you go, you're
right through to the next-- jeez. It's-- it's another
hallway this exact size-- RICHARD SCHAVE: Right. --leading straight
down the street. Which extended itself all the
way through Pershing Square. That is pretty-- pretty amazing. We broke out the SWAT kit to
get a glimpse of LA's lost underworld. This is my worst angle. This is the wall
right in front of me, so let's just stick this
camera right through this hole and see what we see. There we go. Can you see? RICHARD SCHAVE: This is great. DON WILDMAN: We're
going in there-- oh, yeah, you can see. So that's the underground
of the building next door, and it's even bigger than
the one we're in here. And so you can figure that
keeps going all the way, they say, to the Biltmore Hotel
all the way to the City Hall. This entire thing is connected. It looks like a
basement and a hallway, but this is part of a vast web
of tunnels almost completely forgotten now. I mean, you had the mayor, the
City Hall, chief of police, wealthiest guys in town
running this racket. You know, up-- up on the
streets, solid citizens. Down here in the
tunnels, a life of crime. LA-- it's all about appearances. In 1971, Charles Manson was
on trial inside that building for masterminding the grisly
slaughter of seven people two years earlier-- the infamous
Tate-LaBianca murders. Out on the sidewalks, Manson's
devoted followers-- "the girls" as they were known-- were holding a bizarre
vigil and carved crosses into their foreheads. They were willing to do
anything to prove their love for Charlie. Manson's reign of terror ended
when he and his followers were arrested 280 miles from
Los Angeles in Death Valley. They had come to one of the
most inhospitable deserts in the world hunting
for a sanctuary-- a subterranean
paradise they believed was hidden under
the rocky terrain. Look at how remote
this place is. I mean, we're in the middle
of Mojave Desert, the Panamint Mountains around us here. This is the-- This is the landscape that the
Manson family was living in. I'm retracing Manson's
steps with the help of a man who actually knew him
and lived to tell the tale. So I'm meeting this guy
named Emmett Harder. He's a old prospector. He's worked-- been working
out here for decades. He actually knew
the Manson family. He's taking me to
the Barker Ranch where they lived to see their
hideouts and these caves that Charlie believed
were the entrances into this mystical world. Emmett has been prospecting
for gold in Death Valley since the 1950s and was
working in a small mine when he first met
Charles Manson. So why did the Manson
family choose this place? Why did they come here? This was a place
they could live away from the troubles of the world. Uh-huh. And they found a
lot more trouble. Oh, they brought all
of trouble with them. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER): Manson
wasn't just trying to lay low, he was hoping to disappear
off the face of the earth. He believed an apocalyptic race
war called helter skelter was looming in the near future,
but he and his family would survive by following clues
from the Book of Revelation that would lead them to a
huge cavern as big as a city. He came out here to the desert
looking for the mythical Devil's Hole, an entrance
to a subterranean safehouse. In November of 1968,
Charlie and his girls began their search for
his underground kingdom. So when Charles
Manson is looking for this perfect remote
location to set up this new twisted
mystical world, he comes looking for it
here, through this pass inside this canyon. This is the entrance here? This is the secret entrance
into the Manson camp, but it's-- it's hard to
find if you're not look-- looking for it and
know where it is. The soft limestone here is
riddled with caves and tunnels. And Emmett pointed me to one
of them Manson had explored, but a cave-in blocked our way. I mean, this has been
obviously collapsed in, but this would have been
a full on cave inside. This, for them, represented
a mystical place. This entire landscape, you know,
and the caves that are up here. Basically they related to it
all through Charles's vision. Pockmarked with
uncharted cave entrances, the territory Manson explored
is also riddled with over 100 mines, slashed
through with canyons, and dotted with natural springs
that bubble up out of fissures in the ground. Hunting for an entrance
to the underworld here could take a lifetime
because there are so many targets. While Charlie and the
girls were searching for their magical
portal, they settled down in an abandoned mining
camp called Barker Ranch, and this is where their quest
ended and their bloody work began. So this is the Barker Ranch? This is-- EMMETT HARDER: This
is what's left of it. That's-- that's the
original structure there? Yeah. It was a lot nicer
when Manson was here. DON WILDMAN: So you
can just go in here? Yeah. DON WILDMAN: How weird. EMMETT HARDER: The girls
all would gang up in the-- in this little bedroom here. DON WILDMAN: Uh-huh. So this was filled with-- --with girls. [chuckle] When I was here,
the girls were happy, and there was, like,
a picnic table in here and the girls were cooking
on the stove and flapjacks and communal syrup
dip, you know, and we were dipping
and having hot cakes. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
At the time, Emmett didn't give the rag
tag hippies much thought. Your experience with the
Manson family was a-- it was an innocent time,
it seemed like, for them. EMMETT HARDER: Well,
I didn't know all that was going on here neither. DON WILDMAN: Right. They were just desert
people passing through. DON WILDMAN:
Drifters, lost souls, and loners live out here. And when they go missing,
there's rarely a search. Though no evidence has
been found to date, Emmett believes at least
five missing people were killed by Manson and
his family here at the ranch. One of the stories that I
was told by the girls was that there was a girl here that
didn't get along with anybody and-- and Charlie and
Tex took her for a walk-- Yeah. --and came back without her,
and nobody ever seen her again. So it's likely in your
mind that she may be-- She may be buried out there. She might be. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
40 years later, the police launched a new search for lost
and forgotten Manson victims. Led by sniffer
dogs and CSI teams, the sheriff's department
excavated four grave sized pits between 1 and 3.5 feet deep. No bodies were found, but
this desolate area is too vast to dig it all up, so
we may never know what or who Manson buried out here. So the underworld of this
place might be graves. Well, that's true. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
Over the next 18 months, a restless Manson, unable
to find his secret portal, began to lead his followers back
and forth between Death Valley and LA. It was there, in August of 1969,
that they brutally slaughtered seven people. The family wrote "helter
skelter" and "pig" in blood in a twisted attempt to
jump start racial Armageddon and prove that
Charlie was a prophet. Soon after, Manson
and the family scurried back to their
favorite safe house-- the ramshackle
cabin in the desert. The race war didn't come after
them, but the police did. And look up there. See that fence? If you go up there,
there's chairs up there, and that was a lookout for them. And then if you turn
around and look over here-- OK. EMMETT HARDER: --that was
a dugout where they could crawl in and sleep in there. So this was really
base camp for them? This was their hideout,
their base camp, their refuge. DON WILDMAN (VOICEOVER):
On December 1, 1969, police raided the ranch. At first, Charlie himself
was nowhere to be found. When police authorities came
and arrested all the girls who were lined up in the front
yard there, Charlie hides. Charlie hides in the cabinet. And I mean, it's a
tiny little cabinet, indicating how small
this man really is, and he was inside there. Would've been gone except
for the policeman came in to relieve himself, saw Charles
Manson's long hair hanging outside-- outside the cabinet door
and arrests the guy. Eventually, Manson was convicted
of seven counts of murder. Serving a life
sentence, he will never find the mystical underworld
he was searching for. Los Angeles is a city where
disaster can happen daily. From an entire subway
system consumed by greed to super bunkers
shrouded in mystery, this city inspires
twisted behavior, murder, and decadence. The future of Los Angeles all
depends on the underground.
