A True Story: Dan & SF's Fab Four - Jim, John, George & Harvey (Who Milked It)

In November of 1978, immediately after San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered in City Hall, the police asked their assassin, former police and fireman (and, now, former Supervisor) Dan White when he'd previously ever brought his firearm to the federal building:

"I guess it was a few months ago. I, I was afraid of some of the threats that were made and I had a committee hearing coming up where some of these people were going to appear and I, and I know they had a history of violence..."

Who were "these people" with "a history of violence" making "threats" but still openly "going to appear" at an upcoming committee hearing? Back in 2003, the late Michael Bellefountaine's work in the article "Research on Harvey Milk Renews Calls for Reappraisal of Peoples Temple" hinted at one possibility:

"If there were any connection between the City Hall murders and Peoples Temple, it would clearly have been because Milk and Moscone were too closely tied to Jones and the Temple."

You think? And what did "too closely tied" even mean? Could it be what the cult leader himself, Jim Jones, once told Peoples Temple member Deborah Layton?

"Don't think you can get away with bad-mouthing this church. Mayor Moscone is my friend and he'll support my efforts to seek you out and destroy you." 

Michael Bellefountaine seemed to think so when he also wrote:

"One story has it that Milk asked Peoples Temple to remove his name from the church’s list of supporters when reports of violence and theft first came to light, and that he was outraged when the Temple failed to comply with his demand. Eventually, history settled on an official story: Jim Jones was a master manipulator who used unwitting local politicians to gain power for himself. The politicians, including Milk and Moscone, used Jones for volunteers and votes, while remaining personally distant and blissfully unaware of rumors of Temple violence, abuse, theft and even murder."

But were they "personally distant and blissfully unaware"? Dan White certainly didn't think so - which seems to be entirely why Harvey Milk got himself killed:

I didn't agree with [Harvey] on a lot of things but I was always honest, you know, and here they were devious and then he started kind of smirking cause he knew, he knew that I wasn't going to be reappointed. And ah, . . . .it just didn't make any impres­sion on him. I started to say you know how hard I worked for it and what it meant to me and my family an then my reputation as, as a hard worker, good honest person and he just kind of smirked at me as if to say, too bad an then an then I just got all flushed an, an hot an I shot him.

Which sounds too guilty, until you ponder political life in San Francisco, under cultism. Consider another resident of the wrong persuasion, John Barbagelata (March 29, 1919 – March 19, 1994) San Francisco's last Republican Supervisor and the 1975 mayoral candidate, who lost to George Moscone by 5,000 votes:

Barbagelata...opposed labor unions, hippies, and leftist radicals, which made him a target...He received numerous death threats, a bomb was exploded outside his house, a gun was fired through the windows of his West Portal real estate office, and two mail bombs were sent to his house, eventually requiring 24-hour police and FBI protection for his family....Barbagelata ran for mayor in 1975 against progressive candidate George Moscone,...For the rest of his life, Barbagelata maintained that the Peoples Temple far-left religious cult, led by Jim Jones, committed election fraud in the 1975 election by busing in out-of-town church members to double- and triple-vote for Moscone under the names of dead voters.

That sounds like devious behavior, if you ask me. But no one asks. Nor cares:

"After the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978, Temple members revealed to The New York Times that the Temple arranged for "busloads" of members to be bussed from Redwood Valley to San Francisco to vote in the election. A former Temple member stated that many of those members were not registered to vote in San Francisco, while another former member said "Jones swayed elections." Another former Temple member stated of Jones that "he told us how to vote." She stated that Temple members were required to produce booth stubs to prove that they voted, and members that could not produce such stubs were "pushed around, shoved and physically abused." When asked how Jones could know for whom they voted, the member responded "You don't understand, we wanted to do what he told us to."

They like the pretty little Leftist lie, instead: The pretty lie that they're our heroes.

"San Francisco District Attorney Freitas set up a special unit to investigate election fraud charges. He named Temple member Timothy Stoen, whom he had hired as an assistant district attorney, to lead the unit. Stoen employed Temple members as volunteers to help with work on the investigation. The Temple was not mentioned in the proceedings that followed."