Notorious

They call this place the crossroads. It's where children pass the final days of their youth in bright orange uniforms and 10-foot-by-12-foot rooms that lock from the outside; and where the only reminders of life on the "outs" are murals of such heroes as Oscar De La Hoya and Florence Griffith Joyner on the concrete and barbed wire walls. Until now. On Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall did what no other juvenile hall in the county has ever done: It held a prom.

Sixteen years after Notorious B.I.G.'s life and career were cut short in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, his children will pay homage to their iconic father with a new animated series. "House of Wallace" is anchored around the slain rapper's two children, 16-year-old C.J. Wallace -- who he had with his wife, R&B singer Faith Evans -- and 19-year-old T'yanna Wallace, as they fight to maintain his New York City recording studio and preserve his legacy, Ossian Media has announced.

I hope baby boomers do drop out of society, then perhaps Generation X, the young men and women who came into the world behind them, will no longer be treated like dirt by these so-called adults who are notorious for their lack of personal and business ethics. NICOLE DILLENBERG Los Angeles

When Michael Woodford in 2011 became president of Olympus Corp., the Japanese optical equipment maker, he told his secretary there was no need to walk backward each time she left his office. In the executive suite of a Japanese company, where fawning deference to those at the top is the norm, this counted as a radical egalitarian gesture. But, as Woodford discovered, he was not really at the top at all. Although he had been promoted to the presidency, becoming the first foreigner to assume that role since the company was established in 1919, he was kept out of the inner circle.

In answer to Elaine Matzner (Letters, Oct. 5), who was asked to remove her knapsack from her shoulder. The reasons for this are: 1. Thieves are notorious for using knapsacks. 2. People who are wearing knapsacks are also notorious for knocking things off counters. 3. Why would anyone shopping at Harrods be wearing a knapsack at all? MARJORIE PARKER Rancho Palos Verdes

In Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," when the filmmaker Fritz Lang (playing himself) meets Brigitte Bardot's character, she sings the praises of his 1952 Western, "Rancho Notorious." Lang is appreciative, but he begs to differ. "I prefer 'M,' " he says. Lang regarded "M," which opened in 1931, just two years before he fled Nazi Germany for a long if less storied Hollywood career, as his greatest achievement. Judging by its regular placement on all-time-best lists, many critics concur.

Thank you for Ron Russell's wonderful story about the Lido building ("Unreal Life," Jan. 29) and for sharing some of the rarely expressed richness of Hollywood past and present. To set the record straight, however, the building William Holden's character refers to as his home in the movie Sunset Boulevard was not the Lido, but the Alto-Nido, which is on nearby Ivar Avenue. Since you appropriately referred to the Lido as a "Nathanael West novel come to life," it's also worth noting that West himself lived down the street from the Alto-Nido at the Parva-Sed apartments, at 1817 N. Ivar, in the mid-'30s while writing "The Day of the Locust."

Although we still haven't received our census form, I'm glad to see the prisoners are getting theirs delivered to them (April 20). Maybe one of the guards can come by my house and drop off a form, even if it's one of the notorious long forms. KEN MARKS Ontario

1986 is just two months old, and already two notorious dictators--Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti and Ferdinand Marcos--have been sent packing by their outraged subjects. Could this be a trend? Just to keep the ball rolling, I suggest that the Reagan Administration declare March "National Dictator's Month." During this time, any dictator who feels at all insecure about his tenure would be free to leave his country, no questions asked. I also propose that the Air Force scramble a special formation of airplanes--a la the Strategic Air Command--and keep them flying 24 hours a day, ready at a moment's notice to pick up these rejected rulers.

T Like Stephen Farber, I too sat in the theater watching "M:I-2" with a feeling of deja vu ("Mission: Familiar," May 31). Not only can comparisons be made to Hitchcock's "Notorious" and "North by Northwest" but to "To Catch a Thief" as well. I have always been a tremendous fan of Hitchcock's and while I agree that much of the psychological dynamics of "Notorious" are not present in "M:I-2," I don't know that it is entirely a result of the "dumbing down" of mainstream audiences. I believe that the difference has more to do with the studio's desire to pigeonhole audiences demographically, in this case by gender.

GUATEMALA CITY - She holds one of the most dangerous jobs in this spectacularly dangerous country, confronting the most feared and powerful men of the Guatemalan present: gang leaders; dirty public officials; shot-callers in the Mexican drug cartels who have bled in from the north. She is also taking on the titans of Guatemala's past: military men and security chiefs whom she has accused of human rights abuses during the nation's brutal 35-year civil war. Guatemala's emblematic 20th century strongman, Efrain Rios Montt, has been under house arrest since January, when her office charged him with genocide and crimes against humanity.

More than half a century later, the case is closed. Seventy-three-year-old Jack McCullough received a life sentence Monday for the 1957 abduction and killing of 7-year-old Maria E. Ridulph of Sycamore, Ill. A lifetime ago, the two had been neighbors. In those days -- when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and Elvis dominated the airwaves -- Ridulph's disappearance one night, while playing with a friend in the dark on a December evening, horrified the state and the country. Eisenhower himself was reported to have asked for updates on the case.

More than 15 years after Notorious B.I.G. was killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, one of music's most famous homicides remains unsolved, but police officials have released the slain rapper's autopsy report hoping to generate new leads. The Los Angeles Police Department unsealed the report, which had been on a security hold, on Friday, revealing the graphic details of how the Brooklyn-bred rapper, born Christopher Wallace, died in March 1997. But as The Times' L.A. Now blog reported in its coverage of the autopsy report's release, the LAPD has released no new information about the investigation, and it's still unclear whether the release was prompted by new leads on the unsolved slaying.

The Los Angeles Police Department took the unusual step Friday of unsealing the 15-year-old autopsy report of rapper Notorious B.I.G., saying they hope to generate new leads in the murder mystery. The autopsy report had been kept private at the request of investigators. But on Friday, the Los Angeles County Coroner's office released the 23-page document, which provided details about the shooting. "Investigators decided to release the autopsy to stimulate new interest in the case and hopefully produce new leads," said Lt. Andrew Neiman.

Of all the scam artists to set foot in Los Angeles, one of the most notorious was A. Victor Segno, who duped thousands of people around the world into sending him $1 a month to belong to his Segno Success Club. In return, he promised to send out brain waves twice a day to help members achieve success. Some ideas never die. In fact, a century after he carried out his scheme, the beguiling con man still can hook people. Stamp expert Ed Grabowski, a retired chemist from New Jersey, is proof.

Where the Sepulveda Pass spills into the San Fernando Valley, gridlock is a way of life. So much so that this weekend's closure of the 405 Freeway — one of the Valley's chief arteries to the Los Angeles Basin — is a non-event to residents whose lives are already structured to avoid the freeway's notoriously heavy traffic. (Still available are the Hollywood and Ventura freeways, plus surface routes like Beverly Glen Boulevard, Coldwater Canyon and Laurel Canyon Boulevard). With days to go before Friday's shutdown, for example, Hudson and Molly Shock aren't plotting how they will navigate around it. They say they only drive "over the hill" about once a month anyway.

Are the Dodgers really in position to allow themselves to be used as a vehicle for Steve Garvey's swan-song tour of the National League? The Dodgers already have one foot in the cellar and they can only hasten their rapid descent by wasting their time, money and a roster position on Garvey. The Dodgers have become notorious for their recent bonehead player decisions. If they sign Garvey, it would only increase that reputation. BILL TAPP El Cajon

Let me point out two errors in Dennis McDougal's article, "Why Actresses Are in Love With 'Babbitt' " (Nov. 22): The Mercury Theatre on the air did not "launch itself" with "The War of the Worlds." The series debuted on Sept. 11, 1938, with a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The notorious Halloween Eve broadcast of the H.G. Wells adaptation was the Mercury's eighth show. Secondly, even if the 1927 premiere of "The Jazz Singer" is regarded as "the advent of talkies" (which conveniently ignores a silent-to-sound transition period lasting into the early 1930s)

AMARILLO, Texas - It's well after midnight in a parched corner of Texas known as the buckle of the Bible Belt, down the road from the Jesus Christ is Lord Travel Center, which is just what it sounds like: an evangelical truck stop. In the back of an empty strip mall, an up-and-coming hip-hop artist with the self-assurance and billowing locks of Samson is shooting a video. His hair is up in a tidy bun and he's enduring a second hour of makeup transforming him into the likeness of a gender-bending woman, all of which makes more sense once you know that Adair Lion began his career by destroying it. Hip-hop has been described as the heartbeat of urban America, but for years, it had an open secret - that heart was brimming with hate.

On June 11, just before the City Council fired this town's first African American police chief, the Rev. John D. Hardin addressed the packed council chambers, blacks sitting on one side, whites on the other. Hardin, the 82-year-old pastor of the black Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, paraphrased lyrics from an old song by Texas country legends Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, "Just to Satisfy You": Somebody's gonna get hurt before we're through, And don't be surprised If that somebody is you. It wasn't so much a warning as a plea for this East Texas logging town to avoid racial conflict.