To thousands of viewers in the Los Angeles area, station KTTV's impromptu 90-minute crime show last week was better than the big networks' M Squad, Dragnet or Highway Patrol had ever been. Instead of Lee Marvin. Jack Webb or Broderick Crawford, they saw two real hooch-soaked hoods with six hostages as they held out in a tense siege by 150 real cops and FBI agents in an Inglewood dive just outside Los Angeles.
A friend of police, KTTV Special Events Director Bill Welsh, 46, was tipped off on the story only 15 minutes after it broke. He alerted a mobile unit that...
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