The Underdogs' Favorite

Los Angeles Times Reporter-Columnist Paul Coates, 44, specializes in sentimental stories about the oddball and the offbeat. In 18 years of reporting, he has become familiar to just about every criminal, cop and kook in California.

When he walks across the yard at San Quentin prison, inmates line up to shake his hand. He has interviewed pickpockets, prostitutes and crooks on TV; once an escaped mental-asylum patient barged into the studio and unburdened himself over the air. It has become something of a local practice for fugitives from justice to surrender to Coates.

When he answered his office phone one Friday last month, Coates was not surprised to hear a husky female voice announce that Manuel Ruiz, one of a suspected gang which had relieved an armored truck of $110,000, wanted to surrender. Coates accepted the offer. "Dad's playing Dick Tracy again," quipped one of his sons. Coates appeared at the appointed hour on a lonely Los Angeles street corner. "I always do it, and I'm always scared."

Back in Coates's office, Ruiz pulled a paper bag with a suspicious bulge out of his pocket. "Here it comes," thought the reporter. But all that emerged from the bag was a pint of Scotch. "You care if I take a few nips while we talk? I feel pretty shaky," said Ruiz, shaking.

Why did Ruiz want to surrender? He had blown most of his money on a girl friend and on bribing his way in and out of Mexico. Why did he want to surrender to a Times man? He knew that Coates had a weakness for engaging crooks. Besides, Coates would be in line for a $5,000 reward, which Ruiz wanted him to put in a trust fund for his four children. "He felt I wouldn't double-cross him," recalls Coates.

Coates agreed to the deal, but the only reward he got was a big scoop in the Times. The holdup victim, Armored Transport, Inc., was "not about to give any additional money to a man who may have already beat them out of $40,000," says Coates. But a good reporter is not easily put off a juicy crime story. Last week Coates was doggedly tracking down a lead to Ruiz' brother Henry, an alleged member of the holdup gang. He has high hopes of engineering still one more sentimental surrender.

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