Louis P. Mountanos, Marin’s Top Gun

By Steefenie Wicks
There were three of them, Frank Lee Morris, the brains of the outfit with an IQ of 133, and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John W. … would their plan work?  Sometime in the early hours of June 13, 1962 they put their plan to work and escaped from Alcatraz.   Their bodies were never found but in Sausalito, the escape raft washed up at the foot of Johnson Street and was discovered by artist Barney West.  The police were called and the scene took on a life of its own.
Arriving in his vehicle and known for looking quite dashing was Sheriff Louis P. Mountanos, who ordered patrols all along the Marin waterfront.  Sheriff Mountanos had been named Sausalito’s Police Chief in 1955, when he was only 27 years old.  At that time he was one of the youngest police chiefs in California and with his youth came daring that would one day make him a political leader in Marin County.  Mountanous, elected sheriff in 1958, would run for re-election four times and win.  One hears of individuals who become legends in their lifetime, and it is safe to say that Louis P. Mountanos was one of those individuals.
Mountanos was the son of Greek immigrants born and raised in the tight Greek community of the San Francisco Mission District. He attended Mission High School and served in the Navy during WWII.  After the war he returned home and became a member of the San Francisco police force, then found his way across the Bay to Sausalito, where his destiny awaited.  
In his career as Sheriff, the escape from Alcatraz would be only one in a list of world news events his name would be connected with.  In 1953, it was written in the local Sausalito newspaper, that Mountanos, “decided that he could not let the Greek royalty pass through these parts with out a personal greeting.”  The article went on to mention that Mountanos, whose parents came from Sparta, spoke in Greek to Frederika, the German-born queen when she and the King visited Muir Woods.  He reported that her English and Greek were “out of this world.”
In 1963, Mountanos, as Sheriff of Marin County, told the Sausalito Board of review that things had been very different in Sausalito when he was Police Chief. “The Chief of Police should be the City manager… meaning that all decisions should rest with him and not some City Manager who wants to write memorandums.”  Never one for memorandums, Mountanos the maverick went his own way.  Then, in 1970, an event that rocked Marin County took place in a shoot-out at the Marin County Civic Center.
On the morning of August 7, 1970 a call came over the police scanner about a possible gunman at large in the court area of the Marin County Civic Center.   News photographer James J. Kern would later testify that he had been on a call at Marin General when he heard the call come over the scanner.  
When he arrived on the scene, Kern said he saw Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, a shotgun taped around his neck, and convict James McClain, holding a jurist in a tight grip, another gun at the judge’s head, and also holding something that looked like a “home made bomb.”    Sheriff Mountanos and two deputies were standing against the wall, their hands up.   Mountanos, is quoted as telling the convict McClain, “if you blow his [the judge’s] head off I’ll blow yours off.”  To this day no one is sure who yelled “fire,” but as the inmates tried to drive away from the Civic Center, when the smoke cleared  all you could see were bodies.
This event became known as the attack to free the “Soledad Brothers” and would result in the death of Judge Haley, 17 year old Jonathan Jackson and convicts James McClain and William Christmas.  In 1972, a young woman named Angela Davis went on trial for this event.  But it would be the career of Mountanos that began to crumble.
Because by the late 1970s the “House Boat Wars “ on the Sausalito waterfront
would challenge his authority with what was filmed and reported as an out and out “war”on the waterfront houseboat dwellers by the local police and
Sheriff’s departments. Mountanos defended his department’s handling of the Waldo Point Harbor houseboat “riot” and felt that his job was to move his department toward more modern crime fighting technology.
But in 1978 he was defeated and left his position in Marin to become part of the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company.  In 1982 he ran for Congress as a conservative Democrat and lost to Barbara Boxer.   
Mountanos was a graduate of the FBI academy, a Greek with a heritage that led back to Sparta, and he led his life as a warrior who faced the challenges of his world with the spirit of his ancestors.


Louis Mountanos when he was police chief of Sausalito
Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society