Gerry Mulligan was busted for heroin at his north Hollywood home by the notorious John O'Grady, head of the local narcotics squad, on 13 April 1953. Mulligan was young, white, seemingly clean-cut, and leading a quartet – his own baritone saxophone, Chet Baker's trumpet, bass and drums. The band had soared to popularity thanks to its streamlined, weightless, improvised counterpoint between the two horns.
But Mulligan's arrest showed how far the heroin epidemic had penetrated the jazz world. Evidence suggests that the mafia targeted jazz musicians as a suitable market in the 1940s, with outstanding success. Charlie Parker, who invented a new way to play jazz, was a notorious junkie – his younger disciples reasoned that if he took it, there must be something to it. Perhaps it provided a temporary escape from the cultural and social insecurity caused by a lack of proper acknowledgment for what they believed to be work of significant intellectual value.
Mulligan served jail time, cleaned up and rebuilt his career, but those of countless others were permanently blighted or prematurely extinguished by drugs.