He was a high school football player and class president in the Central Valley. Then he went to Panama with the US Air Force, where he became a Baptist preacher. Back in California, he went to law school at night and passed the bar exam. And after that, he was introduced to a nascent movement embracing the new cultural and political categorization of “Chicano.”
In L.A. in the late 1960s, Oscar Zeta Acosta became the movement’s lawyer. But the enigmatic Brown Buffalo was in a way just getting started.
In 1970, Acosta ran for sheriff of Los Angeles County. His platform included a commitment to the “ultimate dissolution” of the department itself. He earned more than 100,000 votes, but still about a million short needed to beat the eventual winner, the long-serving Peter Pitchess (who had started his career as an FBI agent).
Four years later, in 1974, Oscar Zeta Acosta disappeared in Sinaloa, Mexico ... leaving no trace, to this day.