The wildly unhinged 300-pound Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on a real man who was not Samoan at all. Oscar Zeta Acosta was a Mexican-American activist, novelist, and radical lawyer who once ran for Los Angeles County Sheriff carrying a flowered briefcase, then vanished without a trace in Mexico at age 39. We strip away the pop-culture caricature to explore who he really was, weaving the law and literature together as weapons in the fight for a marginalized community.

We follow his journey from a working-class childhood and a creative writing degree to defending the Chicano 13 and the Brown Berets, his audacious campaign to abolish the sheriff's department, and his volatile friendship with Hunter S. Thompson. We examine the painful clearance dispute over Fear and Loathing, the argument that Acosta supplied the b ...