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Eugene Biscailuz joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department as a deputy in 1907. He retired more than half a century later, including 26 years as the county's top cop.
Before becoming sheriff, he made his name in a sensational hunt for a killer, bringing back escaped murderer "Tiger Woman" Clara Phillips from Honduras. He also served as first superintendent of the California Highway Patrol and was credited with modernizing it, making it a model for other states.
As sheriff from 1932 to 1958, he transformed the department into a professional law enforcement agency. He pioneered the practice of putting good prisoners to work on honor farms and ranches in an effort to rehabilitate them. He also started the volunteer Aero Squadron, now an official county search and rescue team, and brought in amateur pilots Hoot Gibson and Howard Hughes as early recruits.
At the same time, he was a courtly and colorful cowboy who sat astride a silver-saddled palomino at parades and rodeos.
Before his death, Biscailuz donated 10 photo scrapbooks to the Doheny Library at USC and more than 40 boxes of personal letters and photographs to UCLA.
"He was a link between the old and the new," said Lt. Paul Scauzillo with the sheriff's court service division, who has been using those resources the last three years to research Biscailuz's life.
A short, stocky man, Biscailuz was a descendant of Jose Maria Claudio Lopez, a Spanish soldier at the San Gabriel Mission.
With French Basque sheepherders and Los Angeles' early settlers as ancestors, Biscailuz mirrored the diversity of the region, speaking four languages: Basque, Spanish, English and Latin. He routinely bowed at the waist to ladies in his company.
He was born in 1883 in...