Sex&Murder

The dealer was arrested on outstanding warrants, and Batres remembers the night as a turning point on RAD's controversial war on drugs in the Haight, a famously tolerant neighborhood widely known as the birthplace of hippie counterculture. "I got a lot of respect for that man," Batres says, adding that crime in the neighborhood dropped dramatically after Joe put the dealer in jail.

But that was back in the mid-1990s, during the heyday of Konopka and his Residents Against Druggies crusade when Joe believed he could parlay his activism into a seat on the Board of Supervisors. RAD gradually stopped patrolling and faded away —just as Joe Konopka did about seven years ago. That was when he lost his second bid for the Board of Supervisors, in 2000. Afterward, he all but vanished from the public eye until this past July, when the 65-year-old Konopka was found dead inside the Ashbury Street home he shared with his wife of more than 30 years, Ethel.

When homicide inspectors arrived at the couple's house that night — after emergency dispatchers received two 911 calls from Konopka's cell phone — they saw Konopka lying facedown on the bed in the master bedroom wearing black leather fur-lined restraints on his wrists and ankles. A black hood covered his face and head. A rope tied to the bed was wrapped around his feet, up to his wrists, and around his neck.

A week later, police arrested a 40-year-old drug user who, according to a friend, became a bondage and discipline, or B&D, escort mainly to finance his heroin habit. But what's unclear is whether this was a bondage session gone wrong or, as prosecutors say, murder.

During the 1990s, Haight residents complained of a crack epidemic sweeping the neighborhood. The longtime hippie crowd, known to cruise Haight Street looking to buy or sell "buds" and "doses," had given way to a crowd looking for harder drugs.

Joseph B. Konopka Jr., a food management consultant, was one of those disillusioned people who moved to San Francisco not long after the Summer of Love. Konopka himself acknowledged that he'd come to Haight-Ashbury "to do drugs" in the 1970s, but believed things had gotten out of hand. "We don't care if you do drugs. We're just saying don't do it on our streets," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1993.

In his view, the Haight was disintegrating. It wasn't just the drugs that infuriated him — he was also a major critic of what he described as an epidemic of public defecation in the neighborhood. At one point, he even hung a sign on his front stoop that read, "Do Not Crap on My Stairs."

In 1993, Konopka gathered about 150 people from the area into the auditorium of the Urban School. At the meeting he spoke of how neighborhood groups were sprouting up in cities across the country to take back the streets. He told them of author and longtime narcotics agent Michael Levine and his book Fight Back: How to Take Back Your Neighborhood, Schools and Families From the Drug Dealers. Levine urged ordinary citizens to fight drugs by targeting users, recommending everything from peer pressure to scare tactics to make them stop taking drugs — or at least push them elsewhere. Resident Karen Crommie remembered the moment in a recent newsletter article written for the Cole Valley Improvement Association in honor of Konopka: "He paused and looked across the faces of those sitting in the bleacher seats and said, 'If you want to follow the neighborhood patrol program of Michael Levine, stay. If you don't, leave now.'"

At the meeting, Residents Against Druggies was born.

Neighbors who joined RAD started donning matching T-shirts and caps in a distinctive lime green that was almost neon (dubbed "RAD green" among members) and patrolling the neighborhood looking for drug crimes and suspicious activity. Joe Konopka even brought in members of the Guardian Angels, the worldwide organization of civilian crime patrollers, to train RAD in everything from self-defense to how to spot drug dealers and buyers. Neighborhood patrollers with RAD focused on taking a nonconfrontational approach. They made their neon-clad presence known and kept notebooks filled with observations, but crimes in progress were usually not interrupted but rather called into "home base," where someone waited by the telephone to call the police.