A Bright and Guilty Place Read online

  “Everywhere the wheels were clicking and the bones were rolling, and a particularly impressive sight was a heavily gold-braided police captain who benignantly elbowed his way in and out of the throng,” said McClure’s. The Northern ran for fifty-four days, with three shifts of dealers and barmen and girls working around the clock seven days a week, netting Crawford $200,000 before reformers discovered that the club was built on land actually leased from the city itself. This was too much, even for Seattle. Hundreds of respectable citizens roused themselves, marching past the Northern Club with banners raised, to the accompaniment of a Salvation Army Band. It was another classic Western scene. Hiram Gill’s mayorship was recalled, largely through the vote of newly enfranchised women. Police chief Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein, another Crawford supporter, earned himself three to ten years in the state pen at Walla Walla, and a new police unit known as “The Purity Squad” patrolled the streets, rousting single women from hotel rooms and arresting even married couples who strolled the streets after dark.

  For Charlie Crawford, Seattle was over. In 1911 he headed south, to a town that still seemed wide open: Los Angeles. Downtown, at 230 East Fifth Street, he opened the Maple Bar, another handsome Barbary Coast affair with a casino downstairs and a whorehouse above. “In those days he was a picturesque, hard-fisted, garish figure, shrewd, generous, and following his own course,” wrote the Examiner. “His saloon was the meeting place of a strange assortment. There were ward heelers, police officers, men of shady and questionable reputation.”

  L.A., though, wasn’t Seattle; the atmosphere was different. “Toil broken and bleached out, they flock to Los Angeles, fugitives from the simple inexorable of life, from labor and drudgery,” wrote Louis Adamic of the Midwestern surge into the city. These immigrants—“half-educated, materially prosperous, but spiritually and mentally starving”—had left behind the freezing winters but brought with them habits of religion and temperance. L.A.’s Anti-Saloon League was well organized, and the city voted itself dry in 1917, more than two years before the federal Prohibition amendment took effect.

  The “great experiment” of Prohibition changed everything, forcing Crawford in theory to shut the Maple Bar. But by now he was an adept operator in the shadows where the city’s politics and police department mixed seamlessly with crime through the simple expedient of money. Civic historians are uncertain when “The System” actually came to L.A. It’s not the kind of historical event that gets marked with a plaque. Many American cities of that era had their own style of graft—Minneapolis was an example of complete police corruption, while in St. Louis “boodlers” (businessmen who paid off officials for public works contracts) ran the show. In Pittsburgh, known as “Hell with the lid off,” industrialists were in control. The way in which business became politics and politics was turned inside-out by money differed subtly from place to place, and it’s likely that Charlie Crawford brought The System with him from Seattle, where he’d operated in a boom town by causing his man, Hiram Gill, to be elected mayor.

  In L.A. Crawford found his enabler in Kent Kane Parrot, a former USC football star and graduate of USC law school. Parrot was a tall, handsome man, a suave dandy who liked urban politics, “because it’s lots of fun.” His first wife had been the screenwriter Mary O’Hara, the future author of My Friend Flicka. Parrot had friends everywhere. He “mastered the art of the unorthodox floating coalition, merging liberals with conservatives, church leaders with underworld figures, union officials with open-shop zealots, and prohibitionists with liquor interests,” writes historian Jules Tygiel. Parrot’s alliance included important preachers, members of the Better America Foundation, a couple of important judges, a local figure who could deliver the black vote on Central Avenue, political fixer “Queen” Helen Werner, and Charlie Crawford.

  The key moment came in 1921 when, defying predictions and the opposition of the Times, the Parrot alliance put in their own man, George Cryer, as mayor. In 1925 Parrot and his crew once again routed the entrepreneurial elite and kept Cryer in power. Parrot embraced municipal ownership of water and other utilities. He promoted a growing city that was businesslike and conflict-free. He believed that people would drink, gamble, and frequent whorehouses whether national and local governments permitted them or not. Tourists were an important part of L.A.’s economy and some tourists expected to enjoy tourism’s more dangerous pleasures. Therefore vice went on, sanctioned and protected, low-key and lucrative, controlled and almost monopolized. A corrupt corps of men in the LAPD didn’t fight crime; they protected it because those who ran the rackets had city government on their side. Practical politics meant not rocking the boat, greasing the palm, and keeping the machine grinding. Parrot let Charlie Crawford work the way he knew. Kickbacks and bribes got things done. Money had to be made and the boys had to be looked after. Vice wasn’t a racket, it was a business; and corruption was merely a part of the grown-up fallen world.

  “The huge diamonds that covered his fingers and gleamed from his tie vanished,” wrote the Examiner, describing how Crawford grew into his role of power. “His clothes became subdued and his conduct underwent the same change. In his own way, Crawford had graduated.”

  Another contemporary observer noted: “He dressed differently, moved with a different stride, walked with a different companionship. He was no longer a ward heeler and a tenderloin boss. He was the man next to the throne and he had the native ability to assume the part.”

  Crawford brought down Albert Marco from Seattle to help him run things. Crawford met regularly with Kent Parrot in Parrot’s apartment at the Biltmore Hotel. Parrot stood closest to the figureheads, the elected officials. Crawford kept tabs on the police and the underworld captains, orchestrating the business between them. “Crawford was the general behind the collections, and the stream of gold that flowed from commercialized vice and the protection thereof flowed through the hands of Crawford,” wrote a contemporary. “Commercialized vice was yielding more profits to those protecting it than the combined salaries of all police officials on the beats.”

  This was the L.A. System, the entrenched graft that the Daily News and reformers sporadically sought to attack. Crawford further burnished his image by opening a real estate and insurance office, though the red ledger on his desk, often showing a daily income of $15,000, told of “Mrs. Flora Carroll, $2,500” and “Mrs. Belle Stocking, $2,500”—these were rents from or protection for brothels. Crawford had a wife, Ella, who was a good deal younger than he, and two small children, both girls. The family lived in an elegant two-story villa with a high, arched portico on North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, then (as now) a ritzy neighborhood of grand properties and wide green lawns.

  Crawford met a beautiful and capable young prostitute, Beverly Davis, and established her as the madam of an opulent brothel in Hancock Park. The brothel was designed for the “rich, sporting element, the studio crowd,” and Davis became Crawford’s mistress and spy. “He was a big, bluff, handsome man,” she said. Crawford was a survivor, a fixer who preferred to outsmart his opponents. “He was never a gunner,” said his friend, the ex-Seattle police chief “Wappy” Wappenstein. “He knew everybody,” the Evening Herald wrote. “Judges, lawyers, bankers, beautiful women, theatrical magnates, chauffeurs, politicians and bootblacks were familiar acquaintances and friends. He was genial, happy, and at home wherever he found himself.” A “politician” then, in the 1920s sense. Even so, Crawford tried to dodge publicity, saying that his mother was “92 years old and wouldn’t stand it.”

  Crawford’s muscle, his chief enforcer through most of the 1920s, was Dick Lucas, an LAPD lieutenant later described as “a racketeer with a gun buttressed by the authority of a police badge.” At the time no journalist would dare print such a statement. Lucas was a big man, over six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, and was often seen casually toting a Thompson sub-machine gun. He made great copy, personally driving Eastern gangsters out of the city by threatening them with the Thompson and sugges
ting they had until the next evening to get back to New York or Chicago, or else find themselves on a slab in the morgue.

  “One day in 1927, Al Capone and his entourage came to town, allegedly to sniff out prospects. The gendarmerie buzzed,” wrote Matt Weinstock of the Daily News. Capone was already a prime symbol of what Prohibition had come to mean, a swaggering multimillionaire bootlegger and ganglord who had gained control of a Chicago suburb, Cicero, while his henchmen afflicted the entire city with a new style of wholesale murder, rubbing out rivals with bombs and machine-guns. Capone lived like a king, occupying several floors of a plush hotel, and driving through the Chicago streets in an armor-plated car with bullet-proof windows. He was the kind of flamboyant gangster that Los Angeles didn’t have, the kind of ruthless, all-powerful gangster and rival that the more discreet Charlie Crawford, especially, didn’t want. So Crawford sent Dick Lucas to call on Capone and ask him what his intentions were. Next day Capone took the train to Chicago and the News headlined its story: “CAPONE TOLD TO BLOW. GANG CHIEF ROUSTED.”

  Another time Lucas and his partner Harry Raymond waited with machine-guns in the garage of a bootlegger who had made the mistake of hijacking some of Albert Marco’s supply. When the bootlegger came home and opened the garage door, they killed him. Applause greeted the effort, though the public didn’t know the cops were on the payroll of politician-racketeer Charlie Crawford. Lucas and his men committed other murders that were then blamed on Italian gangsters who were at that time marginalized in L.A. and kept out of the richest pickings of The System.

  In 1923 reformers managed to put in place August Vollmer, the nation’s foremost police intellectual, a major influence behind the introduction of crime labs, fingerprinting, lie detectors, and method-of-operation files. Vollmer, invited down from San Francisco to reorganize the corrupt and demoralized two thousand–strong LAPD, set up a series of lectures and symposia at USC and UCLA. During one of these think-tank meetings, LAPD Captain Clyde Plummer said: “The Chinese have no excuse for existence. They are gamblers and dope fiends. They are a menace to our community.” Another ranking officer, Lieutenant James Lyons, noted: “The organization I represent is known as ‘The Crime Crushers.’ We are the fellows that go out and knock their ears down. We chastise them.” Los Angeles needed August Vollmer badly. He analyzed what was wrong and issued a progressive manifesto in a big and handsomely bound volume that was promptly discarded. Vollmer was sent on his way, ousted in less than a year by Kent Parrot’s faction.

  Attempts at police reform stopped when Vollmer left, and a quarter-century of neglect ensued. Through the rest of the 1920s corruption was tolerated so long as L.A. didn’t appear to be out of hand in the way of, say, Chicago, where Capone’s friends and enemies blasted each other in the streets and blew each other apart with bombs that killed innocent bystanders too. The LAPD had a number of other chiefs during this period, one of whom, Louis Oaks, was fired when found drunk with a naked woman in the backseat of his car. The most important was James Edgar Davis, another big man, a crack shot who posed for publicity shots surrounded by beauties in swimsuits. Davis, described by one newsman as “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly anti-labor man who saw Communist influence behind every telephone poll,” had the support of Harry Chandler at the Times (Chandler feared organized labor and Reds, not racketeers of The System, who were at least capitalists) and of Mayor Cryer, whose aide was Kent Parrot, close friend of Charlie Crawford. Wheels-within-wheels: “See Charlie—that was the answer to a request for a political favor,” wrote the Evening Herald, and at the height of his power and influence, in the mid-1920s when most people in L.A. had never even heard of Charlie Crawford, he had much of the city’s political structure in his pocket—city hall, cops, reporters, too, dipped their beaks.

  In the grand jury room of the Hall of Justice, on that morning after Ned Doheny’s funeral, Dave Clark saw that Charlie Crawford was with Jerry Giesler, another young attorney making a name for himself. Giesler had come to California in 1907 where he’d studied law at USC, and had apprenticed himself to Earl Rogers. Some of Giesler’s future cases—involving the defense of Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, Bugsy Siegel, and the stripper Lili St. Cyr—would provide headline copy for nearly half a century. But at this time, it’s fair to say, Dave Clark was the more famous and better regarded lawyer. The Marco case had given Clark a glow, and here was a chance to add to it. Back in 1927 a reform-minded city councilman, Carl Jacobson, had approached the Daily News and handed over the addresses of various brothels on Sunset Boulevard. The News then published these addresses as part of its anti-vice campaign that was being spearheaded by reporter Gene Coughlin and chiefly directed against Albert Marco. The brothels, though, were a part of Charlie Crawford’s empire. Crawford assumed that Jacobson was corruptible, like almost everybody else, and sent over Albert Marco to offer him $25,000 if he’d stop being a pest. Jacobson refused. Soon thereafter he found himself befriended by Mrs. Callie Grimes, a blond widow with obvious charms. Grimes invited Jacobson to her home on Beagle Street, to a “vine-covered bungalow” that was soon to be famous. Jacobson was there with Callie Grimes one afternoon when the door flew open and cops burst in, together with reporters and photographers with flashguns. Among the cops were Dick Lucas, Harry Raymond, and others who were on Charlie Crawford’s payroll. It was later disputed whether Jacobson was dressed only in “red flannel underwear” or whether, as he himself claimed, Lucas and Raymond upended him and stripped off his pants while the lovely Callie disrobed to pose for pictures.

  This little farce, which came to be known as “The Red Flannel Raid,” happened on August 5, 1927. Jacobson was charged with a morals misdemeanor and found not guilty. He claimed he’d been framed, and went on causing trouble. Some fifteen months later Callie Grimes herself was persuaded to support him. She sold her story to the News for $2,500 then proceeded to the D.A.’s office and swore out a sensational affidavit, listing the men who, she alleged, had conspired with her to stage the raid and bring down Jacobson.

  Albert Marco was among those Callie Grimes named, as was Charlie Crawford; it was a big moment in the reformers’ struggle with the serpentine power of the L.A. System. The grand jury followed through: conspiracy indictments were returned and arrest warrants issued. Marco was by now already in county jail, awaiting transfer to San Quentin, having been prosecuted by Dave Clark. But Crawford reported to the grand jury room with Jerry Giesler to answer his warrant and hear the date when he would be required to enter his plea and then face trial. Dave Clark arrived a little late, having hurried from St. Vincent’s, but in time to play his part in the formalities.

  Charlie Crawford was a big man, still handsome, long-faced, soft-voiced, with eyes of startling blue and silvery hair. He had ruddy cheeks and big ears with long fleshy lobes. It’s been suggested that golf, the great connector in Dave Clark’s social and professional life, had brought the two men together before this, and it’s indeed likely that their paths had crossed. Certainly Clark, like everybody in the D.A.’s office, already knew a great deal about Charlie Crawford.

  This day’s proceedings were routine. Dave Clark filed for a trial date. Crawford posted $2,000 bail and was granted his freedom. For Crawford, the worst part of all this was the exposure. On the afternoon of February 19, the Evening Express felt free to name him “the city’s outstanding underworld boss.” The Gray Wolf was no longer in the shadows. Soon Clark would be facing Crawford in court, foreshadowing their later confrontation over a gun barrel.

  12

  Systems Under Siege

  Within days of the shootings at Greystone, Lucien Wheeler, the head of the D.A.’s investigative unit, ordered young Leslie White to investigate the death of a prostitute. She’d been found in a gutter in Chinatown, killed by a bullet from a gun that lay nearby. The LAPD reported a suicide. Wheeler wondered whether White, having been “so successful” with the Doheny case, might prove her death happened otherwise. At the morgue White found the woman
’s corpse covered with bruises, apparently made by the toe of a shoe. She’d been kicked almost to death before being shot from an angle and distance that precluded any theory of suicide. It was murder, but White soon discovered that nobody gave a damn. “Her case was dropped not because she had too much money to tamper with, but simply because she did not have money enough,” he wrote.

  White felt like, one way or another, he too had “taken an awful beating.” His anger bubbled over and he confronted Lucien Wheeler.

  In the early 1920s, while bureau chief for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Los Angeles, Wheeler had orchestrated the capture of former Mexican general Enrique Estrada, who was amassing machine-guns, armored cars, and various other weaponry in Southern California, planning to march back down into Mexico and start a counterrevolution. Along with Estrada, 104 other insurrectionists were arrested, and the Mexican government sent engraved watches to each of Wheeler’s men who’d helped thwart the half-baked though dangerous scheme. BOI agents (like FBI men subsequently) were forbidden from accepting such gifts so Wheeler gathered together all the watches and returned them. This was all very well and proper. On the other hand, Wheeler had been a beneficiary in one of the Julian Pete rings, happy to line his pockets.

  In 1927, J. Edgar Hoover, the new head of the BOI, threatened Lucien Wheeler with a transfer. Hoover liked his agents young and eager and kept them on their toes by shifting them or firing them at will. Wheeler was too experienced to submit to Hoover’s tyranny. Besides, he had other irons in the fire. He resigned, and was replaced in L.A. by Frank Blake, who would in time orchestrate the trapping and slaughter of the bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde and become one of Hoover’s top men. Meanwhile Wheeler set himself up as a private investigator. One of his first clients was Jake Berman, aka Jack Bennett, the two-name “Boy Ponzi” whose antics and demeanor so annoyed Leslie White. Wheeler, on becoming head of Buron Fitts’s investigative unit, brokered the deal whereby Berman received immunity in exchange for turning state’s evidence.