A Bright and Guilty Place Page 11

  Lucien Wheeler was more than savvy; he was a part of the power structure that he knew how to juice, and when White summoned up courage and confronted him, asking “Who do you think killed Ned Doheny?,” he refused to answer. He was giving White a lesson in real-politik or, more likely, just protecting his own position. In L.A. the accomplished Lucien Wheeler swam in the same mixed-up waters as everybody else.

  “What was I supposed to do?” White asked.

  “You were wrong, Les,” Wheeler said. “You should have let sleeping dogs lie until you could prove definitely what did happen.”

  “How can I prove a thing like that unless I’m allowed to investigate it?” White asked.

  Lucien Wheeler shrugged.

  White was walking out of the Hall of Justice, going down the steps when he met Dave Clark coming in. It was a cool and cloudy afternoon. White had seen the handsome Clark often enough by now and the two men usually exchanged nods and greetings. This time, though, Clark stopped. He’d heard that White’s wife was expecting a baby. “Congratulations,” he said, and he touched White on the shoulder in a friendly way. The two men—the one tall and dressed with his usual elegance, the other short with his hat pushed back on his head—stood there chatting. It was a scene White would remember and record in his diary.

  Just about a week before, at around the time of the Greystone killings, Alfred A. Knopf had published Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, in which an unnamed narrator, a private investigator called the Op (short for “operative”) is summoned to a mining town where, to solve his case, he plays off all sides against each other, cops against gangsters, gangsters against gangsters, cops against cops. “I’ve got a hard skin over what’s left of my soul, and after twenty years of messing around with crime I can look at any sort of murder without seeing anything in it but my bread and butter, the day’s work,” says the Op, launching a sour yet hugely seductive and influential world view, a quintessential American style: the hardboiled. Hammett, the former Pinkerton man, had once been offered $5,000 by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to kill labor leader Frank Little. Hammett viewed himself as a formerly dangerous man living in a perpetually corrupt society; his starting point was worldly disillusion, and his Op is “a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy.”

  Leslie White, on the steps in front of the Hall of Justice in February 1929, was a very different sort of detective. Sickly, smart, dedicated, and eager to do good, he recalled an earlier character type, such as those created by Balzac or Charles Dickens. Both authors wrote novels about naïve young men recently arrived in the big city, about to undergo adventures they only think they want, but might not survive. White was the subject of a real-life bildungsroman, and Dave Clark—what Dave Clark said and what happened to him—would be a part of his education. Dave Clark was, in ways both urbane and ultimately tragic, a reality instructor.

  The two men talked about the Doheny case and Lucien Wheeler. “You stood out for what you believed,” Clark told White. “That’s unusual. It frightens people.”

  Clark warned White that he could expect some ridicule from the older detectives, the broken arches. “Not because you were wrong, but because you were naïve,” he said.

  Clark also told White a story. One time he’d been inside the Doheny Mansion at Chester Place with his then boss Olin Wellborn III. He’d seen Doheny open a desk drawer filled with neat stacks of $100 bills and hand Wellborn $50,000 as casually as though it had been a nickel.

  “You might not like that kind of power but you have to know that it’s there,” Clark told White. “It makes things happen.”

  Clark liked E. L. Doheny. He admired not so much the empire the old man had built or the way he pushed people around but his indomitable spirit. He sympathized, too, with Leslie White’s predicament, knowing that crusades were hard work. People tended not to thank you for embarking on them.

  “Have you heard of Charlie Crawford?” Clark asked.

  Indeed White had. “Even before I learned that a city, any city, is invariably under the dominance of a ‘boss,’ I knew of the existence of Charles Crawford, sometimes known as the ‘Gray Wolf’ because of a whitish-gray thatch of hair,” he wrote. “He was almost a legendary figure about whom all sorts of rumors and mysterious stories were told. Boss of Los Angeles County, when he wiggled his fingers the puppets we knew as politicians danced to his lyrics.”

  Clark brought up the subject of the so-called “Red Flannel Raid” and the upcoming conspiracy trial in which Crawford would be among the defendants. Buron Fitts wanted to target The System and was making a big deal of the case. Clark said some preparatory investigative work needed to be done.

  “Would you be interested in tackling the job?” Clark asked.

  White said yes, and Clark spoke to Lucien Wheeler about it. Two days later Wheeler approached White, who collected his gear and drove to 4372 Beagle Street where he climbed the creaking and uneven steps that led up to Callie Grimes’s cottage. He took pictures of the room where Jacobson’s pants were supposedly removed. He made a map of the neighborhood. A photograph from this time shows White himself, stern and owlish in his horn-rimmed spectacles, pinning material to a board in the Hall of Justice.

  Callie Grimes failed to appear at various pre-trial hearings; she’d vanished, and rumor suggested that Crawford had given her a payoff and arranged for her to leave town. Lucien Wheeler put wiretaps on the phones of Grimes’s friends and family. When Grimes contacted her mother, the call was traced to El Paso, Texas, where Grimes was then surprised in a room at the Sheldon Hotel, propped up among pillows and wearing little besides a string of pearls that she claimed Charlie Crawford had given her. Lucien Wheeler chartered a plane to bring her back to L.A. She arrived in time for the beginning of the trial, with silverware and towels she’d stolen from the Sheldon Hotel hidden in her suitcase. Callie Grimes was in no mood to testify. “Why should I be bothered?” she asked grandly. “My plans are my own.”

  Callie Grimes, clearly, would be less than reliable as a witness. The trial began in late March, with Dave Clark and the two other deputy D.A.s who were working the case bitterly denouncing the “subtle alliance” that existed between the police and the underworld. For one afternoon the court was removed to Beagle Street, where Leslie White gave a tour of the cottage, pointing out objects and locations that would feature in proceedings, and rubbing shoulders with Callie Grimes and with Albert Marco, who had been let out of jail for the day. Here White gained his first close-up look at Charlie Crawford. White had expected a villainous roué. Instead he found “a soft-voiced old gentleman, big of stature, with a bland expression and a lock of silvery hair that curled over his forehead and gave him, somehow, a priestly look.”

  Crowds grew daily as the trial went on. Dave Clark was quick to admire Jerry Giesler’s cool and witty conduct of Crawford’s defense. Giesler wasted no chance to exploit the humor of the case; remorseless, he piled indignities on Carl Jacobson, arguing that the councilman had been guilty of improper conduct. “Entrapment is no defense,” Giesler argued. “Carl Jacobson made love and improper advances to Callie Grimes.”

  Jacobson wept on the stand. Recalling what had happened, he said he felt something, “a slap on the neck,” and stumbled onto Callie Grimes’s bed. “Next thing I remembered there were four flashlights in the room, like lights coming out of a dim fog. A policeman was standing in the room with my trousers over his arm. I had one shoe on and the other off. My glasses had been knocked to the floor,” he said.

  Giesler said that Jacobson had been like a mouse after cheese in a trap: he got his neck broke.

  Jacobson told how Marco had offered him the $25,000 bribe in a room in the old City Hall. Jacobson was voluble, but not convincing; he hadn’t reported the attempted bribe at the time the offer was made.

  Callie Grimes refused to back up the accusations she’d made in her affidavit and Giesler argued that charges against Crawford and Marco should be dismissed because there was no lega
l evidence linking them to the conspiracy. The judge accepted this, and Crawford rose to go, sweeping out of court with a smile, while Marco was returned to his cell in the county jail. The trial of the LAPD men went on, however, and resulted in a hung jury and the ordering of a retrial.

  “The case was laughed out of court,” Leslie White wrote. “I was satisfied that Crawford was a vicious old scoundrel.”

  Afterward, in the Hall of Justice waiting for the elevator, White confronted Dave Clark. “That was a farce,” White said. “You know that Crawford was guilty.”

  The suave Clark smiled. “He’s fully capable of framing his own grandmother,” he said. “You don’t seem bothered.”

  Clark shrugged: you win some, you lose some, he seemed to be implying. “It was the right time for our office to run with the informers. And Crawford might not have won after all,” he said.

  Clark had a point. The result looked like a triumph for Charlie Crawford but really wasn’t. The timing of the trial was crucial. A mayoral election was in progress and public airing of the underworld’s intimate connection with City Hall and the LAPD (the gap between these entities now having been shown to be less than the width of a councilman’s undershorts) gave plentiful ammunition to Crawford’s enemies, and to the enemies of Kent Parrot and George Cryer, who decided not to run again, on grounds of ill health, and was replaced as a candidate by another Parrot/Crawford stooge, William G. Bonelli.

  Eminent among Crawford’s enemies was the Reverend Robert Pierce Shuler, known as “Fighting Bob,” a charismatic figure in one of the city’s increasingly powerful arenas: religion. Shuler was a brilliant and powerful evangelist who charmed his massive audience though a whiff of manure seemed to cling to his shoes. This one-man moral backlash fought a form of class warfare on behalf of his “folks” against the corrupt downtown grandees and the sybarites of Hollywood. He was not so much the conscience of L.A. as its puritan subconscious sprung to vivid and resentful life.

  “The Rev. Bob Shuler was born in a log cabin in the Blue Ridge. His people were mountain whites, all poor and most of them illiterate. As a boy, he worked with oxen in the fields. His clothes were made by his mother on a spinning wheel out of flax grown behind the barn,” wrote Edmund Wilson in the New Republic in 1931. Bob Shuler cut wood, hoed corn, tramped the railroad looking for jobs, became a Methodist preacher and, upon arrival in L.A. in the early 1920s, a celebrity. Like his rival Aimee McPherson, Shuler was a rousing preacher whose wealthy followers provided money for a radio station. Unlike her, he had a passion for politics, and used his huge radio audience accordingly, rallying them against evolution, graft, the Jews, Hollywood, and the perceived lawlessness of the rich and famous and powerful. “I’ve found very few millionaires who didn’t get their money in a manner that I doubted if God would own or bless,” he said. With his hillbilly vernacular, Shuler played to the conservative Midwesterners whose exodus had first peopled L.A.

  “Bob Shuler’s appeal was perfectly gauged for these retired farmers and their families, who, finding themselves, after the War, unexpectedly rich from their wheat and corn, had come out to live in California bungalows and to bask in the monotonous sun, but for whom listening to sermons was one of their principal pastimes,” wrote Wilson. “Side by side with sporting oil-millionaires, an exotic California underworld and the celluloid romances of Hollywood, they were glad to get an intimate peek into the debauched goings-on of their neighbors, and at the same time to be made to feel their own superior righteousness, and even—what was probably most gratifying of all—to have a hand in bringing the wicked to judgement.” Fighting Bob became “Christ’s ambassador in a wicked city.” At his red brick Trinity Church he preached in front of banks of flowers and beneath an enormous American flag. Two nights a week he turned over the airwaves of his station, KGEF, to “civic betterment.” Translated, this meant dishing the dirt. Shuler was the most powerful gossip in L.A. and the best informed. He was outspoken, magnetic, a charming fanatic, a zealot who wore loose brown suits and flapping ties and saw conspiracies everywhere. He’d seen one in the fall of Julian Pete, believing that hucksters disguised in the respectable robes of business had robbed blind tens of thousands of his radio congregation; he was right about that, and he rode this insight to greater power, attacking the “Julian thieves” endlessly, slamming Asa Keyes for booze parties and shady meetings with luscious secretaries, and mocking the successive LAPD chiefs who, he saw, were mere pawns of Kent Parrot and Charlie Crawford.

  Through the months of April and May 1929, in the wake of the dismissal of the conspiracy charge against Crawford, Bob Shuler used his radio station and his magazine to lobby hard for John Porter, his own candidate for mayor. Shuler had plucked Porter, a junk dealer and one-time Ku Klux Klansman, out of nowhere—or rather, from the ranks of the grand jury that had indicted Asa Keyes. Porter, therefore, had some loose association with reform, and with Buron Fitts, whom Shuler idolized. A master of innuendo and the personal slur, Shuler liked to single out specific individuals—not just the vague targets of immorality. As the mayoral election reached its climax, he declared that he would “as soon baptize a skunk as Charlie Crawford.” Crawford was “the greatest artist of the double-cross that California has ever seen, a snake,” Shuler said, “no, lower than a snake, a slithering reptile force smearing his loathsome reptile scales on the cleanliness of our city.”

  The rhetoric, going out citywide, had a gathering effect, and in the elections on June 4 the Parrot/Crawford slate met with defeat. John Porter was elected mayor by a wide margin. Further, nine of the candidates nominated by Shuler as city councilmen were put in office. Overnight “Fighting Bob” Shuler became, in effect, the new political boss of L.A.

  It looked like a shattering blow to The System. Mayor Porter quickly replaced LAPD chief Edgar Davis with Dick Steckel, Dave Clark’s good friend. Steckel fired Dick Lucas and Harry Raymond, Crawford’s strongarm men. In swift order Crawford had lost his City Hall clout and the backbone of his protection. Nor was that the end of his problems or threats to his power.

  On February 14, 1929, sandwiched between the end of the Asa Keyes trial and the deaths of Ned Doheny, Jr., and Hugh Plunkett, seven men had been gunned down in a warehouse on Clark Street in Chicago, a now legendary moment in the history of crime: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when Al Capone struck at his rival Bugsy Moran.

  At the time, though, what had happened was far from clear. “Chicago’s Massacre Unsolved,” declared the Times, in a story that ran alongside the breaking news of the Doheny killings on the morning of February 18. “Police Opine Canadians May Be Gang Killers.” The massacre, coming as part of a liquor war, and hard on a wave of bombings and hijackings, made Capone’s enemies think about getting out of Chicago; some of his allies, too, expecting a clampdown, wondered about swapping the windy city for balmier climes. Both groups eyed California, specifically Los Angeles—the new wild west. The Mafia now began to make a more concerted effort to move into L.A., using as allies those Italian racketeers—Jack Dragna, John Rosselli, and the rumrunner Tony Cornero—who were already active in the city, but had been cut out of Charlie Crawford’s System.

  Like E. L. Doheny, Charlie Crawford was a figure from the Old West who’d survived into another time and prospered. Like Doheny, he’d been instrumental in the development of the city he’d made his home, and his arena, in middle-age. Crawford’s role was in the shadows, but he and Doheny had known each other in a casual way for a long time. They both juiced the city’s hidden power lines. Now both of them saw enemies in every corner. Soon after his son’s death, E. L. Doheny boarded a train that took him from L.A. to Washington, D.C., for the bribery trial of Albert Fall. “My friend will be on trial back there and I’m going to testify in the case—that’s about all there is to it,” he told the reporters who watched him depart.

  Attorney Owen J. Roberts, acting for the prosecution in the case of United States v. Albert B. Fall, summed up the affair: “It is all simple,” h
e said. “There are four things of a controlling nature for you to remember. One is that Doheny wanted the lease of the Elk Hills. The second is, Fall wanted money. The third is, Doheny got the lease, and the fourth is, Fall got the money.”

  The aging Fall collapsed and onlookers feared that he might be about to die when the jury delivered its guilty verdict. Fall didn’t die; instead Judge William Hitz fined him $100,000 and sentenced him to a year in jail. Doheny, “stiff and ashen” as the Times reported, knew now that he would be tried for giving a bribe to a man who had already been found guilty of accepting it.

  It wasn’t in the nature of either E. L. Doheny or Charlie Crawford to throw in their hands and quit. They were accustomed to power and command, and their careers had been a process of successful adaptation. They would go on fighting, even as an era drew to its end and history got ready to sweep them away.

  13

  Reach for a Typewriter

  In June 1929 Leslie White’s wife gave birth to a son. Fatherhood added to White’s feelings of uncertainty. Aspects of his work, and the closed-off avenues he was warned not to explore, worried him and nagged at his conscience. He’d put down a deposit and taken out a mortgage on a small house in the suburb of Glendale. He commuted into the city each morning, often sharing the ride with his friend, Casey Shawhan, a crime reporter on the Examiner. The two talked freely about law and graft in L.A., and White aired his insecurities. He had a baby and a bad lung he had to nurse along. For all he knew, he would be let go if another D.A. was elected. The current D.A., Buron Fitts, had set up the expanded investigative bureau as a brand new deal, and with Fitts the bureau might fall. “I had studied hard and was already a qualified court expert on fingerprinting and photography, and something of an expert on the examination of questioned documents,” White later wrote. “At best the job was an interlude.”