A Bright and Guilty Place Page 14

  Then on the night of April 15, Robert Bursian, a jeweler, was found beneath his totaled Buick at the bottom of a 100-foot embankment off Beverly Boulevard. Apparently he’d been crushed to death. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that he had “knock-out drops” in his blood and might have been the victim of poisoning. Fitts then made the announcement that Bursian had been an undercover agent working on a “particularly vital phase of the Julian investigation.” Fitts stated: “If it is not foul play, it is a remarkable coincidence.”

  Fitts offered no further details, and ultimately the mystery of Bursian’s death would remain unexplained and unsolved, like the death of the chauffeur, found drowned in his car, off the end of the Santa Monica pier in Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. When asked who had killed the chauffeur, Chandler replied: “How the hell should I know?” Chandler’s fictional story lines, when he came to construct them, would be a lot like the Julian Pete—difficult to follow, full of twists and turns and changing allegiances, reminders of life’s potential for chaos and disorder.

  For sure, something happened to Robert Bursian. On the next day, April 16, Dave Clark appeared in the grand jury room in the Hall of Justice and secured indictments against Charlie Crawford and former securities commissioner Jack Friedlander on charges of bribery and influence peddling. Crawford, according to the allegations made by Jack Roth, had acted as a middleman, shaking down brokers eager to sell Julian Pete stock. These brokers had been required to pay kickbacks, which were delivered to Crawford on fourteen occasions by Roth’s friend Morris Lavine. Crawford then passed on a share of the money to Friedlander. Probably Kent Parrot got a slice as well. Morris Lavine had been much more accustomed, apparently, to giving money to Charlie Crawford than taking it from him.

  Crawford, furious about this new indictment, refused to cooperate in the prosecutions of Leontine Johnson and Morris Lavine, whose downfall he’d orchestrated. The Lavine/Johnson trial opened on April 29. Crawford, when called to the stand, stood on his right to silence and refused to answer questions. Lawyers on either side argued with such heat that the judge was forced to excuse the jury, whereupon Crawford risked a sly smile.

  The case against Lavine and Johnson was in trouble, and great importance was now attached to the testimony of Leslie White, the only witness to the shakedown. White, dressed in a suit and a sober silk tie that he’d bought for the occasion, took the stand. “My palms were sweating,” he wrote in his diary. “But I think I did well.”

  Lavine was represented by Richard Cantillon, one of the city’s leading defense attorneys. Cantillon had discovered that White wrote fiction. It was too tempting a line of attack to ignore. “I understand that you are quite accomplished as a writer and as a developer of plots, and that in a current issue of a well-known magazine, under your own name, you published a deep-rooted detective story which even goes so far as to involve and name characters in the office of District Attorney Buron Fitts,” said Cantillon.

  White admitted that this was the case.

  “Maybe your imagination ran away with you and you invented the story of the $75,000 in Charlie Crawford’s office.”

  White stuck to his guns, and to his story, and found an ally in the wily Charlie Crawford. Called back to the stand, Crawford poked fun at Cantillon’s theory, and Cantillon dropped it. During a recess White caught up with Crawford in a corridor in the Hall of Justice, trying to thank him.

  “You don’t want to be seen talking to me,” Crawford said, warning White off. “I’ve got a pretty bad name around town. And you’re supposed to hate bad men.”

  “You don’t seem like a bad man, Charlie,” White said.

  Crawford raised an almost rueful eyebrow. “No, I’m not bad,” he said in a soft voice, as if talking to himself. “Not like they’ve painted me. They say I’m the head of the underworld, but I don’t know what that is. The only underworld I know anything about are the sewers, and I reckon they can’t mean those.”

  White would remember, with some sadness and even a little affection, that moment when Crawford had seemed to bare his soul. He was just “Good-time Charlie,” trying to make his way. He had a wife and kids, a family he loved. Why did people want to destroy him?

  Then Crawford spotted one of the jurors watching them talk. “Beat it!” he said to White sharply.

  Morris Lavine and Leontine Johnson were found guilty and sent to jail. Meanwhile, on March 30, 1930, Edward L. Doheny stepped off a train in Los Angeles to face a battery of newspaper photographers, movie cameras, and a 500-strong crowd of employees and well-wishers. At his Washington trial he’d been found not guilty of giving the $100,000 bribe that his friend Albert Fall had been convicted of receiving, a verdict that prompted one U.S. senator to remark, “Under this system you cannot convict a man with $100 million.” The Literary Digest wrote: “The question ‘Who bribed Fall?’ now passes into American folklore alongside the historic question, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’”

  Albert Fall was puzzled. “The evidence was the same for both of us,” he said, missing the point that he’d made a bad impression in the courtroom, while Doheny, thanks to the efforts of his attorney Frank Hogan, achieved an opposite effect. Hogan once remarked that the best client was “a rich man, scared,” and Doheny fit the bill. He took the stand so that Hogan could lead him through a humble retelling of his remarkable and quintessentially American life, a story of poverty suffered, adventure enjoyed, fabulous wealth achieved, and tragedy endured. Pulling a courtroom stunt worthy of Earl Rogers, Hogan sat in a chair and impersonated the dead Ned Doheny while tears streamed down his client’s face.

  In the icy Washington courtroom, a jury of nine men and three women retained their overcoats and fur wraps when they returned after deliberating for only one hour. “Not guilty,” said the foreman, and Estelle Doheny threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him. She thrust him away to gaze at him then embraced him once more. A stunned Doheny stood immobile but misty-eyed amidst the wild yells of his supporters. Frank Hogan happily handed over crisp $100 bills to reporters who had bet on acquittal. Doheny, grateful and generous, subsequently gave Frank Hogan a Rolls-Royce and an envelope containing a bonus check for $1 million. Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the president of USC, had been among those who testified on Doheny’s behalf, and when Doheny secured his acquittal, von KleinSmid got an entirely new campus building, USC’s splendid Doheny Memorial Library. Practical politics. Or, as Raymond Chandler would later write: “Law is where you buy it.”

  Leslie White witnessed Doheny’s triumphant return to L.A. He noted in his diary: “Great crowds. Doheny waved in a modest way and seemed pleased.”

  Dave Clark left the Hall of Justice and headed downtown to the Petroleum Securities Building, to the offices of Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, where spirits were high and champagne was flowing. He chatted for a while with his friend and former boss, Olin Wellborn III, who told Clark that although Doheny was happy to have won the case, he wasn’t well. All these years of trials and investigations had worn him out. “The old man needs a rest,” Olin Wellborn III said.

  Charlie Crawford, though, was more emotional. He knew when a man was under pressure, and he thrilled to the news of Doheny’s escape, clapping his hands together, laughing with his wife and saying to her: “The fox outran the hounds.”

  17

  Zig-Zags of Graft

  Dave Clark was on the rise, moving toward the center of power. At that time the D.A.’s office was organized into six different departments, and Buron Fitts now made Clark the head of one of them: the complaints department. “Dave Clark is an outstanding attorney and I’ve come to rely on him,” Fitts told the Times. In his new role Clark would examine evidence and testimony before deciding which cases should proceed and go to trial. It was a key role at the Hall of Justice and a big promotion for Clark. Eight deputy D.A.s were assigned to work under him, and his salary increased substantially, to $625 a month.

  To celebrate, Clark bought a
new car, a soft-topped Ford Roadster, bright yellow, with wire wheels and white-walled tires. He took his wife Nancy on a belated honeymoon, the two having married in haste after a whirlwind romance in the spring of 1926. They went south into Mexico and stayed at Agua Caliente where they swam and golfed and sunned themselves. In the evenings they danced in the opulent grandeur of the ballroom and drank at the Gold Bar, before walking outside and strolling arm-in-arm along the resort’s torchlit paths to their bungalow. After a few days they drove slowly back up the coast and took a ferry across to Catalina Island. During this trip, Clark, who liked to fish, became friendly with James W. “Jimmie” Jump, a self-made millionaire and self-styled sportsman who held world angling records for swordfish and marlin. Jump took the couple out on his yacht, and the Clarks tasted the leisurely SoCal high life, staying at the Catalina Island Yacht Club, of which Jump was a founder. “I enjoyed meeting you and your wife,” Jump later wrote to Clark. “She’s a beautiful woman and you’re lucky. Look after her.”

  Nancy—“a fluttering little thing,” said the Daily News—inspired paternal and protective feelings in many men, though she was tougher and more volatile and experienced in life than her demure appearance suggested. She was of very Irish descent, having been born in New York on January 2, 1905, to a mother whose maiden name was Reilly. Her father, James T. Malone, was a graduate of Harvard Law who became a New York circuit judge, famed for his stands against graft and the corruption of Tammany Hall. Malone was an upright judge and a hard man, “a massive figure in a flowing black silk gown.” He suffered a heart attack and died in a restroom in Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, shortly after having heard the guilty verdict in a murder trial over which he’d been presiding.

  That was in 1920, when Nancy was about to turn sixteen, and pregnant. She came to Los Angeles with one of her sisters, to stay with an aunt and have her baby. Life as a single mother took over until she met Dave Clark in 1925. She was passionate, headstrong, hot-tempered, with the baggage of a small child and the bonus of a well-connected legal family. Clark was tall, smart, handsome, close-mouthed, a war hero from a solid background, a young professional with the city apparently at his feet. They fell in love, and a year later Clark became a husband and a stepfather. He called Nancy “sweetheart” and said he loved her and could never love anyone else. Nancy had been around lawyers and the law all her life, yet sometimes found Dave hard to read. Still, she believed she’d found her soul mate and protector.

  On returning from the belated honeymoon in Mexico and on Catalina, Clark took up his position as head of the complaints department. He enjoyed the increased power. He spent time further reviewing the Leontine Johnson documents, and Fitts asked him to give special attention to the Charlie Crawford case and other ongoing Julian Pete prosecutions. Soon, though, something very different landed on Clark’s desk.

  On June 9, 1930, in a pedestrian underpass at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, a gunman killed journalist Jake Lingle. Harry Chandler, not only the publisher of the Times but the president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, tagged Lingle “a front-line soldier in the fight against crime” and offered a reward of $50,000 for the capture of his murderer. At his funeral, Lingle lay in a silvered bronze casket, behind which marched ranks of policemen and several brass bands. Jake Lingle, martyr, was buried to a muffled roll of drums.

  But another angle emerged.

  “Ostensibly Lingle was a police reporter on the Chicago Tribune earning $65 a week,” wrote Herbert Asbury, the great 1920s and 1930s chronicler of the history of American low-life, “but death revealed him in possession of an income of more than $60,000 a year.” Lingle drove a big car, gambled heavily, wintered in Florida, and plunged on the stock market. He died wearing a diamond-studded belt buckle that had been given him by Al Capone. He’d been up to his ears in the rackets.

  Moments before his death Lingle had bought a racing form. He’d been carrying the newspaper under his arm and smoking a cigar when the killer came up behind him, took out a revolver, leveled it at his head, and coolly pulled the trigger. Lingle pitched forward, dying while still clutching the paper and the glowing cigar. The gun that killed him was traced to Frankie Foster, a lieutenant of Capone, so Foster fled Chicago by train and fetched up in L.A.

  Chicago authorities contacted the D.A.’s office. Dave Clark swore out a complaint, and having issued a warrant for Foster’s arrest, put Leslie White on the case. On the face of it, this looked like a tricky, not to say dangerous, assignment. White had little trouble finding Foster, who was swaggering about in a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel. Foster and his entourage, though armed, put up no fight when White and two other D.A. investigators made the arrest. They accepted their removal to jail with “an amused tolerance,” White said.

  Foster made a halfhearted attempt to defeat extradition but was soon slated to return to Chicago. The D.A.’s office surrounded Foster’s departure with secrecy, opting to ship him out not from L.A. but from San Bernardino, sixty miles to the east. In the dead of night White drove out to San Bernardino with Foster handcuffed in the passenger seat, two detectives in the back, and a fleet of armed officers following in cars.

  Foster, a sleek and handsome young man of about thirty, laughed at the melodrama. “Why in hell should I try to get away?” he said. “I’ll be sprung the minute we hit Chicago.”

  A surprise awaited Foster, however, and when he got off the train he was taken into custody. Dave Clark once again called Leslie White into his office. Clark was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, with his long legs stretched out on his desk, White would recall.

  “Do you want to go to Chicago?” Clark asked. “I need somebody to work with the Illinois State Attorney’s office. They’re getting ready to prosecute Foster. I thought you might be interested.”

  White, ever eager, jumped at the chance. Chicago, at that time, meant one word: Capone, who dispatched bands of gunmen and sluggers to run his liquor shipments, bomb stores and manufacturing plants, put acid into laundry vats, and kill his enemies. Capone, the one-time New York street hoodlum, now reputed to be worth $30 million. Never had racketeering been developed to such perfection as in Chicago during Capone’s overlordship. European journalists traveled thousands of miles to interview him. He received fan mail from China, Japan, and Africa. Sightseeing buses pointed out “Capone” castle, the Hawthorne Inn in the suburb of Cicero. The windy city of skyscrapers and slaughterhouses was in thrall to a plump gangster who lolled on silk cushions and wore a $50,000 diamond ring on his pinkie. Leslie White couldn’t wait.

  In Chicago detectives vied with each other to prove to White how corrupt their city was. They showed him judges at the beck and call of mob attorneys. They staged liquor raids that involved plenty of noise and drama but no arrests. He glimpsed Capone, riding (White wrote) in “that infamous seven ton armor-plated car,” and heard that Capone was but a figurehead, taking his orders from a syndicate of businessmen who kept out of the limelight. White stayed in Chicago several weeks until charges against Foster were inevitably dropped. Meanwhile White had taken an advanced course in metropolitan politics. “Gangland promoted and fostered vice, and businessmen wanted and promoted it. If you disturbed vice and crime in Chicago, you interfered with high rents, with graft—with business,” he said.

  The more realistic stories in Black Mask were often set against the backdrop of a corrupt town. Dashiell Hammett used the theme many times, notably in his first novel, Red Harvest, and in his fourth, The Glass Key, the early parts of which Leslie White read when they were serialized in the magazine in March 1930. The hero of The Glass Key is Ned Beaumont, a gambler whose friend and employer is Paul Madvig, a political boss in an unnamed city (presumably Baltimore) near Washington, D.C. It’s an election year, and Madvig has the job of getting his slate of candidates elected. Beaumont is paid to help Madvig get this done, not an easy task when Madvig is suspected of murder.

  “For a novel in
which political power plays so great a part, ‘The Glass Key’ is remarkably apolitical,” writes Richard Layman, one of Hammett’s biographers. That’s because Hammett is writing, not about ideals and the public face of politics, but about the grimy, slippery, insidery, practical politics that thrived in Charlie Crawford’s fiefdom. Hammett’s fiction challenges the idea that traditional, and basically turn-of-the-century, civic institutions could govern a swiftly growing modern city in a way that wasn’t corrupt. In Los Angeles successive waves of reformers came in promising to clean house. Somehow the corruption stayed put, and the reformers either got out or became a part of it. “The word ‘progressive’ means something different here,” Hammett wrote when he came to L.A. in 1930. “It means graft progresses everywhere and all the way.”

  White had been reading Hammett but also making a study of Lincoln Steffens, whose 1904 classic of muckraking reportage The Shame of the Cities had laid out for the first time how corruption actually worked in local politics. “The uniformed police were in cahoots with certain politicians and associations of liquor dealers, gamblers, and other law-breakers,” said Steffens. In a succession of articles that Steffens wrote for McClure’s (pieces that formed the basis of his book), he found this pattern repeated in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. He saw capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. “Politics is business,” he wrote. “In America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.”

  Each of the cities that Steffens researched was governed by an open alliance with crime, and at the center of that alliance always stood a “boss,” “easier to deal with than the people’s representatives,” a manipulator connecting crime, business, and politics.