A Bright and Guilty Place Read online

  White’s young wife urged him to quit, but he stuck to the job. One morning, while he was preparing to photograph yet another fetid cadaver, he felt a sudden pain in his chest and a balloon of blood spurted from his mouth. His left lung had hemorrhaged and collapsed. Exhausted, he lay in a hospital bed. Doctors warned that he was developing tuberculosis and advised rest at a clinic in the desert near Palm Springs. White couldn’t afford it. Instead he gave up his Ventura darkroom and moved with his wife down the coast to Los Angeles, for the dryness of the air. Odd as it may seem now, like many in the city’s early days, he went to L.A. for his health.

  3

  A Hero Named Clark

  Illness and one of California’s worst disasters combined to bring Leslie White to Los Angeles in the summer of 1928. On the other hand, David Harris Clark was a native son, born in Highland Park (near where Dodger Stadium is now) on April 4, 1898, thirty years before White moved to L.A.

  Clark’s father was named William Alton Clark, the “Alton” having been taken from the town in Illinois near where explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (from whom this line of Clarks claimed distant descent) started their great westward journey of discovery in 1804. William Alton Clark was himself born in Maine in “about 1860.” The 1930 U.S. census records note that he was unsure of the date. He married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Laina, and they traveled through the West before settling in Los Angeles in about 1890. They were probably intrepid, and experienced both adventures and hardships; but nothing suggests either was ever wild. Anna Laina was stoic, not a talker (her mother was a Finn), and generally kept her smoldering temper in check. By all accounts she was, when young, a beautiful woman.

  The 1898 City Directory for L.A. lists William Alton Clark as a clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad, then the most important and reviled corporation in the state. The 1910 census lists his occupation as “railroad secretary.” By the 1920 census, however, he was happy to describe himself more fully: “chief accountant for the Southern Pacific’s freight division,” an important job. He had bought a large home in Highland Park, on the fringes of downtown, and was supporting a large extended family: his wife’s mother and father, his wife, and their five children—three boys and two girls.

  He was a tall, lean, bespectacled man, proud of the steady rise he had achieved in a city that even then tended to promote spectacular and instant success. He’d survived and prospered amidst the various strategy shifts and upheavals and changes of ownership that the vastly powerful Southern Pacific had gone through in the early part of the previous century. He was diligent, hardworking, a churchgoer, and well positioned in L.A.’s business community. As a railroad man, Clark was also a representative of the past in a place that didn’t like to look back, a city to whose bursting growth he had contributed but which already saw its future with the automobile. Still, the shrewd William Alton Clark had every reason to suppose that his children would prosper from the secure base he had provided.

  Dave Clark, the second of his five kids, was educated at nearby Monte Vista Grammar School and Los Angeles High—the oldest high school in Southern California, then a big Gothic pile situated downtown on North Hill Street at Sunset Boulevard. Among the school’s future alumni would be Fletcher Bowron (a four-term mayor of L.A., from 1938–1953), Ray Bradbury, Charles Bukowski, Dustin Hoffman, and Johnnie Cochran (the attorney who defended O. J. Simpson)—as well as some who achieved darker fame.

  Dave Clark excelled both academically and as an athlete. In 1917, on America’s entry into WWI, Clark joined the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. “Clark is able and disciplined and good material. He performs well, but must watch his temper,” wrote one officer who taught him. Clark and a group of friends, fearful the war would end before they saw action, headed north to Canada and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. Clark became a fighter pilot. His service records show that he was based with the RFC’s 5th Squadron on the Western front. Dispute would later arise about how much action Clark saw, but certainly he flew sorties, was shot at and shot back. The life expectancy of pilots on the Western front was brutally short—often only a matter of weeks. Harold Beaumont, one of Clark’s American friends, was killed on July 17, 1918. “You have to carry on,” Clark wrote to his brother, but noted too that in a rage during the mess that night he had smashed a bottle and cut his hand. “Damp hangars, muddy roads, crystal blue skies. I’ll miss Harold. He was a crack pilot. I suppose now I’ll have to kill a German for him.” A photograph of the time shows Clark, dressed in uniform with a scarf trailing around his neck, leaning against the fuselage of a single-engined SE5 fighter. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired. His eyes look tired, but his expression is calm. He liked and needed action and didn’t forget the spirit of the war. Always, after he’d returned from France to find an America that increasingly shrugged off wartime idealism in favor of realism and then hedonism, he wore an RFC badge on his lapel, a pin with a pair of wings.

  Clark had a cool bravado that could amount to cruelty, but he was close to his family and never doubted he would return to Los Angeles. He was determined to succeed in the city where he had grown up, but questioned what career he should pursue. In 1920 he took a screen test with First National Pictures. “My head’s not empty enough to be an actor,” he told his brother. Or maybe Clark decided to pursue what looked like a steadier career. He spent the next two years studying law at USC and left, without graduating, as soon as he was admitted to the California Bar on March 3, 1922. Again, we might detect impatience here, the action of a man determined to get ahead fast—although forgoing law school graduation was frequent practice for law students in those days, when the route to a professional career was more flexible. It could be that he was strapped for cash—a common occurrence throughout his life. The handsome and socially connected war hero joined Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, a small but established and powerful downtown law firm.

  The Wellborns had for decades been players in the growth of Los Angeles. Olin Wellborn, Sr., a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, had been a three-time congressman in Texas who secured the federal judge-ship for Southern California in 1895. For a while he partnered with oil magnate E. L. Doheny in a number of ventures. Though Olin Wellborn, Sr., died in 1921, his sons and grandsons continued the firm and still represented E. L. Doheny and had office space in Doheny’s magnificent art-deco Petroleum Securities Building at Olympic and Figueroa.

  It was here that Dave Clark went to work, seeing the downtown building boom firsthand and learning his trade as the fast and brittle mood of the 1920s took hold. Women’s skirts soared above the knee, the stock market scaled new peaks, a lot of people expected to get rich in a hurry, and Clark moved with ease among other lawyers, reporters, and cops. He was happy to throw off his coat and get down on the floor and play cards or shoot craps with the guys. Dick Steckel, a police captain who worked way down in Venice, was a particular friend. They golfed together. Clark was a championship level golfer, for years featured on the USC alumni team. He rode well and played polo too. He was charming, forceful, and perhaps vain—confident in his charisma and looks.

  In 1926 he married Nancy Regina Malone, the petite and beautiful daughter of a New York judge. Nancy brought with her a little girl, Mary Lenore, her daughter from a previous relationship. During that same year Clark made another big decision, leaving Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn to join the fast-growing District Attorney’s office. He wanted to make a name for himself as a litigator. For a starting salary of $375 a month, he became one of twenty deputies in the D.A.’s trial department, which was responsible for prosecuting more than 300 cases a month—burglary, robbery, grand theft auto, drunk driving, narcotics, assault, possession of a still, and murder cases, an increasing number every year. Crime in the 1920s, like pretty much everything else in L.A., was out of control. The LAPD simply couldn’t cope, leaving many crimes undetected or unpunished. The murder rate more than tripled in the decade, rising to more than sixty a year. The upr
ight and debonair Dave Clark knew that he’d be busy each morning when he strode into the lobby of the new Hall of Justice, the heels of his shining oxfords ringing on the marbled floors.

  A courtroom is a theater, and L.A. had already known some star performers, notably Earl Rogers, who defended Clarence Darrow against jury-tampering in 1911, and was described by Darrow himself as “the greatest trial lawyer of his day.” Rogers was a showman, a flamboyant and mesmerizing orator who, in his entire career, lost only three cases. He was also a reckless drinker and a womanizer, and died at age fifty-one in 1922, the year Dave Clark entered the law. Rogers was a legend, and perhaps for a young lawyer like Dave Clark, something of a role model. But Rogers’s courtly, theatrical style already belonged to the past. Clark was something else again—leaner, harder, with a persona that seemed designed for the camera, not the stage. A 1926 photograph of the D.A.’s staff, taken just after the move into the new Hall of Justice, features Clark prominently; he’s taller than everybody else, more tanned, and much better dressed—in a slick tailored suit with a silk tie tight at his neck, an immaculate white handkerchief folded in the outside breast pocket, that flyer’s pin on his lapel. He has a pencil moustache and a gorgeous quality about him. Reporters likened him to John Barrymore, to John Gilbert, and later to Clark Gable.

  On the morning of July 6, 1928, Dave Clark rose early, kissed his wife Nancy on the cheek, left their home in West Hollywood, got into his Model T Ford, and turned onto Wilshire Boulevard, heading downtown. He had a big day ahead. District Attorney Asa Keyes (pronounced to rhyme with “eyes”) had given Clark important jobs before, but none as big as the one that faced him today, when he would begin prosecution of racketeer and bootlegger Albert Marco, called “L.A.’s Capone” by the Daily News.

  “Marco’s just a goon to me,” Clark told the News, ridiculing the idea that the gangster might be given special consideration. “No stone will be left unturned and he will be sent to San Quentin.”

  “Tough words characterize this ice-cool prosecutor,” wrote Gene Coughlin, a top writer on the News. Like many L.A. reporters of the day, Coughlin had served his apprenticeship in Chicago. He was friendly with Lionel Moise who, it’s been said, taught Ernest Hemingway his trade on the Kansas City Star. Certainly Moise provided Hemingway, and Coughlin too, with a hard-drinking, hard-fighting journalistic persona that they adopted as their model. Coughlin was working the Marco story under instruction from News owner Manchester Boddy who had assumed control of the fledgling tabloid (L.A.’s first) in 1926, and immediately decided that the paper needed a circulation-boosting crusade. Vice, and Albert Marco in particular, became a target. “Albert Marco is loud, brash, and plumply complacent,” wrote Coughlin in his gleeful and lurid way. “The whole of Los Angeles trusts that ‘Debonair Dave’ will rid our city of this menace.”

  It was a scorching summer day; by noon the temperature would reach 90 degrees. Crowds packed the Superior Court and jammed the corridors outside, barring what little breeze there was from the Hall of Justice. Charlie Chaplin, who loved a good trial, was given a numbered ticket so he could claim a seat. Albert Marco sauntered in and posed for photographers. “Seated beside his counsel Marco paid scant attention to the proceedings, glancing about the courtroom and smiling for friends,” wrote Coughlin. “He was dressed in a gray suit, a skyblue silk bowtie with handkerchief to match, and wore a huge diamond in his lapel.”

  The D.A.’s office had tried to prosecute Marco several times before, but he’d always beaten the rap. Marco had friends in top places and was in no doubt that he’d secure an acquittal this time too. His courtroom demeanor mixed preening arrogance and feigned boredom. Albert Marco had once lost $250,000 in a single hand of poker to Nicky Arnstein, the famed gambler “Nick the Greek.” Marco wanted the world, and Dave Clark, to know that a mere murder charge didn’t faze him.

  Marco had been born in 1887 in an Alpine village in northern Italy, where he’d been apprenticed to a hatmaker before deciding to try his luck in America. He, along with thousands of others primarily from Italy and Central Europe, passed through Ellis Island in 1908. He drifted west, roaming Nevada and Washington State as a pimp and confidence man. In Seattle he ran the prostitution business at a large and briefly successful gambling hotel. In 1919 he was arrested for burglary in Sacramento and served a brief sentence. The early 1920s found him in Los Angeles, already driving a Cadillac, wearing slick suits with a Panama hat pushed back on his head, and shipping bootleg booze into a Long Beach warehouse. In 1925 he drew a gun on an LAPD officer and brutally pistol-whipped him. For this, Marco got a $50 fine and was given his gun back. He had good reason to believe himself above the law. He was an important cog in The System, the cabal that ran the Los Angeles underworld.

  “‘Marco’s been indicted,’ was the whisper flashed from joint to joint,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the News when Marco was arrested for attempted murder on June 28, 1928. “Many of the Marco hirelings, all of them strong believers in the racketeer’s boast that he was ungettable, were hard to convince that the baron faced a potential penitentiary term.” Marco, his clothes dried crimson with blood, had been caught on the roof of the Ship Café in Venice, trying to escape. He told the cop who arrested him. “I’m Albert Marco. I’m a big shot with the police downtown and if you pinch me you’ll be sent to the sticks for life.” A Los Angeles Times photograph shows him sitting on a police bench, staring at the camera with an expression of insolence and contempt. His dark hair stands almost straight up, a shock of vigorous, untidy curls rising above a long, meaty face. The double-breasted jacket of his smart suit is worn over a bloody undershirt; his dress shirt, presumably even more stained, had been left in the restroom where he’d been trying to wash it clean.

  This, then, was Albert Marco: a thug, thickset and not pretty, but with blunt charisma. His trial—trials, rather, for there would be two—brought Dave Clark glory, but also would plant the seeds of his future doom.

  Judge William Doran got proceedings under way amid rumors of jury tampering and stories that Marco had already reached a civil settlement with Dominick Conterno, the man he was accused of trying to kill. The first two days were consumed by the all-important ritual of jury selection before Conterno at last took the stand, with Dave Clark unsure whether this first, and most important, witness had already been squared away by the defense. That turned out not to be the case. Led by Clark, Conterno gave a telling and vivid version of what had happened.

  The trouble began when a drunk Marco approached Conterno’s wife and was rebuffed, whereupon he called her a “lousy whore.” Conterno, unsurprisingly, took exception and the argument swiftly escalated into a brawl, first in the restroom of the Ship Café, then outside, where Marco yanked out a pistol and fired two shots. The first slammed Conterno in the back, the second missed its target but winged Harry Judson (the singer with the jazz band that played at the Ship) who had stepped outside to observe the fun.

  “I saw the flash of a gun and felt the bullet go through my body,” Conterno said.

  “How would you describe Albert Marco at that moment?” Clark asked. “He was snarling like a dog,” Conterno said.

  Sitting beside his lawyer, an unperturbed Marco wrote something on a pad of paper on the table in front of him; he wasn’t making notes, merely doodling.

  Under cross-examination, Dominick Conterno admitted that he’d been so drunk on bootleg grape brandy that he could no longer remember exactly what had happened—a big point for the defense. Dave Clark countered with two witnesses who testified that they’d seen Marco fire the shots and a third who declared he’d heard Marco say, just before the shooting, “I’ll kill you!” But then Evelyn Brogan, an attractive brunette who gave her profession as “legal secretary” (well, maybe she was Marco’s secretary, and what she was doing now had something to do with the law), testified on Marco’s behalf, swearing that she’d been Marco’s companion that night and he’d had nothing to do with the shooting.

  Judge Doran had
placed the twelve jurors in sheriff’s custody; they stayed in a downtown hotel at night. One morning the jurors piled into a bus and left downtown, heading west on Pico Boulevard, across empty countryside, and down to Venice Boulevard where Clark led them through the Ship Café, showing them the dance floor, the orchestra stand, the restroom where the fight had started, and the roof to which Marco had fled.

  The weapon from which Marco was alleged to have fired the shots had disappeared, however; likewise had several witnesses who were, according to Coughlin in the News, “vacationing down Mexico way, courtesy of Albert Marco.” Still, after the trial had been in progress for twelve days, Dave Clark reckoned he’d laid out a strong case. “Albert Marco fired those shots. He shot Dominick Conterno in the back, not caring whether he killed Conterno or not. It’s true and it isn’t pretty and I call upon the jury to find Marco guilty,” Clark said in his closing remarks.

  The jury went out, and stayed out, for more than two days; when they trooped back in, the foreman told Judge Doran they’d been unable to reach a verdict. Nine had been in favor of acquittal, while three believed Marco guilty.

  Clark was shocked: nine had favored acquittal?

  Marco smiled while his attorneys argued strenuously that the case should be dismissed, but the judge surprised Marco and his team of legal mouthpieces by announcing that there would be a retrial. Judge Doran was a lean, balding, bespectacled USC graduate who knew his own mind, a former member of the District Attorney’s office who had argued cases against Earl Rogers and regarded himself as a mentor to Dave Clark.

  Dave Clark’s handsome face lit up with surprise and a smile; he’d been given another chance.

  4

  Angel City

  Leslie White had been warned that another hemorrhage in his lung would most likely kill him. Doctors in Ventura County recommended confinement to bed and complete rest for at least a few months. White arrived with his wife at his aunt’s house in Hollywood and tried to oblige. He lay on his back, reading books and the papers. He listened to the radio, sipped orange juice, and tried to sleep. Images from the St. Francis disaster—mangled corpses with twisted limbs and faces eaten away—kept flashing through his mind. He couldn’t rid himself of the stench of decay that seemed to linger in his nostrils. He feared that he’d lost his mind as well as his health. He needed to be active, so when a different doctor told him he couldn’t fight consumption lying on his back, White was only too glad to hear the news. He got to his feet and set about exploring “the great complex metropolitan machine” in which he found himself.