A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (11 page)

“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 submachine gun. He made great copy, personally driving Eastern gangsters out of the city by threatening them with the Thompson and suggesting 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

W
ithin 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.

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, hardboiled, 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 legal 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.