The Violent Years (23 page)

It was suspected but never proved that Chester Tutha played a role in the gun-smuggling plot. No one was ever tried for smuggling the guns that were used in the Marquette Prison fiasco. The evidence presented to the grand jury investigating the causes of the 1931 riot at Marquette were inconclusive. Tutha would go on to become the leader of a gang of safecrackers that operated in the Detroit and Hamtramck area for many years. By the mid-’30s, Tutha would join forces with several Purple Gangsters. The Purples used Tutha and his gang for their safecracking abilities. Louis Fleisher and several Purple Gangsters would work with Tutha and his Mob in a series of rural-area robberies in which safes were removed and carted away to other locations to be opened.

“Dear Sirs:

It seems there is a great deal of vice going on in Detroit, and as long as the police are a part of it, it seems perhaps the government should know something about it in order to do a bit of clean up work.”

—Letter from Mrs. Janet
MacDonald to the Detroit office
of the F.B.L, August 5, 1939

“It was illegal. It was unethical. But it was not grand larceny with a receiving account. In my book if an officer hijacks a racketeer that’s stealing. If the racket guy brings the money in and lays it down that’s not stealing. That’s the way I see it.”

—Former Detroit Police Inspector
Raymond W. Boettcher, Ferguson
Grand Jury witness, January 4, 1944

I
t was almost noon on Saturday, July 8, 1939, when Inspector Perry Myers of the Detroit Police Department’s Mounted Division left his office in back of the Bethune Street station. Myers was on his way to a nearby restaurant for lunch. As he cut across an alley that ran behind the station house between Horton and Custer Avenues, he heard the roar of an automobile engine. Myers glanced down the alley and saw a Buick sedan racing towards him. He quickly stepped back out of sight and waited. As the car slowed to a roll at Bethune Street, the inspector saw a pistol lying on the front-seat cushion. Myers pulled his own revolver and stepped up to the side of the sedan. He ordered the four startled men in the car to shut off the motor and put up their hands. As the four men climbed out of the vehicle, Myers noticed two cigar boxes and several more pistols. Both boxes were full of money. The inspector paraded the four men back to the Bethune Station with their hands in the air. It was first reported that $1,600 in cash was found in the two cigar boxes. (The exact amount was never known.) Seven hundred thirty-seven dollars was taken off the persons of the four suspects. The men were quickly identified as Joe Holtzman, Lou Jacobs, Irving Feldman, and Sidney Cooper. All four suspects were associated with a group of young thugs known as the Junior Purple Gang. These were men who were several years younger than the core group of Purples. Inspector Ray Boettcher, who worked at Bethune Station at the time, later admitted that the four Purple Gangster suspects were all well known to him. Boettcher described them as racketeers whom police suspected of shaking down legitimate businesses.

At first, there was some confusion as to what exactly was going on. “There’s nothing wrong,” Holtzman told detectives. “I’ve just got some change here for a couple of the joints, and I need the guns to guard it!” The bills found in the cigar boxes were all brand new and in unusual denominations. There were several packages of one-dollar bills. Each package contained $100 and still had bank wrappers on it. Other bills were consecutively serial numbered. To his surprise Myers discovered that the pistols he found in the suspects’ car were not loaded. The four Purples explained to detectives that they had gotten the money they were carrying from Izzy Bernstein. The suspects disclaimed any knowledge of the guns found in the car.

As Bethune detectives began to question the four suspects, a robbery report was phoned in from another precinct. Why the robbery was reported to the wrong precinct remained a mystery. The offices of the Great Lakes Realty Company in the Stormfeltz/Lovely building located directly behind the Bethune Station had just been held up by two men. The bandits allegedly tied up the office manager, Dr. Martin Robinson, his wife, and a secretary, and escaped with an undetermined amount of cash. A sergeant and two patrolmen were sent to the offices of the Great Lakes Realty Co. to investigate the robbery complaint. When the officers arrived, Dr. Robinson and his staff confirmed that they had been robbed. Dr. Robinson was a 1914 graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School. He had only practiced medicine briefly. He later owned and operated a drugstore and dabbled in Michigan politics. At one time, Robinson had even run for Detroit City Council and was also rumored to be involved in the Detroit numbers racket.

Details of the robbery checked with those already noted during the questioning of the four suspects. Two of the pistols found in the suspects’ car were registered to Robinson. Descriptions of the bandits, the cigar boxes, and the denominations of the bills that were stolen immediately linked the four Purple Gangsters to the robbery. Robinson and his staff were brought to the Bethune Station to view the suspects. Dr. Robinson reluctantly identified Lou Jacobs as one of the bandits, and his secretary, Florence Wolfe, identified Irving Feldman as the man who tied her up. When Robinson came face to face with the four suspects at the station house, he was reported to have turned white. He was very anxious not to file a complaint even though he had tentatively identified one of the men, and his secretary had pointed out another. Detectives refused to let Robinson drop the armed-robbery charge, and the four Purples were locked up.

Two days after the reported holdup, Robinson was again asked by detectives to come to police headquarters to view the four suspects in a lineup. This time Robinson told detectives that he could not identify any of the men, and he was positive that these were not the men who had robbed him. It was obvious that there was something very peculiar about the Robinson case. For some reason, Robinson seemed to be trying to cover up the robbery. After he learned that Robinson had first identified and then refused to identify the suspects in the case, Fred Frahm, Superintendant of the Detroit police, had ordered a police investigation of the Robinson case. The case was officially assigned to Bethune Station Detectives Wilfred E. Brouillet and Byron E. Farrish.

Coincidentally, as this drama was unfolding, Lt. John McCarthy of the Racket Squad and his men raided the Square Deal policy house in Detroit. A man who worked at the place claimed it was owned by somebody named Robinson. When Frahm questioned Robinson about his connection to this numbers operation, Robinson replied, “Well, you know, Superintendent, I like to help people. I know this man, yes. I knew he needed some money, and I loaned him some. That’s the only interest I have in the place.”

“What about the Great Lakes and those other policy joints?” asked Frahm.

“The same with them,” Robinson replied. “I like to help people out. They need money, and I lend it to them. I am always willing to help. I don’t have any other interest in the places.”

The day after the Square Deal policy house was raided, Lt. McCarthy and his men raided a handbook operated by Sammy Millman (younger brother of Harry). Police had received information that Millman had threatened Robinson not to identify any of the robbery suspects.

On July 11, after much police coercion, Robinson again positively identified Lou Jacobs as one of the holdup men. Throughout the whole identification process, the doctor continued to be very reluctant to identify any of the suspects. “Can’t we just call this whole thing off?” Robinson asked reporters as he left police headquarters.

On July 20, 1939, the four armed-robbery suspects were examined before Judge John V. Brennan in Detroit Recorders Court. Once again, Dr. Robinson failed to make a positive identification of any of the men. Undaunted by the reluctant Robinson, the judge held all four men for trial on charges of armed robbery.

The strange circumstances surrounding the Robinson holdup case would eventually be brought to light during the January 1940 trial of the four suspects. For all practical purposes, however, the Robinson case would remain an ordinary robbery investigation until early in 1940. Nobody could foresee in July of 1939 that this seemingly insignificant case would bring about revelations that would mark the beginning of the end for large-scale underworld gambling operations in Detroit and the surrounding area. Possibly this case would never have gotten any public attention had it not been for a startling chain of events that was set into motion in August of 1939.

• • •

On the evening of August 5, 1939, Mrs. Janet MacDonald dressed herself and her 11-year-old daughter Pearl in their best outfits. She then took her daughter by the hand, and they left the boarding house in which they lived. The mother and daughter walked to a nearby garage that Mrs. MacDonald had rented several weeks earlier. Inside the garage, she had carefully prepared her car for a final journey. A hose was connected to the exhaust pipe and fed into the vehicle through a hole that had been broken in the rear window of the car. Lying on the back seat of the sedan were two neatly tied stacks of letters. The letters were addressed to Michigan Governor Dickinson, the three daily Detroit newspapers, John S. Bugas, Special Agent in charge of the Detroit office of the F.B.I., and Police Commissioner Heindrich Pickert. Mrs. MacDonald had already posted copies of these letters earlier that day, but she wanted to be thorough. Closing the garage door behind them, she started the car and with her daughter sitting next to her on the front seat, they quietly slipped into eternity. The bodies of Mrs. MacDonald and her daughter Pearl were not found until 8 p.m. the following evening by the owner of the garage. The body of Mrs. MacDonald was slumped over in the front seat, and the child’s body was found on the floor.

Janet MacDonald, 36, had killed herself and her daughter as the result of unrequited love for a smalltime Detroit numbers racketeer named William McBride. McBride had been the manager of the Great Lakes policy house, an illegal numbers betting operation located in Detroit, where Janet MacDonald worked as a bookkeeper. Accusations in the letters MacDonald had left behind tied certain members of the Detroit Police Department to the local underworld gambling industry through graft protection payoffs. According to the letters left by Mrs. MacDonald, McBride had been in charge of the graft payments made to Detroit police for protection. She named Lt. John McCarthy as one of the officers who received a substantial monthly protection payment. Ironically known as “Honest John,” McCarthy was in charge of the Detroit Police Department’s Racket Squad and had been involved in the Robinson hold-up case. She also claimed that McBride made monthly payments to a large number of sergeants and patrolmen whom she did not name. In her letters, Mrs. MacDonald claimed to know a great deal about the policy and bookmaking rackets in Detroit and stated that other high-ranking police officials besides McCarthy were also on the gamblers’ payroll.

When William McBride read about the suicide of his former lover and her daughter in the morning papers, he caught a cab and had the driver take him to Toledo, Ohio. McBride spent the night in various Toledo beer gardens. The following day he began to hitchhike back to Detroit. By this time, Detroit police wanted very badly to talk to McBride, and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. McBride was picked up by Michigan State Police in a drunken stupor. He was rushed back to Detroit police headquarters where the gambler was grilled for more than 10 hours by detectives.

McBride described himself as a small-time racket guy lucky to make $48 a week. He told police that he had bootlegged during Prohibition, tended bar, and later worked as a “capper” at various handbooks around Detroit for $5 a day. McBride claimed he had met Lou Synder, the owner of the Great Lakes policy house, 10 years earlier. Synder later offered McBride a job at the numbers joint, and he eventually worked his way up to manager of the operation.

According to McBride, he had met Janet MacDonald in a downtown Detroit beer garden known as the Cowshed three years before. He began to date Janet and later got her a job at the policy house as a typist. McBride told police that he was divorced and that his ex-wife and 10-year-old son lived in Sandusky, Ohio. “Aren’t you the payoff man for the policy house?” McBride was asked by a detective. “No, I’m not. Not me. I’ve been a bartender, a bootlegger, and I’ve never given a policeman so much as a cigar!” McBride stated that he did not know Lt. McCarthy personally. McCarthy had arrested both McBride and Janet MacDonald the previous fall in a raid on the Great Lakes policy house. McBride insisted, however, that he knew nothing about any graft payments. McBride told detectives that he had seen Janet the night she killed herself, but that he had refused to take her out because he was trying to break off his relationship with her.

All of Janet MacDonald’s suicide letters consistently conflicted with McBride’s story. According to the notes, McBride was the payoff man for the principal gambling interests in the city, and Lt. John McCarthy had conspired with gamblers and was on the syndicate payroll. In one letter, MacDonald stated that Lt. McCarthy always warned the gambling house of impending raids with a phone call. Officers who worked in the precinct and refused to take graft payments were demoted or transferred. McCarthy was the only Detroit police officer specifically named in Mrs. MacDonald’s accusations.

McBride was distraught over the death of his lover and her young daughter. “I did not want to marry her because I was not good enough for her,” he told police. “She should not have done it. She had no reason to do it!” Concerned over the serious charges in Janet MacDonald’s suicide notes, Mayor Richard Reading ordered Police Superintendent Fred Frahm to make a complete investigation of the charges. McCarthy would remain on active duty pending the outcome of the inquiry.