A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (10 page)

Doheny biographer Dan La Botz, writes: “Today, years later, it seems clear that Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett were the victims of old man Doheny’s ambition …. He had used his son and his son’s friend to carry out the dirty business of bribery and deceit … No matter whose hand did the deed, it was Doheny’s character that killed them, his egotism, his hubris.”

Doheny’s malfeasance returned to punish him in a way that does indeed seem plotted to achieve the maximum effects of tragedy and irony, snatching from him that which he wished to preserve above all else: the integrity and future of his family. Ned’s death shattered Doheny. He’d been at Chester Place when the call came through from Greystone. He’d hurried over, driving through the silent streets of Beverly Hills, insisting against advice on seeing the bodies, hoping there’d been a mistake. Then the reality had sunk in. “Yes, it is Ned after all,” he said.

A Times reporter captured the sad scene: “He gazed at his son’s body for a moment, and then knelt beside it. He shook with emotion as he reached down and took young Doheny’s right hand. ‘Ned, my Ned,’ he sobbed as he was half carried from the room.”

“He came staggering into his son’s house like a ghost, hardly able to walk. He crept up the stairway. There he collapsed,” wrote the
Examiner
. “The favorite of madcap fate, in the evening of his life, found himself the plaything of destiny.”

11

Good Time Charlie

N
ed Doheny’s funeral was held on Tuesday, February 19, less than sixty hours after the shootings at Greystone. E. L. Doheny wanted this done in a hurry, but with the style and pomp that he felt was his son’s due. The funeral, coming so quickly after the tragedy, and at a time when press coverage was peaking, seized the imagination of the whole city. The outside of St. Vincent’s, the massive church at the corner of Adams and Figueroa that Doheny had paid for, was draped in black. Squads of LAPD men struggled to restrain the thousands of people who crammed and thronged the streets, hoping to get inside, where the congregation filled every seat and overflowed into the aisles, standing rank on rank.

Dave and Nancy Clark arrived early, and Clark found his wife a seat on the right side of the church, close to the pews that were roped off for family members. He himself joined those who stood, looking back over a sea of hatless heads toward the great oaken doors of the church. Clark knew the Dohenys. While at Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, he’d helped prepare for one of E. L. Doheny’s earlier trials, in which Doheny had been accused of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Clark was part of a large and expensive legal team that eased Doheny off that particular hook. He’d met the old man on several occasions in the corridors of the Petroleum Securities building. He’d known Ned Doheny, having helped draw up the contract with Greystone architect Gordon B. Kaufmann. Clark had attended USC alumni events with Ned, and they’d golfed together at the Los Angeles Country Club. Clark was proud of his connection with the city’s most powerful family; it fitted his vision of himself as an Angeleno who was going places and destined for big things.

At ten o’clock Clark heard the organ of St. Vincent’s rise and swell, and the service began. Some of E. L. Doheny’s closest business and political associates walked in front of the casket, honorary pallbearers: Ezequiel Ordonez, the Mexican geologist; Frank J. Hogan, Doheny’s Washington attorney in the Teapot Dome trials; Albert Bacon Fall; and Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the head of USC. The presence of these men reflected, perhaps, a son whose life had belonged too much to his father. Clark also noted that Olin Wellborn III, his friend and former boss, was one of the six men actually shouldering Ned’s coffin. Behind the casket walked Lucy Doheny, the widow, her face hidden by a veil that reached almost to the ground. E. L. Doheny himself, shaking and walking on unsteady feet, held his daughter-in-law’s arm—for support, it seemed, rather than comfort. Doheny was white and haggard, and his vacant eyes kept slowly closing and opening, as if his mind was broken.

The service, hushed and respectful, proceeded nonetheless with all the splendor that E. L. Doheny had wished. John J. Cantwell, a close friend of the Dohenys and the bishop of the diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego, was presiding, clad in purple and seated on a massive throne covered with a canopy of red and gold. Father Martin O’Malley, the pastor of St. Vincent’s, delivered the main address, offering words of gloomy consolation. “Death, bitter death,” he said, the words falling slowly and inexorably through the vaulted reaches of St. Vincent’s and into Dave Clark’s ears. “This is sober truth, this is bitter death. But to you whom Ned Doheny loved, to you who are crushed by the burden of the cross that the loved ones must bear”—and here O’Malley turned toward the weeping widow and the crumpled old man at her side—“to you there is but a few words that might make less and soothe the burden. These are the words that Ned learned at the altar as a child when he was confirmed. Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, although he is dead, shall live, and he who liveth and believeth in me shall not die for ever.’”

Dave Clark glanced toward his wife, but Nancy had her head bowed in prayer. Nancy had grown up in a Catholic household and still had her faith, attending mass twice a week. Dave Clark’s parents were still active in their local Highland Park church but he’d ceased to care about religion. Nancy believed in permanent and passionate commitments. Dave was more footloose.

“God grant Ned Doheny eternal rest and let the eternal light shine upon him,” said O’Malley.

E. L. Doheny seemed to stare unseeingly before him. Lucy Doheny was slumped in her pew, a handkerchief to her eyes, sobbing. The two were helped from their seats for a last glance into the casket. Then Doheny once again held tight to his daughter-in-law’s arm as they walked out of the church.

Ned’s body was taken by hearse to Forest Lawn and interred in the Doheny family mausoleum, a vast marble temple brought by Doheny from a church in Rome where it had once held the remains of a second-century Christian martyr. Predictably, less ceremony would attend Hugh Plunkett’s funeral, which took place the next day, though he too was laid to rest at Forest Lawn, barely thirty feet from the Doheny mausoleum where Ned lay entombed. The two men were as close in death as they’d been in life, and as far apart.

After the grandeur of St. Vincent’s, Ned Doheny’s burial was private, a strictly family affair, and Dave Clark wasn’t among those who witnessed it. Besides, on that Tuesday morning, once the requiem mass was concluded and the congregation filed out of church and into the streets, he had business to attend to. He kissed Nancy on the cheek and hurried downtown to attend a hearing in the grand jury room on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. Clark was as yet unaware that these proceedings would have grave implications for his own future, though he did know that the hearing concerned another older man who was at the center of power in Los Angeles: Charlie Crawford.

Charles Crawford—“Good Time Charlie,” the
Examiner
called him—was in his early fifties by 1929. Like E. L. Doheny, Crawford came from Irish stock. Like Doheny, he was born of pioneer parents. His basic education in a one-room schoolhouse was followed by a drift westward. Crawford fetched up in Seattle in the late 1890s, soon after prospectors found gold “like piles of yellow shelled corn” up in Alaska’s Yukon Valley, on the banks of the Klondike. “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!,” screamed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!” Within days, the last great gold rush was born; the whole continent went Klondike crazy, and Seattle became the port of entry for those heading to the mining camps. The American economy had been hit hard by financial panic in 1893. Unemployment was widespread and there was growing strife between industrial employers and emerging unions. The prospect of sudden, easy wealth was even more seductive than usual. Within a year of the discovery of gold in Alaska, more than 100,000 people came to Seattle, fanning north into the Yukon territory toward Dawson City. In time 12.5 million ounces of gold were taken from the ground. The writer Jack London recorded the hardships endured, the adventures enjoyed; and Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 silent film The Gold Rush would be set on the Klondike. Another uncharted region of the West was put on the map.

“Prosperity is here,” said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time, and a hastily formed Seattle Chamber of Commerce, led by the ingenious Erastus Brainerd, plotted a successful campaign to seize the bulk of the gold rush trade.

Seattle roared, and Charlie Crawford was there, having realized that Klondike entertainment and crime would be even more profitable than Klondike prospecting. Hardworking miners rarely held on to their stake. Gambling parlors and brothels sprang up all over town, and Crawford made his first small fortune, booking dance-hall and vaudeville entertainers into local theaters, dance halls, and saloons. He became a vice-lord in Seattle’s Tenderloin, “a bottomless cauldron of sin,” according to McClure’s magazine in 1911. Lawyer and city councilman Hiram Gill handled the interests of Crawford and other underworld captains. In 1910 Gill ran for mayor on a “wide-open town” ticket, arguing that vice was both natural and lucrative but should be regulated and confined to one section of the city. “Hell, this is a sea port, ain’t it?” Gill said. His campaign was successful, at which point, said McClure’s, “The city transformed itself almost magically into one great gambling hell.” It was Charlie Crawford’s kind of town. On Beacon Hill he built the Northern Club, with 500 rooms the biggest and most elaborate gaming hotel in the country, prefiguring Las Vegas in its grandeur. Roulette, blackjack, craps, faro, poker, and slot machines featured at ground level, while prostitution roosted above.

“Everywhere the wheels were clicking and the bones were rolling, and a particularly impressive sight was a heavily gold-braided police captain who benignantly elbowed his way in and out of the throng,” said McClure’s. The Northern ran for fifty-four days, with three shifts of dealers and barmen and girls working around the clock seven days a week, netting Crawford $200,000 before reformers discovered that the club was built on land actually leased from the city itself. This was too much, even for Seattle. Hundreds of respectable citizens roused themselves, marching past the Northern Club with banners raised, to the accompaniment of a Salvation Army Band. It was another classic Western scene. Hiram Gill’s mayorship was recalled, largely through the vote of newly enfranchised women. Police chief Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein, another Crawford supporter, earned himself three to ten years in the state pen at Walla Walla, and a new police unit known as “The Purity Squad” patrolled the streets, rousting single women from hotel rooms and arresting even married couples who strolled the streets after dark.

For Charlie Crawford, Seattle was over. In 1911 he headed south, to a town that still seemed wide open: Los Angeles. Downtown, at 230 East Fifth Street, he opened the Maple Bar, another handsome Barbary Coast affair with a casino downstairs and a whorehouse above. “In those days he was a picturesque, hard-fisted, garish figure, shrewd, generous, and following his own course,” wrote the
Examiner
. “His saloon was the meeting place of a strange assortment. There were ward heelers, police officers, men of shady and questionable reputation.”

L.A., though, wasn’t Seattle; the atmosphere was different. “Toil broken and bleached out, they flock to Los Angeles, fugitives from the simple inexorable of life, from labor and drudgery,” wrote Louis Adamic of the Midwestern surge into the city. These immigrants—“half-educated, materially prosperous, but spiritually and mentally starving”—had left behind the freezing winters but brought with them habits of religion and temperance. L.A.’s Anti-Saloon League was well organized, and the city voted itself dry in 1917, more than two years before the federal Prohibition amendment took effect.

The “great experiment” of Prohibition changed everything, forcing Crawford in theory to shut the Maple Bar. But by now he was an adept operator in the shadows where the city’s politics and police department mixed seamlessly with crime through the simple expedient of money. Civic historians are uncertain when “The System” actually came to L.A. It’s not the kind of historical event that gets marked with a plaque. Many American cities of that era had their own style of graft—Minneapolis was an example of complete police corruption, while in St. Louis “boodlers” (businessmen who paid off officials for public works contracts) ran the show. In Pittsburgh, known as “Hell with the lid off,” industrialists were in control. The way in which business became politics and politics was turned inside-out by money differed subtly from place to place, and it’s likely that Charlie Crawford brought The System with him from Seattle, where he’d operated in a boom town by causing his man, Hiram Gill, to be elected mayor.

In L.A. Crawford found his enabler in Kent Kane Parrot, a former USC football star and graduate of USC law school. Parrot was a tall, handsome man, a suave dandy who liked urban politics, “because it’s lots of fun.” His first wife had been the screenwriter Mary O’Hara, the future author of My Friend Flicka. Parrot had friends everywhere. He “mastered the art of the unorthodox floating coalition, merging liberals with conservatives, church leaders with underworld figures, union officials with open-shop zealots, and prohibitionists with liquor interests,” writes historian Jules Tygiel. Parrot’s alliance included important preachers, members of the Better America Foundation, a couple of important judges, a local figure who could deliver the black vote on Central Avenue, political fixer “Queen” Helen Werner, and Charlie Crawford.

The key moment came in 1921 when, defying predictions and the opposition of the Times, the Parrot alliance put in their own man, George Cryer, as mayor. In 1925 Parrot and his crew once again routed the entrepreneurial elite and kept Cryer in power. Parrot embraced municipal ownership of water and other utilities. He promoted a growing city that was businesslike and conflict-free. He believed that people would drink, gamble, and frequent whorehouses whether national and local governments permitted them or not. Tourists were an important part of L.A.’s economy and some tourists expected to enjoy tourism’s more dangerous pleasures. Therefore vice went on, sanctioned and protected, low-key and lucrative, controlled and almost monopolized. A corrupt corps of men in the LAPD didn’t fight crime; they protected it because those who ran the rackets had city government on their side. Practical politics meant not rocking the boat, greasing the palm, and keeping the machine grinding. Parrot let Charlie Crawford work the way he knew. Kickbacks and bribes got things done. Money had to be made and the boys had to be looked after. Vice wasn’t a racket, it was a business; and corruption was merely a part of the grown-up fallen world.