A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (15 page)

17

Zig-Zags of Graft

D
ave 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 lowlife, “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 onetime 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.

White knew that Charlie Crawford had been such a figure—delivering votes, raking off cash, pulling strings, fixing politics—but behind the scenes, running the discreet L.A. System. But what White saw in Chicago shocked him. It was “an astonishing spectacle,” he wrote, a city turned upside down where gangsters quite openly ran the show, and on his return, he saw Los Angeles differently. The city would soon be like Chicago, he concluded, run openly, and much more violently, by the gang interests. “Big business had long used gangsters to suppress strikes and to intimidate workmen, but now small business began to use gangsters to fix prices, eradicate competition, and to force demands they could not force by process of law,” he wrote. Crime and malignancy were starting to run amok. Within days of White’s arrival back in town, movie theater owners hired gangsters to blow out the fronts of properties belonging to rivals, machine-guns rattled on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bomb went off at the Clover Club on Sunset Boulevard. “It was a short step for businessmen to use gangsters in their private quarrels, and we began to enjoy unsolvable murders. Witnesses began to act, in Los Angeles, like they did in Chicago. They vamoosed,” White wrote.

L.A. was falling into the hands of the underworld in a way that seemed like anarchy, or as one journalist noted, “terroristic.” Charlie Crawford’s hold had slackened with the election of Mayor Porter; other racketeers, including some of his former allies, or Italians with Eastern mob connections like John Rosselli, looked to gain control of the gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging now that the power of the L.A. System seemed to have crumbled.

A gang war was in the offing, and seemingly to save his skin, Crawford made a big display of quitting “politics.” He joined a church. On Sunday, June 29, 1930, at St. Paul’s Presbyterian on South La Brea Avenue, along with twenty-five others, he was baptized with water specially imported from the River Jordan. Onto the collection plate Crawford dropped a ring set with two large diamonds, later valued at $3,500. He said that the ring, a treasure from his days in Seattle, meant more to him than anything in the world except his family. Accompanying the ring was a note addressed to the pastor of the church, Reverend Gustav Briegleb: “Please sell this ring and use it for the building of the parish house Sunday school,” the note said.

Briegleb was a graduate of Yale and a onetime lieutenant of “Fighting Bob” Shuler. He had grizzled hair and a frowning arrogant face. He dressed well but lacked Shuler’s oratorical gift. He and Shuler had parted ways soon after Mayor Porter’s election, with Shuler accusing his former ally of sucking up to the rich. “As I see it, his trouble is that the ‘big boys’ can feed him stuff,” Shuler said.

Crawford and his mother had been attending Briegleb’s church for some weeks. “I think Mr. Crawford is entitled to a great deal of credit for taking this step,” said Briegleb of the Gray Wolf’s sudden turn toward the Lord. “Especially in view of his mature years.”

The L.A. press took up the story with the kind of relish that these days might greet some flaky celebrity’s involvement with Scientology or rehab. “CHURCH JOINED BY CRAWFORD,” said the Times, while the
Examiner
greeted the move as Crawford himself would have wished: “CRAWFORD DONATES DIAMOND, QUITS POLITICS.”