A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (19 page)

21

Double Death on Sunset

B
ig news,” said Blayney Matthews, late in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 20, 1931, and this had nothing to do with the approaching Love Mart trial. Matthews, usually so calm and genial, was scarcely able to contain himself. “Charlie Crawford’s been shot.”

White, amazed, stared at Matthews for a moment. “Is he dead?”

“No.”

Crawford, badly wounded but still conscious, was in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. A journalist, Herbert Spencer, who had been with Crawford at the time, had been shot too, and was already dead. Spencer was the editor and co-owner of The Critic of Critics, the political weekly that Crawford was backing. All this had happened in Crawford’s office at 6665 Sunset Boulevard, inches from the door through which White had heard Morris Lavine extort Crawford the previous year. The gunman had fled the scene. None of Crawford’s numerous alarms had sounded.

“I want you to get over there,” Matthews said. White started to gather together his forensics gear.

“I knew at once this was dynamite,” White later wrote.

All over town phone lines buzzed. Newsmen grabbed their hats and cops dropped what they were doing. Within minutes two LAPD men arrived at Crawford’s office. They’d been cruising in their patrol car on Sunset Boulevard when the call came in and had narrowly missed catching the perpetrator.

Lucille Fisher, Crawford’s young receptionist, said that a man—dressed in a blue suit, fair-complexioned, obviously an American—had arrived at 6665 Sunset Boulevard at around 3 P.M. She hadn’t known this man, but Crawford had greeted him at the doorway to his office, smiling and saying pleasantly, “How are you? How have you been? Come on in.” A little while later, Fisher said, at about 3:30 P.M., Herbert Spencer had arrived. He, too, had looked friendly and calm, and there was still no sign of trouble. At about 4 P.M., Fisher took a call from Spencer’s wife, knocked on the door of Crawford’s office, and went in with the message. “They were sitting there at ease, talking,” Fisher said. Spencer came out and spoke to his wife, assuring her that he’d be home soon, before returning to the inner office. Thirty minutes later, a chair scraped back, a heavy fist seemed to pound a tabletop, and voices were raised; then there was scuffling, and the shooting started.

Herbert Spencer, mortally wounded, staggered out of the office. At the front of the building he stopped to steady himself against the signboard advertising a photographer’s studio; then he collapsed, spilling his blood, bright-red against the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard. “I saw him fall,” Lucille Fisher said. “We carried him in and I held his head.” George Copeland, a realtor who leased an office from Crawford, went to the cooler for a glass of water, but Spencer was dead before he had the chance to drink it. The fatal bullet had torn off the tip of his right index finger before plowing through his heart.

Roger Fowler, the owner of the photographer’s studio at the front of the small building, said he heard two shots and saw a man walking out the side door, buttoning the jacket of his neatly tailored blue suit. “He walked erectly and didn’t seem disturbed,” Fowler said.

Mildred “Billie” Rohrback, Fowler’s assistant, also heard the shot and described the man: slender, straight-backed. Rohrback, dark-haired and stunning, would become a photographers’ favorite in the coming weeks, and would parlay the fame the case gave her into a screen test and bit parts in pictures. She added the details that the suit the man wore was double-breasted, and he’d been carrying a straw skimmer hat. Neither she nor Fowler had known him.

George Crawford, Charlie’s brother, came forward with his story. At 3 P.M. he’d been sitting in his car on Sunset Boulevard, gun at the ready. For months he’d been acting as Charlie’s bodyguard. Through the rearview mirror George saw an expensive sedan draw up at the curb. His eyes focused on the gorgeous woman, “a bejeweled blonde,” who was behind the wheel. Beside her was a man “dapperly dressed in a dark blue suit,” who paused for a moment and smiled at the woman before getting out and going into Crawford’s office. George, evidently not much of a bodyguard, reckoned there was no threat. Hungry, he started up his car and drove to a drugstore at the junction of Sunset and Highland. He was eating a steak when Copeland rushed in to tell him about the shooting.

Leslie White, having been in Crawford’s office before, was familiar with the layout and quickly set to work. He took photographs of the desk, the upturned chair, and the blood on the floor where Crawford had fallen. On the wall, newly added since White had been in the room, was a framed photograph of the Reverend Gustav Briegleb, whose new church—with the empty room ready for a radio station in the basement—Crawford had paid for. In a box on top of the large safe were back issues of The Critic of Critics. An empty whiskey bottle was in the trash, suggesting the three men had been drinking, although when White took his photos, only one glass stood on the desk. In a daybook Crawford had recorded the income from his brothels and other businesses. Another entry spoke of his anxiety that he was about to be “taken for a ride.” White examined the room for fingerprints and found many. He also found a spent bullet slammed into the wall.

Mike Schindler, co-editor of The Critic of Critics, reported that Spencer, too, had been threatened. Anonymous callers had warned him to “lay off.” “Go see the motion picture The Finger Points,” a mysterious voice had said, referring to a Warner Bros. film based on the Jake Lingle affair, starring Clark Gable and Fay Wray. “You will find out what happens to newspapermen who know and print too much.” Only a few days before, The Critic of Critics had carried this: “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN—A few days ago one Guy McAfee, who lords it over certain phases of the Los Angeles nether regions, informed a member of the staff of The Critic of Critics that unless this publication ‘got wise to itself’ he would see to it that we were ‘taken apart.’ That, we suppose, is the ‘take ’em for a ride’ threat in the Los Angeles manner … If any member of the staff of this publication is molested in any way it will be the signal for the opening by the authorities—and a certain daily newspaper—of a well-filled safe deposit box now reposing in the vaults of a certain bank. In that bank, among other things, are described the names, addresses, haunts, and habits of all those who would be closing the mouth of the editor.”

The magazine had been in business for a year. It was small, only pamphlet-sized, but neatly laid out and well written, mixing local politics with showbiz news. Its announced aim was “to rid the city of such persons as Mayor Porter and Rev. Robert Shuler and show up other long hairs who try for fame or money by limiting personal liberty of Americans.” It sounded good. In fact the magazine, with a circulation of 15,000, pitted one set of vested interests against others, siding with its backer Crawford and slamming his enemies, attacking the efforts of eastern and rival racketeers who were gaining a foothold in the city.

A recent article, headlined “Guy McAfee—‘Capone’ of L.A.,” had exposed the alleged activities of former police captain McAfee. Back in the early 1920s McAfee had been head of the LAPD vice squad. He married a woman who ran one of Albert Marco’s brothels, left the police, and went into business with Marco and Crawford. But with the election of Mayor Porter, the rise of Bob Shuler, and the apparent dwindling of Crawford’s power, McAfee had assumed more control. The
Examiner
, the Times, and the
Daily News
called McAfee “a gambler,” and it’s true that he owned the Johanna Smith, the gambling ship moored off Long Beach, and the swanky Clover Club, just above Sunset Boulevard at La Cienega.

The Clover Club, situated at the end of a long driveway so that McAfee’s men could see the cops coming, was a haven for the movie crowd (it was here that director Howard Hawks met his glamorous second wife, Nancy “Slim” Hawks, the inspiration for the droll, tough-talking persona that Lauren Bacall would adopt in various Hawks pictures, including his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep) and for high-rollers who sometimes lost tens of thousands in an evening and were escorted from their cars by security men armed with machine-guns. McAfee wanted his patrons to lose their money inside, not in the parking lot. The Clover Club was fitted with tables that could be flipped over and hidden during raids, details that Chandler would use in The Big Sleep, whose smooth mobster Eddie Mars is modeled after Guy McAfee.

At the time he was shot, Crawford had been feuding for months with McAfee. Along with the incendiary article, The Critic of Critics had published a cartoon featuring Guy McAfee as an octopus, sitting at the back of the Jeffries Bar on Spring Street, his tentacles stretching into every one of L.A.’s criminal and civic pies. He was more than just a “gambler,” in the same way Crawford had been no mere “politician.”

“I know who killed my husband,” Herbert Spencer’s widow, Frances, told the
Examiner
reporter who sped to the Spencer house in Los Feliz, arriving ahead of the cops. At first Mrs. Spencer, usually known as “Frankie,” refused to believe what the reporter was saying. Then, heartbroken, she collapsed on a divan with her weeping son in her arms. “Daddy’s gone, dear—those terrible, bad men finally got him,” she said. Sympathetic neighbors told the reporter he must leave. He didn’t. Other newsmen and photographers were already piling out of their cars, dispatched in a hurry by their city editors, and soon the grieving Frankie Spencer held an impromptu press conference for an audience of fifty.

“You know who killed Herbert as well as I do. He knew they were after him. He was telling the truth in his magazine about the gang that keeps this town wide open,” she said. “My husband had only one enemy in the world. That man controls the saloons and casinos in Los Angeles. Herbert was telling things he knew about this man and the crooked officials who let him operate.”

Frankie Spencer recalled the times when her husband had been a top man on the Evening Express, covering stories as a reporter. He’d call her and say, “Gee, Frankie, do we have a beautiful murder … it’s a natural … don’t wait up, honey … no telling when I’ll get home with this story breaking …”

Thinking of this, Frankie Spencer broke down. “Beautiful murder! Oh God, I can’t stand it. That phrase rings in my ears. It’s haunting me. It all seems a nightmare. I just can’t believe he won’t walk in the door any minute or call me.”

She prayed for vengeance. If she’d been there, she said, the man who killed her husband would have been forced to kill her too, otherwise she’d have killed him. “I’m going to see that justice is done in this terrible case if I have to fight the gangs who are fattening on this city alone. Herbert knew the word had gone out on him. He told me a few days ago, ‘Honey, if they ever find me dead, you know who did it—or, rather, had it done, because he’s too yellow and cunning to do it himself.’ So I tell you now—go ask Guy McAfee who did it.”

The cops—both the LAPD and Buron Fitts’s men—had precisely the same idea. McAfee was the top suspect. But at the time of the shootings he’d been nowhere near Crawford’s office on Sunset Boulevard. He’d been downtown in the Hall of Justice, the possessor of an iron-clad and nose-thumbing alibi. McAfee was only too glad to let himself be taken into custody.

In conversation with reporters McAfee agreed that he and his former boss had been engaged in bitter “political” fights. “Everybody knows that,” he said. “But here is something that is not generally known—Charlie Crawford and I buried our chief differences at a meeting last Monday night.”

Subsequent investigation revealed this last part to be false, a blatant lie. A meeting had indeed taken place that Monday night but had ended in an argument, with both men shouting abuse and threats. Now McAfee was almost laughably measured and thoughtful:

I figure it this way. The man who did the shooting had called on Crawford to discuss some problem—some business matter in which both were interested and in which it was necessary for them to reach some agreement. They couldn’t reach an agreement and Herb Spencer was sent for, or entered the office by chance, and became a sort of arbitrator. Probably the argument reached a point where there were hot and angry words. Possibly Crawford sided with Spencer against the unknown man. The unknown, enraged by this, either pulled his own gun and shot Crawford and Spencer, or else picked up Crawford’s gun, which was supposed to be in his desk. I don’t think it was in any way planned or premeditated. No-one who plotted a murder would pick out that tiny little office, where there is scarcely room for three men.

As analysis, this seems reasonable, even plausible—given the oddity that the Los Angeles press corps was encouraging a racketeer and suspect to hold forth expertly like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. In the LAPD McAfee’s badge number had been 396. He had a big handsome face with stick-out ears, and he was tall: his nicknames were “Slats” and “Stringbean.” He was also known as “The Whistler” because, while still a cop, he’d whistled down the phone line to warn his friends of upcoming raids. A much later photograph, taken in the late 1940s, shows a laughing man, rocking back on his heels, face creased and transformed by glee. His performance here, talking to the men from the Times, the
News
, and the
Examiner
, seems similarly self-amused, almost too cute, as if he wished to shine a spotlight on his smarts and sense of growing power.

Charlie Crawford, the man who could answer many questions, lay on an operating table at downtown’s Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. Cops and reporters surrounded him. His gray hair fell back from his forehead. The skin on his face, filmed with sweat, kept changing color—first pale, then livid blue as the burly frame of his body fought for oxygen. He called for his wife and two little daughters. “I want to see them. Tell them I’m all right, but I want to see them,” he said.

Crawford’s brother, George, was at his side, holding his hand. “I’ve sent for them, Charlie,” George said.