A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (3 page)

As the days went by, the work became more and more grisly. White photographed, for instance, the Cowdens, an entire family that had been wiped out. The bodies of father, son, and daughter washed up quickly but the mother, Corinna Cowden, was found days later, already in such an advanced state of decomposition that her eyes and nose were gone. Some corpses, buried in silt and protected from the air, were well preserved even when found more than a week later. Others were rotten with maggots and vegetation, nothing appearing human except the rows of grinning teeth. So little remained of some bodies that the pieces were stored in small baskets.

On March 20 White set out on a different kind of expedition. Together with Bernie Isensee, another Ventura photographer, and an armed deputy sheriff, Carl Wallace (a future intimate of J. Edgar Hoover), White crossed the county line back into L.A. County to photograph what was left of the dam. Isensee, soon to quit photography and become a highway patrolman (a later picture shows a handsome man in jodhpurs and aviator shades), owned a stereoscopic camera that produced negatives fifty inches wide. The men set up their equipment above the dam, with White shooting from the exact spot that Isensee covered in his wider version. Then they worked their way back toward the sea, along the path the flood had taken, selecting different vantage points from which to take more and more pictures. The eighteen huge images made by Isensee remain the most striking visual record of the scale of the flood, showing a skyscraper-high dam destroyed, an enormous reservoir emptied, an entire landscape and hundreds of buildings leveled.

At one point during the day, the men paused at the end of a washed-out road for a group photo. White set up his camera on a tripod, set a timer, and walked back into the shot so he could be a part of it. Indeed, he stands smack at the photo’s center, a cocky little rooster of a guy, looking all business with his hat pulled down a little over one eye and his hands on his hips.

Los Angeles quickly agreed to make restitution. Money came from the DWP, from the Harbor Board, from L.A. County, and from individuals. Claims were adjudicated without going to court. Precise dollar and cent values were given for property loss and loss through death. A racial element came into play here: Nora McDougal, for instance, received a $15,000 settlement for the death of one adult, while Emilio Quezada received $500 for a similar loss. But Spanish-speaking victims signed off on the papers, receiving much less than their English-speaking counterparts, and L.A. got what it wanted—the chance to move on and start forgetting that the St. Francis Dam ever existed. Nobody knows exactly how much was paid—estimates vary from $5.5 million to $25 million in 1928 dollars. Roy Pinkerton wrote that $7 million had been paid by the mid-1930s. Meanwhile the water levels in the Hollywood Reservoir—held in place by the Mulholland Dam, a sister to the St. Francis and built along the same lines—were immediately lowered, and the dam itself was scaled back. Nobody wanted another disaster, least of all the DWP.

The first checks were handed to Ventura County victims and their families within months, while Leslie White went about the mournful task of helping to identify the corpses that were still showing up. “For weeks the authorities continued to bring in putrid corpses which had to be carefully examined and photographed, and for months skeletons were found on the great scar left by the flood,” he said. What he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.

White’s young wife urged him to quit, but he stuck to the job. One morning, while he was preparing to photograph yet another fetid cadaver, he felt a sudden pain in his chest and a balloon of blood spurted from his mouth. His left lung had hemorrhaged and collapsed. Exhausted, he lay in a hospital bed. Doctors warned that he was developing tuberculosis and advised rest at a clinic in the desert near Palm Springs. White couldn’t afford it. Instead he gave up his Ventura darkroom and moved with his wife down the coast to Los Angeles, for the dryness of the air. Odd as it may seem now, like many in the city’s early days, he went to L.A. for his health.

3

A Hero Named Clark

I
llness and one of California’s worst disasters combined to bring Leslie White to Los Angeles in the summer of 1928. On the other hand, David Harris Clark was a native son, born in Highland Park (near where Dodger Stadium is now) on April 4, 1898, thirty years before White moved to L.A.

Clark’s father was named William Alton Clark, the “Alton” having been taken from the town in Illinois near where explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (from whom this line of Clarks claimed distant descent) started their great westward journey of discovery in 1804. William Alton Clark was himself born in Maine in “about 1860.” The 1930 U.S. census records note that he was unsure of the date. He married his childhood sweetheart, Anna Laina, and they traveled through the West before settling in Los Angeles in about 1890. They were probably intrepid, and experienced both adventures and hardships; but nothing suggests either was ever wild. Anna Laina was stoic, not a talker (her mother was a Finn), and generally kept her smoldering temper in check. By all accounts she was, when young, a beautiful woman.

The 1898 City Directory for L.A. lists William Alton Clark as a clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad, then the most important and reviled corporation in the state. The 1910 census lists his occupation as “railroad secretary.” By the 1920 census, however, he was happy to describe himself more fully: “chief accountant for the Southern Pacific’s freight division,” an important job. He had bought a large home in Highland Park, on the fringes of downtown, and was supporting a large extended family: his wife’s mother and father, his wife, and their five children—three boys and two girls.

He was a tall, lean, bespectacled man, proud of the steady rise he had achieved in a city that even then tended to promote spectacular and instant success. He’d survived and prospered amidst the various strategy shifts and upheavals and changes of ownership that the vastly powerful Southern Pacific had gone through in the early part of the previous century. He was diligent, hardworking, a churchgoer, and well positioned in L.A.’s business community. As a railroad man, Clark was also a representative of the past in a place that didn’t like to look back, a city to whose bursting growth he had contributed but which already saw its future with the automobile. Still, the shrewd William Alton Clark had every reason to suppose that his children would prosper from the secure base he had provided.

Dave Clark, the second of his five kids, was educated at nearby Monte Vista Grammar School and Los Angeles High—the oldest high school in Southern California, then a big Gothic pile situated downtown on North Hill Street at Sunset Boulevard. Among the school’s future alumni would be Fletcher Bowron (a four-term mayor of L.A., from 1938–1953), Ray Bradbury, Charles Bukowski, Dustin Hoffman, and Johnnie Cochran (the attorney who defended O. J. Simpson)—as well as some who achieved darker fame.

Dave Clark excelled both academically and as an athlete. In 1917, on America’s entry into WWI, Clark joined the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. “Clark is able and disciplined and good material. He performs well, but must watch his temper,” wrote one officer who taught him. Clark and a group of friends, fearful the war would end before they saw action, headed north to Canada and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. Clark became a fighter pilot. His service records show that he was based with the RFC’s 5th Squadron on the Western front. Dispute would later arise about how much action Clark saw, but certainly he flew sorties, was shot at and shot back. The life expectancy of pilots on the Western front was brutally short—often only a matter of weeks. Harold Beaumont, one of Clark’s American friends, was killed on July 17, 1918. “You have to carry on,” Clark wrote to his brother, but noted too that in a rage during the mess that night he had smashed a bottle and cut his hand. “Damp hangars, muddy roads, crystal blue skies. I’ll miss Harold. He was a crack pilot. I suppose now I’ll have to kill a German for him.” A photograph of the time shows Clark, dressed in uniform with a scarf trailing around his neck, leaning against the fuselage of a single-engined SE5 fighter. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired. His eyes look tired, but his expression is calm. He liked and needed action and didn’t forget the spirit of the war. Always, after he’d returned from France to find an America that increasingly shrugged off wartime idealism in favor of realism and then hedonism, he wore an RFC badge on his lapel, a pin with a pair of wings.

Clark had a cool bravado that could amount to cruelty, but he was close to his family and never doubted he would return to Los Angeles. He was determined to succeed in the city where he had grown up, but questioned what career he should pursue. In 1920 he took a screen test with First National Pictures. “My head’s not empty enough to be an actor,” he told his brother. Or maybe Clark decided to pursue what looked like a steadier career. He spent the next two years studying law at USC and left, without graduating, as soon as he was admitted to the California Bar on March 3, 1922. Again, we might detect impatience here, the action of a man determined to get ahead fast—although forgoing law school graduation was frequent practice for law students in those days, when the route to a professional career was more flexible. It could be that he was strapped for cash—a common occurrence throughout his life. The handsome and socially connected war hero joined Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, a small but established and powerful downtown law firm.

The Wellborns had for decades been players in the growth of Los Angeles. Olin Wellborn, Sr., a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, had been a three-time congressman in Texas who secured the federal judgeship for Southern California in 1895. For a while he partnered with oil magnate E. L. Doheny in a number of ventures. Though Olin Wellborn, Sr., died in 1921, his sons and grandsons continued the firm and still represented E. L. Doheny and had office space in Doheny’s magnificent art-deco Petroleum Securities Building at Olympic and Figueroa.

It was here that Dave Clark went to work, seeing the downtown building boom firsthand and learning his trade as the fast and brittle mood of the 1920s took hold. Women’s skirts soared above the knee, the stock market scaled new peaks, a lot of people expected to get rich in a hurry, and Clark moved with ease among other lawyers, reporters, and cops. He was happy to throw off his coat and get down on the floor and play cards or shoot craps with the guys. Dick Steckel, a police captain who worked way down in Venice, was a particular friend. They golfed together. Clark was a championship level golfer, for years featured on the USC alumni team. He rode well and played polo too. He was charming, forceful, and perhaps vain—confident in his charisma and looks.

In 1926 he married Nancy Regina Malone, the petite and beautiful daughter of a New York judge. Nancy brought with her a little girl, Mary Lenore, her daughter from a previous relationship. During that same year Clark made another big decision, leaving Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn to join the fast-growing District Attorney’s office. He wanted to make a name for himself as a litigator. For a starting salary of $375 a month, he became one of twenty deputies in the D.A.’s trial department, which was responsible for prosecuting more than 300 cases a month—burglary, robbery, grand theft auto, drunk driving, narcotics, assault, possession of a still, and murder cases, an increasing number every year. Crime in the 1920s, like pretty much everything else in L.A., was out of control. The LAPD simply couldn’t cope, leaving many crimes undetected or unpunished. The murder rate more than tripled in the decade, rising to more than sixty a year. The upright and debonair Dave Clark knew that he’d be busy each morning when he strode into the lobby of the new Hall of Justice, the heels of his shining oxfords ringing on the marbled floors.

A courtroom is a theater, and L.A. had already known some star performers, notably Earl Rogers, who defended Clarence Darrow against jury-tampering in 1911, and was described by Darrow himself as “the greatest trial lawyer of his day.” Rogers was a showman, a flamboyant and mesmerizing orator who, in his entire career, lost only three cases. He was also a reckless drinker and a womanizer, and died at age fifty-one in 1922, the year Dave Clark entered the law. Rogers was a legend, and perhaps for a young lawyer like Dave Clark, something of a role model. But Rogers’s courtly, theatrical style already belonged to the past. Clark was something else again—leaner, harder, with a persona that seemed designed for the camera, not the stage. A 1926 photograph of the D.A.’s staff, taken just after the move into the new Hall of Justice, features Clark prominently; he’s taller than everybody else, more tanned, and much better dressed—in a slick tailored suit with a silk tie tight at his neck, an immaculate white handkerchief folded in the outside breast pocket, that flyer’s pin on his lapel. He has a pencil moustache and a gorgeous quality about him. Reporters likened him to John Barrymore, to John Gilbert, and later to Clark Gable.

On the morning of July 6, 1928, Dave Clark rose early, kissed his wife Nancy on the cheek, left their home in West Hollywood, got into his Model T Ford, and turned onto Wilshire Boulevard, heading downtown. He had a big day ahead. District Attorney Asa Keyes (pronounced to rhyme with “eyes”) had given Clark important jobs before, but none as big as the one that faced him today, when he would begin prosecution of racketeer and bootlegger Albert Marco, called “L.A.’s Capone” by the
Daily News
.

“Marco’s just a goon to me,” Clark told the
News
, ridiculing the idea that the gangster might be given special consideration. “No stone will be left unturned and he will be sent to San Quentin.”

“Tough words characterize this ice-cool prosecutor,” wrote Gene Coughlin, a top writer on the
News
. Like many L.A. reporters of the day, Coughlin had served his apprenticeship in Chicago. He was friendly with Lionel Moise who, it’s been said, taught Ernest Hemingway his trade on the
Kansas City Star.
Certainly Moise provided Hemingway, and Coughlin too, with a hard-drinking, hard-fighting journalistic persona that they adopted as their model. Coughlin was working the Marco story under instruction from
News
owner Manchester Boddy who had assumed control of the fledgling tabloid (L.A.’s first) in 1926, and immediately decided that the paper needed a circulation-boosting crusade. Vice, and Albert Marco in particular, became a target. “Albert Marco is loud, brash, and plumply complacent,” wrote Coughlin in his gleeful and lurid way. “The whole of Los Angeles trusts that ‘Debonair Dave’ will rid our city of this menace.”

It was a scorching summer day; by noon the temperature would reach 90 degrees. Crowds packed the Superior Court and jammed the corridors outside, barring what little breeze there was from the Hall of Justice. Charlie Chaplin, who loved a good trial, was given a numbered ticket so he could claim a seat. Albert Marco sauntered in and posed for photographers. “Seated beside his counsel Marco paid scant attention to the proceedings, glancing about the courtroom and smiling for friends,” wrote Coughlin. “He was dressed in a gray suit, a skyblue silk bowtie with handkerchief to match, and wore a huge diamond in his lapel.”

The D.A.’s office had tried to prosecute Marco several times before, but he’d always beaten the rap. Marco had friends in top places and was in no doubt that he’d secure an acquittal this time too. His courtroom demeanor mixed preening arrogance and feigned boredom. Albert Marco had once lost $250,000 in a single hand of poker to Nicky Arnstein, the famed gambler “Nick the Greek.” Marco wanted the world, and Dave Clark, to know that a mere murder charge didn’t faze him.

Marco had been born in 1887 in an Alpine village in northern Italy, where he’d been apprenticed to a hatmaker before deciding to try his luck in America. He, along with thousands of others primarily from Italy and Central Europe, passed through Ellis Island in 1908. He drifted west, roaming Nevada and Washington State as a pimp and confidence man. In Seattle he ran the prostitution business at a large and briefly successful gambling hotel. In 1919 he was arrested for burglary in Sacramento and served a brief sentence. The early 1920s found him in Los Angeles, already driving a Cadillac, wearing slick suits with a Panama hat pushed back on his head, and shipping bootleg booze into a Long Beach warehouse. In 1925 he drew a gun on an LAPD officer and brutally pistol-whipped him. For this, Marco got a $50 fine and was given his gun back. He had good reason to believe himself above the law. He was an important cog in The System, the cabal that ran the Los Angeles underworld.

“‘Marco’s been indicted,’ was the whisper flashed from joint to joint,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the
News
when Marco was arrested for attempted murder on June 28, 1928. “Many of the Marco hirelings, all of them strong believers in the racketeer’s boast that he was ungettable, were hard to convince that the baron faced a potential penitentiary term.” Marco, his clothes dried crimson with blood, had been caught on the roof of the Ship Café in Venice, trying to escape. He told the cop who arrested him. “I’m Albert Marco. I’m a big shot with the police downtown and if you pinch me you’ll be sent to the sticks for life.” A
Los Angeles Times
photograph shows him sitting on a police bench, staring at the camera with an expression of insolence and contempt. His dark hair stands almost straight up, a shock of vigorous, untidy curls rising above a long, meaty face. The double-breasted jacket of his smart suit is worn over a bloody undershirt; his dress shirt, presumably even more stained, had been left in the restroom where he’d been trying to wash it clean.

This, then, was Albert Marco: a thug, thickset and not pretty, but with blunt charisma. His trial—trials, rather, for there would be two—brought Dave Clark glory, but also would plant the seeds of his future doom.

Judge William Doran got proceedings under way amid rumors of jury tampering and stories that Marco had already reached a civil settlement with Dominick Conterno, the man he was accused of trying to kill. The first two days were consumed by the all-important ritual of jury selection before Conterno at last took the stand, with Dave Clark unsure whether this first, and most important, witness had already been squared away by the defense. That turned out not to be the case. Led by Clark, Conterno gave a telling and vivid version of what had happened.