A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (7 page)

Judge Doran (he also presided over the Marco trials) knew the result should have been different and expressed his surprise in scathing terms: “I feel that diligence on the part of District Attorney Keyes would have brought a different verdict,” he said. All hope of retribution against those who’d plundered the Julian Pete seemed to have been lost.

The verdict divided the city’s press. The
Examiner
seemed unconcerned, arguing that this was how the nitty-gritty of business sometimes worked and business, after all, was America’s lifeblood. The Times, on the other hand, had an axe to grind against Asa Keyes. Rumors had long persisted that, back in 1926, Keyes took a $30,000 payoff following the sensational disappearance of the evangelist Aimee McPherson. A pile of clothes was found on Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica and for thirty-two sensation-packed days, the world wondered where she was. Several of her distraught followers killed themselves, and the city spent vast sums organizing a search. Then McPherson reappeared with a tale of having been kidnapped, although it soon came out that she’d been shacked up in a hotel with the man who was her radio operator and lover. “Her followers were kneeling in the sand, praying for her to come back walking on the water,” wrote reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, the daughter of Earl Rogers. “Instead she came up in the desert in Arizona with a young man named Ormiston.” Asa Keyes brought McPherson to court and charged her with obstruction of justice then did an about-face and dropped proceedings. Now, for the Times, it seemed the same had happened again, this time within a situation that reached deeper; the Julian Pete swindle had touched most of the city’s population one way or another.

The Times got proof of Keyes’s corruption in the shape of a diary, a little black book that had been kept by Milton Pike, an assistant to a prominent downtown tailor named Ben Getzoff, whose shop at 609 Spring Street was near the courts and the business district. In his diary Pike had recorded the various comings and goings, and the shady transactions, that took place in the back of Getzoff’s shop, all of which he observed through an angled mirror. Prominent Julian Pete players had been frequent visitors, likewise Asa Keyes, “often half-lit” on the bootleg booze kept there. Pike alleged that he’d seen Keyes accept lavish gifts and bribes. At first Keyes denied the charges and refused to resign, but accumulating evidence forced his hand. Asa “Ace” Keyes, the Los Angeles District Attorney, a public servant of twenty-four years, had taken money and thrown the most important trial on his watch. Some were shocked, but many perplexed and faith-shaken Angelenos thought this outcome logical. “So pock-marked was this slimy business with fraud and faithlessness, so infiltrated with shuffling and trimming, with bad faith and treachery, money-juggling and moral back-sliding, that few citizens were greatly surprised at this dramatic turn,” wrote Guy Finney.

Enter Buron Fitts, elected with a mandate to get Keyes and clean house. Making Julian Pete prosecutions would become the holy grail of Fitts’s first term as D.A. In time he’d learn that the Julian Pete was an unending and unfathomable story. The scandal symbolized the crazy prosperity of the 1920s boom and presaged the despairing time that was to follow. Its consequences would ripple on and on, gaining force until they became bewildering for Fitts and, in the end, deadly for the likes of Charlie Crawford.

7

Our Detective Learns the Ropes

T
he trial of Asa Keyes, former District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles, gave Leslie White his first important assignment in his new job with the D.A.’s office. Jake Berman (aka Jack Bennett, the “two-name man”) and one of the leading Julian Pete conspirators, had turned state’s evidence in exchange for the immunity Buron Fitts granted him. As a result, Berman found his life under threat and White was to be his bodyguard. Forensics was nowhere on White’s agenda. As he later wrote, “When trapped by the reform administration, Berman sold his confederates down the river. In this wise, he gained his release and my particular task was to keep either his former friends or the thousands of victims from killing him.”

Jake Berman was twenty-eight, only a few years older than White, but the two men could not have been more different. Berman grew up in the Brooklyn ghetto, worked as a runner on Wall Street, and served time for fraud in a New Jersey prison. He’d arrived in L.A. with nothing but a suitcase and the friendship of S. C. Lewis. He had a round face and thinning hair, but his soulful brown eyes made him handsome as a gigolo. He sported silk neckties with a stick-pin bearing a diamond the size of a dime. He’d proven himself a master manipulator and salesman, capable of making ten suckers grow where previously there’d been only one. He’d thrown $20,000 parties with champagne and movie starlets on hand to gladden the hearts and soften the purse strings of big investors. In one sixteen-month period—January 1926 to April 1927—his bank transactions totaled $67 million. “Gossips say the boy wonder had $2 million in $10,000 bills in a body belt on his person,” wrote Lorin Baker in 1931. When Julian Pete crashed, Berman had eluded capture, fleeing to Europe on the ocean liner Berengeria, carrying $625,000 in that same chamois leather belt. He landed in England and outfoxed the Scotland Yard men sent to catch him. In time he returned to America of his own free will, traveling first class on another liner, the France, and surrendered to Buron Fitts in L.A. His soft-leathered shoes were natty and expensive, his suits cut from the finest cloth. He was a classic con man: people came to him in droves, wanting something for nothing; he gave them nothing but took plenty.

White and his partner, the more experienced Blayney Matthews, kept Berman holed up in an apartment house at Hollywood and Vine. Next door a nightclub dancer played jazz on the phonograph all day long. Berman tapped on a table, beating the rhythm. He was restless, irritated by this confinement, and kept ordering White to fetch him coffee and sandwiches. No doubt this rankled, as did Berman’s grinning certainty that he could manipulate the law with ease. He had bilked investors out of millions, yet he expected to walk away. “You’ll help me do it,” he told White.

“Berman was sleek and flashily groomed; he reminded me of a wharf rat that has just climbed out of the water. He had brazen bulging eyes,” White wrote. “He was a bumptious Jew.”

An FBI report notes Berman’s “hebraic features,” and White’s remark to some extent reflects standard race prejudice for the era. It still sticks in the throat. Here was material for a comedy: the country boy, new to the city, boxed in a room guarding the life of a man he professes to despise but perhaps secretly envies—the smoothest of smooth urban operators. White earned $55 a week, not a bad wage at the time, but Berman had between two and three million dollars salted away in safe deposit boxes all over town. White hated Berman with a vengeance; Berman, when he noticed White at all, treated him with a mixture of arrogance and contempt, laughing in White’s face when White said he believed what politicians told him. “It’s all just a show. Wind to rope the suckers,” Berman said.

Jake Berman’s defection decided the fate of Asa Keyes. The trial’s result was never really at issue. First, the prosecution put Milton Pike on the stand. Pike ran through the allegations that had already been published and closed his testimony by reading his diary entry for July 28, 1928, the last day he worked for Ben Getzoff, when he saw Asa Keyes drive up to the tailor’s shop in a brand new Lincoln coupe. This prepared the way for star witness Jake Berman, “debonair and with a multitude of diamonds flashing on his fingers,” said the
Examiner
, who told how Keyes came to get that new Lincoln, and much more.

Keyes, acting through Getzoff, had put on the squeeze, first demanding $10,000 from Berman to cover gambling debts. Then Keyes wanted a gift for his house, a chaise lounge with fabric chosen from Brooks Brothers. Then a new car, a Chevrolet, for his daughter, “as it will please me and help the situation along.” Then the Lincoln, and an additional $10,000 so that Keyes could get the property he’d just bought in Beverly Hills out of escrow. One day Getzoff suggested that Berman might buy Keyes a set of golf clubs, and forced Berman to wait while he got Keyes on the phone—choosing makes, weights, and sizes. The clubs, inlaid with the initials “A.K.,” were then delivered in a splendid leather golf bag to Keyes’s home. All this suggests that the Roaring Twenties underworld as evoked by Damon Runyon corresponds more closely to the real thing than we might suppose. These “jungle-dwellers,” as Louis Adamic called them, had a sense of mischief about their greed.

Berman bribed Asa Keyes to the extent of $40,000. On the witness stand, Keyes attacked the crooked character of his accuser but couldn’t dent Berman’s credibility. Judge Ben Butler, entirely sold, reckoned that Berman was as persuasive a witness as any he’d ever seen.

Dave Clark was part of the prosecution team. No doubt this was a way of proving his loyalty to his new boss Buron Fitts. And it was another high-profile trial, a way of continuing to build his career. Clark joined in the fun, describing Keyes “on his way to heaven, wearing a smoking jacket, listening to an $1150 radio with a set of golf clubs in one corner, a Lincoln roadster on behind as a trailer, and in his hands a sheaf of Ben Getzoff’s liquor prescriptions.”

Buron Fitts had none of Dave Clark’s experience or flair as a trial lawyer. Still, he knew how to play a courtroom hand as strong as this. He protested all along that he’d been hoping and waiting for his old boss Asa Keyes to prove his innocence. “He has utterly failed,” Fitts said. “He has debased and rendered contemptible this county in the eyes of the world. He has made the Temple of Justice a den of thieves. By your verdict you will say whether this sordid, rotten, putrid scheme of things as carried on by Asa Keyes will continue in Los Angeles County.”

In the evening of February 8, 1929, the jury deliberated only ninety minutes before finding Keyes, and co-conspirator Ben Getzoff, guilty on all counts. Keyes turned ashen, knowing that he would be sentenced to San Quentin, where many of the murderers and crooks he himself had prosecuted were still serving time. In San Quentin Keyes became prisoner number 48,218. His hair was shorn, like that of a common thief. He was photographed, fingerprinted, and put in a cell in the old men’s ward. “What is life?” he said, passing through the prison gates. “We have an hour of consciousness and then we are gone.”

Ben Getzoff, on hearing the verdict, was less philosophical. Crushed, he slumped in his seat, exclaiming: “That settles it!”

The verdicts rocked L.A., confirming what many had feared and suspected: the Julian Pete had been a huckster’s paradise in which a chosen few had looted the pockets of the average Joe. Now the chosen few were fighting among themselves like dogs. Some joined with Fitts in his hope that the irreputable city was at last becoming reputable. Others agreed that this might be a new beginning, but saw the events as a foreboding—as if the next cycle would see not a coming together but a falling apart that would prove still more violent. L.A. was on the verge of something.

“The trial of Asa Keyes and his co-defendants was a spectacle I shall never forget. The courtroom was always jammed with celebrities, many from the film colony,” White wrote, fascinated and horrified by how a smart courtroom attorney like Dave Clark could heckle, bewilder, and confuse a well-meaning witness. Clark would start a witness off slowly, letting him relax, and “then abruptly hurl question after question at him until the poor devil did not know what was happening.” White resolved that when the time came to take the stand himself, he would adopt the trick of counting to three before answering even the simplest question, such as his name or address, so that when the tougher and more confusing questions came, his pauses wouldn’t be conspicuous.

The tailor Ben Getzoff, meanwhile, sick with ulcers and groaning with pain, feared that he was about to die. Dramatically he called for Buron Fitts and named more names, men who’d been part of a fixing ring that centered around his shop. Getzoff’s goal was to extricate himself from the slammer, and Fitts seized on the chance to gain more column inches. The story Getzoff told “will shake this county to its very foundations,” Fitts said, making political hay. The names Getzoff coughed up included politicians, attorneys, and one “who held a higher position in the community than any of the others,” Fitts said.

The saga of Julian Pete entered a new phase.

Jake Berman, meanwhile, wanted to start living again and was determined to go out to dinner. White and Blayney Matthews usually let Berman go out the door first. On the evening after the trial, however, Blayney Matthews himself led the way and saw a gunman open his coat and pull out an automatic pistol. Matthews slammed shut the door just as the gunman readied himself to shoot. Two bullets punched through the door and into a wall.

“To kill Berman would have been an act of justifiable homicide, but we defended him at risk to our own lives,” wrote Leslie White. His innocence and principles were no pose; he sincerely believed that if enough individuals refused to be corrupted, the system could be changed. Berman was the first of his reality instructors, but White couldn’t yet respond to Berman’s blithe, opportunistic cynicism. Instead he saw problems that needed to be solved. White’s idealism was like a thick rope, tough to cut.

8

Shots in the Night

J
ust a few days after the conclusion of the Asa Keyes trial, on February 17, 1929, Leslie White received another phone call in the middle of the night, around 2 A.M. Lucien Wheeler, head of the D.A.’s investigative unit, was on the line.

“Les, young Doheny has just been murdered. Get out to their Beverly Hills home as soon as possible,” Wheeler said.

Half-asleep, White again struggled to understand the immensity of what he’d just heard. “You mean E. L. Doheny’s son?”

“The same. I’ll meet you there,” said Wheeler, and hung up.

White scrambled into his clothes, gathered his cameras and fingerprint gear, loaded his car, and drove into the night. He didn’t need to be told the address—his aunt had often pointed out the Doheny mansion, Greystone, looming high in the hills. Everybody knew where the Dohenys lived. They were, along with the Chandlers of the Times, among the most powerful families in L.A.—the elite, the ruling aristocracy. E. L. Doheny, the old man of the family, was one of the richest men in America; his life story recalled a Western dime novel, but his power reached throughout the realm, rivaling that of J. P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller. He was a legend.

It had been Edward L. Doheny who, flat broke and still hopeful after almost twenty years of scrambling for gold and silver throughout the West, first struck oil in L.A. back in 1892. Within a year he had sixty-nine more wells pumping, most in residential districts, setting in motion the oil boom. “He had developed the Midas touch,” the New York Times would observe. “Gold flowed out of the grounds at his command.” With the California market in hand, Doheny ventured into Mexico, gained a lease on a million acres around the port of Tampico, on which he built roads, railways, shops, warehouses, and living quarters, creating a whole city around the oil he struck. What he’d found in California was nothing compared to his great Mexican wells—Cassiano 6 & 7, Cerro Azul 4. They were like oceans, producing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day, turning the vivid colors of the tropical jungle glistening black. Thus Doheny became the most successful prospector in history, much more successful than he or anybody else had become through gold, silver, or gems. When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Doheny bribed officials and financed a private army to protect the region he controlled, lobbying hard in Washington to bring the objectives of the U.S. government in line with his own. He was involved in plots, uprisings, and attempted coups d’etat. Some of his contemporaries believed him responsible for the assassination of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza in 1920.

By the early 1920s E. L. Doheny was worth more than $300 million. He was short and slight, with stooped shoulders. He had sharp blue-gray eyes and a thick, graying moustache. He spoke quickly and was impulsive and overbearing. Always willful and driven, he’d beaten down almost overwhelming obstacles. Success had made him both pig-headed and feared, like a Napoleon in Los Angeles.

At the turn of the century he’d bought a mansion in Chester Place, then the city’s most exclusive district, where big homes were grouped around a park. When he moved in, he decided this should be his own kingdom, and bought all the other houses so he could rule as he pleased. Single-handedly he funded the building of St. Vincent’s, the magnificent Roman Catholic Church that still stands at Adams and Figueroa, near his Chester Place compound. Doheny hobnobbed with presidents and heads of state. His companies were major suppliers to the U.S. Navy and the Cunard Line. Gas stations—their signs bearing the Doheny symbol, a green shamrock—had sprung up all over Southern California. As president of the American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic, he was the country’s leading funder of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Promoters, eager to thrill people with the idea of wealth and to hammer home the dream of money, took their prospects on bus tours of L.A., pointing out both the old wells Doheny had brought in and the palatial Chester Place residence, “home of the multimillionaire.” William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, complained that it was tough to hire journalists because Doheny had put so many of the best ones on his own payroll—protecting Doheny interests, supporting Doheny positions.

Doheny had a sense of humor and was used to bending entire nations to his purpose. He so hated to lose that he routinely appeared in court to fight speeding tickets, having fun torturing the judge a little before handing over the fine, a detail that Upton Sinclair seized upon and gave to his fictional oil magnate J. Arnold Ross in Oil! B. Traven, the socialist author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had featured Doheny’s Mexican plots and counterplots in another of his novels, The White Rose. Doheny, then, was admired, reviled, a figure of awesome accomplishment and domineering arrogance—an emblem of American success in all its profligate and controlling glory.

In the early hours of the morning of February 17, 1929, speeding in his Model T Ford through the dark streets, Leslie White sat with his back straight, peering shortsightedly through his horn-rims, gripping the steering wheel tight, and smelling the cool fragrance of the Los Angeles night through the open window. He was nervous and excited, knowing that he was calling on power. This, for White, was something entirely strange and new—a real taste of the big time. He was aware, too, that the situation would touch upon not only the supposed murder but an already existing scandal that had rocked the country and wrecked a presidency.

The First World War confirmed that oil—possession of oil, control of oil—was central to military power. Washington politicians increasingly sought E. L. Doheny’s opinion and support through the decade 1910–1920, when his influence and the twenty million barrels of oil he provided yearly for ships, airplanes, cars, trucks, and tanks became crucial. As early as 1917, Doheny appeared before a Senate Committee, arguing that oil-rich American lands laid aside for the U.S. Navy should be commercially exploited. Josephus Daniels, then Secretary of the Navy, opposed the idea. He quizzed Doheny about Mexican oil he was providing for American ships. This oil had a high sulfur content that, when burned, made much more smoke than Doheny had promised it would. Doheny replied with a twinkle: “I lied about it.”

Warren Harding, on his election as president in 1920, appointed a new Navy Secretary, Edwin Denby, who, unlike his predecessor, was pro-oil and anti-conservationist. Doheny stepped up efforts to get hold of federal lands located in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming; and Denby soon handed over control of the matter to another Harding appointee—the new Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall.

Now the story became pleasingly plot-heavy and intimately corrupt because Albert Fall was Edward L. Doheny’s oldest friend in the world. They’d played poker together and been partners back in the early 1880s in the wild mining town of Kingston, Arizona. There Fall, a big fellow with piercing black eyes, had never been without a gun and liked to boast that he’d killed men. Since then Fall had done well as a lawyer, and prospered as part of the Santa Fe property ring that ordered the assassination of legendary lawman Pat Garrett, himself the killer of Billy the Kid. Later Fall became senator for the fledgling state of New Mexico—another story, apparently, of the frontier spirit surviving to triumph in the twentieth century. Fall, like Doheny, gained power; but unlike his friend, he didn’t know how to hold on to his money. He lived high and was always short of cash. In 1921, when he took office as Secretary of the Interior, he owed taxes and was heavily in debt—inconveniences he was just managing to keep secret.

Fall arranged for Doheny to meet President Harding, and soon handed his old friend the Elk Hills lease, which Doheny reckoned would be worth more than $100 million. In exchange Doheny agreed to build the vast oil storage facilities that would allow the creation of a deep water port for the U.S. Navy in Hawaii—Pearl Harbor.

All this was incestuous, corrupt in the predictable way of the world, but would have been “perfectly legal,” as Doheny later said, were it not for one detail: on November 30, 1921, Doheny’s son, twenty-eight-year-old Edward L. Doheny, Jr., acting on his father’s instructions, withdrew $100,000 from a New York bank account, stuffed it in a black leather satchel, carried it by train to Washington and, in a room at the Waldman Park Hotel, presented the money—five $20,000 bundles bound with rubber bands—to Albert Fall.

Unknown to the Dohenys, Fall made a similar deal with oilman Harry Sinclair for the Teapot Dome lease, and suddenly awash with ready money, paid off his back taxes, put $40,000 into improvements to his New Mexico ranch, and even bought some adjoining property. Journalist Carl Magee, struck by the mystery of Albert Fall’s sudden new wealth, did some digging and before long uncovered the messy story. Fall resigned and Warren Harding died in disgrace, but not before memorably remarking: “I can take care of my enemies; it’s my friends who are causing me trouble.”

By the beginning of 1929 the presidency of Calvin Coolidge was finished, and Herbert Hoover was about to take office. But “Teapot Dome,” as the scandal was known, refused to go away; on the contrary, it became a national symbol of Jazz Age greed and graft, an even more far-reaching version of the Julian Pete. Albert Fall’s ham-fisted attempts at a cover-up only made Doheny’s situation worse. More than seven years after the $100,000 had been handed over—after an endless series of congressional investigations, civil suits, contempt cases, and acquittals that led only to further criminal prosecutions—Doheny faced yet one more trial, with the certainty of further public controversy and disgrace coupled with a real possibility of jail time.

And now Doheny’s son, the deliverer of the black leather satchel, had been killed. On the one hand Leslie White knew all this as he whizzed toward a moment of destiny; on the other hand, he had no idea what he was getting into. He was about to face whole worlds of money and machination that were beyond him. Jake Berman had been a beginning; soon White’s education and disillusionment would really speed up.