The Laughing Gorilla (21 page)

The new extra-long, extra-heavy riot clubs, nightsticks with a lead core, were forthwith shipped to San Francisco to the delight of Chief Quinn, who addressed his next concern. He was a little leery of the effectiveness of the tear gas being offered him. For the last decade, the SFPD had kept tear gas and mustard gas bombs in its arsenal for routing barricaded criminals and dispersing strikers, and he found it too mild.

“Oh, the new stuff is not the usual tearing kind,” explained McCarty. “These are canisters of a powerful vomiting and nausea gas. The longshoremen won’t know what hit them.”

“Really!” Quinn’s sales resistance shattered quicker than a cracked skull. “I’ll need several crates of the sickening gas before Easter.”

“Chief Quinn was determined to be nobody’s Sentimental Alice,” wrote historian Kevin Starr. When the longshoremen struck the previous May, Quinn ordered his antistrike squad (182 patrolmen, 17 mounted policemen, and 5 prowl cars) to Pier 35 where the Industrial Association—the powerful San Francisco business interests intent on breaking the unions—were moving cargo by truck convoy. They were also conveying two hundred scab workers (some dressed as policemen) to unload the
Diana Dollar.
“Bear down hard on any threats of disorder,” he ordered as longshoremen blocked the convoy.

Along the Mission-style facades of the Matson Navigation Company piers, sixty cargo ships specializing in the Hawaiian trade were idled. Three American-Hawaiian freighters had anchored in the stream to save wharfage duties. Another two were abandoned in their berths. On May 28, 1934, Mayor Rossi ordered Quinn to “put every man in the department on the Embarcadero if necessary to preserve peace and order.”

The chief’s detachment of five hundred mounted and foot patrols armed with sawed-off shotguns and tear-gas bombs rushed strikers at Pier 20. “Some of you boys with shotguns fire into the crowd,” Lieutenant Joe Mignola ordered. “If bricks start floating at us again, somebody will wind up in the morgue and I don’t think it will be any of us.”

Patrolman Emmet Honore shot a striker in the back, a police car knocked two girls to the pavement, and a mounted policeman rode over a twelve-year-old girl. Women leading a parade were clubbed, officers aiming “for the soft parts of their anatomies.” Three days later, Mignola’s officers ran amuck again near Steuart Street, attacking activists with blackjacks and clubs. In response the ILA struck all West Coast ports, effectively shutting down two thousand miles of intercoastal trade.

The steamer
City of Los Angeles,
the Grace Line steamer
Santa Rosa,
and the coastwise six-hundred-passenger transport
H.F. Alexander
(which routinely sailed between Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) were idled. Travelers and crewmen alike were stranded, including a burly figure whose shadow fell on the doors of the Bay Hotel.

His long arms were as muscular as a weightlifter’s and he moved with an eccentric, flat-footed shamble. The figure upturned his nostrils as if sniffing the wind and, overcome with an overwhelming desire for sleep, entered the lobby. Behind the desk, John Smeins noticed the guest’s expensive well-tailored gray suit, but not his face. Quite soon, his attention was diverted to the roving mobs outside. The Gorilla Man intended to stay a few nights, until the ships were moving again and the police had retreated from the docks.

In his room, he studied his large hands. On the dorsum, the skin was not soft and yielding as is usual, but tough and thick to stand wear and covered with a fibrous septa. He washed his hands in cold water, shook them for several minutes to stop them from tingling. His thumbs made a snapping, cracking sound as he flexed them and then went to bed. The next two nights, the hotel staff heard him alternately laughing and sobbing. Once he screamed aloud.

 

 

ON
July 3, seven hundred policemen in gas masks rolled a line of boxcars into place to seal off the south side. At noon, five trucks chaperoned by eight police patrol cars edged south toward the warehouse at 128 King Street, an area Quinn had so far kept free of strikers. Suddenly, pickets broke their lines near the S.P. Depot, surged around a pile of bricks, and began hurling them. Inspector Desmond was hit under his eye, Inspector Cornelius in the head, and Officer John LaDue in the leg. A rock crashed through the cruiser window and grazed Sergeant McInerney as he was tossing gas bombs. A brick narrowly missed Quinn, who was crouching in the backseat and showered him with glass. Gas oozing from overturned cars threatened to ignite, and he barely escaped. He was certain now that Communists had been drawn to the city to turn the strike into an actual revolution against national law and order. “I am carrying on the important work of suppressing the radicals who seek to destroy our government,” he said. “This is not merely a bitter strike, but a well planned revolution.”

An hour and a half later, strikers blockaded the Belt Line at Second and Townsend streets to prevent police from using the tracks. “Let ’em have it, boys!” Police Captain Thomas Hoertkorn shouted as his men fired shotguns into the crowd. In revenge, longshoremen “patrolled like vultures” for scabs, and when they found one, they kicked out his teeth or laid his leg across a curb and snapped it like a twig.

On July 5, Bloody Thursday, thousands of city workers cheered a union parade of about 150,000 members. Quinn armed eight hundred cops with the new heavy riot sticks and canisters of vomiting gas. At 8:00 A.M. a state Belt Line locomotive dragging clouds of black smoke and carrying dozens of cops prodded two refrigerator cars toward the Matson Line docks. Near the roundhouse near Pier 30, marksmen hugged the slanted stairs of the coal car. Fire trucks played high pressure hoses on thirty thousand strikers and their sympathizers. The employers’ group, the powerful Industrial Association, had agents riding with the police. Sirens screaming, Quinn’s shock troops, in a sweeping front south of Market Street and east of Second Street, marched over strikers who withered beneath gas and shotgun and machine gun fire.

At 9:30 A.M., at Piers 38 and 40, picketers held their ground as mounted police, protected by a broadside of rifle and pistol fire, swept up Rincon. At 1:00 P.M., a pincher movement by two phalanxes of cops south and north closed upon the ILA headquarters at 113 Steuart Street. Police split heads with nightsticks, and mounted patrols ran over those who fell. Cornered, the strikers made a wild surge on a police car and rocked it until two police inspectors leaped out. “If any of you sons of bitches want to start something, come on!” one cop taunted and spun around, shotgun locked into his cheek. He kept his forehand elbow down under the fore end and the grip hand’s elbow out to his side. His weight was slightly forward as he fired. He dropped the shotgun to waist level and took a second shot from a low assault position. Discarding the shotgun, he fired slugs from his revolver until it was empty.

Howard Sperry, a sailor, and Nick Counderakis, an unemployed cook, had just completed their shifts in the longshoremen’s relief kitchen when they were mortally wounded, Sperry at Steuart and Market streets and Counderakis near the corner of the Audiffred Building on Mission Street. Charles Olsen was hit in the arm, face, chest, and leg and lay near death. Thirty-two strikers were shot and over three score gassed or badly injured. “Still the strikers surged up and down the sunlit streets among thousands of foolhardy spectators,” the
Chronicle
’s Royce Brier wrote. “Panic gripped the east end of Market St. Soldiers in San Francisco. War in San Francisco.” By midnight tanks were rolling along the Embarcadero.

On July 9, thousands marched somberly from the Ferry Building down Market Street to Valencia Street for Sperry and Counderakis’s funerals. Theaters, restaurants, and shops hung signs in sympathy: “Closed Till the Boys Win.” No streetcars, buses, or taxis were running. The only transportation were railroad-owned ferryboats, because they carried the U.S. mail from the southeast end of the Ferry Building. Federal law forbade their crews from striking.

On July 17, two regiments from the 40th Infantry Division of the National Guard occupied the Embarcadero from Fisherman’s Wharf to China Basin. “If it is a question of you or the rioters, get them first,” Lieutenant Colonel David Hardy ordered his 159th Infantry and the 125th Coast Artillery troops. “If you are attacked clip them, then bayonet them, then use bullets.”

They blocked both ends of Jackson Street from Drumm to Front with machine gun-mounted trucks and raided the ILA soup kitchen at 84 Embarcadero.

Widespread violence ended two days later, and the strike two days after that. Ship owners agreed to settle by arbitration and Australian immigrant Harry Bridges, head of the ILA, sent his men back to work. The ILA gained control over the waterfront hiring halls, the key issue of the walkout. “San Francisco has stamped out without compromise an attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt,” said Mayor Rossi on national radio.

On April 12, 1935, the city’s establishment praised Chief Quinn “for the strong stand he had taken against Communists during the summertime maritime strike.”

His round, baby face beamed with pride. An hour later, Dullea got a call from Desmond and Kelleher. While combing shore-side dives and flea-bag hotels they had found three witnesses who had seen Bette Coffin with the Gorilla Man. They were to be in Dullea’s office first thing in the morning.

—FORENSIC TEXT OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

ON
April 13, eight days after the Bay Hotel murder, Dullea’s intense manhunt on the waterfront yielded the first sighting of Bette Coffin in those missing hours before she checked into the Bay Hotel. The three dock workers took chairs in Dullea’s office. Their hatred of the chief had been overridden by a sense of moral outrage that a woman they knew had been butchered. Besides, they liked Dullea.

They had seen Bette about 11:00 P.M. the night of her murder at Fifth and Market streets, ten blocks from the Ferry Building. An hour later they spotted her again a block away at the Old Mint.
⁹
The
Chronicle
clock tower cast light directly onto the steps under the portico where she sat with a stocky young man. His drunken laughter was so distinctive that the trio heard it long after the fog and rain had swallowed the couple up. The man’s face had been shadowed, so the crucial hours between 1:00 A.M. and 3:00 A.M., when Bette and her “husband” registered at the Bay Hotel, remained a mystery, but it did get Dullea to thinking.

Had they been so drunk that they were turned away at various hotels until they were accepted at the Bay Hotel? La Tulipe compared the foggy east side of London’s Whitechapel and prostitutes and the foggy east side of San Francisco’s Embarcadero and prostitutes. More than fifty years earlier at 1:00 A.M. an inebriated Catherine Eddowes had been liberated from Bishopsgate Police Station. Turned away from her lodgings, she was drunkenly wandering Mitre Square when she met the Ripper.

As for Slipton Fell, the laughing reporter, Dullea had no way of knowing that he often took long, unexplained voyages to Latin America, San Diego, and New York under the guise of gathering news. Right now he was cruising just outside San Francisco. In the months after hurriedly deserting his apartment several doors down from the Bay Hotel, Fell had felt out of sorts. His multiple identities kept bumping into each other, keeping him preoccupied and sleepless. Who was he today? His identity was defined by the roles he chose to enact and the masks he wore. The powerful young man was what Ezra Pound termed “a broken bundle of mirrors . . . a streaming sequence of selves.” So many personalities, all warring with each other inside his handsome head, had to hold an equal number of jobs and thus Fell found himself very busy indeed. He needed all those aliases.

The previous October, Fell had been working at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in Oakland, when he reported his paycheck stolen. A replacement was issued, but when he cashed both drafts, the pilfered check was traced to him, and he was fired. Then he got a job at a Richmond gasoline service station, forged another check, and was sacked again. In the following November, Fell obtained a job at an auto assembly plant, where he met Joseph Anthony, a thirty-two-year-old oil service attendant at the Cutting Boulevard station. Anthony, who had come to California from Marshfield, Oregon, four years earlier, spent his free time inside his second-story apartment behind the filling station. He had no friends and no known enemies, except for Fell. Somewhere in the mix was a woman—there was always a woman—and the two men had fought over her. When Fell left the plant at the end of December, that should have been the end of the feud, but apparently wasn’t.

On January 7, 1935, someone climbed the stairs to Anthony’s apartment and slugged Anthony as soon as he opened up the door. After a furious battle, the visitor knocked Anthony out, carried him to his bed, and trussed him hand and foot with wire he had brought along. Then he propped Anthony up with a pillow, stuck a burnt cigarette in his mouth, and buried a carpenter’s ax in his skull with tremendous force.

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Shaw’s grocery shop took up the ground floor of Anthony’s building. When Mrs. Shaw had not seen Anthony for some time, she went upstairs, discovered his body, and called police. Richmond detectives initially suspected a woman of the killing because of the long fingernail scratches on his cheek, neck, and ears. But a strong man had to have carried Anthony to the bed and buried the ax so deep. He had left two fingerprints in blood on the haft of the ax. The only item stolen was Anthony’s gold watch. As for Slipton Fell, he possessed four watches of which he was immensely proud. All of them were gold.

One of the jobs Fell did in the guise of yet another of his personalities was at the Woodside garage near lonely Ada Rice’s house. Under the name of Jerome Selz (Jerry to his friends), he pumped gas, wiped windshields, and repaired the occasional engine. He was the All-American boy in this role. Though Will Werder, the station manager, had recommended Fell to Ada, he personally didn’t like him. “Jerry was not popular with men,” Werder said, though this was not the truth. “Of course, he didn’t seem vicious or dangerous. In fact the reaction of most of us was that he was a conceited bore. No matter what subject we brought up, Jerry always knew all about it. He was the expert. He had done it better than anyone else and done it first. His favorite trick was to bet the firemen at Woodside that he could lift them from the ground by their belts using just his teeth. Jerry always won that bet.”