The Laughing Gorilla (28 page)

“No. It’s in horrible shape,” said Harper, aghast. “It’s not a job for one man. It’s a job for the government.”

“Then who? What if I detail William J. Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation, to the June meeting?”

“Mr. Burns does not stand ‘ace-high’ with many of the chiefs. If he went to Buffalo he would merely antagonize them. But there is an assistant to Mr. Burns named J. Edgar Hoover, a bright, efficient young fellow and very affable. The Chiefs would take more kindly to Hoover than Burns.”

“Now that you mention it, I do prefer his company.” Holland called Hoover “Speed” because he rushed in, rattled off his words with Gatlinggun rapidity, then whisked himself out. He didn’t know Hoover spoke fast to mask a crippling stutter. Sharp-featured, bulldoglike and stout with black curly hair, Hoover came down, chatted with the two men for fifteen minutes, then left like a rocket. “You know, Hugh, he always reminds me of ‘Off again, on again, gone again, Finnigan.’ But he’s intelligent, has a splendid personality and the drive it will take to put the matter over in the proper way. Yes, Hoover is the properly qualified man to send.”

In Buffalo Commissioner Enright advocated a national repository of fingerprints be housed within the Department of the Interior. The powerful IACP, which favored the DOJ, won out.

“Do we have any legal right to move the present fingerprint bureau from Leavenworth Prison to Washington?” Attorney General Harry A. Daugherty asked Holland.

“Yes, I checked with various acts of Congress and I couldn’t find anything that denied the Attorney General such authority. Naturally, the appropriation for maintaining the bureau is carried in the appropriation for the Leavenworth penitentiary and that ties it pretty close to that institution.”

“Well, some of our political friends out that neck of the woods will probably raise heck about it.”

“Well, dammit, General,” Holland said, “I’ll be the goat and take all the blame.”

“You will do nothing of the kind!” said Daugherty. “Take the bull by the horns and I’ll stand back of you.” With that he authorized Holland to ship the convict fingerprint records from Leavenworth to the Washington bureau and discard their two hundred thousand Bertillon measurements “into the limbo of forgotten things and useless antiquities.”

In September, the IACP, using DOJ funds, transported their records of 150,000 fingerprints to Washington and consolidated them with the Leavenworth file of 650,000 prints. The result, “pretty much a jumble,” was run by two employees who tied fingerprint cards into 50,000-card bundles and stacked them in the corner. For six months the nation was without any identification bureau at all.

When Daugherty entangled the bureau in the Teapot Dome Scandal, President Calvin Coolidge forced him to resign. “Daugherty left the government service,” Holland said, “the most cruelly and brutally maligned man I have ever known in public life.”

On May 10, 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named J. Edgar Hoover as acting director of the Bureau of Investigation. He strong-armed Congress into funding a permanent Identification Division within the Bureau, then negotiated with William A. Pinkerton and St. Louis Chief Martin O’Brien to consolidate the bureau’s existing fingerprint files with the IACP records. With Congress’s first subsidy of $56,000, twenty-one new employees were added to the Identification Division in the Old Railroad Building.

On November 24, 1932, the lab—with a borrowed microscope, ultraviolet light equipment, and a helixometer (to examine the inside of gun barrels) that did not work—was finally up and running. By November 1935, the lab had $100,000 of new equipment and was able to compare the Jackass Hill victim’s prints with its five million fingerprint records. There was no match .
¹²
Next his prints went to a new Civil Identification Section (140,000 prints of government employees, military recruits, and civil defense workers and 30,000 prints of civilians who had volunteered as a precautionary measure). The Single Latent Fingerprint Section included partial fingerprints and palm prints. When John Dillinger had his fingers scarified with skin grafts and acid, his prints still showed a sufficient number of points to establish positive identification. But the Jackass Hill victim’s prints were not in these files either. The tattooed sailor would never be identified.

 

 

THAT
same day, LaTulipe decided to approach Chief Quinn about his poor lab equipment. He had to admit Quinn did have some far-reaching ideas. A long string of loan company and bank holdups two years earlier had given him an idea of how to combine his two great loves: police work and radio.

At that time, the only way to dispatch officers already in the field was to have uniformed vehicular units call stations through pay phones and request instructions. Quinn’s idea was that they use commercial radio to summon police. Regular radio programming would be interrupted, a gong sounded, and listeners would hear the chief say: “Neighbors and friends hearing this broadcast will confer a great favor on the police department by notifying all police officers of this message . . .” Within a few moments, the streets near the various police headquarters were thronged with reporting officers and volunteer citizens.

During a dry run over the KGO microphone, Quinn called patrol cars by number and told them to report to 111 Sutter Street, the NBC studio. Microphones in front of the station picked up the sound of the cars arriving and each driver reporting his arrival. Then he had a better idea. “What if we had high-powered radio-equipped autos patrolling all districts 24 hours a day and available for every police department?” he thought. “What if we had a radio channel dedicated to police communication and installed receivers in police cars? Then dispatches about crimes in progress could be flashed to officers on patrol.”

Quinn put Ralph Wiley, chief of the Department of Electricity, in charge of KGPD, a shortwave radio station. Communications were forwarded from the SFPD’s private, low-frequency radio transmitter in the Jefferson Square Central Fire Alarm Station to twin Eiffel Towers to Quinn’s new Automotive Radio Patrol Unit—a fleet of nineteen radio cars, four solo motorcycles, and detail cars equipped with earphones. While radio car officers still could not talk to the dispatcher, the radio allowed several cars to simultaneously converge on a crime scene. In extreme emergencies KGPD could be patched into KGO on the NBC radio network to alert citizens.

Day after day, the chief put his radio patrol cars and motorcycle officers through dry runs—how to surround a bank, wait for backup, and cut off all possible escape routes. Somehow he found funds for nine police operators to answer forty incoming phone lines. “If only we had money to hire extra men, money to finance prolonged manhunts across the continents and overseas,” he said. “We are striving toward it, but it is uphill work. However, year by year, we secure more alert recruits; we train them longer and more thoroughly, and we can obtain more modern equipment, employ more modern methods. Then and only then we might make more progress against crime.”
¹³

La Tulipe walked the marble corridor to the big corner office and knocked decisively. An hour later he thanked Chief Quinn and returned to his office heartened by his words. By July 1950, the SFPD would have spent over $100,000 to make LaTulipe’s lab the best in the state—a modern ballistics-comparison microscope, bell jars, meters, spectrographs, enlargers with bellows, and other machines for magnifying and evaluating evidence and catching criminals with invisible evidence.

At the new ID Bureau, La Tulipe’s unidentified print from the Bay Hotel was compared to their foreign files (the FBI exchanged prints with sixty-eight countries) and was finally identified. It belonged to the missing Otto von Feldman, the former Bay Hotel porter, the one employee LaTulipe hadn’t printed. With that avenue closed, LaTulipe now began looking for strangulation/dissection murders comparable to Bette Coffin’s. Perhaps the Cleveland cases could teach him something about the kind of man who committed such brutal crimes and why he did what he did.

—CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

IN
Cleveland, along Praha Avenue and Bragg Street at the foot of solitary, steep-sided Jackass Hill, people passed briskly if not at a trot. On Sweeney and Francis streets and across the Kingsbury Run on Kinsman Road neighbors heard laughter on Saturday night, January 25, 1936. It was a mirthless chuckle at first but took on such a heartless tone that folks cowered in their homes and children hid under their beds. Cautiously, some drew back their curtains and peeked out. A stooped figure carrying a sack was trudging along the curved rails at the turn. His tracks filled with snow behind him. The bare limbs of ice-encased trees shown like glass in the moonlight as he lumbered toward a deserted factory at 2315 East Twentieth Street. The temperature dropped further and hardly a soul was out but one.

It was freezing Sunday morning and the temperatures in Cleveland the night before had plunged to near zero. The next night would be as cold. Raw winds whispered among the abandoned freight cars. Grass alongside the rails shivered with a brittle rattle. The howling of a dog rose to meet the frigid gale. Pedestrians near Charity Hospital turned up their coat collars against the piercing wind and rushed about their business. None of them paid much attention to Nick Albondante’s howling dog, Lady.

Neighbors heard Lady’s howl up and down the east side of Central Avenue in the Third Ward, “The Roaring Third,” a torrid region of speakeasies and houses of prostitution that Ed Andrassy once frequented. At 11:00 A.M. a black woman entered the White Front Meat Market at 2002 Central. “There seems to be some hams setting outside near your back door in a couple of baskets,” she told the butcher. “You should bring them in.”

“Sure,” Charles Page said, laying down his cleaver.

Lady continued baying, her breath a frosty cloud, tiny sickles dripping from her nose. Behind the brick plant, Waite’s off duty cabs filled a bleak lot. Beyond, dense woods stretched to a double curve of railroad tracks and a line of corrugated metal sheds. In the distance, thirty feet in the air, an iron railway trestle spanned the tracks. Across it a train glided toward East Forty-ninth and the frozen knob of nearby Jackass Hill. A band of black children playing along the tracks heard Lady and ran up the snowy slope to see her scratching at two wicker baskets. At 11:20 A.M. Page stepped from his rear door.

A minute later Sergeant McBride got Page’s call. “My God, there’s another body without a head,” he cried. “It’s in two half-bushel baskets behind the Hart factory. And it’s worse, much worse than those others.”

He had instantly made the connection between the butcher murders and a body dumped near the tracks of the run. Orley May, and Lieutenant Harvey Weitzel started for the plant, but Sergeant Hogan, head of homicide since November, got there first. At 11:25 A.M., his howling siren died away in front of Crescent Manufacturing. Chief Matowitz’s patrol car, and cruisers D-2 and No. 3 converged right behind.

Within the baskets were two burlap sacks containing a blackish-streaked package that accommodated a solidly frozen right arm, right hand, two thighs, and half a woman’s nude lower torso imbedded with coal dust. “O.K., begin the search for the missing legs and head because all we’ve got now is a bloody jigsaw puzzle,” Matowitz said.

“The same thin curved knife was used,” said Pearce. “The head was severed between the third and forth vertebrae in the same professional manner.”

But were the incisions truly professional? Even the great London forensic expert Lord Spilsbury had erred in judging a similar dismemberment. At Charing Cross Station someone had checked a round-topped, wickerwork trunk. Inside was a stout female body divided into large pieces at each shoulder and hip joint. The constable who found the body took his job seriously; he refused to allow the remains to be removed until a surgeon certified she was dead. “Clean dismemberment of parts suggests an experienced slaughter man,” Spilsbury wrote but, after finding hesitation cuts, corrected his assessment. “Two tentative cuts, one opening the peritoneum and the second at the back of the right knee, should have told me the operator was unskilled.”

Cuyahoga County Coroner Sam Gerber concluded their impossibly strong, right-handed killer had been in a state of fury. After breaking the skin, he wrenched her arm from its shoulder socket, roughly disarticulated her knee joints, and fractured the midportion of her lower legs.

Fingerprints on the severed right hand matched those of an Ashtabula, Ohio, native, Mrs. Florence Sawdey Polillo (aka Florence Martin, Flo Ghent, Florence Ballagher, Flo Davis, and Clara Dunn). Her file listed arrests for vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and prostitution. The stocky forty-two-year-old, who had dyed chestnut hair and brown eyes, was currently on relief and resided somewhere in the slums. Heavy snowflakes were flattening on stoops by the time Nevel and Hogan located her rooming house at 3205 Carnegie Avenue. Mrs. Ford, a red-haired and fiery tempered landlady, answered Nevel’s knock.

“What do you want?” she snapped.

“Take it easy! This isn’t an arrest,” said Nevel. “We want some information about Sawdey Polillo. She had a room here.”

“She owes me a month’s rent and she run out on me a week ago. Maybe if you find her, you’ll get my dollar and a half back.”

“You’re never going to lay eyes on that dollar and a half. Mrs. Polillo is dead. We found her torso in some old baskets this morning. Did anyone come to see her recently?”

“Well, sure, lots of men came to see her, but not during the last week. She had a few boyfriends—Martin a tall, blond truck driver with the Cleveland Transfer, a lover named Eddie and a Great Lakes sailor named Harry.”