A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (12 page)

Through the months of April and May 1929, in the wake of the dismissal of the conspiracy charge against Crawford, Bob Shuler used his radio station and his magazine to lobby hard for John Porter, his own candidate for mayor. Shuler had plucked Porter, a junk dealer and onetime Ku Klux Klansman, out of nowhere—or rather, from the ranks of the grand jury that had indicted Asa Keyes. Porter, therefore, had some loose association with reform, and with Buron Fitts, whom Shuler idolized. A master of innuendo and the personal slur, Shuler liked to single out specific individuals—not just the vague targets of immorality. As the mayoral election reached its climax, he declared that he would “as soon baptize a skunk as Charlie Crawford.” Crawford was “the greatest artist of the double-cross that California has ever seen, a snake,” Shuler said, “no, lower than a snake, a slithering reptile force smearing his loathsome reptile scales on the cleanliness of our city.”

The rhetoric, going out citywide, had a gathering effect, and in the elections on June 4 the Parrot/Crawford slate met with defeat. John Porter was elected mayor by a wide margin. Further, nine of the candidates nominated by Shuler as city councilmen were put in office. Overnight “Fighting Bob” Shuler became, in effect, the new political boss of L.A.

It looked like a shattering blow to The System. Mayor Porter quickly replaced LAPD chief Edgar Davis with Dick Steckel, Dave Clark’s good friend. Steckel fired Dick Lucas and Harry Raymond, Crawford’s strongarm men. In swift order Crawford had lost his City Hall clout and the backbone of his protection. Nor was that the end of his problems or threats to his power.

On February 14, 1929, sandwiched between the end of the Asa Keyes trial and the deaths of Ned Doheny, Jr., and Hugh Plunkett, seven men had been gunned down in a warehouse on Clark Street in Chicago, a now legendary moment in the history of crime: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when Al Capone struck at his rival Bugsy Moran.

At the time, though, what had happened was far from clear. “Chicago’s Massacre Unsolved,” declared the Times, in a story that ran alongside the breaking news of the Doheny killings on the morning of February 18. “Police Opine Canadians May Be Gang Killers.” The massacre, coming as part of a liquor war, and hard on a wave of bombings and hijackings, made Capone’s enemies think about getting out of Chicago; some of his allies, too, expecting a clampdown, wondered about swapping the windy city for balmier climes. Both groups eyed California, specifically Los Angeles—the new wild west. The Mafia now began to make a more concerted effort to move into L.A., using as allies those Italian racketeers—Jack Dragna, John Rosselli, and the rumrunner Tony Cornero—who were already active in the city, but had been cut out of Charlie Crawford’s System.

Like E. L. Doheny, Charlie Crawford was a figure from the Old West who’d survived into another time and prospered. Like Doheny, he’d been instrumental in the development of the city he’d made his home, and his arena, in middle-age. Crawford’s role was in the shadows, but he and Doheny had known each other in a casual way for a long time. They both juiced the city’s hidden power lines. Now both of them saw enemies in every corner. Soon after his son’s death, E. L. Doheny boarded a train that took him from L.A. to Washington, D.C., for the bribery trial of Albert Fall. “My friend will be on trial back there and I’m going to testify in the case—that’s about all there is to it,” he told the reporters who watched him depart.

Attorney Owen J. Roberts, acting for the prosecution in the case of United States v. Albert B. Fall, summed up the affair: “It is all simple,” he said. “There are four things of a controlling nature for you to remember. One is that Doheny wanted the lease of the Elk Hills. The second is, Fall wanted money. The third is, Doheny got the lease, and the fourth is, Fall got the money.”

The aging Fall collapsed and onlookers feared that he might be about to die when the jury delivered its guilty verdict. Fall didn’t die; instead Judge William Hitz fined him $100,000 and sentenced him to a year in jail. Doheny, “stiff and ashen” as the Times reported, knew now that he would be tried for giving a bribe to a man who had already been found guilty of accepting it.

It wasn’t in the nature of either E. L. Doheny or Charlie Crawford to throw in their hands and quit. They were accustomed to power and command, and their careers had been a process of successful adaptation. They would go on fighting, even as an era drew to its end and history got ready to sweep them away.

13

Reach for a Typewriter

I
n June 1929 Leslie White’s wife gave birth to a son. Fatherhood added to White’s feelings of uncertainty. Aspects of his work, and the closed-off avenues he was warned not to explore, worried him and nagged at his conscience. He’d put down a deposit and taken out a mortgage on a small house in the suburb of Glendale. He commuted into the city each morning, often sharing the ride with his friend, Casey Shawhan, a crime reporter on the
Examiner
. The two talked freely about law and graft in L.A., and White aired his insecurities. He had a baby and a bad lung he had to nurse along. For all he knew, he would be let go if another D.A. was elected. The current D.A., Buron Fitts, had set up the expanded investigative bureau as a brand new deal, and with Fitts the bureau might fall. “I had studied hard and was already a qualified court expert on fingerprinting and photography, and something of an expert on the examination of questioned documents,” White later wrote. “At best the job was an interlude.”

For a while White considered joining the LAPD, a job that wouldn’t go away and came with a pension; but, within weeks of his son’s birth, he was called upon to investigate a murder. A Mexican teenager, Christobal Silvas Sierra, had been found dead in an empty lot with two bullets in his back. Apparently he’d been shot by a friend, Robert Ocana. But White and the D.A.’s office soon discovered that Sierra had in fact been killed by an LAPD officer, Bill Bost, a beat cop with a nasty drinking habit and a berserk temper. Bost’s LAPD comrades at the Boyle Heights station had covered up for him, framing Ocana.

Bost was tried, but convicted only of manslaughter. White felt he should have hanged. Under the circumstances, though, the manslaughter verdict was a victory, and White received pats on the back and a letter of commendation from Fitts. He was struck by how unsurprised everybody seemed. This very nasty case attracted little press, the LAPD’s clannishness being regarded, perhaps, as a necessary evil, or a problem too engrained to tackle.

Joining the LAPD was thus removed as a possibility. White doubted his ability to stay in line or even alive within the organization. But he still faced the problem of how to plot his future. Needing advice, he called a friend in Ventura, and when the friend’s business next brought him to L.A., the two men met in a cafeteria on Broadway, down the hill from the Hall of Justice.

Over coffee White found himself looking into a round, moon-like, almost bland face with unexpectedly sharp eyes that squinted and glittered at him from behind wire-frame glasses. His friend’s name was Erle Stanley Gardner. In appearance Gardner was nondescript, like somebody’s uncle, but White knew the man had the energy of a bursting dam. For years—Gardner had just turned forty—he’d toiled in the courts and law libraries of Ventura and Oxnard. In L.A. he was known to be a clever and determined attorney, a country boy who came to town and occasionally bested the metropolitan legal stars. But White didn’t want to talk to him about law; he wanted to talk about writing. He knew that Gardner supplemented his income to the extent of $15,000 a year by creating fiction. Gardner slept as little as three hours a night, instead staying at his typewriter until he had produced the 4,000-word daily target he set for himself. Gardner was a writing machine, a story industrialist. He had yet to create Perry Mason, the character that would make him famous—and for a long time, the world’s bestselling author—but in recent years he’d hammered out millions of words and sold hundreds of stories: about Speed Dash, human fly; Sidney Zoom and his police dog; Ed Jenkins, the phantom crook; confidence men Lester Leith and Paul Pry; Key-Clew Clark, consulting criminologist, and Major Copely Blane, freelance diplomat; the Patent Leather Kid; Hard Rock Hogan; Señor Arnaz de Lobo; and a host of others.

White had always wanted to write. It seemed to him the ideal sort of existence: a chance to think as he liked, to travel, to escape the sordid side of life. But he’d been afraid to mention it to Gardner until now, and was still nervous about doing so. Instead he poured out his frustrations about the Doheny case, about the LAPD, about money. In Ventura, Gardner’s office had been just down the street from White’s photographic studio. The two had met while Gardner had been fighting, and winning, a pro bono case on behalf of a farm laborer sentenced to hang. White admired Gardner’s energy and go-getting practical attitude.

“I’m thinking about trying fiction,” White blurted out finally. “But I have no education. I don’t know where to start.”

Gardner regarded White with brusque impatience. “Forget about education. You’ve got a whole library of stories inside you,” he said. His voice was calm but forceful. “That ‘sordid filth’ you say you want to get away from—it’s material.”

Erle Stanley Gardner would remain a friend, and this brief conversation would change Leslie White’s life. White was by nature an enthusiast. In later years he turned himself into an expert on the breeding of beef cattle and the building of model railways, about which he wrote Scale Model Railroading, a standard text. He threw himself into things. Having received this encouragement from Gardner, he went home to Glendale that night and walked out to a newsstand to buy some of the publications Gardner was writing for and selling to: the pulps, so called because they were printed on rough, wood-pulp paper, not expected to last. White found them crowding the newsstand, hundreds of magazines, seven by ten inches with gaudy covers and trashy titles: Thrilling Detective, Dime Detective, Crime Busters, The Shadow, The Underworld, The Whisperer, Weird Tales, and so on. It was a different America: millions read these all-fiction magazines every week, and hundreds of writers made money selling stories to them, at one to three cents a word. The pulps had usurped the dime novel’s place in the culture.

White began his studies with Black Mask, the best in the market, founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Nathan, but by then under the editorship of the legendary Captain Joseph T. Shaw. White saw that Gardner himself had a story, titled “Spawn of the Night,” in the current issue, for August 1929. Also advertised was the upcoming serial of Dashiell Hammett’s new novel, The Maltese Falcon. Gardner had told White that Hammett was Black Mask’s ace performer, a private eye who had learned about writing, not a writer who was faking it. Hammett wrote in a style that was lean and stripped down. His stories had plausible hooks and twists and convincing motivation. He showed the underbelly of American life without illusion. He was creating a whole new kind of crime fiction.

White set up his typewriter on the kitchen table, at the far end of the house from where the baby was sleeping. He rolled in a sheet of paper, paused for a moment, and began to tap away. He found, to his surprise, that the words came easily. He finished a story in a single burst, mailed it out the next day, and watched it come back over subsequent weeks with a series of rejection slips, from Black Mask and other pulps. It didn’t really matter, because by then he’d already written several more stories and sent them out too. On November 3, 1929, he found a letter from New York in his mailbox. “Dear Mr. White,” wrote editor Harry Goldsmith. “I enjoyed reading your story, ‘Phoney Evidence,’ and it is an accept for DRAGNET. In your letter you asked for suggestions, but the story was very good in every direction. Please keep working along the lines which you have started and I am confident you will sell to DRAGNET regularly.” Enclosed was a check for $50.

White was on his way. From then on he made regular sales. He was no stylist like Hammett, but his stories moved quickly. In “Phoney Evidence,” a doctor covers up a murder by daubing another man’s blood on the face of his victim—shades of E. C. Fishbaugh. In “The City of Hell!,” a story that White did sell to Black Mask, renegade cops take down a crime machine that has an unnamed city by the throat; the cops kidnap racketeers, lawyers, the chief of the grand jury, and a judge, and hold vigilante trials in the sewers. Then they save the state and taxpayers a lot of money, shortcutting the necessity of more formal legal proceedings with a staged nightclub shoot-out: “All hell broke loose! With the deafening chatter of the twin machine guns, came the screams of stricken men.”

The speed at which White wrote these early stories revealed the nature and limitations of his talent. He had verve and a quick gift for story. He leaned in the direction of hokum and melodrama. Like any crime writer, he gave away parts of his inner fantasy. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade takes several steps further the cynical bastard Hammett hoped he was. Georges Simenon’s Maigret provides the answer to a question Simenon posed himself: What if I were a decent man? White’s detectives have none of the depth of these characters. He didn’t write realistic versions of himself or Lucien Wheeler or Blayney Matthews. Instead he created comic book avengers, upright and merciless conquerors of wrong, as if on the page he wanted to fix and make right a world he was coming to regard as irreparable.

During the day, working for the D.A.’s office, White’s attitude changed. He gave up worrying about making a mistake in forensics or in court. The trickier and more sensitive the case, the more he wanted to get involved. He was no longer merely an odd kind of cop; each morning, as he entered the Hall of Justice, striding through the barrel-vaulted entrance hall that ran the entire length of the building, he knew something else was going on beside the investigative challenges he faced with a new eagerness. He was researching, gathering material. He was writing pulp fiction.