A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (14 page)

15

Entrapment of a News Hound

P
hotographs of Leontine Johnson, the former secretary to larcenous Julian Pete chairman S. C. Lewis, show an attractive brunette in her late twenties, wearing a cloche hat with her lips thickly rouged. After the collapse of Julian Pete she’d worked for Will Hays in the newly formed film censor’s office, and she liked to boast of her references and her integrity. “I have been kind, benevolent and generous. I came from a little Georgia town and have lived a clean, upright, and honorable life,” she said. This image of innocence belied the reality of a tough cookie taking care of herself in a city where everybody was on the make. She was another creature of the era, and she at once took center stage in the $15 million lawsuit that Raymond Chandler helped bring on behalf of Joseph Dabney and others. Chandler was present with Dabney’s attorneys when Leontine Johnson gave the deposition in which she spoke of the “little gray account book” that was in her possession and the two suitcases stuffed with papers that she’d taken from the Julian Pete offices. These documents, it was supposed, would blow the lid off the entire mess and help secure Dabney victory in the lawsuit. She said that S. C. Lewis had already offered her $30,000 if she’d give this material back. She’d refused, whereupon Lewis increased his offer to $100,000—or so she claimed: Leontine Johnson would soon prove to be a self-serving and crooked witness. Her shenanigans would ensure that the Dabney lawsuit dragged on for years; they would also help usher in the bloody climax of the Julian Pete fiasco.

Proceedings in the lawsuit began in mid-February 1930. The trial’s early days were pretty routine for L.A. at this time, which is to say that Leontine Johnson looked a knockout on the stand, then wept, then fainted and had to take a day off while her attorney told the press that she was in a state of nervous collapse. She returned to tell how $10,000 had been paid to bribe a juror in the first Julian Pete trial and how she’d hired a Slavic language instructor to coach S. C. Lewis when, at one point, he’d been planning to flee to the Soviet Union.

This was juicy, but Leontine Johnson was already plotting her big coup. She’d teamed up with
Examiner
reporter Morris Lavine to tell, and sell, her story. In a town filled with tough-mouthed newsmen, Lavine was already something of a legend, a character who might have stepped straight out of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 newspaper comedy The Front Page. Lavine made his first contribution to a paper when he was only fourteen and paid his way through UC Berkeley by writing journalism on the side before joining the
Examiner
in the early 1920s. It had been Lavine who, in 1922, ventured to Honduras and tracked down hammer murderess Clara “Tiger Woman” Phillips after her escape from jail, inducing her to return to California and face a life sentence. It had been Lavine who had wrung a confession of murder from Herb Wilson, known as the “Preacher Mail Bandit.” It had been Lavine who discovered the bloodstains that led to the arrest of William Edward Hickman, and Lavine who had been credited with the first exposé of Julian Pete in 1927. He was a handsome big man, persuasive and confident, not merely a reporter but an action magnet who kicked his stories into another cycle by virtue of his own involvement.

Lavine shut himself away with Leontine Johnson in her apartment at 236 S. Coronado Street, pounding at a typewriter while he doctored her tale. The first installment of “My Three Years with S. C. Lewis, or The Truth about Julian Pete,” appeared in the
Examiner
on March 10, offering the titillating information that Lewis had rented three downtown hotel suites a day to conduct business and had “spent money as fast as he got it.” The excerpt was presented as a teaser, a taste of deeper and darker revelations to come.

Again, this was all par for the course: an attractive witness in a scandalous trial had sold her story to the press—not exactly praiseworthy, but predictable enough. Then the big twist happened: a plot development of which Leslie White, or even Raymond Chandler, might have been proud.

On the morning of March 10, White was summoned to see his friend Blayney Matthews, the new head of the D.A.’s investigative bureau, Lucien Wheeler having quit (as he’d told Buron Fitts he would) to set up a private detective agency.

“You know Charlie Crawford, I suppose,” said Matthews to White, more of a flat statement than a question. “Of course,” replied White.

Matthews said that a case had come up and he wanted White to get over to Crawford’s office right away.

“I won’t force you to take this assignment, Les,” said Matthews. “There may be political risks. But if you want it …”

White, sensing story material, grabbed at the chance.

Crawford’s office was in a building he owned at 6665 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a nondescript California bungalow resembling a residence rather than a business. A photographer and a realtor rented some of the space from Crawford. On the porch, ivy trailed down from hanging baskets, and cactus and aloe grew in terracotta planters.

Crawford’s lair was at the back, entered either through an interior door or French doors that opened onto a side alley. The room was paneled almost to the ceiling with dark wood and there were hat stands and leather-backed chairs. Light seeped through a skylight, glinting off a big steel safe. There was a fan raised high on a shelf in one corner. A Tiffany lamp stood on the massive desk beside a cigar box and four telephones, one of which, White understood, had been a direct line to the office of the district attorney during the regime of Asa Keyes. This was where Crawford, the Gray Wolf, pulled his strings and did his business.

White was struck by the steel mesh that covered the skylight. Wires ran from the ceiling and from a button on the side of the desk to an alarm bell on the wall. The doors were fitted with special locks and steel bars that could be slid into place. Crawford was either very cautious or very afraid.

Crawford remembered that he’d met White before, in the Hall of Justice, during the Callie Grimes fiasco. Crawford shook White’s hand and said he was expecting a visitor any moment. The visitor soon to walk in through the French doors would be Morris Lavine.

White hid himself; it had all been meticulously planned by Crawford.

“When Lavine entered through the French doors, he unsuspectingly dropped into a chair that placed his head less than two feet from where I stood, with only a thin panel intervening,” White later wrote.

With his ear pressed to the wall, Leslie White listened while Crawford urged Lavine to talk and Lavine fell for it, asking Crawford if he’d seen the
Examiner
, and warning that unless he “bought” the documents in Leontine Johnson’s possession he’d be exposed. Crawford agreed to pay up.

“Have you got the money?” Lavine asked.

“Now, remember, I don’t want to be blasted any more in the paper,” Crawford said.

“That’s all right, you know me,” Lavine said.

“The $50,000 is for you. The rest is for the girl,” said Crawford.

White later described how, through the thin partition, he heard the crackling of crisp bills as they were counted out.

“I don’t want to be chiseled anymore. I’m just doing this to protect my gray-haired mother,” Crawford said, making White, in his hiding place, smile.

Lavine checked that all the money was there and left, only to find Blayney Matthews waiting when he came out through the French doors and stepped into the street. Matthews tapped Lavine on the shoulder, informed him that he was under arrest, and took him back into Crawford’s office.

“I jerked open his coat and relieved him of a loaded forty-five Colt automatic pistol, which hung loose in the armhole of his vest. From an inner pocket, I retrieved the seventy-five one thousand dollar bills,” wrote White.

The money had been wrapped in newspaper in two separate packages. White checked the serial numbers of the bills and stored them away as evidence while the great Morris Lavine, for once at a loss for words, slumped in a chair.

“This is what happens when you shake down your friends,” Crawford said. “It pays to be honest.”

Lavine tried to protest: he could explain all this, he said.

“Morrie, you’re just a blackmailer,” Crawford said.

Leontine Johnson was arrested within the hour. No further portion of her story was ever published in the
Examiner
, and the Dabney lawsuit was left in disarray. Johnson blamed Lavine, swearing she knew nothing about blackmail. Lavine himself said he’d been framed, set up by Crawford to stop the
Examiner
series. Buron Fitts, though, got his hands on the little gray notebook and the two suitcases “stuffed with documentary dynamite,” guaranteeing future developments.

On the evening of the two arrests, White left the Hall of Justice and drove with Blayney Matthews and a stenographer back to Hollywood where, in a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, they took Crawford’s formal statement. It came out that Lavine had been to see Crawford the previous day, a step in his plan to extort Crawford and several others who’d been involved in a Julian Pete “ring,” including Kent Parrot and California State Securities Commissioner Jack Friedlander. Through Kent Parrot, Crawford had informed Buron Fitts and the D.A.’s office of the plot, and they’d agreed to entrap Lavine.

Crawford had just used the D.A.’s office as his pawn and he had an amused look in his eye. He rattled the change in his pocket and gave White a wink. He helped himself to whiskey from a decanter, and White gathered that Crawford kept the suite here at the hotel permanently, as a base of operations that he could sometimes use away from his office, his home, and the other real estate he owned around the city.

As the D.A.’s men got ready to leave, Crawford reminded them that they had something of his—the $75,000. White assured him it would be returned at the end of Lavine’s trial. In fact, that money, as money often does, assumed its own life and created another story strand. Crawford never saw his $75,000 again. A mild-mannered and hitherto blameless county clerk would abscond with it and go on a stock market spree; by then Charlie Crawford would be dead.

16

Running with the Foxes

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uron Fitts was taking a run at the California governorship. His campaign, and his ambition, added layers to the drama of the Julian Pete. For political reasons Fitts wanted, and needed, further prosecutions associated with the scandal. Documents in the suitcases seized from Leontine Johnson gave him ammunition, suggesting that Jack Friedlander, the state securities commissioner, had been in the pocket of the Julian Pete guys. Friedlander was the appointee of C. C. Young, the present governor, and Fitts’s chief rival in the race for the Republican nomination. Young, the documents suggested, had taken a $250,000 campaign contribution to give Friedlander the job.

Here Fitts had a problem: that $250,000 contribution, if indeed it had been made, had come from the pocket of Jake Berman (aka Jack Bennett, by now known to the press as “Immunity Jack”) who was prone, according to the
Examiner
, to “prancing about the Hall of Justice with a proprietorial air.” Other documents in the Johnson trove provided evidence that Jack Roth, a stockbroker associated with Morris Lavine, had given bribes to Kent Parrot and Charlie Crawford, both of whom had been instrumental in C. C. Young’s previous gubernatorial campaign. This was another useful angle for Fitts so he assigned Dave Clark to look into the case. The whole murky stew began to bubble and boil.

Fitts had made an enemy out of the
Examiner
and the paper attacked him for his alliance with the slippery Jake Berman. On March 19, 1930, the
Examiner
published an affidavit that had been sworn out by one of Berman’s crew, Carl Vianelli, who had been a bartender and guard at Berman’s home. Vianelli alleged that the bribery associated with the first Julian Pete case had been even worse than supposed. Berman, using his dentist as a front, had bought one of the jurors a house and had given another juror $25,000. Fitts worked hard to protect Berman, while hurrying Dave Clark and other assistant D.A.s to line up further indictments.

The Rev. Bob Shuler entered the fray, both in his radio broadcasts and with a self-published pamphlet titled “Julian Thieves,” attacking Young and defending Fitts, who, Shuler argued, was “too brave, too splendidly fine” to be made a fool of, even by a “cunning human rat” like Jake Berman. “If he must grant him immunity that the corruption of the community be purged, well and good,” wrote Shuler. “Get all you can out of him, Buron, that will help produce justice and vindicate right.” Shuler was a partisan, a supporter who believed in Fitts as a transforming agent of reform. In reality Fitts was already sinking deep in the miasma of double-cross and corruption that he had pledged to eradicate.

The Times published Berman’s grand jury deposition. Fitts had presented the Times with this document, in which Berman told of giving Morris Lavine $30,000 so that Lavine would run pro –Julian Pete articles in the rival
Examiner
. Berman also said he’d seen his former partner Lewis present Governor Young with $10,000 cash in a suite at the Biltmore Hotel. Berman, as before, presented himself as a plausible witness, while Fitts took further criticism for manipulating the grand jury for political ends.

Then on the night of April 15, Robert Bursian, a jeweler, was found beneath his totaled Buick at the bottom of a 100-foot embankment off Beverly Boulevard. Apparently he’d been crushed to death. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that he had “knockout drops” in his blood and might have been the victim of poisoning. Fitts then made the announcement that Bursian had been an undercover agent working on a “particularly vital phase of the Julian investigation.” Fitts stated: “If it is not foul play, it is a remarkable coincidence.”

Fitts offered no further details, and ultimately the mystery of Bursian’s death would remain unexplained and unsolved, like the death of the chauffeur, found drowned in his car, off the end of the Santa Monica pier in Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. When asked who had killed the chauffeur, Chandler replied: “How the hell should I know?” Chandler’s fictional story lines, when he came to construct them, would be a lot like the Julian Pete—difficult to follow, full of twists and turns and changing allegiances, reminders of life’s potential for chaos and disorder.

For sure, something happened to Robert Bursian. On the next day, April 16, Dave Clark appeared in the grand jury room in the Hall of Justice and secured indictments against Charlie Crawford and former securities commissioner Jack Friedlander on charges of bribery and influence peddling. Crawford, according to the allegations made by Jack Roth, had acted as a middleman, shaking down brokers eager to sell Julian Pete stock. These brokers had been required to pay kickbacks, which were delivered to Crawford on fourteen occasions by Roth’s friend Morris Lavine. Crawford then passed on a share of the money to Friedlander. Probably Kent Parrot got a slice as well. Morris Lavine had been much more accustomed, apparently, to giving money to Charlie Crawford than taking it from him.

Crawford, furious about this new indictment, refused to cooperate in the prosecutions of Leontine Johnson and Morris Lavine, whose downfall he’d orchestrated. The Lavine/Johnson trial opened on April 29. Crawford, when called to the stand, stood on his right to silence and refused to answer questions. Lawyers on either side argued with such heat that the judge was forced to excuse the jury, whereupon Crawford risked a sly smile.

The case against Lavine and Johnson was in trouble, and great importance was now attached to the testimony of Leslie White, the only witness to the shakedown. White, dressed in a suit and a sober silk tie that he’d bought for the occasion, took the stand. “My palms were sweating,” he wrote in his diary. “But I think I did well.”

Lavine was represented by Richard Cantillon, one of the city’s leading defense attorneys. Cantillon had discovered that White wrote fiction. It was too tempting a line of attack to ignore. “I understand that you are quite accomplished as a writer and as a developer of plots, and that in a current issue of a well-known magazine, under your own name, you published a deep-rooted detective story which even goes so far as to involve and name characters in the office of District Attorney Buron Fitts,” said Cantillon.

White admitted that this was the case.

“Maybe your imagination ran away with you and you invented the story of the $75,000 in Charlie Crawford’s office.”

White stuck to his guns, and to his story, and found an ally in the wily Charlie Crawford. Called back to the stand, Crawford poked fun at Cantillon’s theory, and Cantillon dropped it. During a recess White caught up with Crawford in a corridor in the Hall of Justice, trying to thank him.

“You don’t want to be seen talking to me,” Crawford said, warning White off. “I’ve got a pretty bad name around town. And you’re supposed to hate bad men.”

“You don’t seem like a bad man, Charlie,” White said.

Crawford raised an almost rueful eyebrow. “No, I’m not bad,” he said in a soft voice, as if talking to himself. “Not like they’ve painted me. They say I’m the head of the underworld, but I don’t know what that is. The only underworld I know anything about are the sewers, and I reckon they can’t mean those.”

White would remember, with some sadness and even a little affection, that moment when Crawford had seemed to bare his soul. He was just “Good-time Charlie,” trying to make his way. He had a wife and kids, a family he loved. Why did people want to destroy him?

Then Crawford spotted one of the jurors watching them talk. “Beat it!” he said to White sharply.

Morris Lavine and Leontine Johnson were found guilty and sent to jail. Meanwhile, on March 30, 1930, Edward L. Doheny stepped off a train in Los Angeles to face a battery of newspaper photographers, movie cameras, and a 500-strong crowd of employees and well-wishers. At his Washington trial he’d been found not guilty of giving the $100,000 bribe that his friend Albert Fall had been convicted of receiving, a verdict that prompted one U.S. senator to remark, “Under this system you cannot convict a man with $100 million.” The
Literary Digest
wrote: “The question ‘Who bribed Fall?’ now passes into American folklore alongside the historic question, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’”

Albert Fall was puzzled. “The evidence was the same for both of us,” he said, missing the point that he’d made a bad impression in the courtroom, while Doheny, thanks to the efforts of his attorney Frank Hogan, achieved an opposite effect. Hogan once remarked that the best client was “a rich man, scared,” and Doheny fit the bill. He took the stand so that Hogan could lead him through a humble retelling of his remarkable and quintessentially American life, a story of poverty suffered, adventure enjoyed, fabulous wealth achieved, and tragedy endured. Pulling a courtroom stunt worthy of Earl Rogers, Hogan sat in a chair and impersonated the dead Ned Doheny while tears streamed down his client’s face.

In the icy Washington courtroom, a jury of nine men and three women retained their overcoats and fur wraps when they returned after deliberating for only one hour. “Not guilty,” said the foreman, and Estelle Doheny threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him. She thrust him away to gaze at him then embraced him once more. A stunned Doheny stood immobile but misty-eyed amidst the wild yells of his supporters. Frank Hogan happily handed over crisp $100 bills to reporters who had bet on acquittal. Doheny, grateful and generous, subsequently gave Frank Hogan a Rolls-Royce and an envelope containing a bonus check for $1 million. Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the president of USC, had been among those who testified on Doheny’s behalf, and when Doheny secured his acquittal, von KleinSmid got an entirely new campus building, USC’s splendid Doheny Memorial Library. Practical politics. Or, as Raymond Chandler would later write: “Law is where you buy it.”

Leslie White witnessed Doheny’s triumphant return to L.A. He noted in his diary: “Great crowds. Doheny waved in a modest way and seemed pleased.”

Dave Clark left the Hall of Justice and headed downtown to the Petroleum Securities Building, to the offices of Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, where spirits were high and champagne was flowing. He chatted for a while with his friend and former boss, Olin Wellborn III, who told Clark that although Doheny was happy to have won the case, he wasn’t well. All these years of trials and investigations had worn him out. “The old man needs a rest,” Olin Wellborn III said.

Charlie Crawford, though, was more emotional. He knew when a man was under pressure, and he thrilled to the news of Doheny’s escape, clapping his hands together, laughing with his wife and saying to her: “The fox outran the hounds.”