The Laughing Gorilla (24 page)

“Over the last 20 years,” the chief said, “Mayor Rolph had achieved honesty and efficiency through a ‘hands off’ policy and the appointment of sterling Police Commissions. The current Commission’s president, Theodore J. Roche”—Quinn smiled wolfishly at Roche—“is a brilliant lawyer, a law partner of U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson and of the Hon. Matt Sullivan, former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. His $100-a-month goes to charity. He’s a man money can’t buy.

“Commissioner Jesse B. Cook is an experienced, successful former chief. Commissioner Thomas E. Shumate—progressive, able, a leading physician is proprietor of a chain of drug stores and a breeder of blooded horses. Commissioner Frank J. Foran—vice-president of the King Coal Company, Olympic Club secretary, a golfer and prominent all-around sportsman. Can you conceive of such a mayor and Police Commission countenancing graft or inefficiency and corruption? They haven’t. They don’t. They
will
not!”

Their lunches arrived on covered silver platters. The china was of the hotel’s own design. Roche grew thoughtful as he ate, partially convinced that the SFPD was nurturing vipers at its breast. Because men were human, Quinn often said, there would be occasional graft scandals and bad apples and some would involve cops. Roche studied Dullea. Sometimes one good apple survives in a barrel of bad apples. But one honest cop could do only so much. “The Hall of Justice was dirty and reeked of evil,” columnist Herb Caen observed when all the facts were in. “The City Hall, the DA and the cops ran the town as though they owned it, and they did.” The SFPD was the “toughest gang in town.”

If Dullea wanted the SFPD swept clean, he would have to dislodge the mayor, the chief, and the police commissioners—his bosses—and do it himself. To speak out without proof and without powerful political friends in his corner was to be immediately exiled from the department. At the end of lunch, Quinn paid, then looked down at the change in his palm. It had been polished in a silver burnishing machine and rinsed and dried under hot lights until mint clean and germ free. For the last three years, only the St. Francis washed its coins. The chief went away jingling the gleaming silver, feeling a little better. Dullea hoped there weren’t thirty of them.

 

 

AS
they left the St. Francis, another luncheon was ending in San Rafael to the north where John V. Lewis, collector of Internal Revenue, was delivering an anticipated club address. His final words brought gasps from the audience. “And so we have discovered one retired SFPD officer,” he said, “whom we have asked to pay his long delayed federal tax on a personal fortune of $110,000!”

Lewis’s revelation of such wealth in such economically troubled times precipitated a stunning series of developments. Chief Quinn didn’t really enter the picture until the owner of Club Kamokila got angry.

The comely Mrs. Alice Campbell was Hawaiian royalty. Her mother was Princess Kuaihelana of Hawaii’s royal ruling house, and her father, Jim Campbell, was the multimillionaire Pineapple King and Sugar Czar. Alice, a guileless woman known as “Princess,” had opened a nightclub in a former Methodist church on downtown Bush Street as a venue for her vocal aspirations. When Central Station officers began shaking her down, it irritated her that they never harassed the hookers working out of lavish upstairs rooms along nearby Lysol Alley. Not that Princess didn’t employ equally friendly women in grass skirts from the Powell Street sidewalks, she just didn’t like to be unfairly singled out.

In short order, special-duty officers arrested her bartender and manager, convinced neighbors to file noise complaints, challenged her dance hall license, and stationed a permanent detail of six uniformed officers in her doorway to discourage customers. In each of the city’s fourteen districts, two to four special-duty men, a vice contact group (disrespectfully referred to as “bucket men” or “collectors” behind their backs), operated as aides de corps to the district captains. The captains were not only unsupervised but answerable to no one (not even the Bureau of Communications) as to their whereabouts at any hour of the day, even in emergencies, and exercised considerable authority subject only to minimal review by their superiors. Being virtually accountable to only their unaccountable captains, the bucket men were ripe for graft.

“The Kamokila Club is a dive, one of the worst in town,” said Captain Fred Lemon, the bull-necked commander of Central Station. “This woman is not fooling anyone with this society bull and I’m going to close the place every night.”

Princess’s lawyer, Jake Ehrlich, the legal representative for the police department, didn’t question that graft on a large and grand, well-organized scale existed, flourished, and excluded all competition but advised her against paying off. Next he filed a $20,000 slander suit against Lemon based on Lemon’s known salary, which represented only a tiny fraction of his true income.

When Princess could hold out against Lemon’s Central Station extortionists no longer, she paid them, then dialed the SFPD and asked for Chief Quinn personally. “I want to check on the bribe I just paid to your men,” she said. “I want to be certain I haven’t been overcharged.” Princess was a careful woman.

“Overcharged?” asked Quinn.

“Well, you tell me. Is $150 the right amount to pay six policemen for protection? Should I have demanded a receipt?”

Quinn dropped the receiver back on its hook, legally obligated to call Mayor Rossi and DA Brady. Instead, he called Captain Lemon, who was “a very great and good friend” of Tom and Pete McDonough. The two brothers (and their nephew, Harry Rice) ran the underworld’s post office where they extorted, refused, threatened, and obliterated anyone who impeded their brutal management of the city’s gambling, dope, graft, and organized vice rings. They protected pimps, bankrolled madams, and kept an eye on the nightly take of every hustling girl on Eddy Street. “They knew to the dollar how much gambler Bones Remmer or Eddie Shahati took in a night play,” said Ehrlich, “and had the drawings on any burglary, con-game or safe blowing that happened
before
it happened—or it
didn’t
happen. Tammany never ran New York City as completely as the McDonoughs ran the right to break the law in San Francisco.”

Having learned their trade during the corrupt Abe Ruef administration, they suborned witnesses, tampered with judges, paid off police, and bribed officials to pass or amend city ordinances beneficial to their enterprise. As the not-so-secret overlords of the underworld (“the Fountain Head of Corruption” according to the
Examiner
), they commanded an army of crooked cops, daylight stickup artists, pickpockets, fast-money specialists, burlesque queens, grifters, lamsters, and shoulder strikers.

That Captain Lemon was a good friend to the McDonoughs was not remarkable. Numerous police officials, judges, and even the DA were their friends, too, and beholding politically. Big-bellied, cigar-smoking Tom McDonough even possessed a $2,500 IOU bearing DA Brady’s name. The two Irish-Catholic brothers had founded the nation’s first modern bail bonds business. The cops, underpaid at $200 per month, commonly got kickbacks for recommending arrestees use the McDonoughs for bail. They provided it from their one-story bail bond brokerage at Clay and Kearney streets—so near the HOJ that Chief Quinn winced every time Pete raised his voice in anger.

Princess’s next call was to Ehrlich to make doubly sure she hadn’t been overcharged. He was furious that she had paid. “And you could have demanded a money back guarantee too,” he said. “Where did you get the idea?”

“Well, Jake, there was this used car salesman who knew someone in the mayor’s office who said it was better if I paid.”

“When you start playing ball with the right people, Princess, you can turn in your grass skirt and head for the showers as far as I’m concerned.” He believed that the reasons grafters flourished so long and so openly were peculiarly San Franciscan. “Always a robust-minded town, San Francisco had convinced itself that vice was a necessary evil.” The cops had convinced themselves that they were expected to pick up extra dough by the most expedient means possible and above all please their captain.

That evening Ehrlich drove to the HOJ to speak on Princess’s behalf. “All other San Francisco nightclubs have dancing and we are going to have dancing too . . . beginning tonight. The police have made a circus of Princess Kamokila’s attempt to start an honest business in San Francisco and it’s going to have to stop. This is to advise you that the police are going to have to break down the doors of the club if they want to get in from now on.”

Both Central Station and the HOJ began to pressure Princess to stop her calls to the press. She was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury the same day action was tabled on her club’s dance permit and a telephoned threat was made against the life of her little daughter, Pineapples McFarlane. Princess locked her inside her Fairmont Hotel penthouse, hired a bodyguard, and got a gun permit. Somehow the cops got to her anyway. By the time she testified she no longer recalled what the shakedown officers had looked like.

But Chief Quinn knew the Central Station bucket men who most logically would have accepted the payoff. When they refused to testify under oath, he fired them. An investigation was promised, but Princess had a better idea. “San Francisco is on trial,” she told reporters as she left the grand jury chambers, “and reeks of bought illegalities, official venality and under-the-table deals. . . . When the community is not courageous it must expose vice and crime. The city should hire an investigator and pay him $100,000 to clean up this Sodom and Gomorrah.”

It is surprising that the economically strapped city did just that.

DA Brady, without notifying Quinn or the Police Commission, enlisted a commercial policeman to conduct a secret graft inquiry of the SFPD. His special investigator, Edwin Newton Atherton, was a handsome former G-man with the “open smile of a casket salesman.” He was also a man in need of dollars. Before Rossi and Brady knew it, Atherton would have $100,000 of theirs. In rapid succession, Atherton set up a posh headquarters in the Keystone Apartments on Nob Hill’s west side, organized three boxes of files in two cabinets, and began spending the city’s money as fast as he could. He even bugged Ehrlich’s office. Atherton’s style was to get as close to his quarry as he could, “wheedling, flattering, threatening and promising,” and then snap the trap. Stealthily, Atherton set to work like a mouse gnawing a live electrical cord.

—INFORMATION GUIDES FOR SAN FRANCISCO’S FERRY BUILDING

 

 

 

 

 

DULLEA
had been at the Ferry Building since early morning working the multiple murders of sailors. It was evening now, and a tired army of blue-collar workers was trudging homeward across the wide cast-iron bridge. He watched them rising up and over the inclined span as they passed the Bay Hotel. This crime had touched Dullea and his men, even reduced the seasoned deputy coroner, Mike Brown, to tears. In his fury, the Gorilla Man had made a tactical error. The frenzy of his autopsy, one of the most horrific crime scenes the SFPD had ever encountered, had filled the detectives with a sense of vengeance.

Dullea had a solitary dinner, then finished briefing his men. Before he knew it, it was 11:00 P.M. Sore from his workout that morning as a member of the South End Rowing Club, Dullea paused midpoint on the bridge and scanned the Loop below. He was expecting an informant who claimed to know who had murdered the sailors. The eerie light of the immense bridge construction in the Bay cast a glow over the docks. The terminal’s electrical system (which powered all the waterfront’s foghorns, chimes, and whistles) kept the pier lights on all night long, because stevedores loaded ships all night. The footbridge lights would be extinguished in an hour. The ground floor of the Ferry Building was already dark (though the second floor was still ablaze). Like pretty much every great building in San Francisco, it was a copy of some great building somewhere else, in this case Charles Atwood’s railroad station at the Chicago World’s Fair.

While the power to operate the Embarcadero’s lights surges from the Ferry Building, the force powering its Big Clock comes from a suspended nine-hundred-pound weight. Its intricate springs, valves, and wheels are wound weekly by a crank fitted to an axle. Dullea glanced at his watch. As usual, the Big Clock was running two minutes fast, had been since 1906. That made little difference since most watches were set by it. Unlike the Big Clock, Dullea couldn’t gain a minute, and he was counting on every one.

If the night clerk Smeins could be believed, their quarry did resemble a gorilla. Crouching, a gorilla is tall as a man though he weighs three times as much, almost all muscle, and has bones correspondingly thick to support his upper body’s tremendous weight. Dullea theorized his quarry was not civilized and really might be a Gorilla Man, at least on a psychological level. Something compelled him to act as he did, some broken mainspring, like the clock’s, which made him run fast. Dullea believed that Gorilla Men (as their name implied) were some sort of throwbacks. In the years after World War I, these creatures had been thankfully rare, but in the last decade, the nation had been infested with them. The Gorilla Man, a victim of an irresistible impulse to perform his irrational acts, had no choice. He
had
to commit another autopsy murder. Dullea was driven too. Though he would never stop protecting defenseless women like Bette Coffin, Jessie Hughes, and Mrs. Johnston, he sometimes felt as powerless as they. Was he incapable of ever providing such women justice?