A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (5 page)

“L.A. was the hottest news city in America, probably the world,” said Matt Weinstock of the
Daily News
, the tabloid that featured Gene Coughlin and had been launched in 1923 by twenty-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. The
News
—located in a building at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Los Angeles Street, downtown but farther south than the other papers—was new and fresh and different. Vanderbilt, the rich son of a famously rich family, loved the swift, jazzy tabloid style; but he tried to break away from the sensationalism that usually went with that style. He envisioned a penny paper that “may safely enter any home” and ordered his editors to look for international stories and human interest stuff that the great New York tabloids would ignore (“FOUR HUNDRED CHICKENS DISAPPEAR,” ran one
News
headline). Circulation rose to 200,000 within a year but then slumped. The
News
foundered in 1926, and was plucked from the bankruptcy court by Manchester Boddy, a former book publisher and sales manager for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Boddy had $750 in his pocket, but proved to be the perfect man to put the young tabloid back on the map. He immediately removed Vanderbilt’s quixotic ban on sex, scandal, and violent death, and circulation began to rise again.

“Los Angeles had the finest murders
ever
,” wrote Carey McWilliams with a hint of pride. There was Walpurga Oesterreich, who kept her lover imprisoned in the attic for over fifteen years and then one day goaded him into killing her husband. There was college student Edward Hickman who kidnapped twelve-year-old Marion Parker and, having failed to extract a ransom, presented the corpse, with eyes and legs severed and eyelids sewn open, to the girl’s father, asking: “Do you think I’ll be as famous as Leopold and Loeb?” There was the murder of movie director William Desmond Taylor, shot through the heart with a single well-aimed bullet, perhaps having gotten on the wrong side of a dope dealer, or maybe one of the two gorgeous actresses he was bedding, or the mother of one of those actresses with whom he’d also been having an affair, or his ex-wife, or a gay lover. The bisexual Taylor, it transpired, had more people with reason to wish him dead than the victim in an Agatha Christie novel.

“Ideas grow as rank, coarse, and odorless as geraniums in the freakish atmosphere,” wrote McWilliams. “When so many people have nothing meaningful to do with their time, nothing real with which to occupy their minds, they indulge in fantasy, in silly daydreams, in perversions, and, occasionally, in monstrous crimes.” Incessant migration, rapid growth, and the swiftly repeated cycle of boom and bust and boom again had created a pathology of cults, cranks, and thousands of hastily improvised businesses and buildings—snakes for sale, frogs for sale, diners and stores that shot up in the shapes of owls, derby hats, shoes, airships, teakettles, windmills, and mosques.

“Los Angeles is the kind of place where perversion is perverted and prostitution prostituted,” McWilliams observed. The city could seem like a vast melodrama of maladjustment. Climactic episodes took on an addictive character, and civic rituals turned inevitably into gaudy spectacle. Much of this now centered at the new Hall of Justice, the thirteen-story Beaux-Arts building in spotless light-gray California granite that occupied an entire block at the corner of Temple and Spring.

The Hall of Justice was, and is, an impressive structure—solid, dignified, and elegant. When it opened for business in 1926, it was placed atop a hill with a handsome park in front of it, and with the enormous letters HALL OF JUSTICE chiseled in stone above the lofty entranceways. It was designed and erected at a time when the fathers of this most recklessly modern and American of cities felt they needed a Parthenon, a statement of civic intent and seriousness.

The Hall of Justice cost $6.5 million in 1920s dollars. A barrel-vaulted entrance foyer swept through the entire length of the building, and visitors, like the folks who worked there daily, couldn’t fail to be impressed by the gold marble walls, enormous marble columns, marble floors, and gold-coffered ceiling. Elevators rose to the offices of the District Attorney on the sixth and seventh floors, the courts on the eighth, and the jury and press rooms on the ninth. Above that was the County Jail, a full three floors of cells. Most days the place was a bustling hive. The people of L.A. demanded not only fictional but real-life entertainment. The Hall of Justice, envisioned for a cast of thousands, soon became not something Greek, but the city’s equivalent of the Roman Coliseum, a grand arena of life and death.

This building would soon become the center of Leslie White’s professional life, as it was of Dave Clark’s. Both would be players in the great crime circus of L.A. in the late 1920s and early 1930s; both would be touched by murder and scandal, although only one would survive intact. White had come to Los Angeles during the first Marco trial, and he’d read about a number of racket-related murders that had occurred since then. Jack Palmer, a Washington State rumrunner, another newcomer to town, had been killed in a downtown rooming house. Palmer’s flapper girlfriend said nonchalantly that he’d been shot by gangsters. Another man, Augie Palambo, was killed in the back of a San Pedro taxi cab. The
Evening Express
showed a picture of Palambo’s straw hat with a bloodstained bullet hole in it. These underworld rumblings were connected with the opening of a gambling ship, the
Johanna Smith
, off Long Beach. Marco was a part owner of the ship, along with his associates “Farmer” Page and former LAPD vice cop Guy McAfee. Were these men fighting among themselves, or were outsiders trying to muscle in? Reporters didn’t know, or if they did, they weren’t writing about it. The
Express
did note that the number of unsolved murders in the city was soaring. There had been fourteen since the beginning of the year.

White, intrigued, took a streetcar downtown and entered the Hall of Justice for the first time, riding the elevator to the eighth floor where, outside the doors of Judge Doran’s Superior Court, he joined the line of early spectators awaiting the start of Albert Marco’s second trial on the morning of August 24, 1928.

5

The Gangster Goes Down

D
ave Clark faced an uphill struggle. As proceedings got under way, a string of witnesses either didn’t appear or dropped out. Walter Eaton, an LAPD cop who had evidence of how the enraged Albert Marco had smashed chairs in the grand jury room, and Louise Bardson, a member of Marco’s party at the Ship Café, simply didn’t show up. Dr. George T. Dazey, who had dug the bullet out of Dominick Conterno’s back, had “gone to Europe.” Marco grinned when Dazey’s absence was announced in court, while Clark, furious, demanded a thorough investigation.

Marco had gotten himself a neat new haircut. He wore a dark blue suit with a muted chalk stripe, but his swagger was still unrestrained. He yawned and laughed. He slumped in his chair beside his attorneys, doodling and buffing his nails. He “smiled at secret thoughts,” as Gene Coughlin wrote in the
Daily News
, and treated the trial like a joke. He probably had good reason. Two of the key prosecution witnesses seemed to have developed eyesight and memory problems when they took the stand. Dominick Conterno said he’d been fighting with Marco, pummeling the vice-king over the head when a blow rendered him almost unconscious. The blow broke his hold on Marco, and he staggered backward. It was at this moment, he said, that he saw a flash and felt the bullet punch into his back—but he didn’t see who fired the shots. Harry Judson testified that he had no idea who fired the shot that wounded him in the foot.

Leslie White recorded some of his impressions. “Marco is an ugly brute. His neck is so thick it threatens to tear apart the collar of his shirt. The young prosecutor’s name is Clark. He’s got an impossible job, I think. Everybody thinks Marco is guilty and everybody thinks he’ll win his acquittal in a trial that seems fixed.”

White was still weak and walked with a stick. He sat at the back in the stuffy courtroom in case the heat made him faint and he needed to get out. Allied Architects, the designers of the Hall of Justice, had put big windows in the courtrooms, failing to consider the sheer amount of light that would strike them. On an average day Los Angeles received fourteen times more sunlight than New York. Fans had been installed in Judge Doran’s court, and venetian blinds that threw slanted patterns on the floors; but on summer days, the room still cooked.

Dave Clark, immaculate as always, looked cool in the heat, though he felt this shambles of a trial slipping out of his control. That weekend he and his wife Nancy accepted an invitation from Baron Long, the owner of the Ship Café. Long and a syndicate of other investors had recently opened a gambling resort across the Mexican border outside Tijuana, in the picturesque hills at Agua Caliente. The resort, set on 655 acres, had its own airport. Clark and Nancy flew down in Baron Long’s plane, and Clark walked for the first time among the sumptuous and soaring spaces of Agua Caliente. He saw the huge ballroom, the immense mosaic-tiled spa, the vast floors of the Gold Bar and Casino, where he gambled with chips made from solid gold. There were no windows or clocks, and security men watched from tracks above the paneled and coffered ceiling.

“Paradise in the midst of hell,” was how the writer Ovid Demaris described Agua Caliente. For years the resort—with its hotel, bungalows, swimming pools, golf course, spas, stables, and racetrack—would serve Hollywood and Southern California as an exclusive retreat. It was over the border where American laws didn’t apply and L.A. reporters knew not to snoop. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Clark Gable would be frequent visitors; likewise Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, and other studio bosses. Margarita Cansino, later known as Rita Hayworth, would be discovered there, dancing in the cabaret. Designed by the young architect Wayne McAllister, Agua Caliente was a prototype for Las Vegas, where McAllister would later create The Sands casino and hotel.

Dave Clark’s diaries were strictly appointment books, lists of names and times and places. He wrote few letters and left no commentary on his life. He wasn’t self-conscious in that way and remains impenetrable and hard to read. But we know that he fell in love with Agua Caliente because he would return there again and again, rubbing shoulders with the high rollers and the Hollywood aristocracy. The resort was like a gorgeous movie set that suited, perhaps, Clark’s inner sense of his own drama and glamor. He had a high opinion of himself—with some reason, for he was a man whose gifts and guts had already taken him far.

Clark came back refreshed from Agua Caliente, and the second trial of Albert Marco entered its second week. Meanwhile, a wild buying orgy sent stocks soaring on Wall Street; at San Quentin hundreds sought tickets to see the Los Angeles murderer Edward Hickman hang; and on a busy street in Chicago, Tony Lombardo, Al Capone’s aide and consigliore, was killed, struck by two dum-dum bullets that ripped away half his head. In L.A. the spate of unsolved underworld murders went on: Bobby Lee, “Chinese flapper bride,” was gunned down in
Chinatown
; the bullet-ridden body of Bozo Lancer was found on the floor of his North Broadway restaurant; Philip Rubino, the “proprietor of a grapejuice and bottle supply company,” was killed by a shotgun blast outside his Compton home. In connection with Rubino’s killing, the L.A.
Examiner
used the word “mafia,” perhaps for the first time in the paper’s history. “The Mafia supposedly never forget,” LAPD Captain William Bright told reporters. There’s rich irony here, for later it would be revealed that two LAPD cops had in fact killed Rubino, acting under orders from somebody in the Los Angeles “System”—maybe Marco himself.

Clark rested a prosecution case that he knew to be weak. His best efforts had been undermined at every juncture, and the defense began to call its witnesses. Among the first was Earl Kynette, an LAPD lieutenant who testified that he knew Albert Marco well. “The defendant is a peaceful man,” Earl Kynette said. Ten years hence, in 1938, Kynette—by then a captain and the head of LAPD’s notorious Red Squad, a unit that was set up to monitor and arrest Communists but became a tool of the underworld—would himself be prosecuted for attempted murder, having placed a bomb in the car of a private investigator hired by civic reformers. But in 1928, the LAPD’s connection with the rackets was not the open secret it would become, nor were the Marco trials seen as they would later be perceived—as an early chapter in the long, turbulent story of citizens trying to regain control of city politics.

Next witness for the defense was Evelyn Brogan, the “legal secretary,” who testified that when the shooting broke out at the Ship Café, Marco had been so scared she’d had to hold his hand. Sitting in his chair, looking plump and complacent, Marco smirked.

“Who did fire the shots, if the defendant didn’t?” Clark asked.

“I didn’t see,” Evelyn Brogan replied, and Marco smiled again.

It was at this moment that Marco’s attorneys, perhaps overconfident, made their big mistake. Joseph Moore, the hulking chauffeur of Marco’s Packard, shambled onto the stand. Far from smart, he nonetheless gave his evidence with unblushing effrontery. “It was I who shot Dominick Conterno,” he said.

Sitting in his usual spot at the back of the courtroom, Leslie White said he was unsure whether to laugh or gasp as Moore told how he’d just finished parking the car when he heard a commotion in the Ship Café.

“I ran to the swinging doors and looked in. I saw four or five men beating Marco up,” Moore went on. He said he ran back to the car to get a jack or something, a weapon. “The first thing I saw in the car was the gun, a .32 caliber pistol, and I grabbed it and ran back up into the café.”

Moore described how he stood beside Marco, with the gun placed beside Marco’s hip, and opened fire when the assailants tried to attack his boss again. “I was trying to scare them. I didn’t mean to injure anybody,” he said. “Afterwards I ran onto the beach and buried the gun in the sand.”

Dave Clark, in his cross-examination, asked Moore whether he could remember exactly where he’d hidden the gun. Moore said yes—it was close by the Ocean Park lifeguard station. Clark then called for an adjournment, so that he, Moore, and officers of the court could search for the weapon. A trip westward duly ensued, and the automatic was retrieved. An expert’s examination established that the gun had been in the sand only a matter of days, not for the two months that had passed since the shooting.

“This story is an utter and ridiculous fabrication, a device that the defense seems to have cooked up with the help of Broadway,” Dave Clark said when proceedings resumed. He was referring to a recent play, The Racket by Bartlett Cormack, in which a stooge takes the blame for his underworld boss. “I’ll prove that Joe Moore wasn’t within fifteen miles of the Ship Café when the shootings took place.”

Moore, called back to the stand, now kept his mouth shut, refusing to answer any more of Clark’s probings about his phony confession, and was promptly arrested for perjury.

“Moore was a ‘goat’ who’d been paid $10,000 to take the rap, plus an additional $10,000 for each year he spent in the pen at San Quentin,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the
Daily News
.

Albert Marco appeared unconcerned; he went on doodling and chatting with his friends, unaware that the trial was about to take one more sensational twist.

Judge Doran, convinced that certain jury members had been bribed, threatened, or otherwise tampered with, called counsel for both sides into his chambers and told them he was planning to dismiss all twelve of the present panel.

Dave Clark jumped on this. “If you take my advice, Judge, you’ll get rid of them and never let them come back.”

Howls of protest came from the Marco side—to no avail. In a scene reminiscent of Brian DePalma’s Prohibition gangster movie The Untouchables, Doran marched out one jury and swore in another before rushing the trial to its conclusion.

This gave Clark the opportunity to draw on a skill learned from Earl Rogers, who is credited with inventing the art of cross-examination in its modern form. In the famous 1902 Catalina Island Murder Case he cajoled, badgered, and lulled a witness into admitting his guilt concerning the killing for which another man was on trial. When Albert Marco took the stand in his own defense, Clark had no need for melodrama. Standing in front of him was an ideal candidate for cross-examination, a defendant who was surly and ill-prepared yet believed himself invulnerable. The trial transcript reads wonderfully:

Clark: “Did you fire the shots?”

Marco: “No.”

Clark: “But you were at the Ship Café that night.”

Marco: “Yes.”

Clark: “You heard the shots?”

Marco: “Yes.”

Clark: “Where were you at the time?”

Marco: “I can’t remember.”

Clark: “Many witnesses have testified that you did indeed fire the shots. You took aim and shot Dominick Conterno in the back.”

Marco: “I didn’t fire those shots. But if the jury believes I did I want them to know I was acting in self-defense.”

Evidence was reprised, closing statements made. The new jury went out, and though expected to remain out for at least a day, returned within hours, finding Albert Marco guilty on all counts, whereupon, Gene Coughlin reported in the
News
, Marco’s “wry smile turned to a sneer.”

Marco’s attorneys sought a new trial, but Judge Doran refused it and found himself facing death threats. So did Dave Clark. Undeterred, Clark pressed for the maximum sentence and a week later Doran handed Marco fourteen to twenty years in San Quentin.

“BIG PAPA SENT TO PEN!” said the headline in the
News
.

It all ended in such a hurry that Leslie White missed the moment when the jury delivered its verdict. He’d been struck most of all by the sheer theatricality of the trial, and how different it had been from those he’d seen in Ventura County. “Here in Los Angeles nobody spoke of the truth—they spoke of testimony and evidence. If a witness tried to tell a straightforward story, he was heckled by both the defense and the prosecution until he was too bewildered and confused to remember anything,” he wrote. He recorded, too, further impressions of Dave Clark. “A big city attorney. Young, standing upright. Brave, with a real military bearing.”

Dave Clark felt the heat of fame. His picture appeared in the papers and he showed that he knew how to milk the moment. “Marco went to extreme measures to try to ensure his freedom,” he said. “But the jury came back with the only verdict twelve intelligent people could return. This serves notice on gangland—Los Angeles won’t tolerate racketeers big or little.”

“The blue-eyed prosecutor did his job courageously and honestly,” reported Gene Coughlin, whose path would one day cross Clark’s again in very different circumstances. “The people of this city should congratulate the gangbusting lawyer and handsome poloist.”

Dave Clark wasn’t Earl Rogers yet, but this was more than a beginning. He was the lawyer with guts enough to take on the underworld and brains enough to win.