The Laughing Gorilla (11 page)

—CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

IT
took a second betrayal to really open Dullea’s eyes. This time it was one of his own men.

Just after midnight on January 27, 1933, dispatcher Paul Frasher eyed his shotgun standing in the corner and shivered. It was a frigid night at Land’s End. The wind was rising, shaking the painted frame barn, and whistling over the peaked roof. Frasher heard it humming through the crisscrossing of electric wires above. He wished he were home in his cozy Irving Street apartment by the Bone Yard, a square block of abandoned streetcars. He heard sand biting the windows and the medallion reading “Market St. Railway Co.” swinging violently in the gale. Other signs were for passersby farther west: “To Lincoln Park” and “California Palace of the Legion of Honor.” Beyond Twentieth Avenue, sand dunes stretched to Sunset Boulevard, though in four years the dunes up to Thirty-ninth and Taraval would be gone. The Sutro car barns at Thirty-second Avenue and Clement Street (one of the main car barns of the Market Street Railroad) lay just south of a succession of precipitous cliffs overlooking Salada and China Beaches. Three sets of streetcar tracks led into a huge barn packed with white-fronted cars returned after their day’s run. Frasher listened to the hiss of his tiny stove, the faint
tick-tick-tick
of cooling machinery and— something else—tiny pebbles cracking against the front window. Frasher peered out.

While his attention was diverted, a tall, elegant intruder in a white domino mask slipped in through the rear door. The Phantom jammed Frasher’s shotgun into his chest and sent him sprawling. “I’ll blow out your brains,” he said with fury.

Two confederates in white handkerchief masks burst through the door, the smaller hiding behind his larger comrade. They bound and gagged Frasher, tossed him facedown in an outer office, and dropped an overcoat over his head.

The Phantom was remarkably well informed. Somehow, he knew the first safe in Frasher’s office was empty and the second stuffed with $2,219 in coins—the receipts of three Sutter car lines. Rapidly, the thieves chiseled off the knob and smashed the combination so silently five other workers in distant parts of the barns never heard. “We’re not going to have enough time to finish it. We’ll just take the safe away with us.”

Somehow the Phantom knew Special Officer Frank Sheehan was due on his rounds. In spite of the enormous weight of the coins, the gang shoved the safe into a burlap sack and dragged it across the sidewalk. Outside they hefted it up into a small sedan and drove to their hideout, a little beach cottage. Frasher wriggled across the floor toward the phone, but before he reached it Officer Sheehan, a bit late, reached the barns and freed him. A tall policeman had stopped him on the street and delayed him.

The next day, Rockaway Beach Deputy Ed Winters found the blown safe discarded on a beach road near the links of Sharp’s Park Golf Course. LaTulipe rushed fifteen miles from San Francisco to capture any errant fingerprints. Apparently, the gang hadn’t been in such a big rush after all. They’d taken time to leisurely rub their prints from the safe.

On March 5, the nation’s banks went “on holiday” for four days. Not so the White Mask Gang who kept themselves gamely employed blasting open safes all over the Embarcadero. On March 14, Dullea met with Inspector Richard Tatham, the head of the Robbery Detail, to discuss this highly successful gang of cracksmen. It was hot in Dullea’s office. Tatham took off his hat and wiped his brow with a checkered kerchief. His remarkably square head, sturdy as a cast-iron kettle, was a disorderly bird’s nest on top and shaved at the sides in the crop-eared style. His broad, trusting features were doughy and unfinished, as if created by the pressure of a knuckle here and the scratch of a nail there.

A terrible suspicion lurked in the back of Tatham’s mind, one he was afraid to voice but one common sense told him had to be true. “My theory is”—Tatham closed the office door—“that these ‘petermen’ are being tipped off by someone on the inside.” Somehow the Phantom had timed the movements of both special and public police patrols to the second and was granted access to every door. No matter what trap they laid, the lanky ghost would be forewarned. As Frank Egan had once been, the Phantom had to be a policeman.

“I sincerely hope not,” said Dullea. His shoulders slumped as he recalled Egan had known of some great corruption within the SFPD. Was this it?

In April, the phone rang at a palm-shrouded, redbrick one-story, rebuilt in the Romanesque revival style. The Richmond Police Station on Sixth Avenue between Anza and Geary avenues was Dullea’s home in his rookie days when he covered his Richmond District beat (bounded by Fourteenth and Forty-eighth avenues, Lake and Fulton streets) by motorcycle. Even when patrol cars were introduced into this northwestern corner of the city, it was still so sparsely settled that Richmond Station never assigned more than one patrolman per car to the region.

Back then, Dullea wore a round-topped billycock hat and a knee-length uniform coat with tails long enough to stow handcuffs and a serviceable blackjack, which he relied on because he was such a poor shot. Though his Marine Corps discharge papers, which he still kept in his desk drawer, had rated his character as “excellent,” they listed no firearms qualifications, even as a marksman. Dullea still carried the service pistol he had emptied at a fleeing gang of robbers in the Richmond. When he ran out of bullets the robbers turned, drew their guns, and began chasing
him.

Dullea had proudly trained at the knee of “The Dutchman of Richmond Station,” Sergeant Oliver L. Hassing. Hassing, a devoted husband, a father of three, and a well-respected model officer, was dark haired, craggy-faced, and amiable. Over his twenty-three years of spotless service, the Dutchman had been attached to the Traffic Bureau, a separate entity reporting directly to the Police Commission, then as a corporal at the Mission Station before being transferred to the Richmond Station. At the police desk, the Dutchman snatched up the receiver. “My name is Joseph Boberg,” the caller said. “I’m superintendent of the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist over at 300 Funston Ave.” Boberg reported he had seen a prowler around the church. “We have $500 in the safe at all times.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Dutchman. His expression had not brightened. His workload was considerable because he was working day and night. “I’ll make a report on it, and we’ll have the beat officer keep an eye on the place for you,” he said. “Now tell me everything.”

Boberg was comforted for at least two weeks. That was when the Phantom’s White Mask Gang cracked Boberg’s church safe like an egg and stole every cent of its Easter collections.

—
DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG

 

 

 

 

 

ON
February 17, 1934, fog bells were ringing low across the water as the first bracing portal of the new Golden Gate Bridge reached 480 feet above mean high water. This week alone the Marin-side bridge tower had consumed 570 tons of steel. Off Fort Point, the last of three eight-hour shifts were quitting work on the south pier excavation. The cabin liner
Santa Cecilia
out of New York a day late was just sailing past the Headlands to discharge forty disgruntled passengers onto the docks.

From those docks, the White Mask Gang scurried like rats into an office at 188 Embarcadero Street, hammered the dial off a safe with a center punch and heavy hammer, and drove the spindle free of the tumblers and snatched $1,000. Two nights later, within the shadow of the Ferry Building, they smashed into the Alaska Fishermen’s Union at 49 Clay Street, located the safe’s soft spot, and drilled the spout out. Their appropriation of $3,477 of hardworking men’s cash plunged union secretary John Olson into such deep depression he killed himself.

“All through 1933 and 1934,” Inspector Tatham recalled, “the burglars known as the White Mask Gang launched a breathtaking offensive, a shocking wave of crime month after month that had us at our wits’ end. . . . In previous years San Francisco’s police department had kept from the city all known ‘petermen,’ but now I was convinced we were trailing a new and clever gang who had learned their lawless trade without previous arrest or intervening prison terms. In other words, professional amateurs—an odd paradox.”

On Easter Sunday morning, Dullea cursed aloud. He had provocation. Last Easter Sunday, the White Mask Gang had committed a burglary in the early morning hours. Now they’d done it again—jimmying open a side window at the Wilson Candy store on Clement Street and blowing the safe. On Saturday, May 5, the unscrupulous “yeggs”
⁴
propped a ladder against a building adjoining the Fleischmann Yeast Company at 245 Eleventh Street, leaped the short distance to the other roof, and scurried down a light well. They prized the door off a fireproof safe with a crowbar (“a rip job”), crammed $500 in cash into a black bag, and blended into the heavy morning fog seconds ahead of arriving workers. Inadvertently, the Phantom had swiped a fortune in registered securities. Considerately, he mailed them back. By then Tatham and Inspector Bill Mudd had already wasted a night compiling a comprehensive list of the stolen bonds. When LaTulipe dusted the envelope he found no prints, watermarks, or other identifying marks.

Midnight man John Davis was scrubbing down a delivery wagon outside the People’s Baking Company at 1800 Bryant Street when he heard a hollow laugh. Sponge in hand, he peered into a deep shadow cast by an arc light. A tall man with a long white handkerchief over his face was leaning against a wagon. “Raise ’em, buddy,” the Phantom said.

With his gun, he motioned Davis inside into a small office segregated from a larger office by a plate-glass window where the gang waited. They bound and gagged Davis and baker Frank O’Neill and spread burlap sacking beneath the window to muffle the sound of falling glass. The gang climbed through to the safe. They laid out their tools on a blanket—three chisels, six drills, two pliers, three punches, two drill keys, one wire pick, one copper hammer (which would make little sound if dropped), a fulminating cap, a brace and bit, and a cake of Lux soap.

The Phantom consulted a small black binder—an inch of mimeographed pages held together with three screw-headed brads. He disliked torches, which tended to incinerate any money inside, and preferred the old Civil War technique of pouring gunpowder into the crevices around the door seam and sealing the fissures with soap. The modern method, the “lock shot,” consisted of punching the safe by drilling holes into the lock spindle hole and stuffing them with nitroglycerin-soaked cotton. “Use the lock shot,” decided the Phantom. He uncorked a small bottle of homemade “soup” brewed by slowly boiling dynamite sticks in a kettle over a fire. Nitro rises as a clear, straw-colored film that can be skimmed off—dangerous work. The nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide created during the process can collapse your lungs. He walked as if on eggshells—that single eyedropper full was potent enough to jolt the safe’s door off its hinges.

He inserted a charge of nitro-soaked cotton into a primed cartridge (a dynamite blasting cap and wire fuse) and exploded it with an electric detonator. That blast set off the larger nitro explosion. With a muffled
whump!
all four sides of the safe expanded, the tumblers released, and the heavy door—trailing smoke and sparks—launched itself through the smashed window and almost hit Davis. A second shot crumpled the steel compartment inside the safe without damaging the several strongboxes and $1,600 of currency. Leaving behind shards of glass, steel, and plaster, the gang faded away. Davis and O’Neill made themselves comfortable. They wouldn’t be discovered for hours. “They were cautious, clever, and astonishingly well-informed,” Davis told Tatham. “Good craftsmen. All around it was a neat job, and though I hate to, I’ve got to give them credit.”

When the gang took the Associated Grocers on Pacific Street for $4,000 and sped off in a waiting truck, cops patrolling less than a block away failed to notice. By summer, San Francisco was strike-ridden and aflame with labor riots. For almost two years the gang had been striking with impunity, but during the bloody unrest when every cop was on overtime cracking the skulls of agitators at the waterfront, they committed no robberies. When the Globe Brewing Company at 1423 Sansome Street left its doors open offering hospitality to patrolling police, the Phantom befriended Robert Graham, the elderly watchman, and engaged him in long conversations. After the strike ended, the police left, and longshoremen got back to work. So did the White Mask Gang. Now Tatham was certain the Phantom was a cop. Graham was going to work one night when a tall, white-masked figure blocked his path. “All right, Graham,” he said, “this is as far as you go.”

“How do you know my name?”

In reply, the Phantom split his skull and robbed the Globe
.

The Phantom’s string of precisely planned capers finally began to go awry on July 29, when he busted into the Golden State Milk Company’s main plant at 459 Bay Street, less than five blocks from Pier 33. The gang sealed employees Fred Frocade, Americo Frigole, and George Lombardi in the milk chilling vault. There were several dull roars, then cursing. The safe was empty. Milk worker Wayne Storey met the cracksmen going out. They pinioned his arms, debated whether to kill him, and settled for kicking him unconscious. On September 4, they smashed into the Coca-Cola plant and were almost surprised by a beat patrolman before wrangling a 1,500-pound vault containing $500 into their truck. They left it shattered on a Daly City mountain top. “I had that safe photographed and gone over inch-by-inch by La Tulipe,” said Tatham, “but the only prints were those of the employees.”