The Badge

by Jack Webb

  While Hull scanned the report, Mills examined the cashier’s check and accepted it. Almost as an afterthought, Hull said, “Here’s my business card.” He showed Mills his police identification and arrested him.

  Search of Mills’ files disclosed that more than two hundred persons, mostly pensioners and retired couples, as it turned out, had similarly invested and lost their life’s savings. LAPD estimated that investors throughout the country had been taken for at least $1,000,000 since the Los Angeles victims alone contributed more than $600,000.

  LAPD filed fourteen counts of conspiracy and theft against Mills, but the wily ex-lawyer got thirteen of them dismissed on the grounds that the police had illegally searched his hotel files and seized his mineral specimens, stock certificates, sucker lists and other documents. One charge, his stock sale to Lieutenant Hull, stuck. He was sentenced to a term of one to ten years in state prison.

  Still he wasn’t through. He appealed to the California State Supreme Court and after a turndown there, went to the United States Supreme Court, where his case is pending.

  Nor did he for a moment lose the aplomb that had made him one of the master salesmen of his time. Frankly, he advised Bunco Captain Harry Didion, the police would have been smarter to invest rather than arrest. Didion and Hull passed.

  Once his testimony had been given, Lieutenant Hull plunged immediately into another case; for the war against the bunks is unending, and a stiff note on the Squad Room bulletin board reminds the detectives:

  “All officers work mornings and nights when necessary and are subject to call from Detective Headquarters, and must give the case at issue immediate and proper attention.”

  III

  A thoughtful, scholarly cop, an authority on labor problems, an expert on the intricacies of leftwing politics throughout the country, Lieutenant (now Captain) Joseph E. Stephens holds down an improbable assignment in LAPD. He commands the expendables, the commando cops, the suicide squad of seventy policemen, two lieutenants and eight sergeants known officially as the Metropolitan Division.

  A Policeman in the Harbor Division may never see duty in San Fernando Valley, some forty miles to the north, and a Robbery detective sensibly leaves murders to the Homicide Squad. A Bunco man cares nothing about traffic problems.

  But Metro, the small, tough, mobile force of super-specialists, is all over the place, geographically and procedurally. On loan-out assignments, they work a month in each division, communications, forgery, vice, scientific investigation; and there isn’t a phase of police know-how in which they do not excel.

  Shotgun handling… Stakeouts… Picket line duty… Traffic control… Riot work… Walkie-talkie… Chemical agents… When to shoot….

  Metro is the rolling force that is thrown in for the kill after routine procedures have failed. Once, in considerable annoyance, a Metro squad spent 200 man-days disguised as women to find one rapist. They got him.

  Another time, four Metromen staked out an alley for seven nights to catch “The Eel,” who had successfully made eleven raids on a garment shop located five stories up in the loft of a building. Finally, they spotted a five-foot, one hundred-pound wisp of a man sneaking into the alley with a long rope.

  They challenged him, and he fired. They fired back. They got him.

  Every crime report in LAPD bears a number assigned by the Division of Records, but it is Metro’s DR numbers that make some of the best reading. On holdup stakeouts, they shoot it out with trigger-happy stickup men. On night watch, they sometimes double as firemen till the apparatus arrives, evacuating the young, the aged, the frightened. And sometimes, but not too often, because courage is expected of them anyhow, there is the award of the precious round medal which says, “Los Angeles Police Department—For VALOR.”

  For months a daylight burglar had been making life miserable for the Central Division. Little by little, as he pulled seventy-five jobs, detectives put together a composite picture from what witnesses could tell them.

  Dapper, personable, about thirty-five to forty-five years old, he carried a briefcase and walked and talked like a successful salesman. He stole only cash and small valuables which could be stuffed into the briefcase. In a few minutes, he was in and out of an apartment building and then lost on the street among dozens of other prosperous-looking salesmen.

  In fact, the police knew practically everything about him, except who he was and where he would strike next. And that was when Metro was called in.

  First, Metro detectives analyzed a map of the section where he operated. From his pattern they picked out the area of a few blocks which he probably would visit that same day. Then Lieutenant Stephens blanketed the pocket of less than a square mile with ten two-man teams.

  From cars and doorways, on street corners and in front of stores, the stakeout waited patiently, unobtrusively hour after hour. Then late in the afternoon, an affluent-seeming gentleman with a briefcase stepped briskly from an apartment building on a small side street. Two Metro men jumped him before he could fight or run. It was a nice, clean take.

  LAPD hit him with seventy-five burglary charges, and then San Francisco, Portland and Seattle police said they’d like whacks at him, too, for a total of more than three hundred burglaries in their cities.

  To Metro, it had been a real pro job. The street on which he was grabbed was so narrow you might miss it at a fast walk, but it was just about dead center of the area which the Metro detectives had marked off on the map with their prophetic slide rules.

  When Joe Stephens took command of Metro in 1950, he had a double mess on his hands. Morale and work output were low, and the division was the unwanted orphan of LAPD. By wangling better equipment and assignments for his men, by delivering pep talks and dressings down with equal fervor, by selling departmental brass on the theory that Metro could do anything any time anywhere, he lifted his division by its bootstraps. Today, there is a waiting list of almost two hundred policemen who want to transfer to Metro.

  But that was only half of his problem in 1950. A major assignment of the division is the policing of labor disputes; and labor hated the cop. To the union card carrier, he was just the boss’ bully boy who broke up picket lines with a night stick.

  For sixty years, Los Angeles had suffered stormy and often bloody labor relations. A typographers’ strike against the Los Angeles Times in 1890 left a twenty-year legacy of walkouts and lockouts in various business fields which finally exploded in tragedy.

  In 1910 the Los Angeles City Council made labor history with an ordinance which barred labor picketing. Within a few weeks, almost five hundred union members were arrested; and then, at I a.m. that October 1, the Los Angeles Times was dynamited. Twenty employees were killed in the blast and fire, and the building was leveled.

  The two McNamara brothers, Jimmy, a member of the Typographers’ Union, and Joe, secretary of the Structural Iron Workers, were named as the brains in a nationwide bombing conspiracy. For fourteen months, Clarence Darrow conducted a skillful defense and then, in a maneuver to save their lives, had them switch to guilty pleas. Jimmy got life and Joe was sentenced to fifteen years.

  For years afterward, the bombing outrage poisoned labor relations in Los Angeles, and LAPD was aligned always with the anti-labor faction, the unionists felt. Before and after World War II, as the area increasingly industrialized with aircraft and auto assembly lines, rubber and oil, labor’s hostility to the cop deepened. They said he wasn’t much more than the boss’ private guard in a public uniform, and since Metro handled labor details, it was Metro that labor particularly hated.

  Joe Stephens was probably the only man in LAPD who could have straightened out this dangerous division between the working man and the policeman.

  All during the war he had worked on the subversive detail and afterwards he helped southern California labor leaders eliminate communism from their ranks. In public and private, he moved with the Left, and in addition to pinkos, phonies and deep Reds, he met many sincere labor leaders
. He learned to talk their language and he became sensitive to their problems. They trusted him as a sympathetic outsider.

  When interim Police Chief William A. Worton assigned him to Metro, Stephens promptly called together the top labor men of Los Angeles. The Division would continue to police disputes, but he promised a one-word slogan for his men—impartiality. They would side neither with management nor with labor. He told them of his own abhorrence of stick-swinging on picket lines, and pleaded for their support in restraining their own men. Trusting him, they gave it.

  Today, as the third largest industrial area in the nation, Los Angeles has almost 800,000 union members. Yet, a Metro survey showed, during one recent year only six of thirty-five strikes in the city itself necessitated uniformed police patrols. These cost the city 202 man-days, an all-time low.

  Impartiality has been paying off.

  Under Lieutenant Stephens, Metro’s labor specialists watch vigilantly for any indication of labor racketeering. They record all attempts to organize factories and businesses and analyze inter-union strife. Though they maintain a hands-off policy on purely union affairs, they know what is going on so they can step in quickly if the union itself doesn’t keep a clean house.

  On one occasion, Metro was deeply concerned with the organization of coinbox operators through a local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Practically all factories in Los Angeles have coin-operated coffee and cigarette machines for the convenience of their workers. Since the president of the IBEW local was an important man in the factories’ labor relations, he would be in a strategic position to force acceptance of his coinbox operators and exclusion of non-members. While LAPD was investigating, IBEW’s international union quietly lifted the charter of the local, and the coinbox scheme collapsed.

  But rarely is the solution that simple. Joe Stephens devoted two years of his life to another investigation which paid off with only a single indictment. And yet the probe gave the taxpayers a two-year respite which saved them from a small but nasty racket.

  The first tip-off came from a woman, one of the thousand independent rubbish collectors in Los Angeles, who operated a little one-truck business in San Fernando Valley. Almost apologetically, she wrote to the City Council that she was being “pushed around” because she wouldn’t buy protection from a collection association, and shouldn’t City Hall know about this?

  Together, Joe Stephens of Metro and Captain Hamilton of Intelligence dug into her complaint. They visited the offices of various rubbish collectors’ associations, checked on a local of the Teamsters Union and talked to the frightened small operators.

  By the simple device of grabbing control of the city dumps, the detectives found, association men were putting the squeeze on the little fellows. If they couldn’t find a place to unload their trash, they were simply out of business.

  From William L. Crowder, an independent, who collected rubbish from 1,250 homes in San Fernando Valley, Stephens got names and places. Crowder had been barred from his customary dump because he wasn’t a union member. He visited the Teamster local involved, paid a $25 fee and then was referred to one of the rubbish associations to “get squared away with them.”

  Here he was told that he would have to pay an initiation fee, which usually ran into hundreds of dollars, and additionally give up half his clients to other members of the association. When he refused, he said, his trucks were blackballed at all the dozen dumps in the city.

  Another little man, Daniel A. Rosati, said he had been subjected to intimidation and sabotage when he tried to resist “organization.” Finally, in return for his personal safety, he said, he was forced to “sell” his $8,000 worth of assets for $1,300. He was ordered to pay a $250 initiation, $500 to the rubbish men’s lobby fund at the state capital, and waive his thriving collection area in favor of a marginal zone. “‘I am at your mercy,’ I told them,” he later related to the police. “‘I concede defeat.’”

  The Stephens-Hamilton combine was particularly concerned because the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had set a deadline to end all rubbish burning in backyard incinerators. The praiseworthy purpose was smog elimination, but the practical result would have been deliverance of the city taxpayers to the “organized” rubbish collectors.

  When the Board of Supervisors persisted in its plan, Mayor Norris Poulson appealed to the public. He charged that not only was there a monopoly in rubbish pickups but also that crimes were being committed to perpetuate that monopoly. When a grand jury investigated, Lieutenant Stephens and Captain Hamilton gave detailed substantiation to the charges.

  Dissatisfied with the pace of the grand jury investigation, Mayor Poulson launched his own probe under a rarely invoked section of the City Charter. Again LAPD came through, producing a taped telephone conversation in which one of the rubbish syndicate leaders had bragged:

  “… We’ll break the Mayor if he gets in our way…. If he tries to legislate us out of business, we’ll put him out of office!”

  After that, the State Legislature had to dispatch its own investigating committee to Los Angeles. The legislators found the situation was exactly as LAPD had pictured it. Of those questioned, the only casualty was a Teamsters’ official later convicted of perjury, and he promptly appealed.

  Offhand, this might not seem productive police work after two years of investigation. But LAPD had fought a delaying action for the backyard incinerators and given its Mayor time to establish a municipal rubbish pickup system.

  THE CAPTAIN

  AT LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, the swarthy man with the expensive luggage shoulders ahead of his fellow passengers who have just arrived from Chicago. He nods brusquely to a waiting character who takes his bags. A man in plainclothes joins them.

  “Eddie Vance?”

  “So?”

  “Police officer.”

  The swarthy airport arrive scowls. But the plainclothesman persists.

  “There’s a plane taking off for Chicago in an hour. Be on it, Eddie.”

  “What for? I’m clean, copper.”

  “That’s not what our files say, Eddie.”

  “Files! Listen, you, I’m a businessman. I got nothing to be afraid of.”

  “You’re a celebrity, Eddie, not a businessman. You got a big name. The kind the newspapers might like to get hold of—in Chicago as well as Los Angeles. Now whadda ya’ say?”

  The swarthy gent winces.

  “Okay, pal. You win.”

  He crosses the waiting room to the ticket counter.

  Ordinarily, hoodlums aren’t thin-skinned, but beginning in the early 1950s, LAPD detected a major shift in nationwide underworld activity. The rackets bosses had decided to go respectable. Some openly, some through stooges, they invested heavily in manufacturing, oil, and a variety of wholesale and retail businesses. Publicity could be ruinous, and Intelligence decided that mere exposure in newspaper headlines might keep the out-of-town racketeers out of town. The policy has succeeded handsomely.

  In the decade before Intelligence was organized, there had been some eight gang bumpoffs, Chicago style, and LAPD feared that organized crime was getting a foothold in Los Angeles.

  In every case, promising suspects were seized, but all had air-tight alibis. Against the underworld clam-ups, detectives were powerless.

  Then, with the organization of the Intelligence Division, LAPD went over to the attack. Instead of the futile, “pinch-‘em-and-sweat-‘em” tactics of the past, its thirty-seven men were charged with collecting every scrap of information about the workings of organized crime. The approach, based on the military G-2 system, meant that investigations would get underway before the violence erupted.

  Offhand, Jim Hamilton, the new commander, was no gangbuster. He came from rural stock. His father had been born on a wagon train fourteen days out of Salt Lake City, and his mother lived all her life in the little San Joaquin Valley town of Lathrop. Jim’s first job was as an accountant in the State Controller’s offi
ce. He transferred to LAPD in the mid-1930’s because policemen got $170 monthly compared to an accountant’s $132.

  But Hamilton had three special qualifications for the job. He kept busy, planning and moving all the time. He knew how to pick men of close-mouthed integrity because in Intelligence the security of the entire operation would rest on each one of his thirty-seven detectives. And he had the vision to see the almost frightening scope of his new assignment and draft the only possible counter-attack:

  “There is a criminal army in the United States, well-organized, disciplined, with its own laws, courts, and executioners. It is nationwide in operation and control. It is a government within a government, levying a sometimes hidden but heavy tax upon all citizens.

  “The carefully selected and trained members of this inner circle operate in the twilight zone of quasi-legality. They plan, direct and reap the profits from crime but seldom perform violent criminal acts themselves.

  “Effective action against the disciplined regulars of organized crime requires specialized methods. As with any subversive element, it can be combatted best by highly trained intelligence agents who operate through information, infiltration, and surveillance.”

  The first thing Intelligence did was to assemble, from dozens of sources, its own Who’s Who of U.S. Crime. Detailed case histories running into thousands spelled out the hoodlums’ backgrounds and connections, their daily associations with other hoods, their hangouts, their businesses, the brand of toothpaste they used. From other LAPD units, from newspapers and from out-of-state law enforcement agencies, each dossier was fleshed out periodically with notations of current activities.