by Jack Webb
The crusher came when Mayor Fletcher Bowron’s reform administration took over City Hall just before the war. At last, it seemed, graft and incompetence in vice enforcement were gradually being licked—and then came the scandal of Brenda Allen and her 114 pleasure girls.
Red-haired Brenda Allen worked indefatigably to keep her 114 girls regularly employed and her blue-chip clientele happy. She subscribed to a telephone answering service used by physicians and lawyers, occasionally inserted chaste ads in actors’ directories and distributed her phone number to cabbies, bartenders, bellhops.
However, she accepted only the wealthiest applicants, and some officers believe she was the first madam to run a Dun & Bradstreet check on her customers. Similarly, her girls were analyzed as to their more intimate characteristics, all jotted down on a card file. It was always Brenda’s hope to bring about meetings of the wealthiest men and the most versatile girls.
As Brenda posted her sex ledgers, which often showed daily takes of $1,200 on the traditional 50-50 split between madam and girl, vice teams investigated in vain.
Months were wasted in surveillance of Brenda’s home because for the most part her girls kept outside trysts with the men in Hollywood or Beverly Hills. Decoys, undercover men, wiretaps were futile. Almost twenty times, the police bagged her, and every time she was released the next morning.
Finally, they made one arrest stick, and like the woman scorned, Brenda began to talk before the Los Angeles Comity Grand Jury. Among other things, she charged that she had been the mistress of a Los Angeles vice detective. The investigation snowballed, and though nothing much was proved, the vice enforcers of Los Angeles were thoroughly smeared.
By report, one team of Hollywood vice detectives were shaking down prostitutes, dope addicts, and homosexuals, exchanging immunity for payoffs… Other V cops were padding their expense accounts to bet on the horses… Still others were harassing certain bars to soften them up for sale to an outside purchasing syndicate.
In the end, the scandal simmered down to a handful of resignations and dismissals from the department. But to LAPD, the Brenda Allen case is an administrative landmark. Out of it came today’s technique for handling both the oldest profession and the oldest police problem, the Administrative Vice Squad.
Though he suffers unfairly from the sins of the past, the young Ad Vice man is an entirely different kind of officer. Instead of closing his eyes to trouble, he goes out looking for it, and no device is too farfetched for him if it means a conviction.
On one occasion, a ring of prostitutes in Skid Row had Ad Vice completely stymied. They had gone to great pains to memorize the description of every V detective, and there was no way to close in on them.
Then, in somewhat embarrassed fashion, one of the young detectives offered a suggestion to Captain Stanley. “You may think I’ve been going to too many movies, Captain,” he said. “But how about working in a disguise?” Stanley gave the okay.
The detective turned himself over to the makeup men at Republic Studios. After long conferences, the experts decided to transform him into a latter-day Lon Chaney.
Shortly afterwards, a deformed stranger with hunched back and scarred face moved into Skid Row. Slowly he got to know the prosties, their habits and their customers. It was an unpleasant way to live, and the job went on for weeks. But he got the evidence that smashed the ring.
To Ad Vice, the heartbreaking thing is that often months of preparation are washed out not by clever criminals but by their non-cooperative victims. Ashamed to face publicity, they refuse to press the complaints which are necessary to prosecution. In no other form of police activity do the “good” citizens so often protect the underworld.
All night, for weeks, V operatives “lived with” a Hollywood Hills mansion, one-time home of a silent screen star, where they knew a rigged dice game was operating. A raid would result merely in misdemeanor charges for gambling. What they wanted was evidence that the game was crooked. Then they could hit the operators with felony charges of grand theft.
Finally, a wealthy lumberman in town from the Northwest was steered into the game, and in two hours dropped $30,000 to the loaded cubes. He complained loudly to the police, demanding to know why LAPD didn’t protect out-of-towners. There was the implication that maybe the police were letting the game operate for reasons of their own.
This was what Ad Vice had been waiting for, and joyfully they took the lumberman back to the house for a confrontation with the crooks. The dice men professed distress that there had been any “misunderstanding.” To prove their good sportsmanship, they were herewith returning the victim’s 30 Gs, they said, and under Ad Vice’s noses they counted out the long green.
When the victim was returned to Headquarters, he balked at signing a written complaint. “Don’t see any point in making a fuss about this,” he said. “After all, I didn’t lose anything.” But Ad Vice did. The long stakeout had been wasted, and they were back where they had started. All they could make stick were the misdemeanor charges.
From an eighth-floor office at Headquarters, Captain Charles Stanley administers his little Ad Vice Squad and worries. Worries about the long hours his men work and the risks they take. And particularly about the public’s lethargic, tolerant attitude.
“Vice is small most of the time,” he says, “but it could be big. And vice has broken more city administrations than any other single thing. Look at vice enforcement this way. To the degree of vice you have, you have that degree of corruption. This we try to combat.”
Charlie Stanley worries that Ad Vice is undermanned for the job, but he carries on because all his life he has had to fight against the odds. When he was only twelve, his father was killed in an accident, and yet he went on to UCLA. He was a star linesman on the ‘26 team. In LAPD, he rose to probationary sergeant and then a week before his tryout ended he was adjudged “unfit to be a supervisor” and busted in rank along with seven other sergeants and four lieutenants. Eighteen months later, he was No. 1 on the new sergeants’ list.
Small as it is, Ad Vice has purged Los Angeles of its red light houses, and call girls can operate only sporadically by means of elaborate phone setups. An Angeleno has difficulty locating a bookie, and a stranger finds it practically impossible to lay a bet.
“We are an undermanned army,” says Charlie Stanley with a touch of pride in his voice. “But we are a vigorous army. We’re doing what we think helps the community most. We’re cops. Vice in Los Angeles has mostly been driven underground.”
III
It is a crowded, colorless room. A bent, withered man sits with his back to the crowd.
The man faces a California State Senate committee on narcotics, in hearing at Los Angeles. For the record, he is “Mr. X.” But life knows him otherwise; as the father of eight grown children. His story is familiar to the men of Captain William H. Maddens narcotics detail. It has been retold a thousand times.
“I don’t know where it went wrong,” the old man says in a soft, troubled voice. “We have a good family, the rest of them. Seven of the kids are wonderful. All married. All have families and make good livings. They’re all wonderful… except her.”
Even she, his second youngest, had been wonderful till she was sixteen. The family lived in the suburbs then, and one night she wanted to go to a party. He thought she was a little young, but when he visited the house of her girl friend, the latter’s mother reassured him that she would chaperone the affair.
“The next thing I heard of the party was when a deputy sheriff called. Our girl was in custody. It had been a marihuana party. My wife and I tried to explain to her what this meant. That marihuana was the bait, and dope addiction the trap.
“We thought she understood. She seemed so repentant…”
To get her away from the bad crowd, they sent her to school in the East and, when she didn’t like it, to another school away from home.
“Whatever she had, she had it bad … In the new school, she took her first sh
ot of heroin. Just for kicks. She was hooked… My little girl … at sixteen….
“She was never really bad, not ever. But she had this craze. She used to say, ‘Daddy, I’ve gotta have it.’ She meant the heroin. That or alcohol.’ She had to have it; when she didn’t, she drank alcohol like water.”
After that, there had been an interracial marriage, a child, a breakup of the marriage.
“Yet, even now, she is lovable, sweet, sympathetic, kind… one of the kindest people I know. I am her father and I love her.”
Gently one of the Senators asks a question. The old man looks up, then drops his eyes. “Why, I guess, she paid for the stuff by prostitution…
“I love her. You can’t help loving your child, no matter what. But I’d rather see her in her casket than the way she is today … I tell you this—all of it—in the hope that you gentlemen can find some solution to this problem of drugs among our babies…”
Ask any man on the “hop squad”—he’ll tell you. Vicious as Hollywood’s narcotics kick was, it was concentrated in a small, wealthy group. And they were adults. Today, dope is being peddled to the teen-ager who progresses from “goof-balls” to the weedy pseudo-ecstasies of marihuana and finally to “H,” the deadly heroin.
The lingering public apathy to the narcotics problem bothers men like Bill Madden of LAPD. But they keep at it in the daily grind—and sometimes in a rather spectacular manner.
With the cooperation of Los Angeles Police Academy officials, an entire class of twenty-five cadets was placed under secret around-the-clock surveillance. In class, on the training field, at meals, in the locker rooms and even off-duty, they were “staked out” just as though they were criminals. Each man’s appearance, behavior, class work and characteristics were noted and compared. Finally, the twenty-five were winnowed down to nine prospects, and they were called in for briefing.
A multi-million-dollar dope ring was operating throughout the city. Because they were known to the higher-ups, the regular “narco” men could not get close to them. New and unfamiliar faces were needed.
“This is strictly volunteer,” the nine were assured. “Your standing in the Academy will not be influenced by your decision.
“Your life will be in constant danger. During the operation you will forget about your normal associations at home and elsewhere. You will be living somebody else’s life. This is top secret.
“You will not receive extra pay for this. You will not have fixed hours. You will probably not like what has to be done.”
The nine listened with painfully fixed wooden expressions. Maybe they were only cadets, but they were going to accept this like pros.
And then came the clincher:
“Above all, you must make the decisions and suffer the consequences, whatever they may be. You cannot rely on LAPD protection.
“We will offer you the best training known for the job to be done. After that, you are on your own.”
There were three more words, and they came like pistol shots. “That’s it, gentlemen.”
Not one of the cadets backed out.
In the next few weeks, the nine moved into the dirty gray world of the pusher and addict. They learned a new language, the lingo of the dope trade, and the kind of “stuff” that was being pushed. Not only “grass” and “H” but also the whole modern family of barbiturates known as “yellow jackets,” “green dragons” and “red devils.” They were taught how to distinguish the “drugstore stuff” from the milk or sugar.
There is a proper way to approach a pusher and make contact for the buy. They were shown how to accomplish it without arousing suspicion. They learned how to “split” from a “buy” and how to stash their evidence. And, all through, they were warned to follow the cardinal rule of undercover work: Never become part of the crime itself.
Now they were almost ready. As the last touch, they grew goatees and sideburns and practiced the insolent walk and talk of the sidewalk punk. They swapped their trim Academy khaki for loud sports shirts, striped trousers and gone jackets and disappeared into the dark corners of Los Angeles. They were on their own, and if they got into trouble, LAPD couldn’t help them.
Cadet Leighton L. Sleigh was twenty-three, and he had a pretty young wife whom he hadn’t seen in weeks. Instead, he was play-acting a “hype” to gain a pusher’s confidence. One misstep and he might never see her again.
He won over the pusher, bought his “fix”—and now trouble. The pusher wanted to share it with him, and as they rode around aimlessly in Sleigh’s car, he kept remembering the warning. Never become part of the crime itself.
He stalled, complaining about the price of the “fix,” and the pusher was becoming suspicious. Sleigh had an inspiration.
“I’ll give you nothing!” he shouted in simulated rage. “How do I know who you really are? You might be working with the cops!”
He pulled over to the curb. “Get out!” he yelled at the protesting pusher. He shoved him into the street and drove off—with his evidence.
Cadet Bill Anderson, thirty and single, had seen Intelligence duty with the Air Force in World War II and in Korea. But with all his undercover know-how and specialized Academy training, two weeks passed before he made a contact.
Now he was standing near his car with a pusher when a radio unit drove up. The policemen didn’t like the looks of the two characters and started questioning them. Anderson was sweating. A pickup on suspicion would kill the contact he had been working on so long.
“You guys are a drag,” he growled at the officers.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve gone this route before.” He glanced wearily at his narcotics friend. “Next thing they’ll want to do is shake my car.”
“That’s what we want to do,” one of the officers snapped. And that was just what Bill Anderson had hoped for.
As one of the officers searched the car, he pulled up the floor mat and in the beam of his flashlight spotted Bill’s identification card. Quickly he slapped the mat back into place, and glanced covertly at Bill.
“It’s clean,” the officer said to his partner. They warned Bill and his friend to move along, and then drove off. “Lousy cops,” the pusher said sympathetically to Bill.
At last the nine cadets had the evidence, and on a full-moon night in spring more than one hundred LAPD officers launched the biggest mass crackdown on dope peddlers in the department’s history. Working round the clock for two days, they seized 160 pushers and broke the back of the huge ring.
So many other narcotics characters fled town that adjacent cities sent urgent requests for LAPD files and photos on known peddlers. In their stampede out of Los Angeles, they had invaded the surrounding areas by the dozens.
LAPD’s first wholesale narcotics raid was followed by sharp plunges in crime indices, with burglaries and other types of theft leading. A slump in the crime rate, while pleasing, is hard to explain by police. But it is their accolade at the end of a long stretch of planning and labor.
Still the work load runs on, increasing by the hour. “Since World War II the narcotics problem has grown steadily, without letup,” says Bill Madden. To meet the tide, LAPD puts fifty-four men and a woman in the field around the clock. They range through the city in the battle that never ends.
And the forty-two-year-old commander of LAPD’s Narcotics Division expects no truce. “They keep growing in numbers,” Madden says of the narcotics crowd. “The youngsters just get older, and the older ones never quit.”
IV
… Men with honor and brains and guts…. You tore down every best part of ‘em. The people who read it in the papers, they’re gonna overlook the fact that we got you… that we washed our own laundry and we cleared this thing up. They’re gonna overlook all the good… they’ll overlook every last good cop in the country. But they’ll remember you. Because you’re a bad cop. You’re a bad cop.”
The hurt and indignation a good cop feels about a bad cop were expressed by Sergeant Joe Friday i
n a DRAGNET program. It was based on the true story of an officer who had gone sour in Los Angeles. But they might just as easily be the words of Captain John W. Powers, Internal Affairs Division.
Johnny Powers weighs 185 pounds and stands six foot two, and all cop. Before him, his father was a policeman in Poughkeepsie, New York, for thirty-six years and one of the ace fingerprint men in the East. Before that, his grandfather was a policeman in Newburgh, also in New York state.
To Johnny, there just couldn’t be any life but a policeman’s life, and he worked and waited six years to make LAPD. For four years, he was on the private police force at Warner Brothers Studio while he hoped for an opening. Just about the time it was due, a police scandal froze the lists, and he waited another two years. In 1940, when he finally entered the Police Academy, he was twenty-seven years old.
Immediately he began making up for the lost time. When he was graduated from the Academy in mid-December, he was sent to Parking and Intersection Control to help with the Christmas shopping rush, but within three weeks he moved on to the Metropolitan Squad, LAPD’s commandos. And three weeks later he was almost killed in a close-range gunfight.
With his partner, Charlie Hart, Policeman Powers ran into two young hoodlums from the East who had just pulled a $25 cigar-store stickup in downtown Los Angeles. They were trigger-happy, and as the officers approached, they began blazing away. Powers and Hart fired back.
In ten seconds, twenty-eight shots were fired, one hood was fatally wounded, and his companion was lying jack-knifed against a building, both lungs punctured.
The officers had got it, too. Charlie Hart was sprawled in the gutter with slugs in the thigh and jaw. Johnny Powers, stretched out on the sidewalk, was bleeding profusely from the right hip.