by Jack Webb
Sometimes, and you can’t blame him, a man gets gunshy after an ordeal like that, but not Johnny Powers! A year to the day later, almost to the hour, he was shooting it out again.
For two weeks, a gang of purse snatchers operating from stolen cars had been terrorizing women on the street. One night, they suddenly stepped up the pace of their operations, and in less than two hours seven snatchings were reported. All the police knew was that the gang was using a stolen tan sedan.
Officer Powers was working with the Gangster Squad of the Robbery Division which patrolled beer joints, pool rooms, and other gathering places of punks and petty criminals. His job this night was to hold down the office, but studying the reported movements of the tan sedan, he spotted a pattern and had a hunch. And Johnny always rolled on “these feelings,” as he calls them.
A short time later, he was parked alone near an intersection in southwest Los Angeles. Five minutes later, the tan sedan appeared, then roared off when the driver spotted Johnny’s police car. Johnny called the radio board and set out after it. Unexpectedly, the sedan braked, and four men piled out to blaze away at Johnny. He kept firing back, but by the time radio cars came to his assistance, he had been wounded again. Anyhow, Johnny says, the suspects were taken.
To a good cop like that who has spilled his own blood, a bad one deserves no breaks, and Johnny’s “IA” Division is respected in the roll call room of every police building in Los Angeles.
In LAPD not only the public life but also the private life of a policeman is closely regulated. Instead of enjoying special privileges, as the public often thinks, he signs away his rights as a private citizen when he takes the oath and the badge. But he continues to pay taxes.
He can’t have any bad debts. He can’t get drunk in public view. He can’t break any unwritten laws or the accepted code of morality. On duty, off duty, he always acts in the tight, disciplined manner of LAPD or he hears from IA.
As a minority group who are often subjected to public hostility, the police instinctively try to cover for one another. In the past, this “country club code” quashed many a police scandal before the public heard a whisper of it, but Chief Parker has done his best to stamp this out of LAPD.
Thus, though IA handles almost two complaints daily against Los Angeles officers, Chief Parker insists that the facts and the trial board hearings be open to the public. Sometimes, this proves embarrassing to LAPD, but the Chief and his disciplinary boss, Captain Powers, are agreed on the basic philosophy.
“A good police administrator backs up his men when they are right, although they are accused of wrong,” explains Captain Powers. “But when there’s scandal in the department, he does something about it. And quick. If he does nothing about it, this is what can kick a chief out of office. And quick.”
In a typical year, there will be almost two hundred complaints against policemen of conduct unbecoming an officer and more than one hundred each charging use of excessive force and neglect of duty. Some will be accused of dishonesty, others of violating civil rights, a few of sex offenses. IA doesn’t pull its punches in the follow-up investigations and about one-third will be convicted after hearings.
In its administrative peculiarities, three of the toughest and most critical jobs in LAPD are handled at the level of captain. Intelligence for Jim Hamilton and vice control for Charley Stanley are more than man-sized assignments. But, in many ways, Johnny Powers holds down the hottest desk. A rogue cop, a crook masquerading in the uniform, who knows the inside workings of the department, is an almost frightening figure.
From the beginning, there was something suspicious about the outbreak of burglaries in the West Los Angeles Division. They were scattered over a large area, but they always occurred on the morning watch between two and four a.m. and they were confined to business places which sold gardening equipment, sporting goods, and hardware.
After each outbreak, police stakeouts were posted through the division, and the burglaries immediately stopped. The stakeouts would then be lifted, and there would be fresh complaints from the businessmen. There was, at least, a leak in the department. Reluctantly the divisional commander, a captain, suspected something worse. And, sure enough, shortly afterwards he picked up an anonymous tip that one of the policemen on the morning watch had, suddenly and suspiciously, come into possession of a power lawn mower. But which officer the informant didn’t say.
Four detectives were assigned to the investigation, and then another four. They listed all the men assigned to the division and then slowly eliminated those who lived in apartments, those who didn’t own their own homes, those whose time could be completely accounted for. There was still a sizable number of names, and the touchiest part of the job was ahead.
Somehow, without arousing suspicion or stepping over the tight legal restrictions on illegal search-and-seizure, they had to get into the suspects’ homes. So the plainclothesmen got cover jobs with private firms which gave them entree. After sixty days of undercover sleuthing, they had turned up one power mower—which belonged to a gardener.
And then, when they were pretty well convinced the original tip had been phony, they found a brand-new mower in the Valley home of a policeman. Further, he had once before been the subject of a personnel investigation.
On the pretext that a personnel complaint had been lodged against him, the suspect was brought in for interrogation. During routine preliminary questioning, before the detectives had even gotten around to the lawn mower, he suddenly blurted out that he had stolen property in his possession.
He admitted having stolen the mower himself, and involved fellow policemen. Detectives rounded up fifty other officers for grilling and searched their homes. After checking out every bit of hardware, clothing, and tool supply that seemed suspicious, they narrowed the field down to a handful of men—seven officers who had been on the force anywhere from seven to fifteen years. They were family men and several had excellent records.
What went wrong?
All residents of San Fernando Valley, they had formed a car pool to make the winding trip across the mountains to their division headquarters. Little by little, grousing about a cop’s low pay and the high cost of keeping a home, they formed their scheme.
Somehow, they rationalized that taking only what they really needed wouldn’t quite be stealing. They made their plans two weeks ahead when some of the gang would be on the morning watch. Then two of them jimmied open the skylight of a seed store while two others waited outside with a truck.
The original plan had been to pick up a few lawn mowers, some garden tools, a few sacks of fertilizer. Now, seeing so much unprotected merchandise there for the taking, they piled the truck high with thousands of dollars’ worth of loot.
After that, the stealing came easier. They hit a camera shop, a store specializing in skin diving gear and a hardware store. They even raided a boxcar loaded with furniture which had been left on a siding. From modest larceny, they turned to professional burglary, and several sold off their loot to fatten their bank accounts.
When they were caught, they received a trial before a Police Board of Rights under Section 202 of the city charter. Five of them turned in their badges during the trial, and the other two were dismissed from the department. Subsequently all seven were brought to trial in a public court and convicted of theft.
Six were sentenced to the Los Angeles County Jail camp for a year, and one fought his conviction through an appeal, the decision on which has not yet been handed down.
Of all the disciplinary crises weathered by Chief Parker and Captain Powers, the worst was the “Bloody Christmas” scandal in Central. The heat on LAPD was so intense that the wiseacres were predicting Parker’s imminent step-down to status of deputy chief. But Parker acted so decisively and IA investigated so thoroughly (making a report of 204 single-spaced typewritten pages) that LAPD survived its ordeal by headlines and politics.
Ironically, it all began with Christmas cheer, both in Central where ab
out one hundred policemen were enjoying a party and in a small bar in a rough part of town.
Two policemen, rolling on a “trouble” call to the bar, tried to eject two holiday celebrants. A brawl broke out, and the outnumbered officers were beaten up, one so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
Reserves hustled seven of the merrymakers off to Central, booked them and put them in a waiting room. So far, routine, for Christmas Day.
Then, among the police celebrants, the story spread that the more seriously injured officer was going to lose an eye. Immediately, the enraged policemen began taking turns to work over the seven prisoners. Before they were through, the floor was blood-covered, the walls were spattered red.
At least, that was the story, though precisely what did happen has never been fully established. Parker and LAPD were subjected to attacks which continued for months. Six of the young celebrants were freed by a judge who denounced “lawless law enforcement.” “Police Brutality” became almost a standing headline. The grand jury launched an investigation.
In his biggest departmental shakeup, Parker shifted fifty-four men, including two deputy chiefs, two inspectors and four captains. But he refused to acknowledge the action was disciplinary, and he went on TV to warn that the underworld was taking advantage of the furore to discredit LAPD.
Subsequently the grand jury indicted eight policemen for felonious assault. But Parker was not to be outdone. On the basis of IA’s monumental investigation of some 400 policemen and officers, he suspended thirty-three.
At last, he was able to get across his point to the public, and the agitation subsided. Not only should LAPD discipline LAPD abuses, but the department most certainly would do so.
In truth, Captain Johnny Powers is unexpectedly sympathetic to the officer in trouble. IA runs close herd on him, could even bust him out of the department, but Powers knows many a civilian has been an accessory and should be standing before the same Police Board of Rights.
“Policemen are subject to more temptations than workers in any other type of occupation,” Powers says.
“Bar owners are happy to give an officer a bottle of liquor, hoping that this will sometime influence his official actions. For the same reason, women offer themselves readily at times to a policeman.
“There is always ready money for the policeman who will forget he is a cop. Policemen are put to great stress living on their ‘just-get-by’ salaries.
“They have trying work schedules, bad hours that make it tough on home life. They are subject to a rigid promotional setup which, mathematically, makes it impossible for everybody to advance.
“We’re all human, we policemen. We have the same emotions as other men, the same tensions, the same drives.”
But, to a good cop, these things just can’t matter. Johnny Powers’ voice bristles with pride. “When a man takes the Badge, he must learn to control these things inside him. If he doesn’t want to control them, he won’t stay on this police force.”
THE INSPECTOR
THURSDAY: 11:35 P.M.
Tom Reddin, junior inspector in LAPD’s Detective Bureau, had gone to bed fifteen minutes earlier and was just comfortably drowsing off when the phone rang. From years of training, he was instantly alert and already unbuttoning his pajama top as he scooped up the receiver.
“Inspector!” The voice from Headquarters crackled with unprofessional excitement.
“A bomb was thrown into a cafe near Normandie and 59th Street. We know two people are dead.”
“On my way.”
Like a fireman, Reddin kept his pants hung so that he could slide into them in a couple of minutes. He was still buttoning his shirt as he hurried out the back door to his car. From his home in the Westchester section, he had a long drive through town. He jammed down the gas pedal and the car leaped forward.
Bomb?
A few weeks earlier, shortly before dawn, a cafe in the Wilshire district had been bombed by a crude explosive.
“Maybe some guy we threw out got mad,” the bar owner had told Reddin. “Maybe a nut did it. When you run a bar, you can expect things like this.”
Now this one. Reddin wondered.
11:50 p.m.
When Reddin reached the scene, the little Mecca Bar was still burning. Ambulance sirens whined, and fire apparatus cluttered the neighborhood. Already, dozens of patrol and traffic policemen were blockading off the streets and pushing back the curious. Arson investigators were at work, and divisional detectives had reported on a standby basis.
As the inspector in charge, Reddin first had to get a fast rundown on the tragedy, then tie together the police, fire, and emergency efforts. All kinds of help, almost too much, had rolled on the first flash, “Bomb!” and he had to coordinate the dozens of men into one team.
It was worse than he had feared. Probably half a dozen people had been killed, another dozen or so badly burned. There might be still more bodies in the smoking building. Quickly he gave the orders.
One team of detectives went to the morgue to begin identification of the dead. Other teams were dispatched to the various hospitals for interviews with the injured. More men circulated through the crowds, rounding up witnesses and a few survivors who had not been badly hurt.
Reddin set up his headquarters in the 77th Street Station and began the investigation that was to carry him through forty hours without sleep.
What had happened in the Mecca? From the hysterical, often conflicting stories of survivors and passers-by, he put together the story and made decisions. Outside, forty newsmen and photographers were clamoring for attention. Yes, let the cameramen go to work, Reddin ordered. Tell the reporters I’ll be right with them.
The Mecca Bar was a cosy, neighborhood tavern and the quiet, Thursday night crowd of twenty patrons almost filled it. It wasn’t the kind of place where brawls start, but tonight four strangers were making nuisances of themselves. They were loud and foul-mouthed, and one began pestering a pretty brunette to dance with him. Some of the regular patrons defended her.
A fight started, and the four were thrown out. The Mecca settled back into its Thursday night calm. The jukebox played, and people laughed. “Just happy people, having a good time,” Larry Fenton, the bartender, later told Inspector Reddin.
At 11:30 p.m., Fenton happened to glance toward the doorway. Howard Marriott, who was sitting on a bar stool near the door, saw Fenton’s glance and turned to look over his shoulder.
A man was pouring liquid from a container onto the barroom floor. Marriott thought it must be a gag. Then he smelled gasoline.
A moment later, a shorter, second man suddenly appeared. He seemed to be holding a ball of fire which he hurled into the puddle. The two men fled, and for just a split second nothing happened.
And then holocaust.
When a pool of gasoline is ignited, a small column of flame fans up into a fiery umbrella, which first consumes the fumes lying heavily in the air. Then the fire eats back to the pool itself, de-oxygenating the air and exploding.
“A sudden flash and the cafe turned into a hell on earth,” said Larry Fenton.
They ran.
Clothes and hair aflame, they ran forward through the flames into the street. They ran out the back into an alley. They tried to hide from the blasts of flame in the rooms marked Girls and Boys.
Mrs. Robert Hartner of Gardena happened to be driving past with her husband as the Mecca suddenly vomited flames and screaming, burning human beings. Some were stumbling, others were crawling on their hands and knees.
Mrs. Hartner whipped off her skirt and jacket and tried to help a girl who seemed to be on fire from head to foot.
“She was hysterical and hard to help,” Mrs. Hartner told Inspector Reddin afterwards. “As I pounded out the flames, she kept screaming, ‘I’m burning! I’m burning!’ Then she fainted. And when she came around, she moaned, ‘Why did they do it?’ ‘What about my children?’”
These were the lucky ones.
One patron rema
ined riveted to his bar stool in paralyzing fear, and his charred body, stripped of its clothes, was found by firemen still crouched on the blackened, twisted stool. Another who was trapped in a booth screamed, then collapsed forward on the table as acrid smoke filled his lungs.
In all, six persons never got out.
Thursday: 2:36 a.m.
In three hours and six minutes, Inspector Reddin established that the Mecca outrage must have been a grudge bombing unconnected with any form of racketeering. He held his promised press conference and frankly told the reporters the whole story, asking only that they hold back a few details which might possibly help the perpetrators. The newspapermen agreed.
With his detectives and watch commanders, Reddin plotted the job ahead:
On the assumption that the arsonists were two of the men who had been thrown out of the Mecca, the police were looking for a quartet of drunken, irresponsible characters, possibly drifters. Unless pure chance had directed them to the neighborhood-type bar, maybe at least one of the four lived somewhere nearby on the Southside. Reddin directed that some 1,200 homes and apartment houses in the area be canvassed.
Unless they had drained the gasoline out of a car, they must have purchased it at a gas station. They had needed some kind of a container for it, too, and probably they had thrown it away right afterward. The inspector ordered more than fifty gas stations double-checked and called for a foot-by-foot search of a mile-square area near the Mecca. In all, hundreds of cans of all descriptions were found and discarded by the searchers and another two hundred were brought into the 77th Street headquarters for scientific tests before being discarded. From as far away as San Bernardino, one hundred miles distant, calls later came from persons who thought they had found the container.
Eyewitness leads? No good. An aircraft mechanic reported having fired three shots at the fleeing car. He thought he had hit one of the fugitives, but hospitals and physicians had no records of a gunshot patient. Somebody else thought he had gotten a fast look at the license plate. It didn’t check out with D.M.V.