by Jack Webb
If in the peculiar nature of your business you wear disguises, take out ladies for pay or offer a retreat where couples can walk around together without any clothes on, your activities are of immediate importance to the Police Commission. Through licensing, the Commission controls any business which possibly poses a public risk, an opportunity to defraud, or an encouragement to unethical business practices. In Los Angeles these are deemed to include the following:
Advertising posting, auctioneering, auto parks, baths, bowling alleys, dancing clubs, escort bureaus, junk collecting, massage parlors, merry-go-rounds, nudist colonies, night clubs, pawn shops, pool rooms, rummage sales, sidewalk hawking, and used-car sales.
And quite a few more. In all, the Commission must police more than 10,000 businesses in fifty-two categories.
From its quarters in the new seven-million-dollar Police Administration Building, the Commission thus directs a sort of super Better Business Bureau. With a staff of seventeen LAPD policemen, the board checks the character and background of every applicant for a police permit, determines whether he has an FBI or other police record, sends out a field investigator to ascertain whether the proposed business would adversely affect the neighborhood.
Once the permit is granted, the Commission investigates any complaints and spot-checks against lax operations. During World War II, constant vigilance was maintained against Hollywood clip joints suspected of feeding knockout drops to servicemen and then robbing them. Though police in the divisional stations help in the field work, the Commission’s own probers make more than 2,000 investigations and almost 10,000 personal calls yearly.
Sometimes the sleuths find that junkyards are acting as receivers of stolen property. They ferret out the clip artists employed to fleece customers in cheap night clubs. Particularly, since Los Angeles lives on wheels, they war against the used-car swindler and the gyp garage which charges $300 for the advertised “$49 motor overhaul.”
On one occasion, a motorist drove into the lot of one of the biggest used-car dealers, a firm with assets of almost two million dollars, with a very simple request. He wanted to trade in his three-year-old Cadillac sedan on a newer Cadillac club coupe. The salesman agreed to accept his old car as a $2,000 down payment against the $3,664 price of the coupe. The customer was told he could make up the $1,664 difference in monthly payments that would run “somewhere between $108 and $110.”
With a big, successful company like that, he saw no harm in signing a blank contract because he was in a hurry to drive off in the new car. Two weeks later, the company told him he would have to pay $630 cash on the deal. When he protested that his old car represented the down payment, the manager told him firmly, “The salesman wrote up the deal erroneously.” He refused to pay, and the company promptly repossessed the car.
The motorist complained to the Police Commission and then, a few days later, in an apparent change of heart, returned to the dealer, agreeing to pay the $630. Two friends waited casually as the motorist signed a new contract promising to pay $230 at once and the rest of the $630 in biweekly $100 payments—all in addition to monthly installment charges of $117 (rather than the $108 to $110 the salesman had cited).
Then the two friends stepped forward, identified themselves as commission investigators and opened a full study into the company’s other sales, trade-ins and contracts. They found eighteen similar cases where the blank-contract racket had been worked. The firm was closed.
When permit applications are questioned or protested, civilian examiners conduct hearings in behalf of the Commission. They receive $25 per them (which means that any day they work they are making two and a half times what a commissioner makes for the whole week). The Commission can approve or reject the examiners’ findings, but even its adverse ruling is not the last word. Appeal can be made to the courts.
In one instance, the hearing examiner had ruled against a young Negro who wanted a junk dealer’s license. The examiner cited his record as both an ex-convict and former dope addict. Since junk dealers ordinarily come into private homes, he added, the youth was obviously a bad risk.
On appeal to the Commission itself, the Negro admitted his record, but he pleaded that during his last jail sentence, and in the four months since, he had been off narcotics. He liked handling junk, he said, and he thought if only he was allowed to go into the business, he could straighten himself out forever.
Almost in tears, his sister, an intelligent girl with a responsible job, backed him up. Until his teens, she said, he had been industrious and considerate, and then there had been a falling out between him and his father. After that, he just drifted for several years between “fixes” and jail. But now she knew his reform was sincere, and she was lending him the money to start the business.
The youth’s probation officer confirmed his story of apparent reform, but naturally, he said, he could not guarantee that he had completely conquered addiction. The decision was up to the Commission. “We try to do what is right and fair for all,” says Commissioner Ferraro, but what is fair in the classic contest between society and the individual?
Finally the Commission decided to take the risk and grant the license. As the youth stood before the board, tears in his eyes, Commissioner McGaughey said slowly:
“We have a duty to the City of Los Angeles. We take our obligation very seriously. If you don’t live up to the spirit of this permit, you’ll be letting a lot of people down. You’ll be letting the City of Los Angeles down.”
“Oh, I won’t sir!” the boy promised. “I won’t!”
And thus far he hasn’t. He’s making it.
In its dedication to the job, the Police Commission reflects a hardened public opinion that the mistakes of the past must not happen again. There were the corruption scandals of 1938 which sent two officials to prison for the almost-fatal bombing of an honest detective. Then in 1947 two women, one The Black Dahlia, were gruesomely murdered and a man disappeared, and the police didn’t seem able to solve any of the three. There was the vice scandal of 1949 when the red-haired madam, Brenda Allen, charged that she had paid in both cash and kisses for protection of her one hundred and fourteen courtesans.
In those dreary days, the honest policeman felt ashamed to come home nights, the taxpayer jeered, “Where’s his next dollar coming from?” and the Commission fought a rearguard action for LAPD. During the ‘47 furore over the murders, the commission supported then-Chief C. B. Horrall against public clamor for his ouster. “People who read mystery books and listen to foolish radio programs expect magic solutions almost at once,” the board observed tartly.
In the Brenda Allen scandal, the commission again supported LAPD because, it said, a few bad cops shouldn’t besmirch a whole department. But this time the board could not save Chief Horrall, and General Worton moved in as interim Chief. From then on, LAPD slowly gained ground and the Commission was no longer fighting the rearguard fight.
Ever since, LAPD and the Commission have been on the offensive, but it is a wary offensive. Historically Los Angeles was a violent, sinful town right back to its birth. There can be no complacency lest the bad old strain assert itself again.
To the visitor, the Barbary Coast still is a tourist stop; a quaint, subdued relic, they think, of the wildest, most sinful days of the old Far West. Actually, at the same time that San Francisco was making a red name for itself, cutthroats from Mexico, thieves from the East were flocking into Los Angeles, too. In fact, the city even got the spillover from San Francisco when the Vigilantes began to ride.
Los Angeles’ Barbary was a sump in the heart of the city, where four hundred gambling joints and all the deadfalls known to sin were crammed into an area of two square miles. The only law in the town was a volunteer force of one hundred men. Despite the constant crackle of gunfire and at least one fatality from violence every day, they made few arrests.
The first show of enforcement was the mass hanging of five assorted horse thieves, cattle rustlers and no-goods following a t
rial by “representative citizens.” Though admirable, the affair was perilously close to mob lynching, and thereafter matters were entrusted to several vigilance groups and the Los Angeles Rangers with which the Mayor and the responsible business-professional element rode.
In 1869, when the population was something under 5,000, a paid police department was organized with six men and a city marshal. As an afterthought, the Police Commission was created the next year, consisting of the City Council Committee on Police and the marshal.
Uniformed according to their individual tastes, the seven-man force was identified only by white ribbon badges which warned, in both English and Spanish, “City Police— authorized by the Council of L.A.” Such malefactors as fell into their hands labored on chain gangs at $2 per day, fifty cents for Indians.
No sooner were the police firmly organized than mob action exploded against the Chinese. For months the community leaders had blamed them for aggravating Los Angeles’ considerable vice problem and then a tong war developed over the theft of a Chinese girl. With the support of citizens, police moved in to break up the dispute.
Officer Jesus Bilderrain was shot in the right shoulder and wrist, and his fifteen-year-old brother caught a pistol ball in the leg. From behind iron shutters, Chinese marksmen cut down several more of the group and then an Oriental brandishing two guns, shot and killed Robert Thompson, an enlisted deputy.
That night a mob of one thousand men, described as “the scum and dregs of the city,” descended on Chinatown with guns, knives, and ropes. Doors, windows, and furnishings were smashed, and nineteen Chinese, many of them innocent, were hanged on an improvised gallows. Though a special grand jury later handed up forty-nine indictments, twenty-five of them for murder, only six of the lynchers were punished with brief jail terms.
In this stormy period, the Police Commission was a docile creature of the Mayor. With more social than police consciousness, the members regulated the saloon trade, periodically scolded Chinatown for its morals, and debated the temptations to youth provided by the curtained alcoves then popular in the city’s public dining rooms. But Los Angeles had entered the Gay Nineties before the Commission acted decisively on a real police matter.
In his annual report to the board for the year 1890, Police Chief J. M. Glass plainly put it up to them that something should be done in a city which boasted:
“Nineteen hotels; 212 lodging houses, of which twenty-seven have a doubtful reputation; seventeen pawnbrokers, four of whom are Chinese; twenty-seven second-hand dealers; 171 saloons; sixty-five poker games, exclusive of those places where an occasional game is allowed; ten houses of prostitution; eighty-nine cribs; 104 prostitutes known to police; twenty-five maquereaux (French pimps better known as ‘Macks’).
“In Chinatown, there are twenty-six fan-tan rooms; nine lottery companies; seventeen Chinese poolrooms and 138 Mongolian prostitutes.”
In addition, there was the continuing problem of the highbinders, criminal gangs associated with the Chinese section, who hired out for assassinations and lesser crimes.
With unaccustomed vigor and some political acumen, the Commission ordered LAPD to launch a campaign against vice—to start with Chinatown. Again the hapless Orientals saw their section dismantled, practically board by board, but this time there were no lynchings. Having forced their incontestably higher moral standard on the heathen, the police and the Commission sort of lost interest in the rest of the vice campaign.
Actually, it was Chief Glass rather than the Commission who did something with LAPD. He established physical standards for recruits, banned smoking, drinking, and pool playing while on duty and prudently ordered that police hats be hard instead of soft. “You will,” he commanded his mustachioed regulars, “keep your coats buttoned, stars pinned over the left breast on the outside of your coats—and hold your clubs firmly.”
By the early 1900’s, with a population of almost 320, 000, Los Angeles had outgrown the approach of the Nineties, gay as that had been. In 1911 the Police Commission was changed so that two independent citizens, appointed by the Mayor with City Council approval, could serve four-year terms without pay. Though the Chief still dictated police policy and operation, subject only to mayoralty veto, there were at least two inside observers who had the taxpayers’ interest at heart.
In the wake of World War I, the Chinatown and Metropolitan Squads had to double their lockup activity, the number of arrests equaled more than one-in-ten of the total population, and in a year the amount of stolen property recovered quintupled. The postwar crime spree was immediately followed by labor violence and public indignation forced the revision in the City Charter which is still followed today: Thereafter, there were to be five men on the Police Commission serving five-year terms on appointment from the Mayor—but they were to name the Police Chief and he was to be responsible to them.
At last, democratic control of the police by the people had been achieved in Los Angeles.
Looking back on the development of LAPD, the police historian would be hard put to single out the one decisive moment where the upturn began. Very probably, it was that day in the late 1940’s when Chief Parker, then a deputy chief, and Captain James E. Hamilton, then the lieutenant who acted as chief investigator for the Commission, decided that bingo would have to go.
Offhand, bingo (bridgo, beano, keno; call it what you will) is an innocuous, sociable game that has charmed even the Russians. At the same time violent anti-Communists were playing it in Los Angeles, Muscovites by the hundreds were piling into No. 3, Kropotkinskaya Naberezhnaya, Moscow, the “American House,” for a turn at the cards and beans.
It was cheap (only ten cents a card), and it didn’t take any brain power. As the pit boss called out the numbers, the players covered the corresponding numbers on their cards with beans, discs, or squares. The first player who covered a full row of numbers, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, yelled, “Bingo!” He was the winner. It seemed such an innocent pleasure that the police were narrow-minded meanies to stop it.
But bingo was a vice. Welfare officials in Los Angeles had long since classified it as such. Four out of five players were women—housewives who should have been home instead of gambling the grocery money, elderly widows frittering away their retirement money—and all chanted the nonsensical refrain of the bingo addict:
“Money, marbles, or chalk! Never mind the prize! How’s the gamble?”
Parker and Hamilton had long since resigned themselves that the policeman cannot save man (or woman) from self-determined folly. But bingo had grown so big and blatant that the underworld had moved into the operation and complaints had multiplied. Entire pension checks were disappearing, rent money was vanishing, and one husband filed a missing persons report, telling his wife had vanished, too. (She later came home in a taxi which the bingo parlors provided for some of their better customers. )
Worst of all, millions of dollars yearly were pouring into the underworld coffers. One police investigator who followed the play for two weeks, noting down everything on graphs and charts, estimated that the games brought in $200 income hourly, and they ran from one o’clock in the afternoon till midnight. The yearly take had to be at least four million dollars and possibly as much as twelve millions.
The poor man’s Monte Carlo of Los Angeles was, appropriately, located on the sea side of the city, in Venice. Here Abbot Kinney, multimillionaire manufacturer of Sweet Caporal cigarettes back around the turn of the century, had transformed one hundred sixty acres of sand and marsh, some twenty-five miles from downtown Los Angeles, into an American city on water. There were homes, hotels, connecting canals, gondolas, and even two dozen Italian boatmen brought over from Venice on the Adriatic.
Kinney had dreamed of a Chautauqua resort by the Pacific, but the dream died with him; and in 1925 Los Angeles annexed the little community. As part of the deal, it was reported, immunity was promised for so-called games of skill along the beach.
The bingo operators had devis
ed a clever stratagem to get around the law and still promote gambling. For a “skill” game which involved tossing a ball at a series of numbered holes, they charged and awarded prizes. At the same time, contestants played bingo; but since this game was free, the operators claimed to be within the law. And, on one occasion, the District Court of Appeals had supported their stand, ruling that there was no evidence of gambling and setting aside a lower court injunction.
At 9:40 o’clock one August night, Lieutenant Hamilton and Policewoman Rita Holmes strolled casually into the Clover Club to see whether they could make a case against “Venice-type” bingo.
As the policewoman played five “skill” games and simultaneously enjoyed five “free” games of bingo, Hamilton watched the players. In one case, he noticed, the balls in the “skill” contest were never in play, and yet the pit boss collected from the player after each game. Obviously he was collecting for bingo.
In the Palace Club, operating along the bingo strip, Policewoman Holmes played five successive games of bingo, four cards per game, which cost her ten cents per card. “In spite of the fact,” her report added, “that I did not throw any balls or participate in any way in the respective games of skill and science.” In other words, bingo was not a free adjunct of the ball-type game. You were being charged for bingo cards.
To nail down his case, Hamilton decided to come back with twenty-two officials, men and women, who would work all eleven clubs in teams of two. For two months, they pounded the bingo beat, surreptitiously jotting down their observations every fifteen or twenty minutes till they had amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence.
“Twice during the game I took one bingo card in excess of the number of blue balls I had paid for,” reported Policewoman Estella R. Wallen. “The first time the attendant said, ‘You owe me another dime.’ I paid. The next time I said, The announcer said that the cards were free so I thought I would just take another one.’ The attendant smiled. ‘But you owe me a dime,’ he said. I paid.”