The Laughing Gorilla: A True Story of Police Corruption and Murder

by Robert Graysmith

  Princess’s lawyer, Jake Ehrlich, the legal representative for the police department, didn’t question that graft on a large and grand, well-organized scale existed, flourished, and excluded all competition but advised her against paying off. Next he filed a $20,000 slander suit against Lemon based on Lemon’s known salary, which represented only a tiny fraction of his true income.

  When Princess could hold out against Lemon’s Central Station extortionists no longer, she paid them, then dialed the SFPD and asked for Chief Quinn personally. “I want to check on the bribe I just paid to your men,” she said. “I want to be certain I haven’t been overcharged.” Princess was a careful woman.

  “Overcharged?” asked Quinn.

  “Well, you tell me. Is $150 the right amount to pay six policemen for protection? Should I have demanded a receipt?”

  Quinn dropped the receiver back on its hook, legally obligated to call Mayor Rossi and DA Brady. Instead, he called Captain Lemon, who was “a very great and good friend” of Tom and Pete McDonough. The two brothers (and their nephew, Harry Rice) ran the underworld’s post office where they extorted, refused, threatened, and obliterated anyone who impeded their brutal management of the city’s gambling, dope, graft, and organized vice rings. They protected pimps, bankrolled madams, and kept an eye on the nightly take of every hustling girl on Eddy Street. “They knew to the dollar how much gambler Bones Remmer or Eddie Shahati took in a night play,” said Ehrlich, “and had the drawings on any burglary, con-game or safe blowing that happened before it happened—or it didn’t happen. Tammany never ran New York City as completely as the McDonoughs ran the right to break the law in San Francisco.”

  Having learned their trade during the corrupt Abe Ruef administration, they suborned witnesses, tampered with judges, paid off police, and bribed officials to pass or amend city ordinances beneficial to their enterprise. As the not-so-secret overlords of the underworld (“the Fountain Head of Corruption” according to the Examiner), they commanded an army of crooked cops, daylight stickup artists, pickpockets, fast-money specialists, burlesque queens, grifters, lamsters, and shoulder strikers.

  That Captain Lemon was a good friend to the McDonoughs was not remarkable. Numerous police officials, judges, and even the DA were their friends, too, and beholding politically. Big-bellied, cigar-smoking Tom McDonough even possessed a $2,500 IOU bearing DA Brady’s name. The two Irish-Catholic brothers had founded the nation’s first modern bail bonds business. The cops, underpaid at $200 per month, commonly got kickbacks for recommending arrestees use the McDonoughs for bail. They provided it from their one-story bail bond brokerage at Clay and Kearney streets—so near the HOJ that Chief Quinn winced every time Pete raised his voice in anger.

  Princess’s next call was to Ehrlich to make doubly sure she hadn’t been overcharged. He was furious that she had paid. “And you could have demanded a money back guarantee too,” he said. “Where did you get the idea?”

  “Well, Jake, there was this used car salesman who knew someone in the mayor’s office who said it was better if I paid.”

  “When you start playing ball with the right people, Princess, you can turn in your grass skirt and head for the showers as far as I’m concerned.” He believed that the reasons grafters flourished so long and so openly were peculiarly San Franciscan. “Always a robust-minded town, San Francisco had convinced itself that vice was a necessary evil.” The cops had convinced themselves that they were expected to pick up extra dough by the most expedient means possible and above all please their captain.

  That evening Ehrlich drove to the HOJ to speak on Princess’s behalf. “All other San Francisco nightclubs have dancing and we are going to have dancing too . . . beginning tonight. The police have made a circus of Princess Kamokila’s attempt to start an honest business in San Francisco and it’s going to have to stop. This is to advise you that the police are going to have to break down the doors of the club if they want to get in from now on.”

  Both Central Station and the HOJ began to pressure Princess to stop her calls to the press. She was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury the same day action was tabled on her club’s dance permit and a telephoned threat was made against the life of her little daughter, Pineapples McFarlane. Princess locked her inside her Fairmont Hotel penthouse, hired a bodyguard, and got a gun permit. Somehow the cops got to her anyway. By the time she testified she no longer recalled what the shakedown officers had looked like.

  But Chief Quinn knew the Central Station bucket men who most logically would have accepted the payoff. When they refused to testify under oath, he fired them. An investigation was promised, but Princess had a better idea. “San Francisco is on trial,” she told reporters as she left the grand jury chambers, “and reeks of bought illegalities, official venality and under-the-table deals. . . . When the community is not courageous it must expose vice and crime. The city should hire an investigator and pay him $100,000 to clean up this Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  It is surprising that the economically strapped city did just that.

  DA Brady, without notifying Quinn or the Police Commission, enlisted a commercial policeman to conduct a secret graft inquiry of the SFPD. His special investigator, Edwin Newton Atherton, was a handsome former G-man with the “open smile of a casket salesman.” He was also a man in need of dollars. Before Rossi and Brady knew it, Atherton would have $100,000 of theirs. In rapid succession, Atherton set up a posh headquarters in the Keystone Apartments on Nob Hill’s west side, organized three boxes of files in two cabinets, and began spending the city’s money as fast as he could. He even bugged Ehrlich’s office. Atherton’s style was to get as close to his quarry as he could, “wheedling, flattering, threatening and promising,” and then snap the trap. Stealthily, Atherton set to work like a mouse gnawing a live electrical cord.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The E. Howard Clock Co. of Boston had designed the four clock faces (each looking to one of the compass points) of the Ferry Clock Tower as the world’s biggest—11-foot-long minute hands, 7-foot-long hour hands on an outer dial 22-feet in diameter with 3-foot-high numerals.

  —INFORMATION GUIDES FOR SAN FRANCISCO’S FERRY BUILDING

  DULLEA had been at the Ferry Building since early morning working the multiple murders of sailors. It was evening now, and a tired army of blue-collar workers was trudging homeward across the wide cast-iron bridge. He watched them rising up and over the inclined span as they passed the Bay Hotel. This crime had touched Dullea and his men, even reduced the seasoned deputy coroner, Mike Brown, to tears. In his fury, the Gorilla Man had made a tactical error. The frenzy of his autopsy, one of the most horrific crime scenes the SFPD had ever encountered, had filled the detectives with a sense of vengeance.

  Dullea had a solitary dinner, then finished briefing his men. Before he knew it, it was 11:00 P.M. Sore from his workout that morning as a member of the South End Rowing Club, Dullea paused midpoint on the bridge and scanned the Loop below. He was expecting an informant who claimed to know who had murdered the sailors. The eerie light of the immense bridge construction in the Bay cast a glow over the docks. The terminal’s electrical system (which powered all the waterfront’s foghorns, chimes, and whistles) kept the pier lights on all night long, because stevedores loaded ships all night. The footbridge lights would be extinguished in an hour. The ground floor of the Ferry Building was already dark (though the second floor was still ablaze). Like pretty much every great building in San Francisco, it was a copy of some great building somewhere else, in this case Charles Atwood’s railroad station at the Chicago World’s Fair.

  While the power to operate the Embarcadero’s lights surges from the Ferry Building, the force powering its Big Clock comes from a suspended nine-hundred-pound weight. Its intricate springs, valves, and wheels are wound weekly by a crank fitted to an axle. Dullea glanced at his watch. As usual, the Big Clock was running two minutes fast, had been since 1906. That made little difference since most watches were set by it. Unl
ike the Big Clock, Dullea couldn’t gain a minute, and he was counting on every one.

  If the night clerk Smeins could be believed, their quarry did resemble a gorilla. Crouching, a gorilla is tall as a man though he weighs three times as much, almost all muscle, and has bones correspondingly thick to support his upper body’s tremendous weight. Dullea theorized his quarry was not civilized and really might be a Gorilla Man, at least on a psychological level. Something compelled him to act as he did, some broken mainspring, like the clock’s, which made him run fast. Dullea believed that Gorilla Men (as their name implied) were some sort of throwbacks. In the years after World War I, these creatures had been thankfully rare, but in the last decade, the nation had been infested with them. The Gorilla Man, a victim of an irresistible impulse to perform his irrational acts, had no choice. He had to commit another autopsy murder. Dullea was driven too. Though he would never stop protecting defenseless women like Bette Coffin, Jessie Hughes, and Mrs. Johnston, he sometimes felt as powerless as they. Was he incapable of ever providing such women justice?

  Wind cut spray into Dullea’s face. He buttoned down his double-breasted suit and cinched his raincoat. The wind could never dislodge his new hat with its latex sweatband that adjusted itself to all the irregularities of the human head. Below, the massive black trains of the Belt Line made their last cargo runs. The fire marshal drove by, lights flashing, checking for hazardous cargo, then U-turned toward his office on China Alley at the south end annex. Most of the piers were shuttered now, their massive facades closed until morning, when the Anna Lemons of the world put in another exhausting twelve-hour shift. The final Belt Train chugged past, pushing a line of SP boxcars. Dullea waited.

  Freighters and rusty tramps rose and fell all about him. When the moon reaches its highest point above the Bay, the stream runs high, courses over the slick rocks of the strait, and lifts vessels along the waterfront about nine inches. Six hours later, when the moon dips behind the Farallone Islands, the ships sink lower. Actually, the entire region from Montgomery Street northeast to the Bay was floating on water, shifting sand, jettisoned cargo, and abandoned Gold Rush vessels. But no building on the waterfront is as sturdy as the Ferry Building, which sits on a foundation of thousands of creosoted Oregon pines sunk eighty feet into bedrock. In 1850, during the Gold Rush, South Seas ships had brought the ships’ worms whose descendants were still nibbling on those pilings.

  Dullea heard the whine of winches, and from a dense shelf of fog discordant jangling bells, bleats, and whistles. The Ferry Building’s deep foghorn out-shouted them all. Out to sea, a deep, drawn-out bass sound repeated. He heard waves faintly slapping the hull of one of the 170 ferries bound daily for San Francisco from Marin and Oakland. Somewhere in the tulle mist a lost ferry was looking for San Francisco, which in itself is only a point of fog.

  When the final streetcar departed, swinging around the Loop on the spur track, so did Dullea. He descended the slick steps to the foot of Sacramento Street. Several doors down, the Bay Hotel sign shimmered. The lights of the Harbor Emergency Hospital behind the Bay Hotel illuminated sailors out drinking and young women plying their trade. Farther down, the street was hushed. At the alley formed by two multistoried buildings, did something exit a window, hold briefly with one hand from the fire escape, and drop silently to the road? Was that a silhouette with long arms against the brick wall where the alley made a sharp turn? Was that a vague figure melting away? Dullea walked to his car. That the SFPD would lock horns with the Laughing Gorilla again was the only thing he could count on in the treacherous mist, on the shifting ground in that point of fog.

  ON a quiet street, the Gorilla Man laughed to himself—as if he could ever stop laughing. Traveling here and there, back and forth, he sailed and drank, and lost himself in blue-tinted rages and tried to forget. There was a rhythm and a flow to his outbursts, a compulsive timetable that he least of all understood, but reminded him most of the tides he sailed. Whenever he had been drinking, a curtain of blue lowered and made him do things. Sometimes the curtain was red, but whatever color it always took away his reason. When that curtain parted, he was able to blot out most of what he had done, but not completely. Faint memories remained, like footprints on the shore. Sometimes it all seemed like a dream. He shuddered. They couldn’t hang a man for a dream, could they? That the local press had forgotten him didn’t mean the Gorilla Man didn’t exist. He still moved in his odd, flat-footed shamble, hands buried to hide their size.

  He had been among Dullea and his men before, close but unseen except as a fleeting shadow. He intended stalking the Embarcadero tonight, trolling for unsuspecting women at seedy waterfront hotels. He felt off-kilter. The Ferry Building is not square with Market Street but at a slight angle aligned with the arcade anchored to the seawall. It lies directly on the axis with Market and Commercial streets, but parallel with the Embarcadero. He paused at a tavern door south of Market. Drinking scared him because it was then he lost control—as if he could ever give up drinking! He went into the tavern. Tony Sudari was behind the bar cleaning a glass with his apron.

  ON Monday, August 12, 1935, the two dozen men assigned to hunt the Gorilla Man were detailed to other cases. Yet the hairs on the back of Dullea’s neck still tingled when he passed the Bay Hotel. Though a dozen other serious cases needed his attention—George Gordon, slain in a Utah Street factory, and Paul Hanson, killed at Lake Merced when he defended his date from a gang rape—he still studied every open doorway and followed long-armed strangers along the piers. Somewhere a laughing gorilla would continue his murderous ways in whatever port he landed. All sea routes eventually led back to the Embarcadero and all roads led to the Ferry Building, the second busiest terminus in the world. He would be back.

  Inspectors LaTulipe and McMahon were camped in Dullea’s office. The rush of passing traffic came in through the open window as fog tumbled past in the typically frigid summer air. The Bay is an estuary filled with tidal marshes where fresh and salt waters combine. Moisture and prevailing northwesterly winds at least had the square in bloom. Dullea pawed through some circulars, then sat back wearily. McMahon wasn’t tired. After all, he was still looking for the beautiful unknown woman who’d accompanied the Whispering Gunman five years ago. “You’re smitten with her,” Dullea kidded him, pointing out that he kept her sketch, yellowed now, thumb-tacked over his desk.

  The sun was just going down. Everyone in Dullea’s office was drinking, mostly Scotch. LaTulipe opened a binder and laid out photos of Mrs. Johnston, Mrs. Coffin, and a woman strangled in Golden Gate Park. “No, no, put them away,” snapped Dullea. “I don’t have the stomach for them.”

  The criminologist put them away and took out a card marked “Bay Hotel.” Two types of hairs—coarse guard hairs and soft, thin down hairs were taped to the card. “The coarse hairs are animal,” he thought. “Or they might be from a chair since animal hairs are used as fibers to manufacture upholstery. If ‘Mr. Meyers’ is really a sailor perhaps he picked them up on a freighter transporting wild animals. What if they were an ape’s? Wouldn’t that be something?”

  They left the HOJ to grab a bite at Il Trovatore Cafe. Busboys Vic Gotti and his brother Roland enthusiastically greeted them and brought menus. Dullea opened the tall menu. On weekdays, a complete dinner (hors d’oeuvres, soup, salad, spaghetti or ravioli, choice of entrees from the menu including filet mignon, vegetables, potatoes, dessert, coffee, and a small bottle of red house wine) cost 50¢. Because it was a Saturday, each would have to cough up an extra ten pennies.

  Over ravioli, LaTulipe ventured that the Gorilla Man was mentally subnormal and morally depraved. “His subnormality removes the inhibitions that hold his sex urge in check,” he said. “He may not be more lustful than the average man, but an example of what happens when a man with a powerful libido feels he has nothing to lose. Remember Earle Nelson, the first Gorilla Man?” Dullea turned away as he felt the past drop over him like a shadow. He could still hear the killer’s laugh on the
shadowed landing. “He was a strangler too with huge hands,” said Dullea.

  “He’s not our ‘Mr. Meyers,’ if that’s what you’re thinking,” said LaTulipe. “The original Gorilla Man was a sex killer and religious fanatic. He had a motive. Besides, he’s dead, executed in Canada. I checked.”

  But the Gorilla Man was alive, if only in Dullea’s tortured dreams. “The greatest reign of terror ever inflicted on the nation’s women began in San Francisco,” said Dullea. Those had been bleak and terrible times—his first big case and his worst—until now.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation, throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead.

  —E. A. POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

  ON the outskirts of San Francisco, a healthy grassland was flourishing. In Woodside Glens, the neighbors had observed an unusual thing about Slipton Fell. After he moved into Ada Rice’s bungalow, he would sit shirtless on the grass playing soulful tunes on his mandolin but seemed afraid to enter the house. As evening fell, he would cast long, fearful looks at it, then around five o’clock, as the bungalow cast its shadow over him, he would start as if he had sighted a moving figure in the skylight. As the sun sank that optical effect was heightened. Then Fell’s eyes would widen, his face maple, and a light sheen overlay his brow. As fog overflowed Skyline Boulevard and rode down into the basin on the wind’s back, he would rouse himself with effort and, shivering, trudge inside.