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

by Robert Graysmith

  “How would you?” he shouted back. “I’m not down in the dumps.”

  The hearing was so brief it set records. Only fifty-five minutes after he pleaded guilty, Fell was on his way to San Quentin with McGrath, Britt, and Maloney. One of the reasons Fell had confessed was to help his “pals.” On board the ferry to Sausalito, passengers flocked to the dining room to peer at him. Fell, ascot around his neck, white teeth wolfish, was getting in one last attack on a juicy steak. Holding a steak knife, he poured ketchup over his steak and fries. “It’s the last good dinner I’ll get for a long while.” He beamed. Next to him, Britt was having a steak, too.

  “Who wants to buy my overcoat?” Fell quipped to the crowd.

  “I wouldn’t take it as a present,” said a voice from the back.

  “Do you feel relieved?” someone asked.

  “I haven’t decided yet. I feel like a dog getting out of water who hasn’t shaken himself yet. Some people might be surprised by my action today, but it wasn’t a sudden decision. I’d been thinking about it all the time. As I’ve said no one knows what is in my mind.”

  “Jerry, I think you’re crazy,” a spectator said.

  “And can you prove you’re not?” said Fell.

  By 7:30 P.M., Fell was at the prison gates to start serving a life sentence as prisoner number 58,769. The former weightlifter towered over Warden James Holohan, whose first words to the new inmate were fierce. “Take that pipe out of your mouth!” he snapped. “You’re just lucky they didn’t string you up down there.”

  Fell stopped laughing as if he had been slapped across the face. Britt and Maloney had never spoken so harshly to him during his long interrogations. His face grew pained. Taking off his snap brim felt hat, Fell held it over his heart and addressed the newspapermen with one foot inside San Quentin and the other on free ground.

  “Fellows,” Fell said, “there’s just one thing I’d like to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I know I’ve caused a lot of grief especially for the relatives of the deceased. I want to thank all of you for your kindness. I’m going in now to do my damnedest to make good,” he said jerking a thumb in the direction of the prison. “You can count on that.” He gave a hearty wave of his hand. “So long, Boys!” he called.

  He considered many of them friends, had even rehearsed his good-bye speech with Maloney, whom he considered the best of them. It was not hard for the reporters to see why Mrs. Rice had fallen for Fell. In his dark outfit, with no shirt or socks, and in yachting shoes he was a very handsome man. He had charmed the reporters, too.

  “Good luck, Jerry,” they cried. His huge hands closed around Maloney and Britt’s hands as he bid them farewell. “Thanks, Jimmy,” said Fell. “Thanks, Tom.” His eyes brimmed over. As the steel gates slammed behind him, the press heard the warden say, “Put some handcuffs on him!” A minute later the big man’s hearty, booming laugh was echoing down the cell block. Fell was his old jocular self (or selves) again.

  “Good-bye, Jerry!” the newsmen called after him as if parting from a loved one. They still stood there as a group taking it all in as night fell.

  FOR months after, the Richmond Oil Company continued to receive letters lauding the excellent work of Jerry von Selz at their Woodside station. The letters, all in different handwriting and signed by different names, bore one thing in common—the postmark of San Quentin Prison. Fell did keep his word. He made good inside as captain of the prison’s tumbling team, champion weight lifter, and prison strong man. But when he took up pole vaulting, guards cast a nervous eye toward the low walls, calculated his superb physical condition, and scrapped the program. Finally, Fell, desperate to fight for his country, attempted to enlist. Army doctors rejected him as a “constitutional psychopathic inferior” but did order him to a minimum security facility at Chino. Fell obtained maps of Mexico, shipped his prized mandolin ahead, and strolled away from the honor institution. He never got to Mexico, but did reach Minnesota where he enlisted with the draft board as Corporal Ralph Jerome “Tiny” Morgan, a physical education instructor. Identified by his prints, he was extradited back to California to serve out his sentence. Fell was never discharged of the murder of Michael Baronovich. That would have been impossible. How could he have killed a man who had never lived? With the help of some makeup, Baronovich was only another of Fell’s multiple identities or, at the very least, a product of his frenzied and imaginative dream mind, the only place he was real.

  “WHY are you so glum, Charlie?” asked La Tulipe. “We put Bette Coffin’s killer in Q yesterday.” Dullea turned in his chair and stared out the grimy window. The trees were still bare. “Slipton Fell either killed for gain or by accident,” he explained. “He was a greedy boy who just wanted to be liked, but hadn’t the stomach for murder. Remember how his killing of Mrs. Rice so unnerved him he couldn’t sleep in her house? No, Fell wasn’t the Gorilla Man.”

  Then who had killed Mrs. Coffin and committed the brutal murders in San Diego, New York, and San Francisco? Was there a connection with the Butcher in Cleveland? The only suspect the Cleveland police ever had “that amounted to a nickel” was a Great Lakes sailor named Harry who once worked in a morgue doing autopsies. That was enough to make LaTulipe wonder all night.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  An absence of a command structure on all levels made high-level command decisions at night and on weekends impossible. Under Quinn the lines of authority throughout the department were unclear.

  —REPORT ON THE SFPD

  THE grand jury investigation into alleged police graft and extortion progressed in secret. Ed Atherton, the DA’s $100,000 privately contracted investigator, liked it that way. Such stealth gave the former G-man, officer in the foreign service, and private investigator the opportunity to apply a little extortion of his own. It helped that he lacked sympathy for the little fellows, the foot soldiers of the system. He considered them sacrificial lambs to find, publicize, prosecute, and annihilate to give the public the impression they made up the entire San Francisco underworld.

  The forty-year-old Atherton had studied law at Georgetown University, entered the consular service during the Great War and served in Italy, Bulgaria, and Jerusalem before joining the DOJ in 1924. While with the FBI, he moved to New York, Boston, Detroit, and finally Los Angles where he helped capture a neo-revolutionary army of Mexican nationals at the border. Over the following two years he headed the FBI office in San Francisco. After he resigned in 1927, he started a private investigating firm in LA with his partner, Joseph Dunn. Atherton’s local snitches included Louis Bucchiers, a bootlegger, extortionist, greengrocer, and night janitor at the Chronicle. Bucchiers pointed him in the direction of a waterfront cop, a balding, former heavyweight boxer, Lieutenant Henry “Dutch” Ludolph of the Harbor Station.

  “I respect you because you have the reputation of being the straightest straight-shooter in town,” Atherton told Ludolph. Atherton didn’t interrogate as much as insinuate himself into the confidences of those he interviewed. He turned one cop against another by convincing him that another cop had already talked. “I have no intention of hurting you in any way or bringing about your prosecution,” he said smoothly. “All I want are the higher-ups. Play ball with us.” Ludolph kicked over his chair and went to see his attorney.

  “He’s trying to get me,” Ludolph told Jake Ehrlich.

  “Who?”

  “That man, Atherton. I tell you, Jake, I never took a nickel of graft in my life. I’m clean as a whistle or I wouldn’t come to you. He wants I should put the finger on everyone; on all the other guys in the business.” A cop in San Francisco was never “on the force,” but always “in the business.”

  “Atherton isn’t willing to settle for a squealing Ludolph,” Ehrlich thought. “He wants a broken, destroyed and thoroughly stigmatized victim.” Ludolph claimed to have amassed his fortune of $50,000 (twenty-three times an average man’s annual income in 1936) by picking winning horses and prizefighters. He could document every wager, but began with h
is bet on Battling Nelson against Joe Gans at two a half to one odds. “I took the Swede for $250 (Ludolph’s present month’s salary). I won. I got a stake. From then on I was just lucky, lucky but careful. I bet on the horses where I can’t lose. I never blew no money on the hotsy-totsies.” Recently, he had won on Hidden Sight in the eighth race at Narragansett, which paid sixteen to one. “Atherton claims I’ve been collecting for me, for the mayor’s last campaign, for the organization; all that kind of crud.”

  On the west side of Nob Hill, Atherton was fine-tuning his seventy-page grand jury report, which mentioned a hundred crooked cops by name and smeared another hundred honest ones. “At gathering general information, near information, rumors, whispered asides and irresponsible scandal,” said Ehrlich, “he was an ace at rounding up documented fact that could be turned into legally admissible evidence. Atherton was an ace with a broad A.”

  Though he calculated vice in the city grossed $1 million a year, the real figure was closer to $4 million. Gambling and prostitution alone accounted for $2.5 million. Atherton listed 135 houses of prostitution. There were actually 580, and 300 of those within arm’s length of the HOJ. The Palm Hotel was “close enough for the girls to read Chief Quinn’s morning mail without binoculars.” Atherton quit just short of any real information but leaked enough to terrify the SFPD brass.

  At the HOJ, Dullea was despondent for the honest men on the force tarred by the same brush. He was sickened by the chief’s repression of any departmental dissent and apparent ignorance of widespread corruption. Much of the criminality could be laid at the chief’s feet because he was responsible for the tone of the department, even if it was one of favoritism and political influence. Dullea was working in his office when Chief Quinn entered. He stood at the window, legs apart, eyes sweeping the skeletal trees of Portsmouth Square. Yellow-eyed brewer’s blackbirds and starlings flitted in the lowering light. Quinn began to speak of his future. It was odd how Quinn, when he revealed his innermost thoughts and dreams, almost always turned his back on the listener.

  “Charlie,” he said, his face briefly lit by his Optima cigar as he drew in smoke, “if all this should go away”—he swept out a beefy arm to encompass the room—“I would like to devote myself to radio work in which, as you know, I have had considerable experience and I modestly must say great success.” Fifteen years earlier commercial radio didn’t exist. Now it reached into almost every home.18 Quinn loved radio and if given a choice would rather have gone into that field than be chief. During the hunt for Frank Egan, he had issued an effective plea over the radio and enlisted the public. As a child, he’d had a crystal set—a long stained board, mounted with a wooden tuning dial and a bit of quartz crystal beneath an inverted see-through glass guard and tuned with a roving “cat’s whisker.” Fifteen years earlier a radio you had to assemble cost $120. Preassembled radios now cost $5. Quinn was proud of his Atwater Kent from Ernest Ingold’s. The powerful one-dial, six-tube receiver in a two-tone brown crystalline case sat in a place of honor in his office. It had knobs for volume and tuning in stations, a lighted dial window, and a separate speaker resembling a circulating fan. Radio, which allowed eighty-five million Americans to escape the harsh realities, now seemed very inviting to the chief. It was now Tuesday, April 28. The events the next evening would be the first tentative cuts of the chisel into the big Irishman’s tombstone, though it was made of very tough granite.

  IN his cell on Alcatraz in the Bay, “Scarface” Al Capone, insane from syphilis, was thinking of grand juries. The quick-tempered mobster thought he had found a legal loophole that would free him. It relied on the use of “a” instead of “the” in a statute covering the manner in which grand juries may be extended. Captain Dullea was thinking of grand juries, too. On Wednesday, April 29, the anniversary of the murders of both Officer John Malcolm and Josie Hughes, Dullea took the elevator to the fifth floor of City Hall and sat down outside its largest, most ornate courtroom. At 8:00 P.M., the county grand jury convened. “The Grand Jury is inquiring into charges of corruption and rumors of graft and vice involving the SFPD,” jury foreman Mott Q. Brunton announced. How deeply the chief was involved Dullea couldn’t prove, but as long as Police Commissioners Theodore Roche, Thomas Shumate, and Frank Foran backed Quinn he was unassailable. The corrupt cops weren’t.

  First to take the stand was Captain Thomas Hoertkorn, commander of Southern Station and the man who had ordered, “Let ’em have it, boys,” during the bloody strikes. “I don’t know what my financial position is,” Hoertkorn told DA Matt Brady, who had grown white-haired and bow-backed during the last year. “Go ahead and subpoena my wife. She knows all about the family finances and is the fiscal agent.” Hoertkorn ran one hand through his brushy hair. “Can I go?” He could.

  The next night, Mrs. Emma Hoertkorn failed to appear at 8:00 P.M. with her bank books and records of any family financial transactions that might impact her husband’s finances. This put the DA in a dilemma. Because no charges had been brought against Captain Hoertkorn, his wife could not be forced to appear. Within the hour, Emma’s physician, Dr. Emil Torre, sent the court a letter. “Mrs. Hoertkorn collapsed the minute she accepted service of the Grand Jury subpoena to appear at City Hall,” he wrote. “She has had a partial breakdown and is on the verge of hysteria. She has been ill for some time [Emma had been injured in an auto accident on Geary Street the year before] and will be in no condition to testify for at least a week.”

  The DA didn’t want to wait a week to get an explanation about the $7,000 her husband had cached in an old bait can for the last fifteen years.

  On May 4, he grilled Sergeant Patrick Shannon. “Do you serve under Captain Fred Lemon?” he asked. Lemon, who had replaced honest Captain Art Layne, was the commander of Central Station. “And is it true that you are responsible only to Captain Lemon?”

  Shannon refused to answer.

  “As a special duty man, did you ever take a gift of money from the keeper of a house of prostitution or a gambling house, or a bootlegger, or any illegal or unlawful enterprise?” Silence for a full minute from Shannon. “Are you prepared to answer?”

  “Wait a second, will you. Hold your horses. I want to protect my rights.”

  “Well, do you refuse to answer on constitutional grounds?”

  “Yes,” said Shannon, “I avail myself of my constitutional rights. My real reason is that I want to get the advice of an attorney.”

  The real reason was that Shannon feared any answer might incriminate him and lead to criminal prosecution. He was already suspended, but if the charges of gambling, making a false report, and giving false testimony were substantiated he faced summary dismissal. The DA had already connected Shannon with the operation of two bookie joints on his beat and a store that was missing jewelry after he investigated a suspicious fire there.

  “Do you realize refusing to answer is an act of contempt?” said the DA.

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  Over the next half hour Shannon refused to answer whether he would answer. And what about the $25,000 Shannon claimed he had won at Tanforan Race Track and hidden in a woodpile? According to him a mystery bangtail picker named “Monk,” a Gorilla Man of another sort, ran up Shannon’s $2 bet to $25,000. After Turf broker “Cabbage Head” Winchell swore he was Monk’s partner, a photo of a well-dressed monkey in glasses reading a racing form appeared in the Chronicle with a cartoon depicting three monkeys wearing police caps captioned, “See no evil,” “Hear no evil,” and “ESPECIALLY speak no evil.”

  Patrolman Joseph Brouders, another tightlipped special-duty man under Captain Lemon, took the stand next. The tough ex-Eagles’ Hall bartender had joined the department the same year as Shannon but never risen higher than beat cop. Brouders refused to answer any questions regarding his bank accounts, property holdings, or conduct as an officer. “Do you refuse to answer on a constitutional ground?”

  “I refuse to answer whether I refuse to answer on that ground.”

>   While an officer is entitled to the exercise of his constitutional rights, he is not entitled to keep his job if he refuses to cooperate. “While a man has a constitutional right not to testify against himself,” Justice Holmes wrote, “he has no constitutional right to be a policeman. The refusal to relate facts concerning performance of one’s duties is ground for immediate suspension or dismissal.”

  Whereas Shannon had been calm, Brouders was edgy. With a cry, he ran from the court with his hat over his face. Ignoring the elevator, he dashed down four flights where three friends waited outside in a running car. As the reporters caught up, Brouders wheeled and reached for his hip pocket holster. “The first bastard that takes a step toward me—!” he said furiously. He backed onto the auto’s running board and was driven away.

  “Ashamed of Something?” the Chronicle captioned pictures of Shannon and Brouders with their hats and fingers over their faces.

  A few days after the grand jury investigation got under way, Officer Jim Coleman, a twenty-nine-year vet under Captain Lemon, retired suddenly and went fishing. Dullea could find no record of Coleman’s retirement. He knew that an officer with such a long service usually received comment in the press or best wishes from his fellow policemen and superiors. “Mrs. Coleman is lacking in the usual degree of knowledge that a wife would have of her husband’s whereabouts,” said the DA.

  Dullea drove to the Coleman’s home. When nobody answered, he peered in. The dog and all the furniture were still there. He went to Fulton Street to question their landlady. She had been sworn to secrecy. “Mrs. Coleman has left town too,” she whispered. “I can only conclude Coleman’s taken a run-out,” Dullea reported to the DA. Now he had to uncover what he could about Coleman’s personal fortune, which was now estimated at $90,000.