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

by Robert Graysmith

  An attendant at the Soho refinery pump house saw an expensive black Lincoln pull onto the Jefferson Street Bridge. A short, heavyset man got out and heaved a heavy bundle into the river, where it was immediately swept away. Three weeks later, Joe Perry, a pump-house worker, observed the black Lincoln creep onto the bridge again. A month later, John Mokris and Frank Skrovan were crossing the High Level Bridge when a stranger appeared in the riverbed below. Carrying a weighty duffel bag, he crossed the slick rocks and disappeared into a brick storm drain. Over the gurgling water, they heard his steps echoing along the outflow pipes of the tunnel. They left an hour later, unfamiliar with Matowitz’s theory of a secret murder lab below ground. Merylo and Zalewski were on the bridge that night, too, but after so much unrelenting work came to blows. Zalewski left the investigation and Merylo retired to work the case privately. More human flotsam, the left foot, thighs, and headless torso of a tenth victim, appeared in the Cuyahoga River and washed ashore near Superior Avenue. Again, hesitation marks suggested the Butcher was breaking in an apprentice. The bodies became just another example of unidentified disjecta membra discovered in Cleveland’s sluggish rivers and icy lagoons and on the slopes of lonely Jackass Hill.

  FORTY-TWO

  Rules and Procedures gave the district captains the responsibility to report the status of their personnel and equipment. They were doing this, but in a perfunctory manner and without fear of consequences.

  —RULES AND PROCEDURES, SFPD

  IN San Francisco Patrolman E. J. Christal, another special-duty man from Central Station, refused to talk to the grand jury, which held him in contempt and suspended him immediately. The next witness, Lieutenant Mark Higgins, had barely opened his mouth when a bailiff whispered something to Judge Robinson. The judge cleared the courtroom. A janitor, under orders for a week to keep a lookout, had stumbled across batteries and paraphernalia strung in the attic directly above the jury quarters. Dullea got a chair, climbed up and unscrewed the plate. Resting just inside a wire mesh opening he saw an amplifier. He tracked a thin, copper wire for six hundred feet along two sides of the City Hall attic to the Polk and Grove side and dropped down into a little room with a broken lock. An empty chair had been drawn up to a cardboard box with a Dictaphone inside. It was placed there after Friday because before then the room’s lock hadn’t been broken.

  On June 3, 1936, Sheriff Murphy took Lemon and Hoertkorn into custody. Their bail was fixed at $250 each, which both men immediately paid, and then departed. “The attitude of this commission,” Roche said the next day, “is clearly and unequivocally established by their action last night in overruling Captain Lemon’s objections to the proceedings and denying his motion to dismiss. Because of the lateness of the hour it would have been impossible to have completed the trial of Captain Lemon upon the charges preferred against him.”

  Gillen, who was “being swamped with various angles of the case,” wanted to name a temporary assistant DA to act as a special prosecutor. “While a Grand Juror may not divulge what has taken place in the Grand Jury Room,” he said, “there is no law that muzzles a DA who shall keep the public fully informed through the press as to what is taking place in this important investigation into a very important situation.”

  On June 6, 1936, Atherton asked for another $50,000. The DA told him that $25,000 might be sufficient.

  Chief Quinn, seeing the way things were going, publicly abolished the special-duty men as a major police evil and returned all bucket men to uniform. On June 10 at 8:00 A.M., he organized a permanent vice squad from eight trusted special-duty men attached to his own office. “Hereafter,” he said, “if an occasion arises when it is necessary to take men out of uniform for one reason or another, the captain may do so, but under a time limit of 24 hours. The same men shall not serve consecutively on this work on an immediate subsequent occasion, but others must be used. In the event this arrangement is not sufficient for investigative purposes, the new vice squad will take on the work.”

  The new unit, headed by Patrolman Jim McCarthy, would handle all cases affecting public morals and also function as a narcotics unit during the planned dope cleanup campaign. The chief then shook up the districts most affected by the probe.

  For several months before, Captain Art Layne had been working in the personnel department at the HOJ. Abruptly and to his great joy, he was transferred to the Crime Prevention Detail. Behind the scenes, Dullea had been working hard to return this honest cop to his former position at Central Station. In response the chief sent Layne on a long vacation and named Lieutenant Ed Copeland acting captain at Central Station during Lemon’s suspension. He transferred Captain Michael Riordan from Mission Station to Central to replace Copeland. Captain Bernard McDonald was transferred to Southern District, replacing Captain Hoertkorn, and Captain Peter McGee was transferred from Ingleside Station to Mission to fill Riordan’s vacancy. Lieutenant Jack Sullivan of Mission Station was transferred to Ingleside. The chief elevated two lieutenants to acting captains to fill in any remaining holes. Dullea decided not to appoint anyone to replace Lieutenant Mitchell as head of the Auto Detail until he saw how all the changes worked out and just how honest these men would prove to be.

  The following day, June 12, Patrolman James Miles of Harbor Station, another special-duty man, refused to answer the Grand Jury. “Your questions are an invasion of my private affairs,” he said. “I believe I might be incriminated or subject to ridicule.”

  Judge I. M. Golden assailed all the nontalking officers. “They are legally and morally to respond to questions affecting the welfare and security of the citizens employing them and touching upon their own integrity as law enforcement agents.”

  The cops had waged a long court fight to evade trial, but the tide was turning. Lieutenant Joe Mignola and Sergeant Peter McIntyre put in for retirement. “In cases where the stories of wealth do not agree with information at our disposal,” Atherton expressed doubts about the testimony of Lieutenant Frank McConnell (the outstanding bunko detective in the nation), Sergeant Dan O’Neill, and Sergeant John Stelzner. “We have discovered definite discrepancies between the statements they made concerning their wealth and its sources and information in our possession. There is a misconception abroad that because an officer has testified and returns to his duties, his activities are no longer the concern of this investigation. Such belief is not well-founded.”

  Mayor Rossi studied Atherton’s request for $50,000 more. The expenses so far were as follows: $25,000 for the primary investigation; $2,000 for the transcript; $3,500 for the Grand Jury itself; $1,000 on October 16, 1935; $2,000 on December 6; $2,000 on January 7; $2,000 on February 7; $2,000 on February 18; $2,000 on March 12; $2,000 on April 6; $2,000 on May 28; $2,000 for warrants; and $6,000 for other items.

  During the graft investigations of the 1920s Roche had said, “I am going to clean up this department for the benefit of the good officers and honest men in it. The police officer’s position is a hazardous one, but he is well paid for it. It has its rewards, but under no circumstances will we tolerate graft from the lowest or the highest officer.”

  Now he was digging deeper. “When an officer reaches the crossroads in his career,” he said, “when a turn to the right means the performance of his duty as an officer, and a turn to the left means a turning aside from such duty to a stand on his constitutional right as an individual, he cannot take the left road with leaving behind him the mantle of his office. Understand, no one has any constitutional right to job.”

  Ed McKenzie, defense attorney for ten nontalking police officers, resigned from the bar for “confidential” reasons. Harsh criticism of his tactics were the true reason. On June 28, 1936, the call went out to find and arrest Captains Lemon and Hoertkorn, both out on a habeas corpus writ. Hoertkorn’s son, Harold, was already the subject of a search.

  FORTY-THREE

  Keep cool during a holdup. Drop face down on the floor in the case of a gun duel between the bandits and the police, but speedy
action is vital in turning in those alarms. Don’t wait.

  —CHIEF QUINN’S ADVICE TO BANK TELLERS

  AFTER eluding a half dozen deputies, Lemon and Hoertkorn surrendered and were jailed at the HOJ. Hoertkorn’s bushy gray hair had turned white; Lemon’s great bulk had been reduced by thirty pounds. They were placed in the visitor’s cage in the north wing of the jail, then escorted across the Bridge of Sighs by bailiff George McKeever. “Give Lemon the works! Throw Hoertkorn in the hole!” inmates awaiting trial howled as the sullen captains ran a gauntlet along their row of cells. As the chanting grew louder, deputies chased forty prisoners to the rear so the two captains could be questioned unimpeded by William Gamble, a trusty serving a term for forgery. Gamble had been arrested in the Southern District Station Hoertkorn had once commanded.

  In the sheriff’s office, they emptied their pockets. Lemon had $461 on his person; Hoertkorn only $200. That night, Superintendent Bernard Reilly, fearing something “might happen to them in this place,” moved them into the south wing among the hookers. Both men were dismal. They refused breakfast the next day and at noon declined a lunch of corn beef and cabbage and black coffee.

  On June 30, 1936, three deputy sheriffs took Lemon and Hoertkorn from their cells for a three-hour midnight hearing of the fourteen policemen who had defied the Grand Jury’s graft investigation. They were the only ones not in full uniform because they could not leave jail to get them. Cases against four of the thirteen silent policemen, Lemon, DeGuire, Mino, and Brouders, were completed, and the next day Judge Robinson denied them bail.

  On Friday, July 3, the Police Commission took the cases under submission at 4:00 P.M. and deliberated thirty-five minutes. They granted leniency to three who had shown a willingness to talk (Lieutenant Thomas Roche, Henry Ludolph, and Patrolman Harry Gurtler), but fired eleven policemen. Found guilty of unofficer-like conduct and disobedience were three police captains, two lieutenants, and six patrolmen. Lemon, the first fired, cocked his hat on his head and with a final tug at his empty holster, shrugged, and stalked out, followed by Hoertkorn, who did not wait to hear his name. Finally, all the “obstruction, pettifogging, and appeal to the frivolous” was at an end.

  “We will have to reorganize the entire department,” said Roche, his voice trembling. “We were obliged to dismiss officers with whom we have had friendly relations with over a quarter of a century. That was not easy. But I could not let my personal feelings interfere where the welfare of the entire department was at stake.”

  He had performed the hardest duty of his lifetime—the greatest mass ouster and departmental shakeup in any city’s history.

  On July 9, six more officers were shifted, including Quinn’s personal aides Inspector Charles Gallivan and Frank McConnell, who were transferred out of his office back to Bunco Detail where their expertise was more suited. “Captain Dullea sometime ago requested that Gallivan be transferred to the Inspector’s bureau in preparation of the coming World’s Fair,” explained the chief, who would not be affected by the coming reorganization. Roche had made certain of that.

  The graft revelations had depressed morale, and throughout the probe honest officers had been ashamed to put on their uniforms. “The picture is so bleak,” said one observer. “Short of disbanding the department and starting all over again, I don’t know what can be done.”

  Patrolman Jim Coleman, missing on his two-month-long fishing trip, was now the object of a nationwide search by Treasury agents hell-bent to collect taxes on his $90,000 fortune. When Atherton turned in his final report, he admitted he had accomplished little. “It’s kind of like a book on taxation that makes no mention of the Treasury Dept.,” said Jake Ehrlich. “It carefully describes the process of collection from its earliest stages all the way up to the McDonough brothers. In a book about taxation you wouldn’t expect the reader to accept the idea that all moneys collected got no further than the Department of the Internal Revenue, would you?”

  Who was at the top? Atherton had quit just short of real information.

  One Sunday, Patrolman George Burkhard, an expert marksman and under prosecution for falsifying documents related to the graft hearings, shot his wife and two grown daughters, then committed suicide. “Funny thing,” said a cop, “that yahoo Atherton managed to louse up a lot of lives, to embarrass a whole gang of careless but not really guilty guys into retirement, to hound that poor devil into suiciding not only himself but his whole damn family and yet the bastard never really got the guy he had loaded his gun for.”

  But what could they do? They couldn’t bring down the big guy, Chief Quinn.

  “These officers received a deserved fate,” said Atherton. “They were all given every opportunity to testify before the Grand Jury. They chose to flout the Police Commission, the courts, the Grand Jury and the people of San Francisco.” He blamed the Grand Jury, mayor, and DA for not supporting him. “It’ll all end up in a whitewash,” predicted the Jack Armstrong- handsome G-man as he took the train south. By August 31, 1944, he would be dead.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Where there is stagnant water or in a River with a slow current, the body will likely go down where last seen.

  —CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

  A golden spider was spinning in the brilliant light of the Bay. Endlessly the mechanical spider shuttled back and forth, it’s spinning wheel assemblies laying six strands of copper wire at each pass. Four sheaves carried a bight from reels at one anchorage across to mid-span of the Golden Gate Bridge, looped it over a shoe, then shot back across the channel. Each shoe contained 452 wires, which made up one strand. The spider laid four strands at a time, each anchored to a pair of steel bars extending deep into the concrete. When the glittering spider had twisted together sixty-one strands, it had spun one cable, which it compacted under enormous hydraulic pressure. At the end of one eight-hour shift, the spider had spun a thousand miles of wire. The spider applied narrow steel bands at intervals to bind the long cable together, wrapped it round with steel wire, and rested.

  The Bay Bridge had its own diesel spider. It spun ten miles of thick cables to hold the flooring on the bridge then, at top speed, wove single strands into twenty miles of main and secondary cables to suspend the double-decker span. Forms on the San Francisco section had been placed, the painting of the first field coat was in progress, and concrete girders for the off- ramp over Harrison Street and Pier 26 were being poured. It was almost done. Watching the bridge was the Gorilla Man, his shadow snaking along the dock. His long arms swung as he boarded a freighter. His huge hands were restless.

  Where there had been none before, there was a plague of Gorilla Men throughout the nation. Fascinated with these motiveless killers, LaTulipe continued to follow their activities. The same month Coroner Gerber released his report on the Butcher, LaTulipe studied a newspaper feature profiling the smiling strangler, Robert Irwin. A pictorial diagram titled “The Gorilla Man” compared his facial characteristics to a gorilla. “The small opening of the eyes show ‘The Gorilla Man.’ The upturned nostril . . . the straight slit in his face that goes for a lip, is also seen as an animalistic trait. Dark-blond wavy hair, low-set ears with thick lobes, a high bulging forehead, eyebrows slanting downward into his eyes in satanic fashion.” The facial similarities between this erstwhile sculptor and Earle Nelson, the original Gorilla Man, were astonishing. The Butcher case intrigued LaTulipe, so much he decided to visit Ohio and learn firsthand about the methodology and psychology of a new kind of man that none of them understood.

  AS Captain Dullea drove along Market Street, his wheels bumped on the raised tracks. The city’s planner, Jasper O’Farrell, had insisted on Market’s 120-foot width as the dividing line between the fifty-vara20 lots on the north and hundred-vara lots to the south. Dullea turned left and passed the Ferry Building. It was bustling with activity that day, but for how much longer? Its glory days had been numbered from the moment engineers anchored the Bay Bridge to the bottom of the Bay. The south pier lay underwa
ter on a shelf of rock extending from the Fort Point shoal; the north pier was on rocks at the water’s edge. To construct the deepest foundation ever, the Oakland Moore dry dock built an open-topped steel caisson a half block in size and fitted fifty-five vertical steel cylinders into it. Workers towed it to a ridge of rock running from Rincon Hill to the bridge’s central anchorage, Yerba Buena Island. As floating mixers poured in concrete, the box sank lower, the sides were built up, and the cylinders lengthened. Sharp-pointed steel gads were dropped through the cylinders to anchor them to the rock a hundred feet below.

  Finally the last of twenty-two million rivets was driven, and on November 12, 1936, a soaring plane wrote in the sky: “THE BRIDGE IS OPEN.” After three and a half years of work, former president Herbert Hoover, a Bay Area resident, cut the ribbon amid cannonade salutes from fourteen naval ships. The skies thundered with 250 navy planes, as the first vehicles rumbled across the span at fifty miles per hour. The upper deck had six two-way lanes for cars; the lower deck had three lanes for trucks and buses and two tracks for electric trains. San Francisco had the longest (4.25 miles), tallest (519 feet above the water), and most costly suspension bridge in the world. The last section of the Bay Bridge slid, like the lid of a crypt, over the exact spot where Officer Malcolm had been shot. It was an actual grave for the bustling Ferry Building. As the sun went down that opening day, the bridge’s sodium vapor and mercury vapor lights gave off the light of thirty-five full moons—a strange, glare-free light visible in the deepest fog.