Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles

by Paul Lieberman

  * * *

  THE WAR AND a wedding gave Jack Whalen a fresh start in life. Despite his youthful brush with the law, he was accepted for pilot training, commissioned a lieutenant, and sent to the College of Idaho for a crash course by its professors—in mathematics, physics, history, geography, English, medical aid, and civil air regulation—as a prelude to taking to the air as a flyboy. But before leaving he scored a coup that on paper trumped any scheme his father ever dreamed up. Jack married into one of Los Angeles’ oldest families, the Sabichis, with roots in L.A. dating back to Spanish land grant days. It was a clan that embodied the mythic merger of Anglo and Spanish cultures (and bloodlines) that gave birth to a fledgling city long before the arrival of the railroads and the unpleasant hordes of the twentieth century.

  Much as the Old South was given a rewriting by Gone with the Wind, Southern California had its rancho-and-pueblo era romanticized by popular fiction such as Ramona and Zorro. But to the degree such a world existed, it had a real Adam and Eve. William Wolfskill was born in Boonesborough, Kentucky, in the time of Daniel Boone, so he naturally caught the pioneer spirit. Wolfskill joined a party of mountain men heading west into the wilderness to collect beaver skins, and by 1831 he had gone as far as possible, settling just inland from the Pacific, where he planted grapevines and orchards—lemons and oranges—in “the little Spanish village which nestled in the hills.” He also met Dona Magdalena Lugo, who was part of a Spanish family (from Lugo, Spain) that owned considerable property up the coast, in Santa Barbara. They married/merged in 1841, seven years before the Mexican-American War won California for the United States, setting the stage for statehood in 1850.

  But the development of Los Angeles took one more human merger, of the couple’s daughter, Magdalena, with an English-educated merchant (and lawyer) Francisco Sabichi. Frank Sabichi served for years on the City Council, including a stint as president, helped bring water to the arid city, and was counsel for the Southern Pacific while donating the thirteen acres that became the railroad’s central station. He also was a fixture in the West Coast versions of the Mayflower Society, helping found the “Pioneer Society of Southern California” and serving as grand trustee of “Sons of the Golden West” at the time of his death in 1900. To the degree that Los Angeles had a high society, Frank Sabichi embodied it. He would have rolled over in the family vault in Calvary Cemetery at the thought of his granddaughter marrying a big lunk from the Whalen clan.

  Katherine “Kay” Sabichi spent her first years in the family’s twenty-seven-room Victorian mansion on South Figueroa, which had eight bedrooms and an elevator to its third-floor ballroom housing Los Angeles’ second oldest piano—an instrument manufactured in New York, shipped by boat around Cape Horn, and carted inland on the backs of eighteen Indians. Grandma Magdalena Sabichi spun tales of the gracious life on the hacienda back when you took in wandering travelers and attended exhibitions of horsemanship by riders atop elaborately carved saddles. “Modern turmoil has swept away forever the wondrous beauty and tranquility of the past,” her grandma said. “I often long to escape from the roar and artificiality of modern life but it is not possible, for the golden sands of the past have run once and for all.”

  When she was old enough, Kay went to finishing school where “they teach you only to be a lady,” she explained, “and fine manners.” But this Sabichi girl was not exactly the demur society lass. Sporting cascading dark hair and an exotic look that reflected her Spanish heritage, she hung with the movie crowd and took small parts in two films, one with Marlene Dietrich and the other Madame X, in which an adulterous wife is cautioned, “Life isn’t a storybook.” The gossip columns linked her to the early movie cowboy Hoot Gibson, who was twice her age and thrice married. Jack Whalen was not quite as talented a horseman as the Western star but he was swaggeringly confident and much better looking than the old prune Hoot Gibson. Jack proposed to Kay Sabichi with a diamond engagement ring he swiped from his older sister’s cedar chest.

  Both the bride and groom lied about their age on the marriage certificate. Kay listed herself as twenty-six when she really was past twenty-eight. Jack gave his age as twenty-four, when he was only twenty-one—he was at least seven years younger than the blue-blooded bride he married on January 27, 1943, with a reception at the Aces Officers Club in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The age difference was only part of the reason the bride’s wealthy daddy was wary of his dashing new son-in-law with the pool-playing father. The father-in-law, Louis Sabichi, had just one arm after a streetcar accident but drove a Pierce-Arrow touring car and enjoyed being a privileged heir within the small world of true Angelenos. He refused to meet the ex-bootlegger Fred Whalen. “He has a feeling that we are trying,” the groom later said, “to use him.”

  * * *

  JACK WHALEN MADE it through military service with, as best as can be determined, one fight. Sent to Waco Army Air Field in Texas, he got into it with a superior officer he suspected was flirting, or more, with his society wife. Though finished with his training too late for combat, he piloted both B-25s and B-29s and at war’s end commandeered one of those to fly his wife and new baby daughter, along with their furniture, home to L.A. He began offering his services as a charter pilot for film crews, and as a trainer of horses for the movies, that on a small ranch in Encino, in the Valley. He also enlisted an up-and-coming Hollywood photographer who specialized in glamour shots, pinups, to create a portfolio that might get him jobs as an actor.

  One photo showed him posed in cowboy gear leaning against a shiny ’47 Cadillac convertible, a pinky ring on his right hand and a slender cigar between his fingers, but with a smile on his face and white hat on his head—he had good guy roles in mind with that. Another spotlighted his sex appeal by posing him leaning against the peeling bark of a shady sycamore tree, the Caddy behind. The would-be leading man also adopted a stage name, Jack O’Hara. At least that’s what he told police it was, a stage name, when they found two sets of identification in his wallet.

  His Hollywood dream was real, who didn’t have that? But for all his flirtation with the other straight-and-narrow stuff, and ventures that never quite made it—there always was an excuse—Jack Whalen was possessed by the same addiction that drove his father, for the criminal’s elemental thrill of getting over on the other guy, the suckers (in his father’s case) and weaklings (in his). Where the father was the bullfighter’s red cape—now you see it, now you don’t—the son was the charging bull. Don’t give me b.s., give me the money.

  His first arrests were for trivial crimes such as breaking-and-entering then (quickly) for assault and extortion, the muscle activities cited by the Intelligence Division in adding him to its watch list. The trademark of Jack the Enforcer was that he was so tough he never needed a gun. He liked it when people gave him the (slightest) excuse to knock them out. For some jobs he had backups and he kept clerks on his payroll when bookmaking himself, not merely collecting. But mostly it was just him and his fists, as the racetrack scammer Michael Rizzo discovered.

  Rizzo was no Freddie the Thief, but he had a good con running for years. A former horse trainer, he’d tell gullible gamblers he could fix a race if they came up with the cash to take care of the jockeys. Then he’d introduce his mark to a real jock or to an associate posing as one—one pretend rider used a lighted match to burn a blister on his thumb to make the ruse look authentic, part of a sting that took a retired oilman for $4,000. So one day Jack Whalen, aka Jack O’Hara, showed up at the apartment of Mike Rizzo.

  He come in real friendly and shook my hand, sat down on an end table. I was sitting on the couch.… He says, “How you been doing?” … and the conversation was friendly. So a few minutes later he said, “You’re going to be with me.”

  I said, “With you doing what?”

  “Whatever you do—it don’t make any difference what you do, you’re with me now.”

  I laughed.… I thought he was kidding. The first thing I know … he hit me here in the eye—I h
ave a big scar on my eye here—and my nose and my eyes and my lips, and I was covering up and I was still on the couch. I couldn’t get up and he was hitting me and cursing me, “You dirty motherfucker … let this be a lesson to you.”

  I says, “Alright.”

  “Give me some money.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  Then he told me to get $300 and he’s coming back. Meantime he went through all my drawers and all through the apartment looking for money … “I’ll be back for the $300.”

  Like most everyone in his position, the racetrack scammer Mike Rizzo did not dare call police to report what Jack Whalen/O’Hara had done—he didn’t want to get clobbered again, or worse. What’s remarkable is that the slender dance instructor Jon Anton, enforced over three $5 horse bets and beaten to a pulp at the Mark Twain Hotel, did go to the cops. Despite the threat to take him into a dark alley, Anton cooperated in every way with authorities and signed any documents they needed.

  After the $15 horse bettor agreed to testify, Captain Hamilton assigned Con Keeler and Dick Williams, the six-foot-three former Ranger, to bring in “Jack the Enforcer.” All they had to do was stop by the District Attorney’s Office to get the paperwork. They spoke to a young deputy D.A., who told them it was routine, no problem, Keeler recalled. They just hadn’t counted on a father’s influence.

  Everything was fine. Good case. Good witness. So he took it down to the senior deputy for his approval. He comes back in a few minutes and says, “Well there’s a stop order on this. The chief deputy won’t sign it.”

  “What’s a stop order?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  So Williams and I went down the hall, all these locked doors in the D.A.’s office. There was a conference going on in there and Williams and I busted in and the Chief Deputy D.A. looked up, “Who are you?”

  I told him who I was. “I want to know where in the penal code it says anything about a stop order.” I guess I wasn’t exactly a gentleman. He excused everyone out of the room. Got up and came around. He says, “I read the case,” and we start going down the hallway.

  So I told him, “In the underworld, Freddie Whalen is supposed to have a stop order on the D.A.’s office. This kind of verifies it, doesn’t it?”

  Well he blew his top, threw the papers up in the air and stomped down the hallway. So we picked up our papers and went on over to our office. I told the captain, “Well, I kind of spoke out of turn over there.” About ten minutes later he called me in, “I have a call from the D.A.’s office—your warrants are waiting for you over there,” and he kind of grins. Williams and I went over to pick up the warrants then went over to pick up Jack Whalen and of course he was long gone. We found later he was in Palm Springs for three weeks.

  When Jack Whalen returned from his convenient getaway in the desert he surrendered at the courthouse to deal with the piddling case stemming from the $15 collection. His wife, Kay, submitted a handwritten letter pleading for him to receive probation, at the worst, so he could support a family that now included a second child, a boy. “I have no vocation whatsoever,” the former debutante wrote, “you see, I only attended girls’ schools when I was younger … and fine manners, that I have, but that doesn’t enable me to make money.” She went on about her husband, “I wish you could see him through my eyes—his love of children, dogs, horses, sunshine, picnics with all his relatives on Sunday at Griffith Park … so many normal things that make the right kind of man.”

  In his own letter pleading his cause, Jack Whalen provided a peek into the dynamics between the Whalens and Sabichis, which hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. “My wife’s father has quite a substantial amount of financing behind him,” The Enforcer explained, but “he has never helped my wife and I since our marriage.” What’s more, the suspicious Louis Sabichi still had never spoken to Jack’s father until an encounter that week—Freddie the Thief made it look like a chance meeting with their rich relative who was not acting family-like. “My father informs me that on the evening right before last … he had an occasion to meet my father-in-law at a restaurant they both frequent.… I am told that the meeting on that evening and the conversation that followed was not exactly on a friendly basis.”

  The deft Fred Whalen would never stop trying to help his son—to bail him out, somehow, if he couldn’t talk the boy out of his foolishness.

  But Jack Whalen still couldn’t understand why the cops were giving him the treatment once reserved for a Mickey Cohen or Jack Dragna. “In my own mind … this case is one of persecution,” he wrote. “I know over twenty-five officers of the Intelligence Department personally whom I have met on different occasions, namely, ‘pick-ups’ for questioning.” When they got to court, he elaborated, “All of these officers have told me at one time or another that they needed someone to pick on and that I was as good a prospect as anyone.” He did not mention that one of those cops, at least, was now a friend.

  CHAPTER 19

  The $1 Career

  It’s possible that Jack Whalen wasn’t puffing when he said he’d heard of Jerry Wooters, for the Gangster Squad sergeant had a way of earning mentions in the papers. In his first months on the LAPD, a botched gambling raid won him the headline, FAITHFUL FIDO MUTILATES SEAT OF RAIDING OFFICER’S PANTS, and from then on stuff always was happening around the cop who exuded the same screw-you edge to crooks and his bosses alike.

  Like most everyone but the Sabichis and their crowd, he was not a native Angeleno. Gerard Wooters was born in Philadelphia in 1917 to parents with a biblical pairing of names, Mary and Joseph. His mother died soon after, however, and his father carted Jerry and the two other children west in 1922—that year again—with dreams of finding gold in Mexico. Joe Wooters settled his family in Los Angeles and set off to pursue the perilous gamble later depicted in the Humphrey Bogart film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, trekking south and into the hills looking for a strike. Jerry was the baby of the family, so his brother and sister (nine and eleven years older) looked after him while their dad was consumed with that boom-or-bust life. Jerry might come home from school and see a gleaming new car outside, or discover all their possessions on the street and his roller skates gone—he sobbed when he couldn’t find them. When his brother and sister grew old enough to be off on their own, he landed for a time in an orphanage in Woodland Hills, at the end of the Valley. He was a lonely kid who learned to be cynical about the world from the youngest age—and who vowed, like Scarlett O’Hara, to never be hungry again.

  While his dad did operate a mine in Baja, he once asked his sons to drive the payroll down in an ancient Model T. Jerry rear-ended a pickup full of Mexicans and, at twelve, had to bribe his way out of a local lockup, an encounter not likely to inspire an exalted image of law enforcement. A couple of years later, he was picked up in Hollywood for peddling dollar-a-bag oranges out of a truck and taken to the city’s Lincoln Heights lockup, where an old sergeant lectured the arresting officer, “We can’t have any kids in this god-damned jail.” Jerry insisted that the same old sergeant who sprung him still was on duty there when he became a cop and hauled someone in. “Well, you’re back, huh?” the old sergeant said.

  Where Jack O’Mara always dreamed of a career in law enforcement, Jerry stumbled into it. After high school he hustled work driving a taxi, gave tourists quick tours by movie stars’ homes, and occasionally hauled lights at Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount studios, where his older brother was an electrician. By 1941, he also was taking a few English and pre-law classes.

  I was going to L.A. City College, kind of fooling around, and there was a kid in the class by the name of Elliot. We had jobs part-time. Just before that Mayor Shaw had been thrown out and there were a lot of policemen fired or took retirement. They had like 250 vacancies they were filling. He said, “The police are giving an exam. Let’s go down and take it. It cost a buck.” Turns out he didn’t take it. So I took it. Did quite well.

  On April 10, 1941, for the price o
f a bag of oranges, Jerry Wooters, too, became part of the generation that was supposed to change the LAPD, except he was recruited into a unit that hadn’t entirely left the scandalous ’30s behind.

  I had a terrible time in the Academy. Guns scared me to death. There was some sergeant who would stand behind me to make sure I passed. Then the night after graduation we had a big party and a sergeant came up, I didn’t know who he was, he said, “Have you got an assignment yet?” I said, “No.” So that’s how I got on the Vice Squad. I guess I didn’t look much like a policeman.

  Central Vice was looking for new faces that wouldn’t be recognized to go undercover on the sex beat, “B-girls, homos … degeneracy work,” as he described it. One form of the last was interracial coupling, spelled out by the disgruntled Vice cop Charles Stoker, who joined the LAPD a year after Wooters. “In the confines of Los Angeles are innumerable places known in police parlance as ‘Black and Tan’ joints where whites and blacks intermingle sexually, for the purpose of enjoying homosexual relations, smoking marihuana, or for reasons of general debauchery … Their proprietors, generally Negroes, engage or lease large houses frequently located in exclusive residential sections, where well-to-do white women engage in sinful liaisons with colored males.” Candles provided the only lighting in one such establishment catering to the rich “silver fox and mink coat trade,” and the help dressed like characters from the Arabian Nights, with baggy silk pants, embroidered blouses, and turbans on their heads.