* * *
JERRY WOOTERS WARNED prosecutors to protest when lawyers for Chuck Cahan began harping during his trial on a particular bug stashed under a dresser. It was in a two-story structure attached to one of the bookmaking ring’s rented homes, with its own entrance off the driveway. The room in question had the clothes dresser but also a couple of phones and paperwork strewn about that had nothing to do with getting a good night’s sleep. At the trial, Jerry kept telling the D.A., “You’ve got to bring out that this is not a bedroom, you can’t violate a man’s bedroom.” The prosecutor snapped back, “Jesus Christ, who’s prosecuting this case?” It was no different than what they’d done for years, after all.
They also had an ace card under the rules that long had guided criminal prosecutions in California—even if police had acted illegally, the evidence they gathered was not excluded from court. The federal system already had a so-called exclusionary rule. But in state court, if you got the goods, no matter how, you could use ’em. In the Cahan case, there were plenty of goods. Jack Horrall, the chief’s son, prepared elaborate charts showing the damning evidence gathered at each site. Facing all that, six of the defendants pleaded guilty. When the others were tried by a judge, without a jury, all but one was convicted, including Chuck Cahan, of conspiring to engage in horse-race bookmaking. It still was just a gambling case, no more, and Cahan was sentenced to only ninety days in county jail, a $2,000 fine and five years’ probation. He appealed nonetheless, alleging that the cops had trampled on his basic Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure—and the state’s top court could not have agreed more.
Appeals moved slowly so it took the California Supreme Court until April 27, 1955, to decry the “flagrant violation of the United States Constitution (4th and 14th Amendments), the California Constitution and state and federal statutes.” The court named names too, starting with Sergeant Gerard Wooters, though it got his first name wrong—and got Bert Phelps’ last name wrong—as it lashed out on what had been standard operating procedure in the LAPD.
Gerald Wooters, an officer attached to the intelligence unit of that department testified that after securing the permission of the chief of police to make microphone installations at two places occupied by defendants, he, Sergeant Keeler, and Officer Phillips … entered one “house through the side window of the first floor,” and that he “directed the officers to place a listening device under a chest of drawers.” Another officer made recordings and transcriptions of the conversations that came over wires from the listening device to receiving equipment installed in a nearby garage.… Such methods of getting evidence have been caustically censured by the United States Supreme Court: “That officers of the law would break and enter a home, secrete such a device, even in a bedroom, and listen to the conversations of the occupants for over a month would be almost incredible if it were not admitted. Few police measures have come to our attention that more flagrantly, deliberately and persistently violate the fundamental principle declared by the Fourth Amendment.…”
The evidence obtained from the microphones was not the only unconstitutionally obtained evidence introduced at the trial over defendants’ objection. In addition there was a mass of evidence obtained by numerous forcible entries and seizures without search warrants. Thus, without fear of criminal punishment or other discipline, law enforcement officers, sworn to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of California, frankly admit their deliberate, flagrant acts in violation of both Constitutions and the laws enacted thereunder. It is clearly apparent from their testimony that they casually regard such acts as nothing more than the performance of their ordinary duties for which the city employs and pays them.
So the squad got a tongue-lashing from on-high and California got the Exclusionary Rule, mandating that illegally obtained evidence could no longer be used in court. The message was clear, recalled Bert Phelps, one of the chastened crew facing a changing world no longer so tolerant of the practices of the past.
“From then on we couldn’t do it,” he said, “supposedly.”
CHAPTER 21
A Favor for Mr. Dragnet
Police chief William H. Parker went nuts over the Cahan decision, absolutely nuts. His passion seemed surprising given that it was not entirely unexpected that the courts might want the police to get a judge’s OK—a search warrant—before they broke into someone’s house. As a lawyer, Parker knew that the U.S. Supreme Court was pushing the states inexorably in that direction, that it was just a matter of time before all of them enforced the Exclusionary Rule. What’s more, Parker was the first to argue that there needed to be checks against wayward cops, those wicked men who cast disrepute upon all their colleagues—he just didn’t think that setting suspects free was the best way to discourage police misconduct. “The almost positive implication to be drawn from the Cahan case is that the activities of the police are a greater social menace than the activities of the criminal,” Parker said in one of many rants in the wake of the ruling. “This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.”
Parker saw America as imperiled on several fronts at once—by godless Communism, organized crime and degeneracy in society at large, the general lapse of values. It was one gigantic battle with the future of the nation on the line. The Cold War was revving up when he took office and within a year Los Angeles authorities prepared the city for nuclear bombardment. Two thousand firemen fanned out to L.A.’s households in 325 vehicles to deliver 600,000 copies of a booklet entitled Survival Under Atomic Attack. Parker warned a subcommittee of the state legislature that the Cahan decision signaled a setback even in that international war:
One of the basic aims of the Communist Party, as you gentlemen may know, is to drive the police of America into a state of fear. And if the police are driven into a shell of fear, then God help the people of this country!… This is the action long sought by the masters in the Kremlin. The bloody revolution, long the dream of the Comintern, cannot be accomplished in the face of a resolute police.
From the moment of the California Supreme Court ruling, the chief also predicted that crime would rise, and within months he was wielding a pointer before huge graphs streaking upward to show a 31.7 percent increase in robberies and 30.9 percent in auto thefts. “Unfortunately, my prophecy of a crime increase has come true,” he told the city’s most prominent women’s club. The ruling was not only a gift to the Communists but to “members of the underworld who prey upon law-abiding citizens,” and there were plenty of those. In a law review article, Parker estimated that six million Americans made their livings through crime.
This is obviously not a game in which police play “cops and robbers” for the amusement of society … This is a case of a lawless criminal army warring against society itself … The most dangerous criminals are professionals—people who refuse to work productively or legitimately, people who sneer at those who do and refer to them as “suckers” and “chumps.”
Parker blamed judges far removed from the streets for hampering the police, who had to confront the criminal element there. It is often a dirty business—a very dirty business—because of the warped nature of the criminals with whom police must often deal … They can discharge that responsibility only to the extent that society supports them … The effect of this decision has been catastrophic as far as efficient law enforcement is concerned.
Yes, indeed, Chief William Parker was furious at what the courts had done. And he had a prominent ally on the outrage front, Mr. Dragnet.
* * *
JACK WEBB WAS a native, born in Santa Monica and raised in a struggling household after his father split, his mother forced to take in boarders at a rooming house through the Depression. Webb briefly attended L.A. City College about the same time as Jerry Wooters before enlisting in the military in hopes, like many, of becoming a flyboy. But he washed out of pilot training, obtained a hardship discharge—on grounds he had to support both his mother and grandmother—and move
d to San Francisco to pursue a career as a radio performer, writer, and producer. Webb became the deep voice of the title characters in two detective shows, Pat Novak for Hire and Johnny Madero, Pier 23. Both radio dramas featured hard-boiled pulp dialogue and corny noirish metaphors (“The street was as deserted as a warm bottle of beer.” “I felt about as safe as an alligator walking through a handbag factory.”), and private gumshoes who worked their cases over the wishes of hapless police Homicide detectives.
Webb began seeing law enforcement in a different light when he was cast in a secondary role in a 1948 film, He Walked by Night, about an electronics expert who steals equipment and kills an off-duty policeman to keep his scheme going. The film was based on a real LAPD case, used real officers as advisors, and even used the names of real cops for some characters. It also resisted the usual extremes in depiction of policemen—as either one-man crime-fighting wonders or clueless flatfoots—in favor of an account of the painstaking procedures used by underappreciated professionals Webb came to see as “a group of men trying to upgrade their life against all odds.”
The next year, 1949, he approached the LAPD hierarchy—then Chief Horrall and Joe Reed—with a proposal for a radio show based on the department’s cases. Webb must have made a resonant pitch because Horrall told him, “You’re on the right track reflecting the day-to-day drudgery of police work.” More on point, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI already had demonstrated the public relations potential of radio by lending the bureau’s closed cases to such shows as Gang Busters and This Is Your FBI, though they were more melodramatic than what Webb had in mind, featuring lots of shoot-outs. Webb was not yet thirty when Dragnet hit the radio airwaves in 1949 with its trademark lines, “The story you’re about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Listeners were told the show was created “in cooperation with the Los Angeles Police Department,” and it developed a devoted Friday evening following.
By the time Webb decided to take his show to the still-young medium of television, he had a more impressive film credit on his résumé, a mid-sized role in Billy Wilder’s acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, playing Artie Green, a nice-guy second-unit film director who loses the girl to his ethically challenged pal, the doomed William Holden. But Webb was not going to be second-banana to any corrupt glamour boy in TV’s Dragnet. The LAPD had a new brain trust by 1951—Chief Parker and Captain Hamilton—and he reassured them that they would be able to review every script to make sure his Sergeant Joe Friday remained a dedicated robbery detective who knows the rules and obeys them. His character’s head wouldn’t be turned by a pretty skirt, either. The upright sergeant was still living at home with Mom—he was married to his job and his partner. The show would provide tangible benefits to the department too, $25 a week to officers who served as technical advisors and contributions to build classrooms at the Police Academy and to the Widows and Orphans Fund. Dragnet debuted on the small screen on December 16, 1951, with Webb announcing, “This is the city, forty-five square miles of it … two million people. In my job I get to meet ’em all. I’m a cop.”
Any doubts Chief Parker had should have eased after he read the review by one New York critic who confided that before Dragnet all he knew about the LAPD was “it didn’t do very well with the Black Dahlia murder.” Now, week after week, thirty million households tuned into a thirty-minute love affair with the department, promoted as “the documented drama of an actual crime, investigated and solved by the men who relentlessly stand watch on the security of your home, your family, and your life.” Webb did not ignore the possibility of a wayward officer—a landmark episode featured one who steals a fur coat for a dame he has stashed in an apartment. But Sergeant Friday gives him a reaming out that echoed themes voiced earlier in Mayor Bowron’s angry radio speech of 1949 and in Chief Parker’s own inaugural address.
You get this through your head, Mister: you’re a bad cop. You wanna know what that means?… You’ll be all over the front pages tonight.… Everybody’s gonna read about you. A bad cop. It makes great news. They’re not gonna read about 4,500 other cops. The guys who walked their beats last night … The traffic boys on the motorcycles, the men in R. and I. or the Crime Lab crew, or the guy in Robbery who stopped two slugs last night … We could’ve piled up a hundred years of great policemen and great detectives, men with honor and brains and guts, and you tore down every best part of them. The people who read it in the papers, they’re gonna overlook the fact that we got you, that we washed our own laundry and we cleared this thing up. They’re gonna overlook all the good. They’ll overlook every last good cop in the country. But they’ll remember you, because you’re a bad cop.
When TV Guide debuted as a national publication in 1953, its first cover featured Lucille Ball. Its second had Jack Webb, whose “Just the facts, ma’am” cops were one of the two ways America was sold a glistening new image of the LAPD throughout the 1950s, the other being Chief Parker himself with his paramilitary style and calls for a spiritual rebirth of the nation. Before long, Parker had only one rival as a symbol of honest, square-jawed law enforcement in America, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover.
It was inevitable, then, that the chief and his biggest fan would be eager to see Dragnet elevated to the big screen, as a feature film. When that finally happened, in 1954, Jack Webb set the story in the Intelligence Division, a.k.a. The Gangster Squad, and turned it into a lecture not on bad cops but on the danger of giving criminals all those rights.
* * *
CON KEELER WAS amazed at how the movie’s technical crew swarmed over their office.
Webb was a very nice guy, a funny guy. But like everybody else, he was a Hollywood person who had friends and so forth, some of whom we wouldn’t have approved of. So we went out a couple of times to talk to him and just advise him. But he was a perfectionist, I mean a perfectionist. He sent men in our office, six or eight guys came in one day and they photographed our office, guys with tape measures measuring the floor space, measuring the walls, measuring the glass, and it was like a bunch of ants. And other guys were drawing out the thing, OK? When they made up the set at the studios out there I was called as a technical advisor on a thing. Webb says, “Well, how does this look?” Well, I looked in there, walked in, they even had our transmitting radio in there. It was all props but it was just as if I’d walked in our office.
They even got the spittoon down right for the film version of Dragnet.
The main (paid) technical advisor on the film was Captain James Hamilton, the boss of the unit in real life and a major character in the movie, played by the gruff-voiced actor Richard Boone. Three years later Boone would become a TV star as the cultured gunslinger Paladin in the Western series Have Gun, Will Travel, on which he spoke lines often written by a former LAPD sergeant. That unusually creative cop, Gene Roddenberry, would go on to create the series Star Trek and base its stoic Mr. Spock on none other than Chief William Parker. But in 1954, Boone was the perfect choice to play the chief’s best buddy, for he had a tall, commanding presence, rugged face, and a real-life pioneer heritage. The actor traced his roots back to Daniel Boone while Captain Hamilton’s people came from the very territory Boone settled, Kentucky. Like Con Keeler’s clan, Hamilton’s came west in a covered wagon—his family lore suggested that his father may have been born right in the wagon, in 1865, en route to California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley. Almost a century later, the settler-stock Captain Hamilton was an imposing figure in public while living through daily trials in private, excruciating migraines that left him paralyzed at times in his office next to Parker’s. Yet he always was there to huddle privately with the chief first thing each morning. They had the sort of rapport people are lucky to find once in a lifetime, trusting each other with their lives, careers, and the combination to the safe that kept the secrets of the LAPD. They also shared the belief that the nation did not grasp the threat of organized crime.
Hamilton spent months helping Webb find the right mob story from
the squad’s files. They later suggested that the real crime was from the mid-’40s but the plot borrowed suspiciously from a 1951 case that was still quite live, the Two Tonys murders, in which the underworld’s code of silence enabled Jimmy Fratianno to remain free. Jimmy The Weasel later insisted that he actually saw his name on the cover of a script on Hamilton’s desk when the squad dragged him in for questioning another time. Fratianno asked, “You going to make a movie?” and the captain replied, “Maybe.” The Weasel said he told Hamilton they’d never get him back in prison for that crime, or any other, “The only way you’re going to send me back is by framing me.… Frame me and both you and Parker will die miserable deaths.” The cops’ account was a bit different: they said Fratianno was docile whenever they honored him with the same harassment as Mickey, Dragna, and a few others. Their heat helped foil his bid to set up a business selling orange juice to bars down in San Diego—buy it, or else—and they finally caught him threatening the president of an oil company in a bid to extract 2 percent of the take. Fratianno said that indeed was a frame—his third cousin had called the man, imitating his voice—but he was back behind bars, for extortion, by the time the movie version of Dragnet hit theaters in September 1954.
The plot had Sergeant Friday trying to solve the killing of a mob underling with the help of an informant or two, a bug or two, and lectures about the unfair justice system. Only one low-level ex-con is gunned down at the start, but his fatal sin is failing to give his underworld higher-ups a share of his collections of gambling debts—he’s a greedy renegade, like the Two Tonys. The hoodlum we see directing the rubout, a character named Max Troy, has to eat baby food because of a bad stomach, a parallel to Fratianno’s diseased lung with Ping-Pong balls in it.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 21