A Bright and Guilty Place

by Richard Rayner

  This building would soon become the center of Leslie White’s professional life, as it was of Dave Clark’s. Both would be players in the great crime circus of L.A. in the late 1920s and early 1930s; both would be touched by murder and scandal, although only one would survive intact. White had come to Los Angeles during the first Marco trial, and he’d read about a number of racket-related murders that had occurred since then. Jack Palmer, a Washington State rumrunner, another newcomer to town, had been killed in a downtown rooming house. Palmer’s flapper girlfriend said nonchalantly that he’d been shot by gangsters. Another man, Augie Palambo, was killed in the back of a San Pedro taxi cab. The Evening Express showed a picture of Palambo’s straw hat with a bloodstained bullet hole in it. These underworld rumblings were connected with the opening of a gambling ship, the Johanna Smith, off Long Beach. Marco was a part owner of the ship, along with his associates “Farmer” Page and former LAPD vice cop Guy McAfee. Were these men fighting among themselves, or were outsiders trying to muscle in? Reporters didn’t know, or if they did, they weren’t writing about it. The Express did note that the number of unsolved murders in the city was soaring. There had been fourteen since the beginning of the year.

  White, intrigued, took a streetcar downtown and entered the Hall of Justice for the first time, riding the elevator to the eighth floor where, outside the doors of Judge Doran’s Superior Court, he joined the line of early spectators awaiting the start of Albert Marco’s second trial on the morning of August 24, 1928.

  5

  The Gangster Goes Down

  Dave Clark faced an uphill struggle. As proceedings got under way, a string of witnesses either didn’t appear or dropped out. Walter Eaton, an LAPD cop who had evidence of how the enraged Albert Marco had smashed chairs in the grand jury room, and Louise Bardson, a member of Marco’s party at the Ship Café, simply didn’t show up. Dr. George T. Dazey, who had dug the bullet out of Dominick Conterno’s back, had “gone to Europe.” Marco grinned when Dazey’s absence was announced in court, while Clark, furious, demanded a thorough investigation.

  Marco had gotten himself a neat new haircut. He wore a dark blue suit with a muted chalk stripe, but his swagger was still unrestrained. He yawned and laughed. He slumped in his chair beside his attorneys, doodling and buffing his nails. He “smiled at secret thoughts,” as Gene Coughlin wrote in the Daily News, and treated the trial like a joke. He probably had good reason. Two of the key prosecution witnesses seemed to have developed eyesight and memory problems when they took the stand. Dominick Conterno said he’d been fighting with Marco, pummeling the vice-king over the head when a blow rendered him almost unconscious. The blow broke his hold on Marco, and he staggered backward. It was at this moment, he said, that he saw a flash and felt the bullet punch into his back—but he didn’t see who fired the shots. Harry Judson testified that he had no idea who fired the shot that wounded him in the foot.

  Leslie White recorded some of his impressions. “Marco is an ugly brute. His neck is so thick it threatens to tear apart the collar of his shirt. The young prosecutor’s name is Clark. He’s got an impossible job, I think. Everybody thinks Marco is guilty and everybody thinks he’ll win his acquittal in a trial that seems fixed.”

  White was still weak and walked with a stick. He sat at the back in the stuffy courtroom in case the heat made him faint and he needed to get out. Allied Architects, the designers of the Hall of Justice, had put big windows in the courtrooms, failing to consider the sheer amount of light that would strike them. On an average day Los Angeles received fourteen times more sunlight than New York. Fans had been installed in Judge Doran’s court, and venetian blinds that threw slanted patterns on the floors; but on summer days, the room still cooked.

  Dave Clark, immaculate as always, looked cool in the heat, though he felt this shambles of a trial slipping out of his control. That weekend he and his wife Nancy accepted an invitation from Baron Long, the owner of the Ship Café. Long and a syndicate of other investors had recently opened a gambling resort across the Mexican border outside Tijuana, in the picturesque hills at Agua Caliente. The resort, set on 655 acres, had its own airport. Clark and Nancy flew down in Baron Long’s plane, and Clark walked for the first time among the sumptuous and soaring spaces of Agua Caliente. He saw the huge ballroom, the immense mosaic-tiled spa, the vast floors of the Gold Bar and Casino, where he gambled with chips made from solid gold. There were no windows or clocks, and security men watched from tracks above the paneled and coffered ceiling.

  “Paradise in the midst of hell,” was how the writer Ovid Demaris described Agua Caliente. For years the resort—with its hotel, bungalows, swimming pools, golf course, spas, stables, and racetrack—would serve Hollywood and Southern California as an exclusive retreat. It was over the border where American laws didn’t apply and L.A. reporters knew not to snoop. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Clark Gable would be frequent visitors; likewise Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, and other studio bosses. Margarita Cansino, later known as Rita Hayworth, would be discovered there, dancing in the cabaret. Designed by the young architect Wayne McAllister, Agua Caliente was a prototype for Las Vegas, where McAllister would later create The Sands casino and hotel.

  Dave Clark’s diaries were strictly appointment books, lists of names and times and places. He wrote few letters and left no commentary on his life. He wasn’t self-conscious in that way and remains impenetrable and hard to read. But we know that he fell in love with Agua Caliente because he would return there again and again, rubbing shoulders with the high rollers and the Hollywood aristocracy. The resort was like a gorgeous movie set that suited, perhaps, Clark’s inner sense of his own drama and glamor. He had a high opinion of himself—with some reason, for he was a man whose gifts and guts had already taken him far.

  Clark came back refreshed from Agua Caliente, and the second trial of Albert Marco entered its second week. Meanwhile, a wild buying orgy sent stocks soaring on Wall Street; at San Quentin hundreds sought tickets to see the Los Angeles murderer Edward Hickman hang; and on a busy street in Chicago, Tony Lombardo, Al Capone’s aide and consigliore, was killed, struck by two dum-dum bullets that ripped away half his head. In L.A. the spate of unsolved underworld murders went on: Bobby Lee, “Chinese flapper bride,” was gunned down in Chinatown; the bullet-ridden body of Bozo Lancer was found on the floor of his North Broadway restaurant; Philip Rubino, the “proprietor of a grapejuice and bottle supply company,” was killed by a shotgun blast outside his Compton home. In connection with Rubino’s killing, the L.A. Examiner used the word “mafia,” perhaps for the first time in the paper’s history. “The Mafia supposedly never forget,” LAPD Captain William Bright told reporters. There’s rich irony here, for later it would be revealed that two LAPD cops had in fact killed Rubino, acting under orders from somebody in the Los Angeles “System”—maybe Marco himself.

  Clark rested a prosecution case that he knew to be weak. His best efforts had been undermined at every juncture, and the defense began to call its witnesses. Among the first was Earl Kynette, an LAPD lieutenant who testified that he knew Albert Marco well. “The defendant is a peaceful man,” Earl Kynette said. Ten years hence, in 1938, Kynette—by then a captain and the head of LAPD’s notorious Red Squad, a unit that was set up to monitor and arrest Communists but became a tool of the underworld—would himself be prosecuted for attempted murder, having placed a bomb in the car of a private investigator hired by civic reformers. But in 1928, the LAPD’s connection with the rackets was not the open secret it would become, nor were the Marco trials seen as they would later be perceived—as an early chapter in the long, turbulent story of citizens trying to regain control of city politics.

  Next witness for the defense was Evelyn Brogan, the “legal secretary,” who testified that when the shooting broke out at the Ship Café, Marco had been so scared she’d had to hold his hand. Sitting in his chair, looking plump and complacent, Marco smirked.

  “Who did fire the s
hots, if the defendant didn’t?” Clark asked.

  “I didn’t see,” Evelyn Brogan replied, and Marco smiled again.

  It was at this moment that Marco’s attorneys, perhaps overconfident, made their big mistake. Joseph Moore, the hulking chauffeur of Marco’s Packard, shambled onto the stand. Far from smart, he nonetheless gave his evidence with unblushing effrontery. “It was I who shot Dominick Conterno,” he said.

  Sitting in his usual spot at the back of the courtroom, Leslie White said he was unsure whether to laugh or gasp as Moore told how he’d just finished parking the car when he heard a commotion in the Ship Café.

  “I ran to the swinging doors and looked in. I saw four or five men beating Marco up,” Moore went on. He said he ran back to the car to get a jack or something, a weapon. “The first thing I saw in the car was the gun, a .32 caliber pistol, and I grabbed it and ran back up into the café.”

  Moore described how he stood beside Marco, with the gun placed beside Marco’s hip, and opened fire when the assailants tried to attack his boss again. “I was trying to scare them. I didn’t mean to injure anybody,” he said. “Afterwards I ran onto the beach and buried the gun in the sand.”

  Dave Clark, in his cross-examination, asked Moore whether he could remember exactly where he’d hidden the gun. Moore said yes—it was close by the Ocean Park lifeguard station. Clark then called for an adjournment, so that he, Moore, and officers of the court could search for the weapon. A trip westward duly ensued, and the automatic was retrieved. An expert’s examination established that the gun had been in the sand only a matter of days, not for the two months that had passed since the shooting.

  “This story is an utter and ridiculous fabrication, a device that the defense seems to have cooked up with the help of Broadway,” Dave Clark said when proceedings resumed. He was referring to a recent play, The Racket by Bartlett Cormack, in which a stooge takes the blame for his underworld boss. “I’ll prove that Joe Moore wasn’t within fifteen miles of the Ship Café when the shootings took place.”

  Moore, called back to the stand, now kept his mouth shut, refusing to answer any more of Clark’s probings about his phony confession, and was promptly arrested for perjury.

  “Moore was a ‘goat’ who’d been paid $10,000 to take the rap, plus an additional $10,000 for each year he spent in the pen at San Quentin,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the Daily News.

  Albert Marco appeared unconcerned; he went on doodling and chatting with his friends, unaware that the trial was about to take one more sensational twist.

  Judge Doran, convinced that certain jury members had been bribed, threatened, or otherwise tampered with, called counsel for both sides into his chambers and told them he was planning to dismiss all twelve of the present panel.

  Dave Clark jumped on this. “If you take my advice, Judge, you’ll get rid of them and never let them come back.”

  Howls of protest came from the Marco side—to no avail. In a scene reminiscent of Brian DePalma’s Prohibition gangster movie The Untouchables, Doran marched out one jury and swore in another before rushing the trial to its conclusion.

  This gave Clark the opportunity to draw on a skill learned from Earl Rogers, who is credited with inventing the art of cross-examination in its modern form. In the famous 1902 Catalina Island Murder Case he cajoled, badgered, and lulled a witness into admitting his guilt concerning the killing for which another man was on trial. When Albert Marco took the stand in his own defense, Clark had no need for melodrama. Standing in front of him was an ideal candidate for cross-examination, a defendant who was surly and ill-prepared yet believed himself invulnerable. The trial transcript reads wonderfully:

  Clark: “Did you fire the shots?”

  Marco: “No.”

  Clark: “But you were at the Ship Café that night.”

  Marco: “Yes.”

  Clark: “You heard the shots?”

  Marco: “Yes.”

  Clark: “Where were you at the time?”

  Marco: “I can’t remember.”

  Clark: “Many witnesses have testified that you did indeed fire the shots. You took aim and shot Dominick Conterno in the back.”

  Marco: “I didn’t fire those shots. But if the jury believes I did I want them to know I was acting in self-defense.”

  Evidence was reprised, closing statements made. The new jury went out, and though expected to remain out for at least a day, returned within hours, finding Albert Marco guilty on all counts, whereupon, Gene Coughlin reported in the News, Marco’s “wry smile turned to a sneer.”

  Marco’s attorneys sought a new trial, but Judge Doran refused it and found himself facing death threats. So did Dave Clark. Undeterred, Clark pressed for the maximum sentence and a week later Doran handed Marco fourteen to twenty years in San Quentin.

  “BIG PAPA SENT TO PEN!” said the headline in the News.

  It all ended in such a hurry that Leslie White missed the moment when the jury delivered its verdict. He’d been struck most of all by the sheer theatricality of the trial, and how different it had been from those he’d seen in Ventura County. “Here in Los Angeles nobody spoke of the truth—they spoke of testimony and evidence. If a witness tried to tell a straightforward story, he was heckled by both the defense and the prosecution until he was too bewildered and confused to remember anything,” he wrote. He recorded, too, further impressions of Dave Clark. “A big city attorney. Young, standing upright. Brave, with a real military bearing.”

  Dave Clark felt the heat of fame. His picture appeared in the papers and he showed that he knew how to milk the moment. “Marco went to extreme measures to try to ensure his freedom,” he said. “But the jury came back with the only verdict twelve intelligent people could return. This serves notice on gangland—Los Angeles won’t tolerate racketeers big or little.”

  “The blue-eyed prosecutor did his job courageously and honestly,” reported Gene Coughlin, whose path would one day cross Clark’s again in very different circumstances. “The people of this city should congratulate the gangbusting lawyer and handsome poloist.”

  Dave Clark wasn’t Earl Rogers yet, but this was more than a beginning. He was the lawyer with guts enough to take on the underworld and brains enough to win.

  6

  Oil, Law, and Scandal

  Albert Marco had worked with, and for, Charlie Crawford, the “kingpin politician” of whose murder Dave Clark would be accused in 1931. Yet, throughout the entire course of the Marco trials, and in all the reporting of those trials, Crawford’s name was never mentioned. He occupied a higher rung than Marco on the ladder of the L.A. System, but for the moment remained where he wanted to be—in the background, in the shadows, known only to those by whom he wished to be known, or those who wouldn’t or didn’t dare to mention his name. Crawford’s power lay behind the scenes, and relied on secrecy. This would change, much to Crawford’s dismay. The brazen corruption of which he was a part would soon be flushed out into the open. Leslie White had arrived in L.A. at the time when crime and the integrity of those who should have been enforcing the law had become a major issue. Forces of reform were fighting back. “Albert Marco has finally discovered that his money, his power, his more or less respectable political contacts, his threats, his promises and his pleas are unavailing in the face of simple honesty and unassuming integrity and courage. The lesson he has learned will not be confined to himself; it will permeate the entire realm of criminal thought and activity here,” claimed the L.A. Times, sounding a hopeful if pompous note. “Had he been able through the unlimited fund at his command to set aside the just disposition of his case he would have afforded to those of his kind a shining example of what can be achieved by the unscrupulous use of wealth and influence.”

  The Women’s Republican League of Van Nuys, in supporting Judge William Doran for reelection, spoke more forcefully of “a terrific struggle by all the influences of evil, subtle and bold, from the lowest depths of society to the high circles, to flaunt the law. L
os Angeles is facing a crisis in the battle between civic righteousness and the underworld.”

  In November 1928 the city elected a new District Attorney, Buron Fitts, who would keep the job until 1940. Controversial and tenacious, Fitts would see out the death throes of L.A.’s adolescence and survive the depressed years of the city’s early maturity. He would be a key and ultimately compromised figure both in that transition and in the struggle for reform. He was big-nosed, big-talking, anti-labor, anti-radical, anti-liquor, still—at age thirty-three—young, and a favorite of Harry Chandler, publisher of the Times. Photographs show a shaven-headed, bright-eyed, mean-faced man gazing at the camera, unsure whether to snarl or smile. Soon after his election, he struck out a city ordinance that had legalized slot machines and staged raids on downtown nightclubs and gambling ships off Long Beach, making sure that the press tagged along. Throughout his career, Fitts knew the value of a photo op. He was more a politician than a lawyer.

  Fitts reshaped the D.A.’s office, getting rid of the previous regime’s deadwood and retaining a staff nucleus of only thirteen assistant D.A.s, a number to which he would quickly add new recruits. Dave Clark—fresh from the Marco triumph—was among those kept on, and Fitts handed Clark both a salary increase and greater responsibilities within the trials department. Clark celebrated by buying a couple of new suits, and driving with Nancy to Agua Caliente for dinner; they danced in the ballroom and toasted with champagne.