Thrilling Cities
Page 9
This solid bit of police intelligence work in progress is typical of Hamilton. He is a powerfully built, good-looking man of Scottish ancestry, aged about fifty-five, and he has held his post in the second biggest Police Department in America for some ten years. He has often been used by Erle Stanley Gardner as a source of police material and also by the late Raymond Chandler. Dragnet was written around the Los Angeles Police force, and Hamilton provided much of the material and vetted all the scripts. When I had last visited him, five years before, he was finishing an operation to rid Los Angeles of big out-of-town gangsters who were trying to muscle in on the territory. He had told me that the Los Angeles police were capable of looking after local crime, but what they feared were hook-ups with Chicago and New York mobs which would make his task infinitely more difficult. So he put his territory out of bounds to the rest of the American crime syndicates. The way he did it was to have one or two innocent-looking plain-clothes men posted at the airport and the railroad station. (No self-respecting gangster would travel across America by motor car.) These detectives were armed with concealed cameras in a book, an overnight bag, or some such innocent object. On the arrival of a plane or train, they watched the passengers and took photographs of any suspected or known criminal. Once identified, the man would be followed to his hotel or apartment building. From then on he would be ‘leaned upon’. The process of ‘leaning on’ an undesirable is extraordinarily effective. Whenever Mr X left his room, he would find two plain-clothes detectives walking at either side of him at his elbow. If he went into a drugstore for breakfast, the men would sit on either side of him and order the same breakfast as he did. If he took a cab, the detectives would follow and, when he got out, range themselves again alongside him. The same thing would happen at lunch and dinner. Not a word would be spoken and the man would not be molested. After as little as twenty-four hours of this treatment, added to the certainty that his telephone was being tapped, the gangster would have had enough of it and leave town.
But now, Hamilton explained to me, things were not so easy. The mob was back in Los Angeles, but this time in the labour protection racket. He opened the drawer in front of him and passed over a hundred-dollar bill. ‘That was stuffed in one of my men’s pockets yesterday by this guy.’ He had the police card on his desk. Attached to it was the usual harsh police photograph. It showed a glowering man with an Italian name. He had a string of convictions for carrying arms, violence and manslaughter, but his latest description was ‘labour organizer’. ‘It’s the same old story all over the country, but without the sub-machine guns,’ explained Hamilton. ‘Protection, extortion, sabotaged machinery, a fire in your factory. All under the cloak of the labour unions. And, of course, the dues are collected by men like that’ – he pointed to the photograph– ‘and after they’ve had their cut the rest goes to the big union bosses who send their kids to Columbia and Vassar. They’ve put away the pineapples and choppers. Nowadays, crime’s gone respectable.’
‘Los Angeles has become a Mecca for the dregs of civilization.’ Who said that? Not Mr Khrushchev, who was given a most unfriendly welcome by the town. Those are the words of the Chief of Los Angeles Police, W. H. Parker, faced with an annual increase in crime which is positively staggering, with burglary, grand larceny and rape, for instance, over one hundred and fifty per cent up over the 1950 rate. Crime, says the Chief of Police, has increased six times as fast as the total population of Los Angeles city and twice as fast as all business activity in Southern California. But the worst of it, said Hamilton, was narcotics, and the increase in juvenile crime by around fifty per cent. Of the latter, the forthright Chief of Police has written:
Crime among youth is encouraged and nurtured by:
The decline and fall of mid-Victorian values in Anglo-American civilization, leaving the individual to mature in a society that fails to establish a clear moral definition of right and wrong.
The direct influence of adult criminality or, in other cases, by a passive contempt by a large section of our adult population for law and order.
The increasing emphasis of our society upon not only materialism, but upon materialism without effort.
A cultural imbalance between Man’s advancement in technology and a commensurate level of conduct. Thus we are attempting to substitute scientific proficiency for social responsibility.
These are strong words. I dare say we in Britain would second them.
But to return to narcotics. Captain Hamilton said that the F.B.I. had estimated that in Los Angeles County alone there were six thousand confirmed dope-addicts and that the number was now increasing at the rate of one thousand a month. These staggering figures (there are four hundred and forty-two registered drug-addicts in the whole of the United Kingdom) are due to the almost wide-open supply of narcotics over the Mexican border, only some hundred and fifty miles away. There was no way of controlling this traffic, said Captain Hamilton. Every week-end, ten or twenty thousand motor cars cross the frontier for the Mexican horse-races. To search this vast number of cars was an impossibility. The Mexican Government refused to do anything about their poppy-growing industry, which was the source of the opium and heroin. ‘What the hell do they want all those poppies for in Mexico?’ said Captain Hamilton angrily. ‘Table decoration? It’s time the State Department did something about it.’ His only hope, he said, was to make drug-peddling so hazardous that the market would dry up.
‘But how the hell are you going to do that?’ he asked. ‘My department has to look after four hundred and sixty square miles of territory with a police force that has increased seven times less than the increase in crime. We’ve 1.88 police officers to every thousand population. Add to that the biggest traffic-policing job in the world and you can guess how many men we’ve got to spare for the narcotics business. Last year the number of narcotic arrests was five thousand seven hundred. We seized hundreds of pounds of marihuana, cocaine, heroin, opium, peyote and the rest. But that’s a drop in the ocean. With this spread down to the teenagers (we arrested around two thousand of them for narcotic violations in 1958), what the heck do the citizens expect us to do? Nobody likes arresting juveniles – it’s a last resort. But somebody’s got to keep an eye on these kids and save them from themselves. Their parents won’t do it.’
Hamilton explained: ‘You see how it is. You have a couple with children. The father goes out to his business and comes home whacked in the evening. The mother wants to earn a bit of extra money, so she takes some light work in a near-by factory. There she’s got plenty of company and new friends and some simple manual task that’s a million times easier than looking after a bunch of squawking kids – you know what hell they can raise. So the kids are looked after by neighbours and baby-sitters and, when they are around ten years old, they just go out on the streets. Then they get caught up in the local teenage gangs, start smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor. Then one of the older boys says, “Why not try a puff of this? It really sends you.” Then, a bit later, the older boy says, “You can make good money peddling these around your school.” And there you are! The circuit’s complete.’
It all made very clear sense to me, and I said so. So what was he doing about it?
Well, said Captain Hamilton, he had tried the obvious course – penetrating the rings by stool-pigeons. He had taken young trainees straight from the Police Academy and had them taught all the tricks and lingo of the narcotic traffic, fixed them up with dirty lodgings and off-beat clothes and had sent them into the Los Angeles underworld like ferrets after rabbits. In due course these lads moved from one pedlar to the next until Hamilton had organized a big swoop and had got one hundred and twenty-six drug-pedlars under arrest. Then had come the pay-off. Thanks to a famous case, The People v. McShann, of October 1958, in America the prosecution must disclose the identity of an individual when he is a material witness. The judge ruled accordingly in this instance. To save the lives of his stool-pigeons, Hamilton had had to withdraw the charges against ninety o
ut of the one hundred and twenty-six traffickers. This McShann decision effectively prevents the police from using undercover agents to ferret out crime. Other recent court decisions restrict the police in searching a suspect before he is arrested, wire-tapping, or installing dictographs. Suspects may now make one private telephone call from jail, as opposed to the usual police call to the arrested man’s attorney, employer or relative. This allows one member of a crime ring, in the course of a seemingly innocent conversation, to alert all the rest of his gang.
Hamilton had, of course, known the McShann decision before he brought his case and, to dodge the decision, he had arranged that, after a stool-pigeon had obtained the address of a trafficker, he would pass the address back to headquarters and the actual purchase of narcotics would be carried out by an ordinary plain-clothes detective. Even this had not succeeded. The judge had still ruled that the original informant, the stool-pigeon, should be produced in court.
Hamilton quoted two typical cases of over-humanized law from an address given by Virgil Peterson, Director of the Chicago Crime Commission, to the American Bar Association. (The Commission is the heir to the famous ‘Secret Six’ formed by Chicago businessmen to combat Al Capone and his rivals.) In the first case, an officer testified that he was on his regular beat as a motor-cycle cop when he received a radio call reporting a burglary in process in an apartment building. He immediately went to that address. Upon finding nothing suspicious on the first floor, he went to the second floor where he saw two suspicious-looking men coming towards the stairway leading through the hall. He questioned them and observed that the pockets of one of them were bulging. Upon searching the two men the officer found a bracelet, camera and cigarette case engraved with the initials of the victim whose apartment had just been burgled. All the property recovered had been stolen from that apartment. When the men were taken to court, it was ruled that the police officer did not observe the men in the hall committing any crime, nor did he know that, in fact, a crime had been committed. Therefore, arrest and search were ‘unreasonable’. The police evidence was suppressed and the two burglars were turned loose. One of them had a record going back twenty years with a total of thirty-nine arrests, a number of which were for burglary and possession of burglary tools.
On that very same day, June 4th, 1958, two officers who were on routine patrol saw a black Ford coming out of an alley running parallel to a bowling establishment. The officers did not then know that the bowling alley had been burgled, but the black Ford made a sharp turn at a high rate of speed and their suspicions were aroused. They gave chase and succeeded in forcing the Ford to stop. One of the men in the Ford tried to run for it while his confederate remained crouched on the floor of the car. On searching the Ford, the officers found 2,455 dollars and some cheques, as well as a sledge-hammer, crowbar and two guns. Again the court, applying the Federal exclusionary rule of evidence, held that when the officers stopped the Ford they did not then know, in fact, that a crime had been committed and, since they did not observe the defendants violate the law, the arrest, search and seizure were unreasonable. The police evidence was suppressed and the two burglars were turned loose. Both had previous criminal records.
These two extraordinary cases rest on Justice Frankfurter’s famous Mallory decision when a convicted rapist appealed to the Supreme Court. This opinion states that: ‘The police may not arrest upon “mere suspicion”, but only upon “probable cause” … The arrested person may, of course, be “booked” by the police but he is not to be taken to police headquarters in order to carry out a process of inquiry that lends itself, even though not so designed, to elicit damaging statements to support the arrest and ultimately his guilt.’ On this decision, Mallory, a confessed and convicted rapist, was turned loose – as were the burglars mentioned above.
Hamilton said there were countless similar cases of this nature where a known criminal was protected by an overall humanizing of legal procedure which, while entirely desirable in the protection of the innocent from wrongful arrest, search, etc., was, in effect, giving criminals almost limitless sanctuary. ‘If the courts go on leaning too far backwards to maintain theoretical individual rights,’ said Hamilton, ‘we shall end up by tying the hands of law enforcement so tightly that we shall destroy the first law of the individual – the right of self-preservation.’
‘Here in America,’ he said, ‘we have got these problems – a vast narcotics industry that’s ruining our youth, teenage gangs, the Mafia, the big crime syndicates, graft of every kind and description – what amounts to a soaring crime wave – and the police are being told to do something about it. And what happens? A good officer makes an arrest of a criminal with a record as long as your arm and next thing he’s pounding a beat for the rest of his life because of some crazy court decision. Everybody’s in favour of the rights of the citizen, but that doesn’t mean that the drug trafficker should have super-rights. It don’t make sense.’
I said we also had our troubles in England. There had recently been the case of a man called Podola who had shot a policeman and, because he had got a black eye in the course of his arrest, had almost been made into a public hero. It seemed to me there were periods when the liberal spirit got a little bit out of hand. On this diplomatic note we parted company and Captain Hamilton sent me back to the Beverly Hills Hotel in a prowl car on whose radio I listened to a pair of police helicopters regulating the traffic on the famous Los Angeles Freeway over which, with its connecting roads, 630,000 vehicles would have travelled during this twenty-four hours. It seemed to me that Captain Hamilton and the rest of his department had one hell of a problem fighting crime and the legislature at the same time. As the movie mogul had remarked earthily to me at lunch regarding some similar dichotomy: ‘You can’t sit on two chairs with one bottom.’
*
At night, from an aeroplane, the great gambling resort of Las Vegas looks like a twinkling golden river in the black vastness of the Mojave Desert across the high Sierra from Los Angeles. Alongside the ranks of slot machines in the small airport is an automatic machine that, in exchange for a dime, gives you a quick shot of pure oxygen if you apply your face to a rubber mouthpiece. This, according to the machine, stimulates, calms the nerves, and gives you encouragement. You need all of that if you are going to take on the casinos, who pay taxes on a declared profit of $80 million a year but are believed to bring in a further $450 million that somehow don’t get included in the accounts. I duly indulged with no perceptible result and proceeded to the Tropicana (happily placed on the corner of Bond Road and the Strip), the latest of the million-dollar hotels that has sprung up on the famous Strip.
It was ten o’clock at night and the casino, so arranged in all the Strip hotels that you cannot move in any direction without passing through it, was crowded.
It was nearly midnight and I was exhausted after my two high-pressure days in Hollywood, but I was determined to test out my luck. I changed two five-dollar bills into the single silver dollar cartwheels that are the common currency of Las Vegas and walked boldly up to a dollar machine. There is every shape and size of slot machine in Las Vegas, and the different models swallow anything from a dollar down to a copper cent. This one had a particularly intimidating expression. Heat radiated from its brilliant coloured lights and from its disgusting machinery, but I thought it looked a worthy opponent for my strong right arm. It offered a series of odds ranging up to a jackpot of $150, and this small fortune suggested that it had been set for a formidable percentage in favour of the House. A House can set these machines to pay any percentage it wishes and they can be adjusted daily. Normally the percentage is around ten per cent to the House but, if a particular establishment is doing badly, a row of machines can be adjusted to pay a small percentage in favour of the customer. The news of this bonanza row gets round Las Vegas like lightning and the slot-machine addicts pour in and fill the establishment up until, at dead of night, the mechanics come and readjust the odds and the House gets back into
the money again.
I squared up to my monster and fed it ten single dollars. With each pull of the handle lights blinked and the stars, oranges, plums and those three rosy cherries whirred merrily. Then would come the heavy clonk as my dollar fell into the damnable iron belly and that deep, metallic sigh that meant a nil return. In this way I disbursed very quickly all my ten dollars and said to myself: ‘I told you so. This machine has an evil face. It’s an evil machine. Try and get your money back on a quarter dollar machine.’ I duly changed a further ten dollars into quarters and warily examined the ranks of quarter machines. Two of them had rather pretty, friendly faces, and, sure enough, the first of these started to dribble coins back at me. (In view of what is to come, I record the fact that the machine is the Star Chief, number 306/301 in the Tropicana Hotel and it announces in large letters ‘Joker Wild with all winning combinations. Seventeen ways to a jackpot.’) I scrabbled these out of the iron mouth and suddenly, remembering some bowdlerized Nannie’s dictum of childhood, it crossed my mind that it would be lucky not to scrabble them all out but to leave one behind ‘for the pot’. At once there came more and healthier dribbles and my right-hand trouser pocket began to get heavy.
Suddenly the handle stuck. A stony-eyed deputy sheriff with a pistol hanging from a belt lined with brass cartridges came up. He gave one glance at the machine and said, ‘You forgot to put a quarter in. Funny. Our machines don’t work until you put money in them.’ I swallowed the sneer with good grace, and, now inspired, began playing both the two friendly looking machines, one with each hand. Now they both started sicking up coins for me. By some miracle I had obviously struck a couple of one-armed bandits that were really ‘hot’, and then, in quick succession, came not one, but two $25 jackpots and coins fairly vomited out of the machines and even spilt over and rolled on the floor. My right leg was almost anchored to the floor by its burden of silver, and people at neighbouring machines were beginning to stare at me – the man with the golden arm. But now the machines were going cold and only an occasional triple cherry came to cheer me. Wisely, and fearing for the seams of my trouser pocket, I went back to the old grannie at the caisse (no doubt the old girl had lost her pension at the machines and ‘Gamblers Anonymous’ had converted her from felon into wardress) and unloaded my hundredweight of silver in front of her. She poured the coins into a perforated aluminium soup plate, pressed a button and the coins whirled and disappeared down a hole. Numbers appeared on the machine and she paid me seventy dollars.