Read Online A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Richard Rayner
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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. Los 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.
Fitts also restructured the D.A.’s investigative unit. He brought in a friend, Lucien Wheeler, a onetime presidential bodyguard and former Los Angeles bureau chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI, the predecessor of the FBI), to head up the show. Wheeler let go many of the incumbent staff and started to recruit a new team. Within weeks he had more than 3,100 applications on file for some thirty jobs.
Meanwhile, Leslie White had been wondering what to do with his life. One day at his aunt’s house in Hollywood, he was delighted to be visited by friends from Ventura County. They came in with long faces because the word back in Ventura had been that Leslie White was at death’s door. They were amazed to find him on his feet and hear him say he was itching to get back to work. One had heard about Buron Fitts’s new investigative unit and suggested, “Why not apply?”
Armed with letters of recommendation, White went again to the Hall of Justice, this time riding the elevator to the seventh floor and the D.A.’s office. He was young and green, but his experiences as a deputy in Ventura and during the St. Francis Dam disaster worked in his favor. He’d photographed and identified hundreds of corpses so was at least unfazed by the sight of death. He landed a job specializing in the gathering of material evidence. Police forensics was then in its infancy. Fingerprint classification, corpse temperature graphs to determine the time of death, and the comparison microscope for bullets were still relatively new techniques. In 1923 the forward-looking August Vollmer, then briefly head of the LAPD, had created America’s first crime lab. Now Fitts’s office would have one too. Leslie White would become, in his way, a pioneer and a crusader. “Politically Los Angeles was in a panic. The reformers were sweeping into every office, looting and pillaging the old system. Having reached the saturation point of corruption, the old regime had been driven from power and the ‘revolution’ was on,” as he
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. Los 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.
Fitts also restructured the D.A.’s investigative unit. He brought in a friend, Lucien Wheeler, a onetime presidential bodyguard and former Los Angeles bureau chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI, the predecessor of the FBI), to head up the show. Wheeler let go many of the incumbent staff and started to recruit a new team. Within weeks he had more than 3,100 applications on file for some thirty jobs.
Meanwhile, Leslie White had been wondering what to do with his life. One day at his aunt’s house in Hollywood, he was delighted to be visited by friends from Ventura County. They came in with long faces because the word back in Ventura had been that Leslie White was at death’s door. They were amazed to find him on his feet and hear him say he was itching to get back to work. One had heard about Buron Fitts’s new investigative unit and suggested, “Why not apply?”
Armed with letters of recommendation, White went again to the Hall of Justice, this time riding the elevator to the seventh floor and the D.A.’s office. He was young and green, but his experiences as a deputy in Ventura and during the St. Francis Dam disaster worked in his favor. He’d photographed and identified hundreds of corpses so was at least unfazed by the sight of death. He landed a job specializing in the gathering of material evidence. Police forensics was then in its infancy. Fingerprint classification, corpse temperature graphs to determine the time of death, and the comparison microscope for bullets were still relatively new techniques. In 1923 the forward-looking August Vollmer, then briefly head of the LAPD, had created America’s first crime lab. Now Fitts’s office would have one too. Leslie White would become, in his way, a pioneer and a crusader. “Politically Los Angeles was in a panic. The reformers were sweeping into every office, looting and pillaging the old system. Having reached the saturation point of corruption, the old regime had been driven from power and the ‘revolution’ was on,” as he
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