Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Young Bill Parsons was advised that more reliable money could be found elsewhere. As a policeman, he was told, he had certain privileges. For starters, there was legitimate moonlighting. Foreclosures, one of the few growth industries in the 1930s, relied on off-duty policemen to provide force for the hated banks. A third of all the legal work at the time was in taking back property. And it wasn’t just failed mortgages that led to foreclosure; many people couldn’t pay for the most basic of services. One woman lost her home because she was behind on a twenty-four-dollar sewer bill. Old and sick, she begged a pair of Spokane policemen to let her die in her home. Attempting to cut a deal during her eviction, she promised to leave her house to the city if they let her live her last months inside. The city took the home and kicked the woman out.

  As a hub for miners, lumberjacks, fruit-pickers, railroad workers, and assorted farmhands who’d lost their tenuous link to the land, Spokane had always been a town where the most urgent of vices—sex and booze and gambling—were well serviced. Just before the start of statewide prohibition in 1913, there were seventy-eight saloons within the small downtown area. Nearly twenty years later, in the dying years of the dry era, a newspaper survey found eighty-six illegal liquor joints. Chinese workmen, who had stayed long after the railroads were built, set up a thriving lottery business and sold opium to regular customers. Farm girls who couldn’t make it on tired fields found easy work hopping from laptop to laptop of saloon clients. At least forty-two Spokane establishments burned the red lampshade of the brothel in their windows after dark. The toils of liquor-consuming and ass-chasing went on almost exclusively in a ten-block section downtown, on the south banks of the river, across from the falls. The gentry—those families enriched during the boom years around the turn of the century—lived above all the riffraff, on the South Hill, in elegant mansions shaded by thick oaks. They promoted their town through annual marketing reports, issued by the Spokesman-Review, the morning daily; they produced an official version of city history that was like a Christmas card from a fractured family, omitting all mention of the bruises or beatings. The paper trumpeted the virtues of a city with 156 churches, a “negro population of less than one-half-of-one percent,” a place where “white and native-born people far exceed the general average.”

  Just south of the crashing torrent of Spokane Falls, at the center of the vice factories, was a six-story stone building erected in 1912: headquarters of the police department. When Bill Parsons first walked out of that building in 1935, he beamed, wearing a uniform of navy blue, a cap with a badge atop its brim, polished leather shoes, and the confidence of a young man who’d found secure job footing amidst an economy where the earth had moved. Before the Depression, everyone seemed obsessed with how much his neighbor made; after 1929, the talk was of how much he had lost.

  Hundreds of men applied for the five openings in the police department that year. They didn’t need a high school degree or any knowledge of law enforcement or particular skill at shooting a pistol. What the department was looking for were men who could kick butt and walk away from it, men who wouldn’t burden the pension system with their broken noses, back problems, bad teeth, or flat feet.

  Pictures of the new officers ran in the Spokesman-Review, five young patrolmen whom the civil service commissioner labeled “as fine a bunch of men as I have seen in a long time.” Each face stared out sternly, already wearing the sphinxlike visage of the cop—except for Bill Parsons. He was a stunning looker, with perfect teeth, smooth skin, thick, dark hair, and sleepy, half-lidded eyes that in a later time might have been compared with those of Elvis Presley. His cap was half-cocked, on the side, and he smiled in a jaunty, got-the-world-by-the-tail look.

  Parsons weighed in at nearly two hundred pounds; his upper body was knotted and hard, his hands shiny from calluses. Before moving to Spokane, he had labored in the forests of northern Idaho, fighting fires, building trails, sawing through the four-foot-thick waistbands of Ponderosa pines. Parsons was not afraid of the raw elements of the rural West. What’s more, his confidence was bolstered by a moral code forged in the woods. A guy had to be loyal. A guy had to be fair. A guy couldn’t cheat another guy out of something that was rightfully his. So when twenty-five-year-old Bill Parsons first walked out of the stone building as a Spokane police officer, he found his philosophy inscribed on a statue of Abraham Lincoln looking west from a perch above the falls. The words read:

  Let us have faith

  That right makes might

  And in that faith

  Let us to the end

  Dare to do our duty

  As we understand it.

  As Parsons understood it, his duty was to walk a beat, fists and billy club ever ready, looking for vagrants, miscreants, petty thieves, drunks, and Reds. He was to respond when a good citizen asked for help. More important, he was to watch for outsiders—suspicious characters looking for trouble. The city seemed to be full of such individuals in 1935. For months, the transit workers had been on strike, complaining they couldn’t feed their families on their meager wages from the city. Spokane’s political leaders would not budge. There was no money to fill potholes, no money for jail food, no money for parks, no money for the zoo, which closed its doors and gave away the animals, and no money for city workers. After several months, they began to hire scabs from the ranks of the farmer families pouring in from Oklahoma and Texas. The striking workers went on a rampage, smashing windows at transit headquarters and blowing up one transit car with dynamite. During a riot, the entire police force was called out to smash heads and arrest strikers.

  Then there were the new workers from the East, blacks mostly, who’d been sent from such places as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago to Spokane for three-dollar-a-day government jobs. In 1935, Roosevelt introduced the Works Progress Administration—the centerpiece of his New Deal job program. The West was treated like a long-neglected yard, ready for chores. The newcomers from the East were put to work building a road to Mount Spokane, north of the city around Deadman’s Creek. They slept under big tents or assembled shacks of their own. By day, they were given picks and shovels and told to plow their way up the mountain. At night, many of the men came in for a drink at Jimmy Young’s, a second-floor walk-up just two blocks from the police station, or for a dance at the Cotton Club, on First Avenue, a few blocks the other way. Too often, a Saturday night’s relaxation turned into a vagrancy charge.

  The city leaders had a particular distrust of anyone who attempted to disrupt the political order. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, Spokane enforced laws that made free assembly, public speaking, and certain demonstrations illegal. Since the Cowles family controlled both newspapers—a profitable monopoly—the hardy perennials who held office were invariably Protestant Republicans approved by the paper’s editorial board. The raw political energy down below, where the vice pits and shantytowns clustered along the river’s shore, was feared, and not easily cornered. It could spring from the compost of discontent—a beer parlor, a union hall, a Civilian Conservation Corps hiring camp—and quickly take hold. The city’s solution was to outlaw certain types of free speech.

  Spokane had changed very little since the most famous fight over free speech. In 1908, members of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, known as the Wobblies, converged on the city to stage a public-speaking marathon. Several hundred Wobblies who were trying to organize timber and mining camps had been arrested, charged with being union rabble rousers. To protest the arrests, thousands of Wobblies came to Spokane from all over the West. They arrived with soapboxes and took up positions on the street, where they proceeded to advocate revolution, unionism, one-worldism, and a host of other utopian ideals. The city council promptly passed a law prohibiting street speeches, and when the Wobs held forth from their soapboxes as usual, they were arrested. The jail was so full that a nearby high school had to be opened up in order to hold all the street orators. The Salvation Army took exception to the new l
aw, so the council passed a loophole, which outlawed free speech in public places except that with musical accompaniment. In response, the Wobs starting singing their slogans. They were still arrested. Even in 1935, long after most of the Wobblies had faded away, the official yearbook of the Spokane Police Department recorded dozens of arrests for speaking without a permit or handing out flyers without a license.

  Bill Parsons made his rounds, a bit confused by the rules he was supposed to enforce. His baby face had a way of drawing raised fists. In two months of police work, he picked up more cuts and bruises than he did during years of tramping in the woods of northern Idaho. Around the police station, he was starting to hear things. How could the sergeant afford a new Buick—a five-passenger sedan priced at nine hundred dollars—on his salary, with two kids and a wife to support? What was the night-shift captain doing in the Cotton Club, after hours, with the town’s biggest bootlegger? There was a lot of talk about liquid cash, trade secrets, payers and players. The words were barely concealed. Surely, nothing spoken within the stone fortress of police headquarters would ever leave the building.

  Outside, the natural world seemed to be falling apart, from dust storms in the Columbia Basin to forest fires in Idaho to earthquakes in Montana. The man-made world was no better, with lines of hungry people snaked around the block of the big soup kitchen at Sacred Heart Hospital, and the streetcars unsafe to ride for fear of a striker’s bomb blast. But inside police headquarters, one thing had not changed: the Cop Code. The worse things became, the more the tribe of the Spokane Police Department closed ranks, for mutual gain and mutual defense.

  The way a rookie cop learned the job was to follow a journeyman around. There was no police academy. No rudimentary introduction to the law. No courses in when to fire a weapon or in legal rights. During his first months on the force, Parsons was introduced to Dan Mangan, a patrolman six years his senior. Most rookies were afraid of Mangan, with his big hands, his lightning scowl, and his small eyes glowering behind wire-rim glasses. With a select bunch of friends, he was a cutup. Angered, he was a terror. Mangan was one of only a handful of officers to be hailed as “physically perfect” during the annual physical of 1935, something that he never let any of the muscularly inferior officers forget. Mangan told Parsons that being a policeman presented all sorts of opportunities. Just watch.

  Liquor came from one of several gangs that made hooch in town and retailed it to the clubs, or from a connection in Canada. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 did nothing to change the way Spokane’s speakeasies did business. The states could still enact their own laws. Washington allowed beer parlors to operate, providing suds with no more than 3.2 percent alcohol; but it was illegal to sell liquor by the glass. So many clubs, which specialized in moody piano music and healthy shots of bourbon for a quarter, continued to flourish throughout the thirties. There were actually more bootleggers in town after Prohibition was repealed than there were during the dry years.

  One big-time mover, Albert Commellini, used to buy corn sugar by the truckload. When Parsons was introduced to him, the rookie asked him what he did with all that sugar. “I make good pies,” Commellini replied. Mangan howled. Commellini was a swell guy—a regular, Mangan said. At first, Parsons didn’t understand what he meant by that. A regular? In his inaugural months on the street he had heard the story about the big shipment of whiskey that arrived one day from Canada, an attempt to horn in on well-marked territory. It was hijacked by a Spokane police officer and promptly delivered to Commellini.

  Every six months or so, the newspapers would call for an investigation, and the federal prosecutor would make alarming sounds in front of a grand jury. Then the clamor would die down; among the clients of some of the best-known and most profitable clubs were assistant prosecutors, defense lawyers, and reporters. By day, they professed to be shocked—shocked—at what was going on in the queen city of the self-proclaimed richest empire in the Western Hemisphere. By night, they warmed regular seats at the Cotton Club or at the second-floor speakeasy of Jimmy Young.

  The night shift, midnight to eight, was Mangan’s most lucrative time. Making the rounds, he could count on at least one envelope from a club—the usual price of doing business. Sometimes, Mangan told young Parsons, you could double your salary just by knowing which way to walk. Parsons was appalled. He wanted to tell somebody what he’d seen and heard. But of course there was no one to tell.

  On duty, Officer Mangan was especially good at working with his hands. He knew how to pry open a slot machine and was quick enough that he never got caught. He could crack virtually any lock with a flick of a small tool—a skill that came in handy at a butcher shop on his beat. Mangan and his circle of police friends and hangers-on ate well during the dark days of 1935. Another shop, a candy store north of the river, was also a favorite target of Officer Mangan. He knew how to loosen a back window so it would pop open, allowing him enough space to crawl through. Inside, he would find sugar, butter, tools, occasional cash. Back at the station, Mangan made no effort to conceal the fruits of his labors; he shared the booty with his regular friends and boasted of how he had done it.

  The small-time merchants Mangan was stealing from were people living on the edge, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days to take home thirty dollars a week. In a year when 40 percent of the state’s citizens were without steady income, it burned in Parsons’s gut to think that a cop, whose salary was paid by their taxes, was taking from the few people trying to hold on. He didn’t consider himself a snitch. You could call a guy an Okie, a Red, a nigger, a bindle stiff; but to be labeled a snitch was a death sentence. Turning away from the talk among other officers, Parsons was determined to do legitimate police work, something to make him stand out, to justify his selection above the hungry hundreds who wanted his job. When the civil service commissioner included him as one of the “fine … bunch of men” upholding the laws of the city of Spokane, Parsons wore the compliment like ranch initials engraved on cowhide.

  Walking his beat in the summer of 1935, the rookie wondered what he could do about the surge in burglaries. Across the state line, in Idaho a young sheriff’s deputy was celebrated as a hero when he caught somebody in the act of stealing beans and wheat from a farm. The thief was loading up a truck with food in the middle of the night when the deputy nabbed him. The arrest spurred talk among the merchants and creamery men: if only they could get a similar break in the Spokane area.… Parsons was ambitious. To catch the butter thief—that would be a coup.

  But what Parsons was learning from veteran cops had very little to do with police work. The other officers were starting to turn away from him, keeping their secrets in a circle which broke up when Parsons came near. They had nice clothes to change into when the shift was up, cars that could make a fellow proud, and cash for food, whiskey, a hunting rifle. Parsons took home his twenty-seven dollars a week, but after paying for rent and food and giving a bit to his family, he had very little left. The rap on Parsons, early on, was that he wasn’t a go-along-and-get-along guy.

  By contrast, William Harrison “Hacker” Cox, who had joined the department just before Parsons, was already deemed one of the boys and had become a drinking buddy of Mangan’s. Cox was chunky and loud, in a patronizing, back-slapping way. While waiting to be hired by the police department—he had scored high enough on the civil service test to be ranked near the top—Cox had been arrested for bootlegging and brawling in a hotel room one night. On his way to the station, he told Officer Clyde Phelps that the arrest would ruin his chances of joining the force. So he was booked under the name William Harrison, and when his number came up for hire at the police department and he was asked if he’d ever been arrested, he shook his head, knowing his real name wouldn’t be connected to the bootlegger who’d been picked up a few months earlier. Phelps, Mangan, and a few others knew his secret, but that was the nature of the department—a conspiracy of small corruptions.

  The Spokane County prosecutor, Ralph Foley (whose son, T
homas S. Foley, would, many years later, become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives), knew how badly compromised the Spokane Police Department had become. When he wanted to raid one of the Chinese gambling dens downtown in Trent Alley, he bypassed the city police and used cops from the county sheriff’s office. After the raid, Foley’s name was shit inside the stone fortress. Most patrolmen and some of the detectives felt they were getting more consideration from the bootleggers and the club owners—at least they were respectful, treating an officer of the law like somebody who mattered.

  On duty one night in midsummer, Parsons saw a truck loading from a rear entrance of a garage on Riverside Avenue, about ten blocks from the police station. Cases of whiskey, scotch, bourbon, and vodka were being transferred from the rear to the unmarked truck. Parsons jumped out, ordering the men to stop.

  “Who are you?” came a gruff reply.

  “Parsons. Spokane Police.”

  “Don’t recognize the name.”

  Parsons was asked if he knew Officer Mangan, or Officer Cox, or perhaps Detective Clyde Ralstin. Yes, of course, Parsons knew them. The connection established, the men continued loading the truck. Parsons persisted. They asked him if he was a troublemaker. “You want to settle this,” said the man who appeared to be in charge, “go across the street, get Clyde Ralstin.”

  Parsons looked to the other side of the street, at Mother’s Kitchen, an all-night diner where Ralstin, Mangan, and other cops hung out. Parsons felt alone, a man without a tribe.

  “Here,” the liquor-loading foreman said, stuffing a pair of ten-dollar bills into an envelope and handing it to Parsons. “Take this and run along.”

  Parsons stared at the envelope, the truck, and across the street: Mother’s Kitchen was lit up with warmth and camaraderie. It radiated a glow of security, of belonging. The train whistle blew; another load of people with long faces, empty stomachs, and the resolve to find a job in this hub of the richest empire stumbled out of boxcars.