The Laughing Gorilla: A True Story of Police Corruption and Murder

by Robert Graysmith

  A terrible suspicion lurked in the back of Tatham’s mind, one he was afraid to voice but one common sense told him had to be true. “My theory is”—Tatham closed the office door—“that these ‘petermen’ are being tipped off by someone on the inside.” Somehow the Phantom had timed the movements of both special and public police patrols to the second and was granted access to every door. No matter what trap they laid, the lanky ghost would be forewarned. As Frank Egan had once been, the Phantom had to be a policeman.

  “I sincerely hope not,” said Dullea. His shoulders slumped as he recalled Egan had known of some great corruption within the SFPD. Was this it?

  In April, the phone rang at a palm-shrouded, redbrick one-story, rebuilt in the Romanesque revival style. The Richmond Police Station on Sixth Avenue between Anza and Geary avenues was Dullea’s home in his rookie days when he covered his Richmond District beat (bounded by Fourteenth and Forty-eighth avenues, Lake and Fulton streets) by motorcycle. Even when patrol cars were introduced into this northwestern corner of the city, it was still so sparsely settled that Richmond Station never assigned more than one patrolman per car to the region.

  Back then, Dullea wore a round-topped billycock hat and a knee-length uniform coat with tails long enough to stow handcuffs and a serviceable blackjack, which he relied on because he was such a poor shot. Though his Marine Corps discharge papers, which he still kept in his desk drawer, had rated his character as “excellent,” they listed no firearms qualifications, even as a marksman. Dullea still carried the service pistol he had emptied at a fleeing gang of robbers in the Richmond. When he ran out of bullets the robbers turned, drew their guns, and began chasing him.

  Dullea had proudly trained at the knee of “The Dutchman of Richmond Station,” Sergeant Oliver L. Hassing. Hassing, a devoted husband, a father of three, and a well-respected model officer, was dark haired, craggy-faced, and amiable. Over his twenty-three years of spotless service, the Dutchman had been attached to the Traffic Bureau, a separate entity reporting directly to the Police Commission, then as a corporal at the Mission Station before being transferred to the Richmond Station. At the police desk, the Dutchman snatched up the receiver. “My name is Joseph Boberg,” the caller said. “I’m superintendent of the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist over at 300 Funston Ave.” Boberg reported he had seen a prowler around the church. “We have $500 in the safe at all times.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Dutchman. His expression had not brightened. His workload was considerable because he was working day and night. “I’ll make a report on it, and we’ll have the beat officer keep an eye on the place for you,” he said. “Now tell me everything.”

  Boberg was comforted for at least two weeks. That was when the Phantom’s White Mask Gang cracked Boberg’s church safe like an egg and stole every cent of its Easter collections.

  ELEVEN

  Gorilla: a hoodlum. A thug, or knuckle-dragger with lots of brawn, not much brain. A criminal with a fondness for strong-arm tactics. Long-armed Abe Lincoln was called the Illinois gorilla, Al Capone’s men were known as gorillas.

  —DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG

  ON February 17, 1934, fog bells were ringing low across the water as the first bracing portal of the new Golden Gate Bridge reached 480 feet above mean high water. This week alone the Marin-side bridge tower had consumed 570 tons of steel. Off Fort Point, the last of three eight-hour shifts were quitting work on the south pier excavation. The cabin liner Santa Cecilia out of New York a day late was just sailing past the Headlands to discharge forty disgruntled passengers onto the docks.

  From those docks, the White Mask Gang scurried like rats into an office at 188 Embarcadero Street, hammered the dial off a safe with a center punch and heavy hammer, and drove the spindle free of the tumblers and snatched $1,000. Two nights later, within the shadow of the Ferry Building, they smashed into the Alaska Fishermen’s Union at 49 Clay Street, located the safe’s soft spot, and drilled the spout out. Their appropriation of $3,477 of hardworking men’s cash plunged union secretary John Olson into such deep depression he killed himself.

  “All through 1933 and 1934,” Inspector Tatham recalled, “the burglars known as the White Mask Gang launched a breathtaking offensive, a shocking wave of crime month after month that had us at our wits’ end. . . . In previous years San Francisco’s police department had kept from the city all known ‘petermen,’ but now I was convinced we were trailing a new and clever gang who had learned their lawless trade without previous arrest or intervening prison terms. In other words, professional amateurs—an odd paradox.”

  On Easter Sunday morning, Dullea cursed aloud. He had provocation. Last Easter Sunday, the White Mask Gang had committed a burglary in the early morning hours. Now they’d done it again—jimmying open a side window at the Wilson Candy store on Clement Street and blowing the safe. On Saturday, May 5, the unscrupulous “yeggs”4 propped a ladder against a building adjoining the Fleischmann Yeast Company at 245 Eleventh Street, leaped the short distance to the other roof, and scurried down a light well. They prized the door off a fireproof safe with a crowbar (“a rip job”), crammed $500 in cash into a black bag, and blended into the heavy morning fog seconds ahead of arriving workers. Inadvertently, the Phantom had swiped a fortune in registered securities. Considerately, he mailed them back. By then Tatham and Inspector Bill Mudd had already wasted a night compiling a comprehensive list of the stolen bonds. When LaTulipe dusted the envelope he found no prints, watermarks, or other identifying marks.

  Midnight man John Davis was scrubbing down a delivery wagon outside the People’s Baking Company at 1800 Bryant Street when he heard a hollow laugh. Sponge in hand, he peered into a deep shadow cast by an arc light. A tall man with a long white handkerchief over his face was leaning against a wagon. “Raise ’em, buddy,” the Phantom said.

  With his gun, he motioned Davis inside into a small office segregated from a larger office by a plate-glass window where the gang waited. They bound and gagged Davis and baker Frank O’Neill and spread burlap sacking beneath the window to muffle the sound of falling glass. The gang climbed through to the safe. They laid out their tools on a blanket—three chisels, six drills, two pliers, three punches, two drill keys, one wire pick, one copper hammer (which would make little sound if dropped), a fulminating cap, a brace and bit, and a cake of Lux soap.

  The Phantom consulted a small black binder—an inch of mimeographed pages held together with three screw-headed brads. He disliked torches, which tended to incinerate any money inside, and preferred the old Civil War technique of pouring gunpowder into the crevices around the door seam and sealing the fissures with soap. The modern method, the “lock shot,” consisted of punching the safe by drilling holes into the lock spindle hole and stuffing them with nitroglycerin-soaked cotton. “Use the lock shot,” decided the Phantom. He uncorked a small bottle of homemade “soup” brewed by slowly boiling dynamite sticks in a kettle over a fire. Nitro rises as a clear, straw-colored film that can be skimmed off—dangerous work. The nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide created during the process can collapse your lungs. He walked as if on eggshells—that single eyedropper full was potent enough to jolt the safe’s door off its hinges.

  He inserted a charge of nitro-soaked cotton into a primed cartridge (a dynamite blasting cap and wire fuse) and exploded it with an electric detonator. That blast set off the larger nitro explosion. With a muffled whump! all four sides of the safe expanded, the tumblers released, and the heavy door—trailing smoke and sparks—launched itself through the smashed window and almost hit Davis. A second shot crumpled the steel compartment inside the safe without damaging the several strongboxes and $1,600 of currency. Leaving behind shards of glass, steel, and plaster, the gang faded away. Davis and O’Neill made themselves comfortable. They wouldn’t be discovered for hours. “They were cautious, clever, and astonishingly well-informed,” Davis told Tatham. “Good craftsmen. All around it was a neat job, and though I hate to, I’ve got to giv
e them credit.”

  When the gang took the Associated Grocers on Pacific Street for $4,000 and sped off in a waiting truck, cops patrolling less than a block away failed to notice. By summer, San Francisco was strike-ridden and aflame with labor riots. For almost two years the gang had been striking with impunity, but during the bloody unrest when every cop was on overtime cracking the skulls of agitators at the waterfront, they committed no robberies. When the Globe Brewing Company at 1423 Sansome Street left its doors open offering hospitality to patrolling police, the Phantom befriended Robert Graham, the elderly watchman, and engaged him in long conversations. After the strike ended, the police left, and longshoremen got back to work. So did the White Mask Gang. Now Tatham was certain the Phantom was a cop. Graham was going to work one night when a tall, white-masked figure blocked his path. “All right, Graham,” he said, “this is as far as you go.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  In reply, the Phantom split his skull and robbed the Globe.

  The Phantom’s string of precisely planned capers finally began to go awry on July 29, when he busted into the Golden State Milk Company’s main plant at 459 Bay Street, less than five blocks from Pier 33. The gang sealed employees Fred Frocade, Americo Frigole, and George Lombardi in the milk chilling vault. There were several dull roars, then cursing. The safe was empty. Milk worker Wayne Storey met the cracksmen going out. They pinioned his arms, debated whether to kill him, and settled for kicking him unconscious. On September 4, they smashed into the Coca-Cola plant and were almost surprised by a beat patrolman before wrangling a 1,500-pound vault containing $500 into their truck. They left it shattered on a Daly City mountain top. “I had that safe photographed and gone over inch-by-inch by La Tulipe,” said Tatham, “but the only prints were those of the employees.”

  On October 22, the gang found the cupboard bare at the Challenge Creamery and retreated so rapidly they left their best small drills behind.

  The Phantom’s end came at 10:45 P.M. on November 11 (Armistice Day). Mary Mardueno, an attractive dark-bobbed woman, noticed a light across the street from her tiny flat and went to her window overlooking the Majestic Bottling Plant at 36 Beideman. Across the wide thoroughfare, shafts of light were darting about the topmost floor. When they blacked out, Mary retired. At 11:57 P.M., a heavy roar shook her from her cozy bed. As she dialed the Western Addition Police Station, the concussion was still rumbling through the neighborhood and rattling window panes. Officer John “Andy” Johnson, a blond, triangular-faced young man, who was about to go off duty, snatched up the receiver. “There’s been an explosion at the Majestic Bottling Works,” Mary cried. “Wait, I can see lights inside again. . . . I think they’re burglars. . . . Yes! Hurry. Hurry! You can still catch them.”

  Sergeant Michael McCarthy, Andy, and five heavily armed uniformed officers in Sam Browne belts raced to the plant. “You are to hinder any escape by those still inside until we know what the hell’s going on,” McCarthy ordered.

  He stationed officers McNally, Desmond, and Nilan at the front, Jim Casey at the rear, and Tom Miller and Andy in the main yard. When Andy heard faint scuffling at the far end, he scaled the fence and crawled into the open space, when a cough from behind a pyramid of packing crates alerted him. He climbed over an iron grill into an alley and shone his flashlight up a ladder tilted against the building. Two men in white masks and leather gloves were cowering at the top. One was lean, sleepy-eyed, and unshaven; the other was a neckless, crop-eared giant with a can-shaped head, and toothbrush mustache.

  Though he didn’t know it, Andy had half the White Mask Gang in his light. Passing his prisoners off at the front gate, he returned and heard a long, weary sigh from inside the plant. Inside, he apprehended a third man in a long black coat.

  “Don’t,” the tall man mumbled. “Oh, for heaven’s sake . . . get me out of here.” The man licked his lips. “Don’t take me in. For the love of God, please let me go. You know me, Johnson. I’m an officer with the police. You know what this means to me. For God’s sake stand aside!”

  “You . . . you stand there!” said Andy, confused at finding an officer he had known for over a year in such hot water. Suddenly, he sighted a fourth man and gave chase. “Stay there,” he called back.

  The tall man fled, but was halted by Casey at the rear gate. “Who are you?” Casey demanded, covering him through the steel grill. “I am a police officer. Let me out . . . the gate—Wait, I will convince you. See.” He held a gold-encrusted star into the flashlight beam, but kept his thumb over the badge number and his hand up to his face as he backed away, smiling, waving, smiling and saying, “No problem . . . no problem . . .”

  In the top floor office, Andy smelled the strong odor of explosives. He called Dullea, who pulled on a hound’s-tooth suit, four-button vest, and gray hat and hurried to the scene, sleepy but excited. At last, some of the White Mask Gang was in custody! Leslie Orlandi, general manager of the plant, theorized the gang had entered through the basement by wriggling under a loading platform, opened a rear door facing the yard, and propped up a ladder for a quick getaway.

  “Because they couldn’t drill the door open,” said Dullea, “they went back and got some nitro. They used too much and that’s what woke Mrs. Mardueno. The strong blast only bulged out the sides of the safe, blowing open the combination, but failing to force open the inner strongbox. They must have run outside, then driven around the neighborhood to see if anyone had heard the explosion, then returned to the plant. They waited around the safe too long deciding what to do next. That’s how we surprised them.”

  “Too bad they didn’t know the safe was empty,” said Orlandi grinning. “Six days ago, Election Day, it was full.”

  Dullea inventoried the abandoned paraphernalia—an empty burlap bag, a square copper hammer, an assortment of chisels and drills, and, most interesting of all, a small loose-leaf binder containing a mimeographed instruction book titled The Manual of Safes. “This tells how to open safes,” he said. “It’s a reference work for locksmiths or, in this case, safecrackers.”

  The author’s name had been razored off. Under “Dials,” the 120-page typewritten handbook listed “Alpine, Champion, Hall, Liberty, McNeil & Urban, Phoenix, Reliable and Victor.” It contained information about drilling positions, explosives, and diagrams of dials, handles, corners, and acorns. It even advertised a tool to determine the combination of all wafer safes.

  Forty minutes later Andy drove to Tatham’s house for advice. “There’s been a big safe job at the Majestic bottling plant,” he said, “and we got two suspects in cuffs—Richard Frank [aka “Richard Frombee” and “Albert Wiener”] of 1595 Golden Gate Avenue and Kenneth “Tiny” Meyers [aka “Edward Martin” and “Clarence Wilson”] of 3578 California Street. When I went into the building I found this Station Officer. I told him to stand there. I chased a fourth man who had gone out the window, but he got away. When I returned the other man was gone.”

  Tatham realized he had momentarily detained the Phantom himself. “Johnson recognized the man,” he said, “but what could I do? The man in question was an officer and hadn’t been caught doing anything. The next day at dawn, trying to get more information, Inspector O’Neill and I drove to the City Prison to question Meyers and Frank in their cells. Meyers, though often arrested for robbery and burglary, invariably ‘beat the rap,’ at least on every San Francisco case.5 I asked Meyers if there were more than three men in the gang and Tiny named Frank Fitzpatrick as one.”

  Tatham knew Fitzpatrick, a former bootlegger, as one of a gang of burglars once protected by Frank Egan. But nothing in his background would enable him to be a master safecracker. “We drove to Fitzpatrick’s fifth floor Broderick Street apartment, but the room was ransacked. He had flown the coop. We went next to Richard Frank’s cell.”

  “Meyers confessed there were four in the gang,” Tatham told him.

  “Meyers has said a lot of things he shouldn’t have,” said Frank.

  “W
ell, what were you doing in the Majestic Bottling Plant at night? You are a two-time loser, aren’t you?”

  Frank then admitted Tiny had spoken the truth but demanded a deal before he named the fourth man. Instead, Tatham returned him to the holding tank at the end of a row of steel cages and asked Meyers, “Wasn’t a policeman in on it?”

  “Yes. He planned most of the jobs, sized up the safes to be blown and participated in the dynamiting operations. When he cased the Majestic Bottling Plant, he rented a flat on the O’Farrell Street side of the building and studied the comings and goings of the workers with binoculars for over a week.”

  The Phantom held a post at a district police station. Tiny preferred to write the name rather than speak it. “As I read the name it was still a stunning revelation,” said Tatham. “It was monstrous, this charge from Meyers—it left me ragged and numb, this ghastly thing. A policeman, a man sworn to enforce the law—consorting with cracksmen and thieves. . . . It was beyond conception! I mulled it over until my head ached.”

  At the District Station the night of the Majestic robbery the Jekyll and Hyde cop had returned unexpectedly from a ten-day sick leave. This upstanding policeman, assigned to the waterfront during the strike, had been a secret partner in a garage at 351 Valencia Street with Paul Schainman, a narcotics dealer, counterfeiter, and killer who was serving time in the Nevada State Prison. Dullea, sickened by this disgraceful breach of faith, labored all Friday night, November 16, building a case. He could not in his heart differentiate between this betrayal and that of Frank Egan. The Phantom had been a trusted friend, mentor, and fellow officer. It broke his heart.

  Saturday morning, gaiety reigned on the docks where the White Mask Gang had ruled so cruelly. A robust legion of confetti throwers were jubilant as the President Cleveland, under Captain Bob Carey, sailed away to the Islands and the Orient. As festive vacationers departed, Captain Bernard McDonald of Richmond Station solemnly drove to the Sunset District. He passed the gang’s hideout at 727 Forty-third Avenue and parked down the street at 811 Forty-third. He trudged grimly up the walk to a comfortable but not extravagant home and rang the bell. A haggard man in civilian clothes answered. “You’re wanted at the Hall right away,” McDonald said sternly.