While he was courting her, Jerry would invite the other guys to drop by the house she shared with a group of stewardesses on a winding street in the Hollywood Hills, an idyllic spot surrounded by blooming bougainvillea. Jerry’s own rented duplex was near the Police Academy and he’d invite the fellows there too, especially on paydays, when he’d say, “C’mon, c’mon over,” so they could play poker for their checks—so what if he peeked at their cards? Billy Dick Unland, who worked on the Dragnas and the other Italians, grew uneasy at such shindigs when Jerry would offer him and his partner bottles of booze or a spare watch—no one knew how he got them—as if he was setting them up to ask a favor. Unland couldn’t fathom what Jerry was doing in Intelligence where you had to have the patience to tail people day after day and tap sources to get background information that could help in the long run. Jerry came in with the mentality of a Vice Squad player, working games you couldn’t understand while seeming far too eager to book someone. Jerry admitted it, “That’s all observation,” he said of what Billy Dick and others did. “I like to put people in jail. I don’t like to just follow them and get nothing.”
* * *
HIS FIRST ASSIGNMENT was Charles Cahan, a husky life-of-the-party sort who, with his brother Joe, had come from nowhere to become a major player in the gambling scene just as Los Angeles officials thought they had the bookies cornered. Local authorities had been trying various tactics since the heyday of the racing wires, which had provided the main means—in addition to muscle—for Bugsy, Mickey, and Dragna to gain a stranglehold over a large number of bookmakers. The racing wires became as essential to the bookies as a ticker was to stockbrokers and the California Commission on Organized Crime saw them elevating a petty local nuisance into a national racket driven by “bloodshed, violence, intimidation, bribery, corruption.” Authorities moved to ban the wires in the state in 1948 and the following February the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Western Union would have to cease providing leased lines to the dominant Continental Press. Even then, the LAPD suspected that a local offshoot, the Los Angeles Journalists Publishing Company, still was offering bookies $2,500-a-month packages that included bail bonds, legal help, and an array of racing information provided from a nerve center with twenty-five phones.
The next legal maneuver was national, snuck into federal tax legislation that most notably raised the levy on packs of cigarettes to 8 cents, up a penny. Effective November 1, 1951, the federal government required that all bookmakers purchase $50 occupational tax stamps, post them at their place of business and pay the Treasury 10 percent of their gross handle, meaning all their profit, if not more. Someone living in fantasyland estimated that the measure might bring in $407 million nationwide. In reality, it was unworkable on many counts, and of dubious legality, but in Los Angeles six bookies actually registered for the $50 stamps and the policy caused momentary confusion in the ranks. That’s when the cops detected the emergence of a group of rugged-but-engaging up-and-comers who were undeterred by the government’s ploy, including Jack “The Enforcer,” Lloyd “Sailor Jack” Woods—an accomplished golf hustler on the side—and Chuck Cahan, who became the target of the newest member of the Intelligence Division, Sergeant Jerry Wooters.
The feds had just passed a law that a bookmaker had to buy a stamp and I don’t think they knew what the hell they were doing. But it frightened all the bookies because they didn’t know whether to take a stamp out or not. Because if he took a stamp out, the feds were going to come after him for his net worth, you know? So there was turmoil in the city and everybody stopped booking horses. Cahan was just a kid in a gas station, big tough kid who’d been a runner or something for a bookmaker. All these other people stopped taking book and he opened up like a bomb. He had about six joints, and probably would have been good if he’d just laid under but he was suddenly the big gangster, had the Cadillac convertible, had the two-level penthouse, all the fancy broads, and he got the reputation. Chief Parker said “I want this son of a bitch in jail, I don’t care what it costs.” That was my first assignment. Walked in the door and I worked twenty hours a day for six months.
To be fair to his reputation, Jerry did try to save himself all that effort—he tried a shortcut first, an extreme one right out of the early playbook of the Gangster Squad. His young partner, Jack Horrall, listened in amazement as Jerry phoned the rising bookie and pretended to be an angry hoodlum much higher up on the food chain. “You fuckin’ greaseball motherfucker, if you don’t leave our thing alone, I’m gonna kill you,” Jerry yelled into the phone and the voice on the other end responded, “Who’s this? Who’s this?” and Jerry said, “If you want to fucking find out, come meet me.” So Chuck Cahan said, “OK, I’ll meet you,” which was not what Jerry expected to hear. He apparently had tried this act in his Vice years and either gotten a hang-up or the reaction he wanted—the asshole got out of town. No one had ever accepted his offer.
Never had one want to meet me before. So I said, “Fine,” and I borrow the chief’s car, he’s got a big black Oldsmobile. Put new plates on there. And I get two big dago kids out of my office, give ’em hats and overcoats. We park up off Sunset Boulevard, behind a restaurant there. Told them meet me at nine. Took the two dago kids, sit them on the fender on this big black sedan. So they come. They stop in the street, look in the parking lot half a minute and they’re gone.
In short, the Wooters’ shortcut didn’t work. Cahan went nowhere and the real investigation began. They gave him a team to help with the grunt work, which started with following the bookie. But someone in Cahan’s position rarely visited his bet-taking sites—the clerks often did not even know their real boss. They had two types of phones, some only for incoming calls from bettors, runners, or field outlets such as barbershops. Another phone was set aside solely for use by the bookie’s back office, which would call in regularly to get a rundown of the bets, at which point the clerk could destroy the evidence, whether a slip of paper or a scribbling on a slate board, easily erased. But every location needed to have the morning line before the tracks opened, the preliminary odds on the horses still running. As an old Vice hand, Wooters had sources who could point him to the publisher’s overnight printing site, which he would watch to see who picked up the paperwork, and then follow them to learn where they delivered it. He discovered that the Cahans were operating out of a series of rented houses maintained like normal residences, especially on the lower levels, but with extra phones upstairs. It was time for the bug men.
* * *
CON KEELER HAD recruited another “electronics expert” to their ranks, Beauford “Bert” Phelps, who had an unusual LAPD pedigree: his father was the department’s first pilot, except he never flew. Phelps’ dad was a Minnesota native who served as a lieutenant in World War I and homesteaded a ranch in Oregon before coming down to Los Angeles and taking a job with the May Company department store, as a piano polisher. The elder Beauford Phelps also knew how to fly, and the LAPD wanted someone with that skill in the event of an emergency up in the Owens Valley or elsewhere along the 223-mile aqueduct providing the city’s lifeline of water. The problem was, the department didn’t have an airplane so Phelps’ dad was a given a motorcycle instead and gained renown not for flying, but deadeye shooting. “As a little kid, I used to see him with a gun and notches on the the side,” the junior Phelps said. “What’s that for, Dad?” “Well…” Well, Daddy had killed suspects in ’32, ’34, and ’35, once in a shootout with robbers who had used an underground tunnel to get into a Bank of America branch, and he had four slashes carved into his revolver to prove it. The elder Phelps served as a reminder of how the progression of generations worked on a police force—each new one could look back at those before and ask, “How did they get away with that?”
The younger Phelps wanted to become a pilot too, in World War II, but the military had enough at the tail end of the war so he was made a radio operator instead, on a B-25 converted into a general’s flying command center. Phel
ps was six-foot-two and 220 pounds but was baby-faced and less than physically scary—he was no Jumbo Kennard. He was clever as they come, though, and brought a new generation of skills. Where Keeler tinkered with simple hearing aid parts, Phelps took a big old street corner fire alarm box and turned it into a device that could detect every phone number dialed from a bookie’s telephones. Phelps also proved in the Cahan case that he could think on his feet, in the breakfast cereal episode.
It was in one of the back offices, one of the offices nobody knew about. It’s funny because we had to get through—we couldn’t open the door, kick the doors open. We went around the side of the yard, I always had a bag of goodies with me and I pulled out my shims and shimmed up one of the windows. It was the old-style glass window, and as we got it shimmed something popped out and it was going to crash—this was 2 o’clock in the morning and I just barely caught it, it would have made a sound heard a mile away if it crashed. We went in, went upstairs. Of course, Jerry was obtaining some evidence, which there was a lot of. We wanted to put in a permanent mike because we didn’t know whether or not we were going to get back in, so we looked around and the other investigator with me said, “Can we get behind the wallpaper?” The wallpaper had flowers on it.
So I took a razor and I cut around a flower, and I gradually peeled it away and cut out the plaster in back of it, put a hole through the wall, planted the mike in there along with the wire that went to the outside. Then I scraped the wallpaper with the razor blade so the air would be able to get in to hear what was going on. I was going to put the wallpaper back on, the flower, and reached in my bag for the glue—and no glue, no stick-um, no nothing. So we got the bright idea and went down to the kitchen and looked in all the cabinets. There were some Wheaties. We got a bowl, mixed it up with water and made a paste, brought it upstairs again, got it real nice and pasty, put on just a thin coat of it around the edge there, put the wallpaper back on again, smoothed it out real nice. We were able to get back in several weeks later and it was still there doing a great job.
No one would spot the wire they fed along the home’s phone lines to the nearest pole, then off to their listening station. They had phone company uniforms in addition to the look-alike truck so they could work around the poles without drawing suspicion, even during the day, though that was not wise with well-armed targets on the lookout for surveillance—then the work had to be done under the cover of night. Keeler had red tags to hang on their connections on the poles, signaling that only a supervisor could mess with that line. They had sharp cleats to climb the poles and both Keeler and Phelps did it. But Keeler had grown weary of battling the splinters and Phelps was a bit burly to set speed records on a pole. Luckily, the squad also had enlisted Roger Otis, who once worked as a phone company lineman and could scamper up those things like a monkey.
But posing as phone workers was almost too predictable—their termite ruse was far more inventive. They used it on a home rented by the horse-betting operation’s accountant in West Los Angeles, as Phelps recalled it.
We found out who owned the house through the legal records. The person lived in San Diego. A couple of investigators went down there and talked to the person. Before they went down they ran his records to be sure he was clean. He was, a regular upstanding citizen. They talked to him about the situation on condition that he be quiet about what we were going to do and also under the advisement, I should say, that if he didn’t he might become involved with the conspiracy that was going on. So anyway Sergeant Keeler and myself went out to the termite company that Keeler knew. We went for a day and learned how to do termite inspections, how to write the charts up and all this stuff, a 9 by 11 chart. They showed us a couple of uniforms we could take. Then we borrowed a truck and knocked on the door. Some hoodlum came to the front door. We told him, “We’re here to make a termite check.” We showed him the clipboard and all this stuff and he could see our uniforms with the termite sign on it and also the termite truck we had. He made a phone call and came back and said “OK,” so we went under the house and we’re banging and everything like we were inspecting it, and while we’re banging we’re drilling holes and putting microphones in.
I don’t know how Keeler found out where the office was located. He drilled a hole up through the bottom and came to the carpet and slit the carpet and placed a microphone in there. In the meantime I was pounding and making charts of where the termites might be. We finished there, went over to the front door and told the man that we found termites, showed him the chart where they were located and we’d give him an estimate of how much it would be and he could send it on to the owner. We backed out and said, “Thank you very much,” and we left. I think it was $700 or $800. It wasn’t very much. We wanted to keep it low. We wanted to give the guy a break.
* * *
CHARLES CAHAN AND fifteen others were rounded up in raids on nine locations in April 1953. Jerry Wooters signed the criminal complaint but in the tradition of the squad others got to make most of the collars, a task force of thirty-five Vice cops. Cahan and his brother Joe both beamed for the cameras when the press was let in to document the cracking of what was billed as a $20,000-a-day bookmaking ring. “I am innocent of any wrongdoing!” Chuck Cahan announced.
Later, at the trial, the cops were matter-of-fact about never bothering with search warrants during their long investigation. When did they ever have them? They also were matter-of-fact about how they got into various homes. “I forced entry through the front door,” one testified under cross-examination. “I kicked it open with my foot.” At another location, the door wouldn’t budge.
We tried to knock it down, yes sir.
With what … a shoe, a foot?
Tried to kick it in, yes.
And then you moved over and broke the window to gain entrance, is that right?
We did.
What was the big deal? Sure, there was a crime called breaking and entering, but when did it ever apply to them?
As far as the bugs were concerned, they thought they had legal cover under a 1941 state law inspired by then-new “dictograph” technology, the systems that essentially captured and amplified the natural sound in a room—that was just a notch up from listening in through an air vent, wasn’t it? The penal code made it a misdemeanor for any civilian to install such an eavesdropping device, without consent of the owner, in “any house, room, apartment, tenement, office, shop, warehouse, store, mill, barn, stable, or other building, tent, vessel, railroad car, vehicle, mine or any underground portion thereof,” pretty much covering all bases. But there was an exception for a law enforcement officer operating in the line of duty—a cop could use such bugging equipment when “expressly authorized thereto by the head of his office or department or by a district attorney.”
So what if Keeler and his mates didn’t always have such authorization? If they planted a bug at night, they could have the boss sign off on it the next day or week, with a little backdating, if necessary. “Nobody paid too much attention to it,” Keeler said. “There were a lot of things that were sneaked in.”
Phone tapping was more problematic—that was a felony in California, even when done by police. Law enforcement lobbied for the right to listen in on calls but the word was that a powerful politician had become enraged when his wife wired their phone, suspicious of his relationship with his secretary. The influential pol insisted that remain a felony for anyone, so Keeler and the others had to be careful when messing with phones. While the phone company’s chief investigator was a secret ally, one of his underlings, a fellow nicknamed “Red,” was forever trying to catch them in the act. They once almost shot the fool when he burst in on them in the basement of an apartment where they had clips hooked onto the phone box, merely a ground, Keeler swore, “but he was a pain in the side.” Attorneys for Jack Dragna tried to show that they had tapped a phone in the case that nailed the local Mafia boss on morals charges—defense lawyers alleged that Keeler and Billy Dick Unland had done more than p
lant a mike in the mistress’s headboard. Dragna’s lady friend once noticed a thin wire going to her phone and summoned her landlord up to see it. But later on, when they came back, the wire was gone. Imagine that.
The truth of what the squad did was in an 8-by10-inch Operations Book carefully locked away in their safe in City Hall. The gray logbook contained the basics on scores of surveillances: address, type of device, where it was hidden, where the listening post was. “It had everything,” Phelps said. Only Chief Parker, Captain Hamilton and a few others—and the bug men—had the combination to the safe that protected their secrets.
The realpolitik of their time was underscored when Mayor Fletcher Bowron’s long tenure in office finally ended. He was defeated by Congressman C. Norris Poulson, an Oregon native who’d come to Los Angeles in 1923, gone to night law school and three decades later ran for mayor as an arch anti-Communist. When Poulson took office on July 1, 1953, he asked Chief Parker if his bug men could sweep his suite in City Hall. Con Keeler and Bert Phelps got the job.
Phelps: We did a lot of work for the City Council. Every time they heard a noise on the phone, “OK, call Intelligence.” They were scared that somebody was listening. I didn’t find one tap, except one time—when Bowron went out and Poulson came in. Connie and I were detailed to check out the mayor’s office, so we went in and tore the place apart and sure enough we found a bug on Bowron’s telephone, in the mayor’s desk, hidden in the woodwork. There was a mike, there was a connecting device and apparently it had been placed on there for some time. It looked like it was quite old. So we took that off.
Keeler: There were two layers of walls in the mayor’s office, the regular walls and then another for decorative purposes. And in between were these wires. When they were put in there who knows? Supposedly somewhere along the line way back, under Shaw, he supposedly had it wired to a room across the hall and had someone record conversations in his office when everything was graft. But nobody wanted to talk about it. It doesn’t pay to talk about things like that in city government. The bug in the mayor’s office, someone may have wired Bowron, you never could put your finger on it. But yeah, we worked in a gray area, a lot of gray area.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 20
