Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  By 1922, avowed Klan members controlled the Bakersfield mayor’s office, various police departments throughout the county, much of the sheriff’s force of deputies, several judgeships, the city school district, and the county board of supervisors, whose powerful chairman, once exposed, unabashedly wrote that he was proud of “the good work” of the KKK, adding in a front-page newspaper column, “I make no apology for the Klan. It needs none.” He would serve a total of six terms and twenty-four years in office—most of it after his Klan affiliation was made public.

  The Klan’s allure in Kern County and other parts of Southern California lay as much in clever marketing as in its traditional message of racial hatred. The group pitched itself as a Christian fraternity that could combat the frontier corruption plaguing Bakersfield and other cities of the era. As such, it was able to attract not only avowed racists, but also ordinary members of the community who had tired of the open culture of vice—and who were willing to tolerate the Klan’s brutality if it meant cleaning up the streets, trading one form of crime for another. The KKK in Kern County billed itself as the scourge of immorality, but it simply recruited the corrupt, rather than combat them, then launched its own brand of terrorism and thuggery on dissenters of every race.

  Yet the Klan’s infiltration of Kern County government and law enforcement and its brazen attacks on ordinary citizens also led to one of the county’s finest moments in its long war on crime. A courageous District Attorney named Jess Dorsey, aided by a crusading local press, revealed the organization’s long reach and corrupting influence. The DA showed how members were required, among other things, to take an oath that superseded any vows of office or citizenship—police chiefs and sheriff’s deputies literally swore to protect the Klan before enforcing the law. Numerous police chiefs and officers, judges, and city and county officials had taken this oath and had attended meetings in which fellow Klansmen planned and described lynchings, beatings, kidnappings and arsons—yet none of these officials interceded or reported the crimes. Some took part in the offenses, while others used their official standing to cover for Klan members.3

  “Here the most brutal atrocities on the coast have been committed,” the Bakersfield Californian editorialized on May 19, 1922, in the wake of a scathing grand jury report on the KKK’s growing presence in Kern County. “Here the Klan has gained its greatest headway in official circles. And here lies the greatest danger for the future, unless the organization is destroyed while public sentiment demands its destruction.”

  For a brief time, it seemed that District Attorney Dorsey might succeed in bringing about that destruction. Blistered by headlines and public protests after years of acting with impunity, most of the Klan members in public office resigned or were ousted. But others, Kern County Board of Supervisors Chairman Stanley Abel among them, simply grew a bit more discreet—clinging to their positions by razor-thin election margins, though their closets still held white capes and hoods.

  The furor ended anticlimactically, with Dorsey’s vaunted grand jury charging a mere three Klan members with assault. At the trial, a line of one hundred fifty prominent citizens snaked out of the courthouse, each man eager to testify to the defendants’ good character. The three offenders, though convicted, walked out of court on probation. In the aftermath, a newspaper called the Kern County Klansman smugly wrote, “Listen, Mr. Dorsey, there are more Klansmen in Kern County today than there were thirty days ago . . . If you think that you have put the Klan out of business in this county you are badly mistaken.”

  The controversy soon died, and District Attorney Dorsey found himself voted out of office. A decade later, not long before Pat Dunn was born in a farm camp north of Bakersfield, the luster came off the county’s war on crime, when another wave of beatings, false imprisonments and suspicious deaths hit Kern County. But this time, the justice system did little to combat the crimes and much to protect the perpetrators. For in this case, the target of the violence had shifted from local victims to outsiders who commanded far less sympathy—the Dust Bowl refugees and other impoverished migrant workers who arrived in Kern County in the mid-to-late 1930s from throughout the Southwest, desperate for work and easily preyed upon. It was a time of goon squads, red-baiting, labor riots and disease-ridden shantytowns built of cardboard and hunger.

  The Klan members still in government found new favor in this era, for now the local press and a new DA joined them in supporting “stern treatment”—a euphemism for beatings and union-busting—as justifiable and necessary to protect farm profits and ward off the communist menace that the immigrants supposedly represented. Farm workers from Oklahoma, Arkansas and other drought-plagued states came to be reviled as shiftless lowlifes who would overrun the good citizens of Kern County—then numbering only 30,000—with their burgeoning numbers. Signs sprang up in Bakersfield restaurants and other public places, proclaiming, “No Niggers or Okies.” In 1939, Kern County—still led by Klansman Stanley Abel—banned The Grapes of Wrath from schools and libraries in protest of its fictionalized portrayal of the farm workers’ plight, inadvertently putting John Steinbeck on the national map and exposing Bakersfield to national ridicule. (While Steinbeck has long since returned to the local library shelves, even to this day, Kern County remains home to some of the richest farms and the poorest farm workers in America.)

  Among the desperate and poor legions flocking to Central California during this era of Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought was the Dunn family. Leaving behind a ruined farm and a foreclosed house, they arrived three years before Pat Dunn was born. Toward the end of the Dunns’ time in Oklahoma, the dust-laden winds sweeping across the devastated land had become so thick and pervasive that they would swallow the sun for days at a time. Birds dropped from trees, suffocated. The Dunns had to sleep with wet rags covering their mouths and noses, lest they suffer a similar fate. When there was nothing left but debts and death and the sifting sound of dust, they packed up what belongings their aging car could hold, and headed toward the promised land they had heard so much about: California.

  Their first home in paradise was a tent.

  2

  LILLIAN DUNN HAD TWO PASSIONS IN LIFE: HER FUNdamentalist religious beliefs (all her lady friends back home were “sisters”) and labor unions. Before Pat was born, she worked the fields with her husband and three older children by day and helped organize Okie laborers by night. Inevitably, as was customary for the times, Lillian was denounced as a communist for her union activities and was briefly imprisoned for participating in a farm-worker protest that erupted into a riot and a shooting. When the judge in the case asked Lillian Dunn if she was a communist, she said that she did not know exactly what that was, but if a communist was someone that wanted to be paid enough to feed her children, then she must be one. Lillian had a blunt, tart way with words—a trait she passed on to Pat, and one which did not always serve her (or him) well. Even Lillian’s friends described her as “difficult,” while others seemed to feel far less charitable, her children among them.

  Despite her unrepentant response to the judge, charges were eventually dismissed against Lillian Dunn. Still, it remains unclear whether she was being disingenuous about her knowledge of communism or if his question merely piqued her interest in the subject. Either way, when Pat was born in 1936, she was intimate enough with the philosophy of Marx and Lenin to name her new baby after a communist labor organizer she had met in Kern County.

  By the time Pat was born, the Dunns had left their tent in favor of a small house in the Little Oklahoma neighborhood of Delano, an impoverished farm community where, three decades later, César Chávez would form the National Farm Workers Association, soon to become the United Farm Workers of America. Pat’s mother and father separated when Pat was still a small child; he grew up under his older brothers’ sporadic attempts at paternal attention. During World War II, Pat helped support the family by picking cotton and grapes and caring for the family garden, chickens and cow. As he recalls it, his first
day in the first grade marked the first occasion on which he ever held a pencil in his hand. “Needless to say,” Pat would joke many years later, after he had become a teacher and school counselor, “I was behind my classmates and may never catch up.”

  After the war, the Dunns moved to Bakersfield where, at age twelve, Pat landed a job with the Bakersfield Indians, a minor-league farm club for the Cleveland baseball team. Tall for his age, graceful and athletic, Pat chased foul balls, ran errands for doughnuts, shined the players’ shoes, and—this was the magical part, something Pat would have done whether they paid him or not—occasionally even pitched batting practice. He’d float lazy knuckleballs over home plate, hearing the bat crack into each pitch, watching the ball arc overhead into the outfield. Once he threw to future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, a thrill he still describes a half century later with child-like wonder and reverence. For a kid in that era—before the arrival of exorbitant player salaries and season-busting strikes and the nomadic movement of players from one high-bidding club to the next—this was a dream job. The team manager called him “The Indispensable Mr. Dunn,” a title that puffed up the boy far more than his first paycheck—ninety-nine cents for four days’ work. (The crestfallen look on his face that first payday must have left an impression; his boss immediately upped his salary to one dollar per night.) Pat Dunn would never hold a job that paid him less or made him happier.

  In high school, he needed steadier employment for lunch money and to buy clothes—his mother offered him no money for such luxuries. As a freshman, Pat would walk home every day and stop at each store along the way to ask if they had any work. After several weeks of this, the manager at the Barker Brothers furniture warehouse finally threw up his hands and said yes, he had work, especially for such a persistent kid. This steam-roller approach to getting what he wanted would become a regular pattern in Pat’s life, sometimes to his benefit, when people found his forcefulness admirable or even charming, and sometimes to his detriment, when his insistent refusal to alter course led him astray. When he vanquished the Barker Brothers manager, he was only fourteen but easily passed for older. No one asked his age so long as he could pick up the tables and couches and haul them around as needed.

  Years later, after high school and a brief, unmemorable tour in the air force, Pat enrolled in Bakersfield Community College and began studying to become a teacher—something of a surprise to those who knew him in high school as more interested in cutting classes than passing them. It was in college that he met and married a fellow teaching student, Nancy Leonetti, who was as warm and open as Pat was boisterous and prickly. Around the same time, he took back his old part-time job at the furniture warehouse to pay the bills while he finished college. And it was there that he first met Alexandra.

  The year was 1960. Kennedy was running against Nixon, the economy was booming, Detroit made the best cars in the world, and Kern County, with a population one-tenth its current size, was pumping more oil than any other nation in the world. And a Bakersfield native by the name of Earl Warren—who had left the California governor’s mansion to become chief justice of the United States Supreme Court—was about to enrage his law-and-order hometown with a then-novel legal principle: that cops and prosecutors gathering evidence of crimes should have to obey the law like everyone else, or pay a heavy price. Out of this commonsense yet revolutionary notion, the Warren Court crafted the “exclusionary rule,” which bars prosecutors from using illegally obtained evidence in court—a rule that Kern County officials have occasionally flouted, regularly railed against, and repeatedly attempted to overturn ever since.

  In 1960, Pat’s new mother-in-law ran an upscale women’s clothing store next to Barker Brothers, and she occasionally invited him over for his lunch break. One day, she introduced Pat to a new sales clerk, a thin and pretty young woman who had just moved to Bakersfield from the East Coast: Alexandra Hoey. “Call me Sandy,” she had said in a strong New York accent, all flat vowels and long Rs. To Pat’s Okie sensibilities, she sounded as exotic as a Parisian.

  After that casual meeting, Pat would see Sandy after work from time to time waiting for the bus and he would stop his car to offer her a ride home. She almost always accepted. During these drives, she told him about growing up on Park Avenue in Manhattan, and how her mother was an expert in Asian artifacts, having inventoried a huge shipment of plundered artwork and pottery seized from the Japanese during the war years. “She wrote the book on jade,” Sandy proudly announced whenever the story came up, and Pat would always marvel at this as if he had never heard it before. That was the limit of their relationship then—Sandy never even met Nancy Dunn. Pat’s older brother Jay believes that Pat was smitten with Sandy even back then, but Pat shrugs off the suggestion, saying that he was married at the time and never had any such thoughts—none that he acted upon, anyway. In any case, within the year, Sandy was gone from the clothing store and from Pat Dunn’s life.

  A wealthy Bakersfield developer and real estate speculator named Patrick Paola, who built a respectable fraction of modern Bakersfield, had become a regular customer at the clothing store. He wanted only Sandy to attend to him as he personally selected his wife’s wardrobe. Mrs. Paola would either stand mutely by his side, or not even come into the store. “He’s very old school,” Sandy told Pat during one of their rides home. “He doesn’t let his wife do anything.” Pat remembers thinking that sounded pretty odd to him—he couldn’t imagine picking out Nancy’s brassieres, or her letting him do so even if he wanted to. But he made no comment, as he clearly heard in Sandy’s voice that she thought Mr. Paola quite charming and sophisticated, Old World ways and all. Being taken care of, it seemed, even in such a heavy-handed fashion, strongly appealed to her.

  Not long after that conversation, Sandy left her job at the clothing store and Pat stopped seeing her waiting for buses. The next thing he heard, Patrick Paola—nearly thirty years Sandy’s senior—had left the wife he so jealously cared for and had begun courting the twenty-six-year-old sales clerk from Manhattan. They married a short time later, in 1961. Sandy told friends of how she tried to resist Paola’s advances, fretting that everyone would think that she was some kind of gold digger interested only in Old Man Paola’s money. But while Sandy tended to be intensely concerned about what others thought of her, proud and acutely conscious of what she considered to be her lofty station in life, her new husband cared little about what people thought of him. He was, according to one contemporary, a fast-talking deal maker with huge ambitions and a modestly proportioned conscience. “That’s okay, honey,” he had told Sandy with a laugh when she mentioned her fears about being seen as a gold digger. “Tell them, hell, yes, you’re after the money. That’ll shut them up.” From that moment on, this anecdote became her lifelong foil—she would tell it as a kind of preamble to describing her years with Pat Paola, just in case someone really did think she was a fortune hunter.

  Pat Dunn lost touch with Sandy after her marriage to Patrick Paola, though he would occasionally hear reports from his mother-in-law about the courtship and marriage, and how Mr. Paola had begun doing everything for Sandy just as he had for his first wife, right down to selecting her shoes and underwear. Pat’s in-laws knew the Paolas—in fact, Pat and Nancy Dunn held their wedding reception at his restaurant, gratis. But the Dunn family did not move in the same circles as the Paolas, who went about building a number of Bakersfield landmarks, from housing developments to bowling alleys to shopping malls, and accumulating several million dollars in cash and real estate in the process.

  Twenty-five years passed without them crossing paths again, except for one time when Pat helped his father-in-law—then a Paola employee—measure the square footage of the Paolas’ home for an appraisal. In those twenty-five years, Pat and Nancy Dunn raised three children, Patrick Jr., Danny and Jennifer. Pat taught elementary school and junior high math classes in the Bakersfield school system, later becoming a counselor, then taking a job as principal for a tiny school district
at the windswept top of the Grapevine Pass, in a historic community called Tejon Ranch. He eventually left that position on an early retirement in 1981 after taking the losing side in a heated political battle with the school board over the size of the faculty at the district’s two schools.

  Seizing on California’s sky-high real estate market at the time—and the record number of defaults that the high prices were causing—Pat entered the mortgage-foreclosure business the following year. He cleaned, repaired and boarded homes that had been repossessed—sometimes, he did the evicting and repossessing, too—so that the properties could be resold by the banks or federal housing agencies that held the notes on them. The homes of the dispossessed were rarely left in pristine condition, and Pat soon had more offers for work than he could handle. His company quickly grew from two trucks and crews into nine and handled business throughout the broad valleys and boom towns of Central California. It was a dirty, sad business, and Pat took pity on some of the people whose houses he seized, particularly the wives and mothers who had been abandoned and left holding a bad mortgage and a mailbox full of bills. He would help them pack up, take their possessions to storage and drive them wherever they needed to go—the one part of this thankless work Pat enjoyed. “It takes some of the sting out,” he’d say when a less charitable colleague would ask him why he bothered. Of course, not every soon-to-be-homeless person was so easily mollified, and some were unwilling to simply hand over their house keys to this bluff, big man with his sheaf of legal papers. But when trouble arose, Pat’s standing instruction to his crews was to avoid any altercation and simply call the police. “You can always depend on the man in blue,” Pat would preach. “He’s on our side.”