by Jim Newton
With Becker’s top lieutenants convicted, Warren and Coakley turned to Becker himself. One early obstacle was the Klan. The grand jury, whose eighteen members included seven Klansmen, initially agreed to indict Becker’s bag man—a cohort who collected the bribes—but would not indict Becker himself.65 Warren refused to accept that indictment and moved for its dismissal. He then called Becker before the grand jury and sought to question him. Becker refused, citing the threat of self-incrimination. A sheriff taking the Fifth was too much even for the Klan. Said Warren, “The head of the Ku Klux Klan group came to me and said, ‘Well, go ahead and prepare your indictment. If the so-and-so won’t take care of himself, well, he can’t expect anyone else to.’”66
As the trial approached, Warren’s investigators continued to chase leads, seeking with particular energy an automobile dealer named Fred Smith, who was alleged to have collected payoffs for Becker. Smith had fled the area when the scandal broke, and Warren’s office had been looking for him for more than a year. Then, a newspaper reporter from the San Francisco Examiner learned of Smith’s whereabouts and shared the information with Warren on the condition that the Examiner be allowed to have two reporters present when the arrest was made. Smith was captured, and Warren’s investigators brought him to a hotel to meet personally with Warren. “I told him he had a choice to make,” Warren said, “that of being a witness for the prosecution in the graft investigation or a defendant in a grand larceny charge.” Smith chose to be a witness. He admitted that a lawyer for some local Chinese lottery houses had paid him $2,700 for protection and that Smith had passed the money along to Becker; he also said he had received similar payoffs from bootleggers.67 But on the eve of his testimony, he reconsidered. Warren instructed Coakley to have Smith charged with larceny, and then Smith thought again. He testified the following day.68 From there, Becker was done. He was convicted of “willful and corrupt misconduct” and sent to San Quentin.69
Warren was deluged with congratulations. The Merchants’ Exchange hosted a testimonial dinner for him, while churches, civic organizations, and citizens sent hundreds of letters thanking him for his work. “Future generations of Alameda County will owe more to your vision and your courage than they will ever know,” the Public Welfare League proclaimed. “We are with you,” the Oakland Boosters’ Club said simply. One pastor must have especially pleased Warren with a note urging him onward and comparing his courtroom success to that of Hiram Johnson. Even the Ku Klux Klan dropped him a line, praising the verdicts while stressing that the defendants were no longer Klansmen, having been forced out of the Invisible Empire “for various reasons.”70
His corruption victories helped seal Warren’s political standing in Alameda. They set the tone for Warren’s prosecutorial administration: tough, efficient, incorruptible. After 1930, he never faced a serious challenge to his incumbency. But because the Becker case took years to unfold, Warren had to run in 1926 before he had secured those convictions. That year, he was a new DA, appointed by the board and never tested by the voters. It was arguably Warren’s most important election—incumbency tends to start soft and solidify over time as the public grows accustomed to reelecting an official. That makes an early victory especially important and an early loss often devastating. Warren proved a tough fighter. He announced in June 1926 by boasting of convictions in 414 of the 499 felony cases resolved in Superior Court on his watch. He alluded to his military service and deftly sought to ally any opponent with the criminals he was prosecuting as district attorney. His opponents, he said, had accumulated a “slush fund of $25,000 . . . from the underworld” to defeat him.71
His rival in the race, a local defense lawyer named Preston Higgins, understandably did not take kindly to being cast as an underworld candidate and responded by writing to local ministers and others. In his letter, Higgins accused Warren of grandstanding in his raids on local bootleggers and others—staging those events for political purposes while doing little to dislodge crime. More stingingly, Higgins argued that Warren was a candidate “of the political bosses which have handled ‘politics’ in this county for twenty years.”72
That last charge was meant to associate Warren with the Kelly machine, since Warren had received his appointment from the county supervisors. It was patently unfair, and Warren was not inclined to let the slight go. He wrote to the ministers himself, rebutting Higgins’s charges one at a time and defending his allegation that his opponent was tied to the darker forces in local politics. While Warren had been serving as the appointed DA, he noted, his opponent had been working as a defense lawyer, where he “defended more than 250 bootleggers, gamblers and prostitutes, of which more than 90% were convicted.”73 Not only was Higgins associated with criminals, Warren stressed, he wasn’t even particularly good at it. If anything, Warren’s response was overkill, though it was understandable from a political novice whose standing with voters in that first election was tentative. Warren won the election going away. He never again faced a serious challenge to keep the job of Alameda DA.
Warren’s secure place as county district attorney allowed him the luxury of buying a house big enough for the family. He had not saved much, and needed a large house for such a brood of children, but it was the Depression, and banks were eager for buyers. He and Nina picked a large, gray house on a quiet street and moved their family in. Bobby was still a baby when the Warrens moved to 88 Vernon Street. Eighty-eight, as it became known in the Warren household, was a tall, severe structure in the hills above Oakland, with big yards front and back. It had three stories, with kitchen and living spaces on the first, four bedrooms on the second, and Warren’s office and two more bedrooms on the third. Beneath sat a large basement, where the Warrens’ Christmas celebration was centered each year. The house sat across from an empty lot that the Warren children would often play in during the afternoons. It was the last house that Earl and Nina Warren would own.
The Warrens were a public family but a guarded one. The graft trials had exposed them to anger and threats, and though they were listed in the local phone book, they did not draw attention to their home. When Jim Warren arranged one day to have the curb freshly painted with the address, his mother pulled him aside and warned him against such attention-getting in the future.74
The clear roles that Earl and Nina played in their family—he as its presiding officer, she as its functional manager—were reflected in the home itself. Warren’s office sat atop the house, a place where he could read or work while still being close to his children. Nina, meanwhile, was a near-constant presence in the kitchen. She produced angel food and devil’s food cakes for family and friends, and seemed constantly to be working thick sheets of batter across the flat, clay platter she used for mixing. Always shy and occupied with the children, Nina asked to be excused from the political obligations of marriage to an elected official; not once did she deliver a speech on behalf of her husband. Earl, she said, understood and approved.75 Indeed, with such a large family, Nina seemed to her children always to be busy; there were times, she said many years later, that she actually was glad when Earl got home too late for supper. “She couldn’t have made it with one more meal to prepare,” their friend, journalist Drew Pearson, recalled.76
Warren’s work was paying off. He had become a formidable political figure, and the graft cases established him in the image he sought for himself—the stalwart, corruption-fighting prosecutor undeterred by political powers in his quest for clean government. By 1931, he was attracting attention well beyond Alameda County. Raymond Moley, then a professor of public law and jurisprudence at Columbia University, contrasted Warren’s success with San Francisco’s “traditionally inefficient system of prosecution,” and concluded that Warren was “to my mind, the most intelligent and politically independent District Attorney in the United States.”77 That was gratifying praise, but more significant was the approval that Warren sought and received during the early 1930s from a man whose life would overlap with Warren’s from then on:
J. Edgar Hoover.
Warren first enlisted Hoover’s help when Warren was a prosecutor of growing renown and Hoover was the head of the Justice Department’s Division of Investigations, forerunner of the FBI. The subject was one of Warren’s regular efforts to combat organized crime, in this case by creating an Anti-Racket Council for Alameda County, whose members included, among others, Joseph Knowland. Hoover provided assistance, and in 1934 sent a top official to consult with Warren about the developing council. Those contacts took place in the context of the hierarchy of their early relationship—Warren was beseeching, even obsequious, while Hoover took the pose of a grand Washington official, in position to grant or withhold favors and approbation. When, for instance, an agent visited Warren at Hoover’s suggestion in 1934, the agent reported back to Hoover that Warren “asked me to extend to you his personal regards, and to state that he was extremely sorry that he had missed you on his last trip back East.”78 Through the 1930s, that pattern would continue: Warren would ask favors of Hoover, would invite him to attend events, would pass along praise of his agents and would, after seeking an audience, visit him in Washington. That relationship would undergo two significant transformations in the years ahead, but by the mid-1930s, Hoover’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco office, through which much of Warren’s communication was handled, was able to report accurately a “very close spirit of cooperation . . . between Earl Warren’s office and the San Francisco office of the Bureau.”79
The Becker case was a clean victory for Warren, satisfying both substantively and politically. The other defining case of Warren’s prosecutorial tenure carried other implications, however, far more complex ones. It, too, would help cast his image in the minds of many Californians, but this time with darker shades.
The case began in the early morning hours of Sunday, March 22, 1936.80 There, in a cabin of the Point Lobos, a steamship docked in the Alameda harbor and preparing to sail the following day, Chief Engineer George Alberts was beaten to death. Alberts was not a likable man, and there was no shortage of suspects, since he had antagonized his crew with his bullying and undisguised contempt for their unions.
Earl Warren and his principal homicide deputy, Charlie Wehr, learned of the killing within hours, and Wehr was on board the Point Lobos that night, questioning people and dispatching police in search of suspects. The search was a long one, but five months later, Warren announced the arrests of four men: Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, Frank Conner, and George Wallace. A fifth suspect, Ben Sakovitz, was said to be at large. All five were members of the Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers Association, an influential local union believed to harbor Communists or other radicals. Warren and his prosecutors alleged that the attack was ordered up by King and Ramsay, who sent Wallace and Sakovitz to rough up the chief engineer in retaliation for his mistreatment of union workers. In administering the beating, Warren’s office charged, the defendants went too far and killed Alberts. The murder, Warren said when he announced the indictments, was a “paid assassin’s job, and the basis of the plot was communistic.”81
To label the case “communistic” was a singularly provocative act in the circumstances under which the Point Lobos defendants would come to trial. The West Coast was then preparing for the latest act in its long-running drama between labor and management. Maritime workers from San Diego to Seattle were threatening to strike, and employers were girding for a protracted confrontation. So when Warren elected to prosecute the Point Lobos murder as a labor conspiracy—and to link that conspiracy to Communism—he gave strong moral support to employers.
The result: Earl Warren, who loved to brag of his Musicians’ Union membership, now became the enemy of Bay Area unions, which saw him as a tool of Knowland, the Oakland Tribune, and employers in general. Warren plowed ahead, indulging in tactics that bordered on improper. His deputies traveled to Seattle and arrested Conner, a dim man with little ability to hold his own in an interrogation. Back in Alameda, they took Conner to the Hotel Whitecotton rather than to jail, where he would have had access to a lawyer. While in DA custody and out of public view, Conner confessed to his role in the murder, saying that he and Sakovitz had been sent to “tamp up” Alberts and that Sakovitz had administered the fatal blows. Once finally allowed to see a lawyer, Conner recanted that confession, and the defense protested vigorously that it had been coerced.
The composition of the grand jury that delivered indictments in the case reinforced doubts about the fairness of the case against the defendants. In selecting citizens to serve on the county grand jury, Warren and his staff scoured the community for respectable citizens—seeking, for instance, the recommendations of local bankers, lawyers, and other businessmen. Although the practice of relying on leading citizens for grand juries was not limited to Warren in those days, it had particular implications when that group of citizens took the measure of the evidence in the Point Lobos case, with its overtones of Communism and violence. The Point Lobos defense lawyers were convinced that jurors had been picked for their loyalties, if not to Warren directly then at least to a status quo unfriendly to labor. “The ordinary worker or the ordinary person didn’t have much of a chance to make it,” one of the defense lawyers, Aubrey Grossman, said later.82
Finally, Warren intervened personally in the selection of the judge to hear the case. Both sides agreed that the first judge assigned to the case, Edward Tyrrell, was not up to such a complicated and important trial. But Warren managed to have Tyrrell replaced by Frank Ogden, who had worked with and for Warren in the district attorney’s office. Ogden’s association with Warren made defense lawyers suspicious, and his sympathetic treatment of the prosecution case reinforced those suspicions.
The Point Lobos trial opened on October 26, 1936. That same week, maritime unions called a strike. On October 31, at midnight, 15,000 longshoremen, 7,000 sailors, 4,000 cooks and stewards, 3,000 firemen, 3,000 engineers, 2,000 radio operators, 2,000 warehouse men, and thousands of mates, masters, and pilots walked off their jobs and joined picket lines along the entire Pacific Coast of the United States.83 Violence followed swiftly. The lead photograph in that morning’s Los Angeles Times was of a bandaged man, above the predictable headline “Injured in Attack by Unionists.”84 With tensions high and thousands engaged on both sides, Warren and his prosecution team entered the courthouse through cordons of protesters. The protesters would stay for the entire case, badgering lawyers and witnesses for the government and forcing the jury to be sequestered. Threats were directed toward the Warren family as well, and pickets occasionally massed in front of their home on Vernon Street. A member of Warren’s staff was given the job of shuttling the children to and from school.
At trial, Wallace broke from the other defendants and testified against them, earning him the lifelong enmity of organized labor and forcing him out of the defense pact that enveloped King, Ramsay, and Conner (once Conner had recanted his confession, he had been welcomed back).
Warren personally led the prosecution of the Point Lobos defendants and even took the stand twice as defense lawyers turned him into a witness regarding the facts surrounding Conner’s contested confession. As a lawyer and even as a witness, Warren was even and unflappable, righteous, and, to the defendants, infuriating.
Warren delivered the prosecution’s closing statement himself, and he used it to try to separate the defendants from their union supporters. “This is not,” he insisted, “a case against union labor, it is a case against four men.” Of those men, Warren was unforgiving. “All I want is the law enforced,” he said. “All I want to see is life and property safe in this community.”85
Judge Ogden then did his part. Using a prerogative of California judges during that period—one created by a constitutional amendment that Warren’s staff had helped write—Ogden told the jurors that Wallace’s confession was persuasive to him and that Conner’s confession, despite his attempt to recant it, also was made voluntarily.86 In effect, Ogden directed the jury to convi
ct the defendants. On January 5, 1937, the jury complied. It deliberated for five hours and forty minutes and then returned guilty verdicts of second-degree murder against all four defendants. 87
Defense lawyers then and later complained bitterly of Warren’s prosecution. In some cases, their charges against Warren were plainly false. Despite defense claims, for instance, no evidence ever surfaced of defendants being physically mistreated while in Warren’s custody. Still, the composition of the grand jury, the selection of a clearly proprosecution judge, and the secretive questioning of Conner all undermined Warren’s insistence that he ran an exceptionally principled prosecutorial staff, at least in this case. Moreover, unbeknownst to the defendants or their lawyers, Warren’s staff also secretly recorded at least one of the defendants while in custody, parking an office secretary nearby to transcribe his conversation with another inmate.88 And Warren investigators broke into a San Francisco hotel room, installed a hidden microphone, and used it to listen in on conversations involving King and another union official, Albert Murphy.89 When they confronted Murphy with the evidence of their eavesdropping, he implicated King, Ramsay, Wallace, and Sakovitz in the murder in order to avoid prosecution himself.90 In later years, Warren would make much of his refusal to use hidden microphones, and it is not clear whether he knew that his deputies had used them in this case.
Warren was pleased by the outcome of the trial and undoubtedly shared his reaction with his friend the judge. Warren’s personal calendar shows that he lunched with Judge Ogden three weeks after the defendants were convicted and just seven days after Ogden sentenced them to prison. They remained close afterward, with Warren attending an Elks reception for him in April and meeting again with him for breakfast in May.91
