moral turpitude – Page 2

‘Tis the Season for Rum Running and Shoot Outs…

tis the season headline

December 10, 1927
Los Angeles

According to police there are several rival gangs of bootleggers known to be in the city for the Christmas holiday season, and a full blown gang war may be in the offing.

Cleo Bush, 37 years old, of 813 Flower Street, may have become the first casualty in the battle. In his own words, he was “called out” of the Glycol Products Company at 953 South Bixel Street by two men. Cleo told Captain of Detectives Cahill that he recognized the men as enemies who had been trying to “get” him for the last two years, but in true gangland style he refused to identify them. The unnamed assailants fired five .25 caliber rounds at Cleo, striking him once in the back. Cleo is in critical condition at Georgia Street Receiving Hospital following emergency surgery to remove the bullet that penetrated his right lung.

Cleo advised the cops to stay out of his business. He said he’d settle his own affairs. “I’ll attend to those birds when I get out of here,” he said, “and if I don’t, well, that’s all in the game.” mrs evans

Five people were detained as material witnesses to the shooting: Mrs. Lelia Evans, 28, her husband, Lew Evans, 32, of 508 Union Drive; Jim Riley, 31, of 1130 Trenton Street; Claude Haggle, 27, of 1110 Ingraham Street, and Edward C. Young 34, of 1085 Lewis Street, Long Beach. None of the witnesses were willing to identify the shooters. There was a neighborhood witness to the crime; Mr. G.E. Christie of 945 South Bixel Street. He told police that he heard the shots and went outside in time to see two men flee the scene in a roadster. Omar Lipps

Cleo recovered and was released from the hospital, but he continued to keep mum regarding the names of his assailants. Following an anonymous tip, Mr. Omar Lipps, 28, of 438 South Union Drive, was picked up by cops and confessed to the shooting. A trial date was set but Cleo took a powder and the case never made it to court. Lipps maintained that Cleo owed him $400 [$4,803.13 USD 2007] after losing to him in a craps game, and he was adamant that the shooting had nothing to do with rum running.

opium flutes

Epilogue

There were no further mentions of Cleo Bush in the LA Times after 1928 – the man knew how to vanish. Omar Lipps probably should have disappeared too, but instead he stayed in the area, frequented the same old haunts, and got into more trouble. He was arrested during a vice raid in April 1930 for possession of a complete opium outfit.

April of 1931 would find Omar caught in another police raid – this time of a dope pad at 187 South Alvarado Street. Equipment to accommodate half a dozen opium smokers was confiscated, along with pipes ingeniously constructed from flutes!

Omar obviously had a bad opium jones because he was arrested for a third time on January 3, 1935, for narcotics violations. He was holding a lamp, hose, and a small brown bottle containing yen shee. Yen Shee is the residue left in the opium pipe’s bowl and stem after the opium has been smoked. Think about THAT the next time you have a “yen” for something.

Stars That Shine and Smolder

December 6, 1927
Los Angeles

Calling all cars! Calling all cars! Be on the lookout for two easily-recognized scofflaws, film stars Reginald Denny and Hedda Hopper. She’s wanted for speeding at about 34mph around Melrose and La Brea, he for setting a similar pace in the 20mph zone at Sunset and Vine, and without a valid operator’s license, on November 28.

But that’s not all! Denny is also wanted for questioning in the origins of the massive forest fire which began near his cabin near Running Springs Park in the San Bernardino Mountains two nights ago, and which hundreds of men are fighting, with 50 to 75 summer cabins already destroyed.

What shall we do with these antisocial celebrities? Perhaps we should just drop by their homes and have a talk with them. Miss Hopper is reported as residing at 1416 Fairfax Avenue, Mr. Denny at 2060 North Vine.

I Know It When I See It…

I Know It When I See It Headline

November 12, 1927
Hollywood

City prosecutors raided Bookmart, 5602 Hollywood Blvd, and busted 70 year old Charles F. Lewis for possessing, selling and distributing obscene literature. Police had received complaints that Lewis was selling suggestive literature and art to high school students. The Jungle

“The Sun Also Rises", “Elmer Gantry”, “The Jungle” or even the Bible could have been among the twenty pounds of so-called vile literature seized by police, because over the years each of them had been banned. We don’t know for sure what books were confiscated – the titles weren’t given in the Los Angeles Times, but the paper reported that “one particularly nauseating volume” was allegedly rented by the day. Maybe it was “Fanny Hill” by John Cleland.

Defining obscenity is no easy feat. Just wait thirty-seven years and then ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. A quote from his opinion in the obscenity case of Jacobellis v. Ohio will become famous “…hard-core pornography is hard to define, but I know it when I see it…”

By the end of the month Lewis will have decided to plead guilty, and he was given the choice of spending 100 days in City Jail or paying a $250 ($2,995.55 USD 2007) fine. Books, erotic or otherwise, are in short supply in lockup. Lewis opted to pay the fine so that he could stay at home and read.

Because Free Love isn’t Free

freelove November 3, 1927
White Plains, New York

Those free love proponents are at it again! Everybody knows you should pay for love (with your soul). If we ran rampant with free love—divorced from the constraints of law—the next thing you know we’d have homosexuality and obscenity and, well, divorce! And eventually…hippies! And, you know, free love! And you know where that sort of thing leads. Female sexual pleasure.

In any event, it should come as no surprise that United World Communism has the United States as its target for the promulgation of Free Love. But fear not, as one lone woman stands stalwart against the Reds and their revolutionary sexuality: Mrs. B. L. Robinson, President of the Massachusetts Public Interests League, and wife of Prof. B. L. Robinson, professor of botany at Harvard University. She addressed members of the Women’s Political Study Club of White Plains on the topic of “Alien Propaganda in Our Colleges and Schools.”

Mrs. Robinson denounced the radical groups Fellowship of Youth for Peace and the National Federation of Students, but saved her most vitriolic vitriol for that incendiary demagogue whose unholy mission it is to urge our children to use birth control: Bertrand Russell. Unbelievably, stated Mrs. Robinson, Russell’s What I Believe was used in the freshman year English course in Smith College, and over 170 other schools, though the book condones both sex perversion and adultery (Mrs. Robinson was especially peeved with Smith College’s über-lefty Harry Elmer Barnes friendship with Russell and Barnes’ gleeful, secular-humanist demoralizing of twentieth-century womanhood).

Of course, this is 1927, and Russell still hadn’t made his big splash with his piece of 1929 agitprop Marriage and Morals, in which he goes on about how young people can try out intercourse with each other if they so wish before (or without!) getting married—heck, use birth control and get divorced if you wanna!

Now Mrs. Robinson, though Russell was one of those evil lefty one-worlder internationalists (we still fight them to-day!), did you not realize that in discussing birth control he was speaking of population control in general and of preserving your very race, endangered species that it is, in particular? Surely you thought of that as you spoke to your crowd there in aptly-named White Plains:

This policy may last some time, but in the end under it we shall have to give way–we are only putting off the evil day; the one real remedy is birth control, that is getting the people of the world to limit themselves to those numbers which they can keep upon their own soil… I do not see how we can hope permanently to be strong enough to keep the coloured races out; sooner or later they are bound to overflow, so the best we can do is to hope that those nations will see the wisdom of Birth Control…. We need a strong international authority.

– "Lecture by the Hon. Bertrand Russell", Birth Control News, December 1922

Oh, and by the way Mrs. Robinson, you haven’t all that much to fear from Reds of the Russian variety. By the end of the 20s Stalin had quashed all the strides made after the October Revolution; you’ve much more to fear from the English and the Lithuanians and the Japanese and the French and the Germans and the Australians…

1947project podcast #8

The podcast returns with a vengeance, as nasty ladies spank stolen children, acid is flung into coppers’ eyes, a love bird feathers his nest and Crimebo answers your questions. Yes, friends, it’s time again to suffer through the 1947project podcastitifatorial, and you wouldn’t leave us to suffer alone… would you?

Here is the iTunes link for you modern types.

Also available on Moli.

Robber Queen

Robber Queen Headline

September 24, 1927 Patricia Sullivan
Los Angeles

What’s wrong with the dames in this town? When they aren’t powdering and painting their faces, they’re at petting parties, drinking in blind pigs, or dancing the night away doing the black bottom or the kinkajou. Now it seems that they are also morphing into gun molls. According to police, several female stick-up artists are currently menacing Los Angeles residents, and at least two of them are red-heads.

With so many women bandits prowling the streets and preying on the unwary, competition for the title of Robber Queen is fierce…the most recent contender for the crown is Patricia Sullivan, aged 23. Miss Sullivan and a male companion were taken into custody by Officers Reid and Garner in front of her apartment building at Tenth and Western.

Patricia was transported to the county jail where she was booked on suspicion of robbery. Her accomplice has been identified as 27 year old shoe salesman, Alvarado Contreras, of 1132 West Thirty-First Street. The two have avowed their innocence but Miss Sullivan closely resembles the description of the lady crook given to police, from her toes right up to her auburn tresses.

Detective Lieutenant Smith and Captain Kallmeyer of Wilshire Division are arranging for the victims of Her Royal Heistness to come to down to the station to positively identify her as the woman who terrorized them.

Patricia’s reign as Robber Queen was short-lived…she was only Queen for a Day.

1947project podcast #6, August 24 2007

The 6th biweekly 1947project podcast is now online, and can be accessed at the internet archive, at our MOLI.com media page or at iTunes. So don’t say we never did anything for you.

About this episode: It’s time again to travel back to 1927 to see what hijinks our great-great-greats were up to. How’s about long distance swimming feats to celebrate turning 67, petting parties that turn into crime scenes, exploding kegs o’ wine in civic buildings and a very special kind of baked ham? Plus, Crimebo shares his favorite spots for meeting girls and advises a shy young man on how he too can be a Crime Clown,and the meat in a all-gal sandwich!

Hit Records Make a Splash

August 11, 1927
Los Angeles
blasts

Three terrific explosions ripped through the Hall of Records to-day! Who could have committed such a dastardly act? Anarchists? Bolsheviks? Theosophists? Vegetarians?
hor
The twelfth-floor room in which the blasts took place were stained and dripping a deep crimson red. Surely the blood of the innocent! Splattered across our noble governing offices by devious dynamiting moustachio’d malcontents!
kegs
On further investigation, all that dripping gore was discovered to be just red wine…for the Hall of Records, it seems, is a pretty swell place to stash some wine kegs.

Until they burst.

Exclusive! Flapper Fashions Lead to Arrest, Disease

August 7, 1927

Grandma knew better than to show her ankles on the street, but today’s young Jezebels think nothing of flaunting bare knees, backs, and arms in the public square. In a pair of exclusives to the Los Angeles Times, reporters covered the scourge of flapper fashions.

In woodsy Ellenville, New York, Chief of Police Ross bluntly described the problem facing his village. "They really don’t wear enough clothes, the girls who come here for the summer," he said today. Not that the town fathers objected to "short dresses and low-necked gowns, or even bathing suits" as long as the wearer appeared "to have at least a vague interest in swimming." Herein lay the problem. "Somehow a fad got started . . .," Chief Ross explained, "and now half of the girls are running around the streets dressed only in swimming trunks and blouses." On the streets, mind you, where children and the good town fathers might see them—and where no swimming ever took place. "Others wear some little jumpers that look like men’s track pants, sweaters and sandals," the law man continued, perhaps evidencing a more than professional interest in the topic. But woe to these sun-worshippers and their fans: Mayor Wells plans to call a meeting of city trustees next week to pass an ordinance compelling "the girls to wear more clothes."

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Hoye E. Dearholt today announced that "[s]cantiness in women’s dress is primarily responsible" for a rise in "the white plague" of tuberculosis among young women. According to Dr. Dearholt (chief of staff at the Wisconsin Tuberculosis Association), girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 25 who diet to attain fashionably boyish figures and then dress in revealing clothing lower their resistance and set themselves up as easy prey for the disease. "There is a point in the race for scanty clothing at which a girl must stop, lest the body be chilled too much and weakened," the doctor noted before calling for "dress reform." Fashions "somewhere between the petticoat days of two decades ago and the extreme flimsiness of the present day dress would be ideal," he noted.

One only hopes Mayor Wells, Chief Ross, and Dr. Dearholt didn’t live to see the advent of the miniskirt and monokini in the 1960s.

I Did Not Have Sex with that Woman!

Jacobson Headline

August 6, 1927
Los Angeles

Councilman Carl I. Jacobson was arrested in a morals raid at 4372 Beagle Street in the company of a woman who said her name was Mrs. Councilman Jacobson Hazel Ferguson, but who later admitted her real name was Mrs. Callie Grimes.

The married councilman insisted that he was framed and that the raid was the underworld’s retaliation for his much publicized crusade against vice in the city.

Jacobson, who lives in a small bungalow at 3014 Terry Place with his wife of thirty years, told cops that he had called upon Mrs. Ferguson to discuss a matter of street assessments with her. He said Mrs. Ferguson had telephoned him at his home and asked him to look over her property to see if it was worth paying the assessments.

When he arrived for their meeting Mrs. Ferguson poured two cocktails, and then moments later all of the lights in the house went out. It was then that police announced themselves and placed Councilman Jacobson and Mrs. Ferguson/Grimes under arrest.

The four arresting officers, Captains of Detectives Wallis and Williams, and Detectives Lucas and Raymond related a version of events substantively different from Jacobson’s account. They stated that they went to the Beagle street house, watched through a window and then observing what they felt constituted criminal behavior, crashed down a door to arrest the couple on morals violations. The arrest of Jacobson and Grimes begs the question: why were four high-ranking LAPD officers creeping around in the shrubbery with their noses pressed to a window like four Peeping Toms?

The case against Jacobsen would drag on. Jacobson would be tried twice on morals charges. In the first trial the jury would vote 9 to 3 for acquittal; in the second trial the jury would be evenly divided and the DA would decide against trying him for a third time. Mrs. Callie Grimes would confess to her part in the frame-up, and then recant. Grimes along with the four officers who conducted the raid would be tried for conspiracy, and the charges against them would be dismissed in 1929.

One of the detectives, Harry Raymond, would leave the LAPD and become a private investigator. He’d turn up again in the news as the victim of an attempted assassination by car bomb, in a 1938 corruption scandal involving Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw, members of his administration, and the LAPD.