L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

The county grand jury was the wildcard in Los Angeles politics. Every year, the county’s fifty superior court judges appointed nineteen people to the jury, which had broad leeway to investigate wrongdoing. At least seventeen of those judges were in the pocket of the Combination; these friendly judges typically ensured that eight to twelve of the grand jury’s members had close ties either to Mayor Frank Shaw’s administration or to the underworld. As a result, grand juries generally managed to avoid uncovering any serious wrongdoing. A clear majority of the 1937 grand jury fit this pattern. When Clinton and three other jurors pressed for an investigation into vice conditions, the grand jury foreman refused. But Clinton was undeterred. Instead, he went directly to Mayor Shaw and asked him to bless an investigation.

Clinton’s proposal put Shaw in a tough position. If the mayor refused, he risked creating the impression that he had something to hide. So over the objections of Chief Davis, Shaw endorsed Clinton’s investigation. When the group unveiled its name—the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC)—and announced that it would also be investigating municipal malfeasance, Shaw realized he had made a mistake. Clinton’s public statements made it clear that he was targeting more than the city’s brothels and gambling parlors; he was targeting the Combination as a whole. The mayor withdrew his support. CIVIC pressed ahead. Its volunteer investigators soon came up with a tally of vice in Los Angeles: 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines. The rest of the grand jury wasn’t interested. It refused to accept much less publish CIVIC’s report.

Clinton turned to Judge Bowron for advice. The fifty-year-old Bowron knew the underworld well. During the teens, he’d put himself through law school by working as a city reporter. Then, after serving in the Army during the First World War, he’d gotten a job as the executive secretary to California governor Friend Richardson, who appointed him to superior court. There Bowron turned his attention to the issue of corruption. Three years earlier, in 1934, Bowron had presided over a crusading county grand jury that nearly toppled District Attorney Buron Fitts. (Fitts’s office had dropped a case against a millionaire real estate developer who’d allegedly raped an underage prostitute after the developer entered into a shady business deal with a member of the DA’s family.) Now Bowron suggested that Clinton produce a minority grand jury report. When Clinton did so, the judge with responsibility for presiding over the grand jury ruled that it couldn’t be released. Bowron issued a counterruling, and CIVIC hastily printed and distributed thousands of copies.

The report was scathing. It found that “underworld profits” were being used to finance the campaigns of “city and county officials in vital positions.” In exchange, local officials were turning a blind eye to a vast network of brothels, “clip joints,” gambling houses, and bookmakers. The report charged that officials from all three of the principal law enforcement agencies in the county, the district attorney’s office, the sheriff’s department, and the LAPD, “work in complete harmony and never interfere with the activities of important figures in the underworld.”

The counterreaction was swift. Grand jury foreman John Bauer labeled Clinton an “out of control” egomaniac and charged that the cafeteriateur, rather than the underworld, was “Public Enemy #1.” The Los Angeles Times, which was closely allied with District Attorney Fitts, echoed Bauer’s allegations. When a notary appeared before the county grand jury to testify that foreman Bauer was actually a Shaw crony holding lucrative city paint contracts, Fitts, Bauer, and a squad of detectives from the DA’s office arrived, uninvited, at the notary’s house. The detectives then beat the hapless notary so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

Clinton came under pressure too. His real estate taxes were increased by nearly $7,000, a significant sum during the Depression. Complaints of food poisoning became commonplace. Clinton’s newest cafeteria was denied a permit. But the man the newspapers had dubbed “the Cafeteria Kid” was undeterred. So Clinton’s enemies upped the ante. That October, a bomb exploded in the basement of Clinton’s home in Los Feliz. Fortunately Clinton, his wife, and their three children slept on the other side of the house and were unharmed. The LAPD responded by suggesting the attack was probably just a publicity ruse engineered by Clinton himself—despite the fact that a car seen speeding from the scene had license plates that tied it to the LAPD’s intelligence division.