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

Vaus first started working for the LAPD almost by accident. In 1946, Vaus was managing a “quiet, high-class” apartment building in Hollywood for a friend while pursuing his true passion: tinkering with electronics. Tenants at the building had started complaining about a dark-haired, well-dressed girl named Marge, whose apartment was frequented by an unusually large number of “men-friends.” Marge was a B-girl downtown who made her living by tricking customers into buying her (watered-down) drinks. It seemed she was now also turning tricks on the side. So Vaus called the LAPD’s Hollywood station, which promptly sent over a young vice squad officer, Charles Stoker.

Vaus explained the problem of Marge and her many “friends” to Stoker and his partner. Stoker knew the type. “Anyone visiting her now?” he asked.

Indeed there was. Vaus gave the officers her apartment number and retreated to his office. A half hour later, Stoker reappeared.

“There’s someone in there with her, all right,” he reported. “We could hear them talking but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. We think we might hear better from outside. Do you have a ladder we could use?”

He did. Ladder supplied, Vaus returned to his office. A few minutes later, the officers were back again.

“I’m afraid we’re stymied, Mr. Vaus,” Stoker informed him. “There doesn’t seem to be any way we can either see or hear what’s going on, and in absence of evidence, we can’t act.”

Vaus was incredulous. “You mean, the vice squad doesn’t have equipment that will enable you, in a case like this, to hear what is going on behind closed doors?” he asked.

“Nope, there’s nothing like that in the Department,” Stoker replied, “in a tone of voice,” Vaus would later recall, “that implied I’d asked him if he’d bought the license plates for his transplanet rocket ship.”

Vaus explained that it would be a simple matter to get officers the proof they needed. All he had to do was plant a concealed microphone in the room and connect it by wire to a recording device outside. Indeed, Vaus modestly continued, he’d be happy to put together such a system himself to help the officers obtain the evidence they needed against Marge.

“Come back tomorrow night, I’ll have it set up and you can listen in,” Vaus said.

Wiring Marge’s room was a snap. When Stoker returned the following night, he was able to overhear Marge discussing prices with a customer. He promptly arrested her. Word of Sergeant Stoker’s new friend soon spread to other vice squad units.^[11] About a week after the arrest of Marge, one of the senior officers from the administrative vice unit downtown approached Vaus with a question. Could he develop a variant on a wiretap that would allow the police to listen in on conversations and also determine what telephone number had been dialed? In other words, the officer explained, “Joe Doaks walks into a drugstore, uses a particular telephone to dial a number and says, ‘Joe, I’ll take two dollars on horse number four in the fifth race today at Rockingham.’ Could the officer working on such a case hear the conversation and know the number that had been dialed?”

The implications of the request were obvious. If the police could tap phone lines and determine whom calls were being made to, they could then pinpoint the locations of bookmakers across Los Angeles. That would give the police a big edge on the underworld.

“I think it can be done,” Vaus replied. In fact, he’d already been working on just such a device, which Vaus dubbed “the impulse indicator.” But it was Officer Stoker who got to it first. His target was not the bookmaking racket but rather the so-called Queen Bee of Hollywood, Hollywood madam Brenda Allen.

      PROSTITUTION IN HOLLYWOOD has always been a dynastic affair. Brenda Allen had started out as a streetwalker on West Sixth Street between Union and Alvarado Streets. At some point, Allen caught the eye of Anne Forrester, the Combination’s favorite madam. Allen was a quick understudy, and when Forrester went to jail, Allen took over the high-end prostitution racket. Her particular field of innovation was the call girl. Rather than risk running a “bawdy house,” Allen used a telephone exchange service to manage her 114 girls. It was a lucrative business. Allen’s meticulous ledgers would later reveal takes of as much as $2,400 a day, of which half, the traditional split between madam and girl, went to her.

Charles Stoker had first heard of Brenda Allen when she was a plain streetwalker named Marie Mitchell plying her business downtown. He’d been startled when he returned from the war and learned that she’d become the town’s top madam. The brazenness—and cleverness—of her current arrangements aggravated him, and caused him no end of trouble. Whenever he’d arrest another prostitute, she’d complain bitterly, “Why are you arresting me while Brenda is running full-blast?”