Free A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner Page A

Finney.
    The great Los Angeles bubble had burst and trade in Julian Pete stock was suspended. Those 40,000 investors awoke to the realization that they’d been fleeced of $150 million; many of them had been ruined, and almost at once they raised angry cries for justice and revenge. What had happened? Who had done this? To District Attorney Asa Keyes fell the task of rounding up the fraudulent malefactors. Indictments against Lewis, Berman, and a host of others were issued by a grand jury in the summer of 1927. But when, after a succession of delays, judicial proceedings finally began in January 1928, Asa Keyes—shuffling, uncertain, apparently indifferent—recommended to the jury sitting in a courtroom in L.A.’s fancy new marbled Hall of Justice that charges against the accused be dropped. And so, amid chaotic scenes, the case of the People of California v. Lewis, Bennett, et al. collapsed.
    Judge Doran (he also presided over the Marco trials) knew the result should have been different and expressed his surprise in scathing terms: “I feel that diligence on the part of District Attorney Keyes would have brought a different verdict,” he said. All hope of retribution against those who’d plundered the Julian Pete seemed to have been lost.
    The verdict divided the city’s press. The Examiner seemed unconcerned, arguing that this was how the nitty-gritty of business sometimes worked and business, after all, was America’s lifeblood. The Times, on the other hand, had an axe to grind against Asa Keyes. Rumors had long persisted that, back in 1926, Keyes took a $30,000 payoff following the sensational disappearance of the evangelist Aimee McPherson. A pile of clothes was found on Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica and for thirty-two sensation-packed days, the world wondered where she was. Several of her distraught followers killed themselves, and the city spent vast sums organizing a search. Then McPherson reappeared with a tale of having been kidnapped, although it soon came out that she’d been shacked up in a hotel with the man who was her radio operator and lover. “Her followers were kneeling in the sand, praying for her to come back walking on the water,” wrote reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, the daughter of Earl Rogers. “Instead she came up in the desert in Arizona with a young man named Ormiston.” Asa Keyes brought McPherson to court and charged her with obstruction of justice then did an about-face and dropped proceedings. Now, for the Times, it seemed the same had happened again, this time within a situation that reached deeper; the Julian Pete swindle had touched most of the city’s population one way or another.
    The Times got proof of Keyes’s corruption in the shape of a diary, a little black book that had been kept by Milton Pike, an assistant to a prominent downtown tailor named Ben Getzoff, whose shop at 609 Spring Street was near the courts and the business district. In his diary Pike had recorded the various comings and goings, and the shady transactions, that took place in the back of Getzoff’s shop, all of which he observed through an angled mirror. Prominent Julian Pete players had been frequent visitors, likewise Asa Keyes, “often half-lit” on the bootleg booze kept there. Pike alleged that he’d seen Keyes accept lavish gifts and bribes. At first Keyes denied the charges and refused to resign, but accumulating evidence forced his hand. Asa “Ace” Keyes, the Los Angeles District Attorney, a public servant of twenty-four years, had taken money and thrown the most important trial on his watch. Some were shocked, but many perplexed and faith-shaken Angelenos thought this outcome logical. “So pock-marked was this slimy business with fraud and faithlessness, so infiltrated with shuffling and trimming, with bad faith and treachery, money-juggling and moral back-sliding, that few citizens were greatly surprised at this dramatic turn,” wrote Guy Finney.
    Enter Buron Fitts, elected with