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

a mandate to get Keyes and clean house. Making Julian Pete prosecutions would become the holy grail of Fitts’s first term as D.A. In time he’d learn that the Julian Pete was an unending and unfathomable story. The scandal symbolized the crazy prosperity of the 1920s boom and presaged the despairing time that was to follow. Its consequences would ripple on and on, gaining force until they became bewildering for Fitts and, in the end, deadly for the likes of Charlie Crawford.

7
    Our Detective Learns the Ropes
    T he trial of Asa Keyes, former District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles, gave Leslie White his first important assignment in his new job with the D.A.’s office. Jake Berman (aka Jack Bennett, the “two-name man”) and one of the leading Julian Pete conspirators, had turned state’s evidence in exchange for the immunity Buron Fitts granted him. As a result, Berman found his life under threat and White was to be his bodyguard. Forensics was nowhere on White’s agenda. As he later wrote, “When trapped by the reform administration, Berman sold his confederates down the river. In this wise, he gained his release and my particular task was to keep either his former friends or the thousands of victims from killing him.”
    Jake Berman was twenty-eight, only a few years older than White, but the two men could not have been more different. Berman grew up in the Brooklyn ghetto, worked as a runner on Wall Street, and served time for fraud in a New Jersey prison. He’d arrived in L.A. with nothing but a suitcase and the friendship of S. C. Lewis. He had a round face and thinning hair, but his soulful brown eyes made him handsome as a gigolo. He sported silk neckties with a stick-pin bearing a diamond the size of a dime. He’d proven himself a master manipulator and salesman, capable of making ten suckers grow where previously there’d been only one. He’d thrown $20,000 parties with champagne and movie starlets on hand to gladden the hearts and soften the purse strings of big investors. In one sixteen-month period—January 1926 to April 1927—his bank transactions totaled $67 million. “Gossips say the boy wonder had $2 million in $10,000 bills in a body belt on his person,” wrote Lorin Baker in 1931. When Julian Pete crashed, Berman had eluded capture, fleeing to Europe on the ocean liner Berengeria, carrying $625,000 in that same chamois leather belt. He landed in England and outfoxed the Scotland Yard men sent to catch him. In time he returned to America of his own free will, traveling first class on another liner, the France, and surrendered to Buron Fitts in L.A. His soft-leathered shoes were natty and expensive, his suits cut from the finest cloth. He was a classic con man: people came to him in droves, wanting something for nothing; he gave them nothing but took plenty.
    White and his partner, the more experienced Blayney Matthews, kept Berman holed up in an apartment house at Hollywood and Vine. Next door a nightclub dancer played jazz on the phonograph all day long. Berman tapped on a table, beating the rhythm. He was restless, irritated by this confinement, and kept ordering White to fetch him coffee and sandwiches. No doubt this rankled, as did Berman’s grinning certainty that he could manipulate the law with ease. He had bilked investors out of millions, yet he expected to walk away. “You’ll help me do it,” he told White.
    “Berman was sleek and flashily groomed; he reminded me of a wharf rat that has just climbed out of the water. He had brazen bulging eyes,” White wrote. “He was a bumptious Jew.”
    An FBI report notes Berman’s “hebraic features,” and White’s remark to some extent reflects standard race prejudice for the era. It still sticks in the throat. Here was material for a comedy: the country boy, new to the city, boxed in a room guarding the life of a man he professes to despise but perhaps secretly envies—the smoothest of smooth urban operators. White earned