Read Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Online
Authors: Edward Bunker
Theirs was good advice for 1950. Twenty years later it
was impossible to be convicted of a prison murder without at least mil- guard
as eyewitness. In the '50s, most convicts felt such helpless defeat that they
usually confessed after a few days, or weeks, or even months, in the dungeon,
which was what they called a certain row of cells in Folsom's #5 building.
Nobody even thought a convict might have the right to a lawyer. Bob Wells only
ever saw his lawyer in the courtroom.
Another piece of advice I remembered from Sampsell.
"Two guys are the perfect robbery mob. With one guy, you know you won't
get snitched on . . . but one guy can only watch one person while getting the
money. With two guys, one covers the room and the other sacks it up. One guy
can cover a lot of people. And if somebody snitches, there's no doubt who it
was ..."
I listened and
remembered, but without saying that I was not inclined to armed robbery.
Indeed, I had no plans to be a criminal. Neither did I make a vow to God, or
anyone else, that I would not be one. I was going to be penniless when the gate
opened. All my friendships had been born in one cage or another, juvenile hall,
reform school, jail. Whatever happened, I would keep on. Solid convicts would say,
"When it gets too tough for everybody else, it's just the way I like
it." It's an expression I've used often in my life.
About a week after my sentence, the jail bureaucracy
transferred me to the Wayside Honor Rancho, where I lived in a dorm and worked
pushing a Georgia buggy full of pig feces during the day. Nothing known to man
smells worse than pig feces. All evening and on weekends, I played lowball
poker. An old dope fiend confidence man taught me how to hand muck (palm cards)
and deal from the bottom of the deck. Over the years I found that when I could
cheat, I didn't need to because I was a better poker player than that. When the
other players were so good that cheating would have helped, they were also so
good that they, too, knew the moves. Nothing illegal is seen, but there are
telltale ways of holding one's hand, or framing the deck. The primary thing was
being able to spot a card mechanic. When I did I would give him the signal
known to con men around the world, a clenched fist on the table. It signals he
must play it on the up and up. A flat palm means go ahead and work. There are
also standard signals for con men who play the match and the strap, and for
boosters and till tappers and other members of the vanishing breed of
professional thieves who go back at least as far as Elizabethan England.
At Wayside Honor Rancho, which
was the county farm, I slept next to a young pimp named Jim Manes. He wore ex
tremely
thick glasses and had a
sharp
mind. Every Sunday one of his whores brought him enough pot for a few joints.
After the evening count,
we sat outside the dorm and got high. My poker game suffered
when I was high on grass. Manes was serving thirty days for drunk driving and a
string of unpaid parking tickets. He came in after me and went out before me.
As he was rolling up his gear for the bus ride to downtown Los Angeles, which
is where prisoners wire released, he wrote out a telephone number and told me
to get in touch with him when I got out. A Jewish bookie named Hymie Miller, an
associate of LA's pre-eminent mobster of the era, Mickey Cohen, likewise took a
shine to me. He could be contacted through a cocktail lounge in Burbank that
was owned by the Sica brothers, Joe and Freddy, both notorious LA gangsters of
that time.
During my sojourn on the county farm, I got into one
fistfight.
It happened
during the poker game, although I cannot recall what precipitated it. The
opponent was a big man, and added to that, was fat. He was boisterous and
arrogant, traits that have always grated on me. We were playing with a cot as
the card table, six of us — one seated at each end of the bunk, and two along
each side. He was straight across from me. Whatever the dispute, he slammed
down his cards, said something like ". . . fuckin' little punk," and
started to rise. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, but he must
have been near fifty years old. Before he got all the way to his feet, I dove
across the cot and crashed into him, one hand trying to tear his testicles
through his pants, my teeth looking for an ear or nose to bite off.
Those things were unnecessary, for my body toppled him back
and down into the metal side rail of the adjacent bunk. My 150 pounds came down
on top of him.
He screamed. The others pulled me off of him. I'd
broken his shoulder. They took him away to the general hospital and I never saw
him again. His name, however, was Jack Whalen, and those who know about the
gangster days in LA, of Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, the Shannon brothers (who
were born the Shaman brothers) and others, know that Jack Whalen was the most
feared hit man and thug in the LA underworld. I didn't know that until after I
had broken his shoulder. Needless to say, nobody else caused me any trouble
during the rest of my time at the Wayside Honor Rancho. The days dwindled down:
eight, seven, six, five. I would be a free man soon.
Whores,
Hearst and Hollywood's Angel
Freedom!
My fingers were all thumbs and I was half dizzy as I stripped off county jail
denim and waited for my street clothes. The trusty came out of the racks of
hanging clothes and pushed mine across the counter: deep-pleated and full-cut
doeskin gabardine slacks and a jacket with big shoulder pads and a brown suede
front. The look was stylish. When they brought me from Lancaster I was dressed
in US Army surplus khakis, but one morning when I returned from court, the man
ahead of me took off and hung up the doeskin slacks and suede-fronted jacket. I
switched tags — and here they were. They fit as if tailored for me. Except for
the high-topped brogans, I was going forth dressed in the fashion of 1950.
From the jail bathroom, where releases were dressed out, I
was sent up corkscrew steel stairs into a cage. It had an empty bench along one
wall, while the other was like a barred cashier's cage. At the end away from
the stairway was an electrically controlled barred gate.
A
deputy sheriff stepped up to the cashier's window.
"Who're you?"
"Bunker."
He
looked through a pile of releases, found the right one with its attached
documents, and motioned for me to step up. "What's your mother's maiden
name?" he asked.
"Sarah
Johnston."
"Where was she born?"
"Vancouver, British Columbia."
"Gimme your thumb."
He took a thumbprint and, while I used a hanging rag
to wipe off the ink, he compared it with a thumbprint taken when they booked
me. Satisfied, he yelled around the corner to the elevator operator. "One
out!" He pressed a button and the gate buzzed. I pushed it open, stepped
out and let it crash shut behind me.
Around the corner an old elevator operator was holding
the door. I stepped in, the doors slid closed and we dropped ten floors
swiftly. The doors opened into the teeming main corridor of the Hall of
Justice. Lawyers, cops, witnesses, litigants, defendants, bail bondsmen and
trial spectators swarmed rapidly about. Ahead of me was a big glass door.
Beyond that, Broadway. I pushed out. j
On the sidewalk, I stopped. Now what? Pedestrians
swirled around me. The morning was sunny and warm. A pretty young woman in a
bright print dress went by on high heels. I smelt het for a moment. She had
tanned legs and her hair bounced around her neck. She was headed south on
Broadway, toward the taller buildings and the many movie marquees. Al
Matthews's office was in the old Law Building. It was south, too. I followed
the young woman, looking at her legs and imagining them above the hemline. She
moved with verve.
I continued to imagine as we crossed Temple Street.
She turned into the first building, the old Hall of Records. Goodbye, pretty
lady, goodbye. Could you be Laura, passing in the misty light? Oh well. The Law
Building was across the street.
MATTHEWS & BOWLER,
11
th
Floor.
The building was shabby but still
striving for gentility. One
01
two of the better criminal defen
se
lawyers were still there. Joe
Forno had a fancy office, as
did Gladys Towles Root, she who
came to court with purple hair —
or green or blue or
whatever
else matched her clothes. Her trademark hats made bystander duck. Feathers flew
and blew ev
erywhere. In the conservative
world of the courts, she was flamboyance personified. She
was
a pretty good trial lawyer when
she wanted to be. Some thieve
swore by her. Like many jaded defense lawyers, she took every
case whether she could give it proper attention or not. It was a common joke
that she had her own tier of clients in Folsom.
The elevator creaked, and when I entered the law offices of
Matthews and Bowler the carpet was threadbare. Still, it had a certain somber
respectability, with leatherbound law books in cases around the walls, and heavy
leather furniture in the outer office. A bird-like woman, quick and petite, was
behind the receptionist's desk. She came around the desk, smiling broadly,
shook my hand and told me she was Emily Matthews, Al's wife. Al had mentioned
her to me. "Al's in court," she said. "But let me introduce you
around."
A man was gold-lettering "Manley Bowler" on a door.
Bowler was Al's new partner. Emily knocked and we entered. He was a slender,
patrician-appearing man who shook hands and eyed me critically. "You're going
to stay out of trouble this time?"
I replied with candor: "I sure hope so. But ..." I
ended with a shrug. I'd been in trouble as far back as I could remember, so how
could I categorically declare I'd never get in trouble again?
That
would slap the face of probability.
"Well, let's hope you make it." He was friendly,
but his eyes had a different look than Al's. His partnership with Al Matthews
was short-lived, although their friendship continued. Manley had a prosecutor's
view and he soon returned to that side of the table, where his career
flourished.
The outer office phone rang. Emily hurried to answer it and
Manley excused himself: he had work to do. In the reception area I started to
tell Emily that I would return tomorrow. Still on the phone, she shook her head
and gestured for me to wait. When she hung up, she said: "Stick around. Al
wants to see you. Go sit in his office. Read something. I've got to answer
these phones."
Al's office was spacious, the wood old and dark.
Glass-fronted bookcases were along the walls from floor to ceiling. Rows of
numbered volumes,
51 Cal. App. Rpts,
and
52, 53, 54,
etc. Two fat
blue volumes:
Corpus Juris Secundum.
A couple of worn smaller books:
California Criminal Law,
Fricke;
California Criminal Evidence,
Fricke.
Fricke was the guy Sampsell and Chessman were talking
about.
Black's
Dictionary of Law.
These books had incantations that were almost magical, I
thought. If I knew them, I would be a wizard of law.
I sat in Al's chair. The desk
was clear except for a photo of Emily and a boy about twelve years old. Under
the edge of the green desk blotter was tucked a handwritten note. It said,
Eddie . . . Mrs Wallis????
Did that refer to me? If it
did, I would find out at the right time.
I began browsing. The first
book I took down had a slip of paper serving as a page marker. Opening to the
marker, I found a California Supreme Court opinion affirming a death penalty
conviction. Emily came in. "You might as well go. Al isn't coming in until
late this afternoon."
"What time?"
"It's hard to know . . .
whenever the trial judge calls it a day. Some of them go late."
As I started to leave, she
added, "The best time to catch him is in the morning . . . between 9 and
9.30 . . . before he goes to court."
That was fine with me. I wanted
to roam free. We went from the office to the reception room. "Where are
you going to stay?"
"I thought I'd rent a
furnished room." Back then, a furnished room cost $9 or $10 a week. Called
"piss in the sink" rooms, they usually had a sink and faucet, with the
bathroom down the hall.
"You got some money?"
I hesitated half a second
before nodding. Actually, I had about $40 in ones and fives. A five was the
largest denomination a prisoner was allowed in his possession. I'd been red hot
in a poker game during my last week.
The hesitation sent Emily to
her purse. She extracted three $20 bills and tucked them in my breast pocket.
"Nice outfit by the way," she said.
When I departed with $100, I
felt good. It was two weeks' take-home for a factory worker. I was flush.
Back out on Broadway, I
continued south. The sidewalks were filled with well-dressed shoppers. Yellow
streetcars clanged up and down the middle of the street with barely room for a
car to pass
on the right. In the
shadowed canyon of buildings, the movie marquees sparkled. I could see them
from 2
nd
to 9
th
Streets. Here, too, were LA's big
department stores, the Broadway, May Company, Eastern Columbia, J.J. Newberry,
Thrifty Drug Stores; and the local stores, Victor Clothing being the most well
known.