“You’re a cog in the organized traffic when you’re running a house, a spoke in the wheel of the underworld.”
-Call House Madam
Lee Francis was the madam of multiple brothels in Los Angeles under Charles Crawford and his successors. Almost all that is known about her, or believed that is known about her, is information that came from Francis herself and is not reliable. The following is based on my own original research.
1933. The toothbrush mustache was in, Prohibition was on the way out. The nation was in its third full year of the worst economic depression in US history. The Stock Market crash of October 1929 had caused banks to fail, and depositors lost their savings. There was mass unemployment and homelessness. On taking office in March 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a series of federal recovery and relief programs to try to address the crisis. One of the programs was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) created under the Federal Emergency Relief Act of May 1933. The Federal Transient Service (FTS) was a division of FERA created in July 1933, designed to provide transients arriving in a new city with food and shelter and, if possible, a job- at no cost to the state or local governments. On August 10, Los Angeles’ new mayor Frank Shaw restored James E. Davis to power as Chief of Police. Continue reading
Read Pt. I here.
As is now known, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel made a number of trips to Los Angeles in the early 1930s, often with his family in tow. This information comes not from secret gangster sources that can’t be revealed, but the plain old, dull documentary record.
On September 20, 1939, two women crossed paths at the busy corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Though they hadn’t seen each other in 26 years, sisters Fanny Rapport and Ida Schachter recognized each other at once. They had lost contact after Rapport left New York and came to California in the ‘teens. In 1938 Schachter too, ended up in Hollywood with her husband. She lived just down the street, at 1804 Vista Del Mar Avenue.
The chance reunion made it into the Los Angeles Times, a minor human interest item for a slow news day. Hollywood- a place where people came to start new lives, assume new identities perhaps- was full of such tales. To at least one reader, however, this story was positively riveting.
A typical reaction from anyone who reads Geoffrey Homes’ hard-to-find 1946 novel Build My Gallows High (basis for the film noir Out of the Past) is: how on earth did he come up with a name like Mumsie McGonigle? The short answer is: he didn’t. There was a real Mumsie McGonigle, and she was much in the news in early 1940s Los Angeles. Her story involves depravity and corruption to equal any hardboiled fiction plot.
The story of Paulie Gibbons’ life typically begins with his death– on the streets of Beverly Hills on May 3, 1946– punctuated by an “amusing” anecdote about his funeral. But Gibbons’ had a long criminal career in Los Angeles dating back to his youth in the bootleg era.
In its survey of Gangland Killings 1900-1951, the LAPD lists Les Bruneman as the unlucky first victim of the post-bootleg era.
J. H. Graham 