A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

about the courtroom and smiling for friends,” wrote Coughlin. “He was dressed in a gray suit, a skyblue silk bowtie with handkerchief to match, and wore a huge diamond in his lapel.”
    The D.A.’s office had tried to prosecute Marco several times before, but he’d always beaten the rap. Marco had friends in top places and was in no doubt that he’d secure an acquittal this time too. His courtroom demeanor mixed preening arrogance and feigned boredom. Albert Marco had once lost $250,000 in a single hand of poker to Nicky Arnstein, the famed gambler “Nick the Greek.” Marco wanted the world, and Dave Clark, to know that a mere murder charge didn’t faze him.
    Marco had been born in 1887 in an Alpine village in northern Italy, where he’d been apprenticed to a hatmaker before deciding to try his luck in America. He, along with thousands of others primarily from Italy and Central Europe, passed through Ellis Island in 1908. He drifted west, roaming Nevada and Washington State as a pimp and confidence man. In Seattle he ran the prostitution business at a large and briefly successful gambling hotel. In 1919 he was arrested for burglary in Sacramento and served a brief sentence. The early 1920s found him in Los Angeles, already driving a Cadillac, wearing slick suits with a Panama hat pushed back on his head, and shipping bootleg booze into a Long Beach warehouse. In 1925 he drew a gun on an LAPD officer and brutally pistol-whipped him. For this, Marco got a $50 fine and was given his gun back. He had good reason to believe himself above the law. He was an important cog in The System, the cabal that ran the Los Angeles underworld.
    “‘Marco’s been indicted,’ was the whisper flashed from joint to joint,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the News when Marco was arrested for attempted murder on June 28, 1928. “Many of the Marco hirelings, all of them strong believers in the racketeer’s boast that he was ungettable, were hard to convince that the baron faced a potential penitentiary term.” Marco, his clothes dried crimson with blood, had been caught on the roof of the Ship Café in Venice, trying to escape. He told the cop who arrested him. “I’m Albert Marco. I’m a big shot with the police downtown and if you pinch me you’ll be sent to the sticks for life.” A Los Angeles Times photograph shows him sitting on a police bench, staring at the camera with an expression of insolence and contempt. His dark hair stands almost straight up, a shock of vigorous, untidy curls rising above a long, meaty face. The double-breasted jacket of his smart suit is worn over a bloody undershirt; his dress shirt, presumably even more stained, had been left in the restroom where he’d been trying to wash it clean.
    This, then, was Albert Marco: a thug, thickset and not pretty, but with blunt charisma. His trial—trials, rather, for there would be two—brought Dave Clark glory, but also would plant the seeds of his future doom.
    Judge William Doran got proceedings under way amid rumors of jury tampering and stories that Marco had already reached a civil settlement with Dominick Conterno, the man he was accused of trying to kill. The first two days were consumed by the all-important ritual of jury selection before Conterno at last took the stand, with Dave Clark unsure whether this first, and most important, witness had already been squared away by the defense. That turned out not to be the case. Led by Clark, Conterno gave a telling and vivid version of what had happened.
    The trouble began when a drunk Marco approached Conterno’s wife and was rebuffed, whereupon he called her a “lousy whore.” Conterno, unsurprisingly, took exception and the argument swiftly escalated into a brawl, first in the restroom of the Ship Café, then outside, where Marco yanked out a pistol and fired two shots. The first slammed Conterno in the back, the second missed its target but winged Harry Judson (the singer with the jazz band that played at