II

     Charley Pellanda’s great ambition in life was to qualify himself as a faith healer, and his mentor, Rachel (Butterfly) Uwanawich, assured him that his prospects were highly promising. But finally Charley came to the searching last test, which a less dedicated man could scarcely have passed.
     As proof of his faith, Charley had to produce his life savings in the form of cash. The money was wrapped into a package and handed back to him.
     “Take this out onto the sea,” the novice healer was instructed. “Cast it into the sea. This way alone can you dedicate your inner self and join the sanctified and mystic order of the faith healer.”
     Charley blinked but obeyed. Out in the open water between Los Angeles and Catalina Island, he yielded to a momentary nostalgia—because, after all, $21,500 is a lot of money—and peeked for a last time at the nest egg he was sacrificing.
     It wasn’t there. The package contained bundles of paper scissored to the size of greenbacks.
     Immediately, Charley put about and returned to confront The Butterfly. More in sorrow at the loss of a promising disciple than resentment over his charges, she persuaded Charley that he needed rest in a hospital.
     Charley agreed—till he found himself in the Camarillo State Hospital for the mentally ill near Los Angeles. Relatives sprung him, and he came to LAPD’s seventeen-man Bunco Squad with his story of faith and disillusion.
     The Bunco cops, recognizing an interesting professional variation on the old Mexican charity switch, promised to help Charley get back at least part of his money.*
     *Rachel Uwanawich (Rose Wayne) was sentenced for grand theft.
     Because so many retired persons cluster in southern California, Los Angeles is the national capital of the con man, and the marriage and religious bunks are almost a city industry. There are also “doctors,” “professors” and “noblemen” who prey on hope, senility, and ignorance and those despicable practitioners of the “fruit shake.” The latter, posing as policemen, threaten to “arrest” homosexuals unless they are paid off.
     To meet fraud with enforcement, the Bunco Squad is subdivided into teams of experts. One wars on the marriage bunks and social clubs, along with borrowing, short-change and auction rackets. Business bunks require a team of their own, while a third subsquad investigates false advertising, rental bunks and repair rackets.
     In stores, streets, and theaters, another team quietly watches for touts, impersonators and similar phonies who dare to work openly. Finally, though you would think such grifts died with the Old West, Buncomen are still breaking up rigged coin games, three-card monte, and “solid gold brick” sales.
     Unlike most detective squads, the Bunco sleuths rarely use LAPD’s elaborate IBM procedure to detect criminal M.O. Whether it’s the Texas “Atomotrone” (a $30 gadget supposedly efficacious in treatment of some 87 diseases) or the Denver “tubeless radio” (a pocket-sized radio which would require a one-hundred-foot antenna), the squad keeps track of con games being pulled all over the country. Flimflam artists who have been run out of other states often relocate in Los Angeles; and the Bunco squad is ready and waiting with fat files on their M.O.s.
     The game may be as petty as “Dr.” John E. O’Malley’s $5 street pitch, or as grandiose as H. C. Mills’ $1,000,000 stock mining swindles. Bunco Division is impartial in enforcing the fraud laws.
     The “doctor,” who usually identified himself as a Philippine physician, would approach the innocent on the street with a canning jar in his hand. “I have a dangerous bug in this bottle,” he would say impressively. “I must get to Stanford University at once in the interests of science! Can you lend me $5 for bus fare?” For $5, very few persons want to delay scientific progress, and the “doctor” lived comfortably on his modest grift till the Bunco Squad checked his academic background. O’Malley was a graduate only of several state and federal prisons.*
     *O’Malley was convicted and sentenced in February, 1956.
     Homer Cecil Mills, the sixty-seven-year-old gray flannel king of the mining stock swindlers, was a more formidable opponent. A disbarred lawyer who had done time for forgery, he knew every legal trick in the book and despite numerous actions by government agencies, he operated successfully for ten years.
     Once, in fact, for thirty days, he single-handedly stood off an entire battery of U.S. attorneys trying to pin a federal rap on him in the Chicago area. Afterward, he even sold his stock to some members of the jury which had acquitted him, according to the pained scuttlebutt which reached Los Angeles.
     Bunco first heard of him through an anonymous tip that he had transferred his operations to a downtown Los Angeles hotel. He hooked his suckers through ads in the “Business Opportunities” columns of leading papers in Los Angeles and a number of other large cities. He landed them in his hotel suite, a glittering sucker trap adorned with strange mining gadgets, specimens of uranium ore and sacks of gold dust. For the few doubting Thomases, he arranged personal inspections of his Nevada mine which was thoughtfully “salted” in advance with specimens of high-yield ore.
     Lieutenant W. C. Hull was LAPD’s specialist on schemes involving corporate securities. He had been a detective for a dozen years, including five years in the crack Intelligence Division. But he knew that Mills was going to be the slipperiest challenge of his career. He began to amass his facts.
     Mills was promoting the Blossom Mine, a supposedly rich uranium field at Searchlight, Nevada, which actually had once yielded a rich ore strike. But now, Hull determined, it was a washed-up hole, and furthermore Mills didn’t have clear title or interest in the property. Posing as an investor in from Seattle, the detective phoned for an appointment, and the affable Mills granted him one the same day.
     Thereafter, for almost three weeks, they met daily. As he lavishly entertained his new pigeon, Mills outlined a stock offer only a fool would turn down.
     For $3,000, Hull could pick up 30,000 shares of Blossom at ten cents a share with the promise of ten per cent of all the revenue delved from the delivery of the uranium ore to a smelting company. Why, Mills indicated, he should double his money within a year!
     Thus persuaded, Bunco Lieutenant Hull and his “wife,” Madaleine Asdel, a civilian secretary in the division, visited Hull’s hotel suite with a bank cashier’s check for $3,000. Mills told him he had come just in time. A $4,000 ore shipment was then on its way to the smelter and a $10,000 shipment was scheduled to follow the next month. He showed him an assay report valuing the ore at $326.48 a ton.
     While Hull scanned the report, Mills examined the cashier’s check and accepted it. Almost as an afterthought, Hull said, “Here’s my business card.” He showed Mills his police identification and arrested him.
     Search of Mills’ files disclosed that more than two hundred persons, mostly pensioners and retired couples, as it turned out, had similarly invested and lost their life’s savings. LAPD estimated that investors throughout the country had been taken for at least $1,000,000 since the Los Angeles victims alone contributed more than $600,000.
     LAPD filed fourteen counts of conspiracy and theft against Mills, but the wily ex-lawyer got thirteen of them dismissed on the grounds that the police had illegally searched his hotel files and seized his mineral specimens, stock certificates, sucker lists and other documents. One charge, his stock sale to Lieutenant Hull, stuck. He was sentenced to a term of one to ten years in state prison.
     Still he wasn’t through. He appealed to the California State Supreme Court and after a turndown there, went to the United States Supreme Court, where his case is pending.
     Nor did he for a moment lose the aplomb that had made him one of the master salesmen of his time. Frankly, he advised Bunco Captain Harry Didion, the police would have been smarter to invest rather than arrest. Didion and Hull passed.
     Once his testimony had been given, Lieutenant Hull plunged immediately into another case; for the war against the bunks is unending, and a stiff note on the Squad Room bulletin board reminds the detectives:
     “All officers work mornings and nights when necessary and are subject to call from Detective Headquarters, and must give the case at issue immediate and proper attention.”