Mad Dog, Chief of Police
“The prisoner is placed in a cell far removed from others, so his screams cannot be heard.”
The recorded legacy of Seattle vice and corruption reaches back two centuries, to impresario and saloon pioneer John Considine, who helped introduce Seattle to drinks, debauchery, and risqué bare-belly dancer Little Egypt. He also memorably battled rival Alexander Pantages for Seattle’s vaudeville turf, with both men stealing each other’s acts and rising to eventual fame in Hollywood, Considine as a silent-film producer and head of an acting family, and Pantages as a movie mogul and theater chain owner. But it was Considine’s hidden payments to beat officers that made lesser-known history, ranking among some of Seattle’s first street-level bribes. Just as a corrupting racketeer named Frank Colacurcio would do half a century later while dominating his era’s vices, Considine offered cops cash to look the other way as he violated Seattle’s sin laws. Among statutes he paid to break was the 1894 “barmaid ordinance.” The law prevented women from working where alcohol was served, and Considine clearly needed them at his People’s Theater, in what is now Pioneer Square. The “box-house” saloon and card room featured female performers who danced, sang, and serviced a willing crowd, mostly lusty prospectors spilling into town during the Klondike Gold Rush.
Considine also ran three illegal betting parlors by paying fines and bribing cops under a vice tolerance policy that would appear, disappear, and reappear in Seattle throughout the next century. His cozy relationship with Seattle police chief C. S. Reed allowed him to monopolize the vice action for a few years until competitors, some formidable, bought in. Among them was gunslinger Wyatt Earp, described in 1899—eighteen years after the gunfight at O.K. Corral—by the Seattle Star as “a man of great reputation among the toughs and criminals, inasmuch as he formerly walked the streets of a rough frontier mining town with big pistols stuck in his belt, spurs on his boots and a devil-may-care expression upon his official face.” His Union Club on Union Street thrived for more than a year until a citywide crackdown drove him off to San Francisco. Only months after Earp departed, Considine’s joints reopened.
He didn’t get along as well with the next police chief, however, so he killed him. In a 1901 showdown, Considine shot the dislikable William Meredith three times after Meredith fired at him first, the chief’s bullet described in one news report as “scraping along the back of Considine’s neck and lodging in the arm of a messenger boy having sarsaparilla at a soda fountain.” Considine’s actions were deemed self-defense by a jury that took just three hours to decide they didn’t like Meredith either.
Of course, if it was OK to kill the police chief, what did that mean for everyone else? Brevity. Life could end abruptly in the middle of a horse ride or poker game. And thanks in great deal to corruption, incompetence, and the free flow of booze and drugs, citizens could vanish almost as if they never existed. Records to that effect can still be found in yellowed bound volumes in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office at Harborview Medical Center. They tell terse stories of early vice-related lives and deaths. The file on the first person to officially die in King County reads in its entirety:
Name, M.M. Murphy.
Age, unknown.
Residence, Railroad Saloon, foot of Main Street, Seattle.
Cause of death, an overdose of morphine with suicide intent.
Date: March 20, 1889.
The second person to die was also linked to suicide. The third, a steamboat man, went out “in the discharge of his duties” and drowned; the fourth was shot on the outskirts of Slaughter, now known as Auburn; and the fifth succumbed to “frequent and repeated doses of bad whiskey.” In the strange shorthand of the day, a woman named Laura Oldham, alias Laura Sidney, “died from the effects of a debauch started about one week before,” while Miss Edith Valentine committed suicide when she “shot herself over the Budweiser.”
The most consistent notation on every page is that the coroner had collected his $10 fee; on some pages, the collected fee is the only entry.
Back then and throughout most of the next century, “police protection” was a double entendre and depended on how much dirty money a business operator could afford to pay. Among those who could was Madam Lou Graham, who started up a bordello in the 1890s. Thanks to two of the era’s most dependable commodities—vice and corruption—Graham, by the turn of the century, had become one of the city’s wealthiest residents and a major landowner. Her bawdy house at Third Avenue South and South Washington Street, where some of Seattle’s most elite businessmen dropped their shorts, is still remembered by a plaque on a new building at the brothel site today. When she died at age forty-two of syphilis, Madam Lou was rumored to have left her fortune to the Seattle School District, though it actually went to relatives back home in Germany.
The police payoff system continued under Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein, Seattle’s head cop from 1906 to 1907. He became security chief at Seattle’s first world’s fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, held where the University of Washington now stands. He was then reappointed chief in 1910 by new mayor Hiram Gill, an early believer in tolerance policies, if not outright corruption. Wappy immediately informed the madams of Seattle’s thriving brothels they each owed $10 per harlot per month, payable to him or his beat officers.
As historian Murray Morgan recalled in Skid Road, there were at least five hundred women working the old-town brothels, and Wappenstein made certain every one of them paid promptly: “The cops who patrolled the Skid Road were required to make periodic reports on the number of girls in each house. An occasional patrolman made trouble by raiding an establishment where protection had been paid, or by engaging in a shakedown on his private initiative, but such mavericks were quickly transferred to outlying residential districts or put to pound beats along the windswept stretches of the waterfront. Wappy had everything under control.”
Mayor Gill didn’t. He left town one day, and an acting mayor quickly formed a committee to investigate Seattle’s vice. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) also investigated and spread the word about City Hall corruption—just as it would do again fifty years later, exposing yet another corrupt regime of cops and politicians who “tolerated” vice in return for bribes and kickbacks. Gill was tossed out of office by voters in 1911. The deciding ballots came from women whose right to vote—briefly granted, then taken away in 1887—had only recently been restored. Wappenstein also lost his job and was indicted by a grand jury. That, too, would be the fate of the city’s police chief half a century later, except that, unlike Wappy, he wouldn’t go to prison.
Seattle vice flowed on unabated but less conspicuously. The city’s first and only female mayor, Bertha Landes, failed to fully clean up corruption in the twenties—the housewife mayor called her effort “municipal housekeeping.” She was up against a new round of payoffs and protection rackets that flourished around rum-running and bottle clubs during Prohibition. Corruption spread beneath her feet, as did abuse. When not on the take, cops were on the give, dishing out punishment not only to the guilty but also to the merely accused. Getting someone to confess to a crime meant simply putting them in a rowboat with an iron ball chained to their neck and riding them out onto the water. They could either talk or accidentally be thrown overboard. That was the procedure according to William Severyns, Seattle police chief from 1922 to 1926. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Chief of Police, Severyns, known as “Mad Dog,” laid out what was an early version of waterboarding, giving murder suspects the “Ride Around the Lake.”
Two detectives enter the jail, perhaps posing as outraged relatives of the murdered person ... The prisoner is seized roughly. A chain is fastened about his neck. From it descends a heavy iron ball.
He is rushed out of the station and into a waiting automobile, which proceeds at high speed to the shores of Lake Washington. [The prisoner] is thrown into a rowboat and the putative avengers start to row toward the center of the deep and vast body of water.
Almost invariably the prisoner breaks down and either confesses to his participation, or tells what he knows of the identity of the real perpetrators.
In those days, cops multitasked with the iron ball, Severyns noted. They could balance it over a prisoner’s head, attached to a cord threaded through a cell door and tied to the prisoner’s raised leg. If he didn’t confess and grew weary from questioning, his leg would give way and the ball would skull him. Police also used the “Electric Carpet.” It was a live-wire mat that sent shocks, triggered by an interrogator, to any suspect thought to be lying. “In using this,” Severyns cautioned, “the prisoner is placed in a cell far removed from others, so his screams cannot be heard.” Should that fail, there was always brute force.
It is a method hard, direct and blunt—simply and crudely knocking a prisoner cold when he is caught in a deliberate lie. When the prisoner recovers consciousness, he finds the detectives standing over him, fists drawn back for more blows, and all shouting “Lie to us, you———, will you?”
He didn’t necessarily use or approve of these tactics, Severyns claimed, since they could be counterproductive. “So fearful was one man that he is said to have given the sheriff a confession not altogether true!” Severyns said he thought that was so unjust that the next year he ran for sheriff. And won.
In the late thirties, a stern mayor, and later governor, Arthur Langlie, pressed for new laws to combat corruption and abuse. A Republican, Langlie had such an impressive record he later wound up on a five-person list for the 1952 vice presidential nomination. Instead, Dwight Eisenhower chose the ethical time bomb, Richard Nixon. Yet Seattle vice and crime investigations still suffered from the shenanigans and incompetence of their practitioners. One, a man named Otto Mittelstadt, was the county’s coroner in the thirties and forties and the inventor of the portable inquest. In reaction to an increasing number of automobile deaths, he began to convene coroner’s proceedings outdoors at crash sites. He’d quickly call a judge, phone the media, and hurry all of them to the scene, where he’d assemble a jury on the street corner. There he’d swear in witnesses, then grill the hapless driver of the other car. While the practice was less bloody than some of those described by Severyns, the goal was much the same. “As the result of this policy,” Mittelstadt said, “it often has been possible to obtain confessions from hit-run drivers and others who might have had time to frame a false defense, had the inquests been delayed.”
Under different circumstances, that would be the fate of a budding young felon named Frank Colacurcio. He actually had time to think about it, but confessed anyway.