University of California Berkeley
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The Bancroft Library University of California/Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office
Earl Warren Oral History Project
Arthur H. Sherry
THE ALAMEDA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY^ OFFICE AND
THE CALIFORNIA CRIME COMMISSION
An Interview Conducted by
Miriam Feingold and Amelia Fry
Copy No. /
!i) 1976 by The Regents of the University of California
Arthur H. Sherry
TABLE OF CONTENTS - Arthur H. Sherry
PREFACE i
INTERVIEW HISTORY iv
BIOGRAPHY, Arthur H. Sherry ix
I PERSONAL BACKGROUND 1
Family 1
Education 3
Law School 5
Early Legal Experience 11
II ALAMEDA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY S OFFICE 14
Joining the Office 14
Learning the Ropes 19
Work in the Oakland Office 24
In Charge of the Berkeley Office 28
The Role of the Inspectors 38
Administration of the Office 40
Relations with Other Law Enforcement Agencies 43
Relations with the Press 49
The Knowland Family 49
Methods of Criminal Procedure 53
Interrogations and Confessions 56
Coordination of Law Enforcement 63
Legislative Work 64
Graft and Gambling Cases 68
Labor Cases 76
Communist Activity and Criminal Syndicalism 84
Japanese Exclusion 86
III EVALUATION OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY S OFFICE 90
Earl Warren as District Attorney 90
The Office Under Ralph Hoyt 93
The Office Under J. Frank Coakley 96
IV THE SPECIAL CRIME STUDY COMMISSION ON ORGANIZED CRIME 99
Origins of the Commission 99
The Mendocino Prosecutions 106
The Commission at Work 110
Relations with the Legislature 115
The Role of Governor Warren 118
The Role of Attorney General Howser 122
The Mafia and Organized Crime in California 130
Organized Crime and Politics 133
The Impact of the Crime Commission 135
The Kefauver Committee and the Crime Commission 136
INDEX
140
PREFACE
The Earl Warren Oral History Project, a five-year project of the
Regional Oral History Office, was inaugurated in 1969 to produce tape-recorded
interviews with persons prominent in the arenas of politics, governmental ad
ministration, and criminal justice during the Warren Era in California.
Focusing on the years 1925-1953, the interviews were designed not only to
document the life of Chief Justice Warren but to gain new information on the
social and political changes of a state in the throes of a depression, then
a war, then a postwar boom.
An effort was made to document the most significant events and trends
by interviews with key participants who spoke from diverse vantage points.
Most were queried on the one or two topics in which they were primarily in
volved; a few interviewees with special continuity and breadth of experience
were asked to discuss a multiplicity of subjects. While the cut-off date of
the period studied was October, 1953--Earl Warren s departure for the United
States Supreme Courtthere was no attempt to end an interview perfunctorily
when the narrator s account had to go beyond that date in order to complete
the topic.
The interviews have stimulated the deposit of Warreniana in the form of
papers from friends, aides, and the opposition; government documents; old movie
newsreels; video tapes; and photographs. This Earl Warren collection is being
added to The Bancroft Library s extensive holdings on twentieth century Cali
fornia politics and history.
The project has been financed by four outright grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and by gifts from local donors which were matched
by the Endowment. Contributors include the former law clerks of Chief Justice
Earl Warren, the Cortez Society, many long-time supporters of "the Chief," and
friends and colleagues of some of the major memoirists in the project. The
Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation have
jointly sponsored the Northern California Negro Political History Series, a
unit of the Earl Warren Project.
Particular thanks are due the Friends of The Bancroft Library, who were
instrumental in raising local funds for matching, who served as custodian for
all such funds, and who then supplemented from their own treasury all local
contributions on a one-dollar-for-every-three dollars basis.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record auto
biographical intervies with persons prominent in the history of California and
the West. The Office is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart,
Director of The Bancroft Library.
Amelia R. Fry, Director
Earl Warren Oral History Project
Willa K. Baum, Department Head
Regional Oral History Office
1 March 1973
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
ii
EARL WARREN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Principal Investigators
Ira M. Heyman
Lawrence A. Harper
Arthur H. Sherry
Advisory Council
Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong
Walton E. Bean
Richard M. Buxbaum
William R. Dennes
Joseph P. Harris
James D. Hart
John D. Hicks*
William J. Hill
Robert Kenny
Adrian A. Kragen
Thomas Kuchel
Eugene C. Lee
Mary Ellen Leary
James R. Leiby
Helen McGregor
Dean E. McHenry
Sheldon H. Messinger
Frank C. Newman
Allan Nevins*
Warren Olney, III
Bruce Poyer
Sho Sato
Mortimer Schwartz
Merrell F. Small
John D. Weaver
Project Interviewers
Miriam Feingold
Amelia R. Fry
Joyce A. Henderson
Rosemary Levenson
Gabrielle Morris
Special Interviewers
Orville Armstrong
Willa K. Baum
Malca Chall
June Hogan
Frank Jones
Alice G. King
Elizabeth Kirby
Harriet Nathan
Suzanne Riess
Ruth Teiser
*Deceased during the term of the project.
EARL WARREN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
(California, 1926-1953)
Interviews Completed by January 1976
Single Interview Volumes
A. Wayne Amerson, Northern California and Its Challenges to a^ Negro in the Mid-1900s .
1974 With an introduction by Henry Ziesenhenne
Edwin L. Carty, Hunting, Politics, and the Fish and Game Commission. 1975
C.L. Dellums, International President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
and Civil Rights Leader. 1973 With an introduction by Tarea Pittman
Mclntyre Faries, California Republicans. 1934-1953. 1973
Richard Graves, Theoretician, Advocate, and Candidate in California State Government,
1973
Emily H. Huntington, A Career in .Consumer Economics and Social Insurance. 1971
With an introduction by Charles A. Gulick, Professor of Economics, Emeritus
Helen S. MacGregor, A Career in Public Service with Earl Warren. 1973
With an introduction by Earl Warren
Richard Allen McGee, Participant in the Evolution of American Corrections: 1931-1973.
1975 With an introduction by Caleb Foote
Donald McLaughlin, Careers in Mining Geology and Management, University Governance
and Teaching. 1975 With an introduction by Charles Meyer
Edgar James Patterson, Governor s Mansion Aide to Prison Counselor. 1975 With
an introduction by Merrell F. Small
Tarea Pittman, NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker. 1974 With an introduction
by C.L. Dellums
Robert B. Powers, Law Enforcement, Race Relations; 1930-1960. 1971 With an
introduction by Robert W. Kenny
William Byron Rumford, Legislator for Fair Employment, Fair Housing, and Public
Health. 1973 With an introduction by A, Wayne Amerson
Arthur H. Sherry, The Alameda County District Attorney s Office and the California
Crime Commission. 1976
Merrell F. Small, The Office of the Governor Under Earl Warren. 1972
Paul Schuster Taylor, California Social Scientist.
Volume I, Education. Field Research, and Family. 1973 With an introduction
by Lawrence I. Hewes, Fellow, Center for the Study of Democratic Institu
tions, Santa Barbara
Volumes II & III, California Water and Agricultural Labor. 1975 With
introductions by Paul W. Gates and George M. Foster.
Multi-Interview Volumes
California State Finance in the 1940 s. 1974
With an introduction by Stanley Scott, Assistant Director, Institute
of Governmental Studies
Fred Links, An Overview of the Department of Finance.
Ellis Groff , Some Details o Public Revenue and Expenditure in the 1940s
George Killion, Observations on Culbert Olson, Earl Warren, and Money
Matters in Public Affairs.
A. Alan Post, Watchdog on State Spending.
Paul Leake, Statement on the Board of Equalization.
Earl Warren s Bakersfield. 1971
Maryann Ashe and Ruth Smith Henley, Earl Warren 8 Bakersfield.
Omar Gavins, Coming of Age in Bakersfield.
Francis Vaughan, School Days in Bakersfield.
Ralph Kreiser, A Reporter Recollects the Warren Case .
Manford Martin and Ernest McMillan, On Methias Warren.
Earl Warren and Health Insurance; 1943-1949. 1971
Russel VanArsdale Lee, M.D., Pioneering in Prepaid Group Medicine.
Byrl R. Salsman, Shepherding Health Insurance Bills Through the
California Legislature .
Gordon Claycombe, The Making of_ _a Legislative Committee Study.
JohiW. Cline, M.D., California Medical Association Crusade Against
Compulsory State Health Insurance.
Earl Warren and the State Department of Mental Hygiene . 1973
Frank F. Tallman, M.D. , Dynami cs f Change in S tate Mental Institutions.
Portia Bell Hume, M.D., Mother of_ Community Mental Health Services.
Earl Warren and the State Department of Public Health. 1973
With an introduction by E.S. Rogers, M.D., Dean, UC School of Public
Health, 1946-51.
Malcolm H. Merrill, M.D., M.P.H., A Director Reminisces.
Frank M. Stead, Environmental Pollution Control.
Henry Ongerth, Recollections of the Bureau of Sanitary Engineering.
Kent A. Zimmerman, M.D., Mental Health Concepts .
Lawrence Arnstein, Public Heal th Advocates and Issues.
The Governor and the Public, the Press, and the Legislature. 1973
Marguerite Gallagher, Administrative Procedures in Earl Warren s
Office, 1938-1953.
Verne Scoggins, Observations .on California Af f ai rs b_y_ Governor Earl
Warren s Press Secretary.
Beach Vasey, Governor Warren and the Legislature.
The Japanese-American Relocation Revi ewe d . 1974
With an introduction by Mike M. Masaoka, Former National Secretary
and Washington Representative, Japanese American Citizens League.
Volume I Decision and Exodus (In process)
Volume II The Internment
Robert B. Cozzens, Assistant National Director of the War Relocation
Authority.
Dillon S. Myer, War Relocation Authority: The Director s Account.
Ruth W. Kingman, The Fair Play Committee and Citizen Participation.
Hisako Hibi, paintings of Tanforan and Topaz camps.
Labor Looks at Earl Warren. 19 70
Germaine Bulcke, A Longshoreman s Observations.
Joseph Chaudet, A Printer s View.
Paul Heide, A Warehouseman s Reminis cences .
U.S. Simonds, A Carpenter s Comments.
Ernest H. Vernon, A Machinist s Recollections.
Perspectives on the Alameda County District Attorney s Office. 19 72
With an introduction by Arthur H. Sherry, Professor of Law
Volume I
John F. Mullins, How Earl Warren Became District Attorney.
Edith Balaban, Reminiscences about Nathan Harry Miller, Deputy
District Attorney, Alameda County .
Judge Oliver D. Hamlin, Reminiscences about the Alameda County District
Attorney s Office in the 1920 s and 30 s .
Mary Shaw, Perspectives of a Newspaperwoman.
Willard W. Shea, Recollections .of Alameda County s First Public Defender.
Volume II
Richard Chamberlain, Reminiscences about the Alameda County District
Attorney s Office .
Lloyd Jester, Reminiscences of. an Inspector in the District Attorney s
Office.
Beverly Heinrichs, Reminiscences .of a. Secretary in the District Attorney s
Office.
Clarence Severin, Chief Clerk in the Alameda County District Attorney s
Office.
Homer R. Spence, Attorney, Legislator, and Judge.
E.A. Daly, Alaroeda County Political Leader and Journalist.
John Bruce, _A Reporter Remembers Earl Warren.
Volume Til
J. Frank Coakley, A Career in_ the Alameda Coun ty District Attorney s Of flee,
Albert E. Hederman, Jr., From OTCice^ Boy to Assistant District Attorney.
Lowell Jensen, Reflections of the Alameda County District At torncy .
James H. Oakley, Early Life of ji Warren Assistant.
Earl Warren and the Youth Authority. 1972 With an introduction by Allen F. Breed,
Director, California Youth Authority
Karl Holton, Developments in Juvenile Correctional Techniques.
Kenyon Scudder, Beginnings of Therapeutic Correctional Facilities.
Heman Stark, Juvenile Correctional Services and the Community.
Kenneth Beam, Community Involvement in Delinquency Prevention.
iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY
Arthur H. Sherry, professor of law and criminology at the
University of California at Berkeley, was Interviewed for the
Earl Warren Project of the Regional Oral History Office In order
to capture his reminiscences of the Alameda County District
Attorney s office In the 1930 s and 19^0 s and of the California
Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime.
Dates of
Interview February 24- , 1971; Interviewer, Miriam Peingold
Sessions :
March 12, 1971? Interviewers, Miriam Feingold and
Amelia Fry
June 22, 1973; interviewer, Amelia Fry
Conduct of the
Interview: The interview sessions, each lasting about two hours,
were held in Professor Sherry s office, School of
Law building (Boalt Hall), Berkeley. Professor
Sherry sat behind his large, tidy desk on which
the microphone was placed. He listened intently
to questions, or sometimes took his cue from the
outline submitted before each session, then answered.
His words flowed unhesitatingly, with an easy
articulation that comes from a mind that can
synthesize ideas rapidly. He followed the outline
closely, frequently enriching his story with
descriptions of cases and related events.
Editing: Editing of the transcribed, taped interview was
done by the interviewers. Minor rearrangements of
material were made to maintain continuity of the
discussion without interrupting its Informal quality.
.Professor Sherry very carefully reviewed the edited
text, correcting several minor points and adding
explanatory comments.
Narrative Account
of the Since the Inception of the Earl Warren Project,
Interview: Arthur Sherry, as a professor of law and criminology,
has served as one of its advisors and principal
investigators, and has given the Project staff
invaluable assistance. One of his contributions
is the Introduction he wrote to the three-volume
collection of Project interviews on "Perspectives
of the Alameda County District Attorney s Office."
He was therefore well acquainted with the purposes
of the Project and gladly consented to be Interviewed,
Arthur Sherry s career Intersected Earl Warren s
at several points. Their first and longest
association was when Mr. Sherry served as a deputy
district attorney In Warren s office. Later, in
the 19^0* s, he served on Governor Warren s Special
Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime.
Professor Sherry begins the interview with a careful
account of how his grandparents came to California.
He himself was born In 1908 in Berkeley and began his
education in the Berkeley public schools. He
attended high school and college at St. Mary s.
It was a visiting speaker at St. Mary s College
who interested him in law by making law "sound
just one of the most difficult, awful things you
could ever think of," a description the young
Sherry found hard to believe. He enrolled at
Boalt Hall and graduated in 1932.
Professor Sherry gives a vivid account of the
problems that faced a young man Just out of law
school during the Depression. He picked up odd
Jobs in law whenever he could and, following the
advice of an older colleague, eventually applied
for a Job at the Alameda County District Attorney s
office. There were seldom vacancies, but Earl
Warren had Instituted a system of hiring deputies
without pay until a spot opened up. In this way
Arthur Sherry Joined the staff in 1933.
In relating how he learned the office ropes, Pro
fessor Sherry draws a detailed picture of personnel
training, a process he himself later supervised
when Ralph Hoyt was district attorney. In late
1933 i having completed his training, Sherry was
transferred from the main office to the Oakland
City Hall office. It was here that he stumbled
into his first big case, an Insurance fraud case
a type of case then common and saw his name for
the first time in the headlines.
As a result of his success with the insurance fraud
case, Sherry was put in charge of the Berkeley
prosecuting attorney s office. He gives a vivid
account in the interview of his responsibilities
vl
there, which included maintaining good relations
with a difficult police chief and visiting the
scenes of crimes at any hour of the day or night
to collect statements. Professor Sherry describes
several of the more important cases he handled
there.
The descriptions of his work shed valuable light
on the effectiveness of organization of the district
attorney s office. He points out the educative
value of the daily staff meetings, the important
functions served by the inspectors, and the effect
of Warren s procedural rules on the speed with
which cases were tried.
In commenting on procedures of criminal investiga
tion, Professor Sherry notes that Warren s office
was "a long way ahead of Miranda . " I Miranda v.
Arizona re: right of accused to be Informed of his
rights! Warren insisted that deputies inform
suspects or their right to see an attorney arid
their right to silence. Warren also did not
approve of the use of hidden listening devices.
During his later years in the district attorney s
office, Sherry assumed the Job of legislative
lobbyist in Sacramento, representing district
attorneys statewide, a position previously held
first by J. Frank Coakley, then Richard Chamberlain,
then Cecil Mosbacher.
Professor Sherry describes the highlights of the
more Important cases during his years in the
office. His comments range over graft and gambling
cases, labor disputes, murder and kidnapping
cases, and Japanese removal.
In concluding his remarks on the district attorney s
office, Professor Sherry briefly evaluates Earl
Warren as district attorney and compares the
administration of Warren with that of Ralph Hoyt
and J. Prank Coakley.
Turning his attention to the California Special
Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime, Professor
Sherry explains how it was first created in 19^7
under authorization by the Penal Code. Its main
target was organized crime in Southern California.
vii
The Commission was part of Governor Earl Warren f s
attempt to standardize and coordinate law enforce
ment throughout the state.
The Commission, headed by Admiral Standley,
rapidly outgrew its designation as a study
body, and found itself an operational agency
instead. It opened its doors in early 19^-8, and
soon thereafter, Professor Sherry relates, began
receiving rumors that the attorney general s office,
under Frederick N. Howser, was extorting money
from gamblers. Confronted with this information,
Howser failed to take action, resulting in a series
of prosecutions of the gamblers and of Howser* s
agents.
Professor Sherry first entered the work of the Crime
Commission in late 19^8, when he was persuaded by
Governor Earl Warren and Warren Olney, the Crime
Commission s counsel, to leave his post at the DA s
office and become special prosecutor in Mendoclno,
California, in a slot machine racket protections
prosecution of one of Howser s agents. The trial,
"the Watergate of its time," as Professor Sherry
describes it, lasted thirty days, and resulted in
conviction. Professor Sherry describes Howser* s
indignant reaction, and his effort to sabotage
the trial.
Shortly thereafter, in 194-9 , Professor Sherry
relates, Warren Olney invited him to join the staff
of the Commission, a position he accepted and held
for almost two years. He describes the Commission s
efforts to encourage local law enforcement agencies
to prosecute law breakers uncovered by the Commission,
and discusses how that body actually functioned.
He also describes the resistance encountered in
the state legislature to legislative attempts to
curb gambling.
In describing the Commission s Job, Professor
Sherry relates several of his adventures, including
the accidental discovery of Howser s "bag man;"
plugging the leak from the Commission to the pressj
and uncovering falsification of records.
In assessing Howser s role in the crime commission,
he describes Howser s background as a defense attorney
vlll
for underworld Interests and relates the appre
hension with which the law enforcement community
viewed Howser s election. Professor Sherry relates
how Howser recruited his organization, how it func
tioned, and how his deputies were retrained once
he was out of office.
In discussing the Mafia and organized crime in
California, Professor Sherry asserts that the
Mafia is a fiction, and that organized crime is
primarily controlled by individual groups with
little relation to each other. He describes the
Mickey Cohen and Dragna organzations in Southern
California, noting that they resorted on occasion
to "typical Mafia-type retaliation" murders.
Organized crime does, however, have an influence on
elections, he says, although its exact Impact Is
unknown because of the lack of campaign contri
bution disclosure laws In the past.
In assessing the Impact of the Crime Commission,
Professor Sherry relates that large scale gambling
is now virtually unknown in California. Slot
machines and rackets are gone, and off-track betting
is now a relatively small operation. More important,
gaming operators are small-time and unorganized.
In concluding his remarks, Professor Sherry describes
the cooperation extended by the California Crime
Commission to the Kefauver Committee, investigating
organized crime nationwide.
A copy of the Final Report of the Special Crime
Study Commission on Organized Crime, 1950, Is
filed with the copy of this interview in The
Bancroft Library.
Miriam Peingold,
Interviewer
7 August 1973
Regional Oral History Office
466 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
Arthur H. Sherry
Principal Investigator
BIOGRAPHY
Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley
A.B. 1929, St. Mary s College
LL.B. 1932, University of California, Berkeley
Admitted to practice, California, 1932
U.S. Supreme Court, 1952
FCC, 1952
Deputy District Attorney, Alameda County, California, 1933-41
Assistant District Attorney, Alameda County, California, 1946-49
Assistant Counsel, California Crime Study Commission, 1949-51
Chief Assistant Attorney General California, 1951-53, 1959
Professor, University of California School of Law and School of
Criminology, since 1953.
Acting Dean, School of Criminology, 1960-61
Author, Manual Law of Arrest . 1957
Plan for Survey of Administration of Criminal Justice (with John
A. Pettis, Jr.) 1955
Member: American Society of Criminology, American Academy of
Forensic Sciences
Project Director, American Bar Foundation Survey of Administration
of Criminal Justice, 1953-57
U.S.A. F., 1942-1945
Chairman, California Advisory Committee on Criminal Statistics,
since 1954
Member, A.L.I. Model Penal Code Advisory Committee, 1956-62
ABF Special Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice, since 1958
Project Director, Revision of California Penal Code, since 1964
Arthur Harnett Sherry
The Tribune
PIEDMONT - A Mass will be
said Thursday for Arthur Har
nett Sherry, former University
of California, Berkeley, profes
sor of law and criminology and
Alameda County deputy district
attorney, who died yesterday.
He was 76.
Sherry, a lifelong resident of
the Bay Area who lived in Pied
mont, died at Merritt Hospital of
complications from a stroke he
suffered five weeks ago. He had
been in a coma since then.
A graduate of St. Mary s Col
lege in Moraga in 1929 and the
University of California at
Berkeley s Boa It Hall School of
Law in 1932, Sherry served a
long and distinguished career
that spanned more than 50
years.
His friends included Chief Jus
tice Earl Warren and former
California Governor Edmund G.
"Pat" Brown.
Sherry was a deputy district
attorney for Alameda County in
the 1930s and 1940s.
From 1948 to 1951, he served
as special prosecutor and assist
ant counsel to the California
Special Study Commission on
Organized Crime.
Sherry also served as special
prosecutor in an important or
ganized crime case of the era, a
slot-machine protection racket
in Mendocino County that in
volved agents of the lieutenant
governor.
He later became a member of
the organized crime commis
sion.
Sherry joined the UC faculty
in 1953.
Adrian Kragen, a UC Berkeley
professor and long-time friend
of Sherry, remembered his col
league as an expert on criminal
law and the judicial system.
In 1964, Sherry was appointed
by a joint legislative committee
to draft a new penal code. It was
the most comprehensive over
haul of the state s criminal laws
since its enactment in 1872.
Sherry, in 1964, foresaw at
tacks on the modern standards
of the insanity defense.
"He was committed to the in
tegrity of the legal system,"
Kragen said. "He wanted things
done the straight way."
After his retirement in 1976,
Sherry published memoirs of his
work with Warren.
Sherry is survived by his wife
Mary Ellen Leary, former po
litical editor of the San Francis
co News and the West Coast cor
respondent for The Economist
Arthur H. Sherry
Distinguished legal career
Sherry of Sacramento, Judith
Sherry de Carbonel of Orinda
and Virginia Bellitini of San Ra
fael.
Donations in Sherry s memory
may be sent to scholarship funds
of St. Mary s College scholarship
or Boalt Hall.
The Mass will be said at 10
a.m. at St. Francis De Sales Ca
thedral in Oakland.
Oakland Tribune
June 30, 1986
San Francisco Chronicle
June 30, 1986
Arthur H. Sherry
Arthur H. Sherry, retired Uni
versity of California law professor
and prominent prosecuting attor
ney, died yesterday at Merritt Hos
pital in Oakland from complications
after a stroke.
Mr. Sherry, who was 78 and
lived in Piedmont, taught for many
years at both UC law schools, Boalt
Hall in Berkeley and Hastings in
San Francisco.
He was married to Mary Ellen
Leary Sherry, a prominent San
Francisco journalist and political
editor of the old San Francisco
News.
After graduation from Boalt
Hall in 1932, Mr. Sherry joined the
Alameda County district attorney s
office, then headed by Earl Warren,
I who would become California gov
ernor, then chief justice of the Unit
ed States.
Mr. Sherry later was an assis
tant state attorney general and
chief criminal deputy under Attor
ney General Edmund G. (Pat)
Brown Sr., who also became gover
nor. In 1953, he was named by the
American Bar Association as execu
tive director of a national study on
the administration of criminal jus
tice.
In addition to his wife, Mr.
Sherry is survived by three daugh
ters, Suzanne Sherry of Sacramen
to, Judith deCarbonel of Lafayette
and Virginia Bellettini of San Ra
fael, and by six grandchildren.
A rosary will be recited at 4:30
p.m. Wednesday at Bay View Cha
pel, 2414 Martin Luther King Jr.
Way, Berkeley. A Mass of Christian
burial will be celebrated Thursday
at St. Francis de Sales Cathedral, 635
22nd Street, Oakland.
The family prefers donations to
the St. Mary s College Scholarship
Fund and Boalt Hall Scholarship
Fund.
n _! >! r\t
I PERSONAL BACKGROUND
[Interview I, February 24, 1971. Interviewed by
Miriam Felngold.]
Family
MF: Why don t you begin by telllmg me a bit about your
family and where they came from?
Sherry: Gee, that s a long story. Well, my grandfather,
Bernard Sherry, was born in Rochester, New York, and
was married there. My oldest uncle, his first child,
was bom there. Then he came around to San Francisco
as a ship s carpenter.
He was a wheelwright in Rochester, which of course
is making wooden wheels for wagons and that kind of
thing. He worked for a while as a teamster on the
waterfront in San Francisco. Then together with
some other men, he started the first soda cracker factory
that San Francisco ever had.
MF: What years are we talking about?
Sherry: We must be talking, so far as I can tell we haven t
got any accurate family records but this has to be
1868, 18?0, somewhere in that neighborhood.
After he had made good, then he sent for my grand
mother and their oldest child, John. By that time
they had that rather precarious railroad service across
the Isthmus of Panama, so she sailed down to Cristobal
and then across to Panama by the railroad that existed
then and then by vessel up the coast to San Francisco.
After that, my father and a number of other children
were bom to the family. That s the Sherry family.
Sherry: Now, my grandmother on my mother s side was Irish-
bom and emigrated to New Zealand. Her name was Honorah
Burke. In New Zealand she met William Harnett. We
do not know how he got there, but he came from Ireland,
and there is some reason to believe in the family that
he came across the plains to California and then on to
New Zealand. In any event, they met there and
had an elopement from Wellington to Benlcia, California,
on a sailing vessel, and arrived here. My mother
thereafter was born in Benicla. The house is still
there. I think it s on Third Street, where this all
happened.
Then my grandfather expanded his business Interests
and ultimately became associated with a man named Manuel
Preitas In dairy products, butter manufacturing and that
sort of thing in San Francisco and my uncles my father
and his two brothers kind of drifted into that business.
Ultimately it became Sherry Brothers and continued
operation until it was killed off by the depression In
1930 or 31i around in there.
My mother was born in Benicla. She went to what
was then called San Francisco or State Normal
School, which has now become San Francisco State
University. I think she was one of its earliest
graduates. She went Into school teaching and taught up
on the Mendocino coast and In Sacramento, and met my
father on a blind date after a baseball game in Benicla.
He was a baseball player for a semi-pro league in those
days.
She and my father first settled in San Francisco
and then came to Berkeley after the fire and earthquake,
where I was born In 1908 on Grove Street. So I m
Berkeley- bom , which makes me somewhat unusual as a
native Calif omian.
MF: What kind of education did your father have?
Sherry: My father went through high school and some business
college. He was terribly Interested in baseball. A
number of his chums went on and became major league
stars, but my grandfather got hold of him one time and
asked him what he was going to do, play baseball or try
to make a career In business, so he opted to go into
the business and then went to business college. He
didn t have any academic college education at all.
After the business closed down, my father went Into
the real estate business here on the East Bay.
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
Except for the war years, when he wound up as a production
supervisor for Bethlehem Steel Company building ships
during the war, he was in real estate until his retirement.
Is he still alive?
Oh no. No, he died in 1953.
in *61.
My mother is dead too,
Education
MF: So now we have you born.
Sherry: Yes. The first school I went to was the Emerson School,
which is Just down south of the campus. Then, after
first grade, the John Muir school opened and I started
there in the second grade, and went through grammar
school, and then high school at St. Mary s College
High School it was called in those days. After finishing
there I went on and graduated from St. Mary s College
with the class of 1929.
MF: Didn t former district attorney J. Frank Coakley go there
too?
Sherry: Yes. He went there, but he s been almost everywhere.
He went there, he went to Stanford, he went to University
of California law school. I knew his brother Tom, who
has Just retired from the court of appeal. He was Just
a year ahead of me at St. Mary s College, and then
at Boalt Hall later we were contemporaries. He had
stayed out a year before he came to study law.
MF: You knew him when he was playing in the band?
Sherry: Oh yes, I should say. He stayed out the year because
he got a contract to play in the Roosevelt Hotel in
Hollywood .
MF: That s quite an honor!
Sherry: So he took a year out to do that and then decided he
better return to law school. But then he played
hal the band going all the time he was going to law
school, and then afterwards when he was admitted
to the bar he began his practice by representing
sherry i
MPt
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
doing mainly the legal work as counsel for enter
tainers of one kind or another. He was very successful,
and went into a general law practice thereafter.
Did you have any brothers or sisters?
I have one brother. He also graduated from St. Mary s
College, but he didn t do any graduate work. He was
very Interested in travel and that kind of thing. He
started to work for a travel bureau here in Berkeley,
and then joined the Luce Publications before the war.
I guess he was assigned a time in the San Francisco
office.
After his wartime service in the Navy he came back
again and worked for the Luce Publications again. He
recently retired as one of the executive persons of Time
Life International.
He spent most of his career overseas, In
France, Central Europe, and. then his last assignment
was in Mexico City for Central and South America
operations. He s now retired and in New York, and
thinking of moving out to Mexico City again. It s
too expensive in New York. ("Laughter]
I can think of a few other things it s too much of In
New York too!
What did you say his name was?
Noel.
Getting back to your own education, what were you
primarily Interested in in school?
You mean in undergraduate work? Well, I guess I
never liked the idea of a major and at St. Mary s it was
a pretty wide open curriculum. We could pick and
choose pretty much. So I would say the concentration
was largely in philosophy and history. Those were my
chief Interests and, outside of law, remained so.
Do you remember any of your teachers particularly?
Oh, I think I could remember all of them, almost all of
them. The names won t mean much because they were
Christian Brothers and they used religious names.
Brother Leo was a great scholar in literature,
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
particularly English literature, and something of a
philosopher in those days.*
He was a very, very distinguished teacher and an
inspiring one in English. By God, after about two or
three months in his general class as a freshman, I got
all inspired and a friend of mine and I went out
together and had a competition trying to read all of the
Victorian novelists, all Dickens, all Thackeray, all
Swift. And we did.
How long did that take you?
Oh, it took a year or so I guess. But we kept at it.
We didn t read anything else. So he was quite a
teacher.
Then I had a lay teacher on the faculty then,
James L. Haggerty, who was quite a distinguished man
in his day here in the field of philosophy.
The others were "Brother so-and-so" and that sort
of thing, but those two, Leo and Haggerty, were the
two great stars on the faculty, in those days.
If I remember correctly, Mr. Coakley talked about
Brother Leo also.
Sherry: Oh yes. Yes. He was a very, very outstanding guy.
Law School
MF: Then what interested you in law?
Sherry t Well, it s hard to say. I actually didn t have much
idea of what to do at all. My class was the class of
1929. The depression broke that year, in October, but
my parents, having been overjoyed that I finally made
it through college, sent me off to Europe and I had a
*He retired from the Christian Brothers and the
chancellorship of St. Mary s in the mid nineteen
thirties to a literary career under the family name,
Dr. Francis Meethan.
Sherry: three or four month summer tour, third class trip In
Europe, the kind of thing that youngsters today do In
very large numbers, as you probably know. We were Just
over there In 19&9 and gosh, It was Just swarming with
college kids. But It wasn t so usual In those days.
MF: Oh yes. Your parents must have had enough money to
Sherry: Well, you know, It really didn t take very much. I
remember that my father gave me a thousand dollars. He
said he would invest that much in It, and I came home
and gave him two hundred dollars back, and I had a
wonderful time. The most expensive thing was the railroad
trip from here across to New York to board the vessel.
You could travel there was a book, a popular
book, like these Fielding s Guides and the Five-
Dollars-a-Day in Europe, then called Through Europe on
Two Dollars a Day two dollars in American currency,
because of the unsettled conditions following World
War I there, from which Europe didn t recover for a
long , long while. Your money would buy an awful lot
of foreign money. You could pay your travel expenses
and your living expenses inside of two dollars a day with
ease. Very simple.
MF: What sort of places would you stay?
Sherry: Oh, we d stay at pensions, generally that type of place,
or small hotels, and travel third class on the railroad,
which was very inexpensive. Of course, that s still a
bargain to travel.
MF: Yes, that must have been quite an important part of your
education.
Sherry: So, when I came I had been thinking of what to do.
I didn t want to work in the sense of working in business.
I d done a lot of summertime work, everything from
lumber camps to service stations and that kind of
thing.
We had had a kind of vocational series of lectures
in our senior year, in which graduates of the school
would come back from the various professions and
businesses and that kind of thing, and talk to the
class about a career in business, or a profession, or
whatever it might be. One 01 them was a lawyer, and
about all he did was to say, "It s a very, very difficult
Sherry: subject. Only a very few people can do It, and it s
awfully tough and very demanding, and it takes ten
years before you can even earn a living at it when you
get out into practice." He made law sound Just one of
the most rugged, difficult, awful things you could ever
think of, and I just didn t believe him. So I thought,
"Well, you know that s an idea." I began to think
about studying law, and the idea of going to graduate
school and law fit together quite well.
I could have gone to Harvard if I d wanted to. I
remember coming back from Europe in the fall, and I went
up to Cambridge and got in there. I was traveling then
all alone. Before then one of my school chums had been
with me most of the time.
I got in there by the side of Langdell Hall there
one cool, kind of dark, afternoon In August, and I took
one look at the place and walked down to the nearest
telegraph office and told my mother to enroll me in
Boalt. Cambridge was dark and forbidding, and I didn t
know anyone there. I guess I was homesick at that time.
So I came back and started here and finished here in
32.
MF: Were you Interested then in any particular kind of law?
Sherry: No. I became very Interested In it once I got started
In it and discovered what it was all about. There
isn t much opportunity even now to do any kind of
specialization in law, nor is it wise. There is so
much that you have to know in law school that it s
necessary to cover as wide a spectrum as you can,
particularly since you don t know what your opportunities
are going to be.
MF: Yes, that s true.
Sherry: There isn t any point really to endeavor to specialize
to the extent that you can in law school, let s say In
tax law, or family law, or whatever It might be,
because when the opportunity turns up, the one that you
want to take may be In some other kind of an area, a
different kind of practice. You just narrow your
opportunities by specializing, I think.
Of course, there are some students who are unusual ,
who because of prior experience or I don t know what
inspiration, whatever it may be know exactly what
they want to do and pursue it with a kind of single-
Sherry: minded purpose, and they get there. But they re
unusual, most unusual.
MP: Do you remember any or the professors here?
Sherry: Sure. All of them.
MF: Which ones particularly struck you?
Sherry: Well, Orin Kip McMurray was dean of course at that time,
and Max Radin was here, and Ballantine, and Langmald,
and "Captain Kidd" [Alexander Marsden Kidd] of course
was teaching the criminal law course.
MP: I didn t realize he taught here.
Sherry: Oh yes, he was one of the oldest men on the faculty.
Then when I came back to the school, he was still here
but he was retired at that time. He wasn t teaching.
Warren Perrier, Barbara Armstrong, who was still
around taught me what was then called community property
law. We didn t use the name "family lam" at that
point. It was called community property law. It was
& kind of community property, family law course.
Roger Traynor taught I had two courses from him.
George Costigan was the teacher in contracts. He was
excellent of course.
MF: Who taught criminal law?
Sherry t Kidd. He was the only one. That s about it. It
was a twelve-man faculty, something like that, at
that time, to a student body of maybe three hundred
or so.
It was an entirely different kind of experience
than now, because then they followed the Harvard
pattern, which was a very rugged kind of a procedure
that grew out of the fact that Just about anybody who
had a degree, a college degree, was eligible for
admission, so classes were admitted that were fairly
large. They were almost twice as large as the classes
that graduated. There would be a tremendous attrition
usually at the end of the first year.
My class started I think with about 150 students
and we graduated something like sixty-two or sixty-three,
about that number. It was simply a "sink or swim"
Sherry: proposition. Nobody took you by the hand or gave you
Introductory courses to law or anything of that sort,
or even showed you how to write a brief. I never talked
to a professor after class, except in circumstances
where I was In trouble over something, that was the
only time you talked to a teacher. There wasn t any
of this "one to one" teaching that we have today at all.
You just went through this institution and if you
passed your examinations, okay, and if you didn t,
out you went . That was all .
MF: Did they use the case method?
Sherry: Yes, a very, very rigid, very tough case law method
of teaching. Much more emphasis on case method than
now. Since those days there has been a good deal of
criticism of the case system. At thai; time it was a
fresh new kina of thing. The idea of not reading law
out of textbooks, that kind of thing, but dealing
actually with the decisions of the courts was considered
to be a very innovative kind of thing.
All the teachers, all the faculty had been recruited
from the best law schools in the country in those
days the university could go out and buy who it wanted.
There wasn t any problem about money at all. In a very
short time they created an extremely strong faculty at
Boalt Hall.
By the same token, they were all people of about
the same age level, and some years later, why they
almost all retired or died, you know, at the same time,
which was quite a blow to the school. They were a good
strong faculty. They were very, very bright, very
strong teachers. But emphasis was on case method, and
you briefed your cases and responded in class to them.
That s aoout all you ever talked about.
MF: Was there anything like internship work that you could
do in a law office?
Sherry: No. No. Nothing at all. It wasn t even thought
about. It wasn t even considered.
By that time of course, depression had hit and
times were very tough. The students who were graduating
10
Sherry: ahead of me were coming back with stories about difficul
ties In getting Jobs In law offices big firms were
discharging people by the dozens you know. There were
lawyers who were practicing out of their homes so
they could keep up the payments, or practicing you
know in the streets actually, or hanging around
courtrooms and looking for court appointments and that
kind of thing.
In law school it was harder and harder for students
to get work, any kind of work. My father had always
insisted that except when I was in school I pay my own
way, so, you know, when summer vacation came I was
expected to go out and go to work at something, and so
I did. I did a lot of things. It was a great exper-
inece.
MF: What kind of things did you do?
Sherry: Well, I began working on summer vacations for Standard
Oil service stations it was called then, back I
guess In about 1926 or 27 that s a long, long
time ago in a service station down at Shafter and
College as an air and water boy. I was in high school,
and you wore a brown overall kind of thing, a Jumper
business, and all you could do was to inflate tires
or put water in radiators, you know, wipe- the-wlndshi eld
thing. That was your bit. $75 a month. Good money.
I would work in summers after that; I worked up so
that I was senior salesman, all that kind of thing,
operating stations, all in this area. In my two law
school summer vacations I went to sea. That was Just
wonderful.
MFi As a seaman?
Sherry: Yes. Ordinary seaman. I sailed here first on the S.S.
President Johnson , which went around the world in three
months and twenty- one days. Each semester was three
months and twenty-one days, and summer session, inter-
session, was three months and twenty-one days, so if
you caught it right you know, you could use every day.
That was a lot of fun.
After the first trip, that s one of the reasons I
took a course in admiralty, which I liked very much,
when I got back. One of my classmates was the great
Melvin Belli.
11
MF: Oh yes!
Sherry: Because he went to sea too.
MF: So you graduated from law school In 1932?
Sherry: The class of 1932. Yes.
Early Legal Experience
MF: After graduating from law school what did you do?
Sherry: Well, I began studying for the bar. That was the big
thing that you did in those days. They had only one bar
review course and that was Bernard Witklns* course,
Wltkins 1 bar review course.
But I, In common with several of us, Instead of
taking the review course, we bought "Wltklns Summary,"
as It was called. That was a mimeographed survey or
summary of California law, and four or five of us
studied that on our own. We d read It and read all of
the cases and talk about the thing. We couldn t afford
the bar review course anyway. We didn t think it was
necessary. I still don t think it is, as a matter of
fact. I think this way is Just as good as any other.
But it worked anyway, and then we had a lucky
break. The father of one of the young men, one of my
classmates who has since died, was doing some political
campaigning. How he got into I don t know, but he was
involved in the campaign that enacted the Constitutional
amendment to permit horseracing in California, and
we served in that campaign . I guess I got about a
month s work out of that thing, $5 a day. That was very
good indeed.
Then of course the bar examination was in August.
I guess we were admitted and got the good news in
October sometime. It was while I was campaigning
actually that I got the news. The letter was there.
Then, you know, what do you do? My father was
acquainted with lots of lawyers. Judge Atheam was a
12
Sherry: next door neighbor of Atheam, Farmer, Chandler and
Devlin. Athearn was a former corporation commissioner
and actually had been a teacher at San Francisco Normal
School when my mother was there. She had known him from
that far back, and Mrs. Athearn also had been a teacher,
so as neighbors we were fairly close.
But that, or any of my father s golfing companions
and the rest of It, didn t do me any good. Times were
just tough, and very few people were getting placed.
Ths Law Review fellows for the most part did get Jobs
but it was a long pull before everybody settled.
Ultimately those of us who went through it, most of them
got along and have done very, very well Indeed in the
practice of law.
Folger Emerson, now Judge Emerson, was in the
class ahead of mine, and Folger had the same kind of
problem. He d been out a year and had not been able to
get anyplace at all. He had latched onto the Legal Aid
Society Office, the Alameda County Legal Aid, which
was then and for many years under the direction of a
lawyer as an adjunct to his private practice. Sam
Wagener is still active in Alameda County Law, a very,
very distinguished guy. He was president of the State
Ear, and has been on the board of directors of the
State Bar for a long while.
Folger was there, and I ran into him one day,
bumming around looking for something to do. I d been
doing some legal work in connection with the winding
up of my father s business in San Francisco, mostly
trying to collect bills and that kind of thing. He-
suggested I go. At least I d have a place to hang my
hat and the use of a telephone, and occasional secre
tarial assistance, and a magnificent general practice,
with no money.
I did that, and if we could pick up any private
practice that was fine. The secretary would do
whatever typing we needed. We made our own arrangements
for paying her extra for that kind of work. It
turned out to be a very good opportunity because I
joined the local bar, the county bar right away.
I believe I ve been a member of that bar since 1933 now.
That s a long while.
Through that, I got an opportunity, mostly at
13
Sherry: meetings, of meeting the lawyers. It wasn t a very
large bar four or five hundred lawyers at that time
from all over the county. It was a good way of getting
acquainted.
II THE ALAMEDA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY S OFFICE
Joining the Office
Sherry i Then quite fortuitously, I guess it must have been in
the late fall of 32, or it might have been the early
part of 1933, we had some kind of litigation, a case
that Folger and I were working on . A lawyer in town
named Ralph Coffee, who was a friend of my fathers , was
representing one of the parties. I had to serve a
notice on him. It was a very nominal kind of thing.
I called at his office and gave him this thing. He
started chatting, you know, what-am-I doing kind of
thing. He said, "Why don t you Join the D.A. s office?
Earl Warren s looking for guys out of law school, "that
sort of thing.
Well, I had been tramping around to law offices
in San Francisco and Alameda County, Just hours and
hours you know, during all of this time. Partners
would always be very pleasant. They d give me time and
talk. They d be as encouraging as they can, show you
the library, introduce you to the other, partners
and say how terrible it was, they wished they could
give us a Job right now, "Why, if we only had a desk
here, you could sit down, but no, no pay" and that
kind of thing.
So, there I was, when he said that, "Why don t
you go down and see Earl Warren or write him a letter
or something like that." I said, "Well, gee, I ve been
around an awful lot of places. That s a nice idea."
I was Just kind of noncommittal. He said, "Well, ask
him about It."
I don t know, I think he phoned me sometime later
and snld, "You go ahead and write that letter to Earl
15
Sherry: Warren about yourself and what you want to do and that
sort of thing." I said, "Yes." I was still anticipating
that the same kind of thing would happen. So I pro
crastinated. I didn t. Other things were bothering
me.
At one of the bar association meetings Coffee was
there. He got up and came across the room and said, "Why
the hell haven t you sent that letter in to Earl?
He s been asking for it." Well, what that means is
he d been lobbying me down there. So I did write the
letter, and of course nothing happened. Until I came
back to the office one time and the secretary was
there, Jumping up and down, and said, "Mrs. Biedsoe,
the district attorney s secretary, wants you to call
her." So I called, and she said, "Can you come down to
the office tomorrow afternoon or whatever it was
at about four or five o clock?" something like that
I said, "Sure, I ll be there." So, that was it.
I went down and of course are there pictures
around of the old courthouse at all at Fifth and
Broadway? Have you got any of those in the archives?
MF: I haven t seen any, no.
Sherry: Well, that was a remarkable old wooden, typical kind of
classic federal public building, architecture style,
of that day, down at Fifth and Broadway, which was then
a terrible neighborhood, where Jack London square is
now. There were these big concrete aggregate places
and barges came up the estuary. It was all very heavy
industrial, with these two railroad tracks running
through. So the town was really right on the edge of
this old decayed part of town. It was one of the
oldest parts of town.
The courthouse was an old building, and
It had ramshackle additions put on to It to accomodate
courtrooms. I think originally It might have had four
courtrooms, two downstairs and two on the upstairs level.
But in any event it was an old wooden building, and
you went up a high flight of steps from the sidewalk,
way up high. It had a sub-basement, and was about
twenty feet high I guess off the ground, and then into
this brown linoleum floor hallway and a flight of
steps going up to the second floor again. It was an
enormous climb to get up to the second floor.
16
Sherry: The district attorney s office occupied the north
side of the building, which had been two courtrooms and
had been converted into offices. They were the most
shabbily built and contrived places you ever saw In
your life. One of them, for example, was built on In
addition to Earl Warren s one big office and his secretary s
office. tfe used to have a funny name for it, called
the bird s neso or something like that. Between one
addition to the building and the old wing of the
building next door, was kind of a space about, oh,
twenty feet wide, two walls up. What they did was
build a platform from one to the other, like a bridge
you see, and enclose it, a room, hanging in air like
that, you know? It was the craziest thing you ever saw.
Well, that was Earl Warren s private retreat when he
wanted to get away he d go out in that silly little
thing.
If there had been an earthquake you know, those
walls would have gone right down. It would have just
dropped right to the bottom.
He had what had been a courtroom as his office.
Mrs. Bledsoe was in the receptionist s area, which I
think had been a jury room at one time. Then you d
walk Into the office which was enormous, you know,
courtroom size, with a very very high ceiling and a
great big open space with nondescript chairs, all
around the walls. These I found out later were for the
staff meetings which were held there. The man was
there seated at a comer at the far end of the room,
which reminded me later on of the stories about
Mussolini and the similar kind of a set-up I
suppose for different purposes.
Anyway that was quite a march across the room.
He was very friendly, as usual, and exerted his great
charm. We had a very pleasant conversation. What
he was doing at that time was Just sizing me up. I
got into the personnel recruitment business for that
office thereafter, and I know how it was done. He
knew about all he really needed to know about me,
except to talk to me. That was what he wanted to do.
He explained what the rigors of the situation
were, that he was limited by a salary ordinance which
specified each position, you see, and the compensation
for it. He could only appoint people to vacancies as
they occurred. He says, "Not very many vacancies occur
here these days . "
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
And they didn t. That was a good place to stay.
You could have private practice; there was no restriction
against it. But it was very tightly controlled. You
could never do any private practice on office time at
all . It was all on your own on Saturdays or evenings
or that kind of thing. Even if it were Saturdays or
evenings, if there was something else more important,
like a trial you had for the office, you devoted all of
your time to the office thing. The Income from private
practice for most of us there was a very slight amount.
It didn t amount to very much.
Well, he explained all that kind of thing, and
then told me about his business of appointing deputies
to serve at his pleasure without compensation, and
indicating that there were a couple of others there in
that status at that time. So I might have an opportunity
to have one of those appointments. Would I be interested
in that? I said I would be, and that was all.
I walked out, and it was quite an experience, but
gee whiz, you know, "I ll never hear from him again!"
I almost forgot about it completely. It was out of my
mind, when once again the telephone rang. Mrs.
Bledsoe: "Can you report for an appointment to the
office for an appointment as deputy district
attorney?", I guess on a Monday morning or something.
"By gosh! Boy, I am a deputy district attorney!"
[Laughter] That was quite a thing. At least, although
no money, you know, a title, an officer of the govern
ment and all that kind of thing. I was 1 pretty young
at this point, twenty-three or twenty-four I guess.
But I went down, and into the office again and he
told me, "Congratulations. You re on the thing, and
you re going to report to Ralph Hoyt." He was chief
assistant subsequently judge of the superior court.
Ralph headed up the civil side of the court,
performed the functions that the county counsel does.
But he also ran the personnel. He was very good at
that. Warren didn t bother about that much.
I didn t realize that, that that was Hoyt s responsibility,
Yes. He was the one who looked after the hired help,
Sherry: and saw to it that people s promotions were not over
looked and that the pay raises were taken care of, and
all of these kinds of things.
MF: He d break new people in, too?
Sherry: Oh yes. He was in charge of what was a very, very
elaborate training program they had at that time.
You know, you talk about all these loyalty oaths
ejid all the forms you sign these days when you take
public employment. At that time the district attorney
handed me a certificate, a fancily printed thing about
a four by six piece of paper, which said, "I have
appointed so-and-so deputy district attorney to serve
at my pleasure without compensation. Earl Warren,
District Attorney." He told me, "You take this and go
across the street to the Hall of Records and find the
county clerk over there to swear you in."
Well, gosh, I was bewildered. "What does all of
this mean?" I d been in the Hall or Records. That s
where the Welfare Building now is. It was an old
Victorian brick building, an enormous rabbit warren oi
a place. The county clerk s office was, as you came in,
it was right near a great big U-shaped counter, and
you walked into the middle of it. It was always filled
with people: lawyers filing papers and people inquiring
about marriage certificates, and people registering to
vote. A very busy scene.
The county clerk was a man named Wade, a very
fine man.
MF: Oh, yes.
Sherry: Chick Wade they called him. I got to know him very,
very well. He became a very good friend. He was a
big, imposing looking man with much charm and personality,
I came walking in the door with this thing in my
hand, and he knew precisely what I was there for. He
said, "Stand back, everybody! Stand back! We re going
to swear in a public servant for Alameda County!" All
these people stand back, you know, and look in awe and
wonder. I came up, and he said, "Now, Arthur, hold
up your right hand." Not a friend or anything, you
know, Just people.
19
Sherry: That was the greatest thrill of my life. "I
swear to support and defend the constitution," etc.
He shook my hand and said, "Congratulations." Gee,
I walked out on ten feet of cloud. [Laughter] I ll
never forget it .
MF: Do you still have that certificate?
Sherry: It s on file down there someplace.
MF: I see. You handed it in.
Sherry: Yes. He kept it. He puts it in the file. So that was
that, and right away I was to report to Mr. Hoyt. Do
you want me to go on, on that training program?
MF: Yes I ao. In fact, I was just going to ask you about
that. I m very interested in that.
Learning the Ropes
Sherry: Well, that s the nert thing that you got. You
reported to Ralph and Ralph outlined what was going to
happen .
He said I was going to have a reading program, and
at the end of the reading program I would get a research
problem to see if I could solve it, if I had really
learned at Boalt Hall how to do this legal research
stuff and that kind of thing. Then he said, "There
after if everything is going along all right, you ll be
appointed as a junior to go with one of the regular
trial staff people for a while. You ll begin to see
what the trial work is all about."
There were about three or four mimeographed pages.
Let me see what it required you to read. First of all
you were required to read the code, the annotated
code. Kerr s Cyclopedic Code, that s what it was
called. This was a very, very good code, a penal code.
It was very good. It s still today the best code I
know of to go back if you want to find historical
history of code sections. It was very good on that. As
a matter of fact, that s the best history there is if
you want to find out anything, say, prior to i860 or
something like that. Oh, prior to 1900, or 1906.
That s the best source of materials. Well, in any
20
Sherry: event reading a penal code that s quite a Job. Not
the most exciting thing in the world.
MF: fLaughter] I can imagine.
Sherry: So I manfully went all the way through that, and then
there were other things to read. Wellman s Art of
Cross-Examination , and you know some of these more or
less standard "how to do it" books and that kind of
thing.
MF: Did you have to read any books on evidence?
Sherry: No. Presumably I was acquainted in the law of evidence.
You never learn anything by reading about it. You
have to evidence is something you can learn the
theory of in law school, but its utility, its use, you
learn by doing. It f s like studying to be a cook by
reading a cookbook. You can read it and get all the
theory in your head, but you ve got to light the fire
sometime. You re not going to learn until you do.
I think that reading assignment took about a month.
It seemed to me interminable. I think I kind of rebelled
and finally went in and saw him and said, "I ve gone
as far as I can go on that reading; I ve been through
the code and I ve read all of the other things, and
re-read them. I read most of them already before I
came here." He thought I was a little bit rash, and
said, "Oh, you re ready for your problem then I guess."
I said, "I guess."
So he handed me a legal problem having to do with
a very obscure thing involving a tax and bond issue
problem in relation to a school district and the
legality of the situation and everything. A very, very
obscure narrow kind of a question. Well, I didn t know
anything about school dtetrlcts or bond issues or
anything else. None of that was taught in law school.
We didn t have any state and local government law
courses as we do now.
I just went to work on the darn thing and within
a fairly short time I had found the case on which the
problem was based, and discovered by reading the case
that there wasn t any real solution to this. There
waan t any precedent there, you know, all that kind of
thing. So I wrote a memorandum on the thing: "It s
absolutely unique. None of the authorities indicate
21
Sherry: that this problem has arisen In any other Jurisdiction,"
and I was able to do all, you know, the whole thing,
and say, "It s got to be resolved ab inl tio , right from
the start." I gave a suggestion and I said, "I
think maybe this Is the way you solve It In relation
to If this problem now recurs."
Well apparently this was kind of a masterpiece,
because it was an actual problem in the office, and
it just baffled everybody. You know, it was one
rhere was just no answer to. But at least my
suggestions were no worse than the suggestions of the
rest of the staff, so Ralph laughed and said, "Well
that s pretty good. Now let s go down and see Bob
Hunter and get latched on to one of the fellows and
start going to work."
MF: What was Bob Hunter s
Sherry: Bob Hunter was the deputy district attorney. He was
chief assistant In the Coakley administration but he
was on the civil side. He had been doing the criminal,
but he was doing mostly civil work at tciat time, and
working with Hoyt on civil stuff. He did most of
the work for the sheriff s office, representing the
sheriff on all of the creditors remedy situations and
attachments, and all that kind of business, advising as
to the legality of the work that the sheriff s civil
department was doing.
I started in and began going down In the Superior
Court there in trials all kinds of trials
MK: Both civil and criminal?
Sherry: No. It was all criminal. Leonard Meltzer, who is
since deceased, was in charge what they then called
a calendar man. He was a kind of director of criminal
work in the office. Charles Wehr and Warren Olney
were doing almost all the homicide stuff. George
Perkins his speciality was In frauds, corporate
securities particularly, which were very, very prevalent
in California in those days, because the law was most
Inadequate in controlling In those depression days when
"get rich quick" schemes were springing up on every
corner.
22
Sherry: There were some magnificent frauds and scandals.
It was a very, very active field all through the 1930 *s
until shortly before the outbreak of World War II. At
chat time legislation had caught up with the situation
and brought It pretty much to a halt .
I tried cases with Frank Coakley and Leonard
Meltzer. These were the trial guys at that time. It
was a lot of fun .
Office routine, as it then existed, was to have a
meeting of the so-called "outside" deputies, that Is
to say the deputies who were working in Oakland In the
prosecuting attorney s office there, and the Berkeley
office and the Hayward office. That s all there were.
There were Just the three.
There was an office In Alameda, but that was
covered either from the courthouse or no, that was
covered by the man who had the county run, Stanley
Smallwood. He would start out every day he lived
in the lower end of the county, but he had a county
car, and he would bat around that lovely country down
there from Llvermore to Pleasanton, to Hayward, San
Leandro you know, kind of a traveling guy meeting
the people at these old Justice s courts. It was Just
country down there in those days. He covered Alameda
too. He would hit Alameda on Thursday before he came
into the meeting, you see, on Thursday afternoon.
So we would meet then in the Chief s office this
great big office with chairs all around, you see, to
accomodate us fine. He would call for reports what s
going on here, what s going on there, how s Judge So-
and-So, and that kind of thing.
The result of this was that we got to know exactly
what he was thinking about things, and we got to know
what each other was thinking, and we got to know what
was going on at this level around the county. This is
where things are going on, where people are getting
gypped or where robberies are happening or where some
body is starting a gambling racket or whatever, and
it was a good exchange of intelligence.
But also, it was a critique of what we were doing,
and if a complaint had been lodged with the Chief about
something, why we would explore that right there. Boy,
23
Sherry: if you hadn t handled that problem right, he d Just get
so mad he d pound the desk you knowt "Harry, you
should know better than to do that!!!" [Laughter]
He d Just let himself go with his own people there
completely. Those meetings would go on they were
scheduled for ^:00. They would usually begin about
4-: 30 or so, and they d run sometimes to 700 or 730 at
night before we were through with them.
Then on Saturday morning there was a meeting of
the entire office, at 8:00. This was held in what passed
for a library in the old office there. It was rather
small, but everybody could get into it. All of this is
all civil and criminal the whole shooting match.
One of the deputies would be assigned in rotation to have
read the advance sheets, the advance reports of court
decisions in California courts and then to recite
what the case was and what the opinion was, and that sort,
of thing. They didn t have time to read them themselves.
Then we would talk about the cases and the decisions
and how they would affect us.
MF: Did you find that valuable?
Sherry: Oh yes! That was tremendous well, that wasn t so
valuable as the reactions of Earl Warren and my colleagues.
I always read them myself anyway. I didn t like
getting it secondhand from somebody. I didn t care
much about that, but then the discussions that came
the formulation of policy.
He would tell us what he was doing, and the
problems that he saw, governmental problems, state and
local, as well as the operations in the office. Those
meetings generally would drag on until about lOtOO,
about two hours, sometimes a little longer. Then,
if that was a Saturday when there was a football
game in Berkeley, why people would begin leaking out
of the place. They could figure out pretty well when
the Chief would leave too because he d be going to the
same place. So a few would stay to keep the office
open until 12:00. But the big thing was the office
meeting.
MF: How were cases assigned?
Sherry: Well, that I think I can attack that, or reach that
better by telling you about personnel assignment at
Sherry: that time, and what happened to me In that respect.
The practice was to go through the training
period, the reading and the working of the research
problem period, and then to go to court with the other
lawyers. You would be with them when they were
preparing their cases, so you d know how to prepare a
case for trial and the techniques, how to conduct
witness interviews and draft a trial brief. You d Just
learn that by doing, by watching and by observing, and
then one day you would be "Well, go ahead and
examine the witness. You ve talked to him before,
you know."
So then you d begin to learn how to examine a
witness In court and then the day comes for trial and
you are asked to make the opening statement. You know.
That kind of thing. Ultimately you re really on the
rails as a Junior when you have the privilege of making
the opening argument at the beginning of a case, with the
senior guy making the closing argument.
When you ve gone through that process, you would get
to the point where you would do all the direct examina
tion of the witnesses, and the senior guy would take
care of the cross-examination. Then you d finally get
to the point where you would do the whole blooming
thing, except making the final argument, depending on
how well you were getting along with it. But during
that stage, all of that stage, you re in a subordinate
learning in an apprentice sort of capacity.
Work in the Oakland Office
Sherry: Well, this lasted let s see, until about 1933
I guess about, oh, In the late fall of 1933* or sometime
or another. The next step was assignment out to one
of the prosecuting attorney s offices where you d go
to work at the misdemeanor level and learn how to
conduct preliminary hearings on everything from failure
to provide to truancy to shoplifting the whole mess.
I was sent up to the Oakland prosecuting attorneys
office. I was told I was being changed now, I was
25
Sherry: going to go up to the Oakland office, which was like
being pushed out of home by your parents when you ve
grown up. At that time the Oakland office was in the
City Hall, where it remained until quite recently when
they built the new building down there.
The man in charge was Joe Murphy, Joseph Murphy,
who was quite a guy. Joe had been a newspaperman.
During the war he was In the U.S. Air Corps. In my
younger days I regarded anybody who could fly an
airplane with awe and wonder. They were really some
thing. Joe had been a flyer in World War I, although
he had never gotten overseas, but he d done a lot of
flying. Then after the war was over he didn t fly
thereafter. He went to work for AP, Associated Press.
I think at one time he had the night desk In Oakland.
He was going to law school, at night. No, he had the
daytime desk; he went to law school at night. In any
event he got acquainted with Warren as a result of this
. newspaper work, and Warren said, "Well, if you ever
pass the bar, you can have a Job in the office."
He did that not only with Joe, but that happened
to two or three others In the office. In any event Joe
got the Job. He was very briefly in the main office on
the trial staff, but he was in charge of the prosecuting
attorney s office there In Oakland, which consisted,
I think, of five of us. There was Joe, and Lawrence
Fletcher, who was also on the wlthout-compensatlon list
at that times Harry Stiles, an older man who had come
into the office I think somewhat late In life, and
went off back to somewhere I don t know. And
Owen Hotle, "Oxie," who went up to private practice In
Santa Rosa. I understand he s retired now. And I.
We were the whole shooting match.
There under Murphy s tutelage I learned how to put
on preliminary hearings. It s not a very difficult
thing to learn. I learned all the business of relation
ships with the police department and, you know you get
so you re part of them city government, all the rest
of the things, city attorney s office. We had relations
with and worked together with in some aspects.
Then the constant push, push, push. That was a
very busy kind of Job. We would have thousands of
people a month you know coming in and out of the
office with all kinds of petty complaints, and here
26
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
would be four or five of us to handle the whole thing.
That was a terrific experience. Then I began trying
Jury trials. My first jury trial work was done there.
This was a very very active, very demanding part of the
time . I never paid much attention to the fact that my
father was giving me five dollars a week so I could
keep going buy my streetcar fare and lunches.
[Laughter] Such little private practice as I could
pick up didn t amount to much.
Then, one day let s see, this has to be In
1934 Olive Bledsoe again telephoned and said, "The
Chief wants to see you. There s something he wants to
talk to you about." That s all. A summons of that
kind was not something that you d take very lightly.
So I went down wondering what s wrong now.
[Laughter] What terrible things have you done?
I was ushered into the office, and he says, "I think
you ve been working for nothing long enough. Here s
your new commission. 11 Gosh, I looked at Itt "Deputy
District Attorney. $200 a month." Well this happened
because we had lost a couple of deputies. Paul St.
Sure had left the office. He had been in the office
up to that time. After Paul St. Sure, Adrien Hynes
was the next man to go. When Adrien Hynes left, that
opened up the bottom slot. I think Paul St. Sure s
removal put Larry Fletcher In, because he was ahead of
me, and then Adrien Hynes and I was in the slot at
that time. Gee, $200 a month. By gosh. In two
months time, I bought myself a car and got married,
all at once. That $2400 a year, by gosh, I had more
fun on it. I think I saved more of it than I have ever
since.
Then in 19 I guess this was In 1933 t still in
the Oakland office, I stumbled into an insurance fraud
case. An elderly man came in with this very gaudy
Insurance policy that said, "Western Pacific Life"
or some such ambiguous kind of a name, and he said,
"You know, I paid that fellow $60 for this policy"
-- It was purported to be a health and accident insurance
kind of a policy with a beautiful- looking certificate
and all that but he said, "but you know, I Just
can t believe it. I ve been turned down by insurance
people all over the place, and this guy came and he
gavs me this big pitch, no examination, no nothing,
27
Sherry: $60 down and you pay about $5 or $10 a month," some
thing like that. It was all there, what you paid,
mailed to an office in Los Angeles. He said, "I d
,1ust like to know if I got my money s worth."
I didn t know, so I just phoned the insurance
commissioner s office, and got hold of somebody. I
don t know whether I knew someone I must have known
one of the fellows over there and he says, "Heck
no, that s an unlicensed outfit. They haven t got any
insurance company. They 1 re Just selling people pieces
of paper." He said, "That s just one of about six
titles that they re peddling these days," and there was
no direct regulation of this thing at that time.
You didn t have to register for the kind of insurance
company it purported to be I think It purported to
be a mutual company. Only stock companies were regu
lated, and so there was no law preventing a person
from organizing one of these "mutual" things and going
into business. But these people hadn t organized it.
They just pretended they had something. The cash
Input here was all theirs. There Just was no
insurance company at all.
So when I found that out I got somewhat concerned
about it, and I thought, "This Is an awful gyp." But
he didn t know who had sold the paper to him. He
didn t know where he was. He had the name, but the name
meant nothing. There was no address. There was a
Los Angeles address I think on this piece of paper
and $60 petty theft. What do you do in that kind of
a situation?
At one of the Thursday meetings of the justice
court prosecutors I talked about this thing. I
thought we ought to follow up, and all of a sudden,
around the room other deputies spoke up, "Oh, we ve got
one of those." The Chief said, "Gee you d better
turn in all your stuff to Arthur here, and let s see
if maybe we can make something out of It."
So I got all the files, and you could see a
pattern by dates as the sellers moved through Alameda
County selling this phony paper as they went. I
went over to the Insurance commissioner, and they had
a much larger picture. They had them coming up the
Valley from Los Angeles to the north, and then coming
28
Sherry: down the coast selling these things as they went along.
They had a lot of Information. We began Identifying
the guys who were selling and then we began soliciting
asking the police and everybody else and telling
people, "If you hear of anyone else who has done this,
let us know."
We picked up a large number of complainants In
this area. The money involved in Alameda County was
$150,000 or $200,000, which for those days was a
considerable large amount of money. I finally got
all of this put together and came down, and told
everybody, I said, "By gosh, we can go after this as
conspiracy or something, because then we can get all
this "
"Conspiracy to do what?" was the answer, and I
said, "Well, conspiracy to obtain property by false
pretences, and conspiracy to operate conspiracy to
act as insurance agents without licenses." Now, these
are misdemeanors. There are big arguments all the time
about whether conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor ought
to be a felony or just a misdemeanor. Well, we thought
the law was useful. We could handle the cases as a
felony and thus we could take it to the grand Jury.
Well, in any event we got grand Jury indictments,
made a raid on the office in San Francisco and for the
first time in my life Deputy District Attorney Sherry
is all over the front pages. This is my_ case, you
know. And it was Just absolutely great. This was the
first time I put the case on before the grand jury. It
was my first grand jury experience. Warren himself
was there. This was a big enough thing. It was
quire a show. We finally rounded up everybody and
they all wound up by pleading guilty so there wasn t
any trial Involved in the thing.
In Charge of the Berkeley Office
Sherry t About that time Marcus Hardin, who is now senior
partner In a big law office In Oakland, was then in
Berkeley as prosecuting attorney of Berkeley. Warren
began a personnel shuffle. Mark was recalled to the
main office to get on the senior trial staff to try
cases there, and apparently because of my success with
29
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
the insurance fraud case I was told that I would take
over the Berkeley prosecuting attorney s office.
What year was this?
I came out here and started in January, 1935.
I remained in Berkeley, I guess, until about 38.
About three years I had out here. That was a most
unusual job in those days, because I was deputy district
attorney, but I was the prosecuting attorney in Berkeley,
the name on the door in letters of gold said so, and I
had a secretary all my own . We had what they called a
Justice s Court in the city of Berkeley. That was the
name of the court. Oliver Youngs was the Judge of the
court .
Fere I was then responsible for the prosecution of
crime in Berkeley. The Berkeley police department
was the outfit I was working with, and I was the one
who determined whether cases would be charged and what
the charge would be and all that kind of thing, which
was the first really big ongoing responsible Job I held
in the oiflce.
Yes. I want to ask you a question about that. I think
that in 193^- there was a constitutional amendment
passed that allowed the defendant to plead guilty to a
felony in an inferior court.*
I don t know whether it was then or not. 3^ was the
time when they passed the thing allowing comment on the
defendant s refusal to testify, which has since been
declared unconstitutional, but which most important
of those changes was making the attorney general chief
law officer of the state of California
Yes. I think that this pleading of guilty to a felony
in police court was passed in 3^
It could have happened at that time.
I wondered if that had any effect on your work?
*Penal Code Sec. b35a, 1935- A legislative enactment,
[note added by Professor Sherry during his editing of
the transcript. J
Sherry: No. It Just meant that instead of waiving preliminaries,
a man could plead guilty right there. It Just expedited
things. Just had a certificate clamped to the complaint
to the effect that he had pleaded guilty to the charge,
and the complaint was certified in the superior court
for sentence. We used the procedure right away. A
lot of other counties didn t wake up to it for two or
three or four years after.
But there are many cases in which the defendant
there was no point in standing around and waiting for a
preliminary hearing and waiting, you know, for a
transcript to be prepared in cases involving, let s say,
a parole violator who has been arrested on another charge
and charged with it. He s going back to prison in
any event, and he didn t like the dead time waiting
for this procedure. So if he could plead guilty and
get the thing over with right away, it was all to the
good. That was its chief utility. Or in cases in
which it was obvious there was no defense. But that
dealt with a relatively small matter of procedure.
It was Just a convenience.
MP: Oh it was? I didn t know about that. In some of the
research I had done, I d come across quite a debate
In the Commonwealth Club about that amendment.
Sherry: Well, it has continued and experience has been very
good with it. But it s not a procedure that is very
often invoked. Just in special kinds of cases.
So far as Berkeley was concerned, I was the district
attorney. I was the person that people saw every day.
Whenever there was any kind of a civic bash, no matter
what it was, why I was Invited. The prosecuting attorney
was on all the programs and all that kind of thing. I
Joined the Lion s Club; I Joined all the other I
think seven different clubs, stupidly not realizing that
my friends in private practice or working for other
people were having their dues paid while I was paying
all my own. The county didn t take care of that. So
I had to cut that down after a while. But I made lots
of friends and got longlastlng friends. It was home
town , of course.
There were some very interesting experiences. We
had the first of riots and mass trials and all or that
kind 01 thing, antedating the Free Speech Movement by
31
Sherry: a good many years in those days.
MF:
Sherry i
MF:
Sherry:
When was this?
Oh, 1935 or 36, when Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth
Flve-and-Dlme store heiress, made her first marriage,
which was reported in the newspapers, with people
starving to death, as costing a million and a half
dollars for this great big thing. The girls in the
five and dime store were Just getting practically
peanuts wages and that sort of thing. There was a lot
of labor unrest in those days, efforts particularly to
get union labor organized.
There was a five and dime store down at Shattuck
and Center, or something like that, on the west side
of the street, and there was some talk about strike,
but I don t think anybody was actually striking. How
ever, a number 01 students went down there, carrying
picket signs you know: "Unfair," and with references
to Barbara Hutton and a million dollars for a wedding,
you know, and people were entitled to you
know, whatever it is.
In those days, picketing was illegal,
crime .
It was a
That s right. There had been an anti-plcketing
It was a crime. People began complaining that the
students weren t Just standing like these professional
labor pickets you see now, they were walking around
and raising Cain, as they do now. There is no difference
In the technique at all. People didn t like It. They
were not used to it. This was a new kind oi a thing.
One day, I got a call from the chief of police,
whose name was Jack Greening at that time. He said, "I
have fifteen people under arrest down here for picketing."
No prior information to me as to what he was doing or
was going to do at all.
Well, the office was very sensitive to labor
problems, because we d had a lot of trouble in
Oakland with a taxi cab drivers strike Involving a
couple of murders with drivers driven into Lake
ferrltt, you know. Oh gosh, It was Just awful. And
the pea- picker strike thing and other disturbances In
the days when labor was trying to organize. This was
32
Sherry: pre-New Deal of course. Now let s see, wait a minute.
It s about the time of the New Deal, *34 I think was
the election year, 1935*
This was the time when labor was regarded as
bslng a very radical sort of thing. Organizing efforts
were marked by an enormous amount of violence. This
was the work of so-called "goon squads." Of course
historically, if you read Jack London stories of the old
teamsters strike in San Francisco, back in the years,
before that time, where scab drivers would be pulled
off their wagons, taken up an alleyway and had their
arms broken, so they couldn t drive the teams anymore.
These people would hit people with baseball bats and
tar and feather them and wrap them in baling wire.
Oh, they were real rough.
It was after the general strike in 193^-t so Bridges
was in the ascendancy and he was trying to extend his
power by getting the ILWU people into any kind of a
labor situation there was. They read about this little
incident in Berkeley, and Bridges told the newspapers
in San Francisco, "They can lock up those kids, but
by gosh our guys are going to be over there tomorrow
and we ll show them what picketing is like." Well,
that set off some alarms down in the main office, and
Warren began to give it his attention. He was steamed
about the fact that the chief of police hadn t said
anything to me, you know, before he went out and made
the arrests.
Warren was saying, "You don t do things you
don t react that kind of a way I You work out your
problem and see what s going to happen when you do it."
Because of course the pickets marched into the court
and we had fifteen jury trials right away. Why
normally, we had a Jury trial maybe once every two
years. You know, I missed Oakland, where I could
pick up a few more .
Well in any event, next day, sure enough, the
Teamster guys were out there, and then a bunch of them
were arrested, and so here s another big group of
people, and these are pros. They got bailed out
right away. They knew how to handle themselves.
Then we had in Berkeley on the campus here, what
was called a Social Problems Club. That was a
33
Sherry: communist outfit. They made no bones about it, they
were. Aubrey Grossman was one of the leaders of that
thing. They used to sit outside the Sather Gate every
day and have speakers, very radical, fiery talks, with
out benefit of sound amplification. People didn t have
it in those days. Well they got a lot of sympathizers
round about. The same kind of thing that happens
around here now, you see. Every day that picket line
got bigger, and there were more people, and finally one
day the police came back and there were 110 people being
processed through the department.
Warren called up and he was livid. "This is no way
of doing this kind of thing! You tell the chief of
police we issue no more complaints on any of these
things until further notice!"
So I told the chief. He was a very, very narrow
and unimaginative guy without much flexibility. It
just made him mad, but he did it. He took orders.
Then we started setting these cases for trial. We
wound up with oh gee, I guess a hundred trials. We
ended up trying two Jury trials a week scheduled for
four months in advance. I was there every day, and
I was, oh I was, you know, free to keep trying and
trying and trying cases, but this was too much for the
defense lawyers. They couldn t be away from their
offices for so long. They finally became reasonable, and
we agreed on one case in which they would appeal the
conviction. Then we would settle all the rest of the
cases on the basis of the appeal. If the conviction
was affirmed, they d plead guilty on all the rest of
them. If it was reversed we would dismiss all that
were left.
MP: Now were these just local defense attorneys or were they
Sherry: No, this was Grossman and Richard Gladstein. They re still in
practice in San Francisco. Gladstein was the attorney
then for the ILWU. He d been at Boalt Hall ahead of
me, and Grossman just behind me.
Grossman was a real dedicated communist.
Re became Secretary of the Communist Party of Northern
California later on. These were the years before
the invasion of Poland. Actually he was such a
Sherry: dedicated type that he went underground, just disappeared
you know, did that business. He reappeared after the
war, and how he shed that background and got back into
practice without a ripple so far as I know, I never
was able to understand, but he did. Very, very talented
lawyer, and he was on the Law Review here. A very able
guy. Boy, he was sure dedicated.
Well, the case was affirmed, and we began looking
around for our defendants. Well, we couldn t find any.
Half or them were oif in the Lincoln Brigade in
Spain you know, fighting, the ones that could get
over, the real sincere ones. The rest of them
finished school and trickled off and were gone. We
Just couldn t find any of them so we just quietly
dismissed everything and forgot about the whole
business.
A little after that I went down to the main
office and began trying cases. I was a member of the
senior trial staff, and did that up until the war took
me away, in 19^2.
MF: Your mention of those Berkeley cases reminded me that
one of the things that we ve heard over and over again
about Warren s office was that he really expedited
cases going through the courts, that he felt thai; was
very important .
Sherry: Oh yes. He insisted on a very, very efficient opera
tion. We used to have great complaints about Frank
Coakley because Frank Coakley took too long to try a
case. Leonard Meltzer was the calendar man you know.
Frank of course would try many of these very, very
long, complicated fraud cases, just as George Perkins
would, and Frank Is slow and deliberate in his trial
methods, but my gosh, he had his cases prepared I
never saw cases prepared more beautifully and more
thoroughly.
Meltzer s technique was largely a great emphasis
on cross- examination, and complete economy of movement i
get the case tried and get It done, move it along, don t
drag it out and try to prove a lot of facts you don t
have to prove, and that kind of thing. Just two
different kinds of trial lawyers.
35
Sherry: But we for example, one of the rules was we must
never ask for a continuance. The prosecution Is
always ready to try a case. That was one of the rules.
That was Warren s rule. "Do not ask for a continuance."
He said, "There s no excuse for it. If we ve got more
cases than we can handle we ll tell the board of super
visors we need more manpower."
The operation was very efficient, but you must
remember that the right across the office, the mean
level of professional experience was about fifteen or
sixteen years. You see, the office staff had low
turnover. They didn t move as they do now, and some
of the best trial lawyers in the business were in that
office. They d know it was a reasonably permanent
job and they were working at it and developed very, very
high skills, so things could move much better than they
do now, when you have an every -changing law and an
enormous volume that you can t cope with, and young
people who come in and go out inside of two years.
It s much, much different.
When I returned from military service, Warren had
been elected attorney general, and had gone off to San
Francisco with Warren Olney and Charles Wehr and Ted
Westphal, and one or two others; and Ralph Hoyt was
district attorney.
MF: Before we get on to tnose years, I wanted to ask you
also about the Berkeley chief of police. How were
your relations with him generally?
Sherry: Well, Jack Greening was one of my first personnel
problems in the operation . I normally had little
trouble getting along with people, but Greening viewed
anybody who came out there new, that he didn t know, he
tended to regard them with great suspicion. He was a
very cagey, very cautious man, very very fearful
about things. He tended to be rather uncompromising
and terribly strict, an awful disciplinarian in his
police department . But ultimately when you got to
know him, when, you know, he finally got your measure
and understood where you were, then he was easy to get
along with, so far as I was concerned, but there was
always always a tension between him and his
people in the department .
Sherry: I remember one of the things that always happens
to you when you are working at the police court level;
that people are around asking you to fix traffic
tickets, or kill them, or that kind of thing. We had
all kinds of rules and regulations about that.
On traffic tickets our answer was, "Yes, this
will cost you $5 bail to be forfeited, or $10 or what
ever it is, and you give me the money and we ll pay
it off." The Chief (Warren) said, "There s only
one way you can fix those and that s by paying the fine.
If your friend isn t willing to, well maybe you re
going to have to pay it." Everybody understood that
and it worked quite well. A lot of people considered
it to be quite a convenience to be able to call up
somebody at the district attorney s office and have the
deputy d.a. say, "Send me the $5 and I ll take care of
it for you." That was a great convenience.
Anyway when I came to Berkeley, I don t think
Greening and I had even met before that time. One
of my very good friends, the closest friend of my
father s, was In the printing business, Freltas Press
in Berkeley, whom I had known for many, many years. His
delivery truck man had gotten a parking ticket, and
I think Jim gave it to me at one of those Lions Club
affairs. "Some time," he said, "can you do anything
about this?" I said, "Well, I don t know. I suppose
you ll have to pay a slight amount or post some bail
and that sort of thing." He said, "Well, see what
you can do."
My contact with the police department was the
bailiff, a man named Wise. Wise was a very, very
nice guy. He was the guy who would brief me, tell me
where the skeletons were hanging and where the
booby traps were. I said, "How do you handle these
matters out here? How do you take care of these?"
"That s all right, let me take care of It." He took it
and went away.
I didn t hear anything about it at all until one
day I got a telephone call from Warren, the Chief,
and he was wild. He said, "I had a complaint here
about you from Jack Greening." I said, "What do you
mean?" He said., "You ve been fixing tags out there."
37
Sherry: And "boy, was I sore! Because Greening hadn t said
a doggone word to me at all. I said f "That s wrong.
That s all wrong, taint right!" He said, "Well,
what happened?"
I told him exactly what happened. He knew Greening
very well. Greening was always acting like that. He d
never come to the guy concerned. He made the arrests
in the picketing cases and didn t tell anybody. Earl
says, "well, if that Isn t like that blank ety- clank.
Forget it!" he says, "Forget it!" So I forgot it.
That was the end or that. But poor old Wise got pretty
badly disciplined for that by Greening.
But insofar as professional relationships were
concerned, that police department was great. There
were no problems about cooperation or anything else.
Warren Olney and Charlie Wehr handled all homicide
cases. They ran that as their own private domain,
so whenever there was a homicide, no master wriere It
was in the county, they d go tearing off. If there was
a homicide in Berkeley, for example, that wasn t my
business. They would take care of interviewing witnesses,
taking statements , working with the police and all that
kind 01 thing themselves. They were on constant call for
that.
One day the Inspector in charge of homicide, old
Jim Wilson, came in and he wanted me to issue a
complaint for a murder, in a homicide case out here.
I said, "Well, Where s the report?" "Oh," he said,
"Wehr and Olney have taken care of that, you know.
All you have to do is take my oath on the thing." So
I did, and then I went down and got hold of Wehr, and
said, "Look, let me take care of Berkeley. You don t
have to do that. I can do it." He said, "Do you
really want to?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Okay."
Then I went to Wilson, old Jim Wilson. I said,
"I m going to take care or all the homicide stuff." He
had me spotted for the tenderfoot. H e said, "You
really want to get called out on all homicides?" I
said, "Sure do. I ll be there. Where you go, I go."
Full of the old Wehr spirit.
well, that included automobile fatalities as well
as other things. San Pablo Avenue was the place. The
Snerry: death rate down there was terrible. It was a badly
lighted street, and that had all the traffic. There
was no freeway at that time. All of the north-south
traffic, Sacramento traffic, the rest of It, went up
ban fablo Avenue. Big wide street, you know. People
would get lost in the middle of the street, couldn t be
seen, headlights in every direction. Oh, It was
carnage. Anyhow, I m happily asleep at 11:00 one night
at home and there s the doorbell, and pounding on the
door, and Wilson said, "Well, we got one. Are you
coming?" I said, "Sure."
I got dressed and went out, and we had a bad one.
I sat around in the hospital all night, talking to the
people and taking statements, and that sort of thing.
Then I just took over and handled that whole business.
But Wilson, after we d been doing this together for
about a month, phoned again one night and said, "We
got one." I said, "Okay, when are you coming over?" He
said, "Oh, you really don t have to go out on this one.
[Laughter] A very normal kind of a thing." He didn t
need any help, nothing that they would use accidental
something or other. So I d finished my hazing by
him. We had a fine relationship thereafterwards.
So that was, all in all, that was good trial
experience, dam good investigator experience.
The Role of the Inspectors
MF: Did you have to do most of the investigative work
yourself, or did you have inspectors?
Sherry: The police do the investigating at the first stage oi
the case, but the prosecutor who authorizes the filing
of the complaint has to review all the police work, so
all of their reports, all oi their work has to be put
down in writing, and you review it. You are required In
most cases you talk to the prosecuting, complaining
witness you know, the victim of the thing, just
to get the feel of the case and decide at what level
to charge it, what the traffic will bear in that kind
of case.
Now, the inspectors were assigned to the main
39
Sherry: or flee, down at the courthouse. They were down there
Captain George Helms, a wonderful man was In charge. He
looked exactly like everything you imagine a wild west
sheriff should look like. Just a wonderful and a very
handsome guy.
He had six or seven Inspectors there whose Job it
was to do Investigative work on the high level stuff
that came into the district attorney s office about
graft, corruption, and that kind of business, where they
did most of their work, most of their important stuff.
They were also assigned to the lawyer on the trial
staff who was going to try the case, so that when you
received a case down there, and the trial staff gave
out a case assignment, at the same time an Inspector
would be assigned to the case. The first thing he
would do would be to read the file, note down the names
of all the witnesses that appeared in the file and
place them under subpoena right away. Even if you knew
you didn t have a fixed trial, they would at least get
the people buttoned down there.
Then the trial deputy would go to work and read the
preliminary transcript, read all the documents in the
file, keeping a record of weak spots in the case, was
there evidence of this, and did somebody talk to so-and-
so, and that kind of business. Then you d get the
inspector in and tell him if evidence needs to be got,
If further information is required. He d go out and
get it, and then usually, most of these things could
oe corrected by further police work, weak spots and
things. We d ask the officer who had originally
investigated the case. It was his responsibility.
We d just talk directly to him. "You know, you ve got
to get this other stuff for us. We haven t got it."
If he couldn t do it, if it were out of the county
or something like that, then the inspector would go
ahead and do it. Usually anything out of the city, a
ramification in the case of this kind, the Inspector
would have to do it. Local police couldn t leave their
Jobs and do that kind of thing. So they did an awful
lot of police work, investigative work, in that connection
You d usually work go with him, you know. Both
of you would go together on that kind of business.
That s basically what they did.
Sherry;
MPi
Snerry:
MPi
Sherry:
MP:
When the case was on trial, they d be shepherding
the witnesses around, and if something would develop
during the trial and you needed some information right
away that wasn t available, the inspector would get
it for you. It made a very effective team. That
was the principle function.
Yes. We Interviewed several of the inspectors. I
hadn t known that they all worked out of the central
office.
Yes. All of tnem.
As a matter of fact, I interviewed Lloyd Jester several
months ago.
I encountered Lloyd Jester the first time when he was
chief of police of Albany, which was an elective job,
if you can tie that, well, not: he was first a police
man in the department old John Glavinovich was the
chief of police, and when he retired Jester ran and
won the election. After two or three terms he came
down with us as an inspector. Then he was away during
the war, and then he came back briefly after the war
and then went off someplace else. That s when I lost
track of him.
Yes, that s right. He was in the district attorney s
office before he went to Albany and then about the time
when Warren decided to run for attorney general he
was asked if he wanted to run for police chief in
Albany. After the war, he ended up as police chief in
Fargo, North Dakota, and was there for about five
years , and then got called back into the service again .
When he got back out of the service, I think that he d
written J. Prank Coakley and asked if there was any work
here, and Coakley said, "Certainly. Come on back."
Administration of the Office
MF:
Could you tell me something about how deputies were
recruited?
Sherry: The deputies are all recruited the same way I was
Sherry recruited. There was a reason of course for it. One
of the things that Earl Warren was very, very committed
to was complete independence oi action . As much inde
pendence as possible. He didn t want to be subservient
to anyone or owe anybody anything. And he didn t he
was always pressed by friends of his to appoint their
sons or relatives to the office for appointive positions.
He liked to make his own selection. If a classmate or
friend had some young lawyer that he was recommending,
Earl would consider the guy.
By having two or three "bottom deputies," as we
called them, on the staff without pay, warren could
always respond to one of these requests to appoint
some friend or relative by saying, "Well, gee, I d like
to, you know, but things are pretty tight. I ve got
Senator Fletcher s son down there, and I ve got
Oxle Hotle, and you know, they re serving without
compensation in some cases for a year or two. You
wouldn t want me to put your boy in ahead of those
guys, would you?" And of course you couldn t say
[laughterj
MF: Very clever.
Sherry: do that Insulated him from people who were and gave
him an opportunity to be doggone sure who he was
appointing. They were tested under fire so to speak
before they got on the payroll. So that s how the recruiting
was done.
[Referring to Interview outline. J Now, "how
organized and how were cases assigned" the trial
lawyer operates of course with his inspector. That s
tne team. But the assignment of cases was done by
wnat they call a calendar man, who in those days was
Leonard Meltzer. He would go to court every day for
the arraignments of the new cases. Of course cases were
there were please of guilty, those were disposed of,
they didn t need anybody s attention at all. But
cases in which pleas of not guilty when the plea
of not guilty was entered and when a trial date was
agreed upon then an assignment slip would be made
out, and the calendar man would assign it as he knew
he ketp track of everybody s case load. It was mostly
assigned according to case load and according to
specialty.
Sherry: Now although we had specialists like Wehr and Olney
and Perkins and Coakley, for these various kinds of
cases, there was still enough of the usual robbery,
burglary and these unpleasant lewd conduct with little
children cases floating around; everybody had to take
his share of that as well.
You would come In the morning after the calendar
was completed the calendar man would go to his office,
and he d dot-dash all his assignment slips and that kind
of thing. He would come in, make the rounds of the
office every morning and give all the slips to the
fellows "Those are your orders."
The Inspector assigned to you for those cases
would also get a corresponding slip. Ultimately, of
course, you put the case down on your calendar as to
when It was going to go, and reminders to have witnesses
at this particular time, and ultimately you prepared
the case, you read the stuff, you talked to all the
witnesses, and went down to court and tried it.
[Referring to interview outline.] Now, about
hours "and standards of conduct. Well, the hours were
as long as it was necessary to do the Job. Sometimes it
was night and day, although if, for example, you were
just all tired out about something, you d say "I m
taking the afternoon off. I m going to go play goli ."
You could do that, but it was Impossible to abuse the
privilege, because it was hard enough to squeeze time
out yourself to take that kind of time off.
[Referring to interview outline. ] Now, about
standards of conduct. You were expected, sure as the
dickens, to behave yourself and to pay your own traffic
tickets, and never try to over-awe anybody by telling
them you re a deputy district attorney and demand some
kind of favor for that. The problem was compounded
in those days, because until 1935 we were still living
in what purported to be the "age of prohibition,"
although after about 1929, that was rapidly coming
apart. There were still arrests made, and cases being
tried, and so you mustn t ever be caught drinking
publicly, anywhere, at all. What you did in the
privacy of your own home was your own business.
So one would say that high professional and
ethical standards were required, and also, by gosh, we
nad to behave ourselves. There were a few Instances in
which people didn t and bingo! next day they weren t there.
Sherry: That s just all there was to it. That was the end.
MF:
You mentioned earlier that you were involved later on
in personnel recruitment in the office?
Sherry t Yes.
MF: When was that?
Sherry: Well, most of that time was beginning about 19^6, 4-7,
during Ralph Hoyt s incumbency more than anything else,
where we developed and really organized that thing
more than it had ever been done before. We found out
rather, we put down and made regular procedures out of
what had been a traditional mode of doing things
before no written records.
Always you have the problem of getting an authorized
vacancy, getting a slot, getting more positions on the
salary ordinance, and not being able to hire unless
3 r ou had someone. Of course the time had gone by when
you could get anybody to come to work for nothing.
Things had improved very, very considerably. It was
just not possible. Consequently, recruiting was a
matter of people making application.
The office was well known. It had a splendid
reputation as a training ground for great trial lawyers,
and by heavens, the bar is still filled with alumni of
that office, and very, very successful in the practice
of law. Although conditions now, I don t think, are
as good by a long ways as they were then, it was really
something.
There was no lack of people applying for positions.
We d Just open a file on them, interview, and stack them
away. Then when the vacancy occurred, we would have
made our evaluations and we would go through until
we found the first high evaluated guy and call him,
and if he said, "Sorry, I have a Job," then you d go
to the next one. That s the way t worked.
Relations with other Law Enforcement Agencies
MF:
What sort of relationship existed between the office
and other county law enforcement offices?
Sherry t We had very good relationships with all the police
agencies. We cultivated those relationships. Also
with the city governments of the various cities. All
of the cities in this area operated under the standard
city charters except Albany which they ve
adopted.
You know, you used to go down to the stationer s
store and buy blank forms of city charters! All of
these provided for a city attorney, and some for city
prosecutor, but in any event they contemplated that
the city would have its own prosecuting officer for
misdemeanor cases. Los Angeles still has that procedure,
There is a city attorney who prosecutes misdemeanors and
the district attorney takes care of the felonies. Many
of the Southern California cities continue with that
practice.
Mow the trouble with that is that if It s a
misdemeanor, right away, if you can plainly see it s
a misdemeanor, then all right. The city can handle
that thing. If it s a felony case, and that s plainly
visible, the district attorney can probably handle that
thing. But if the district attorney does not go along
with a request by the police for a felony complaint;
if he evaluates the case as a misdemeanor, the inves
tigating officers have to start all over again at the
city prosecutor s office to get a misdemeanor complaint.
This procedure can be very time-wasting.
Although the charters provided for this kind of
thing, when Earl Warren became district attorney,
he said to the cities, "I ll provide all that
prosecutorial service for you. I ll take that load off
your back. All you have to do is supply us with the
office space and such secretarial help as we need "
MF: Tnis is Earl Warren then?
Sherry: I don t know how new it was with Warren. I think maybe
it Just kind of grew up that way, but he firmed it up
and made it a solid kind of a practice, because he
could see what was you know, the population was
growing and all that kind of thing. He was establishing
a pattern .
Basically the reason for It was that it was to
Sherry: attain uniformity in the administration of Justice in
the county by having one single agency making the
determinations of who was to be charged, what cases were
to be tried, and to avoid the kind of thing that has
happened in Southern California, when some gambler,
seeing the police breathing down his neck or something
for some serious offense would walk into a justice
court with the connivance of the city attorney and
plead guilty to a misdemeanor, just blocking off a
felony prosecution.
There s so much time loss where you have these two
offices trying to sort out cases. It s a most
inefficient system. So we operated very efficiently.
Tne cities were delighted to have the D.A. s office
do It.
We maintained continuous liaison with all the
police departments. One of the inspectors I think
one of Lloyd Jester s more important duties was running
around visiting all police departments on a regular
basis, all the time, all over the county. As a former
chief, of course, he had. an entree anywhere. So that
the relationship of police departments was good, even
in Oakland, where we had all kinds of problems, even in
the sheriff s office where our office sent two under-
sheriffs to prison
MF: Yes. I wanted to ask you about that.
Sherry: This was And we convicted a couple of police officers
of murder in Oakland, for killing a prisoner. None
theless we were able to maintain a good relationship
with them.
MF: How about the courts?
Sherry: Well, there was no problem about the courts. The
Judges were good. They were getting excellent service,
darn good trial lawyers. They had absolutely nothing
to complain about .
We used to get Earl Warren himself used to get
a little troubled about T. W. Harris, who was the
presiding judge of the court, an old timer, a grand-old-
man type, but very, very arrogant, very self-asserting,
and that kind of thing. He had a different kind of
local political alignment than Warren, particularly during
Sherry : the graft paving scandal thing, when he once threatened
to charge Ekrl Warren with contempt of court for
releasing a grand jury transcript.
MF:
Oh yes. I wanted to get to that.
Sherry: Earl Warren says, "All right, Judge, you just go right
ahead . "
MF: Was Harris a Mike Kelly man?
Sherry: Mo, he wasn t a Kelly man. It was simply that the paving
graft scandals began to involve all the best people in
town. The Hutchinson family that owned this crushed
rock quarry you know where that new Safeway market
is, down by the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland
there s that big quarry? That s the old Blue Rock
Quarry out of which came that special rock, not to be
found any other place in the region. The ordinance,
the specifications for the contract, called explicitly
for that kind of rock, you see, so they could manipulate
prices and every other thing.
Well, the Hutchinson family were prominent in
society, business, and finance and ail of that kind of
thing. Prominent lawyers were mixed up in it. This
pressure was enormous. Reputations were ruined right
and left. Of course they deserved to be. This thing
just kept right on going, and of course Harris, through
his son, was very close to a lot of those families,
which I suppose today you would call at least a kind
of part of the establishment. That s where the
pressures came from.
Warren, in releasing the transcript, was taking a
chance. But he had to release the transcript. He
had to get this thing out to the public, what was going
on in the grand jury room, where you d ask a man his
name and he would tell you that and nothing more; "Where
do you live?" "I refuse to testify on the ground that
it might incriminate me." "If you told us where you
live, this would incriminate you, you thing?" "I refuse
to testify." When that kind of think got out into the
press the Tribune printed these things why here
a distinguished businessman, claiming the firth amend
ment to such darned silly questions. This was defiant,
you see.
Sherry: When that happened oh boy. The public reaction
was Just Earl Warren was at the top of the wave at
that point. So when Harris, outraged that he was
releasing the transcript of the grand Jury hearing as
fast as it was being typed up it was highly irregular,
but I don t think it was a crime at all Harris said,
"You stop that, or I ll find you in contempt of court."
Earl said, "Go right ahead." He knew that Harris
didn t have the guts to do it, and wouldn t dare do
it, because Harris didn t want to be identified
publicly with these guys.
So Earl always had kind of the Indian sign on
Harris. But Harris would retaliate whenever he could,
once in a while In assigning Judges, you know, and
that kind of thing? he would be very uncooperative.
Oh, that s interesting. I wanted to ask you what the
rules were, then, governing release of grand Jury
transcripts.
I don t know that there is any explicit rule on It
right now. I don t know of any law about It. We had
very Inadequate
What was the practice then?
Well normally, the transcript was never typed up until
the hearing was all over and an indictment had been
returned. And then It was typed up. When It was
finished it would be delivered to the county clerk, at
which point it became a public record.
MF: So it was public even then.
Sherry: Oh sure. After it was finished. Like the Angela Davis
case, you know. Everybody found out what the evidence
was when they filed a transcript over there in the county
clerk s office.
MF: Yes, but I know for instance In the Bessie Ferguson
case, the transcript was never opened because an
indictment was never made.
Sherry: Oh, if there is no indictment, then there is no
transcript. The reporter doesn t write up his notes.
There s no transcript. No point in doing it. Just
the same thing you get a plea of not guilty, or
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
Sherry: rather an acquittal. They don t write up a transcript.
It doesn t serve any purpose. You Just need the
transcript in case there s going to be a trial. So I
don t know.
There wasn t anything explicit in the law about
this kind of procedure, but it was, as I say, highly
irregular. It had never been done before, and was
obviously being done for a purpose to serve the
investigation you know, to let the public know what
was being concealed behind the doors of the grand Jury.
That Just worked beautifully.
I read the transcript myself. There used to be
a copy bouncing around down here in the office. It
was absolutely fascinating.
MF: I &lso read somewhere that California law made grand
Jury sessions open to the public in 1937 If they wanted
it to be.
Sherry: Well, on the petition of the attorney general and with
the consent of the district attorney and the grand
Jury, the grand Jury can have a public session. That
is possible. I don t know it may have been used.
I have a faint idea that it has been used maybe once or
twice.
MF: In this county?
Sherry: Nfo. Never done here that I know of. I remember during
the crime commission days in the 19^0* s when Fred
Howser, then the attorney general, demanded that they
have an open grand Jury hearing up in Sonoma County in
connection with a gambling operation with which he was
connected. Which wasn t granted.
That has Just not been used. I suspect that that
probably had its origins in Earl Warren s recollections
of the problems that he had at that time. That had not
been an open grand Jury hearing. Of course he
accomplished the same thing by handing the transcript
to the papers, published by the Tribune, every word, day
after day. f Laughter] More fascinating than the
funnies!
Relations with the Press
MF: That gets us Into the question of what the relationship
was between the office and the press.
Sherry: Well, the relationship was very good. The press In those
days was a more considerable kind of a press than we
have now.
We had two newspapers In Oakland, the Post- Enquirer
as well as the Tribune . Both of those papers had a man
at the courthouse. Both of them had a man In the city
hall . The San Francisco Chroncile and the Examiner
had four men over here also with the same kind of dlstri-
bution. There were always a lot of press around, and
then if there was a big case of some kind or another,
they would send more people.
Press manpower was far more available then than
it is now. There was a lot more personalized or personal
kind of reporting. We all got to be great friends with
the newspaper reporters and they knew us. We knew who
to trust and who not to trust, and it was Just a
perfectly splendid working relationship.
We had only one problem that I can ever think of
with the press, and that was with the Tribune , and that
was when Ralph Hoyt was district attorney. It was, I
guess, about 19^7. It must have been in 19^-7 that a
seventeen-year-old girl, a nice girl, was seduced by a
wealthy good-for-nothing jeweler in Glendale, and to
get away from him she came up here to one of the state
colleges to go to school. It was a family effort to
separate those two. He was a married man with a bunch
of kids. He Just went head-over-heels for this child.
So he came up here for a reunion with her, and he shot
and killed her in a motel down in the San Leandro
area.
Well we had the newspapers came out with this
"Clair de Lune murder case" because here s the corpse,
and on the phonograph by the body Is a record of
Clair de Lune, a very corny version of that day. And
there were some kind of flowers red carnations.
Another headline was, "The red carnation murder case."
Well, that was a nineteen-day wonder. But we hadn t
the faintest idea who she was or what had happened.
Our only clue was that we found out that she had gone
to school in Alameda.
50
Sherry: We began trying to find out, gradually, throughout
the night, and then all the next day, finally got all the
identifications down, and in the course of that we
understood that she d been out with a man who was
alleged to have been at Moffet Field, which was a naval
air station at the time. The commanding officer
phoned up and said that one of his officers had been
out with her and dated her while she was at school in
Alameda. We wanted to talk to him, and he said, "You
could talk to him." He preferred that we have this up
at the office, but on the assurance that there be no
publicity. Well, what do you do? Say, "Okay, no
publicity." But with all those newspaper reporters
around, when our inspectors go roaring out of the parking
area to go down to Moffit Field, the newspaper reporters
know something is up, and they know that when
the inspectors go away, they ll come back. And when they
come back, they are going to hassle them.
Well, they came back, and they had this naval
officer. And the Inspectors knew what was happening,
too. At the courthouse there s a driveway that goes
down from the street that big steel door there down
into the basement . Well the cars came up and instead
of parking at the curb that big door suddenly came
up and the automobile with the naval officer started
to go down in. That enraged the reporters, and there
was a photographer there. Just as he was about to take
his picture, why Jester or one of the inspectors turned
the camera down, so all he got was a picture of his
toes. The door clanged shut, and boy they were mad.
Gee, they were just absolutely outraged at that.
We hadn t had any time at all, in the circumstances
to get hold of city editors and tell them what the
problem was, in the middle of the night. We Just had
to do it that way. Then of course he was smuggled
out again. Of course they found out who he was. Of
course that gave it all the bigger play, when they
finally identified the naval officer secretly
interrogated by the district attorney. Oh, murder!
MF: I can see the headlines.
Sherry: Well, anyhow, Al Reck, who was then city editor of the
Oakland Tribune, thereafter never printed Ralph Hoyt s
name in connection with any story out of the courthouse.
He would quote deputy district attorneys and assistant
district attorneys. He would never mention Ralph Hoyt,
district attorney. He kept that up and continued It for
51
Sherry: a period of about six months. Then the election, I
think, was coming up and Ralph was getting mighty
upset. But that s the way it was. They finally stopped
But apart from that, there wasn t any no
problems with the press that I can think of.
The Knowland Family
MF:
Sherry:
Me :
I guess one of the things that we have been trying to
get to, in studying this period, is what the connection
was, or the relationship between the Knowland family
an d Warren .
Well, I can t tell you the whole of that story, because
it began long before I got Into the picture.
When Earl came to Oakland and began the practice
of law here, Joe Knowland was then publisher of the
Tribune. He d been a member of Congress. He d been
In the legislature. He was very, very active in the
Republican party, with which Earl Warren, then as a
young man, was affiliated.
When Earl Warren became district attorney, some
thing that Knowland had nothing whatever to do with at
all, they knew each other, they were friendly.
Knowland always gave the district attorney, with this
one exception that I told you about, a good press, and
good editorial coverage and all that kind of thing.
Earl Insisted on the nonpartisan quality of the
office; it s nonpartisan by law, and by gosh it was
going to be nonpartisan. He had Democrats in the office
back in the days when you had to hunt a Democrat,
hunt to find one. Nobody was asked his political
affiliation at all. There was absolutely no inquiry
made that way.
You probably know that Frank Coakley managed the
Al Smith campaign. Actually, he was vice campaign
chairman .
I was Just going to mention that.
52
Sherry;
MP:
Sherry;
MF:
Sherry:
There wasn t any partisan pressure from the Knowlands .
But there was friendship certainly, by all means.
There was a great deal of friendship. Joe s son
Bill Knowland then went to the legislature, and he was
in the legislature when Earl Warren was attorney general.
As attorney general, he would be interested naturally
in legislation, and Bill would carry some of it for
him, not the law enforcement stuff, but anything else
that the attorney general was interested in.
So I never could detect anything there at all
except just friends. There certainly was no impact
upon the operations of the office. I never even
I met Bill Knowland early in the game, but I never met
the old man, Joe, until after he retired and was
giving his life to the business of restoring the old
California missions and that kind of thing. He was a
good philanthropist, and all that. I came to admire
him (rery much. He was a great guy, a very charming
old guy.
Yes. Mrs. Fry did an interview with him.
Joe , that is? Before he died?
Yes. This was probably not too long before he
died.
Yes. Well, he was a great guy.
can say about the Knowlands.
So that *s about all I
[Referring to Interview outline] "Political
parties and political campaigns" there were none, so
far as I was concerned. The office was never involved
in any kind of political campaigning at all, except
for the district attorney s office, and all the time I
was in the office, there, Earl had only the token
opposition of T. L. Christian.
Have you ever heard about old man Christian, who
always ran against Earl Warren? It didn t cost anything
for filing in those days, and he was a fine old guy.
He said, "You don t want to let Earl Warren get away
with everything down there, you know, and think he s
not going to get any opposition!" Every year he would
file? every election year it was Earl Warren and T. L.
Christian, candidates for district attorney. Christian
we d run Into him in the courtrooms or around the courthouse,
53
Sherry: and he d say, "Now don t you worry, Bill," or "Don t
you worry, Tom, when I become district attorney, you re
going to keep your job!" He would get a token vote.
But that was all.
The only campaign that that office ever had in my
experience, was the first time Ralph Hoyt came up for
election. That was the first political campaign that I
ever became involved in to the point where I was out
pushing doorbells and that kind of thing. But otherwise,
you would never know when Earl Warren was running. You
could tell, when somebody would come around and leave
a few of these small hand-cards, "Earl Warren for
district attorney." If you wanted to pass a few out,
you know. That s all there was to it.
Methods of Criminal Procedure
MF: I d like to switch gears a bit here, and talk some
about criminal procedure.
Sherry: Well, law enforcement experiences, the interrogation
procedure, was a very well-organized, very there were
very, very definite kinds of routines, which would
take me another hour, I suppose, to explain, so let
that go until another day.
Search warrants were almost never used. I never
drew a search warrant in my life until we began
having to get into these places where they were running
the private lotteries that began operating here in the
late 1930 s.
You didn t need them, for ordinary crimes,
because first of all there was no exclusionary rule.
There was no Inquiry into how the evidence was obtained.
There wasn t any law of arrest at all, basically. There
would be a search warrant once in a while, if you wanted
to get into a safe deposit vault, for example, or if
you wanted to get into a warehouse where there was
gambling equipment stored or you thought there was.
But it was pretty rare.
Secret listening devices were absolutely barred
by Earl. He would have nothing whatever to do with
them. Wiretapping was explicitly forbidden.
anerryt In the K ing . Conn e r , Ramsay case, In that one,
someone taped or rather, they had some kind of
listening device, I think in King s office in San
Francisco. Now who was responsible for that, I have
no idea, but Earl wouldn t permit it to be used.
MF: Yes, I have several questions about that. In the
King, Ramsay. Conner case, Oscar Jahnsen told us the
story about how he taped a microphone to a table leg
In a hotel room. They were working with one of the
witnesses who had set up a meeting with several people
that included King, and they had
Sherry: Well, he would know more about that than I, because I
was working in Berkeley at the time that case was going
on. I didn t know much more than I saw in the papers.
MF: I remember that Oscar Jahnsen also told us that several
years later, in the Methias Warren murder case,
Pakersfield police chief Bob Powers asked Jahnsen if
Warren would permit the use of a hidden microphone,
and Jahnsen at that time said no, that it just couldn t
be used.
Sherry: Well, that s because he probably got burned pretty
badly for using the one in the King situation.
MF: I was wondering about that.
Sherry: Oh yes. Oscar tended to fly off in rather emotional
kinds of ways once In a while, without telling
people a little flamboyant.
MF: I ve been doing a study on that case and I ve been
reading the records in the D.A. s office. There are
typed transcripts of those taped interviews that were
picked up on that mike. At another point they put
Ramsay in a cell in the Piedmont jail that had a
microphone in it, and they also transcribed that
conversation .
Sherry: Well, that would be between Ramsay and whom?
MF:
Well, it was between Ramsay and Murphy, who was one of
the witnesses who had been picked up right at the
beginning.
55
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
MF:
Oh. That I didn t know about. In any event, this was
undoubtedly again done without Warren s knowledge by
an Investigator, because he most explicitly No
tapes were used in the King, Conner, Hamsay trial,
I m sure.
No. No, I think the inspector said that they were used
as aids to get clues.
That s because they were desperately hunting, and
"What the boss doesn t know isn t going to hurt him
any." That happens lots of times, but they
Just weren t doing what they were supposed to be
doing, that s all.
Well, that clears that up in my mind.
We had no equipment. I don t know oi any police
department around here that had any equipment. Some
of them, 11 they got anything, tney had to borrow it.
So I Just had no experience
I see. Did Earl Warren encourage the use of "copping
pleas ?"
Sherry: Oh, that. No, that s "pleading to a lesser charge";
that is where a man is charged with burglary and you
let him plead to petty theft and all that .
No, we tried the philosophy of the office at
that time was to try to charge the cases for what
they were worth, and then in a situation in which a
plea to a lesser offense would be taken, it would be
carefully examined and determined whether or not that
was an adequate disposition oi the case.
But we weren t so pressed with backloads of cases
as prosecutors are today. We could take our time.
We were hard people to bargain with, particularly with
the theory that we charge them right in the first
instance.
So, it was done, it has to be done, it must be
done. Many times you ll find you ve got your case all
prepared and it Just isn t there. Maybe you have a
missing witness, or maybe a witness is not telling the
story that he told before, situations will occur where
you want to make some disposition oi the case, so you
will listen to an offer of negotiated plea.
56
Interrogations and Confessions
[Interview II, March 12, 1971. Interviewed by
Miriam Felngold and Amelia Fry]
MF: When we left off last time, you had just begun to
talk about criminal procedure .
Sherry: You want to talk about questioning, taking statements,
confessions, and that sort of business.
Well, ordinarily, in the olden days, as now, all
that kind of investigation is done by police Investi
gators, more now than then. But that job is almost
entirely a police job.
The two exceptions that were then important, and
I think still are, are not the usual kind of cases, but
cases of some considerable complexity. A big conspiracy,
corruption in government, something of that sort which
normally would go to the grand jury, would not be the
kind of thing that would come to the police department
in any event, corporate securities fraud, that kind of
thing, business frauds of one sort or another. Most
of the investigation in those cases is handled by the
people in the D.A. s office, because they re equipped
to handle it whereas policemen aren t. The police
can understand, you know, Peter striking Paul, and
that sort of thing, but a complicated fraud, where you
need experts and accountants and all that kind of
thing, the police are out of their depth.
The other exception that we had in the office was
homicide cases. Warren Olney and Charles Wehr were
the homicide specialists in Earl Warren s time and
thereafter, until they left the office. They originally
did all 01 the work in that area, but later on as time
went by and while they were still in the office,
other deputies in the oifice got into the same kind
of a thing. We had an assignment kind of a business
where for a month for example you would be on call for
homicide, if you were a deputy.
All police departments In the county had a little
sign, "If there s a homicide call" you know,
this month "Joe" or whoever it may be, usually one
of the inspectors in the office. The inspector then
would call a deputy and then he d go around and
pick up a secretary, a reporter, who would record the
57
Sherry: conversation, and oif you would go to a hospital for a
dying statement for example, or police station, or
whatever the case may be, in the middle of the night or
the middle of the day. It was very gung-ho stuff for
young deputies, really seeing-lif e-in-the-raw kind of
business.
The normal and ordinary procedure in these things
would simply be to Interrogate the accused and what
ever witnesses the police may have still on hand and
get it all down in the shorthand reporter s notebook.
There wasn t any particular kind of technique
involved in the thing. It was a simple matter of
interrogation, the way a lawyer will interrogate any
client or witness, in which you focus on you have in
mind, what the particular elements of the crime are
involved, and you interrogate to ascertain what those
may be, what those situations might be.
For example, you would always anticipate that
there might be an insanity defense, you know, so you
would always ask the individual, somewhere along the
line something about his health, his hospital experience,
if any, if he d had any kind of mental treatment, been
in that kind of a hospital, or receiving psychiatric
treatment, that kind of thing. So you would have a
good idea of whether or not there was anything
Important in this kind of an area and foreclose what
was not uncommon in those days, what would be a
rlgged-up insanity defense in a particular case.
That generally was done in the homicide cases
simply because they were important cases, of course.
Some police departments, Berkeley for example, kind
of bucked at that because they got it into their heads
that "We can Investigate cases as well as you guys
cant" So we said, "All right, go ahead. We ll inter
rogate after you re through." So at Berkeley, we
would come out and sit around and have a cigarette or
a cup of coffee while the detective in charge of the
case was finishing up with his interrogation and then
we would go he of course would do it with his own
handwritten notes and that kind of thing, whereas
the stenographic statement on the record is by far the
better way to do it.
The Important thing I suppose, In the light of
what has happened in that connection, was what do we
58
Sherry: tell a man, for example, if he suddenly says, "Do I
have the right to see a lawyer?" or "Do I have to talk
to you?" In which event all we said was "You surely
may, you have a right to have a lawyer i and you don * t
have to talk to me." We would tell them precisely in
that situation.
We were a long way ahead of Miranda and all the
other kinds of warnings now that are required in that
kind of circumstance.
MF: Was that unusual for the time for you to
Sherry: I don t think so. That s a lawyer-like thing to do.
Everything is being taken down. Oh, there s another
technique. This is just a lawyer s practice in this
kind of thing. For example, if I were going to take a
statement from you this afternoon, a shorthand reporter
would have been in this room before you came in, so
she can testify that she was here when you came in and
she recorded every question asked and every answer.
Nothing off the record. Nothing is oi f the record
whatever. The reporter will take everything down.
If I m interrupted by a telephone call, she ll write
down what I say, what she can hear of my telephone
call, so she can swear she wrote down every word that
was said in that room from beginning to end.
The person to be interrogated is Introduced to
everybody in the room. That all goes into the
record, so you know everyone who is there and who he is
and what. Then "What is your name? 11 "your address?"
"Your occupation?" and "We understand that you ve been
in an automobile accident" or "you ve had some problem
with your wife" or whatever it is.
start talking.
Then you go on and
Now when the question would be asked, "Do I have
a right to have an attorney?" you can t play games with
that if you re working on the record. We never did.
We never wanted to, and so we would say, "Yes. Do you
have a lawyer?" Of course they don t have a lawyer
and wouldn t have the faintest idea of where to get
one.
They might ask, "Do I have to talk?" "No, you
don t have to talk, you don t have to answer any
59
Sherry: questions at all. But if you are willing to talk we
would be Interested in talking to you about the
situation." Almost always they continue talking.
That s true to this day, in the normal run of crime,
particularly homicide. The individual who has
committed this crime is just full of an urge to explain
why he did this terrible thing. It was, you know/
necessary. You can t shut them up. You can t today
you know, with the Miranda warning, which is in writing,
you have to Interrupt and say, "Wait, sign this first."
It s just psychologically part or the situation.
The only persons I can ever remember encountering
who would raise the question about the lawyer or
"Do I have to?" were people involved in frauds of one
kind or another, fast-talker types and that kind of
thing. "Do I have to talk?" and that sort of thing.
There have been occasions when they ll say, "Well, if
that s the case, then I m not going to talk." "Okay.
Good afternoon, goodby, that s the end of that." But
most or them, even If they raise this issue, most of
them, having a great talent for conning people, which
they do, figure that they can con the man who s talking
to them also, you see. so they re very Interested to
tell their side or the story.
In taking statements, as we called it at that time,
it wasn t important that one get a confession particularly.
It was important that one got a conversation, because
it would either be an acknowledgement of guilt or it
would be some kind of a con job to try to Justify or
mislead and that kind of thing. The more the people
were willing to sit back and let them talk and talk
and talk, then it s very simple to go out with this
story and check it and check out the falsehoods you see.
Actually in a trial it s much better to put in, In
many cases, what seems to be a good explanation and
prove It all to be false. That s part of the thing.
We had one case that was called, it was a kind of
a ninety-day wonder around here many years ago, the
Captain Page murder case . Military rank was a matter
of great importance back in our pristine days of the
1930 s, and this was an ordinary guy who happened to
be a reserve officer how he ever got to be I don t
know. There weren t many of them around but he liked
his title, so he was referred to as Captain Page.
Captain Page got mad at his son one day. He lived
.
60
Sherry: on, oh, Ben venue or Hillegass or one of those streets
south of the campus in Berkeley, and shot and killed
the youngster with his army automatic. Shot his son.
But he didn t die right away. He was taken to Alta
Bates and died there. He was about fourteen or
fifteen years old. Captain Page had the pistol hanging
on the back of the door to his room. He was living
with his mother, the boy s grandmother, and the boy.
The mother was gone or dead. I don f t know what. In
any event, there were parent-child problems, and he
killed the kid. He was mad. Shot him.
I Interrogated Page in the Berkeley police station.
I was then doing that kind of thing. At that time I
didn t know anything about an army pistol, an automatic.
I knew very little about firearms. I knew about rifles
and that sort of thing, but I hadn t much to do with
pistols. And his story was that he was showing his son
how to pull the slide back, and demonstrating the use
of the thing, when he accidentally let go of something,
and bingo, it was a completely accidental shooting.
So I jusb had him repeat about four times, precisely
every movement that he made, everything that he did. I
came out it was just accidental, you know. I didn t
know how one could prove to the contrary. We knew from
the boy s grandmother, this guy s mother, she heard the
angry voices that sort of thing, and told the story of
what really was a murder.. But or course by the time of
the trial she wasn t talking any more about the case.
As it turned out, this routine that I had taken
him through on how the weapon was discharged was
decisive. As a matter of fact, it s impossible for an
automatic to be discharged in that fashion. So, the
end of the case, an expert in firearms from the Presidio
at Monterey came up and said, "You just can t discharge
a 45 automatic that way," and demonstrated it right in
front of the jury.
This is Just a matter of one of the ways you
go about interrogating people and why you need to get
this kind of stuff in advance if you can. Well, what
more about that
Fry: Could I ask a question? I m not quite as knowledgeable
about this as Miml is, and we are Interested In the
practices that lauer on were considerations in the
61
Fry:
Sherry:
Pry:
Sherry:
MP:
Sherry:
Pry:
Sherry:
Fry:
Miranda case. Did you say that the practices In the
ATameda County D.A. s office of always acknowledging
to the person that he can have a lawyer
If he asked. There was no warning,
requirement for that.
There was no
There was no previous warning? Now can you fit this
into the context of other police departments and other
D.A. s offices and so forth in California at the time?
What do you think the regular practice was?
Well, police would bring all kinds of pressures from
tine to time. Police basically, particularly in those
days, were not well-informed. They didn t know the
technical rules of what s a voluntary confession. If
you could get it out of a man without hitting him, why
it was a voluntary confession.
I remember one time having an interrogation in the
Berkeley police department, with a guy on a fraud thing
of one sort or another. I talked to him for an hour
or more and he Just wasn t "it Just wasn t so;
It wasn t true." He wasn t giving me anything. This
very nice police oi ficer who was in there said, "Well,
let me go off for a while with him. Let me see if I
can t get him to talk." So they went off together.
Pretty soon the man came back and said, "Well, I ll
tell you what it s all about." And he did.
What happened?
Well, then I discovered afterwards that the police
officer had told him, "You d better talk to the deputy
district attorney and tell him all about it. You know
your wife s Involved in this thing too." She was,
very peripherally. We had no idea in our heads
we d ever do anything about her, but he said, "If
you don t tell them what happened, your wife s going
to be arrested."
Oh. He knew little threats to put in.
Yes. You know, that kind of thing, which of course- is
the purpose for the Miranda warning, because it was to
insure that that s given .
Was this a general practice that Warren himself made
sure was followed in the office?
62
Sherry: Yes, sure. Yes. He was responsible for the training
program and the whole thing. That s the way It had to
be. So we didn t use that confession. That s the other
side of the coin. I wouldn t use It oh no, no
when I found out what had happened. Even under the
rules In those days It would have been Involuntary
confession, because, gee, way back, one of the early
cases in 1888 or something, the deputy sheriff told
a man , "It would be better for you If you tell the
truth." So he told, and It s an Involuntary confession,
because there was an Inducement. That meant he talked
because there was something held out to him.
The law In California on involuntary confessions
has always been very, very strict. Any kind of Induce
ment, promise or threat, anything any kind of
coercion at all would invalidate a confession. "It
would be better for you If you tell the truth."
What could be simpler and low-key as that? But the
California case in the Supreme Court it s involuntary
if you do that .
MF:
How does this compare with the Los Angeles and San
Francisco D.A. s offices?
Sherry: The practice is about the same.
MF: Were they?
Sherry i Generally, yes. Generally about the same. Alameda
County was far more highly organized and far more
well-developed in this area than San Francisco ever was,
They kind of played it by ear over there, and they
still do
MF: You mean in an investigation?
Sherry: Yes. The district attorney didn t participate much
In investigations. The district attorney s office in
San Francisco really didn t amount to a darn until
Pat Brown became district attorney, with Tom Lynch and
Norman Elkington as assistants. They really set up a
good office and they ran it Independent of the police
department, which is the refreshing thing about that.
The police department s running the office again now.
So they ve lost ground.
Los Angeles always had high standards and good
Sherry: personnel, lots of resources. But we, I think, were
leaders in the field in investigative and trial techniques
and that kind of thing, and did a lot of took the
lead in internal education, you know, on-the-job
training kind of thing. In various district attorney
meetings and that kind of business, the office was the
one that talked about the new styles and new endeavors
and how to do it right .
MF: These were mostly Innovations of Warren s?
sherry: Well, it was because he was just every day he was
living that office and doing that job, and it had to be
done right. He insisted on that. It Just had to be
done right.
The first time in my experience at all that anythig
like a political implication or a political Influence
was ever felt in that office was after Roosevelt s
election, with the passage of the National Labor
Relations Board Act legislation, you know; reorganiza
tion and structuring of labor. At one of the famous
Saturday morning meetings, the Chief Justice [District
Attorney Warren] said, "I have subscribed to "So-
and-So s Labor Letter; we re taking the Federal
Register, " you know, all this kind of thing
"we ve got to learn this stuff, you know, it s important.
It s new!" No one else would have thought of that at
all. So we began getting all these publications. As
one of the oldtlmers in the office said, "very avant-
garde kind of stuff." Unfortunately the Federal
Register is about as much fun reading as the telephone
book. The Labor Letter was terrible; but at least our
eyes were opened to this new unfolding world.
Coordination of Law Ehforcement
MF: I gather that all of that presupposed a certain amount
of cooperation between the police departments and the
county and the D.A. s office?
Sherry: Oh sure. Yes, yes, yes. We had one inspector who
would do nothing except visit police departments. That
was his whole Job. All day long he would go from one
police department to another. "What s doing here?"
Sherry: He served two functions: to find out how they were
getting along "Are you getting along with the deputy
district attorney that is assigned to you, and the
Judge, and what are your problems?" Then he would also
pick up Intelligence, you know. "What s going on?"
MF: Yes. That was Lloyd Jester, was it?
Sherry: No. Before Lloyd Jester it was oh gee. Barfcrom?
Something like that. I don t remember the guy very
well. He s long since gone. But that s all he did.
Jester did it when Jester came In, because he had been
a chief of police and he was a natural for that
kind of thing.
MF: Yes. In Albany.
Sherry: But that had started out long before.
MF: And then Warren was also very involved in the D.A.
associations wasn t he?
Sherry: Oh yes. Yes. Not only that, but he encouraged people
in the office, even bottom deputies, to go to the D.A.
conventions. He would get money out of the board of
supervisors to pay your travel fare, or we would get a
county automobile so you could drive to the dam thing.
Then he would get some money to pay for your hotel
room, or whatever it might be. He was very, very
good about that.
Legislative Work
MF: And then would you become active on committees and
things?
Sherry: Well, the only committee of any consequence in that
association then and now, to this day, was the Law
and Legislative Committee. That s the one that heads
up the entire legislative program on law enforcement
for the legislature. The district attorney of Alameda
County, then as now, was the chairman. It was a Joint
committee of the Peace Officers Association and the
District Attorney s Association.
Before and during the legislative sessions there
65
Sherry: would be these conferences with representatives from
all over these were usually in Oakland at the
courthouse where all the legislation, the bills,
would be reviewed and that kind of thing. Pamphlets
would be published, setting out the contents and what
the position of the joint committee was, for or against.
Warren was the first one to send a representative
up to Sacramento to be there, a legislative counsel or
lobbyist, or representative or the D.A. s and the peace
officers. Re took care of the expenses of whoever went
by having them also designated as Alameda County s
representative, you know, on the civil side also, for
legislation affecting Alameda County, apart from
criminal legislation.
I guess Frank Coakley was the first one who went
off on that assignment, and I think Dick Chamberlain
followed him, after several years, and then Cecil
Mosbacher was there for three or four years, and then
I had a year up there on that assignment, 19^9, or
50 I guess it was no, 48-^9.
Now, of course, it s a very highly regularized
thing. They ve got an office and the man has an
apartment, you know, all that kind of thing. I lived
in a back room oi the Senator Hotel. There was no
stenographic help, no nothing. I typed out my own
drafts of legislative bills on a typewriter in my room.
It was a very, very useful experience. If you re
there every day, all the time, talking to the legislature,
legislators, and going to all the committee hearings and
that kind of business, so that you keep in touch with
what s going on, you can be very Influential. ^.A. s
and peace officers to this day constitute one of the
very, very important voices up there. Anything they
don t want, you have a battle getting it through. I
don t think they have the same amount of clout that they
usaed to have at least they keep saying they don t.
It s still pretty important.
MF: Can you remember some of the major legislative Issues
in the thirties?
Sherry: Oh, well, in my time I don t think there was anything
really very major. The only really big one that I can
think of was when Frank Coakley was up there and Judge
Wollenberg was assemblyman from San Francisco, and was
66
Sherry: a committee chairman of some sort or another. There
was a big battle over the conspiracy law, to make
conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor a felony. All of
organized labor was opposed to that sort of thing. That
was a big battle. Prank Coakley called every district
attorney over the telephone that night. They had a call
of the House, you know, everybody in the House had to
stay there until they acted on the darn thing.
Telegrams began coming in, in response to the telephone
calls, so the thing was finally passed.
There were a variety of little things. In 19^8,
when I went up there for the session, we had the sort
of thing that is so typical of legislators and
governors: we had a bill in for a mandatory jail
sentence for anyone convicted of driving while intoxi
cated. You ve got to throw him in jail! No other
possible way of treating him. Goodwin Knight tried the
same kind of thing several years later.
This was just completely unrealistic. The judges
would have to play games, just as they do now over the
narcotics laws, the same doggone thing. And the district
attorneys would have to play games, use the ordinance
"being drunk around an automobile," which did not have
all of the awful consequences of being connected with
driving while drunk. My gosh, you ve got a truck
driver with a wife and five kids, throw him in jail,
he loses his job, everybody goes on welfare. The very
fact of being arrested and having to pay an installment
fine is plenty for a guy like that, you know. It s a
crazy idea to put him in jail.
We went up there with a program not only to wipe
cut all of this mandatory stuff but to lessen penalties
and to give the judges morepower to admit to probation
than they then had under the law. So we weren t up
there all the time, you know, wanting more and more
penalties and being tougher and tougher. Basically
we were interested in procedure for keeping things
going so the system could operate.
But there were no big issues, except for some
abortive efforts to strengthen the gambling laws.
MF: I seem to remember reading about a series of amendments
in 193^, to the state constitution, one of which
MF: allowed a judge to comment on the evidence
Sherry. That s the "comment on the evidence" thing, you know.
That was back in 193^ and that was part of the reform of
those days, which continued and wound up ultimately in
19^-9, in the reorganization of the inferior courts. This
was a two-part bill. It was a constitutional amend
ment, so it wasn t in the legislature. It was a consti
tutional amendment, I think, proposed by the legislature.
That was the bill that set up the attorney general
as the chief law officer of the state and gave him the
power of supervision over sheriffs and district attorneys,
I don t know why no one thought of chiefs of police,
but they left them out. There was in addition this
"comment on the evidence" thing, because a lot of
people thought we ought to follow the English practice,
efi<l the federal practice of the United States courts,
"comment on the evidence," and that kind of business.
There was also the "comment on the defendant s failure
to explain or deny," which has now been ruled uncon
stitutional in Griffin versus California, a fairly recent
case, with Chief Justice Warren abstaining, because he
was one of the advocates of that in the legislature.
[Laughter]
MF: Whatever happened to the other one, about judges
commenting on evidence?
Sherry: It s still law.
MF: It is?
Sherry: Yes, but they don t do it. It s hard work. If you
want to comment on the evidence, you ve got to be
scrupulously fair. You ve got to be very, very careful
that you do an even-handed job. That means, you have
to go off and you have to write it out . It takes
time, and you haven t got time. You don t do it.
MF: Yes. I could see that, especially today.
Sherry: Originally, after that became law, a lot of Judges
began commenting on the evidence, but all they were doing
was making a seconding speech for the prosecution,
basically. Just shooting from the hip. They weren t
careful about the darn thing, and they got reversed
all over the place.
68
Sherry: One judge we had in Alameda County I m having
memory problems again Prank Ogden It was, one of
our very, very capable Judges. In a murder case we
had there, an extraordinary murder case, of a man who
married three trusting women in sequence, took out
insurance on them
MF: Oh. The Gosden case?
Sherry: The Gosden case. Yes. He commented in that case, but
he had written comment, and that of course is now in
the opinion on the affirmance of the conviction In that
case. Judge Ogden s comment was sustained, because
O^den did a perfectly fair, very scholarly Job
of it.
MF: That was one of the first uses of it, wasn t it,
that case?
Sherry: Oh, no. There were a number of others before, and there
have been a number after. There are a lot of scattering
opinions now, where a Judge makes some unfortunate
comment during the course of a trial or after, where
they save the error by saying, "Oh, a Judge is
empowered to comment, and this wasn t prejudicial in any
way." But it really hasn t changed practice. We re
not geared up to operate the way the English judges
do. It s a different life style that they have,
completely.
Graft and Gambling Cases
MF: Shall we get on to discussing some of the cases?
Sherry: All right.
MF: It isn t going to be exhaustive. [Referring to inter
view outline] I Just put down some of the highlights.
I didn t know if you could talk about them or not.
Sherry: Some of these the bail bond scandal, and the paving
scandal, for example, the graft cases involving the
sheriff s office, all occurred before I was In the
office. Frank Coakley I think you ve talked to him,
69
Sherry: or somebody s talked to him? he tried the
sheriff s case, and got convictions In those cases.
He was In also on the paving case? I don t know about
the ball bond well, you ve talked to him anyway.
You would know about that .
But these were the cases where Earl Warren suddenly
burst upon a complacent public as the real crusading
district attorney type. Everybody sat up and took
notice. They had never thought that things like this
could be taken care of as they were. Now, the gambling
cases
MP: Oh, If I could just ask a couple more questions about
tiie graft cases. Somebody was telling me that the Ku
Klux Klan was very much involved in that graft case, which
is wliy they had so much trouble? I don t know any more
than just that.
Sherry: Yes. There was one of the guys Involved in that, whose
name was Garbutt . He and a companion came out here and
were Ki Klux Klan organizers . Of course that was a great
racket too, you know. You came out in a time, in a day,
when there was a great deal of popular feeling against
Jevrs, Catholics, and colored people. Being a Catholic,
I know what an oppressed minority is like, having
grown up In this community.
But they came out with this doggone Ku Klux Klan
business, and it really didn t mean anything to these
characters except that everybody who was inducted into
the Klan had to buy his sheets and insignia and that sort
of thing, and it was five dollars a head or something
like that. So they d organize these thousands of
guys at five dollars a head and have a big thing on
the hillside with a burning cross and all that kind of
business. It was almost childish really, looking
back on it .
Some people took it seriously, and in Oakland the
Klan decided to have a parade, a public parade, you
know, in opposition to the St. Patrick s Day parade
or something like that. The Knights of Columbus, to
which my father belonged at that time, went down and
served notice on the chief of police they wouldn t
wear masks because there was an ordinance at that time,
and there still are ordinances, that prohibit the
wearing of masks in public places which I think
70
Sherry: make a lot of these motorcycle helmets with the
opaque you know make them quite illegal.
These were In the ordinances, and there It was,
so they conditioned the permit that no Klansmen would be
masked, you see, and they could march down Broadway, where
it was. The anti-Klansmen were out there bright and
early, all with their little Brownie cameras [[laughterl
to take pictures of all of these guys. The parade Just
kind of melted, you know, disappeared, because they
really they d paid their five bucks, and so that was
that.
But In any event, Garbutt and his companion, got
connected with the promoted the sheriff s business;
you know, took over the protection of the bootlegging
places and that kind of thing, and got themselves thoroghly
wound up in everything, the doggone paving scandal,
as I recall. But they were Just a couple of fast-
talking con artists who came in and lived by their
wits for two or three or four years. They would move
in on what-ever kind of a racket was going on.
When Warren came along and began knocking these
things out, of course the field was destroyed for them.
I think they were convicted too, as I recall. Both of
them were convicted of something at that time.
But that was before I was thinking of the district
attorney s office or even knew much about it. But I
do know about the gambling cases, if you want to go to
that.
MF: Okay, let s go on to them.
Sherry: Well, the gambling laws in California are a queer,
strange, patchwork. During the twenties and the 1930 *s
the twenties and the prohibition era, and there
after in the 1930 s Contra Costa County operated
pretty wide open. It was pretty well corrupted.
Everybody was on the gamblers payroll, and everybody
knew that. It was to Alameda County and San Francisco
as Nevada is to California.
Rancho San Pablo was a great big gambling Joint
out Just beyond El Cerrito, over the Contra Costa
71
Sherry: County line, and Black Jack Jerome, he was called had
a dog track out there. They were running a dog track,
which was a flat, open, violation of the law. It was
a huge, big thing, thousands of people, parking lot,
all this kind of business, completely illegal in
California, but well controlled and directed by
city officials of the city of Richmond, who walked a
fine line between being corrupt and keeping Richmond
cltsan . Nothing could go on in Richmond without
Carlson s knowledge. Richmond was, you know,
just right, but the rest of the county was wide open.
The sheriff s office was bought off, and the little
cities didn t amount to a darn.
They always kept trying to move in here, you
know. Get a slot machine place somewhere, or later on
when the pin ball machines came out, and that kind of
thing, they would keep moving in. And the little
lotteries too, the private lotteries and that kind of
thing. Earl Warren reacted very strongly. Whammo, there
would be a seizure. We the district attorney s
guys and the police wouldn t go into a place and
just arrest somebody and leave the slot machine there.
We d take the slot machine too, you see, as evidence.
This hurt. Every place else where they were running,
once in a while they d make a few token raids, you
know, and they d arrest a few operators. It would
cost $15 bail and the machine was still running while
they were gone. It didn t make any difference.
But there was so much money in that, that you d be
surprised how much money you can make on those slot
machines. They re just enormous. A good slot machine
at a decent location, in a comer cigar store or
something like that, was good for about five to
eight hundred dollars per weekend, just Saturday,
Sunday, you know, it d take for one of those things.
And they re all alterable. You can change the reels.
You can get liberal, conservative, or middle reels.
You order from the manufacturer the way you want it .
The Orinda Country Club started up about that
time. My first Inkling of what this kind of a world
was like was when my father was president of the club
out there, and some of the guys thought it would be
a great idea, since there were slot machines all over
Contra Costa County, they ought to have them in the
club. It owuld be fine you know. Have it in the locker
room, and that would help for some of the expenses.
72
Sherry: They got the sales material from Mills Novelty and
some of these other outfits In Chicago, ordered from
them, and were Interested In buying, what were the
prices? and that kind of stuff.
Within a week of having sent In that order, they
were visited by a deputy sheriff, who said, "We hear
that you re interested in ordering a slot machine. You
don t buy them from Mills. We take care of that
for you, you see." [Laughter] Oh, it was really
something.
They went along with the darned thing, and they
got the machines, and they got machines that were set
to, I think, pay something lifte $60 back out of every
$100 put in. Forty percent take on the dam thing.
But that was too liberal for the county, and they were
visited again and told they would have to change the reel
because they weren t getting enough money out of the
machines. The club was getting too much of the take.
They wanted a different arrangement. At that time,
they said, "Take the machines away. We don t want
them." They began to see what they were getting into.
Now there was a decision by the Court of Appeal
during these days it was argued by a lawyer who was
also a member of the legislature, who represented Mills
Novelty and various other companies In which they got
an opinion out of the court, very, very strict wording
of the penal code section of that time, which said that
It is unlawful to possess or operate, use, transport,
that sort of thing, any slot machine, defined, which
is used for obtaining money by chance.
This was interpreted as saying that you couldn t
confiscate one of those machines unless you had a witness
saying, "It is used." You see? So you d have to play
the machine, and get a pay-off, and of course if you re
a deputy sheriff or a policeman or something like
that, and play the machine, they don t give you any
payoff. The machine doesn t work. You can play it and
if the machine works, go and arrest the bartender, or
the cigar clerk, or whoever the deuce it was, but the
machines were not by law explicitly made contraband
so that you could pick them up. You had to prove that
the machine was used. This was very difficult.
73
Sherry: This lasted all the way down until about 1950 ,
when the legislature finally equated slot machines,
even parts of slot machines, with heroin and then
there wasn t any problem. It took until that time to
get that legislation through. That of course was part
of the Howser scandal and all the rest of it, when
people became aware of the fact that these organized
criminal types were not to be tolerated.
MF: I d Imagine that that would have been a problem,
because if you had to have use proved, you really couldn t
get to the guys who were supplying
Sherry: No. No. There wasn t anyting . No.
MF: All you got were the little guys, running their little
stores.
Sherry: Yes. Well, that s what the Mills thing was.
Now, Mills were the big distributors in this area.
They had very few machines in Alameda County.
Our big problem was Qneryville, which was our one
wide-open kind of an area, but the sheriff actually
policed Emeryville. They had Chinese lotteries down
there. That was a very terrible thing they had there in
these days. The terrible thing about it was, the doggone
city council was getting more money from these lottery
operators than they were getting by way of their $5 Per
council meeting, so it was a lucrative Job being
councilman. It was all pretty bad. The sheriff would
go over and raid the lotteries at regular intervals,
and knock them down, just to keep the thing under
control.
Mills kept pushing the things, and we knew they had
that big warehouse down in Oakland, which was kind of a
distribution point for slot machines that they were
distributing in the area. Slot machines were not
too common in San Francisco. Places like the Press
Club for example, or the Olympic Club or something like
that would have slot machines. There were not too many
of them on the streets. They kept them down pretty
well.
San Mateo county was pretty wide open. There
was a dog track running down there too. There were Chinese
Sherry: lotteries and all kinds of organized criminal activities
going on, chiefly in that area. Mills had this warehouse
in Oakland that the office got wind of, and the strategy
figured out. On this Earl Warren, of course, was one
cf the strategy makers, you know, "How do we cope
with this darn thing? The law is not good on the doggone
issue." So they developed this theory that these
machines were c on fi scat able because their only legitimate
use was gambling.
They went down I don t know whether they had a
search warrant; it must have been a search warrant kind
of an operation and said, "We re going to move out
a whole doggone warehouse of the machines." They then
sought to get a civil action confiscating the machines
for their destruction.
That resulted in a civil action in the Superior
Court. Mills Novelty was represented by Monroe Friedman.
He s a retired judge now. He represented Mills Novelty
Company. He was a very gentlemanly kind of lawyer.
We were in a civil action. But the office made it
stick.
Now, I was not actually involved in that, as I
was not on the civil side of the office. Jim Oakley,
the late Judge Oakley whom you ve talked to I
think was in charge of that litigation. So that s that
case . It was simply the use of the civil process to
sei2"e these machines and confiscate them.
But after that, in 3^, 35. and 36, 37, around
in there, we had a big outbreak of lotteries. There
had always been lotteries among the trade unions and
the craft unions, and I suspect they still have them
now. This is the way they took care of some of their
retired members, not having retirement systems.
They d give retired members the lottery thing, going
around from print shop to print shop picking up the
bets, you see, and then delivering on the winning
numbers and that sort of business. Nobody was very
disturbed about that because it was confined to these
small groups and wasn t a generally public kind of a
thing.
But a lot of guys, all of a sudden, got into the
business of running all kinds of lotteries. I remember
the Roosevelt lottery; the lottery tickets were floating
75
Sherry: around all over town. Pay a dollar, and maybe you d
win something, or you wouldn t. You d never know.
They d collect the money and then come around and pay
out some prizes.
At least the bookbinder s lottery which was the
one that the pressmen had, it was called the bookbinders -
had a public drawing. They shook dice to pick out each
number. Shake a dice box and read out the number, and
then shake another until you get five numbers, you see.
But it was all done publicly.
Nobody knew who these other outfits were or
where they were. There were just salesmen around
selling tickets. There were a number of them, die
in San Francisco, a very, very large one over there,
would have a capital prize of something like ^4-0,000
each month they said they had. I don t know of
anybody who ever won it.
We began a compaign against those. You asked
earlier about search warrants. This is where we had
to use search warrants. We d find out where they were
operating, and we would try to hit them as close to
the drawings as we possibly could, when they had all
of their equipment on hand. Bob Hunter and I he
was head of the civil department then; I representing
the criminal department had a two-man operation, with
Inspectors and police nets and everything. We had eight
or nine or ten of these raids knocking off these
lotteries.
That s where I learned about search warrants, because
that s what we used In those days. You had to, you know.
If you know that someone is in a house or in a place
and you have probable cause to make the arrest, you
can break in and make the arrest and then make a
search, incident to this lawful arrest. But if you re
going to break into some place or raid some place and
you don t know whether anybody s going to be in there
or not, then you Just can t operate that way. So
that s where you do need the search warrant.
I suppose we used search warrants more than any
other office that I know of, and it was Just because
of that particular situation. Once it was under
control, then the need for it disappeared.
76
MF: Was Warren able to deal with the dog track races?
Sherry: Yes. The moment he became attorney general. You see,
it was Contra Costa county. The moment he became
attorney general, the very first day that Warren Olney
was on the job, he visited Black Jack Jerome and said,
"The Rancho is to be closed down at once and the
dog track also."
Warren Olney can tell you about that story. He
can tell it better than I because he was there.
MF That s a good question to ask him.
Sherry: Yes. He knows that one. Warren Olney started prac
ticing in the district attorney s office in Contra
Costa County in Martinez before he came to Earl Warren s
office, so he knew Black Jack Jerome. He knew about
that whole darned situation, and he personally closed
that- darned thing down. I don t recall the details of
the closedown in San Francisco, where the dog track
was, where the Bay Meadows horse race track is.
Labor Cases
MF:
Sherry:
Your mentioning union lotteries reminded me that I
wanted to ask about the General Strike of 193^. You
said you were in the courthouse then in Oakland, during
the time of the 3^ strike?
Yes. We had no trouble at that time that I can
recall at all, on this side of the Bay. All the uproar
was over in San Francisco.
I was well aware of the situation , particularly
insofar as it involved what later became the Seamen s
Union, because it was only a year or two since I had
been going to sea, and I knew a lot of these guys.
Because of the strike, all of the ships that came
in immediately tied up and that was it. For the first
time, all of the sailors are ashore, all together, on
the beach. They didn t have anything else to do
except sit around and form a union. They d had the old
Seamen s Union before, but it was a very Ineffective
kind of a thing. It was kind of a one man operation,
77
Sherry: because the merchant mariners are scattered all over
the face of the earth, and no way of organizing at all.
This made a perfect situation, where the sailors
could get organized. Their organization started from
that. The ILWU of course was the big thing, and the
prince mover was Harry Bridges. There were efforts to
break the strike, largely by recruiting university
young men, putting them on tugboats on this side of
the bay and taking them over to the piers that used to
stick out in the bay and then offloading on the piers
from the water, keeping the front completely sealed off
so that they could unload the vessels. Then every
once in a while they had a lot of policemen down
there they d open the doors and the trucks would
come in with the strike-breaking truck drivers, you
see, and that produced all the battles and the violence
tnat occurred.
On this side of the Bay, although the strike was
quite effective for three days everything was pretty
well shut down there were a number of designated
service stations for example, that stayed open. And
because we were public employees we could buy gasoline
at those places or at the county garage. The county
garage had a gas pump for our private cars so that we
could keep mobile .
We were Just kind of waiting for something to happen
but nothing really did happen, one way or another. I
think we could only buy ten gallons of gas at a time,
something like that. I remember one afternoon on the
third day of the strike, in Warren Olney s office, he
wanted to go off some place for the weekend, and the
gas that he had wasn t enough to get out of town. We
figured that we could drive down later in the afternoon
to San Jose, which wasn t closed down, and buy gasoline
in cans and bring it back. We had the plan all cooked
up and everything was all ready. But it was that
afternoon the strike was broken, so we didn t have to.
It was only about a three day shutdown.
There were a lot of crazy things done in those
days. In my town of Piedmont, for example, in which I
did not then live, they had men and boys at all of the
entrances to the town and barricades across the street.
They d stop every automobile. They thought the ILWU was
going to come in with goon squads and take over Piedmont.
78
Sherry :
MF:
Sherry:
Gosh. Extraordinary, hysterical time,
quite quickly.
It all subsided
MF:
Sherry :
Were there efforts made by officials over here to
prevent goon squads or anything like that happening?
Well, at that time, nothing really happened, you know.
It was just a so-called general strike. They weren t
any labor beefs, as they called them, over here at all,
and there actually wasn t much maritime activity
there Tiasn t much to the Port of Oakland. I think the
Port of Oakland, as an entity, didn t exist. There
was the Moore Shipyards and the Encinal terminals and
a few places like that , but Oakland was not Important
as a seaport. So there was very, very little of that
kind of thing.
The shutdown that did occur here was kind of a
sympathy sort of thing. All the unions, the craft
unions, everything else, stopped. They just shut
down. The streetcars stopped running, service
stations were closed, no more grocery store deliveries
they all used to deliver in those days a lot of them
were closed. A lot of the "Mom and Pop" outfits of
course kept open. We didn t have supermarkets or,
you luiow, Safeway. They were just beginning to come in
at that time.
Everything was Just quiet. Nothing much moved,
nothing much happened. The kids went to school if they
could get there, and that sort of thing. But outside
of San Francisco I can t recall any trouble. San
Francisco had some bad battles, you know, some people
killed, some shooting, and that sort of thing. But
that s about all that one can say about the general
strike.
And you said you weren t in Oakland at the time of the
K in g . Ramsay , Conn er case?
I was in the Berkeley office at that time, so I knew
about the case. I heard it talked about all of the
time when I was down at the office and that sort Of
thing. But I had no part in the trial.
The interesting thing about that case this was
the first time, I think, in this area, when that case
occurred, which made a kind of cause, celebre . It
involved what one might call the left wing of that
day, and the left wing of that day were the labor
79
Sherry: unions. They ve changed considerably.
This was the first time the courthouse was ever
picketed, for example. Pickets around the courthouse,
"Unfair Trial," "Railroading the Union Leaders."
The same stuff you hear about Angela Davis. Just
change the name and it s the same routine.
There were all kinds of personal attacks made on Earl
Warren because of the prosection, "frame-up" and all
that kind of thing. One of the attacks was, "As
usual, the district attorney is going to stay as far
away from the court room as ever, you know, in trying
this case."
Well, normally the district attorney is an
administrative officer. He doesn t engage in trials
himself personally. So Warren said, "Well, I guess I ve
got to go down there." So he did. He participated in
that case. He and Wehr, and I guess Warren Olney tried
the case; it was homicide.
MPi
Sherry:
MPi
Sherry:
HP:
Sherry:
MF:
Olney was out of the office by then.
He was?
I think he d just gone into private practice.
He may have. But there was another lawyer. Leonard
Meltzer.
Yes. Meltzer helped try it, and I think Ralph Hoyt
Yes. Ralph worked on it too, about four or five of them.
That s right. Ralph did work on that case. In any
event Warren was there and made the closing argument
and all that sort of thing, simply because they said
he didn t dare.
It was like any other case. It was a big kind of
a sensation and was in the newspapers every day as
lorg as it lasted. There were all kinds of outside
tensions arising out of the fact that the case was
being tried, and threats of political reprisal and all
that sort of business, which all of us in the office
got at one point or another.
Yes. I remember seeing pamphlets that accused Warren
of using this case to advance himself to be attorney
general.
80
Sherry;
MP:
Sherry:
Oh yes. I don t think he even had the idea In the back
of his head then that he was ever going to run for
attorney general. And I think when he became attorney
general, Warren saw himself as another U.S. Webb
[former attorney general], being there for the rest of
his career. As a matter of fact, his later candidacy
for governor was sparked by Governor Olson himself when
Earl Warren was attorney general.
The Point Lobos case, the Alberts murder, was
Important, because when Culbert Olson was elected gover
nor, one of his promises was that he was going to commute
the sentences of these guys, or grant them pardons or
whatever the thing was.
He made a lot of big fat statements about how
they d been railroaded and all, as a part of the
political campaign. Warren was then running for
attorney general; he was not opposing Olson as such.
Warren always ran his own campaigns. So he didn t say
anything about it , but he was vastly Irritated and
angry about it, as he always was whenever he was
accused of acting in bad faith one way or another.
That reminds me of a cute story about him that
maybe nobody ever remembers. During one of the problems
down there, when there were protests about actions by
the office I think it was the pea-pickers strike
thing. You ve run onto that?
Oh yes. I wanted to ask you about that.
The pea-pickers strike operation there were a number
of people who came down and protested to the board of
supervisors about the way the sheriff s office and
the district attorney s office was handling the
thing .
One of the protesters was a clergyman from one of
the churches I think it s the one up about 22nd
and Broadway, a different congregation at that time.
I don t remember. At any event, the clergyman came
down and made a lot of wild accusations about Earl
Warren to the board of supervisors in advancement of
his cause. It so happened that Warren s children went
to the Sunday school in that church, and one of the
distinguished elders of the church called him up and
said he d read about this in the newspaper and said
he was very disturbed about it and hoped that Earl
81
Sherry i wouldn t take his children out of the Sunday school
because of this Instance. Earl replied, "Oh no, I
wouldn t do that. If I took them out of the Sunday
school, I d have to tell them why. And if I told
them why, I would have to
tell them that their preacher was a liar. And I don t
think that would be good for their religious education."
[Laughter] The man has a wit that shows through at times.
MF: Could we pursue the pea-pickers* strike for a moment,
because that is something that we have been wondering
about in the office. Someone else is Interviewing
Dr. Paul Taylor
Sherry: All right, now. This is in the days when labor is Just
trying to get organized, when there is no National
Labor Relations Board Act, when we re pretty much
the way that England is now. Craft unions were pretty
solidly organized, particularly in San Francisco, but
beyond that there wasn t much of anything. There was
no Longshore Union terrible abuses there and
of course no agricultural unions at all.
But we did have during those days, a real genuine,
honest-to-God Communist party, out as such, and hammer
and sickle, preaching revolution, and all that sort of
thing. We had them on campus. What was his name,
that professor who got into trouble here? He got in
trouble because he was a Communist. He was a member of
the faculty, a real card-carrying Communist.
Well, the Communists were doing the things that
people say are being done now, but you have to look
around. You can t find them any more. Southern
Alameda county now, which is wall-to-wall suburb
thing, had enormous truck gardens, starting from about
Irvlngton on south, of all kinds of vegetable produce.
Each year they had a pea crop. It was one of the big
crops. When the pea crop came in, a lot of migrant
workers would come in, you know, from all around, Just
as they do now, and would work at picking the peas. It
was in the years of the depression, times were rough,
and agricultural labor was not properly paid, it was
poorly organized it wasn t organized at all and
very badly treated.
The communist groups, and others as well, had made
82
Sherry t some kind of an effort to organize to Improve the condi
tions, kind of pre- [Caesar] Chavez sort of a thing,
but a very diffuse sort of a business. They had none
of the sophistication of these people now.
In those days, picketing was illegal. It had not
yet been equated with free speech you know, so picketing
was per se illegal. It was illegal to block highways
of course, and Illegal to enter agricultural land.
For the purpose of organizing these groups, of course,
the organizers would go down to the fields, just as
the Chavez people do, and they d march into the fields
or they d block the highway and they had meetings and
that kind of business, or they would picket.
The owners and the farmers would scream and the
sheriff would go down and break them up or make arrests.
Well, I never talked to Warren or heard him say anything
about that, but he evolved his own strategy of taking
care of it by breaking up the gatherings when they
occurred, that sort of thing, but then not arresting
or charging anybody. He Just kept the situation fairly
fluid, so there were no prosecutions that arose out of
it at all.
But there were an awful lot of meetings that
were broken up, and these people that would move into
the fields to organize would be picked up by the sheriffs
and taken over the county line and let out or something
to that effect, something that nobody would even think
of doing now. But at that time you wouldn t think of
doing anything else. It was supposed to be a very
humane way of coping with the problem.
That s about all. Bob Hunter set up his office
I think he was stationed at Hayward. He advised and
directed the deputy sheriffs who were handling that
thing, and rode it out. That was the pea-pickers
thing. I think that probably there were two years of
that, two successive crops I m not sure.
MP: Yes. I remember there was some violence and arrests in
other counties.
Sherry: Oh yes. Sure. My heavens, that happened. When the
Okies came up through the Valley, that was another time
when there was a great deal of social clash and
arrests and violence and the rest of it,
We didn t have much. This was one of Warren s
Sherry: ideas avoid confrontations, avoid these kinds of
showdowns if at all possible. But if you re
confronted with something, you have to act, why go to
it.
MF: Is that why in that Berkeley case you were telling
me about last time that he asked you to tell the chief
of police to stop arresting pickets at Woolworth s?
Sherry: Yes. Yes. It s a frustrating kind of a thing. We
have a repetition of that problem around here now,
around Berkeley. How do you control the mob In that
kind of thing? Well, there are techniques that one
can use, but some of the techniques, and some of the
techniques that were used here, just aggravate the
situation. You know, if policemen just disappeared in
a number of circumstances around here, the crowd would
also. There were other times when the police were
very, very necessary indeed.
I guess it was that so-called Third World business
about four years ago or so I can t keep the dates
firmly in mind -- when they were running around trying
to break up classes a number of windows broken from
the outside and that kind of thing. They finally put
the highway patrolmen inside the building, inside the
door. Then nobody came in. Everything was fine.
Just that change in technique, from patrolling Sproul
Hall Plaza. They couldn t do any harm down there.
There wasn t any point in trying to break up things
down there. Meet, sing, yell, shout. But then, when
they went off in the middle of the campus and started
breaking things up, that was bad.
Warren was very conscious of that sort of thing.
These are not things that you can just resist with
force, with the heavy hand of the law.
MF: Did you know much about the San Jose lynching?
Sherry: Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers.
That wasn t in this county.
MF: Well, part of that case was in this county, wasn t it?
Didn t the murder occur in this county, the murder of
Brooke Hart himself?
Sherry: No. Well, the body was thrown off the Hayward-San
Sherry: Mateo bridge, or the Dumbarton I don t know which
one now, I don t remember maybe the Hayward-San
Mateo Bridge wasn t built then. It was one of those
bridges the body was thrown off of. The trial was in
or it was scheduled to be, before the lynching occurred -
it was scheduled to be in Santa Clara. The men were
siezed and taken out of the Santa Clara County Jail,
and hanged in St. James Park right across from the jail,
lynched right there. No, that was a Santa Clara County
case.
Fry: I noticed in that the governor came out quite strongly
in favor of the lynchings.
Sherry: Holph. Yes. He used to wear Western boots all the
time, too, the Western tradition.
HP: Yes, he said that he was considering releasing kidnappers
from San Quentin so that goodhearted citizens who knew
how to deal with such nefarious criminals could mete
out the same kind of justice to them too.
Sherry: But that we had nothing whatever to do with that
Brooke Hart thing. That was the next-door county.
C ommunist Activity an d Criminal Syndicalism
Sherry: [Referring to interview outline.] Mow, communist
activity and criminal syndicalism. Well, the Anita
Whitney case, which was a terrible thing, was tried
before Earl Warren became district attorney. We had
nothing to do with that.
As I said, in those days, in 193 to about 193^.
there was a lot of communist activity around here.
Communist candidates for mayor I can remember there
was a man named Darcy for example, I met here on
campus, my first real communist, you know. We were
going over to see a Russian motion picture in a
theater in San Francisco, and so about four or five
of us, law school guys, and Darcy, whom we met, went
across on the ferry boat, and he was talking all the
tima about the new socialist world and that kind of
business.
85
Sherry: We saw this frightful motion picture, which showed
a war between very, very thinly disguised German
Nazi types and the noble Russians, and tanks charging
about, and big battles done by just a relatively
faw numbers of actors. At the end they played the
Internationale, the first time I saw people, you know,
give the clenched fist salute.
They really believed it, and they really worked
on it In those days, except that they weren t violent.
They were pretty mild. They were very definitely
committed to working against but within the system, so
tc speak. When Olson was elected governor, the next day
in the county welfare department , every county welfare
worker had a copy of the People s World on his desk,
together with a request for subscriptions. Oh there
were lots of good fights about
Fry: Who put it there?
Sherry: The communists, because Olson now was going to change
things, and this sort of thing. They had a lot of
communists infiltrated into that outfit, and they had
that thing going on. A lot of the employees came down
to the board of supervisors and complained that they
didn t want to subscribe to the People s World, you
know, that sort of thing. This disclosed it and that
was all over.
Fry: That ended that, I guess.
Sherry: I don t think Earl Warren ever had a prosecution under
the criminal syndicalism law that I can think of. Anita
Whitney was the last one.
MF: I guess that was much more strongly enforced in the
teens.
Sherry: Oh yes. Well that oh, that came out of the IWW
movement. This was a statutory endeavor to take care
of the IWW thing, which, was 15, 16, up to about the
end of the war, with a little bit into the twenties. But
we never had that that I know of, except the Whitney
case.
f Refers to interview outline.] Nazi activity
prewar, was very minimal. Very small. One night I
remember a couple of us together with a member of the
bar in Oakland who was interested in what they were
86
Sherry: doing, went to a meeting in a hall right near where the
courthouse is now. One of these Bund meetings I guess
they called it. There were about maybe seventy-five or
eighty people in the hall. These young guys went around
wearing their Nazi uniforms and all that sort of thing,
and "Heil Hitler!" all over the place. Absolute stupid
boring kind of a speech, and people disappeared. That
was that movement. It was of no consequence.
Japanese Exclusion
Sherry:
MPi
Sherry:
And Japanese espionage,
heard of.
There never was, that I ever
Were you in the office when
The exclusion? Yes. That was a big shock and a surprise
to most of us that that occurred. It happened in ^2,
rhe first part of 19^2, and I left the office in mid-
19^ 2 to become a soldier.
They had a corner office, the southwest corner
in the district attorney s office, and I could look
down where the building is still there I think?
it s a state building of some kind right across the
street on the corner. It was then used by the state,
and this was the assembly center for the Japanese.
You d go down there in the morning and see the Army
trucks lined up and these long lines of Japanese patiently
waiting to get on the trucks and be trundled away.
But most of my feeling, and the feeling of anyone,
everyone, that I had any contract at all with was a
fseling of outrage. My heavens, these were our friends
and neighbors and, you know it was just awful.
Oh, there were some frightful things. There was a
Japanese family down in the Hayward area, or the Decoto
area, in that part of the county, a three-generation
Japanese family, all, I think, graduates of this
university --
Pry: Who had a nursery?
Sherry: Yes. And a big one. I don t recall the name. But
87
Sherry: when they took the two men, the representatives of that
family, in exile, there was, oh, a strong resentment
down in that area.
I certainly did not ever at any time experience
or even hear what I now am told was this anti- Japanese
hysoeria kind of tiling around here. It just didn t
occur at all. Everyone thought General DeWitt, by
God, is not going to let what happened in Honolulu
happen here, no matter what. Of course nothing
happened in Honolulu either, but we didn t know it then.
There was no way of knowing anything. Honolulu
had far more Japanese, proportionately, than we did, in
their population down there. That was a perfectly
loyal population. There was no trouble at all. This
should never have happened.
MF: But there were so few people who could speak out against
it at that time.
Sherry: Well, you didn t know. You see, you never knew.
Maybe there wa_s -- . What did happen at Pearl Harbor?
We didn t know what happened at Pearl Harbor for
months.
MFi Yes, and there were so many stories of sabotage which
never happened.
Sherry: Yes. When you don t know, why the stories flourish and
people get excited and these things are done. You know,
from the way you look at it well, I heard Earl
responding here recently to "How could you ever have
done that?" He said, "Well, that s just the way it
looked to us at that time."
He pointed for example to the shelling of the oil
station down at Goleta, when the Japanese submarine
surfaced and began lobbing shells. Well, we were such
innocent people at that time, everybody came for miles
around to watch it. You see? Automobiles lined up
and people standing watching this going on. Somebody
calls the sheriff s office, and the sheriff s car came
cut there. What could he do? The sub finally ran out
of ammunition and went under the water and disappeared.
It did practically no harm at all. Small shells, and
a drilling rig is a poor target. All kinds of alarm
all over the rest of the country, but nobody who was
there was alarmed at all. They thought, "This is
exciting!"
88
Sherry: Then there were two tankers, two or three tankers
which were crippled, too, beached themselves right out
the Golden Gate, within the first three or four days of
the war. That really was a serious thing. This was
real damage, you know, when you see a ship sinking
and piled up on the beach, then by gosh this is war.
Fry: You mean U.S. tankers?
Sherry: Yes. Sure. The remains of one of them, I think, is
still visible out there. It was a Union Oil tanker
I think. I don t know what the other one was. There
were three or four, maybe five ships that were attacked.
Not all were sunk.
In any event, Warren got in touch with the
whoever was in charge of defenses of the West Coast and
hs was appalled to hear that the military services
had one airplane serviceable in the whole area, and
no fleet. There was nothing. The fleet was in Pearl
Harbor. There wasn t much left of it, except, thank
heavens, for that air carrier task force which happened
to be at sea at that time, which of course was the most
important part of the whole business.
We were just militarily completely defenseless.
There was no question about that at all. But at the
same time the Japanese were simply without any kind
of resources at all to do anything except this
pipsqueak sort of submarine, minor submarine attacks.
But after what had happened at Pearl Harbor that
seemed Incredible. I Just couldn t believe that, when
I heard that was going on .
There was a tremendous amount of alarm, and
people just weren t thinking rationally, that s all.
Fry: I guess there was an enormous amount of pressure from
the Army too.
Sherry: Well, DeWitt was given the command, and Husband E.
Kimmel of course had been grossly derelict in Honolulu,
and DeWitt reacted to that.
If you read about the first two pages of the
Stilwell papers, Stllwell was at Carmel at that time and
gat his orders to, I think, go over to China. He
has a paragraph in there which talks about "that fool
DeWitt" seeing ghosts everywhere. Stilwell was a
much more realistic man.
89
Sherry: DeWitt really ran the doggone state, you know.
Ke established his own liquor- selling hours and all of
this kind of thing. And a man in uniform couldn t be
served a drink or buy any liquor until 6:00 in the
evening, I think that was the deadline, or something.
I remember I came back after V.E. day in Europe,
came home. I was destined to go back to the Atlantic
division, the Air Transport Command. But I was home,
and it was great to be home, you know, and in the drug
store at the corner, and renewed acquaintance and said,
"I want a couple of bottles of ." The druggist just
looked at me and said, "You send your wife down. I
can t sell it to you." I thought that was ohl
outrageous, you know. Gosh. So I said something like,
"I thought I was old enough," and he said, "You know
General DeWitt." At that time I did.
But that s kind of getting away from Earl Warren.
90
III EVALUATION OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY S OFFICE
Earl Warren as District Attorney
MF: Getting back to Earl Warren, then, I d like to ask you
for a quick evaluation of his years as district attorney.
Sherry; Well, I think we can do that rather briefly. Earl
Warren was a great district attorney, a great governor,
a great chief justice. He was just an unusual kind
of man in whatever role that he played. He was also,
I thought, a very fine attorney general, although he
had only four years in office there.
That reminds me of the problem about Olson.
When Warren became attorney general, he was a Republican
of course and Olson was the first Democrat in a
million years. Warren s idea was, well, we ve had a
campaign and we ve had these problems and troubles and
Olson s made all these crazy statements about King,
Conner, Ramsay you know and all that kind of thing, but
he said, "I m attorney general and I ll serve him, the
governor; I am his lawyer and I will be it . "
He traveled to Sacramento and talked to Olson
and said, "Apart from any kind of political differences,
you re entitled to all of my services, all that I can
do," and all that kind of thing. Well, fine. He s
prepared to go ahead on that basis.
Within a very short time Warren had appointments
to make of course, his exempt, non-civil service guys to
appoint in the office. Governor Olson telephoned him,
as I recall, and told him that he would like to know
who the attorney general was intending to appoint.
Warron said, "What n It to you?" He aald, well he
thought that he ought to havo nonmthing to nay about tho
pnoplo that wonlil no nppolntwd bo tho orfloo.
91
Sherry: Warren replied, "Not while I m attorney general."
That was that one. That cut that.
Then he had further difficulties with Olson.
There was another thing. I don t recall what it was.
Finally Warren said, "Nobody s going to do anything
about this man unless I run against him. I d better
do it." So his intention, his idea of running for
governor was something that did not arise until he had
been in the attorney general s office and had come
into some kind of conflict with Olson.
Olson, incidentally, attended a meeting of organized
labor in Fresno I think it was, I think during the
summer of his first term, first year in office and
said that he had read the entire transcript of the
King, Conner, Ramsay case and he said that they had had
a fair trial in his judgment and were fairly convicted,
and that he was having serious problems about whether
or not he would commute their sentences, which speaks
a great deal for Olson s honesty. Then he did. He
had to keep his word. He promised that he would and
he did, and this of course angered Earl also when that
occurred. If they were fairly tried and justly
convicted, how can Olson justify turning them loose?
Earl Warren s greatest talent was In his independence
which he preserved in selecting personnel, his ability
to get good personnel, his extraordinary ability to com
mand loyalty from people. When he was governor up
there, he brought Karl Holton who was probation
officer in Los Angeles County, and put him in charge
of the new Youth Authority, and said, "Karl, stay
here a couple of years and get this set up." Karl
was there for seventeen years. He never could get
back. Jim Oakley stayed in that office far longer
than is reasonable, f laughter] taking his circumstances
into account.
Another thing he was able to command that loyalty,
but another problem with Earl was that if a man was
doing a good job, if there were no complaints from
this section of the operation, he just didn t pay any
attention to it. "Why? It s going well." We always
had in the office the problem of movement. You know,
people like to advance, not so much in the matter of
pay, that wasn t so much, but to move from junior
92
Sherry: trial staff to senior trial staff, to get out of the
prosecuting attorney s office down to the main office
and that kind of thing. A lot of people became quite
resentful and unhappy in their jobs not a lot, some
because they were doing such fine Jobs where they
were, "Why move them?" Earl was just not sensitive
to that.
Mow at the same time, he took very good care of
his employees. There were all kinds of problems in
those days, the kinds of problems that government is
now faced with, with shortage of funds, in depression
time. The taxpayers association was having a big
hassle with the board of supervisors asking the supervisors
for a ten percent pay cut on all county employees. Did
you hear this story?
MF : NO .
Sherry: Earl Warren went down there to attend the meeting.
He was advising the board of supervisors, and the taxpayers
lobbyist was making the "times were tough" argument
and all that kind of thing. Earl said, "Well that s
fine. You know, it s tough for all of us, isn t it
now?" "Oh yes it is. These are hard times." And
all that sort of thing. Earl said, "Well, I ll tell
you what. I ll agree to this proposition immediately
just as soon as you reduce payments on my house loan by
ten percent; as soon as you take ten percent off my
account at Capwell s " "Well 1 , 1 he said, "Don t pick
on us, pick on everybody." The kind of inverse dis
crimination that some of us around here now are
suffering, he would not stand still for that one
moment.
Then they wanted to cut back on travel expense.
"Why do these guys have to stay at the first-rate
hotels," and all that sort of thing. Earl just said,
"When one of my deputies goes out representing Alameda
County, he goes first-class, just as good as the
lawyer he s trying the case against." He was very
good that way. But on day- by-day personnel matters,
not too sensitive.
He was not only good as a district attorney, but
I think his particular genius was in evoking loyalty
and his ability to infuse other people with his own
kinds of ideal, his own kinds of modes of operation.
I can t think of anybody who has ever been exposed to
Earl Warren who hasn t to some degree been changed
93
Sherry: or influenced by him. It was inevitable.
Politically he was very, very strongly in the
tradition of the Hiram Johnson progressive Republicans,
very influential, certainly in my political thinking,
because of that, basically.
Ralph Hoyt was really his personnel man.
Ralph was the chief assistant, and Ralph was much
more sensitive to personnel problems when people
v*ere having difficulties, everything from family problems
to being in debt or what not. Ralph was on hand, and
you d go talk to him about the problems. One of the
first things Ralph did when he became district attorney
was to pull out the salary ordinance, and go over the
whole business and upgrade -- tvithin a year or two s
time he had upgraded the whole salary scale level of
the office. Very very good indeed.
The Office Under Ralph Ho.yt
Sherry: Ralph was a milder mannered guy than Earl. Not
quite as imaginative, but very, very hardworking, a
mail of the highest integrity. But he didn t have the
outgoing personality that goes with that job. The
first time he had to run for district attorney he was
Just acutely embarrassed the whole time. He just hated
to go to picnics or to go to Elks clubs or Rotary or
things like that. He was a very shy man, definitely.
He had an awful time. But he changed, he improved,
he learned how. He didn t drink even, but he developed
a fine taste for Scotch, drank it the rest of his life.
He was a gentle man. In operation of the office,
he was a little too rigid. I think he felt a little
uncertain. Earl Warren s a hard act to follow.
Ralph tended riot to delegate enough authority.
He wanted to see everything that was going on.
Well, it got to the point where there were times
when we just had to keep Ralph from knowing what was
going on.
By that time I was in charge of the criminal
division, Bob Hunter had the civil division in the
office. Polger Emerson was calendar man. He ran
Sherry i
the court calendar of cases.
with Ralph.
We had problems
Fry:
For example, he d get all upset when he d read
something in the newspaper about an episode where somebody
was charged with battery but somebody had been cut
with a knife. Ralph said, "When anyone is cut with a
knife, that s assault with a deadly weapon and you
will charge assault with a deadly weapon!" You know,
get them down to the Superior Court. Well, so all right.
The calendar builds up with this backlog of west and
east Oakland barroom brawl cases where somebody got cut
with a knife, even if nothing serious particularly
happened at all. One of the judges finally summoned
me down to the office and said, "You will stop making
my court a police court!"
I got together with Folger.and we let the people
know out in the outlying offices to go back to the old
policy. We didn t tell Ralph a darned thing
about it. ["Laughter] He didn t know, until it had been
going on for four or five months, and we asked him, "Do
you notice anything different lately?" [Laughter]
Now why couldn t something like that have happened
under Earl Warren? Could a decision have been made
underneath Earl Warren and he wouldn t have known? Why?
Sherry: No. No. Well, Ralph s decision was wrong here, you see,
Warren didn t make any wrong ones. That s one of the
great reasons -- mainly he didn t. His mode of
operation, administratively everything was all
right. He wouldn t be arbitrary the way Ralph was, in
any case, you know. Warren didn t operate that way.
Fry: Warren never looked at it just in the legalistic
fashion? He was able to incorporate the needs of the
court calendar, and everything else?
Sherry: He was sensible. He said, "We ve got our business, and
the judges have their business. They don t tell us and
we don t tell them."
For example, during his time, we never did a darned
thing about sentencing. We never recommended for or
against probation. It was a flat rule of his. Once
the cane is done, the plea of guilty is in, or the
conviction, the verdict of guilty is in, you just go and
start in on the file of the next case. You re all
through with thnt case. What happens thereafter Is the
95
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry:
Fry:
Sherry:
judges responsibility, not yours. He let it stay
right there, and it worked too. It was fine. But then,
this was before the days when plea bargaining developed
as it has since, so you no longer can operate in that
kind of context. The volume of cases is too high.
But Ralph would be a little nervous about something,
and he d lay down one of these great big rigid rules that
you couldn t live with, and we knew that as soon as we
could demonstrate to him that it would work all right,
although the rule wasn t being followed, he didn t
mind . He figured that we d keep him out of trouble.
That was the difference.
You mentioned last week that you were involved under
Ralph Hoyt in developing a personnel recruitment program?
What was that?
Well, Ralph Hoyt was interested in personnel, and
shortly after he became district attorney, a man named
Phil Berger was appointed personnel officer for
Alameda County. It was the first personnel officer they
ever had, working with the Civil Service Commission.
Shortly after he was appointed, he came up to the
office. He had to start right in from the very beginning
and draw job specifications for every Job in the county?
salary structure, and get an idea of duties and respon
sibilities and that kind of thing. It was my introduc
tion to that kind of personnel management actually, from
Phil Berger. I worked with him. I was head of
criminal section , and I learned all about the strange
and mysterious operations of personnel people from him.
I did, I guess, almost all of the job specifications
for the office in those days with Berger, in
consultation with Ralph, Ideally where we should
set the pay levels, and that kind of thing.
That s something he was interested in, whereas
Earl Warren wasn t. Earl Warren the shop operates
automatically! [Laughter]
How did the people in the office feel about working
such long hours under Warren?
Oh, they were used to it. That was no problem.
Saturday was only a half holiday in those days. We
96
Sherry: had the office meetings on Saturday morning.
You didn t always work long hours. It depended
on what you were doing. There were some times when
you worked ordinary kinds of working hours. But when
you had a crash case or a "big investigation or some
thing, you just dropped everything and went with it.
That s all.
Fry: I see. It doesn t sound too different from today.
Sherry: Wo. Mo, it s not. It s no different from today. They re
working down there just as hard now as then, and probably
with the rush, they have to do it much more hurriedly
than we had to do it. We could stop and think and do
some legal research, but they have no time for that any
more.
The Office Under J. Frank Coakley
MF: Could you say anything about the office under Coakley?
Sherry: I was instrumental in getting Frank to come into the
office when Ralph was appointed to the superior court
bench. It was a great problem. Frank had gone into
private practice after the war, with his brother Tom and
Bob Li tier in San Francisco. They had a general
practice, and a labor specialty, and that kind of
thing. Frank was doing very well, and having the
time of his life. Ralph s departure came up and who s
going to become district attorney? Coakley was the natral
for the job, because he d been in the office before
and he was very, very well known, and had an enormous
constituency in the county. People knew the Coakley
family and liked him.
But Frank was very reluctant to come over and take
the office over. I remember I went up to his house
one night, walked in about 8iOO in the evening or so after
dinner, and we worked steadily with the problem all
night long until Kitty came down in the morning and
said, "Do you fellows want breakfast now?"
Frank said, "Yes, I ll do it." So he became
district attorney. Now Frank, as a person, was
very, very important to the office at that time. The
97
Sherry:
MF:
Sherry i
office has always been under all kinds of political
pressures and political attack from people, on one side
or another. A lot of people have been envious of the
position, and would like to be district attorney and
there are a lot of people who would like to have their
own kind of district attorney in there instead of the
kind that they have had. But there was this enormous
feeling in the office that "We ve got to keep going in
the old tradition," and Coakley was the man who could
do that."
Frank however, in all of his experience, was a
trial lawyer. He never managed people, he knew nothing
about personnel management, direction, or any of that
kind of thing at all, and so he was just not a good
administrator. He wasn t a good administrator at all.
It didn t make any difference when I came back
afzer the war and he became district attorney. I
guess I was with him another year and a half or two
years before I left the office. Folger Emerson and
I ran it with the utmost freedom. I kept Frank
informed as to what was going on, but he let me run
the show. So there weren t any problems that way at
all.
But later when the office grew under Frank, and
lots of the personnel began getting out of the office,
getting into private practice and all kinds of
opportunities on the outside, he suddenly woke up and
found himself with an office that he d never contem
plated having before, a bunch of youngsters with no
experience. There were some bad administrative
problems down there. He was just not a good adminis
trator at all, in my judgment. I tell him so. I
have told him so.
What sort of problems?
examples.
Just to get a couple of
Well, he was very unsure about trusting somebody.
Instead of dealing through his normal chain of command
he d go and talk to somebody underneath him, a
subordinate. Or he would pick out somebody out of
tne office and give him a problem without any by-your-
leave from the guy who s the fellow s ordinary
supervisor. Jumping the chain of command, the chain
of administrative direction. lie was doing that to the
point where people were very unhappy about the whole
98
Sherry: thing.
MF: Did that improve some as he got more experience?
Sherry: Well. I guess it improved some. I think it probably
improved a great deal more under Lowell Jensen , but I
don t know. [Laughter] But that was a problem,
there s no question about it.
99
IV THE SPECIAL CRIME STUDY COMMISSION ON ORGANIZED CRIME
[Interview III, June 22, 1973. Interviewed by Amelia Fry.]
Origins of the Commission
Fry: When were you on the crime commission? I couldn t
find your name anywhere on this final report.*
Sherry: I was on the original staff as assistant counsel from
mid- 19^9 to the early fall of 1950. I wrote most of
the final report dated November 15. 1950 Then I went
back to the district attorney s office in Alameda County
until January, 1951. This report marked the conclusion
of its work. There was another commission set up with
Warren Olney heading it again thereafter, which
operated in 1951 and 1952, but by that time the attorney
general s office had been reformed; [Frederick Napoleon]
Howser was gone, and it didn t do much. There wasn t
much to report anymore. They had very little activity
and just filed a formal report. There was a little
bit of bookmaking activity, I think, in San Mateo
County, but that was all there was to talk about.
Fry: Were you in on the formation of the first commission?
Sherry: No, I was not. I first heard of it in the newspapers,
a big headline announcing Admiral Standley as the
chairman and that kind of thing. That had to be in 19^7,
I should think.
Fry: It actually came about in the statutes on November 1,
*This interview is based on Final Report of the Special
Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime, state of
California, Sacramento, November 15, 1950*
100
Sherry: Yes, and. the first report was March, 9W It Has created
by virtue of an executive order, November 1, 19^7.
There is a penal code section that authorizes the
appointment of crime study commissions.*
Fry: Mr. McGee told me it was worked In under the Department
of Corrections.
Sherry: Yes, that s because the law which permits the governor
to appoint these various kinds of commissions is in the
Penal Code, and it sets out what the commissions can
do. It s a very broad direction to investigate almost
anything that has to do with the cause and prevention
of crime, a very, very broad commission.
In 19^7 the Study Commission on Organized Crime
was one of five commissions that were appointed, others
in other areas of the criminal law. But this one was
restricted, or rather its main target was organized
crime, which was then manifesting itself in California,
the Mickey Cohen and Dragna gangs in Southern California
particularly.
It was also known that there was a good deal of
variation from county to county in this state with
respect to the level with which the criminal law was
enforced. The system just wasn t working properly.
There was a constitutional amendment passed In 193^
which established the attorney general as the chief
law officer of the state and which gave him supervisory
power over the various county law enforcement officers,
particularly the district attorneys and the sheriffs.
For some reason the chiefs of police were left out.
Earl Warren became attorney general In 1938 with
*Penal Code Section 6028.3.
101
Sherry: that authority. He began very vigorously as attorney
general trying to break down these variations that
were occurring In the counties. Contra Costa County
In this area, particularly, was Just about wide open.
There was a big dog track running right out the other side
of El Cerrlto. Blackjack Jerome was the operator of
that. He had the Rancho San Pablo, which was Just like
a Nevada gambling house, running full blast. It was on
San Pablo Avenue In the unincorporated area of Contra
Costa County, and of course it was under the sheriff s
protection.
In any event , as soon as Earl Warren became attorney
general he stopped that. He sent Warren Olney personally
to see Blackjack Jerome to tell him "it stops right now."
And it did. They burned up all the gambling equipment
taken out of the Rancho San Pablo.
They stopped the dog racing, which was also going
on in San Mateo County. They set up "Earl Warren s
fleet," which went down and knocked over Tony Stralla s
gambling boats in Santa Monica Bay. These grosser aspects
of the situation were easy enough to attack by any
kind of a determined person and certainly Warren was,
in that situation, and he had lots of support.
But when he went to the governor s office, the
war years intervened. [Robert] Kenny was attorney
general. There wasn t much doing during that time.
Kenny was a good attorney general. The war years were
years when the rackets and other kinds of extracurricular
activity operated only in a rather small way. It s
kind of unpatriotic to go out and gamble great sums of
money in time of war and that sort of thing, and of
course a large proportion of the young men who are
attracted to the rackets were in uniform and away.
Pry: I wonder If the gamblers themselves were in uniform.
Sherry: No doubt. In any event the difficulty occurred after
the war, when things began to revert to the way that
they had been before. There began to be increasing
difficulty in policing the situation. Kenny made the
mistake or running against Warren for governor. He
campaigned by traveling to Europe, and of course he
didn t come close to winning. Warren was elected In
102
Sherry: the primary. That put Frederick Napoleon Howser,
former Los Angeles district attorney in office as
attorney general.
Apart from Howser, what the future had in store
with respect to Warren s administration was gang
warfare which was becoming prevalent In Los Angeles. It
had been evident while Howser was district attorney
there, in point of fact, when he was in private
practice before he became district attorney, he had
represented some of the gamblers who were identified
with organized crime in Southern California. Con
sequently, a lot of law enforcement people were very
we-.ry, and suspicious of him when he became a candidate
for attorney general.
Fry: I know that attorneys are not supposed to bear any
guilt of their clients, and yet when attorneys do
consistently take members of the underworld as their
clients, does this put them in a suspect position?
Sherry: Of course It does. It s all right for a lawyer to
defend a client, that s something else again, but to
become associated with him as his more-or-less partner
in crime is Inexcusable. There s no excuse for that
at all.
Howser, and other lawyers, were not only defending
these people in court. They rarely got to court,
actually. They didn t try very many cases. They were
more engaged in protecting them than they were in
defending them. So there was no real attorney-client
relationship.
Howser, for example, consistently refused to do
anything with respect to the gambling fleet off the
borders of his county there. He made a number of
excuses, that the law did not permit him to do it, and
that kind of thing. To demonstrate how wrong he was,
Earl Warren went down and did it himself. He stopped
the water taxis that went out to the ships, on the
ground that they were operating out of California for
an illegal purpose. That was sustained in the courts.
Howser was not anxious to curb any of that at all.
So, when Howser became attorney general there was reason
to fear. That, plus the existence of organized
crime Itself, led the governor to appoint the commission,
with Admiral Standley as Its chairman.
103
Sherry: The people on the commission: William Jeffers,
who Is a very distinguished industrialist, as I recall;
General Joyce was a retired regular army general;
Harvey Mudd was a financier; Gerald Hagar was a very
distinguished lawyer of Oakland.
Fry: Why was Harvey Mudd on that, do you think?
Sherry: He was Just a citizen representative, a friend or the
governor, who was Interested in good government.
Fry: He was a civic-minded sort of person?
Sherry: Yes, that s the idea. I think Harvey Mudd College was
named for him because of his interest in education and
civic enterprise generally.
The commission was not organized as a crime commis
sion. It was called the Crime Study Commission. It was
supposed to study the situation and then to make reports.
Law enforcement agencies were Invited to cooperate with
It. It started out on that tack. Warren Olney had as
his chief assistant at that time the chief investigator
who remained with him all throughout the life of the
commission, Harold G. Robinson, former distinguished
member of the FBI .
They started in early in 1948 . They had an office
on Sansome and California Streets in San Francisco.
Very shortly after, Warren Olney began picking up all
kinds of rumors and information about the attorney general s
office being in collusion with some of the gambling
operations which were going on in various parts of the
state, particularly Riverside County, Kern County,
and Los Angeles County. Not too much had developed
at that time in the San Francisco area. I think San
Mateo was the first place where there was evidence of
infiltration. Chinese gamblers, who were operating
rather freely there their operations were winked
at by the local authorities began complaining that
the attorney general was trying to scoop something off
the top of what they were making. In other words he
was extorting money from them through his people.
The commission, instead of a study commission,
found itself an operational body receiving all kinds of
complaints and information about organized criminal
activity. Warren Olney had the governor invite the
104
Sherry: attorney general to meet with the governor and Warren
Olney In Sacramento sometime during the spring of 1948.
They advised him at that time of what Warren and his
staff had been finding out. Howser stated that he was
glad to have the Information, he was delighted, and
appreciated the fact that It had been called to his
attention. He would look Into the matter right away.
Nothing happened. Newspapers began following the
conduct of some of his special agents who were non-
civil service appointees operating under a director
whose name was Lentz, former chief of police of Long
Beach. They noticed situations such as Isleton or Rio
Vista, two of those river towns up here, where the
attorney general s people came in and invaded a Chinese
gambling hall in one of those communities, where the
customers were Chinese, Mexican field hands, etc., a
poor people s gambling club. They announced they were
officers of the law, shut down the operation at once,
and they departed. They also took all the money they
found with them. The newspapers began saying, "We
wonder where the money went . " It appeared to be a
robbery .
There were a number of incidents of that kind. We
had one in Alameda County where, during a big conference
that the governor had called in Sacramento of all the
district attorneys of the state, sheriffs, and various
law enforcement people, one of Bowser s men purported
to have arrested a man called Tiny Heller, a so-called
"betting commissioner" In Oakland because he was
taking bets on sporting events. This was tolerated;
talcing bets on boxing matches, football and baseball
games was not regarded as bookmaking. That had been
going on for a number of years, nobody apprehending or
being aware of the fact that the bookmaking law pro
hibited not only off-track horse race betting, but
also any kind of contest of athletic skill between
humans as well as animals.
Fry: What was Frank Coakley doing In all of this?
Sherry: This occurred when Ralph Hoyt was district attorney.
It just never occurred to anybody that Heller was
doing anything Illegal at all. And he was not being
protected.
Fry: No one knew the statute?
105
Sherry; Nobody had. read the statute that way. It had never,
ever been enforced that way. Everybody assumed It was
only off -track horse race betting that was illegal.
As a matter of fact, the police used to make sure that
Tiny was sticking to the other kind of gambling! He had
a city license. He operated openly. His door was
open,. Anybody could walk in and out. He wasn t
paying one cent of protection.
So, when he was knocked over by the Howser people,
he immediately went to his friends, the police. He
said, "Look, I ve been doing this in Oakland. I ve
been contributing to the Red Cross and the Policeman s
Fund and all these other things, and I never considered
that I was breaking the law."
But before he was arrested, he had been subjected
to about two or three weeks of extortionate demands to
cut the Howser men in. They not only wanted a
proportion of his earnings, but they wanted to put
their own bookkeeper in to be sure that he didn t cheat
on them. It was when he balked at that, that they,
to show that they meant business, raided him. Their
plan went wrong, because it was Immediately apparent
that we had been wrong and the police had been wrong.
Heller was in fact violating the law.
So we insisted on charging him, although the man
who had arrested him obviously did not want Heller
prosecuted. He had to be chased down the street and
caught by a policeman and brought back to the prose
cutor s office. He said thai; he was "going to come
back tomorrow," but of course he wasn t. So, to Justify
the arrest, he was compelled to sign a complaint
against Heller, charging him with this illegal operation.
Heller was prosecuted. He was defended by a
local lawyer at first, but he was displaced when it got
to the superior court. He was defended there by a
great friend of President Nixon s, a lawyer from
Southern California, Murray Chotiner. Murray
Chotlner was an excellent trial lawyer. There was quite
a trial. Heller was convicted. But Alameda County
had demonstrated that we would run our own business and
that neither organized criminals nor Heller could
operate here. We could see that we should have known
about illegality of Heller s operation ahead of time,
106
Sherry: but there wasn t anything that looked like a racket
going on at all. And nothing else but Heller s betting
parlor was going on.
The Msndocino Prosecutions
Sherry: That brings us down to the summer of 19^-b when, during
the California District Attorneys Convention at the
Feather River Inn , we read in the newspapers that over
in Mendocino County in Ukiah, the district attorney
and the sheriff had arrested two or three of Howser s
people as a result of an endeavor there to set up a
slot machine protection racket. This produced all
kinds of headlines.
Incidentally, whenever something like this happened,
Bowser would Immediately say, "Well, they were doing
their job right. I find nothing wrong. They are
trying to enforce the law and this is Just the under
world trying to tear down and embarrass my efforts to
police the state." That kind of nonsense.
That resulted in grand Jury Indictments of his
principal operator up there, a man by the name of
Wiley Caddel. The case was tried in Ukiah.
At that time I was in the district attorney s
office In Alameda County. It was after the war. I
was then in charge of the criminal division, doing a
great deal of trial work as well. Incidentally, I
was at Feather River Inn when we heard the news of this
astonishing thing at Ukiah, but I went back to business
as usual until In the fall.
It was pretty late in the game it must have
been about the end of September, or first of October
when the district attorney of Mendocino County, James
Busch, came to Ralph Hoyt, the district attorney of
Alameda County, as the sheriff previously had come to
Gleason, the sheriff of Alameda County, for manpower
help under the mutual aid pact . A lot of Alameda
County deputy sheriffs participated in the big round
up in Mendocino County, which resulted in arrests
being made over I don t know how many hundreds or
square miles of area, all the little resorts all over
Mendocino County. They were very small, had slot
10?
Sherry: machines In them. There again, slot machines In the
resort communities were regarded as necessary to keep
them In business. There was no payoi f up there at all.
The blow-up occurred, just as In Alameda County,
when the attorney general s people came In and wanted
to extort, wanted to organize this thing, gain revenue
from this operation. I don t know whether Busch asked
for ne as special prosecutor to come up and try the
case. Jim had never tried a case of that dimension
before. He felt pretty lost, and so I was nominated.
I not only was nominated, but this was done at the request
of the governor and Warren Olney also, which meant
that I had to quit my job, which in those days was a
somewhat awesome decision. I had a young family to
support and a house to buy, having practically nothing
left after the war.
I agreed to do it. Earl Warren is a very persuasive
character, and so is Warren Olney. They agreed to pay
me a fee, hire me as a lawyer to try the case. I
went up there, and to my amazement, although the Indict
ment had been returned in July or August, not an iota
of work had been done on planning the case or inter
viewing witnesses or anything lese. Jim Busch had all
he could do to run the business of the office. He had
no assistant. He was out holding preliminary hearings
and trying other kinds or cases and trying to carry
on a private law practice too, which he was
entitled to do because they were only paying him about
$200 a month to be district attorney.
I yelled for help, and Warren Olney sent Robinson,
his investigator, up to help me. We went to work and
traveled all over that county putting together the
case and interviewing witnesses. The trial started
about the first of November. It lasted thirty days. It
ran, speaking of how courts operate today, from nine
in the morning until twelve, from one of five, and
then from seven til nine in the evening. The Judge,
Lilbum Gibson, was quite a taskmaster. He said this
extraordinary case was interrupting the routine of
his court, and he wanted to get it disposed of as
quickly as possible. It was a "great inconvenience to
the Jurors." This was because although some of the
jurors came out of Ukiah where the courthouse was,
others were commuting from Port Bragg, Willitts and
108
Sherry: various other remote areas. It s an enormous county.
Fry i And. those roads, even today, are narrow and crooked.
Snerry: Yes, when you get off the highway, come in from a
place called Branscombe, or some place like that, that
is really hard.
We finished the case, which was covered by the
newspapers extremely thoroughly. They all had their
reporters up there. In that day I think there were four
newspapers in San Francisco, the Examiner, the Chronicle.
the News , and the Bulletin . So every day there were
headlines it was the Watergate of its time for
thirty days, in this area anyway. They were convicted;
one evening about nine or ten o clock the Jury came
in ana all were convicted.
This was quite a blow to Howser. The evidence in
the trial had clearly demonstrated what had been going
on. It rather clearly showed the involvement of the
attorney general s office, Lentz particularly, who
should have been indicted, had I always thought, but
the evidence wasn t known because of lack of investi
gation ahead of time.
I then went back to the district attorney s office,
back to work. I received my fee, which was something
I needed at the time. I was welcomed back by the
district attorney s office. I think Coakley by then
was district attorney; I think Ralph Hoyt went on the
bench in September or that year.
Fry: Can I put in the record here what the newspapers say
Bowser s public response to this was? This clipping is
in the Mary Ellen Leary papers in The Bancroft Library.
Sherry: Yes, go ahead.
Fry: Howser held his first press conference after this
December 5th conviction on December 20, 19^-b. He said,
"Buck Caddel, his former undercover man, is Innocent
despite his sentence of three to thirty-one years as
an arch-conspirator. He declared that the attorney
general s office would take charge of the appeal in
Caddel s impending fight to reverse the conviction
in the state appellate court." He failed to find
"anything anomalous" in the attorney general s position
109
Fry: in this. He said he is "making no Investigation of his
chief investigator nor of Caddel s immediate superior,
Walter Lentz, and plans no such inquiry. He will oppose
appropriations for the crime commission, which was
largely instrumental in uncovering the case." The
article goes on to explain that Tladdel and two others
were found guilty on two counts of conspiracy and
three counts of bribery. The payoff was $4.00 a
week per machine for protection from Howser s agents."
Sherry: Well, there were a lot of other $4.00 plus a percentage
i bhey were over a certain amount.
Fry: This was a sliding scale?
Stierry: Yes. It depended upon the size of the establishment,
because some of these machines were in little places
like Jenner-by-the-Sea. There s a little cafe at the
end of the line there where a few fisherman drift through,
and there was a slot machine in there. It wouldn t
earn more than $25 or $30 a week. So $4 was a good
percentage .
Incidentally, not only did he make the announcement
that he was going to represent Caddel in the appeal,
that he would take care 01 that, he also had his agents,
during the trial, trying to block witnesses and hamper
the prosecution while we were working in Mendoclno
County. Here we had our own guys spying on us! It s
a unique experience in law enforcement when you have
other law enforcement officers actively trying to
cramp your style.
They tried to intimidate witnesses, to pay them
off. They would come around and try to get them to
talk themselves into inconsistent positions so they
could be Impeached and all that kind of thing.
Nobody knows who paid for the defense of
these guys. They were ably defended by Joe Ball of
Long Beach, who was a very fine man indeed. He was
the chief defense counsel. There were a couple
of others from Los Angeles. There was, I think, only
one local defendant. He was represented by a lawyer
from Petaluma by the name of Lounibos with whom I had
a lot of trouble during the trial.
Anyhow, Howser had to think better of defending
110
Sherry: Caddel. It was his duty to do just precisely the
opposite under the constitution and the law. We were
concerned about that situation and right away we, at
least I, and Jim Busch joined in the thing, requested
permission to file an amicus curiae brief, a brief in
support of the conviction ourselves, which was granted
by the court of appeal in Sacramento.
Howser thought better of what he proposed to do,
and he also discovered he had no way of controlling
those good civil service lawyers in his office, who
were doing everything they could to resist the illegal
ities which he was getting into. He usually let them
run the civil side of the appeals part 01 the office;
he left them alone; they were free to go on as they
always did. HAS principle interest was fooling around
in the law enforcement area in which they weren*t
particularly interested.
Cecil Mosbacher, now Judge Mosbacher, of the
superior court here, and I worked all spring and early
summer of 19^-9 on the amicus curiae brief. She was
assigned to help me with the situation. No conflict
occurred.
Dorothy Mayer, then deputy, now assistant attorney
general in the office in Sacramento, filed a good,
fine, strong brief. The defense lawyers brief was not
much. There wasn t much you could say. The evidence
was too solid. There was a big issue about corroboration
of an accomplice s testimony, a technical rule of
evidence. This was really the only serious point
raised.
We just got done, and I signed the brief, and
went off to meet Mary Ellen Leary in Salt lake Cxty and
get married, the summer of 19^-9.
The Commission at Work
Sherry s Then when I came back and started work again,
Warren Olney Invited me to Join him as his assistant.
That would be in 19^9, judging by these reports. He
was then beginning to strengthen his office. He was
getting more investigators. So I went and worked there
from the end of 194-9 until about mid-1951 t about two
Ill
Sherry: years, I guess.
When we got our office set up, we had more money.
We had more people, and although we were set up to be
a crime study group, It was perfectly obvious that all
the good people in law enforcement looked on it as an
operating agency, an agency which could help.
Indeed, we did an awful lot of that. Our investigators
were going out making investigations of what was
continuing to go on with the Howser people, exposing
the whole slot machine racket, naming names and all
that kind of thing. We had that pretty exhaustively
taken care of. It had some good effects In the legis
lature . We finally got a decent slot machine law which
was enforceable. The one we had before Just wasn t
enforceable at all.
Fry: For things like that did you testify at legislative
hearings?
Sherry: No, I was Warren Olney s assistant and that wouldn t
have been appropriate for us to do as members of a
governor s commission. We were charged very narrowly
with the study reporting, but also doing a lot of
active work as well. What we did, we reported. These
reports were Important for the impact they made on the
legislature. This is far better than talking to the
legislators, to get them to read something like this.
Fry: Your crime committee was the only investigative one,
is that right? The others really were study committees.
Sherry: The others performed their studies. One with which I
was associated briefly before I got into this thing, was
a crime study commission on revision of the penal code,
of all things. Then there was a crime study commission
on the Juvenile Justice system. All they did was to
look at the law and suggest reforms or changes in the
written law.
Our Job was to study and made a report on what
lawbreakers were doing, and also, incidentally, if they
were engaging in criminal conduct , or conduct bordering
on the criminal, point out what wes wrong. Among the
things recommended was legislation.
112
Sherry: But meanwhile we were doing this fact-gathering
kind of thing. We ran into things that we were able to
build up and hand to the district attorneys and say,
"Here s a case you can prosecute. Here are the witnesses.
They are there. Robbie will help and you can try the
cases." We started a number of prosecutions going.
We put a little bit of stiffness In the backs of some
weaK-spined sheriffs and chiefs of police by telling
them, "Sure you can do it. This is how." We told them
how you try the case and that kind or thing, educated
tne district attorney as to what he could do.
In that respect we had considerable impact, but
also the thing that made us most effective was the
fact that we kept the spotlight on the mobsters all
the time. They can t operate with that kind of thing
happening. Then, of course, they go underground. The
most elaborate dodge of that kind was the famous
Guarantee Finance case In Los Angeles.
It was just about the time we were ready to fold
up. We were just about all through. I wanted to get
back to the district attorney s office, which I began
to do, when I finished the report on the Los Angeles
gangsters. I think then it must have been about 1951.
I left. Ongoing at that moment, under Warren Olney s
particular direction, was an inquiry into the Internal
Revenue Department in San Francisco, where there was some
evidence to indicate that the local racketeers were
being helped out with respect to their income tax
returns, concealing assets, etc., by some of the people
in the Department of Internal Revenue. That broke and
touched off an inquiry that went all the way to the top
of the Internal Revenue Service before it was over.
But I was out of the situation at that time.
Fry: I wondered what the next chapter was on that, because
In this final report of 1950 you laid out in very clear
fashion the cooperation of the Internal Revenue Service
with these gamblers and all their fronts.
Sherry: We were all through at that time. That was the last
report. I was back to the district attorney s office
where I was for about six months when Pat Brown got
elected as attorney general and asked me to come over
and join him.
Fry: What happened to this connection between the underworld
and the Internal Revenue Service?
11 Jj
Sherry: Warren Olney was working on that. He had Just started
to break that thing when I left. The first I heard about
it was, I took a vacation driving through Santa Barbara,
picked up a newspaper and got the big story. The
information had finally been disclosed and the grand
jury inquiry was underway. I think some people were
indicted. The immediate reaction in the federal
establishments in San Francisco was much like Howser.
They were, first of all, highly annoyed that a state
agency would be Investigating a federal agency. This
was very offensive to them. It s not generally done.
There were all kinds of efforts to stop the grand
jury inquiry and that kind of thing. It was pretty
hilarious there for awhile.
Pry: Kow did they try to stop the grand jury inquiry?
Sherry: The United States Attorney forbade his deputies from
presenting the case to the grand Jury, but one of them
went ahead anyway and did it on a day that the newspapers
call "Mad Thursday" or something like that. The jury
stuck with it and returned indictments. This was very
unseemly from the federal people s point of view.
Fry: The information that you gave on that in this report had
not yet been actied on, and the people you named had
yet to be processed through the courts.
Sherry: Of course that made a lot of headlines when it appeared,
I recall. And then the papers got interested in what
was going on over at Internal Revenue. They knew the
collector, who was an old political figure in San
Francisco, very well-known for a number of years.
Knowing him, and knowing what was said, I think a
lot 01 the reporters figured he was one of the ones,
so they went after him.
That spread across the country. It was so
unusual, a state Investigating a federal office.
Finally someone back east somewhere said, "The same
thing has been going on here." That s when there was
a later investigation; I don t remember the details,
but there were some upheavals in the Internal Revenue
Service as a result. Nothing like this has happened
since that I know of.
Fry: What ways were you hamstrung in your investigations in
the crime commission? I understand there were some
difficulties in just getting money to hire investigators.
Sherry: No, we had all the money we needed. We didn t have
adequate money as the thing was first conceived as a
study group. The commissioners themselves weren t paid
anything. They served for the good of the public. Warren
Oiney worked out of his private office. He was only
working part time f because his position wasn t conceived
as a full time job at all. I think Harold Robinson
was hired full time right away no, he wasn t. He
came in a little later. He was doing an accounting
service up in Santa Rosa. Warren had quite a time
persuading him to give up that business and come back
to cops and robbers again. In any event, after the
Ukiah trial, we had no trouble about money.
Fry: I thought maybe it was more of a statutory problem.
Dick McGee said something about having to get a founda
tion to come to your rescue.
Sherry: That was about the time that they wanted to employ me.
They had no supplemental funds and weren t about to get
any of them. There was an effort at that time to get
some foundation support to take care of my salary.
Whether that became necessary or not, I don t know. It
was at a time when more money couldn t very easily be
appropriated otherwise. It was before the emergency
had been foreseen. The commission just got swamped
beginning about the end of 194-8 with sheriffs coming
in, policemen coming in, coming into San Francisco and
telling us what was going on in their communities. It
was too much for two men to handle.
Warren needed somebody to help him, and Robbie
needed somebody to help him. We got them, and I m not
aware now that we had any money problems. We seemed to
have enough to get along. The problem was that we were
not official. We didn t have the power of subpoena, we
were not policemen. We were just private citizens.
We obtained nothing by way of evidence except by
persuasion or people volunteering information to us.
So, in that respect it had problems that an ordinary
criminal investigation doesn t have.
Fry: I gathered from the report that you did manage to talk
to witnesses and do some interrogation.
115
Sherry: Yes, sure. We would drive around the country, go In
and talk to them. I was all over the place. I was In
Northern California. We opened an office in Los
Angeles. We had an investigator or two there, a
secretary. We went down almost every other week to Los
Angeles and worked OUT; of that office.
Fry: When you first signed on with this, how long did you
expect this to last? Did it have a cut-ol f date?
Sherry: It was indefinite, but it did have a cut-off date. I
think you should find in some of these reports the
length of time. I think it was appointed on a year-to-
year basis. Or it might have been a two year-to-
year basis, because the legislature was only meeting
every other year during that time. But it did have a
term and it had to end, unless the governor chose to
extend it. If he desired to extend it, of course, he
had to go to the legislature to get money to extend it.
You may be sure that there were plenty of people in the
legislature who wanted to shut us down, too.
Relations with the Leglslat ure
Fry: I noticed, for instance, that the bill to outlaw the
possession of slot machines, was killed in committee
without any overt opposition to it. Does this indicate
a lot of control?
Sherry: The gambler s lobby was as strong as it could
possibly be. They had a former member of the assembly,
Charles Lyon, as I recall his name, who represented
the gambling interests.
Fry: Was he a Samish man?
Sherry: Ke probably was associated with Samish, but his own bit
was the gamblers. They sustained him, and he represented
the gamblers. He was a lawyer, a former assemblyman.
I remember going into a hearing one night on one of
our bills. I think it was later, when I was up there
representing the Alameda County Peace Officers Associa
tion. I went into the senate hearing room. Here are
about six or seven senators waiting for the hearing to
116
Sherry: commence. There s Lyon right down next to the chairman
talking to him like a Dutch uncle. He was going to
be the man that I was going to argue against for what
ever bill it was, I don t recall.
Fry:
Sherry:
Pry:
Sherry:
Fry:
He was an assemblyman at the time?
Ho, he was a former assemblyman. Former memoers of the
legislature have the privileges of the floor. They
are still members of the club. So Lyon could go where
others couldn t. It would be impermissible 1 or me to do
a thing like that, or for any other lobbyist or ad
vocate. Lyon could walk right in on the middle or the
floor in the middle of a session and look up his man.
Nobody else had a chance to say, "Hey, listen to me
first."
I remember after the end of that session, I ran
into Lyon. He was a very charming, personable guy. It
was in the lobby of a hotel. I was getting ready to
return; everything was all over. He came up very
cheerfully. He said, "You remember that night in the
senate hearing room?" I said, "I sure do." "Well,"
he said, "you didn t even have to show up. That bill
was dead all the time." I said, "I figured it was."
Thereafter he went too far, Charlie did, and got
himself convicted for something, I don t recall what it
was.
That was hard going. But ultimately the kinds of
legislation we needed made the grade. I asked a number
of fine people up there, Tom Caldecott, Ralph Brown
to help there were some very fine people. They
worked very hard.
Alameda County s Thomas Caldecott?
successful bill in
He did introduce the
Ralph Brown was a very effective advocate for us. He
is the author of the so-called Brown Act, the anti-
secrecy law for governmental agencies.
I wonder what the connections here were with Samish.
I read in Mary Ellen Leary s papers that there was an
Otis P. Murph Company that made the console slot
machines, and after this bill in the legislature failed
the first time, they sold quite a number of them
11?
Fry: throughout California. The address of their office was
the same as the address of Samish 1 s office in San
Francisco.
Sherry: I didn t mention Samish because ordinarily, as a
general rule, Samish didn t get into the law enforcement
legislative battles at all. He wasn t interested in
criminal law particularly or law enforcement. He looked
in other directions, but since he was the most powerful
cf the lobbyists there, the others from time to time
would enlist his support, as a trade perhaps. There s
no doubt about the fact that there were times when he
would exercise his influence.
However, our policy was never to be seen with him
or talking to him. We stayed strictly away from
Samish. That was the law enforcement side of the thing.
I remember a sheriff went up to Sacramento one
time. He was lobbying for some kind 01 a bill having
to do with working conditions and compensation for his
deputies, a perfectly laudable, proper enterprise. I
think I saw him after lunch one day, and he said, "It s
been a tough fight but I ve just been to see Samish,
and Samish says he s on my side." I was absolutely
shocked that one of our people even talked to him at
t hat t ime .
But Samish did not get himself mixed up actively
in that kind of business. He could see that people like
Hovfser were fools and these other things were dangerous.
There was no point in it. He was getting along well
with his breweries, trucks, bus lines, and other
interests why bother?
Fry: There was another thing that came up in early 1950. An
Initiative was circulated apparently to legalize gambling.
Part of the money would go to pay higher old age
pensions, and I think the pensioners groups was behind
it. I wondered if you knew anything about it.
Sherry: That was dog racing, I guess, not gambling generally.
They wanted to get greyhound racing back again. That
wasn t too difficult, depending on how you feel about
that kind of legislation, because if you were opposed
to it you knew that you had the horse racing people
on your side, and they had lots of money. So you had
them competing with each other in that situation.
118
Fry: Speaking of competition, in the 1950 gubernatorial
campaign one of the campaign organizers for Jimmy
Roosevelt told me that they were contacted by Nevada
gambling Interests and offered a very large sum for the
campaign if they would keep gambling out of California.
I wondered if In the same way you would get a lot of
cooperation from Nevada gamblers who wanted you to keep
gambling out of California.
Sherry: No, nothing like that at all. They didn t care too much
about that. It was not enough to bother them. They
were pretty small in comparison with the way they
operate now. But it is true, at least so far, the
freely repeated stories, both in the press and in talk,
to the effect that they had made contributions to the
opponents of any kind of gambling legalization in
California. And it s only natural that they would.
But this was never overt, it was never apparent. You
always had to assume it was true It wasn t denied,
and that was Just about the status of that. You will
never know. Like the story you heard somebody has
offered money to oppose the legalization of gambling In
California. In a day when there was no attempt what
ever to have any sort of disclosure about campaign
contributing at all, there would never be any way of
discovering that.
Pry: Of course he went on to say that Roosevelt s committee
turned it down . I wondered at the time if this compe
tition from the Nevada gamblers was an aid In keeping
it out of California.
Sherry: No, that didn t make any difference.
The Role of Governor Warren
Fry: Could you spell out what Earl Warren s role was in this,
how active he was?
Sherry: He appointed this commission because he hoped that it
could maintain the fight against organized crime.
He was governor now, having left the attorney general s
office, where he had been extremely active and a powerful
force for carrying that constitutional mandate for
Securing equal law enforcement throughout the counties
of California. That s in the law, in the constitution.
119
Sherry: He took that very seriously. As attorney general ,
he began holding his own meetings of police, sheriffs,
district attorneys. This Is Institutionalized now and
occurs on a regular schedule. It has been a very
effective device for bringing these people together
and giving them some kind of group solidarity which
has the bad effect also of providing group bias. For
example, they are absolutely united on opposition to the
abolition of the death penalty. This comes through that
kind or organization, the good or bad results, what
ever you want to say. It has brought them together as a
group and has given them a lot more Independence.
You pay something for that kind of thing as against
Balkanlzed organization which the law ordinarily
contemplates, where you don t have these statewide
organizations. It gets over that kind of obstacle quite
well.
In his attorney general days, Warren was a very
powerful force indeed. Now he becomes governor.
Ordinarily he would rely on his attorney general.
That s the attorney general s responsibility. He soon
became aware of the fact that he had a weak reed In
Howser to lean on there. He got Warren Olney back again
as trouble shooter and set up the crime commission.
The important thing in the Crime Study Commission
on Organized Crime is the selection of Warren Olney
as counsel, because Warren Olney ran it absolutely. We
would have meetings of the commission, these distinguished
gentlemen, about every month or so or every two months.
We would meet in a hotel in San Francisco or at the
Bohemian Club or something like that , and we would tell
them what we were doing, giving them these funny names
of the mobsters and that sort of thing. They Just
listened fascinated. "Great, fellows. Keep It up!"
that kind of thing, but they didn t function as a
commission .
Curiously enough, they did hold a meeting at one
time, after the Indictment in Uklah when I was not
attached to It. At this meeting, which was in Los
Angeles, Lentz, or one of the people who was Involved in
the racket, appeared. Warren Olney was informing them
then of what had happened in Mendoclno, what the
situation was. They had invited the attorney general to
be present. He sent Lentz, or whoever it was.
120
Sherry: At the end of the meeting Admiral Standley
Inquired about one of the conspirators in the group, the
mar. who ran up and down In the state collecting tne
money ("Chinese" somethlng-or-other he was called,
for reasons which I ve never understood). He was a
former policeman. Admiral Standley asked who he was.
Lentz replies, "Oh, he was the bag man," not thinking
He had replied quickly.
This was an important piece of evidence. It was
perfectly admissibile evidence, but by the time the
trial got started Admiral Standley was way out in the
far Pacific some place. He was flying around as
ambassador, special envoy of the President, that kind
of thing, for about the rest of his life. So we told
the Navy Department in Washington that we needed
Admiral Standley here for the commission. So they
brought him all the way back from the Pacific. We had to
wait two days for him, with the judge Jumping up and
down about this undue delay.
So Standley came back. The very interesting thing
about this was that Standley was born In Uklah. He
was the favorite native son, ambassador to Russia, naval
hero, etc., so that the Judge Just had to grant that
delay. Everybody in town would have shot him if he
hadn t waited for Standley to come! So Standley came,
the returning conqueror. It brought people all in from
the countryside. The hotels and the motels did a
wonderful business for two or three days. When Standley
appeared in the courtroom, the Judge greeted him very
graciously. Standley got on the witness stand. I
interrogated him about the meeting, just asked him who
he was. He was chairman of the commission. Did the
commission have a meeting at such and such a time?
It did. Who was present? Who was Lentz? Was that the
man? Was he there? Did you have a conversation with
him? What did he say? He said that so-and-so was the
"bag man." "That s all, Admiral." The defense lawyer
made no cross examination. So Standley was in court
for about ten minutes, and out.
But of course all the newspapers had "Admiral
Standley names bag man." "Bag man" got to be quite a
word for us.
But Olney was running the show.
121
Fry:
Sherry:
Fry:
Sherry t
Fry:
Sherry:
Fry:
How did you and Oiney divide up your duties?
We didn t divide them up. We just shared them, that s
all. We worked together or we worked separately. We had
a man to do our writing for us. Stopping and sitting
down to write what we had done was pretty hard
for us.
We found it impossible
enough, so that we made the mistake of hiring a guy who
met a tragic end thereafter. He was on his uppers.
He hadn t made it very well in the newspaper world, but
he was a newspaper man who could write.
He wrote a report with our recommendations and
that kind of thing, and about two days before we were
to send it to the press It was just about ready to
go the Los Angeles Times broke our recommendations,
and it was just word-for-word what was in the report.
He denied having tipped off the Times, but he was the
only person who could have, and he was in Los Angeles
at about the appropriate time. We had to let him go,
which we did. Warren Oiney looked at me and said,
"Now you ve got to write it." So we had to start
and write it all over again. That s how I happened to
write that report. I had to. I don t know why we went
to all that trouble, because the results were substantially
the same. I think I did a better job than the other
guy did, but
Did he take his manuscript with him when he left?
Did you have to start from scratch?
We had to take a different tack completely. I wanted
to make it as different as possible from what the Times
had said.
What was the impact of the Times leaking this two days
ahead of time?
Nothing. The Crime Study Commission on Organized
Crime was going to recommend legislation, which it
ultimately did, but in different words and in different
order. But the body of the report itself was
considerably different.
I wondered if you could elucidate a little bit on that
early meeting between Warren Oiney and Earl Warren and
Howser, if you know anything about that.
122
Sherry: All I know Is what Warren Olney told me. I wasn t
there. He just sat there in Earl Warren s presence.
Warren Olney told him everything he knew up to that time
about the operations of the deputy director, as he was
called Lentz, and his men what he had heard. He
Just outlined it. As he then expected, Howser appeared
to be grateful to be informed, hadn t known about it,
he said, and would taKe steps immediately to correct
the situation. So Warren [~ Olney] and the governor
assumed Howser would at least make some show at doing
something. But he made no effort at all. I don t think
there were any other meetings. There may have been; I
don t know.
The Role of Attorney General Howser
Fry:
Sherry:
Pry:
Do you think that the Howser question Instigated the
formation of the whole crime commission idea with all of
its committees?
It was important, although the commission had been set
up before Bowser s activities or his people s activities
had become known. I think in the preamble there is
something said about the expected rise of crime as a
result of the end of the war, particularly in the area
of organized crime. Enough was known then about the
wire services and the slots and all that sort of
business. Just that alone would be adequate reason to
set this up to study the situation and see whether any
new legislation should be enacted in order to take care
of it. But I can t say absolutely that one of the
reasons was because Howser was the attorney general.
But it s my guess that that was a strong motivating
force.
Governor Warren had had experience with Howser
when he [Warren ] was attorney general, trying to enforce
the law in Los Angeles County and running into Bowser s
active opposition and complete failure to cooperate.
When Howser got the Republican nomination in
this could have been an indication that the attorney
general s office might possibly be under a very weak
person if he won the general election. Howser was
known. There was no question about that. There was a
meeting in 1946, right after the war, at Catalina
Inland, of the District Attorney s Association. The
123
Sherry: election primary was over. Earl Warren had been elected
governor at the primary? he had been opposed by Kenny .
(That s the campaign when Kenny traveled to Europe and
Warren won both primaries.)
Howser was the host district attorney, and he was
a new district attorney of course. On the deck on the
steamship (which I see has been just restored to service)
there was a cabin with a lot of merry voices in it.
We looked in, and here s Bob Kenny and Earl Warren
seated side by side. Kenny s term would expire, you
see, at the end of December. He was still attorney
general. He said, "Come on in, fellows, I m celebrating
my terminal leave , " a word which all of us knew at that
time. The two of them (arch rivals) got off the ferry
on the other side where all of the people come to watch
the boat come in, and walked off arm in arm, the
first two off the boat.
This was post-war, and it was very difficult to buy
liquor of any kind. You could buy maybe a bottle or
two at a time. We were going to be down there for almost
a Week. Almost everybody had a bottle in his bag, to
keep him going through the dry stretches. But when we
got there, in our rooms everybody had a bottle of
Scotch and a bottle of bourbon, and there was a big
bouquet for the lady, "compliments of Frederick
Howser, your host."
Well that could be obtained only through one
source, and that was Arty Samish. That, and the conver
sation which spread around about Howser, how "This Is
going to be it. He s going to make it," they thought.
There was a good deal 01 unhappiness among the district
attorneys about this prospect. They knew what Howser
was. Pat Brown was then running on a slate on the
Democratic ticket that included governor and everything
else, and Pat Brown as attorney general.
At that meeting Ralph Hoyt I know, was very
active in this movement a group of the district
attorneys talked to each other about, "Shouldn t we
support Brown? Howser is no good at all, and Brown
is district attorney of San Francisco, and shouldn t
we go for Pat?"
At that time almost all ol the district attorneys
124
Sherry:
would have been Republicans, as were most state offices,
in spite of the large Democratic registration. (Curious
the way California votes, and the nation, for that matter,
these days.) They didn t like the idea of Pat s being
on a slate because it would be difficult for them to
support Pat without being understood to be supporting
everybody else on the Democratic slate. So they
approached Pat and told him that he could have the support
of the District Attorney s Association If he would
split off from the slate and run independently. Then
they would be all for him. Pat said, "It s too late,
I ve given my word. I can t now." So that fell by
the wayside,
support .
He could have had the district attorney s
Pry: Tnat s a very revealing story.
Sherry: Pat takes promises very seriously.
Fry: It also sheds a little light on the usual story that you
read and hear about Earl Warren appointing the crime
commission because he wanted to get Howser. Very
simplistic.
Sherry: There was no "getting Howser" at all. We never
knew the degree to which Howser was Involved. I found
that out later on, after it was all over. I didn t
know what Caddel was doing, running around, going through
all this mysterious Intrigue and threatening people
with "Sure, we can knock you down, and I am representing
the attorney general," and all that kind of stuff.
Half way through the trial Lentz came up and got
on the witness stand and made a mistake very helpful to
us.
When the special agents, of which Caddel was one,
travel, they have to make a daily report, where they re
going, why, what the mission is, who they see, when and
the time, and then their expenditures. At the end of
every day they have to fill these dam things out.
We had Lentz subpoenaed, as chief of the office,
to bring all of those records relating to Caddel with him.
We had asked Howser to supply them. We had invited him.
We needed them. We wanted them. He wouldn t respond.
We Just got no response at all. So finally we resorted
to subpoena. We weren t in a position to subpoena at
125
Sherry: that time. We didn t know quite what we were going
after.
Once the trial was started, and we knew what we
were going to do, we said, "Let s subpoena it at this
time." I think we gave Robbie the task of serving
the subpoena to be sure he nailed his man. He did, and
Lent z appeared. It was the first time I had ever seen
him. He had all of these documents clutched under his
arm .
I Interrogated him about the practice. "You have
with you now the documents of Mr. Caddel, daily reports
covering the period of about two months in which his
activity in Ukiah was important?" He said, "Yes."
So I said, "May I look at one?" He took the top one off
"Went to Long Beach, luncheon 75^, etc." I looked at
two or three of those. There was a big stack covering
about sixty days.
I said, "Mr. Lentz, let me take a look at them. We
can shorten up this cross examination if I can look at
them Just a moment, which I m entitled to do."
So, reluctantly he handed them to me, and I
immediately thumbed to the day I was interested in,
the date Mr. Caddel had come up to Ukiah. I looked
at it. Someone had made a crude effort to change the
date and the place. It was a smudge. A child could
tell that somebody had tried to write over it and
change it from Ukiah to Santa Rosa. It Just couldn t
be done.
"Oh, Mr. Lentz, a very Interesting thing I ve
discovered. Wouldn t you say that this document has been
altered?" Now here was a policeman with experience.
I knew he had only one answer.
He said, "Yes, someone has endeavored to alter
that. It really does say Ukiah and that s the date."
That put Caddel there. He d denied it and he wasn t
about to take the witness stand, so I needed some
corroboration; the only other witness I had was the
sheriff himself. So that daily report was a lifesaver;
In effect, Caddel became a very Important witness for
us in that situation. There was nothing else
Caddel couldn t be cross-examined. The thing was so
126
Sherry: crude. I immediately had It put in evidence. We
made a lot of hay with that before the Jury. It was
a clumsy attempt to conceal, which It obviously was.
I never found out what went on In that situation at
all until a year and a half, or two, after the event.
Caddel was in prison. He was anxious to be released.
He endeavored to get a pardon, which was turned down
by the governor, whoever that was. Robbie and I got a
call that Caddel was at Soledad and wanted to talk to
us . He had something to say about that business that had
happened. We went down to Soledad. The appointment
was set up for evening. We didn t want to be observed
going In, as we wanted to conceal our movements from news
paper people.
We had dinner in town, in Soledad, and went in
about eight o clock. (That s no place to have dinner.
I d just as soon starve.) We met Caddel in a private
office there, late at night. He told us what had
happened.
He [Caddel] was a Los Angeles policeman, as was the
man known as "the bag man," whose name I can t recall.
Lentz was a retired chief of police of Long Beach. I
think he retired to take this post over with Howser.
There was another man, Duke Bolger, who died during
the course of his service there of acute alcoholism
in the Cliif Hotel. He was a public relations man
for Howser in the Howser campaign.
Caddel told me that he was out of the police
department. He was retired. Actually it was one of these
compulsory retirement things; he was guilty of some
kind or misconduct and he was, rather early, retired
after a disciplinary hearing. He was not a very bright
man. He never got beyond patrolman. He never would
qualify beyond that. He was married to a perfectly
wonderful woman. His wife was Just as faithful as she
could be. She never missed a day of that trial. She
stayed with him. But he was Just kind of dumb.
I said, "The only thing I want to know is how did
all of this happen?"
Caddel said, "I don t know how all of It happened.
I was In the parking lot at the state building in Los
Angeles, and I ran into Duke Bolger, a public relations
guy. I said, Is there a chance of getting a JOD in the
127
Sherry: attorney general s office? 1 " He [Caddel] needed
some employment. He had known this character. There
was some conversation. Bolger said, "I ll get in
touch with you and I ll let you know."
The next thing he heard and how this was
conveyed to him I don t know "You go to Mr. Lentz s
oi fice in the attorney general s headquarters and you do
everything that he tells you to do. You re on. You ve
got a Job."
Caddel went there and he did see Lentz. I don t
know whether he had met Lentz before or not. Lentz
explained to him that he would be a so-called under
cover or special agent type, not on the regular
payroll, not civil service. His duty would be to
go around the state and to report to him personally.
He was to report to Lentz all the time.
He said, "I never saw the attorney general
except once, and that was after this interview with
Lentz." Lentz said, "You d better come in and meet the
attorney general."
He said, "I walked in with Lentz." Lentz said,
"Mr. Attorney General, here s the man who is going to
be working with me in my office." That was all. It
was che first and only time that he had ever laid
eyes on Howser.
Then he disclosed that Lentz was the big operator.
Lentz was the man who was running him and running the
guy known as the "bag man." Lentz was apparently
reporting directly to Bolger.
Caddel described what he did. I wanted particu
larly to know about the Mendocino thing. He said
Lentz, called him in and said he wanted him to go to
Mendocino and to call on Sheriff Broaddus. He s got
some slot machines operating up there and we re going to
knock them over." He said, "I went up, and I did Just
what Mr. Lentz told me. I went in and I said and he
repeated the testimony of the trial, exactly what our
witness had said. Incidentally, he gave the lie to
Lentz. Lentz perjured himseli In the course of his
testimony.
Then he returned. He described this business
128
Sherry: he was told to go some place, put In an appearance,
deliver the threat, and then go someplace else. I
said, "My heavens, dion t you know what the reason
for this was?"
He said, "Oh, I figured they were raking some
money off on it somewhere, but they never gave any of
it to me." He was just paid $200 a month, or whatever
they gave him. He never got any or it. [The rake-off.]
Prom what he said I think he was nothing more than a
hireling. It looks to me as if Howser had made a deal
with Lentz and Bolger: "We will support you, help you
get elected, but when you get elected, let us run the
special agent types. We ll take care of that. You ve
got a lot of stuff going on here."
It s very much like the Watergate thing. Did
Howser know or didn t he? I can say with respect to
Howser, with no hesitation at all, that he should
have known, because he was told over and over again,
in the press, by the governor, and by Warren Olney.
He didn t do anything at all. In some way, I m sure,
Howser was under some sort of commitment to these
guys . Whether he personally profited from it or not I
have no idea. I don t know what the reason was why he
would make a commitment like that. He didn t have to.
He was attorney general. It s a well-paid job. You
get elected a couple of times. You get retirement no
matter what happens. Why he did it I don t know.
Fry: Howser tried to sue Drew Pearson for libel, for saying
that he might not have been an angel in all this.
Sherry t Yes, there was a lawsuit, but he lost it.
Fry: Former attorney general Bob Kenny took Drew .Pearson s
case .
Sherry: There was a young man employed fulltlme in that case.
Fry: George Arnold, the son-in-law of Pearson?
Sherry: Yes, he was his son-in-law, and his father was Thurman
Arnold, the great lawyer. Incidentally George Arnold
worked with the crime commission because he was encountering
a lot of stuff, so he traded information.
Fry: Kenny mentions that George Arnold had collected informa
tion on Howser for a year. He had been sent out to
work here. I wondered if he came to the commission.
129
Sherry: Yea, we saw George frequently during those years.
Fry: Looks like you had a good free investigator there.
Sherry t Yes, he was working in his direction. There was a lot
of stuff that he turned up with that was no use to him,
but was useful to us, and vice versa. We had a good
working relationship there.
Fry: What did Howser do to the Bureau of Identification and
Investigation in the attorney general s office?
Sherry: He kind of isolated it. George Brereton was the chief
of the bureau, but it was under Lentz actually; it was
part of Lentz *s responsibility. Brereton was just
isolated. He was just left to be director of the bureau.
Before that and after that, he always played a very
active part in the law enforcement activities of the
attorney general s office. But during the Howser
administration he was Just recording fingerprints,
that s all.
One of the first things that Brown did that became
my responsibility as chief assistant attorney general
on the criminal side the first thing that I did was
to take all of these people who had been floating
around with Lentz, and assign them to the CII with
Brereton, to be his people, responsible to him, because
he was a good administrator and a good personnel
director, so they were all told to move to Sacramento.
This had the effect of resignations or several of them,
whom we didn t want and whom we hoped would resign.
Those that were left went kicking and screaming
up to Sacramento where George got them shaped up
and trained them. He was able to evaluate them and he
reported back which of the guys were pretty good,
which would be helpful, could be used. Then we began
making our assignments. We assigned a couple down to
Los Angeles, a couple to San Francisco, some at
Sacramento. We made a pretty good working organization
out of it.
Strangely enough, there was a very young man
that was in that bureau that Howser assigned as body
guard, if you can believe it, to Mickey Cohen when
Mickey Cohen was getting shot at. He assigned
130
Sherry: one of these fellows, a fine-looking young man, who was
very seriously wounded in one of the assassination attempts
on Mickey Cohen (strangely enough Just outside of
"Sherry s Restaurant" in the Strip area in Hollywood).
This guy was pretty badly hurt. He recovered. We
were very suspicious of him. We shipped him up to
Brereton, and he very soon came back, Brereton saying
that he was a very fine young man and would make a
good investigator. Which he did. I don t know what
ever happened to him, but he was a good man.
Fry: Is that commonly done, that an attorney general can
assign bodyguards to private citizens?
Sherry: No, I ve never heard of it being done before or since.
Fry: I thought maybe I had missed something.
Sherry: No. That s a police department s job.
I think one or two of Cohen s chieftains were
killed in that ambush, but not Mickey.
The Mafia and Organized Crime In California
Fry:
Sherry:
Fry:
Was this the Mafia in California?
mention anything about the Mai ia.
Your report doesn t
I don t think there is one. I don t believe in it.
I think it s a fiction. There are Isolated Italian
groups in various parts of the urban areas, along the
Northeast coast, and in Chicago, who engage In
criminal conspiracies of one kind and another, but
they are not beholden to anybody else. They are Just
individual groups. They know each other. They may
exchange information and from time to time cooperate.
But in a sense that this is a kind of corporate organiza
tion which has a board of directors and passes out
orders all across the country, that s a lot of nonsense.
That does not exist at all.
The next crime commission report made quite a big
point of the Mafia and Its activities.*
*See Final Report of the Special Crime Study Commission
on Organized Grime, State of California, Sacramento,
California, May 11, 195;*
131
Sherry: It may have, but nobody has ever Identified the Mafia
as such. The FBI has put together cases against a
dozen or so of these Italian types out of the Boston
area and New York. There s no question that they are
involved in gangs, but these are largely local. I don t
think there s any connection with the Genoveses and
that crowd in Chicago and the people in Boston at all.
The only thing they have in common is, for the most
part, they are of Italian ancestry and from Sicily,
where the Mafia originated.
Cohen was an ex-prize fighter who was pretty handy
with his fists, and he was able to extort from people
by beating them up and that kind of thing. He Just set
up a protection racket for only one thing and that was
the bookmakers, hole-in-the-wall people, cigar store
operators, that kind of thing, where horse race bets
were taken.
For a set fee he would provide them with a kind
or watch service; that is, the bookie would be phoned
every half hour. If the phone was not answered it
would be assumed that he had been arrested. An
attorney with his habeus corpus all ready, and bail,
would be dispatched to the Jail. Many times the lawyer
got there with his writ of habeus corpus before the
prisoner did. It was a very efficient service. It
would get the man out and back in business right away
again. If there was someone who didn t comply, they
wouldn t go in and beat him up and, more, he would
simply be deprived of his wire service. He couldn t
get any telephone serivce. So he came around quite
quickly.
He had a clothing store, so-called, very fancy,
very expensive clothing. I suppose a lot of people
paid what; was in those days an outrageous price,
like $300 for a man s suit. He didn t want the suit at
all. He didn t get $300 worth, but bought it.
He would Invite the newspaper men out there for
a conference. He d say, "Fellows, take a tie, a
Micky Cohen tie." They would walk over to the $ll>
tie rack. He would say, "Take one. This is my
Mickey Cohen souvenir." It was quite a badge of
honor for a newspaperman to get a Mickey Cohen tie
off the $10 rack. It was probably worth a dollar.
132
Sherry: That was Mickey s thing, and Mickey ran afoul of
the Dragna group. The Dragna group was another, you
could call them a "Mafia" group, but a local Los
Angeles group. At least they all had Italian names.
They were In the same business. There was rivalry
there. Some of their members got into drug importation
from Mexico.
Pry: That was one of the things I wondered about, the drug
problems at the time.
Sherry: When the commission was in business, the Dragnas were
very much in business. One of their group, whose
name I can t recollect, told the federal authorities
all about it. He testified before the federal grand
jury in Los Angeles. He was an Armenian ("Abraham
DavidianJ. When he did this, of course, he marked
himself for retaliation, typical Mafia-type retaliation,
by the Dragna group with which he was associated.
He was assassinated in the course of giving testimony
before the grand jury about those operations.
During all of this time after he had told the
story, while he was waiting for the grand jury, and
during the grand jury investigation, he was carefully
hidden by the FBI. This was a federal case. They
had him down in Arizona and various other places. He
was always with an FBI man. But he got tired of it.
One day after testifying he said, "Hell, I m going
to go home. I m going to go to Fresno," where he came
from. "I m going to stay with my brother." One of
cur investigators, a nice young man, an ex- FBI
character, happened to be around and said, "I m going
back to San Francisco through Fresno. I ll give you
a ride bacK." This was a very, very foolish thing
for him to have done. There was a terrible risk involved
in that sort of a business. But he did and got away
with it. Tom Judge, I think his name was. He got away
with it. He left this man in Fresno and came on in.
Warren Olney was just outraged that he could have
taken a chance like that. There might have been an
anbush any place along the road.
The man stayed in Fresno with his brother, who
remained with him all the time except one noon hour
when he stepped outside because he had run out of
cigarettes. He was gone ten minutes. He came back,
and the witness was dead with a bullet in his head right
133
Sherry: where he had been left sleeping. He was shot by a
sniper through a window.
When that happened, everybody, the FBI, the local
police, the sheriffs, our people, everybody went down
there. They must have Inspected every inch of ground
and every room in that whole doggone community trying
to get a clue as to who could have done it. They looked
at all the airplane lists of incoming people a month
back, all the registrations in the hotels. Everything
possible was done. Absolutely no clue whatsoever.
This was a professional killer. He never leaves a clue.
It s very easy if you want to go out and kill somebody?
you can do it and you can get away with it. Read the
papers lots of people do get away with it.
You could descrioe the Dragna outfit as being a
Mafia operation. Its operation, however, was confined
to Southern California. It operated only in Los
Angeles. Nor did it monopolize the business. It had
a war with Cohen in which Cohen lost all of his henchmen,
his leaders. His numbers were reduced to nothing.
But they were not a Mafia. It s not true that there
is one in California.
Organized Crime and Politics
Fry: In your report you describe how a tremendous amount
of money and power that organized crime accumulates
is brought to bear on political campaigns. I wondered
who was it and what political elements besides Howser
wore most involved and might have profited the most.
Sherry: The only group that I think we really got on to, where
we could name names and amounts of money, was the Kern
County Music Association, which purported to be the
operators of Juke boxes. But really they were the
operators of the slot machines as well as the Juke
boxes. They assessed themselves a lot of money which
was transmitted to Howser through a lawyer who somehow
or other was compelled to disclose that this happened.
But there was no way then of knowing, because
Sherry: there were no campaign contribution disclosure laws at
all. As a matter of fact, that s one of the reasons we
now have disclosure laws, inadequate as they may be.
At least we have something now on the books. Now you
have to go through shenanigans to beat the disclosure
laws, as Watergate tells us. And you leave tracks
when you do that.
But when you would see a relatively obscure or
not politically potent person suddenly appearing in an
election, let s say for the state legislature, you
get suspicious. All 01 a sudden he is spending huge
amounts of money. He has billboards, and everybody
knows that billboards cost thousands of dollars a month.
The big billboard in California came to be a kind of
sign of corruption because of that. So for a long time
candidates avoided them. "No billboards. I don t want
any billboards." Lots of times, of course, bill
boards were given free to candidates by the sign
companies, who were Interested in legislation which would
protect the billboards and not permit them to be knocked
down . That was another way of taking care of things .
You never find cash or checks or that kind of thing,
but that s the way it s done.
Fry: Samlsh describes some of this too, how you can simply
give the candidate the printing services that he needs
or blllooards or something like this.*
Sherry: These people are very, very clever indeed in how tney
operate. If they can get the money transmitted to
the candidate, for example, then they get the candidate
in the embarrassing position or "Shall I return it?
If I return it, will it be known? Here it is."
It s easy to say, "Well, forget it. 1*11 take it.
didn t make any promises."
In Pat s I Brown s] second election campaign
[for attorney general] it turned out after the campaign
that his treasurer, who thereafter deserted him and
became a Republican, had received a very large sum of
money from a very prominent, wealthy liquor distributor
in San Francisco. At the beginning of the campaign
there were strict orders, "No donations are to be
*See Samlsh, Arthur Tl. and Thomas, Bob, The Secret Boss
of California, Crown .Publishers, Inc., New York, M.Y.,
1971.
135
Sherry: taken from the liquor Industry at all." It was Just
a blanket rule, so there wouldn t be any kinds of
problems. The Samish thing was fresh in everybodies
minds and Pat said, "The heck with it, we won t take
it from anybody, not even my friends."
This one happened to be a personal friend, and
Lt did not necessarily mean a corrupt donation at all.
The treasurer took the money. It was a handsome sum
for those days, $6000 or $7000, In that neighborhood.
Of course, a newspaper found it out and published It.
"Brown takes money from so-and-so." I never saw Pat
more disturbed in all my life. He was thrown into
a state of very deep shock. He got hold of his treasurer
and said, "How could you do this to me?" "Well, I
thought we needed the money, Pat." He had an agonizing
time about that, but he said of course, "The money goes
back right now, Immediately." Which it did.
Then he called a press conference and said what
happened, that it was without his permission and his
knowledge and the money had been returned.
But that doesn t make any difference. The newspaper
impression remains. That nasty little thing kept
cropping up for about six or seven months. You d go
to a meeting, "Well how about the attorney general s
taking the money from that man?" So it would all have
to be explained all over again.
Fry: As I remember it, at that time a candidate only had
to report the contributions that were made to him
personally.
Sherry: Yes, that was one gambit. But it wasn t quite that
simple. You didn t have to, for the primary election,
report all of your contributions, only those received
personally, and you had to report it under oath. In
the general election you had to report everything, but
it didn t have to be under oath. It was some crazy thing
like that.
Tne Impact of the Crime Commission
Fryt
Since you have continued in the criminal Investigation
136
Fry: scene, can you evaluate the extent of organized crime
now as it compares with California then? Was this an
unusually large flare-up of organized crime?
Sherry: Yes, it was. They owned transcontinental telegraph
lines. One of the people who was active in that big
line almost secured, financial control of Western Union.
It was some chap in St. Louis. They had open gambling,
horse parlors, betting parlors all over as described
in the report.
We have very unrealistic gambling laws in my
judgment today, but now there aren t any slot machines
ir. California. I sure haven t seen one in this state
anywhere since those days. That racket has gone. The
horse race betting, the bookmaking, the off-track
betting is now relatively small in scope. They are
small operators. I ve seen no evidence at all, except
local groups who are "laying off" on covering their
bets with gambling financiers, the banker types, but
that s Just a matter of underwriting betting agencies
money; that doesn t imply any local control or local
corruption. But they get broken up regularly by the
FBI and by the local police it they try Interstate
communications. They don t exist in open defiance of
the law as they did then.
The volume they handle by way of betting is
nothing on the order of what it used to be. These
people are too small and unorganized. Organized crime
exists when you can control about five or eight or
ten of these groups; then you ve got something very
powerful. But this has not occurred so far as I know.
I ve never seen any evidence of it at all in recent
years. But sometimes you ll see a policeman get up
and make a big speech about the big problem of coping
with organized crime. You can be dam sure he s looking
for appropriations from somebody. He needs more equipment,
more men. He s using the crime menace to get more money.
The Kefauver Committee and the Crime Commission
Fry: The Kefauver Committee came in about that time. I
wonder how that related to the operations of the crime
137
Fry: commission?
Sherry: There was considerable cooperation. Their agents came
out here. Those Kefauver hearings were held in San
Francisco and were televised Just the way the Watergate
hearings are now being televised. The one they centered
on in San Francisco was Samlsh. He was the star of the
show. In calling witnesses before one of those committees
there are just hours and days and months ahead of time
spent in preparation by people ferreting out witnesses,
taking their statements. This Watergate hearing is
Just taking an awful lot of people and hours and hours
of work Just for an hour or two of committee hearing.
We worked with their advance people, gave them a
lot of Information, filled them in, aided and assisted
them, but we had no direct connection. All this was a
United States Senate investigation, and there was no
corresponding governmental unit in California. We
watched the operation with considerable interest.
Fry: Was there any problem with the Kefauver people wanting
access to your records, and your not wanting to grant
access to your investigation records to them, because
they contained unproven accusations?
Sherry: I don t remember anything like that specifically. I
Just don t remember. I had left the crime commission
at that time and I was no longer associated with it. I
would suspect, however, that the commission would have
been very careful with the files. But "Did you have
any interview with X? What did he say? M We d say,
"Well, you go and ask him. If he has anything to say
he will give you the information. We can t show you our
report."
The diificulty was that you were never sure how
you were going to control that report if you gave it
to somebody. Who else would he show it to? He might
return it, but he might have shown it to somebody else,
and you don t know. There you are. Your files may
get compromised.
That s what Is behind this business of L. Patrick
Gray, former FBI head giving the President s people
copies of files. Hoover was almost fanatical about
his files. He didn t permit anybody to see them at all.
He overdid it. But this is generally an Investigator s
136
Sherry: basic rule of thumb, unless It s a very limited thing.
Say that Berkeley police have caught a robber,
ana he is also wanted for robbery in Oakland. Both
cities will cooperate in their investigations and
exchange information. They 1 !! look at each other s
records? but these are local policemen, there s a mutual
exchange here.
But when you find someone coming in representing
a political figure, and it s a political investigation
and he wants a record, that s going too far. Or an
officer, somebody that you don t know, from out oi state
or from some area of the state where you have no
relations, again you cooperate as much as you possibly
can, but usually you will be very cagey aoout the
records.
Fry:
Sherry:
Fry:
Sherry:
Fry:
Sherry:
Can information you get from interrogating people under
oath be used as evidence later before a grand jury?
No, but it could be leaked to a newspaper. It
might be terribly damaging to somebody. Generally, It s
not admissible evidence because of the hearsay rule.
How did your commission findings function In the later
grand jury hearings in the various counties?
Anything that would have been important was subject to
subpoena, but a record of an interview normally is
hearsay. It has no evidentiary value. It has only
ordinary investigative value. The only kind of a
record with evidentiary value in that context would
be a written confession signed by someone. That s
admissible under the rules of evidence, not a report
of a conversation.
How were the results of your investigation, then, used
by county grand Juries?
We told them what we found and who the witnesses were.
We told them where to go. "Talk to that man down
there. Stop making threatening noises at your chief
of police and sit down and listen to what he has to
say, Go to the district attorney, he can help you, you
don t have to be suspicious." These people would get
suspicious of each other.
139
Sherry: Policemen, who are not elected people, tend to still
have distrust about what district attorneys do sometimes.
The district attorney is a political figure and a
policeman isn t. Sometimes police are very careful
what they tell district attorneys.
Fry: It s about noon, time for lunch. Thanks for giving
your time.
Sherry: Mot at all.
Transcribers! Jane West and Frances Berges
Final Typist Gloria Dolan
140
INDEX Arthur H. Sherry
agriculture, migrant laborers In Alameda County, 81-82
Alameda County Board of Supervisors, 80, 85, 92
Alameda County courthouse, 15-16
Alameda County District Attorney s Office. See District
Attorney s Office, Alameda County
Alameda County Peace Officers Association, 115
Alameda County taxpayer s association, 92
Alameda County Legal Aid Society, 12
Albany, city of
Police Department, 40
Armstrong, Barbara, 8
Arnold, George, 128-129
Athearn, Judge, 12
attorney general s office, state of California, 99-110, 122, 129
Becker, Sheriff Burton, case, 69-?0
Berkeley, city of
Justice court, 29
police department, 29, 31-33, 57, 61
Berkeley picketing oases, 31-34
Bledsoe, Olive, 15, 26
Bolger, Duke, 126-128
bookmaklng. See gambling
Brereton, George, 129-130
Bridges, Harry, 32, 77
Brown, Edmund G. ("Pat"), 62, 112, 123, 129, 13^
Brown, Ralph, 116
Burke Honorah, 2
Busch, James, 106, 110
Caddel, Wiley, 106, 108-109, 124-128
California, state of
constitution, amendments to, 29
Crime Commission, 48, 99-106, 110-139
Dept. of Corrections, 100
Dept. of Justice, Division of Criminal Identification
and Investigation, 129
Youth Authority, 91
California District Attorneys Association, 64, 106, 122-124
California Peace Officers Association, 64
Caldecott, Tom, 116
141
Chamberlain, Richard, 65
Chotiner, Murray, 105
Christian, T.L. , 52-53
"Clair de Lune" murder case, 4-9-50
Coakley, J. Prank, 3, 21-22, 42, 65-66, 68-69
administration of Alameda County DA s office under, 34, 40,
96-98
Coakley, Thomas, 3, 96
Coffee, Ralph, 14-15
Cohen, Mickey, 100, 129-133
Communist party, 33, 81, 84-85
crime, organized, ?2-?6, 99-106, 110-139
Crime Commission, California. See Special Crime Study Commission
on Organized Crime
criminal procedures, 29-30, 44-45
"copping a plea" 55, 95
interrogations, 53 56-61, 138
investigations, 25, 37-39, 56
search and seizure, 53, 71-72, 74-75
secret listening devices (wiretapping), 53-55
time on trial, 34, 124-125
criminal syndicalism, 85-86
Costlgan, George, 8
Davidian, Abraham, 132
DeWitt, General John, 87-89
district attorney s office, Alameda County
administration of, 16-18, 21-25, 28, 33-35, 37-38, 40-43,
56-57, 63, 90-98
assignment of oases, 41-42
Berkeley office, 28-38
investigative division, 38-40, 45, 56
lobbying by, 64-67
personnel, 15, 40-41, 43, 93, 95-96
politics in, 51-53, 63
raids conducted by, 74-75, 101, 104
relations with law enforcement, 35-37, 43-48, 63-64
relations with courts, 45-46
relations with press, 49-51
salaries, 26, 95
training, 18-22, 24-25
Dragna gang, 100, 132-133
election campaigns
1946 101, 123-124
1950 118, 13^-135
Elkington, Norman, 62
Emerson, Polger, 12, 93, 97
evidence, rules of, 53, 67-68, 138
142
family law, 8
FBI, 131-133, 137
Federal Register. 63
Ferrier, Warren, 8
Fletcher, Lawrence, 25-26
fraud cases, 21, 26-28, 56
Freitas, Manuel, 2
Freitas Press, 36
Friedman, Monroe, 74
gambling, 11, 66, 70-71, 73, 74-76, 99, 101, 103-105, 115-118, 131
gambling ships, 101-102
General Strike of 1934, 76-79
Gibson, Lllburn, 107-108
Gladstein, Richard, 33
Glavlnovlch, John, 40
Gosden oaae, 68
graft cases, 46, 56, 68-70, 106-110, 120-129
grand Jury, Alameda County, 28, 46-48
Greening, Jack, 31-33, 35-37
Griffin vs. California. 67
Grossman, Aubrey, 33- 34
Hagar, Gerald, 103
Haggerty, James L. , 5
Hardin, Marcus, 28
Harnett, William, 2
Harris, T.W. , 45-4-7
Helms, George, 39
Heller, Tiny, 104-105
Hoi ton, Karl, 91
Hoover, J. Edgar, 137
Hotle, Owen, 25
Howser, Frederick N. , 48, 73, 99, 102, 104-111, 119, 122-124,
126-129, 133
Hoyt, Ralph, 17-19, 21, 35, 49-50, 53, 79, 123
administration of DA s office under, 43, 93-96, 104, 106
Hunter, Bob, 21, 75, 82, 93
Hutchinson family, 46
Hynes, Adrlen, 26
Internal Revenue Service, and organized crime, 112-113
ILWU, 32-33, 77
IWW, 85
143
Jahnsen, Oscar, 5^
Japanese- American relocation, 86-89
Jeffers, William, 103
Jensen, Lowell, 98
Jerome, Black Jack, 71, 76, 101
Jester, Lloyd, 40, 45, 64
Judges, relations with Alameda County DA s office, 45-47
Judicial procedure, 29-30
comment on evidence, 66-68
grand Juries, 28, 46-48, 138
sentencing, 94-95
trials, expediting of, 34-35, 107-108
Juvenile crime, 102
Kefauver Committee, 136-137
Kelly, Mike, 46
Kenny, Robert, 101, 123, 128
Kern County Music Association, 133
Kldd, Alexander Marsden, 8
Kimmel, Husband E. , 88
King* Ramsay. Conner case. See shipboard murder case
Knight, Goodwin, 66
Knights of Columbus, 69-70
Knowland, Joseph R. , 51-52
Knowland, William, 52
Ku Klux Klan, 69-70
labor
agricultural, 31 81-82
organizing, 31-32, 81
strikes, 31-33, 76-79, 80
Labor Letter, 63
law enforcement agencies
lobbying, 115-117
mutual e.id pact, 106
relations with Alameda County DA s office, 44, 63-64
Leary, Mary Ellen, 108, 110, 116
legislature, California, 64-67, 73, 115-H8
Lentz, Walter, 104, 108-109, 119, 124-129
liquor industry, 134-135
lobbying, legislative, 64-67, 115-118
Los Angeles Times, 121
lotteries. See gambling
Lynch, Tom, 62
Lyon, Charles, 115-116
144
McMurray, Orin Kip, 8
Mafia, in California, 130-133
Mayer, Dorothy, 110
Meltzer, Leonard, 21-22, 34, in, 79
Mendocino County
slot machine prosecutions, 106-110
Mills Novelty Co. , ?2-73
Miranda v. Arizona. 58-59, 6l
Mosbacher, Cecil, 65, 110
Mudd, Harvey, 103
Murphy, Joseph, 25
National Labor Relations Act, 63, 81
Nazi party, 85-86
newspapers, 49-51, 108, 121, 135
Nixon, Richard, 105
Oakland Post-Enquirer. 49
Oakland Tribune. 4T7 48, 50-51
Oakley, James, 74, 91
Ogden, Prank, 68
Olney, Warren ill, 21, 35, 37, 42, 76-77, 79, 99, 101, 103-104,
10?, 110, 111-114, 119-122, 128, 132
Olson, Culbert, controversies with Warren, 80, 90-91
Orinda Country Club, 4l
Otis P. Murphy Co. , 116
Page. Captain, murder case, 59-60
paving scandal, Oakland, 46
Pearson, Drew, 128
People s World. 85
Perkins, George, 21, 42
politics, state
and organized crime, 133-135
Powers, Bob, 54
rackets, 69-70, 100-106, 109-111, 131-133
Radln, Max, 8
Ramsay, Ei-nest, 54
Rick, Al, 50
riot control, 83
Robinson, Harold G. , 103, 107, 114, 125-126
Rolph, James, 84
Roosevelt, James, 118
145
St. Mary s College, 3-5
St. Sure, Paul, 26
Samlsh, Artie, 115-11?, 123, 134, 137
San Francisco, city and county of
district attorney s office, 62
police department, 62
San Francisco Chronicle. 49, 108
San Francisco Examiner. 49, 108
San Francisco News, 108
San Jose lynching, 8 3-84
seamen s union, 76-79
Sherry, Arthur
club memberships, 30
crime commission work, 99-139
early legal experience, 11-13
education, 3-11
family, 1-4
head of Berkeley branch of the DA s office, 28-38
In attorney general s office, 129
in charge of criminal division, district attorney s office, 94
Joining the district attorney s office, 14-19
training at district attorney s office, 19-24
work in Oakland branch of the DA s office, 24-28
Sherry, Bernard, 1
Sherry Brothers, dairy business, 2
Sherry, John, 1
Sherry, Noel, 4
shipboard murder case, 54-55, 78-80, 90-91
slot machine rackets, 71-72, 106-110, 115-116, 133
Smallwood, Stanley, 22
Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime, 99-106, 110-139
Standley, Admiral, 99, 120
Stiles, Harry, 25
Stralla, Tony, 101
student protests, University of California, Berkeley, 30-31* 83
Teamsters Union, 32
Traynor, Roger, 8
University of California
Boalt Hall Law School, 7-11
communists in, 33
student protests, 31-32, 83
Social Problems Club , 32
146
Wade, Chick, 18
Wagener, Sam, 12
Warren, Earl
appointments to public office by, 17, 25, 4l, 90-91
as attorney general 52, 80, 90-91, 100-102
as governor, 101, 104, 107, 118-122. 124
campaigns, 52-53
relations with Knowland family, 51-53
standards of criminal procedure, 34-35, 62, 94-95
Webb, U.S. , 80
Wehr, Charles, 21, 35, 37, 42, 79
Westphal, Ted, 35
Whitney, Anita, 84-85
Wilson, Jim, 37-38
Witkins, Bernard, 11
Wollenberg, Al, 65
Youngs, Oliver, 29
Miriam Feingold
Graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963
with a B.A. degree, and from the University
of Wisconsin in 1966 with an M.A. degree in
American history. Completing requirements for
a fti.D. Jin American history from the University
of Wisconsin. Graduate studies also include
criminology.
Worked in field services and oral history
for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
1966-196?.
Taught American history at San Jose City
College, 1970.
Joined the staff of the Regional Oral History
Office in December, 1969 as an interviewer
for the Earl Warren Project specializing in
law enforcement and corrections, and local
political history.
Amelia R. Fry
Graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1947
with a B.A. in psychology, wrote for campus magazine;
Master of Arts in educational psychology from the
University of Illinois in 1952, with heavy minors in
English for both degrees.
Taught freshman English at the University of Illinois
1947-48, and Hiram College (Ohio) 1954-55. Also
taught English as a foreign language in Chicago 1950-53.
Writes feature articles for various newspapers, was
reporter for a suburban daily 1966-67. Writes pro
fessional articles for journals and historical magazines.
Joined the staff of Regional Oral History Office in
February, 1959.
Conducted interview series on University history,
woman suffrage, the history of conservation and
forestry, and public administration and politics.
Director, Earl Warren Oral History Project
Secretary, Oral History Association; oral history
editor, Journal of Library History. Philosophy, and
Comparative Librarianship.
