Grime and Punishment : Landmarks: The county Hall of Justice will close this month, a decaying shell of its former self. Its jail and courtrooms have been home to a ‘Who’s Who’ of L.A. felons.

Charles Manson found the accommodations substandard--”Stone Age,” he said. Hoping to make the best of things, he dropped a wire from a 10th-floor window and tried, unsuccessfully, to smuggle in marijuana and a hacksaw.

A generation earlier, Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel had a much nicer stay at the Hall of Justice. The county’s jailers allowed the dapper mobster to leave his cell and even provided him with a chauffeur for his clandestine “errands.”

Marilyn Monroe visited the Hall of Justice, too--her 36-year-old body was autopsied on a marble slab in the morgue--as did Philip Marlowe, the fictional detective.

When the 68-year-old Hall of Justice closes later this month, it will mark the final chapter in a colorful history of scandal, crime and punishment, the demise of a civic monument from the Los Angeles noir of Raymond Chandler and the Black Dahlia.

Los Angeles County built the square gray granite building at the corner of Temple Street and Broadway in 1925. The first building in the city’s new downtown Civic Center, the Hall of Justice once housed all the county’s criminal courts, along with the offices of the sheriff, district attorney and coroner.

Now only the Sheriff’s Department headquarters and 1,400 inmates remain. And even they will soon leave. Rather than spend the $80 million needed to renovate the dilapidated 15-story edifice, department officials are scheduled to transfer their administrative headquarters to Monterey Park by the end of the month.

The inmates will be transferred to a half-dozen other facilities pending the completion of a new jail in Lynwood early next year.

“I love this place, I’m going to miss it,” said Lt. Greg Morgon, who will be among the last in a long line of Hall of Justice jailers. “With all the history, it’s always been an institution unto itself.”

Entire rows of cells are already empty. The lonely narrow passageways and thick iron bars evoke the ghosts of the thousands of inmates who passed through here, from the days of Prohibition and speak-easies to the age of drive-by shootings and crack houses.

When the facility opened in 1926, at a cost of $6 million, it was the largest building in Los Angeles County. The jail was equipped with the latest technical innovations, including emergency telephones for guards. Walnut-paneled courtrooms filled two floors. The first-floor morgue had space for 68 bodies which, The Times reported, “may be kept indefinitely in air-tight, glass-enclosed cells.”

Almost immediately, the new building became a theater of real life controversy and scandal.

The fedora-clad members of the Los Angeles press corps scrambled through the marble-lined lobby to cover the arrest and trial of Hollywood stars and gangland personalities such as Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Rushing toward the manually operated elevators, the photographers took aim with their bulky Speed Graphic cameras amid a fusillade of flashbulbs.

Actor Robert Mitchum spent 50 days in the jail in 1949 on a marijuana possession charge. The press photographed the handsome young movie star in a variety of poses--one shot captures him mopping the floor of his cellblock.

Siegel was jailed in 1940 on gambling charges. When news of his special treatment was leaked to the press--one unconfirmed report had deputies serving him a pheasant dinner--it caused a scandal that led to the firing of the county’s top jailer.

After Siegel was shot and killed in a Beverly Hills mansion in 1947, Cohen ascended to the throne of the Los Angeles underworld. Known as the city’s “public nuisance No. 1,” Cohen served a six-month sentence in the Hall of Justice on a bookmaking charge.

Inevitably, as art imitated life, the courtrooms and cellblocks of the “Greybar Hotel” found their way into movies and literature.

In Chandler’s 1953 novel “The Long Goodbye,” police throw private detective Philip Marlowe in the Hall of Justice jail for three days. Marlowe begins Chapter Eight in the jail’s “felony tank.”

“The cellblock is clean and doesn’t smell of disinfectant . . . . The jail deputies look you over and they have wise eyes. Unless you are a drunk or a psycho or act like one you get to keep your matches and cigarettes . ... You sit on the bunk and wait. There is nothing else to do.”

Throughout the 1950s, sheriff’s officials faced a persistent problem in the basement crime vault: Mice were eating marijuana seized as evidence. Cats were brought in, to no avail. “Those mice are addicts,” one official commented at the time.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Hall of Justice hosted two of the most sensational trials in Los Angeles history, the cases of Sirhan Sirhan (charged in the assassination of Robert Kennedy) and the Manson Family (charged in the killings of actress Sharon Tate and six others).

Manson, described by the media of the day as a “shaggy-haired hippie,” watched most of his trial from a small, barred holding tank next to an eighth-floor courtroom. At one point in the trial, he lunged at the judge.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Vicent Bugliosi, had his office in the building. In his book “Helter Skelter” he describes the decor as “1930s Chicago.” Manson, meanwhile, was held in a tiny steel cell on the upper floors.

Outside the building, Manson’s female followers kept a strange vigil at the corner of Temple and Broadway. The barefoot young women carved Xs into their foreheads and promised to remain “until our father is released.” When members of “the hippie clan” began brandishing knives, several were arrested, including Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford in 1975.

To try Sirhan Sirhan, the county built a high-security courtroom on the 13th floor, just a few paces from the alleged assassin’s cell. Authorities feared “another Dallas,” says Undersheriff Bob Edmonds, referring to the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. The courtroom is now an “honor” dormitory in the cellblock housing the jail’s homosexual inmates.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the building had fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. A federal judge agreed with the contention Manson had made a decade earlier--jail conditions were cruel and primitive. The jail was closed temporarily in 1979, but reopened in 1982 when the county jail population surged to record highs.

These days, the brick walls are cracking and crumbling. The ancient sewer lines are dissolving. Not long ago, the sheriff’s vice squad found its files covered with sewage leaking from the ceiling.

One reason for the building’s decay, sheriff’s officials contend, is that over the years inmates have become a less respectable breed. Somewhere along the line, they started trashing the jail just for the fun of it. They flush their uniforms down the toilet to clog the plumbing. They dismantle the wire mesh on the windows and bunks to form “shanks,” or jailhouse weapons.

“There was a time when if you put up a sign that said ‘Don’t touch,’ the inmates respected that,” Lt. Morgon said. “Now, they’ll steal the sign.”

Some deputies say the only respectable criminals left in the jail are the “million-dollar” inmates, guys with seven-figure bails.

“They’re the nicest guys,” said Deputy Mike Abdeen. “Most of them are drug dealers. They’ve got a lot of money so they just want to do their time and get out.”

The relative ease with which people can smuggle contraband into the Hall of Justice jail makes it especially popular among some inmates, sheriff’s officials say. Often, inmates cast fishing lines from the upper floors to accomplices on the street below, hauling up small bags of cocaine and other drugs.

In fact, the jail’s archaic design is like the worst-case scenario in a criminal science textbook. There are dozens of blind spots--passages and stairways beyond the view of any guard--sites of stabbings and beatings that settle old jailhouse scores.

Inmates have tried to escape by fashioning ropes from blankets and rappelling 12 or more stories down the granite walls. Some have succeeded; others have fallen to their deaths. In 1959, during the heat of a drug trial in a seventh-floor courtroom, a defendant rushed to a window and leaped head-first to his death.

History again visited the Hall of Justice on the first night of last year’s riots, when an angry mob roamed the Civic Center. Inside the jail that night, both the inmates and deputies could hear the chanting and the breaking glass outside. Like Parisians storming the Bastille, small groups attacked the old building, trying, it seemed, to break in to the jail.

Soon, the remaining sheriff’s officials will pack up their files and decades of memories. Among the items to be moved: a dozen or so file cabinets of evidence from unsolved, 19th Century murders.

The fate of the building is an open question. Edmonds says it will be mothballed--used only for storage. Some have talked of tearing it down; others have said that a civic organization might eventually take over the prime downtown property.

“The county’s got a valuable piece of real estate here,” Edmonds said. “The building itself is the big liability.”

The Hall of Justice Built in 1925, the Hall of Justice has been host to some of the most infamous, tragic and controversial people in Los Angeles criminal history. The Sheriff’s Department plans to close the facility, including a 1,400-bed jail, at the end of this month . Among the building’s occupants:

Robert Mitchum, above left, spent several months in the lockup on a 1949 marijuana possession charge.

Mickey Cohen, above right, served six months for bookmaking in 1942.

Marilyn Monroe was autopsied in the coroner’s office after her death in 1962.

Sirhan Sirhan was tried in the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in a specially designed courtroom a few feet from his cell.

Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel spent several months in jail on murder charges in 1940.

Philip Marlowe, the fictional private detective created by Raymond Chandler, spent three days in the lockup in the 1953 novel “The Long Goodbye.”

Charles Manson was tried in an eighth-floor courtroom and found guilty in the cult killings of Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and four others.