He rose from being a flatfoot in...

He rose from being a flatfoot in the Los Angeles Police Department to become chief of police, and then the city’s highest public servant--its mayor. No one before or since has ever done both.

But he found greater fame in a seemingly endless series of personal scandals.

Even before Missouri-born Charles Edward Sebastian was appointed police chief in 1910 after 10 years on the force, his handsome looks caused Angelenas to sigh when he passed them on the street. In a city of big-bucks political muscle, Sebastian had instead worked his way up from ranch foreman to railroad grip man, sanitation inspector to police officer.

His bold initiative made him a local hero; as police chief, he helped capture a railroad employee who walked into the police station wearing a grotesque mask and carrying 53 sticks of dynamite and threatened to blow the place up. Sebastian’s friends begged him to run for mayor.

After he acquiesced and announced his candidacy, his political troubles began.

Three months before the 1915 election, Sebastian and a high-ranking police officer were indicted in the death of William Jackson, a disabled homeless man who was beaten to death in jail Jan. 30, 1915. The indictment had apparently been concocted by his political enemies, and the matter was dropped within days.

That gave Sebastian second thoughts about running, lest the campaign disclose his longstanding relationship with a woman named Lillian Pratt.

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His political enemies tried anew. Two months before the election, he was arrested again and accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor--Pratt’s sister, 16-year-old Edith Serkin.

The trial ended less than three weeks before the election. Serkin testified sensationally that she always accompanied her sister when she visited Sebastian in Room 17 of the Arizona Hotel at 330 W. 1st St. She said she watched them “dally sexually.”

But jurors acquitted him. Thousands hailed the verdict with a torchlight parade down Broadway. Sebastian, in the uniform of chief of police, waved and bowed from a chauffeur-driven automobile.

Then, on May 31, the eve of his certain election as mayor, someone fired two shots at him, barely missing. Once again, Sebastian’s enemies used it to their advantage: Sebastian was arrested on Election Day and charged with framing an assassination plot to boost his campaign.

Either in spite of it or because of it, he was still elected mayor. These charges, too, were soon dropped.

And despite all the scandal and turmoil, Sebastian continued to see Pratt. Once he was mayor, he became bolder. On an official trip with his wife, Elsie, he wrote Pratt several love letters. One said: “I wish you could have been along, instead of the Old Haybag.” Sebastian neglected to mail the epistles and Mrs. Sebastian discovered them.

Her rage was so great that she took the letters to the Record, a newspaper that shared her disappointment with the mayor. The paper ran the letters on Page 1 under this large headline:

“THE HAYBAG LETTERS!”

Now the good folk who had once cheered him turned their backs. Sebastian slipped rapidly into disfavor and resigned in September, 1916, after barely a year in office. He only said that poor health prompted him to bring his career to an end.

He tried to run a grocery store. He sold drinks at a dance pavilion. He even attempted to open a detective agency, but was denied a license “in the best interest of the public,” the prison board declared.

The district attorney who once tried to put him behind bars finally gave him a job as an investigator. But he left the district attorney’s office and began what was to prove his last career: running a gas station at Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. He earned enough to send his only son, Charles Francis Sebastian, through Stanford Medical School.

In 1921, Mrs. Sebastian tried for a third time to divorce him. (Her earlier attempts, charging desertion, failure to provide and mental suffering, had been denied.) This time her accusations involved social standing. Her husband had let his membership in the Masonic Lodge lapse, causing her to lose her position in the Order of the Eastern Star, the Masonic auxiliary. A judge granted the divorce.

Loyal Lillian Pratt had stayed with him through scandal and divorce. Together with their dog, Barker, they rented a secluded cottage in Venice, where they did live happily ever after.

After years out of the public eye, Sebastian suffered a stroke and, scarcely able to move or speak, was wheeled up and down the street by his longtime mistress.

On April 17, 1929, Sebastian died at the age of 56 in the arms of the woman who had shared his triumphs and shame, but never his name.