Colorful Bondsman Dies : Death: Irving Glasser, long a Downtown fixture, provided bail for some notorious characters.

Bail bondsman Irving Glasser, who put many of this city’s most notorious characters back on the street before the ink on their fingerprints had dried, has died.

From his musty-smelling Downtown storefront office on South Main between 1st and 2nd Streets he had put up appearance bonds for such clients as mobster Mickey Cohen and wife-killer L. Ewing Scott while establishing a colorful identity akin to those of his flamboyant customers.

The 92-year-old Glasser died Wednesday at his home in West Los Angeles, said Marvin Byron, a nephew.

Glasser was the last of two brothers who in the 1920s opened offices in Central Los Angeles that operated 24 hours a day and were near the Los Angeles Police and county Sheriff’s Department jails.

Boasting signs that read, “We Never Close,” they wrote nearly $10 million worth of bonds each year in their heyday, keeping 10% as their profit.

Of the two brothers (Louis died in 1973), Irving was probably the more colorful.

A onetime boxer (who fought under the name Kid Glasser), he sat for decades at his desk inside a glass booth answering a phone that rang constantly. And he dressed the part, wearing pink sports coats, plaid slacks and two-tone shoes.

He had been in the bail bond business since he was 15, working his way through USC by boxing and selling newspapers, he told The Times in 1976.

He graduated with a law degree in 1927 but had studied law only to smooth his way in the bail bond business.

As he was increasingly identified as bondsman for the dozens of bookmakers arrested in the city each week or as the Cohen gang’s personal bondsman, Glasser gradually became a public figure himself.

In 1951 he was questioned by Sen. Estes Kefauver’s Senate Crime Investigating Committee about his links to Cohen and was reportedly involved in gambling operations himself.

He angrily dismissed the notoriety, saying, “I know a lot of people. I’m clean. We play it straight.”

Trust was the basis of his successful operation, whether the customer was a public figure seeking anonymity or an errant husband.

When Glasser told an attorney or a client, “I’m gonna get a guy out, he’s out,” he said. “We get calls from all over the country--lawyers with clients out here, politicians’ kids on dope. . . .

“We run our business like Sears. The bail schedule is our catalogue.”

His motto reflected that premise: “The most trusted name in the bail bond business.”

Glasser said the worst beating he ever took on a bond was $50,000 he lost when the customer skipped town before his court date.

He decried a growing move to what he called “the O.R. men,” agents who convince the courts that many prisoners can be released on their “own recognizance” and trusted to reappear.

“You know who’s going to get screwed” if bail bondsmen are driven out of business, he said in 1976. “The little people. Without bail bondsmen, the poor are going to stay in jail and the rich are going to get out because they’ve got property and can post their own bonds.”

(Nephew Gary Glasser, who with another nephew, Jerry Goldberg, has been running the business since Irving Glasser’s retirement in 1984, said that despite his uncle’s fears, revenues remain near all-time highs.)

Over the decades Glasser said he had seen the business reform itself. There was a time when it was not uncommon for a bail bondsman to ride on a bus transporting prisoners to jail while discussing their bail en route.

Glasser shared his wealth with several favored charities, among them Beth Israel Temple, the Medallions--a support group for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center--and the Westwood Shrine Club.

He cheerfully admitted to making a comfortable living off “the whores, rapists, robbers, drunks.”

The prostitutes were the worst, because they were the most likely to flee, explained one of Glasser’s associates.

“They got something they can sell anywhere in the country.”