Students Track Footsteps of the Law Downtown

This tour guide to history goes by the title of lawyer.

Bob Wolfe needs no script for his annual downtown Law Walk, a show-and-tell of where justice was meted out to a who’s who of Los Angeles’ famous and felonious.

Five years ago, Wolfe, a senior attorney for the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, dreamed up this concept. Each summer, he guides more than two dozen law students through 150 years of crime and punishment.

The tour is a bonus offering of the Public Counsel Law Center’s summer clerk program. Wolfe, a board member of the center, and Ted Zepeda, pro bono coordinator for the center, team up for this witty four-hour running -- well, fast-walking -- and fact-filled commentary.

The sites Wolfe points out include the courthouse that became a whorehouse only to revert to a courthouse and the former haunts of legal celebrities. Clarence Darrow’s Los Angeles office, for example, was in the penthouse of the Higgins Building, near St. Vibiana’s Cathedral.

This year’s tour began across the street from the County Courthouse at 1st and Hill streets. Wolfe began to lambaste the courthouse as “a crime,” with earthquake damage and asbestos problems. Zepeda put a finger to his lips and said, “Shush. Some of these kids work there.”

Appellate Justice William Bedsworth, who went along for the walk, sadly reminisced that the 1950s courthouse “used to be a pretty building” before age and leaks took a toll.

Wolfe noted that the courthouse was renamed a few years ago for the late state Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk, who began his judicial career at age 30, making him L.A.’s youngest trial judge.

Mosk, Wolfe said, was the judge in the 1955 trial of a onetime law student named John Crooker, who was convicted of murdering his Bel-Air employer and mistress, Norma McCauley. In 1959, as attorney general, Mosk supported Crooker’s successful crusade to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Mosk said Crooker’s was “a crime of passion based on an illicit relationship.”

“Crooker eventually was released,” Wolfe said. “That’s when he apparently started sending annual Christmas cards to Mosk.”

In 1912, the Central Police Station was at the southeast corner of 1st and Hill. One day, Wolfe said, “the human bomb, Carl Riedelbach, a.k.a. Carl Warr, walked into the chief’s office.”

Riedelbach wore a grotesque mask and carried a box of dynamite wired to a homemade contraption. He threatened to blow up downtown if the Red Car railway president didn’t raise workers’ wages -- including Riedelbach’s, of course.

After a two-hour standoff, Wolfe said, two detectives jumped Riedelbach, knocking him out and throwing the box into the street. It didn’t explode. He pleaded guilty to endangering human life and spent 12 years at San Quentin State Prison.

Then there was the pistol-packing Municipal Court Judge Noel Cannon, who threatened to give a police officer a “.38-caliber vasectomy” after he stopped her for excessively honking her horn in traffic. She also was known to hear cases with her pet Chihuahua on her lap -- until she was removed from the bench in 1975.

But Wolfe’s favorite story concerns a Superior Court judge who sued the Metropolitan News-Enterprise legal newspaper for libel, invasion of privacy and conspiracy. In 1992, the paper’s employees circulated a parody around the office, purporting to be a memo from Presiding Judge Ricardo Torres. Typed on a mock-up of the court’s letterhead, the “memo” included a seal with a facsimile of the initials stamp that Torres used.

The parody made it seem as if the newspaper had described Torres in print as a “despotic twit” and, as a result, the judge had ordered copies of the newspaper banned from the courthouse. The mock memo warned judges that after-hours searches would be conducted for the newspaper and “other contraband” and therefore advised judges and court employees to conduct their “amorous escapades” at “off-site locations.” The suit was dismissed in 1994.

Wolfe also mentioned Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California bar and the person for whom the criminal courts building was renamed in 2002. Hastings Law School tried to keep her out by arguing that the sound of her swishing skirts would distract the men and that education “would make a woman less womanly.” She sued and won.

Wolfe pointed out the nearby law library, now called the Justice Mildred Lillie County Law Library, for a pioneering appellate justice. Once it was the site of USC Law School, whose first Chinese American student graduated in 1924.

Pointing north past the Federal Courthouse toward Chinatown, Wolfe described the mid-19th century lawlessness of the little settlement, whose crime rate earned it the nickname “Los Diablos,” the Devils. In 25 years, Los Angeles recorded 35 vigilante hangings.

Henry Hazard, an attorney who later became mayor, tried to calm an angry white mob after a saloon owner was accidentally killed during a shootout between two Chinese gangs, Wolfe said. In what would go down in history as the Chinese Massacre of 1871, 20 Chinese were killed during two days of rioting.

“While 37 rioters were later indicted, only eight were convicted,” he said. “All were released within a year when the state Supreme Court threw out the case for lack of proof that any person was actually murdered. Chinese witnesses were statutorily barred from testifying.”

The students listened in silence. “The only history I know is Olvera Street,” said Kenneth Garrett, a native Angeleno attending Harvard Law School.

At the northwest corner of 3rd and Broadway, Wolfe pointed out the Irvine-Byrne Building, built in 1895 by Margaret Byrne Irvine of Irvine Ranch fame and her son, San Franciscan James W. Byrne. There, H. Claude Hudson, the son of a former slave, attended Loyola Law School by night while keeping up his dental practice to pay the bills. “Hudson became the school’s first African American law graduate in 1932,” Wolfe said. The dentist-lawyer was prominent in the legal battle to desegregate L.A. swimming pools and beaches.

Across the street, behind the Bradbury Building, Wolfe walked students through the timeline at Biddy Mason Park, memorializing the life of the former slave who turned her freedom into good deeds for others. In 1856, seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Los Angeles Judge Benjamin Hayes ruled that Mason and 13 other slaves brought to California were “entitled to their freedom and are free forever.”

Clare Kirui, a third-year law student at George Washington University Law School, said she was fascinated by the history more than the cases. “You don’t hear this every day.”

Among other spots on Wolfe’s tour: The Pacific Mutual building at 6th and Olive streets, where future President Nixon had an office, as well as the Three Stooges. Here, Wolfe mentioned the case of a Los Angeles artist who made and sold T-shirts with the Three Stooges’ likenesses. The Stooges’ heirs sued and won; the California Supreme Court ruled that heirs retain publicity rights for 70 years after a celebrity’s death.

“The thing that I like most about the opinion is the fact that it mentions ‘nyuk-nyuks’ and ‘whoop-whoop-whoops’ in the body of the opinion,” Wolfe said.

As for the courthouse turned whorehouse turned courthouse, the present-day Hall of Justice at Spring and Temple streets is on the same block where the Murrieta Building stood in the 1880s. The Murrieta housed two upper-floor courtrooms. When the judges moved to a new courthouse in 1891, madam Pearl Morton took over the place, attracting a legal and political clientele. Morton left downtown for Hollywood in the early 20th century, and the judges moved back.

“Things really did happen in L.A. before 1950,” said Lauren Liebes, a second-year Southwestern law student from back East. “I think it’s really cool.”