Powerful L.A. Couple Fell From Prominence

He was L.A.’s top official lawyer; she was his wife. Together, they were powerful players in the city’s political backroom deals. They ran the city attorney’s office together, and together were convicted of corruption and wound up behind bars.

Erwin “Pete” Werner and his wife, “Queen Helen,” as she was known in 1930s political circles, were central figures in a liquor-license scandal that reached all the way to Sacramento.

Their fall was as dramatic as their rise to power, yet their names are virtually absent from the history books on the shady side of Los Angeles politics. Details for this article come from Los Angeles Times news accounts and court records.

In 1920, Helen McCollum, a pretty, apple-cheeked Tennessee girl, came to California, where she met and married Werner, a Wisconsin-born tax attorney in the state controller’s office in Los Angeles.

Helen had lofty career aspirations for her tall, 200-pound husband. But in the meantime, she settled for a white colonial house in Azusa called Magnolia Farms -- a mere steppingstone in her grand dreams.

When Werner vaulted onto the ballot to run for Los Angeles city attorney in 1929, Helen managed his campaign, throwing lavish parties and seven-course meals to woo the city’s elite, even serving liquor during Prohibition. Werner was on the ballot with fellow Republican and mayoral candidate John C. Porter, a Bible-quoting teetotaler. Both men won, but they would never see eye to eye.

During most of Werner’s term, his wife played an unofficial role as his executive secretary, in an office next to his. Behind the scenes she made friends, influenced people in high places and fired attorneys that she didn’t like, all with her husband’s support.

Early on, rumors of criminal conduct began to surface about the Werners. In 1930, a year after her husband’s election, Helen was already so powerful that she managed the gubernatorial campaign of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Buron Fitts. He lost, but she managed to court votes and support for her husband’s planned reelection campaign, throwing galas at their home for guests that included the entire USC football team.

By 1932, the couple had enemies as well as powerful friends. One afternoon as the Werners drove home, a bullet pierced their windshield, spraying them with glass and leaving them shaken. Werner shrugged it off as a stray bullet, “probably fired by some young boy out for target practice.” An investigation turned up nothing.

That same year, the state controller appointed Helen to the plum position of “inheritance tax appraiser” for the Pasadena courts. The controller was the same official who had employed her husband as a tax attorney. The Los Angeles Bar Assn. protested, calling the appointment a political payoff. When she became a political liability, the controller dismissed her.

A week before the 1933 primary, in which Werner was seeking reelection, a Los Angeles County grand jury began looking into rumors of the couple’s wrongdoing, including reports that they had dipped into city coffers.

“It’s dirty politics,” Helen said. “Silly talk” and “campaign lies, that’s all it is.”

Werner lost in the primary, but the grand jury investigation continued. It was headed by their onetime friend Fitts, the district attorney. Werner opened a Los Angeles law office that allegedly came to serve as a front for his wife’s under-the-table liquor-licensing business.

In 1934, after the Fitts investigation came to naught, Helen began laying the groundwork for her husband’s run for state Senate -- until she was indicted by federal officials.

She was accused, along with an appellate court judge and a businessman, of conspiring to obstruct justice by accepting a bribe from a man who wanted to get his mail-fraud indictment dismissed. The so-called Italo Petroleum case ended her husband’s attempt at a new political career. He dropped out of the race -- even though jurors deadlocked in the first trial. In the retrial, the judge and the businessman were convicted, while Helen went free.

Through all of this, Helen worked for a member of the state Board of Equalization. It was in this post that she earned the moniker “Queen Helen,” for her reputed ability to fix criminal charges through friends in high places and to collect bribes or payoffs for granting or restoring liquor licenses.

In 1936, Gov. Frank Merriam appointed auditors to investigate suspicions of graft and corruption in the Board of Equalization. The probe would continue on and off through the 1950s.

The Werners were among at least 40 people targeted. Investigators tapped the Werners’ phone and took documents from their office, including Helen’s potentially damaging “little black book” with lists of names and dollar figures that prosecutors believed were payoffs.

The Werners and their partner -- the same businessman who had been tried with Helen and convicted of bribery -- were charged with soliciting bribes.

“It’s a political frame-up,” Helen said. As she was being ushered through the Hall of Justice, she slapped a newspaper photographer, knocked his camera to the ground and jumped on it. On the way out of the building, she smashed the camera of another photographer who was sharing the elevator with her.

“I’m plenty mad!” she shouted. “This is the rottenest deal there ever was. But I’ll capitalize on it. I’ll fix Fitts.”

At the trial, jurors heard Dictaphone recordings of Helen talking about a client she was charging $500 to restore a revoked liquor license. “Say, she is getting off cheap,” Helen said on the recording. “Do you know what we charged those folks in South Pasadena? Twenty-five hundred bucks.”

Several Board of Equalization members testified that “Queen Helen” gave them Rose Bowl tickets and trips to Palm Springs as sweeteners. Another testified that he met her on the train to Sacramento, where she boasted she was traveling to meet with Board of Equalization members and master lobbyist Artie Samish, the self-proclaimed “Secret Boss of California.” He controlled the Capitol by using liquor-industry funds to “select and elect” legislators and keep them happy. Samish used to brag that he could tell in an instant whether a lawmaker needed “money, a girl or a baked potato,” but then he got caught.

(The two-decade liquor-license scandals ended in the 1950s with Samish and at least nine other people, including two assemblymen, going to prison, paying fines or fleeing the country. One man committed suicide. Samish paid nearly $1 million in fines and settlements and spent 26 months in federal prison.)

In March 1937, after three hours of deliberation in Helen’s “little black book” case, jurors returned not-guilty verdicts. Helen dramatically collapsed against her husband and began weeping.

One juror, Pearl Matthewson, said she couldn’t vote to convict after the Werners’ co-defendant turned prosecution witness in exchange for getting charges against him dropped. “If anyone was guilty, they all were,” Matthewson said. “It wouldn’t have been fair to the Werners.”

The Werners’ freedom lasted just seven months. They were caught in a state sting and charged with soliciting a bribe to fix a grand theft charge against a client. This time, in April 1938, they were both convicted of soliciting a bribe and grand theft and sentenced to two to 10 years.

Werner appealed and was freed on bond after several months behind bars. While his wife was serving her sentence -- reduced to 10 months for good behavior -- he served her with divorce papers, accusing her of mental and physical cruelty. It would take 15 separations over the next six years before their divorce was final.

While Werner was out on bond, he was brought before the state bar for ambulance-chasing. His law license was revoked for six months, then reinstated by the state Supreme Court in 1939. The following year, the same court threw out his convictions.

Disbarred again in 1944 for unspecified acts of “moral turpitude and dishonesty,” Werner worked over the next 10 years as a delivery truck driver for the American Red Cross, a clerk and brakeman for a railroad and a law clerk.

The now-divorced Werners continued to live together. Helen was back in court at least twice on drunk-driving charges before she died in 1947, at age 60.

The State Supreme Court reinstated Werner to the bar in 1954. He remarried twice before dying in 1975, at age 82.