Sharing a colorful past with old Hall of Justice

Judge Arthur L. Alarcon identifies with Los Angeles’ old downtown Hall of Justice:

It was built in 1925, the same year the federal appeals court judge was born, and is where he started his legal career more than 50 years ago.

Alarcon, 81, an avid walker and gardener, is in much better physical shape than the building, which closed in 1994 for safety reasons and over the years had fallen into shambles.

But Alarcon hasn’t abandoned his old haunt where he first practiced law as a 26-year-old prosecutor. This Italian Renaissance building -- where Marilyn Monroe was autopsied, murderer Charles Manson dangled a wire from his cell window and tried to smuggle in marijuana, and “gun moll” Barbara Graham fell down a flight of stairs -- is as much a part of Alarcon’s life as the stories inside its walls are part of L.A. history.

This month, the county began the first phase of what preservationists hope will be a complete renovation of the building. For now, a $16-million federal grant is being used for interior demolition and salvage of what’s left of its architectural accents.

It had been 30 years since Alarcon last set foot inside. But he got permission recently to give a reporter a guided tour of the premises, before a barbed-wire fence went up around it and demolition crews began work.

Alarcon, the casual historian, also commented on his family’s own legal legacy. His grandfather, a federal law enforcement officer in Mexico, fled to the United States during that country’s revolution in 1911, when Pancho Villa threatened to kill him. And one of his three children, Greg, is a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.

Alarcon chuckled as he remembered the law, order and disorder that took place before and during his tenure in the 15-floor building, including a disruptive murder defendant who spent his sanity trial strapped in a steel chair and encased in a soundproof glass booth -- one of the first times such a device had been used. Alarcon smiled recalling how colorful veteran criminal defense attorney Max Solomon -- whose clients included bookies, madams and gamblers -- showed up in court blowing a “taxi whistle” to announce his own arrival.

Among one of his most memorable cases, Alarcon presided over a three-judge panel in 1972 appointed by the Commission on Judicial Performance to consider the criminal charges against a fellow jurist.

The panel removed Municipal Judge Leland W. Geiler from the bench for using profane language, for arbitrarily removing public defenders from cases, for opening his judicial robe and revealing his naked body to a court reporter and for prodding a male deputy defender with a sex toy in chambers.

“We found the charges were true,” Alarcon said.

But the big cases that unfolded inside the old Hall of Justice aren’t all he remembers. Alarcon didn’t even need to go inside to begin pointing out historical features.

On the north side, where a parking lot now sits, a temporary courthouse once stood. Two years before construction began, in 1923, the county arranged for the 11,000-ton Alhambra Hotel, a former brothel, to be dragged 130 feet to that spot. That year Superior Court jurists opened courtrooms in the six-story concrete hotel with marble pillars.

Through heavy glass doors, Alarcon pointed out the first-floor space that had once been a receiving hospital. The crime vault, where mice once ate marijuana that had been seized as evidence, shared the basement with the morgue, where the bodies of Robert F. Kennedy and Sharon Tate were autopsied.

Near the first-floor wood-paneled elevators, Alarcon reminisced about Freddy, the long-time elevator operator. “She greeted everyone each morning with a warm smile,” he said.

The floors above housed the sheriff, county clerk, marshals, public defenders, stenographers, investigators, grand jury, jurists and media. It was a one-stop justice shop, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

Standing outside the old district attorney’s office on the sixth floor, Alarcon recalled a reception he attended in 1956 for former judge and newly elected Dist. Atty. William B. McKesson.

When a friend of McKesson’s asked the former judge what she should now call him, he replied, according to Alarcon, “Madame, when I took off my judicial robe, I lost my ‘honor.’ ”

Tramping up two more flights of stairs, Alarcon walked into the eighth-floor wood-paneled courtroom where he had prosecuted cases and, beginning in 1964, sat on the bench under gilded coffered ceilings and brass chandeliers.

Two of the most sensational trials in Los Angeles history -- those of Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy, and the Manson family, convicted of murdering actress Sharon Tate and six others -- took place on the eighth floor.

Alarcon recalled presiding over Sirhan’s arraignment and issuing the first gag order by a state judge. Dist. Atty. Evelle J. Younger challenged the order to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Alarcon’s ruling was upheld. The reason for the gag order, Alarcon said, “was because Mayor Sam Yorty announced Sirhan was guilty before the grand jury even convened to indict him.”

In the same courtroom where he argued cases, Alarcon was a front-row spectator in the 1956 sanity trial of James Merkouris, who had been convicted of killing his former wife and her new husband and sentenced to death.

“The judge,” Alarcon said, “threatened to bind and gag Merkouris for screaming obscenities during proceedings,” but before he had the chance, Merkouris grabbed prosecuting attorney J. Miller Leavy from behind -- and at that moment, Alarcon sprang from his seat and jumped on Merkouris’ back.

After deputies broke up the brawl, Merkouris spent the rest of the trial strapped in a steel chair bolted to the floor, encased in a soundproof glass booth, so his frequent outbursts would not disrupt proceedings. He was ultimately sentenced to death by another judge. In 1960, California Gov. Pat Brown commuted his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Merkouris died at Folsom State Prison in 1974.

In other courtrooms on the seventh and eighth floors, Alarcon often found himself opposite the fascinating defense attorney Gladys Towles Root, who, he said, “wore outsized hats, hobble-skirted, full-length dresses with plunging necklines and very large jewelry. She was the best cross-examiner I ever encountered.”

Climbing the last few flights of stairs, Alarcon opened the door to one of the top five floors reserved for jail cells. It was here, in 1968, that a special windowless cell and separate shower were built for Sirhan, to isolate him from other prisoners and keep him secure from many death threats.

The decline of the Hall of Justice began in 1972, with the opening across Temple Street of the Criminal Courts Building, later renamed the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. The coroner’s office left, and the sheriff’s headquarters moved out in 1993. The next year, the Northridge quake closed the building.

Alarcon himself moved to the Criminal Courts Building, then across Spring Street to the federal courthouse in 1978, when he was named an associate justice with the state Court of Appeal. A year later, he became the first Mexican American on the U.S. 9th Circuit, the nation’s largest federal appeals court.

On his way out of the hall after the tour, Alarcon put his hand on one of three archways at the Spring Street entrance. He recalled a cold, rainy night when he was a young prosecutor and a tiny woman wearing a shawl over her head walked up to him and threatened his life for sending her son to prison in a gang-related incident.

“ ‘I’m going to kill you,’ ” she told me, before walking away,” Alarcon said. “Now, 54 years later, I’m still here, looking at that same archway.”

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cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com