Seattle’s legacy of crooked cops
It’s a soggy September afternoon on Seattle’s First Avenue. The drizzle seems to wick the Skid Road stench out of the gutters, suspending it like a chlorine cloud. About 20 young Seattle cops in raincoats huddle on a side street, wondering just what they’re about to do. Assistant Chief Tony Gustin, the operation’s instigator and commander, briefs them, then leads the way. Tall, lanky, and prematurely gray, Gustin cuts a stern figureas he strides along the cracked sidewalks, past the honky-tonk bars and peep shows. He and his squad turn into Pike Place, file up the stairway behind DeLaurenti Foods, and march through the double doors of the Lifeline Club.
Scattered around the smoke-filled hall is an unlikely crew of criminal accessories:some 80 bingo players, housewives and silver-haired ladies with Frederick & Nelson shopping bags propped against their folding chairs. They are studying rows of 10-cent bingo cards, waiting for their numbers to be called.
One of the policemen steps to the front of the hall, displays a warrant, and announces that everybody is under arrest. The baffled patronsreceive written citationsfor illegal gambling and are sent on their way, shopping bags in hand. The cops arrest about 10 of the club’s employees and investigators sift through its file cabinets, scooping manila folders into cardboard boxes and hauling them to waiting cars. Tony Gustin’s raid goes off smoothly and quietly. No sirens, no guns, no flashbulbs. The city barely notices.
The charges against the bingo players were quickly dropped. But that raid on September 24, 1969, marked a turning point in Seattle’s evolution. What Gustin was after was not the ladies with their dime bingo cards but those cardboard boxes, jammed with names and financial records ¾a window on an intricate web of illegal gambling operators, crooked cops, and venialofficials. The raid and its aftermath would send several people to jail¾not for playing bingo, but for bribery and racketeering. And they would help bring down a corrupt system that had reigned in Seattle since the 1920s or earlier. Over the next few years, Seattle would learn things about itself that it did not want to hear. And those revelations would trigger a profound transformation.
Four decades later, Tony Gustin is 78, white-haired and long-retired, living quietly with his wife in rural Grays Harbor County in Southwest Washington. He is recovering from a recent stroke. Wearing gray sweatpants and T-shirt, he shuffles around his doublewide, filled with stacks of books and current issues of Mother Jones and The Progressive. He rarely discusses his 25 years as a Seattle cop, but when he does it is with a grim sense of irony, savoring the fact that a gaggle of middle-class housewives playing bingo at the Pike Place Market proved the undoing of a citywide reign of vice and corruption.
Seattle in the sixties was a middling-sized, middle-class city with nice neighborhoods and plenty of well-paying jobs down at the Boeing plants. But it suffered from a sort of civic schizophrenia; it was at once Sunbelt and Rust Belt, a New West mecca striding toward a hip, high-tech future and an aging industrial town anchored in the politics and culture of the Great Depression. It had built the world’s first jetliners and staged a futuristic world’s fair celebrating the next century’s technological promise. But it remained conservative and inward-looking, run by balding businessmen from leather chairs in the paneled salon at the Rainier Club. The average age of its City Council members was 66, and most had been in office for 12 years or more. Other than the Space Needle, only two buildings had gone up downtown since World War II.
The city was also split by race and class. Real estate agents knew where black families could buy (the Central Area) and where they couldn’t (almost everywhere else). Asian immigrants crowded into what was then known as Chinatown. Gays were tolerated as long as they didn’t stray from their bars around Pioneer Square. Civilization ended abruptly west of Second Avenue and south of Yesler, leaving Skid Road, the Market, waterfront and Chinatown to seedy bars and cardrooms, catering to gamblers, sailors and other less savory visitors. City Hall clung to an odd set of blue laws designed to keep a lid on booze, gambling and sex. Bars were closed on Sundays, and gambling was ostensibly limited to charity bingo and nickel-ante card rooms. Even pinball games and pool tables were deemed offensive and required city licenses.
At the same time, Grandma was allowed to have her gambling, under cover of charity.“There was bingo all over town, and it was legal if they were benefitting a church or charity,” says Doug McBroom, a federal prosecutor then and a Superior Court judge now. “They were frequented by retirees, a major social thing. The Lifeline Club was the biggest, and they had to have that charitable hook, so they passed along 10 bucks a week to a church.”
A cadre of young Turks, lawyers and other professionals, many of them with Ivy League degrees, had begun agitating for change. They were oblivious to any problems with the cops; they thought the city had outgrown its blue laws, but didn’t realize whose interests those laws served. They didn’t understand how Seattle’s Establishment managed things, or how tenaciously it would cling to power.
Gustin learned that civics lesson early. He grew up in rough-and-tumble Aberdeen, where his father managed a sawmill. He studied psychology and the classics at the University of Washington, and in 1952 joined the Seattle Police Department, where he thought he could put the psychology he’d learned to use on the street. He may have been the city’s best-read cop, a college kids who could quote Cicero or issue a string of profanities, often in the same sentence.
He was on the streets a few months before he realized that many of his pals were on the take. “I was down at Precinct 3, the South End,” he recalls. “There wasn’t a lot of money down there. That’s where guys got sent if they didn’t want to be part of the system, or if they were being penalized for not splitting their take properly.”
At first it was just idle talk around the precinct house, then the occasional envelope, stuffed with cash, passed discreetly up the chain of command. Bit by bit, Gustin became acquainted with what was called the Tolerance Policy. The city’s prudish laws ran counter to a street culture that thrived on vice: booze, gambling, sex, drugsand various combinations thereof. Bars could play by the rules, or break the law and pay the cops to look the other way. Most paid. Citizens got their entertainment, the cops saw their meager paychecks enhanced by steady gratuities, and nobody got hurt. The old guard genuinely believed the Tolerance Policy was good for business and good for the city, that it kept the Eastern Mafia out of Seattle.
To keep things orderly, Gustin explains, the ringleaders maintained an unorthodox system of double accounting. Most businesses had to make payoffs twice, to the beat cops and the vice squad, and these payments were recorded separately. Any collector who failed to split the proceeds could be detected by the other set of accounts. This also ensured that the vice detectives were the best-paid cops in town.
The vice dicks tracked their business on pink index cards, with coded lists of who owed what. “Rudy 3" reminded them that an operator named Rudy paid $300 a month for his Chinatown club. If Rudy didn’t pay, he didn’t get stuffed into a car trunk Chicago-style. He would simply get frequent visits from the local beat cops, driving off customers with nightly ID checks and jaywalking tickets. Businesses paid the money or paid the consequences. ”Tolerance” had devolved into shamelessshakedowns. The system had persisted so long—at least 40 years, through the Great Depression, world war, and Boeing boom—that nobody involvedcould remember a time when the cops weren’t on the take.
The beat cops usually collected the cash just after the first of the month. The rules of distribution were simple and clear: The beatman would pocket half and pass the rest to his sergeant, who would split it again and pass half to the lieutenant. By the time the remainder got funnelled to the top commanders, it was real money. Gustin recalls one SPD major who routinely stashed at least $35,000 cash in the ceiling of his home. Local cops had all heard the story, perhaps apocryphal, of several hundred thousand dollars that got stolen from a downtown safe but could not be reported because it was payoff cash.
The system had persisted so long— at least 40 years, through the Great Depression, world war, Boeing boom, and world’s fair—that nobody could remember a time when the cops weren’t on the take. Nobody ever talked about it, least of all the press. The payoffs flowed in from throughout the city, but the big money was downtown, at the Chinatown gambling joints, Pioneer Square clubs, First Avenue cardrooms, and Central Area speakeasies. Guys like Gustin who didn’t take bribes got sent to Siberia—the South Precinct station in Georgetown.
“I suppose I should’ve turned to the other side,” he says, surveying his modest retirement digs. “I would’ve made a lot more money. But hell, I was never really motivated by money. I remember one kid who wanted to start running games on top of his tavern, and wanted to know how much it would cost to take care of the cops. A million bucks, I told him. They all thought I was nuts.”
Nevertheless, Gustin’s scruples didn’t impede his career, at least at first; herose quickly to sergeant, and in 1956 was assigned downtown. “That didn’t last,” he chuckles. “They told me: ‘If you’re gonna work here, you have to play with the big boys.’ And I didn’t fit in.”
Gustin considered blowing the whistle. He met secretly with like-minded friends, discussing what it would take to bust the system. But they had no solid evidence, and the Blue Line seemed unbreakable; cops don’t rat on cops. Even if they wanted to, whom could they talk to? Who wasn’t on the take? “Everybody knew what was going on,” Gustin insists. “The chief knew it. The mayor knew it. The newspapers knew it, or they were brain-dead.”
Not everyone. Much of the city knew nothing of bribes. To get in on the secret, you had to cross the line, into one of the urban subcultures that had been so carefully set apart from respectable society. Now and then, somebody would. In 1962, a young UW criminology professor named William Chambliss began hanging out in Skid Road bars in the name of sociological fieldwork. “I thought I’d get a different view of crime if I looked at it from the other side,” says Chambliss. “And people talked to me.”
Seattle, the Skid Roaders told him, was crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Cops were on the take. Prosecutors were on the take. Everybody was on the take. Chambliss was dubious, but he persisted. Sitting in a Pioneer Square bar, he asked about the card game in the back room, and was invited to sit in at $5 a bet. Later, he watched the local beat cop walk into the manager’s office and leave with an envelope. Chambliss had witnessed his first payoff.
When he tried to report what he had seen, nobody wanted to listen. Even Chris Bayleyand his reform-minded friends were focusing their efforts on the blue laws, not corruption. The press was looking the other way. And it was all happening on the other side of the line.
In January 1967, the silence broke. Not even the reporters involved remember why The Seattle Times, the establishment paper, finally decided to pursue the story. It ran a series of front page stories laying out complaints by gay clubs around Pioneer Square: “Tavern Operators Describe Payoffs.” One owner claimed he was coughing up $370 a month, essentially for protection. Another reported that when he refused to pay, the police harassed his customers.
The stories spurred a brief flurry of activity downtown. Chief Frank Ramon shuffled some beat cops and suspended a few more¾not for payoffs, but for drinking and gambling on duty. And Mayor Floyd Miller appointed a distinguished panel/commission? to investigate. One member was Assistant Chief M.E. “Buzz” Cook¾who later turned out to be a ringleader in the payoffs. The panel set up a post office box, published the address, and waited for citizens to tender complaints.
Nothing happened. City Hall and the press got distracted by other things¾anti-war protests around the University and civil rights unrest in the Central Area. But uptown, things were stirring. The reformers had organized as CHECC (Choose an Effective City Council) to press for turnover and reforms at City Hall. CHECC managed to get two younger progressive candidates, Tim Hill and Phyllis Lamphere, elected¾hardly a revolution, but a beginning.
The next volley came more than a year later, in mid-1968, when the Post-Intelligencer published its own report, including a grainy photograph that purported to show Ben Cichy, whose company held the licenses for some 1,500 local pinball machines and pool tables, delivering money to the home of King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll.
The P-I had picked a big target. Charles O. Carroll, a former UW All-American halfback, was the titular head of the local Republican Party, perhaps the most powerful politician in Seattle. He drove a big Pontiac with flashers behind the grill so he could rush to the scene of a crime. Handsome and barrel-chested, physically imposing even in his 60s, he reigned from his spacious, paneled office in the county courthouse. And, the P-I suggested, he was a player in the rackets. Whether or not he was on the take, Carroll was clearly in control. “His modus operandi was to have something on everybody,” says Bayley—just like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had the dirt to make everyone from mobsters to U.S. presidents do as he said.
Still, nothing changed. A cop who joined the force in 1969 recalls walking First Avenue with his veteran partner. The old bull found two shots of whiskey waiting for him at each bar and tossed both down both. Rounding the corner onto Pike Street, he collected a couple cigars and an envelope full of cash. The young rookie had no choice but to tag along.
In the summer of 1969, the system began to show cracks. CHECC was pushing more council candidates, and the newspapers were beginning to focus on the cops, Carroll, and the Tolerance Policy. Emboldened, Tony Gustin teamed up with two like-minded assistant chiefs, Gene Corr and George Fuller. They took their story to Seattle’s genial old mayor, Floyd Miller: The department is laced with corruption, and Chief Ramon has to go.
Gustin figured City Hall would not act until it was forced to. So he concocted the plan to raid the Lifeline Club. At the club, he recounts, “they had this nice Christian woman who was their accountant, and she told us where to find the records.” Gustin assembled a squad of young cops handpicked to avoid those on the take. He assumed he was being watched, his desk searched each night by crooked cops. So he and his co-conspirators planted memos indicating they were planning a raid up in the Central Area rather than at the Market. He didn’t reveal the actual target to his chief, nor even to his own squad.
When the raid went down, “it was fun.” Gustin smiles. “We finally got what we needed. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all those nice ladies who were just playing a little bingo. We wanted those records.” So did a lot of other people. Federal prosecutors combed through the seized boxes, and the Internal Revenue Service photographed them. The records were loadedwith names and numbers, concise accounts of who paid what to whom going back to the 1920s. Those named included prosecutors and city councilmen. The club payroll included the wife of Tim McCullough, the former county sheriff, though she rarely actually worked. And McCullough himself, who served on the state Parole Board, was allegedto be the bag man.
It turned out that Charlie Berger, the squat little man who ran the Lifeline Club, was grossing more than $1 million a year on bingo. “The money was unbelievable, thousands of dollars a night,” says then-prosecutor McBroom. “And the vice squad was being paid off bigtime to keep it going.” Berger paid $3,000 a month to one Frank Colacurcio, who ran nightclubs and strip joints from Alaska to Tacoma, and who knew how to work with the cops.
Chief Ramon threw a fit. He chewed Gustin out for failing to alert him in advance and for ticketing the bingo players. But the damage was done; two weeks later, Mayor Miller fired Ramon and hired the first of a series of interim chiefs who would parade through over the next few years.
The feds meanwhile were busily harvesting the fruits of the Lifeline raid. Since they couldn’t count on Carroll, Gustin and his alliesneeded to make it a federal case. The club records provided that leverageas well. The Lifeline operators had used beans to cover the numbers on the bingo cards¾“a game worth thousands a night, and they’re using beans,” marvels McBroom¾but decided to upgrade. “Charlie Berger had found this company in Colorado that makes bingo cards with little shutters. So they mailed off and ordered up a bunch of those cards.”
Bingo. The Lifeline Club was doing interstate commerce. The new U.S. attorney, Stan Pitkin, launched a full-scale investigation, calling witnesses to testify before a grand jury. For weeks, newspaper and TV reporters haunted the courthouse hallways, trying to track the comings and goings of police commanders, beat cops, nightclub operators, and city officials, some of whom were snuck in through the basement in a rusty, nondescript van. “I think the city was surprised by what they were seeing,” says McBroom. “Police corruption was supposed to happen in Chicago and New York, not Seattle.”
In February 1970, the first federal indictments came down, charging Colacurcio, Berger and several cops with conspiracy to run an interstate gambling business. Berger eventually cooperated with the feds, testifying that he believed Colacurcio’s police contacts had the power to close down his operation. Colacurcio was convicted and sent to prison. Buzz Cook, the assistant chief who had served on the mayor’s blue-ribbon panel two years earlier, was indicted for perjury; he had testified under oath that he knew nothing about the payoff system. That summer, Cook went on trial at the old federal courthouse¾the first public exposure of the Tolerance Policy. Within days, more than 100 past and present Seattle cops were implicated in open court.
Still, Charles O. Carroll maintained his grip on the courthouse, amid rising doubts as to whether he would or could investigate the system he presided over. One by one, local civic groups and newspapers called for a county grand-jury inquiry. Early in 1970, a group of young Republicans began talking about challenging Carroll in the fall primary. They tapped Chris Bayley as their candidate; he had good party connections, deep Seattle roots, a Harvard Law degree, and a cadre of supporters. And he promised to convene a grand jury.
In June, Bayley decided to pay a courtesy call on the incumbent. “I was ushered into his enormous conference room with the big, leather couch that had supposedly been [U.S. Senator] Warren Magnuson’s,” Bayley recalls. “Carroll was sitting at one end of that long conference table, flanked by the chairman of the party and Bill Boeing [the founder of the aerospace company], sort of like the Holy Trinity.”
Bayley, an elfin figure with none of Gustin’s swagger or physical presence, mustered the deepest voice he could to explain why he was challenging the prosecutor: Well, some of us think it’s time for new blood. “Carroll huffed, ‘Do you understand how tough this job is?’ And the power guys nodded. There was just a disbelief that anybody could take him out.”
Bayley ran anyway, and won. When he took office, he found that Carroll’s files had been cleaned out. Loose wires dangled under the desk¾remnants, Bayley believes, of a recording system similar to the one Richard Nixon maintained at the White House. His first task was clear: He began preparing for the grand jury inquiry he had promised. He recruited a team of young lawyers, who moved across the street to the 29th floor of the Smith Tower to get away from the cops and spies in the courthouse.There they began trying to locate and sway witnesses¾cops, tavern operators, gamblers, anyone who could help them penetrate the network.
Convincing witnesses to cooperate was tough. Even honest cops were reluctant to testify against fellow cops, or downright terrified. Tavern owners feared testifying against cops who had the power to close them down. Prosecutors drove the streets with witnesses in the back seat, coats pulled over their heads, nervously pointing out who did what where. “We were told we were under police surveillance, so we couldn’t talk to people in the office,” recalls Evan Schwab, one of Bayley’s young lawyers. “I talked to one guy in the woods on Vashon Island. And I remember interviewing a police major who was in uniform, wearing his gun, and sweating heavily.”
On April 12, 1971, more than four years after the first press reports, a 17-member grand jury was seated. Reporters and TV crews, barred from the courtroom, thronged in the marble hallway, and the nominallysecret proceedings dominated the news for weeks. By early summer, more than 100 past or present cops had been implicated, some for bribes dating back to 1936. The prosecutors marveled at the system’s tidiness. “In time, we could predict how much a guy was making based on where he was working and how long he’d been there,” says Dave Boerner, then Bayley’s chief deputy. “It sort of ran itself. It required agreement by a lot of individuals—the prosecutor, the police chief, the sheriff. But it was all understood. That’s the way the world worked.”
As the testimony spilled out, Seattle police nervously watched from across the street. At times, detectives sat in the courtroom, taking notes. Nobody was sure what they did with the information, but rumors of retaliation flew. “Drowning was the method of choice,” says Dee Norton, who covered the scandals for The Seattle Times (and whose regular courthouse beat I, a cub reporter, covered while he did). “As we understood it, they’d put somebody face down in the water and then plant a foot on their back.” Ben Cichy, the local pinball king, had drowned mysteriously in five feet of water next to his Lake Washington home in 1969. At least one other drowning death was rumored, but never proved, to be murder. Norton says he never felt threatened himself, but squad cars would occasionally park for hours in front of his Wedgewood home. It was “more harassment than intimidation.”
Three months after being impaneled, the jury indicted 19 police and other public officials for “conspiracy against government entities.” The list included Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll and the affable city councilman Charles M. “Streetcar Charlie” Carroll (no relation), who had chaired the council committee that licensed clubs and taverns. The indictments proved the prosecution’s high-water mark. Over the months to come, Bayley’s office dropped several cases, including the one against Streetcar Charlie. Other accusees were dismissed or acquitted. The final fizzle came on May 17, 1973, when Judge JamesMifflin dismissed eight of the 10 remaining defendants, including ex-prosecutor Carroll and several high-ranking cops, for lack of evidence.
“Proving a conspiracy, that individuals were knowingly in on it, was tough,” muses Bayley. He admits that he and his team were young and inexperienced. And they were handicapped by witnesses who demanded immunity from prosecution, or who were discredited, reluctant, or both.
Nevertheless, dozens of suspect public officials took early retirements. The payoff system was abolished. And Seattle changed profoundly. Fueled by the police scandal, CHECC candidates wrested control of the City Council over the course of three elections and instituted wide-ranging reforms. The City adopted a new charter that transferred budget authority and other powers to the mayor’s office, which in theory could be held more accountable than entrenched council members. The old system had collapsed. “And when that happens, somebody has to come build a new system,” says Norm Maleng, one of Bayley’s handpicked prosecutors. “So we came in and tried to rebuild a system of justice on a new model, done with openness and a new ethical standard.”
Despite their dismal record at winning convictions, Chris Bayley and his aides went on to successful careers. Bayley served two terms as prosecutor, practiced law for several years, and in 1983 became senior vice president of the Burlington Northern railroad conglomerate.After retiring, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and started Stewardship Partners, which promotes voluntary environmentalism by farmers and other landowners. Maleng succeeded Bayley as prosecutor in 1979 and has held the job ever since, widely respected but hardly a powerbroker. Boerner became a law professor, McBroom a judge. Chambliss, the UW professor who crossed the line, went on to a distinguished career at George Washington University. One of his books, “On the Take,” describes his experience with the payoff system.
Tony Gustin stayed on for seven more years at the Police Department. “ I was too damned obstinate to leave,” he says. The corruption was cleaned up, but the bitterness lingered. He was demoted twice, ostensibly because he refused to name his SPD informants, who had helped bust the payoff system. “I’d sworn I wouldn’t name names,” he says. “It was a question of integrity.” The demotions “helped me understand what I was made of.”
Though few crooked cops were actually convicted, many others lived to regret taking bribes. Gustin recalls one old friend who had to sit down with his daughters and explain why he’d been on the take. “The money was poison. It just about killed him.”
Eventually, Gustin destroyed his notes and files. It was all too sordid and painful. “Still, I was a pariah.” He shrugs. “I’d get nasty notes in the mail. In their eyes, I created disorder, and Caesar said, man can’t tolerate disorder. I suppose there were guys who would have liked to shoot me, but I knew they didn’t have the guts.” When he finally retired in 1977, “they could have held my retirement party in a phone booth.”
Gustin finally realized his ambition of becominga police chief¾first in American Samoa, then in Sandy, Utah, where he ran things his way, “like a total asshole¾you don’t accept so much as a free cup of coffee. The guys on the street didn’t like it, but when I left, I think they respected me for it.”
Eventually Gustin retired to the country, a few miles from where he grew up. He reads avidly, thinks hard, and worries at how quickly Seattle moved on and forgot this ugly chapter in its history, making it all the more likely to happen again. The lesson he draws from the payoff scandals is an ancient one: “Power corrupts. We elect people and then we ignore them.
“There is no limit to human greed, nor to human cruelty. It’s our curse.”
