Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland

Four: The Portland Vice Scandal

99 Four E the PortlanD viCe sCanDal Realizing the impact that the Seattle racketeers and Teamsters union officials would have on his vice rackets in Portland, and considering the violent threat issued by Teamsters’ chief Frank Brewster, James Elkins concluded that he had very few options to protect his properties and his life. Elkins’s tried and true methods of running his competition out of Portland would not work against this group. To ensure his survival in an increasingly hostile climate, he decided to go to the press with his sensational story of organized crime, law enforcement corruption, and labor racketeering. The opportunity came when Oregonian investigative reporter Wallace Turner contacted Elkins in February 1956 to ask him if there was any truth to the rumors that a candidate for mayor in the upcoming election was involved in the city’s vice rackets.1 While Elkins denied the rumors, his contact with Turner opened the door to telling the reporter about his troubles—that the Seattle group planned to connect the Portland and Seattle crime syndicates, and that if he got in the way, they would likely kill him. Elkins eventually gave Turner and his partner, William Lambert, irrefutable evidence—the King Tower tapes—that linked Portland’s district attorney and other law 100 ChaPter four enforcement officials to the city’s criminal underground and corrupt Teamsters union officials.2 The reports of backroom gambling, prostitution rings, municipal graft, and corrupt union leadership made for sensational reading when first published in the local and then in the national newspapers and magazines between 1956 and 1960.3 These reports came after decades of crime and corruption had plagued the Rose City, and Portland was not unique, but is a perfect example of crime and corruption that plagued many American cities during the twentieth century. Critics argued at the time, and skeptics argue today, that the Oregonian reporters did not conclusively prove the charges of corruption because they relied on Elkins—a convicted felon and kingpin of the local vice rackets—and mostly lacked corroboration . In fact, by 1957, 115 grand jury indictments had been filed by Oregon’s attorney general against forty-one defendants, including Seattle racketeers Thomas Maloney and Joseph McLaughlin, Portland Teamsters official Clyde Crosby, Multnomah County District Attorney William Langley, Portland Police Chief James Purcell, and “vice czar” James Elkins. Elkins’s role in Portland’s criminal underworld was absent from the initial Oregonian newspaper coverage. In August 2003, journalist Wallace Turner explained that he omitted Elkins and his operations from his articles in exchange for information on organized crime, including vice, narcotics, and police graft. Turner recalled that Elkins “understood that his role was to attempt to supply credible information when asked. Our side of the arrangement . . . was to let him alone in minor matters, and for my part, not to initiate stories that would lead the police to raid his after-hours joints.”4 Turner later said that he benefited from contacts with numerous sources, not only in Portland, but throughout Oregon and Washington . They told him of local and state politics mixed with crime, which he duly reported and which put Turner squarely in the path of bribes. “I began to be offered money [as I] began to see that there were gambling joints going, liquor by the drink [being served],” the PortlanD viCe sCanDal 101 which was illegal in Oregon. Turner later insisted, “I was not for sale.” Elkins first tried to bribe the journalist in 1948 because the newspaper reports on vice activities were causing him trouble with the city’s law enforcement agencies. “I got a call one day from Jim Elkins,” Turner remembered, and as the reporter was later leaving city hall, Elkins pulled up in a blue convertible Buick and offered him $500. “I remember telling him . . . as I rejected his $500, ‘I don’t take money. I take information.’” In 1956, Elkins offered Turner and Lambert wrist watches. This bribe attempt amused the two reporters.5 The relationship between Elkins and the reporters was no different from that of a police officer and an informant. In exchange for useful information, officers often overlook lesser criminal offenses. Turner, though, was not responsible for policing Elkins’s actions, nor was he an official guardian of public morality. For several months, he was able to use the racketeer’s information to alert the public to greater, possibly more destructive operations...