A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia. Tanya Chalupa
could be with any non-Italian. But Dragna was of the old school where only Italians ran things and certainly not Jews like Benny with his Eastern ways. But that didn’t bother Benny none. ‘Fuck Dragna’ was his attitude…
Dragna was really from the old mustache days. The worst thing you can do to an old-time Italian mahoff [big shot] is to harm his prestige in any way, and that’s what took place when Benny came out here.
Jack Dragna did not like to be connected with Siegel…Thomas Lucchese in New York was Jack Dragna’s goombah and a real nice guy. Benny’s was Meyer Lansky. Jack Dragna was actually the complete boss out here before Siegel and I come out here. Now when Benny and I come out here, two Jews, then Meyer made trips out here. So it was really an encroachment on Dragna’s Italian territory. He (Benny) didn’t realize it at first, but I started to get wind of it when I had more meetings with Jack Dragna. He would get in a little zing all the time to Benny and the Jews. You gotta remember the old-time Italian outlook on things. Pride is a tremendous thing with them.6
Jack Dragna got his chance at revenge. In June 1947, with Lansky’s reluctant approval, the East Coast crime families murdered Siegel in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, for failure to manage the new Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas properly. Mickey Cohen, who worked with Siegel, immediately took over Siegel’s rackets and refused to accept Dragna’s authority. Dragna ordered several murder attempts on Cohen, but each time luck was on Cohen’s side. He miraculously survived all the clumsy attempts on his life that Dragna ordered. The men Dragna sent to kill Cohen included Frank DeSimone (who later became a Los Angeles crime family boss), Frank Bompensiero, Nick Licata and Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.7
Dominic Brooklier, who succeeded Licata as boss in 1974, at one time had been a strong-arm man for Mickey Cohen, but he wisely switched over to Jack Dragna in the Cohen-Dragna war over control of LA’s gambling outlets. Had he not done so, Dragna would have had him executed.
Mickey Cohen eventually made peace with the Italians and everything was forgiven, including the sloppy attempts on his life. But by that time Cohen was an old man. At that point Jack Dragna was gone too. He died in Los Angeles in 1956 at the age of sixty-four, when Ettleman was running the so-called Station Wagon Gang. Ettleman knew the history and the gossip of his criminal predecessors. He also knew of Jack Dragna’s legacy. His power within the Mafia came largely from Scotty Spinuzzi, but in California where he lived and did much of his “work,” he dealt with the very bosses who were involved in the Jewish-Italian war for control of Los Angeles.
In the circles in which he was running, it could have been politically suicidal for him to admit he was Jewish. Instead, he made up an elaborate pedigree claiming roots in France and Scotland. It was not in his own interest to remind the California Mafia bosses, with whom he had a symbiotic relationship, of Jack Dragna’s war against the Jews.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Ettleman had a smooth operation going. It is a puzzle why, with the large sums of money he was collecting from safe burglaries, he singled out a couple of well-to-do gamblers in Las Vegas to rob, but he did. One explanation is that he was bored and he was a thief. It must be hard for a thief not to steal at every given opportunity. Whatever the reason, Ettleman was arrested at Caesar’s Palace for burglarizing a wealthy gambler’s suite in the Dunes Hotel. Arresting officers found on him an Atlantic Richfield credit card under another name. They also discovered a fake driver’s license and social security card bearing the same name as on the credit card. Ettleman, who gave his occupation as “drapery hanger,” could not and would not explain the objects found on him.1
Thanks to his brilliant if expensive lawyers, Ettleman managed to steer clear of long prison sentences, in spite of law enforcement efforts to hold a tight grip on him and limit his activities. A little more than two weeks after his arrest at Caesar’s Palace, he was spotted at the Landmark Hotel eyeing another rich gambler. He was recognized as having been recently arrested by the CCS Burglary Unit for possession of stolen credit cards and someone recalled him being listed in the 1967 Western States Crime Conference Manual as an accomplished torch man. As a result, Ettleman was booked and jailed again. This time it was for vagrancy loitering, even though he was registered as a guest at the hotel. The explanation in the report was that he had “no legitimate business within the hotel and appeared to be casing the various players at the game tables, possibly in connection with a burglary of the victims’ rooms.”2
William Ettleman’s steady source of income remained safecracking and his burglary ring continued to flourish. The steady members of his crew of master safecrackers continued to be Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon and Ralph “Indian” Morris.
Born in San Francisco in 1937, Edward DeVaney was the oldest of four children in a conservative Catholic family. His father ran a welding business and, at fourteen years of age, DeVaney dropped out of ninth grade to work full time in his father’s shop, where he learned the art of handling an acetylene torch.
Ralph Morris was half Irish and half Paiute. The Paiutes, before their encounter with Europeans in the early nineteenth century, inhabited the area of Pyramid Lake near Reno and the Moapa Valley, a small Southern segment of Nevada. With his dark good looks and bravado, he easily attracted women. Because of his Native American background, Morris was typically referred to in mob circles as “The Indian.” He was considered one of the best in the West among safecrackers.
Morris learned his “trade” from another super burglar, Sam Bailey, who was once associated with the gang of an all-time infamous burglar, Jimmy Ing. There was a vast difference between Ettleman’s and Ing’s style. As Jackson Dillon describes it, “Ing was an animal and Ettleman was a professional.”
Dillon worked with Jimmy Ing, too. He recalls Ing always carrying a double holster. One time Ing was driving and Dillon was with him, seated in the front passenger seat, when a Nevada motorcycle cop pulled them over for speeding. When the officer walked up to Ing, Ing rolled down his window and asked the policeman, “Do you think your family wants to live?”
“What?” The motorcycle cop looked puzzled.
“I’m Jimmy Ing and I just asked you if your family wants to live.” Ing pushed back his jacket to reveal a holster. Dillon recalls the cop looked suddenly nervous. “All he could say was, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Ing. My mistake. I didn’t realize it was you,’ and he walked away without giving us a ticket.”
Ing was killed in a shootout in 1967 when local law enforcement learned from an inside snitch that Ing was planning to steal valuable artwork from the home of a very wealthy Reno physician. The snitch is said to have been Joe Conforte, owner of the infamous Mustang Ranch, a brothel outside of Reno. Reno police came well prepared, even bringing a coroner with them to the stakeout. When Ing stepped out and appeared to reach for his gun, he was bombarded with bullets. And the coroner was there to pronounce him dead on the spot.
After Ing’s death, Bailey assumed leadership and recruited some of the Ing gang members. Bailey also recruited his wife’s brother who became known as an expert core driller and torch man among his criminal peers. Other members of Ing’s gang formed their own splinter groups. Two of those best known to law enforcement agencies were the Herd Family Gang and the Geary Street Gang.
Sam Bailey was born in Texas in 1934. His first conviction for attempted burglary was at age twenty-four. Over the next fifteen years, this was followed by a series of arrests for burglary, robbery and receipt and transportation of stolen property. In 1972, he received a sentence of three years for a California post office burglary. While Bailey and his men were involved in a variety of criminal activities, which included forgery, arson and even murder, they were best known for their post office burglaries. The Inspection Service’s data of criminal investigations show that in just the year 1978, as much as $663,000 was lost in 1,063 postal burglaries. But as an Inspection Service Bulletin article points out, $407,000