The Laughing Gorilla
been dumped at Marin and Kansas streets. Three days later bootlegger Luigi Malvese was gunned down in front of the Del Monte Barbershop. McGinn knew Genaro Campanello was the killer, but before he could locate him, the chief sacked him.
    Quinn assigned Captain Arthur Layne, commander of the Central District Station, to replace him. Layne was a widower with five sons, $1,800 in the bank, a mortgaged home, and a reputation as the scourge of Barbary Coast gambling interests. In other words, he was an honest cop. At Central Station, Quinn replaced Layne with Captain Fred Lemon, a bull-necked thug. After Layne effectively swept the Tenderloin, arresting grifters, gambling syndicate thugs, and prohibition gangs, the chief sent him on a long vacation. Layne never returned to Central Station where he was so desperately needed, but ended his days running the Police Academy, making sure officers could type. Such was the reward of an honest cop in San Francisco.
    On June 4, McGinn captured Tinnin and held him incommunicado at the Whitcome Hotel under security so tight Tinnin’s own mother sought legal action to learn where he was sequestered. Tinnin claimed that the day of Josie’s murder between 7:30 P.M. and 11:00 P.M., he was in Mrs. Burton Darren’s hotel apartment trying to interest her in an invention. The “inventor,” Frank Yelavich (with whom Tinnin had been tried for robbery in 1916), didn’t keep his appointment. Mrs. Darren wasn’t any more reliable. A year earlier, she had been arrested on two charges of violation of the Corporate Securities Act and one charge of Grand Theft. Egan had represented her in court. Nine days later, McGinn drove to the Salinas Hotel and brought back the register Tinnin had signed to forge “the final link in the story.” Now that Dullea had all the conspirators in hand, he could pit them against each other.
    Those in law-and-order circles, sick of the devious tricks Egan had been using to get guilty criminals off, had been floating a ballot proposition to abolish the public defender’s office. His continued association with his ex-con clients long after their cases had been disposed of made abolition of the office a real possibility for the first time. “Naturally it cannot be suggested lightly that the office be abolished since it was created by the people,” said State Senator Roy Fellom, author of the act creating the office in 1921. “It was never the intention that it was to be used for the defense of seasoned criminals, but to provide counsel for defendants too poor to hire lawyers.”
    It was functioning well in other California cities, but not in San Francisco, where Egan’s staff seemed “unnaturally large.”
    The Hughes murder trial began on August 8 before Judge Frank Dunne, who had adjudicated the historic police graft cases in the 1920s. As Egan was led into court in handcuffs, a man detached himself from the crowd and lunged at him. “My wife was one of your victims,” Ed Cook screamed. “You and Dr. Housman took her away in an ambulance and kept her a virtual prisoner. You placed powders in her drinks and after she signed over her property you bastards let her die.”
    Jailers held Cook back—“Pull yourself together, mister.”
    As murder charges against the conspirators were read, Doran locked his eyes on the floor, Tinnin looked straight ahead, and both moved perceptibly away from Egan. By the time the clerk finished, a wide gap separated all three. Tinnin was represented by Nate Coghlan and Egan by Vince Hallinan and William McGovern.
    When the defense put former San Quentin convict Charles Colonna on the stand, he suggested Doran had killed Josie himself during a botched burglary. “I met Doran on Mission Street a week before the murder,” Colonna said, “and he tried to interest me in burglarizing a woman’s house by Balboa Park.”
    Next, Doran’s county jail cellmate testified Doran said he was going to give up Egan and Tinnin “to save his own

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