A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age Read Free Page A

machinery of justice at will.”
    White shifted jobs frequently. The 1926 Ventura County directory lists him as a driver for Shell Oil and has him living on Poli Street, close to the courthouse. By 1928, however, he was married to Thelma, his first wife, and had opened the Leslie White Studio on Main Street. He loved gadgets and machines and had transformed himself into a photographer. He made portraits, or pictures of weddings and christenings, and did fingerprint and identification work for Ventura’s newly inaugurated police force. His business did well. A wall-sized blowup of one of his street scenes is still featured in the main Ventura library. He was also learning to fly and was a fan of Clara Bow, whose film Red Hair finally reached Ventura in March 1928. White was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and the Breakfast Club (at one meeting of which he caused a rumpus by releasing, as a prank, a tame circus lion!).
    Leslie White was a success, and if truth be told, more than a little bored; but that was about to change.
    At three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, in Los Angeles County, near the Ventura County line, an abutment to the St. Francis Dam gave way. Twelve billion gallons of retained water stirred into life. At that moment a motorcyclist happened to be riding along the road at the reservoir’s edge; he said the area of water, covering 38,000 acres and more than three and a half miles, appeared to grow still and shiver.
    The water began to move, ripping through first one side of the dam and then the other, leaving only the dam’s central section, a 200-foot-high hunk of concrete that lurched forward but nonetheless was left standing like an ugly tooth. On either side, a liquid avalanche was released, shaking the walls of the San Francisquito Canyon with a noise that was “a monster in the night, roaring like a tornado.” Seventy families, mostly Mexican fruit pickers, lived immediately below the dam. They stood no chance.
    Fifty miles to the south, the lights of Los Angeles flickered. For a few seconds, the entire city fell into darkness.
    A power station lay a mile and a half from the foot of the dam. The wall of water took about five minutes to get there. “This was not the express train portrayed by pulp writers, but the generated destructive horsepower was impossible to visualize,” wrote historian Charles Outland. “With a depth varying from 100–140 feet for the first few miles, nothing could withstand the violence of the flood wave. Huge pieces of the dam, some weighing 10,000 tons, were washed down the canyon.” The massive power station was crushed as easily as an eggshell.
    Drawn by gravity, thundering forward at an initial speed of twenty miles per hour, the flood reached the end of the canyon, slammed against the walls of the Santa Clara Valley, and kicked sharply to the right, creating a swirling funnel of water that completely erased the village of Castaic Junction, wiping it clean as a slate. “At Castaic there was nothing left to indicate that any habitation ever existed there,” reported the Santa Paula Chronicle in an “extra” edition later that day. “Where the McIntyre service station, restaurant, garage, and camp buildings stood there is nothing but acres of mud and debris, in places 15 feet deep.”
    A tent city of construction workers, next in the way, was nearly obliterated. A few lucky men found themselves in tents snapped tightly shut that acted like balloons, floating on the flood. The water was now seventy feet high and bearing mangled bodies, trees, homes, and debris as it crossed into Ventura County, plowing toward the sea. Hundred-ton blocks of concrete rode the water like corks.
    Ahead lay the towns and villages of Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, and Santa Paula, where people were just becoming aware of the disaster about to engulf them. Police sirens sounded and residents were told to flee to the hills. Telephone operators—“‘Hello’