Palm Springs a neutral zone where organized crime families mingle and relax, without fear of retribution
The big fish in Palm Springs is Tony Accardo, the Chicago Outfit's consigliere. Two agents make the drive in from L.A. to help Taylor locate the mobster nicknamed "Joe Batters"and "Big Tuna." But they have no luck until a local insurance adjuster joins the agents for a barbecue.
"He was staying in a house in Canyon Country Club, on Alhambra," Taylor says years later. "It had wind damage to the roof. He had been the insurance adjuster on that and had met the tenant."
The Palm Springs FBI office doesn't have sophisticated surveillance devices in the early-'60s. In Chicago, agents use bugs under the written authority of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, although the recordings aren't admissible in court. In the desert, Taylor has to personally tail or interview mobsters to gain information. Burt Spivack, a top Spa Hotel executive, notices Taylor spending so much time observing people coming in and out of the resort, they develop a friendship.
Still, some of Clayton's investigations are almost comical.
Like the search for Doc Stacher, who is Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky's West Coast gambling czar. Hearing that Stacher is in town, Taylor drives up and down Indian Avenue, checking hotel after hotel to no avail. He ends his search at Vista Chino because he doesn't think there's any action beyond The Riviera.
A block away, Stacher is staying at the Racquet Club.
"What I found was most of the organized crime figures came here to vacation," Clayton later says. "They stayed mostly at the El Mirador Hotel and they would spill over to the Spa [Hotel] and a couple of the others. Then they would rent houses for the season."
By the time Taylor retires from the FBI in 1977, Riverside County Sheriff Ben Clark offers this assessment of mob activities in the desert: "Some big hoodlums may put their heads together in the Coachella Valley and plan a crime. But the actual crime they're planning won't occur here; it may happen in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, New York or New Jersey."Ditto that, says Taylor.
"I would do surveillance on (Chicago mobster) Johnny Rosselli, but, whoever he met with, you never picked up anything of value that showed they were violating any laws or doing anything illegal or planning."
Open territory
As organized crime experts piece together the web-like structure of the national syndicate, it becomes apparent that mobsters are strategizing in Palm Springs.
Part-time Palm Springs resident Joe Fusco — the one-time head of Al Capone's Prohibition-era beer-manufacturing operation — is seen hosting a meeting with Chicago mobsters Accardo, Rocky Fischetti and Jake Guzik, New York boss Frank Costello, Genovese family associate Phil Kastel and criminal attorney Abe Pritzker.Pritzker is a partner in a Chicago law firm with Stanford Clinton, the general counsel to the Teamsters Pension Fund. Pritzker, Pritzker & Clinton use the Illinois loan company Frontier Finance as a holding company for mob assets, and its president is none other than Frank Buccieri.
By the late-'70s, there are more than 100 mobsters believed to be living in Palm Springs, mostly from Chicago. In just four years, they've invested nearly $50 million in the desert.
"Palm Springs is like Switzerland for organized crime," Deputy Chief Sam Lowery of the Riverside County Sheriff's Office says. "It's become neutral territory where mob figures can come and relax and not worry about being bumped off. They have been very successful at blending into the community."
Local law enforcement is so passive about the influx of mobsters, other agencies won't share information with them.
"The Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit [in Los Angeles] considered that if they gave information to the Palm Springs Police Department, it was in the hands of the mob within an hour," says former Palm Springs cop Mark Moran years later.
"Chief (Bob) White had a reputation for being very close to all the mobsters, and Palm Springs was like Miami. It was an activity-free zone so that any mobster from any part of the United States — any one of the families — could come here and not suffer the potential consequences of being next to another family that was in competition with them."
Lee Weigel, another former Palm Springs cop, chief of police and a city councilman, echoes Moran's assessment. "All through the 1970s, we were kind of persona non grata with the LEIU," Weigel says. "Word in the police department was this is a place where organized crime figures came. But it wasn't a family territory. (It was) like open territory — like a place of no organized crime business and a truce territory."
Taylor gets his information from a source in the district attorney's office. "Whether he would share it with the police department, I don't know," Taylor says.
Vacation town
Palm Springs, the mid-1970s.
Moran and fellow cops discover illegal gambling operations at local joints the Old World, The Nest and Jilly's, which is owned by Frank Sinatra's close friend Jilly Rizzo. After Moran shuts down the Old World, Palm Springs Police Chief Bob White calls him into his office."Because there is illegal activity going on in there," Moran says.
"We don't do that," says White. "You are not to do this."
Despite the city's lax policy toward mobsters, Weigel says he never hears Palm Springs cops being told not to investigate possible illegal activity.
"There were many briefings about organized crime and organized crime figures," he says. "None were ever pointed out and designated as 'hands off.' "
But mobsters don't come to Palm Springs to lay low.
"You'd run into them all over the place," Weigel says. "But they weren't doing drugs. They weren't bossing around unions. We felt that they weren't criminally active."
The city of Beverly Hills has an ordinance prohibiting ex-cons from entering its city more than five times a month, and L.A. boss Mickey Cohen is arrested for violating it in 1957. Cohen is also arrested in Palm Springs during Chief Gus Kettman's era for failing to register as a convicted felon.
But by the '70s, the mob is so integrated into Palm Springs, the police can't enforce such strict policies.
So Buccieri and his pals roam the local restaurants and nightclubs.
"People who came in to Pal Joey's were mob people," says its co-owner, Joe Hanna. "Somebody introduced me to a guy by the name of Frank Buccieri, who was a mob guy... Tony Accardo used to come into Pal Joey's. He'd bring 10 to 12 guys in. He was a gentleman. He always had a bunch of people in there, but he was a real gentleman."
Mel Haber hosts many of them at his restaurant, Melvyn's at the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs. But he never sees criminal activity from them in the desert.
"When I came in there were still juke boxes," Haber says. "They didn't have the juke boxes, they didn't have the pay phones, they didn't have the garbage. They didn't have anything like they had in every other city. I knew of a couple bookmakers in town. I knew about big card games in the country clubs. But there was no big business.
"I once asked Frank Buccieri — I was in my cups, I had too much to drink. I said, 'Mr. B, I've got to ask you a question. I'm high profile' — this is when I first opened up (in 1975). 'If I was in New York, I'd have 10 guys hitting on me. How come nobody had a hit on me?' He said to me, 'Pal, as long as we vacation in this town, there will never be business in this town.' And there has never been business in this town. Never been organized crime business in this town."
Assigned to RFK
Taylor had a personal relationship with RFK. "He would pick up the phone and call me on a specific case," he says. So he heard things about that legendary bacchanal weekend. He heard Marilyn Monroe was there. And he heard Frank Sinatra was irate that his friend, JFK, wouldn't stay at the presidential wing he had built for him at his Rancho Mirage compound.
"At that time there were some ill feelings because Frank supposedly had done a lot to get him elected," says Taylor. "I did see or hear that some of the golf carts that Frank furnished to the Rat Pack were taken away and some of the guys were kicked out of the Rat Pack — Peter Lawford."
But RFK didn't participate in the party where JFK was also said to have a tryst with an intern while guests popped amyl nitrates. RFK had come from a meeting with the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco. JFK was just getting ready to leave the Crosby house after a Sunday morning service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Palm Desert. Taylor was chauffeuring RFK to join the president for their trip back to Washington, D.C., But it wasn't a smooth operation.
"I met Bobby Kennedy at the airport and I took him down to the little white house," Taylor says. "I get back home and his briefcase was still in the car. He forgot his briefcase! So I took that back to him that night. But Secret Service took over (security) pretty much until the President was assassinated."