Nick De John, Part 2: She Heard Too Much — The Grand Jury, the Garrot, the Girl in the Bay Window, and a Barefoot Kidnapping in Golden Gate Park.

Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of '47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forward to a judge's chambers where DA Edmund "Pat" Brown torches his own trial rather than let a liar keep the stand, then rewinds to fill in the backstory. 

A crab fisherman's wife walks into a police station with an extortion complaint and walks out having cracked a mob murder. Four men plotting in a back bedroom, not realizing the walls have ears — and one very unlucky woman caught listening.

The Grand Jury scene reads like  paperback fiction nobody would believe: a widow turning hysterical on the stand, a son dropped at a movie house hours before his father’s killing, and Leonard Calamia — the friend who delivered Nick to the wolves. He runs, changes his name, even gets himself elected an election worker in Albuquerque, and still can't outrun a Christmas package. The trial turns into theater — memories evaporating on the stand, until a secret witness nobody knew existed turns up watching it all from a bay window above the murder scene.

And because this story never ends a chapter quietly: a California Attorney General’s daughter is kidnapped when three men jump into her car and make her drive barefoot through Golden Gate Park, grilling her about her father’s business in Chicago. When they let her go, finally, they drop one last name, a mobster on the lam. Part Three, next week.

Transcript

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Welcome to Frisco: The Secret History. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. I have a great episode for you today, Part Two of the Nick DeJohn story. I covered Nick’s 1947 garroting in a North Beach apartment building in Episode 30. You should listen to that episode if you haven’t already. Today I’m going to discuss the investigation, the trial, and the some of the odd twists and turns that permeated the case. It is truly an only in San Francisco story. I’ll be posting Part Three next week.

Before we get going, I want say thank you to Walter Hass at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. I should mention that Graffeo Coffee is just up the street on Columbus Avenue from La Rocca’s Corner, a location central to this story.

Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been supplying high quality beans to the public and the best restaurants around to town ever since. I have been drinking Graffeo Coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the Seventies. They make the richest and smoothest coffee I have ever tasted. 

They offer a dark roast, light roast, and a Swiss-water decaf bean. If you can’t get to North Beach to pick your beans up, you can go to Graffeo.com, that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there. They sell whole beans, or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. I have been recommending and gifting Graffeo beans to my friends forever and I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco: The Secret History podcast. I am excited and proud to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand.  Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, “Simply the finest coffee in the world.” It’s true. Give them a try. You will thank me.

[intermezzo]

From the Freddie Francisco Observes column on March 12, 1947, five days after Nick DeJohn’s murder:

[typewriter]

New Characters Invading the San Francisco Scene 

WHERE THERE'S a lot of effect there has to be some cause. Where there was plenty of smoke there had to be some fire and there was. A week ago this department was concerned with observations about one of the most significant aspects of the current San Francisco scene; the sinister and unpleasantly pregnant atmosphere that prevails in the Golden Gate town at the present time. 

San Francisco's night life has been traditionally free of the sordid overtones and the rather gruesome characters that are associated with cafes and clubs and after-dark entertainment in most large cities. Even San Francisco's tenderloin, seamy as it is in spots, is less noxious and unsavory than similar districts elsewhere.

True one wouldn't have to be very stupid to be taken for a bundle of cash there, and all of the dolls with the quiet, significant little smiles that lurk in the Turk-Mason district aren't smiling just because they are affectionate and love humanity. But it has been a tenderloin of friendly frauds and non-lethal larceny; a lot of Damon Runyon characters who love to latch onto a fast dollar but wouldn't stuff a body into a trunk for all the money in Montgomery Street. 

Lately it's been different, though. 

Lately a new type of character has been invading the night spots, the late supper places, the bars and the bistros with too much chrome, and the hotels where the bellboys work the hardest after midnight. Don't get a picture of brokennosed gangster types, complete with blondined broads and vaudeville tailoring. Don't think of B-picture mobsters with diamonds and dialogue out of the corner of the mouth. Underworld styles change too and such characters went out shortly after Hollywood began to cast them that way, The 1947 prototype is a different banana, entirely.

He dresses expensively but as quietly as his precursor did noisily. He thinks of himself as a very conservative and unflashy character and he would be very much alarmed if he thought that anyone would recognize him as a racket guy, He just tries his best to look like the legitimate business personality that one would find de. scribed by his identification papers. 

In manner, too. he is an entirely different gent. Far from being hardboiled, or sinister in the smooth, narrow-eyed Raftian manner, he is affable and disingenuously polite, even humble, Just a friendly, co-operative fellow without a thing in the world to hide and won't you have a cigar! Or a drink. And don't be suddenly chilled by the film that comes down over the eager, friendly glint in the eyes as he looks away, occasionally. He's just thinking. 

In only two ways does he still keep to the hoodlum pattern. He drives a big, expensive car. He lives by night. Nighttime is his natural interlude of activity. And by those two characteristics he defeats his own precautions and draws the attention of the perceptive to himself, This . . . and variations thereof is the nature of the unsavory and unpleasant immigration. The reasons for the influx were capably and probably soundly estimated in the news columns of Saturday's Examiner. 

WHERE there's smoke, there's also fire, and it started to become a little smoky in town several weeks back. There was not only the afore mentioned appearance in local night spots and hotels of out-of: town talent, but other things as well. Telephone calls to the police and to newspapers about characters whose personal equipment included accessories by Colt and Smith & Wesson. Tips about late conferences and overheard remarks of a significant nature. Expensive cars with out-of-town plates. Big bets with local bookies. All kinds of things.

The police weren't idle. 

Quietly and without announcement. they began to comb the tenderloin district and watch the night spots, For several weeks past, inspectors have sat in certain bistros and collected information on the newer and unknown patrons. Frank Murphy, Jack Cruickshank, Ralph McDonald and Jules Zimmerlin, flying squadsters whose nocturnal scrutiny of the city has often been related in this space, were very much aware of impending developments and have interviewed literally hundreds of transient. persons in the tenderloin district. All of those in touch with the situation were aware, tensely aware, of the increasing volume of smoke. There had to be some fire. 

There was. 

On Friday, a body on Laguna Street.

[intermezzo]

And now we jump ahead two years. 

March 8, 1949. Edmond G. “Pat” Brown, future governor of California, currently San Francisco’s District Attorney, stood at the bar in Cookie’s  Blue Star Buffet on Kearny Street, across from the San Francisco Hall of Justice, steeling himself for what he had to do. He knew there would be huge blowback from the Police Department. 

Cookie’s had perhaps the best bar location in San Francisco, kind of nestled in between where the financial district, Chinatown, and North Beach—where they all met. It was a saloon, not a buffet, but there was a Chinese restaurant next door you could access through a swinging door past the far end of the bar. Cookie’s was home away from home to cops, crooks, conmen, lawyers, bondsmen, ball players, boxers, judges, mailmen, newspapermen, tipplers of every persuasion and was a San Francisco institution. twelve-feet wide, half of which was the bar, with an eighteen foot ceiling, which was great considering how many cigars and cigarets were smoked in there on daily basis.  Cookie himself chain smoked Corina Western cigars all day long.

DA Pat Brown downed his whiskey, set the glass down, and exited through  the bar’s narrow arched doorway, lined with weathered cobalt blue glass tiles. The doorway featured a split Dutch door, the top of which was left open all the time to let out the smoke and let in some fresh air and light. 

On the sidewalk, he waited for a break in the traffic and strode across Kearny. Once there, he climbed the front stairs and walked into the 1908 building. 

He took the stairs up to the second floor and made his way to the chambers of Judge Preston Devine, who was presiding over trial for the murder of Nick DeJohn, who had been killed on May 7, 1947. It was March 8, 1949. It had taken that long to bring the case to trial.

When he got to the judge’s door, he didn’t bother knocking. The judge was waiting for him. 

He walked into the room. The judge was behind his desk. Also present were Chief Assistant District Attorney Thomas Lynch, whose oral history about bad boy Jimmie Tarantino and his extortionate tattle-sheet Hollywood Nite Life you may remember from Episode Eleven, and defense attorneys for the three defendants, William E. Ferriter and James C. Purcell.

The deadlocked jury had been sequestered for thirty hours. On trial for the brutal murder were Sebastiano Nani, Michael Abati, Leonard Calamia, well-known gangsters in both Chicago and San Francisco. 

They, along with fugitives Frank Scappatura and San Francisco top mob boss Tony Lima, were the last people to see gangster Nick DeJohn alive, playing cards at La Rocca’s Corner in San Francisco’s North Beach. Nick had needed to use the restroom, but the one in the bar was, conveniently for some, out of order, so Vincenzo “Papa” La Rocca told him to go across the street to an apartment building he owned and Nick could use the bathroom in the basement.

Nick exited the the building some time later, having been garroted and stuffed into the trunk of his shiny maroon Buick sedan. His pants were pulled down around his knees and it was apparent he had been tortured. Intuition tells me that his assailants were looking for the $250,000 he had stolen from the Chicago Outfit before heading out west a year prior. 

The Judge asked Pat Brown why he had requested the meeting.

Pat looked around the room, making eye contact with each man there. He was still standing.

“Your honor, we must dismiss the deliberating jury.”

The defense attorneys were gobsmacked. Also happy.

The judge asked for cause. Pat Brown told him that he had grave doubts as to Anita Venza’s, his star witness’s, , credibility.

Brown continued, “She lied to me just as she did on the witness stand.”

Assistant DA Lynch, as surprised as anybody with this announcement, said he was in total agreement. The defense lawyers said nothing.

The judge dismissed the standing jury in the case. San Francisco Police Department Chief of Homicide Frank Ahern, heard the news while still in the courtroom. He turned beet red and stormed out of the Hall of Justice, promising a statement to the press. “If I can clear it,” he said.

[intermezzo]

[end typewriter]

Leonard Calamia, former Chicago hitman and Cheese Syndicate associate of Nick DeJohn, was the only man arrested in the weeks after DeJohn’s murder. They released him after a few days because the DA did not have enough evidence to mount a case.

Calamia decided to get out of town. Things were still too hot in Frisco. The cops were still investigating the murder and although he had not been one of the men waiting in the basement to usher Nick into his next incarnation, he was the guy who had led his old friend to the slaughter.

He thought he might be welcomed back in Chicago even though six of his Cheese Syndicate pals had been knocked off since May of ’46, Nick DeJohn being the last. 

He moved with his family back to Chi-town and managed to carve out some action for himself, but he only lasted ten months there. He never felt he could relax or let his guard down. He felt great unease and believed that someone was watching him and that someone might want him gone and soon. 

He pulled his children out of school in April of ’48 and put the word out on the street that he was relocating to Texas.

He took his family to Albuquerque and adopted his wife’s maiden name. He rented a small downtown apartment where he lived with his wife and two children. As Len Tallone, he got a job with the state highway department. After that, he got a job in the Bureau of Revenue, and then, amazingly enough, even served as an election judge at the Albuquerque City Hall in the 1948 election.

Back in San Francisco, the big break in the Nick DeJohn murder case, now a year and half old, arrived in the form of one Anita Rocchia Venza, mother of three, wife of a crab fisherman, petty criminal, and friend of Vincent “Papa La Rocca,” in whose saloon DeJohn was last seen alive.

She entered the SFPD Central Station on Vallejo in the heart of North Beach and said she needed to talk to someone, that she was being extorted. She explained that Gus Oliva was trying to blackmail her for $2500. Oliva was a local low-life grifter operating on the edges of organized crime. He had made it into the newspapers plenty of times since 1930, first when he offered a boxer a new car to throw a fight. Mostly, he just a small-time grifter, preying on widows for a few hundred bucks here and there. 

In the course of a discussion about an abortion ring operating in San Francisco, the Nick DeJohn murder came up and she told the police the most amazing story.

The Grand Jury was quickly convened on November 

[intermezzo]

On November 29, the Grand Jury convened and heard testimony from the first witness, Nick DeJohn’s widow, Lena. The newspapers noted that she was garbed in black and wearing a jeweled bracelet. Smiling at first she became almost hysterical as she remained on the stand. She said her husband was a good man, that she had gone back to Chicago right after his murder, and then returned to claim his body.

Next up was Nick’s son, John. He testified that he had had dinner with his father and Leonard Calamia the night of the murder and that they had dropped him off at a movie theater before heading over to the Poodle Dog and LaRocca’s Corner.

The star witness of the night was, of course, Anita Venza, who had arrived at the Hall of Justice with phalanx of four San Francisco Police bodyguards. The newspaper described her as the dark-eyed wife of a crab fisherman.

Her testimony would electrify the courtroom. They had her under protective custody for a reason.

She began by stating that she had been acquainted with Papa La Rocca, the owner of La Rocca's Corner, for some years. 

During the week of May 4, 1947, she visited Papa. She was hoping he could help her find a job and wanted to pay off a small loan she owed. 

She said she went to the La Rocca basement apartment, where Nick DeJohn would be murdered in three days. Upon arriving, she had been ushered into a bedroom by a man she identified as Papa LaRocca's father-in-law. He told her to wait there and Vincenzo La Rocca would be around shortly. 

After waiting some twenty to thirty minutes, she heard some men enter the next room. Speaking Italian, one of them said that Nick DeJohn had come to San Francisco and was causing them a great deal of trouble. 

Someone else said that, unless they took care of him, he would drive them out of business. 

They agreed that they had to get rid of him. It was clear they were talking about taking Nick out permanently.

Papa La Rocca’s relative returned and entered the room where the four men were plotting. 

He said, 'Where is the lady that was here?' 

One of the four said, ‘What lady?’ 

The men rushed into the next room and saw Mrs. Venza. 

They were angry. They asked if she had overheard what they said. 

She said that she had overheard them and understood what they were discussing. 

They asked why she didn't come in and make herself known as soon as they started talking. They said it was too bad that she had overheard them and it would be very bad for her. They knew who she was.

They talked about her husband and children and finally told her to leave town, otherwise something very serious would happen to her.

About that time Papa came into the apartment and explained that Mrs. Venza was a trustworthy person and that he was sure that there would be no trouble. 

Mrs. Venza then left. 

Two days later, Mrs. Venza was picked up by the police on a theft charge, which had been lodged against her, and placed in the county jail. Approximately a week later she was released on bail. 

Upon returning home, she learned that men had been ringing her home continually, trying to talk to her, but leaving no message. Shortly afterward, a man called and told her to come over to Papa La Rocca's apartment and talk to him.

She did so the next morning, May 16, 1947, nine days after DeJohn’s murder. She went to the La Rocca apartment and saw Frank Scappatura, who was one of the four men that she saw in the apartment a week earlier. 

The other three men were Sebastiano Nani, Michael Abati and Tony Lima. 

Frank Scappatura told her that she must leave town and gave her $500, about $7500 today, with instructions to leave the State and never come back. 

Obviously, she had not left town.  

Oddly, while testimony was going on in this special Grand Jury session, Gus Oliva, who had been trying to extort Anita, was seen wandering around the hallway outside the jury chambers. He did not enter and it is unclear what he was doing there.

Lastly, Assistant DA Bert Hirschberg told the court that his wife had been receiving threatening phone calls from a man who identified himself as “Johnny.” Johnny had told his wife that her husband could expect plenty of trouble. Johnny did not mention the DeJohn murder case.

At midnight, the Grand Jury issued indictments against Sebastiano Nani and Michael Abati, who had appeared earlier but refused to testify, and against three fugitives Tony Lima, Frank Scappatura and Leonard Calamia.

Nani and Abati, who had been released from custody earlier in the day, were re-arrested on the Hall of Justice front steps.

[intermezzo]

As I mentioned in Part One of this story, Frank Tornabene had arrived at La Rocca’s Corner shortly after Nick and Leonard had arrived there. He had parked Leonard Calamia’s car up the streets and had handed him the keys surreptitiously. The boys would need Nick’s car to move his body after they killed him.

Calamia had claimed that he was at home having coffee and donuts with John DeJohn at the time of Nick’s murder.

There are a lot of strange aspects to this story, but I find this one to be the most disturbing. 

Leonard Calamia had had dinner with his old friend, Nick DeJohn and Nick’s son, John. After that, Nick and Leonard, in Nick’s car, dropped John off at the movie theater and eventually arrived at La Rocca’s where Leonard knew Nick would be whacked. 

Leonard Calamia left La Rocca’s Corner before Nick crossed the street to meet his destiny. He claimed he was having coffee and donuts with John DeJohn at home while his father Nick DeJohn was being tortured and garroted. 

One of the premises of this podcast is that vice and graft was in San Francisco’s DNA at its inception. We romanticize and celebrate the outlaws in the city’s history, from Charles and Belle Cora, a wealthy gambler and madam, respectively, in the 1850s up to madams Dolly Fine in the Thirties and Sally Stanford in the Forties. The McDonough Brothers, who ran the town’s hugely profitable graft machine from 1920 to 1937, were never implicated in a murder. Frisco was the cool grey city of love.

So it is hard for me to find words regarding Calamia’s testimony and actions. Words like brutal, cold-blooded, sociopathic come to mind.

I tell myself there is a difference between outlaws and criminals. I believe there is a difference. I refer you to Bob Patterson’s Freddie Francisco’s seven-hundred word treatise about the darker currents flowing through the streets of Frisco in the late Forties. 

East Coast and Midwest gangs were trying to move in and they were a different breed.

[intermezzo]

Christmas Eve, 1948. The Examiner headline read “FBI Nabs Calamia, Accused as ‘Finger Man’ in De John Case.

The story read:

[teletype]

Leonard Calamia, the pop-eyed little cheese salesman accused of "fingering" his good friend Nick De John to death, was in jail yesterday at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and awaiting extradition to San Francisco. 

Waiving removal hearing before United States Commissioner Owen J. Mowrey, he remarked cryptically: “I’ll pay my own way. I'll pay all their ways." 

Elated San Francisco homicide inspectors, who consider him the most valuable of the five accused of garroting the gangster, De John, prepared to fly to Albuquerque Sunday to return him.

Calamia, a second rater and fringe figure in the powerful Mafia here, was the only man charged with murder in the weeks after De John was killed May 7, 1947. Police failed to make the charge stick and released him in June of that year. 

[end teletype]

Calamia had been traced to Albequerque from a mysterious tip received by police in San Franisco about a Christmas package his wife had mailed to her mother in Chicago.

San Francisco District Attorney Pat Brown told the press that their case against the accused men was weak without Calamia’s testimony, but quite good with it.

With Calamia in custody, a trial date was set for   February 1, 1949.

[intermezzo]

The trial opened before Superior Court Judge Preston Devine, with Thomas C. Lynch leading the prosecution as chief DA. Three men sat as defendants: Sebastiano Nani, a hot-tempered Sicilian alien up from Brooklyn; Michael Abati, another Sicilian alien, who tended bar here in San Francisco; and Leonard Calamia, who by all accounts looked the part of a man on trial for his life — visibly nervous, blinking rapidly any time his name was mentioned in the courtroom.

Nani and Abati had one lawyer between them, William E. Ferriter. Calamia had his own man, James C. Purcell.

Tony Lima and Frank Scappatura, who had been included in the murder indictment, were still on the lam.

DA Thomas Lynch, in his opening statement said that the State will show that Nick DeJohn was strangled with a rope between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m. on May 7, 1947 in the La Rocca apartment building basement at Taylor and Lombard.

   At about 10:30 that night the De John car was driven from that place by one or more of these conspirators, and that four people were present at that time. The four: Nani, Abati, Scappatura, Lima. Calamia's role had been to deliver DeJohn into their hands.

Lynch began calling witnesses to the stand. Strangely, memories had begun to fade or changed completely.

Chiropractor Patricien Semenza — developed "an unexpectedly new recollection” of when he first saw DeJohn's car abandoned on Lombard Street out in the Marina.

Frank Passantino — suddenly remembered things he had never remembered in prior exhaustive examinations; State moved to impeach him; Judge Devine had not ruled on that at weekend recess.

Fish dealer Ciro Gallo tried to stall and avoid claiming that he had not told Leonard Calamia to bring Nick DeJohn to La Rocca’s Corner.

Frank Tornabene contradicted his earlier testimony and said that DeJohn had left the bar alone. 

Lynch said, “I had this witness and the witness Passantino in my office a few days ago, read every single word of this grand jury testimony to them, asked them if that was what they would testify to, and they said yes. Now this man comes on the stand and sits there waiting for the question to come, and, when it does, his answer is a loud and resounding 'No!'"

Outside of the court a police captain commented somewhat bitterly that he was beginning to understand why Chicago authorities no longer tried to bring gangland killings to trial.

[intermezzo]

On Friday, February 11, the prosecution surprised the court with a secret witness, Mrs. Eleanor Pierce, a pretty, twenty-nine year old brunette who lived in Papa La Rocca’s apartment building on the second floor, the same building where Nick DeJohn was murdered in the basement. Her landlords were Papa, Alphonse, and Leo La Rocca themselves

The police had found her by knocking on doors. Nobody in the courtroom had heard her name before. "We have never known of her existence," a shocked Purcell told the court. 

Prosecutors had kept her under wraps, and she'd been living under full, twenty-four-hour police protection ever since detectives found her.

It was her habit at night, she said after putting her two young children to bed, to sit in a big overstuffed chair in a bay window that overlooked the intersection and watch the world go by.

She told the jury she saw four furtively busy men in and around De John's big town and country sedan at the hour the State fixed as the murder hour, and at the place the State fixed as the murder scene. The car was half in-and-out of a garage at the sidewalk level, pointing outward, blocking the sidewalk.

From photographs she identifled pictures of Scappatura and Lima, although she was not asked and did not explain how she knew them. 

She said she saw a green Ford sedan parked on Lombard just around the corner and a few feet from the De John car. After an interval of perhaps fifteen minutes, she said, she heard the motor of the Ford racing, then heard it "starting and backing down to the corner." 

Q.-Did you see any men around the Ford?  

A.-I saw one get out. 

Q.-Who got out of the Ford? 

A.-Frank Scappatura. 

Q.-Did you see any other men at that time? 

A.-Yes, three men came up. 

Q.-What happened then? 

A.-They talked. Lima lit a cigaret. Then Scappatura got into his car with one man, and Lima got into De John's car with the other man. 

Q.-And what time was this? 

A.-About 10:15 p. m. 

Q.-What happened then?

A.-The Ford drove up Lombard toward Jones and the town and country club (De John's car) drove down Taylor to Columbus Avenue. 

Purcell asked for a recess until Monday. He needed the weekend just to catch up to a witness he hadn't known existed an hour before.

Court was adjourned until Monday.

[intermezzo]

The following evening, Saturday, another strange thing happened. It's unclear what it meant.

Katherine Riordan, daughter of ex-San Francisco Police Chief Michael Riordan — who had since become a State of California Assistant Attorney General — was driving her father's car alone, when three men jumped into the car when she stopped at an intersection. She was also a secretary at the Law Offices of William Ferriter and James Purcell. You remember these guys, don't you? Ferriter was representing Sebastiano Nani and Michael Abati and Purcell was representing Leonard Calamia in the Nick DeJohn murder trial.

She went had gone to a dinner party that night with her sister Patricia and her escort Kenneth Thompson. After dinner, Patricia wanted to go home, so Katherine drove her back to the Riordan house on Laguna Honda Avenue — and it was on her way back to rejoin the party that the three men jumped into the car at Hernandez and Merced Streets.

The men told Miss Riordan to remove her shoes and told her to keep driving.

 Driving in her stocking feet, she obeyed their directions, and went up and down several streets before finally halting near the Aquarium in Golden Gate Park.

And then, she said, the questioning began.

They wanted to know "Why did Mike (her father) go to Chicago?" Was it anything connected with the De John case?"

"Then," Miss Riordan recalled, "they asked about Mr. Ferriter's children, and where he lived.

She said they told her to drive up to Jim Purcell's house, and they knew the way.

"I drove there. We parked in front of the house. It was dark. We drove around and came back by the house and it was still dark."

After that, they directed her to drive toward her home, and left the car at Laguna Honda and Portola Drive.

She said that during the episode, one of the younger ones said: "I can hurt your eye,' and he hit me lightly over the eye with my slipper."

The older man said, "Don't hurt her; she's only a kid.'"

Eventually, they told her to pull over near her house and got out of the car. As they exited the vehicle, she heard one of them then say, cryptically, "What do you think Lima will think about this?" 

[intermezzo]