District Attorney's OfficeHickeBefore we get into that, I want to hear more about your work in the D.A.'s office. Poole Well, everybody used to start off on what was called the complaint desk. That was where the cases were originally made—authorizing a warrant—and the case would be initially started in the municipal court. Hicke Who would file the complaint? Poole The police, and some cases were initiated by an investigation by the police with our office, and then we would go to the grand jury. I was on the complaint desk at first. You get what they called the barking dog cases and that sort of thing. But I only stayed there about six or seven weeks. I did a lot of preliminary hearings. I also went out with the police, and that is where I smoked my first and only marijuana cigarette. [Laughter] One of the police said to me— In those days they would go after a guy— he might have what they called a roach, some about this long. [demonstrates] Hicke About an inch. Poole Yes, and he'd be arrested for that. Nobody would do that today. I went with him. Pat assigned me to go and work with the police. He wanted me to see how they did things, and he wanted to hear from me about my opinion on what they were doing and so forth. It was kind of interesting. So I drove around with a lot of them. Hicke You accompanied them? Poole Yes, they'd make busts and all this. Yes. ― 31 ―
Hicke
So there you were when somebody got busted with an inch long— Poole Yes, oh, that was a big deal. [Laughter] When my tour was over with the police, Pat— His number three man was a fellow named Bill Atkins, and he used to review all of the grand jury transcripts and all the stenographic transcripts. When you have a preliminary hearing to decide if a person who has been arrested would be bound over trial in the courts, there would be a preliminary hearing first. Or it could go to the grand jury. You're entitled to a grand jury. You're entitled to a preliminary hearing which gives the defense a chance to air out what the facts are instead of having it go directly to the grand jury where it's in secrecy and ultimately gets an indictment. Bill used to read all these transcripts—that was his job—and he told Pat that I was doing a very good job on these. So Pat decided that he would promote me from the municipal court and the complaint desk to the main office, which was not in the Hall of Justice. It was in the Bank of America Building on Clay and Montgomery Streets. It had the eighth floor. So I went over there, much to unhappiness of some of the people in the complaint office, who thought it was kind of rushing things. Hicke Fast promotion? Poole Yes. So that's where I was for the next number of years. I tried a lot of different cases. Hicke Let me just ask you, what were your first impressions of Pat Brown? Poole My first impression—I didn't really have an impression of him until— I told you about what he told me, did I not, when I came down to see him the second time? Hicke No. Poole I had this case with a doctor in San Francisco. It was a traffic case, and it never should have gone to trial, but the doctor was stubborn, and he maintained he had been insulted and mistreated—not physically mistreated, but mistreated by the policeman—and had been called names, and called boy. He was a very prominent guy, so he was going to— ## The judge wanted to fine him. He said well, I think I have to fine him. Matt Brady was the judge then. He had been a former district attorney, and he is long gone. The cop felt that this client of mine was wrong, and they felt that the court shouldn't ― 32 ―
give in to him. Nobody wanted to yield anything. That was the problem there. So we were there to either try the case or whatever
it was, and I persuaded my client that nothing would happen: "I'll tell you what; there isn't any question that you went through
that stop sign on California Street. There is no question about that. Now, you'll get a fine. I think we can take care of
everything else. I think I can take this policeman and make him yield on the other stuff. But it doesn't make sense to do
it." But he wouldn't agree to anything.
So we finally went into the judge's chambers. The judge called us into the chambers, leaving the client outside, and he started talking about it. I said, "Your Honor, excuse me, but my client is not an easy person to deal with. If he gets the idea that we're in here deciding his fate without his having anything to do with it, I'll lose him." "And," I said, "whatever is suggested, before we accept that, you have to give me an opportunity to talk with him." He said, "All right." So we suggested a number of different things, and I went out and talked with the client. He came down from almost everything, but the police were hanging back about that fact— See, they had charged him with resisting arrest. He didn't go anywhere, but he was charged with that anyhow. I talked to him and said, "Look, you've got patients, you've got things to do, and any way you take it, nothing is going to happen. I'll tell you what I'm holding out for. You went through a stop sign, you can't dispute that. That's the only damn thing I'll concede, unless it gets hot and I come out and talk to you first. Is that a deal?" And he said, "That's all right." So I went in and we bargained this thing for a good while, and eventually the judge said he would dismiss everything except failure to stop at the sign. He said, "I'll fine him five dollars." So I went out and told the guy. He said, "I won't pay that man." I said, "I'll pay it for you." [Laughter] This is Dr. Carleton Goodlett. He's still alive. He was, for a long time, the operator of the newspaper circulated in the black community—the Sun Reporter. Anyhow, finally when he said he wouldn't do that, I came back and I said, "Judge, to get this out of your way, I'm sorry it has taken so much of your time." "But," I said, "how about suspending the five dollars?" I said, "If you don't, I'll pay the damn thing myself." [Laughter] It got suspended. He dismissed all the charges, except they found him guilty of failing to stop, and he suspended the sentence. He fined him five dollars and suspended the payment of the fine It was after that I got called. As I remember now, one of the political bosses here in San Francisco was Bill Malone. I had ― 33 ―
talked to Bill about the U.S. Attorney's Office. I was sort of interested, and I always had this hankering for the federal
side. Bill maintained that he had nothing to do with that. He didn't have much to do with it. But this was the only time he
had ever been candid in saying he didn't have much to do with it. And I used to talk with Bob a good bit about cases down
there. So I was interested in that. Somehow, someone, and I can't remember who it was now, told Tom Lynch, who was the chief
assistant D.A., and Pat Brown that they might want to take a look at me as a possibility.
After this thing was over, Tom Lynch asked me to come down with him and Pat. Pat talked to me and I made out an application for him. He said that he had a couple of other people that he had to decide what to do with, and he did have a couple. Then they called me again and I came back to see them. Then Pat said, "Fine, we'll do it. Now, I'll make an announcement when the time comes. We won't say anything about it until I make the announcement." I said, "Fine. I have some things I need to clear up anyway, some work to be finished." So we agreed that it would be around a couple of months from then. When that time had expired and I came down to see him again, he was very pleased he was going to have me there. Then he said, "Now, just one thing. There might be some cases that I wouldn't want you to handle." And I said, "What kind of cases would they be?" "Well," he said, "you may find a situation where some colored fellow was charged with assaulting a white woman, and it might be kind of difficult to handle." I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, you know, there is a lot of stealing, and the police wouldn't like it, and someone in the department might not like it and everything." I said, "I didn't get the understanding that you assigned your people to try cases depending upon what somebody in the police department or in the public thought. If a person isn't capable of trying the case, he shouldn't be assigned to do so. In fact, he probably shouldn't be in your office." He said, "This won't happen very often." I said, "Pat, look, I don't even know how to tell you that I appreciate your making the offer to me, and I thought about it, and I talked to my wife and she was pleased with the idea. But I can't accept that restriction. If that's the way the office is to be run, I think it would be a grave mistake to have me in it. You're the district attorney. You have to make your own decisions on who's going to do what in your office, and I can appreciate that. But thanks, but no thanks. I'm not going to tell anybody about this. I'll just keep that to myself, but you won't be embarrassed. I'm not going to try to embarrass you or the office or anything, but I don't think I want to come to work for you under these conditions." So I got up because I was ready to ― 34 ―
leave. Tom Lynch said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." He said to Pat, "Pat,
you can't do this." And Pat said, "I guess I was wrong."
Hicke That's amazing, that he would agree he had been wrong. Poole He said, "I guess I was wrong," and he said, "I'm embarrassed." "But," he said, "I take all that back. No, I'd like to have you, and there's not going to be any of that in this office." Pat has told that story, in fact, in his book. I think he put it in his book a couple of times. [1] But, in any event, that was my understanding with him when I went to work for him. Hicke Let's continue on with working for Pat Brown then. Poole Let's see, this was in 1949, and Pat wanted to run for attorney general. The election was in 1950, and he did. He had run before, unsuccessfully, but he ran this time for attorney general. That's where I met people like Bill [William] Orrick over there and— Who were the old-timers over there on the court? There were quite a few of them. I became friends with him, and Bill and I are still friends to this day. I remember that when the election came, we went around the state a good bit. Hicke You must have been campaigning hard and fast. Poole Well, actually what I did was I met with people, and I give that as kind of an exhibit. It was kind of interesting. I saw a lot of people in various parts of the state that I had never seen before. And he won. Hicke Do you recall what he campaigned on or what the issues were? Poole He ran against Fred Hauzer, who was the attorney general and had a pretty questionable record in some things—supposedly some big deals that were made. I can't remember the details now. But he won. When he won, Tom Lynch called me. By this time I was pretty well established in the office, and Tom Lynch was going to succeed Pat as D.A., provided that the mayor appointed him. That was Mayor Elmer Robinson. Tom asked me if I was interested in the Attorney General's Office, and I said to him, "Well, you know it ― 35 ―
pays more than you do here." But there was a certain small amount of private practice we could do in those days.
Hicke Separate from the job? Poole Yes, and I said, "So with that, I'm fine. I'll stay with you." So Pat became the attorney general and I stayed with Tom, and he reorganized the office. Norman Elkington, who had been in the office before and then had gone back into practice, came on as the chief assistant, and I became what was called the chief of the superior court. That's the trial court. I had the direction of all the trial lawyers and some of them didn't like it. One of them was displaced, as a matter of fact, and a couple of them left. I stayed there and I did every kind of work. I handled the grand jury; I tried cases, a lot of cases. I would suppose that during my time there, I must have tried maybe 115 jury trials. Hicke Do any stand out in your mind particularly? Poole Oh, some do, but each year it grows fainter. Hicke Yes, but maybe you could just think of one that would be an indication of what you were doing. Poole Let's see. One that I remember most poignantly was one that I lost. It was a rape case. A Caucasian couple had adopted, when she was a young girl, a person who was part Indian and part Caucasian. She was a very good-looking person, and she was a nice person. They had moved from Arizona to San Francisco. One night she went to a party somewhere up around—if you go up Fell Street going west, there is someplace up there called something Park. I've forgotten the name of it now. There was a lawyer who had an office down at the Embarcadero and I knew him. I had nothing to do with him. I thought he was a fairly shady guy. But he was known for giving great parties. At his house he had a party, and she had gone to the party with a couple of other girls. They had so many people in the house—it was in the warm weather—that several people went out to get fresh air and that sort of thing. She went out, and she had left some article in the car. So she asked for the keys so she could go out to the car. She went out there and just got into the car when another one drove up, and two or three young fellows saw her there and came over and started talking with her. I'm not sure whether she got what she was looking for or not. She closed the door and was locking it when they said come on, let's take a ride. She said, no, and they grabbed her, and whoever was driving the car drove it up. She struggled with them and they put her in the car. She lost one of her shoes and they drove away. They ― 36 ―
went to someplace in Golden Gate Park. There were three of them, I think it was, either three or four, but they took turns
raping her, except for one who did not.
They brought her home and let her out. Her adoptive parents, by the way, had been missionaries. They called the doctor, the ambulance, whatever it was. Anyhow, some people at the party identified the youngsters; they knew who they were. I prosecuted them. I took it to the grand jury, the grand jury indicted them, and the case came out. Their defense was that she went along with them willingly. I knew it wasn't true. It was a very close case because you had these three or four of them. Two of them were brothers. They had two priests and two nuns who came and sat in either the front row or the second row, and they had a priest who came and gave them character references. So the whole thing was these people from a devout family and this girl's adopted parents who had been missionaries. She didn't, except sporadically, go to any church. It got really nasty. It was really nasty. The jury was out a long time, and they came back and they acquitted these three fellows. There was one of them that we couldn't prove that he had done any more than be present. I remember a couple of the women on the jury said, "Well, she was wearing the wrong kind of—" Let's see, how was it? I think what she was wearing was kind of oval on the shoulders, and she was wearing—I don't know, some part of her underwear had straps on it. And they said she was wearing the wrong kind of— Hicke She was wearing a party dress, obviously. Poole Yes, she was wearing a party dress, and she shouldn't have had that kind of—whether it was a brassiere, or whether it wasn't. I said, "You're kidding." Hicke The victim is at fault. Poole Yes. "Do you really mean that?" And they said, "Yes." They said, "We thought you did a splendid job." I said, "You know, I'm going to have to hold back, because I'm about to lose my faith in the jury system. If people like you, who appear to have common sense, can resort to—" I said, "Of course, I know that isn't why you did it at all. But in your mind, this is a provocation you're talking about." I said, "I don't want to see you anymore." And the priest was there and he said, "You, as a public servant, shouldn't express those thoughts." I said, "Father, I know better than to argue with a priest, and, frankly, I'm disgusted. I think the church was prostituted in this case." And he looked at me, and I walked away. ― 37 ―
I remember that one. It bothered me for a long time. I talked to Tom about it—Tom Lynch—and I said, "I wonder if somebody else could have done that differently." Nobody really wanted to try that case. Although I was their superior, if there was a case that for a reason the person had a valid objection to trying, I wouldn't make him do it. Hicke You would do it yourself? Poole I tried a whole lot of different cases and, for the most part, I had good success. I tried one kidnapping case. It was a prominent realtor here—Max somebody. Time has passed and I can't remember all their names. He had two boys; they were twins. They were kidnapped by a couple of guys. At the time they were kidnapped, a couple of the police inspectors got onto it and went there and broke into the place where they were, pulled them out, and arrested the two guys who had been their captors. At that time, I was trying a manslaughter case. It was a death case of a woman who had married back in the early forties. Theirs was a stormy marriage and they separated. ## She said that he was often brutal to her and so she left him. She took up with a sailor who was very good to her—very kind—but he got killed, and she was pregnant. Her husband then wanted her to come back to him, but he didn't want the baby. She didn't want to go back to him in the first place, and she wasn't going to give up the baby. They lived in Fresno. She came to San Francisco, because she was really afraid of him. Her parents were Russian, and there was a Russian ministry somewhere up on Fell Street at Golden Gate Park. It was a large house, and the primate who was in charge was—I didn't get to know him well, but he sounded like a really fine person, because he was interested in these people who didn't have— It was kind of a shelter for them. There were four or five of them there, and she was there with the baby. The husband found out where she was, and he was in Oakland at a bar, and I think he got himself a little drunk. He found out where she was and he sent her—in those days they would have the singing birthday messages. He arranged for one of those, and there was a card with it too. So the messenger came with the card to the house. He had tried to get into the house and they wouldn't let him in. Her birthday was either that day or was going to be the next day. So he had the singing messenger, and the singing messenger came to the door and told whoever opened the door that they had this singing message for the girl. They called her down and she came down, and the messenger ― 38 ―
sang the song and then was on his way, and the guy stepped out of the dark and killed her. It was one of those things that
said happy birthday, you know, and surprise.
So we tried this case. His defense counsel was a Leo Sullivan of northern Oakland, who was a very well-known trial lawyer, and Patricia Smith, who is, or was, on the superior court in Oakland. The guy had a kind of poignant story, but I said that I would take a second degree, and they said, no, they might take assault with a deadly weapon or something like that. I said, Leo, not on your life. Judge Al Wollenberg was the trial judge in that case, and it was kind of a sensational one, so they moved it up to the City Hall. We were in oral argument, the closing argument. The two inspectors were Alfred Nelder, who subsequently became the Chief of Police in San Francisco, and George somebody, I've forgotten his name; he's still around. They had gotten the statement and gone through this thing, and they were under merciless cross-examination. Leo Sullivan was a good lawyer; he was a tough guy. We adjourned that day, and the next day they came back and he continued his argument. He talked about it, he paraded, he mimicked them, and did all that sort of thing. The jurors were laughing. What he didn't know was—he had come from Oakland, so he hadn't seen the San Francisco Chronicle that morning. These two inspectors were on the front page of the Chronicle because they had broken that kidnapping case. [Laughter] I didn't know the jurors had seen this, and I was kind of worried that—what is all this? They went back and they found him guilty of first degree murder. So I said to Al Wollenberg, I said, "You know, Judge, there is something to be said for this man." I offered them a plea. "Nothing that we can do is going to bring her back." But his family—I remember that in the trial, they had priests. Two priests had come from Fresno, where she had lived down there, and where he had lived, to testify—his character and all that sort of thing. But the jury didn't pay any attention to that. I said to the judge, "They found it real first degree murder and they fixed the sentence at life imprisonment. Do you want me to make the motion to reduce it?" And if I did make the motion, he said, "Well, you might have some problems with that." He said, "I think if we take this young man in his state of mind and so forth, I think we can find sufficient mitigation to cut it down to second." I said, "That's fine with me." So he said, "Well, when the time comes for a motion—" I went out in the courtroom and here was this man who had just been found guilty of murder sitting with an armed bailiff. His lawyer and everybody ― 39 ―
else had gone and left him in the courtroom. I said, "Where is counsel?" He said, "They left." So I sat there and talked with
him for a long time, and I said, "Look, you still have some life, and don't give up yet. The judge has still got before him
the question of whether there should be some mitigation. We'll see what he says." When he set the date for announcing the
sentence, Al Wollenberg reduced it to second degree, and the guy said to me, "If I have any friends after what I've done,"
he said. "they are Judge Wollenberg and you."
Well, he went off to prison. He served about eight or nine years. He corresponded rather frequently to both Judge Wollenberg and to me. Finally he was released on parole. In the prison he had been writing scenarios and he sold some of them. Then he bought into a trucking business and was out on parole. He would come to San Francisco and he would call me. As late as when I was on the district court, he would call me. He always wanted me to come to dinner with him. But I remember him because, as Al and I had said many times, we thought we did something for this man. I guess you look at these things and it just is not all one-sided. Anyhow, I remember that case very well. Hicke I think maybe we ought to stop here for today. |