To Clifford E. Clinton, boyish owner of the "World's Largest Cafeteria" in downtown Los Angeles, customers brought so many tales of civic vice and dishonesty that last year he set up shop as a political reformer. With a few aroused sympathizers he hired a hard-boiled lawyer, Arthur Brigham Rose. Lawyer Rose hired an equally hard-boiled private investigator, Harry Raymond, onetime Los Angeles patrolman and later Police Chief of San Diego. By last week, Clifford Clinton and his cafeteria reform party had managed to stir up the biggest Los Angeles political stench in a decade.
One January morning Investigator Raymond stepped into his car, touched the starter, was blown out of his garage by a crude pipe bomb wired under the hood. Investigator Raymond, who recovered after 150 pieces of steel and glass had been picked out of him, had much to tell his old friends on the homicide squad. Investigator Raymond and Lawyer Rose had been digging into the connections between the Shaw administration and the city's biggest gamblers. Some of these, according to witnesses Lawyer Rose put on the stand, had given Harry Munson—henchman and onetime campaign manager of Mayor Frank L. Shaw—"fistfuls of $100 bills" for use in the mayor's electioneering. The homicide squad found that Raymond had been trailed for three months by Earle E. Kynette, acting captain of the police department's intelligence squad.
At that point, Los Angeles County's big-nosed, big-talking, grandstanding District Attorney Buron Rogers Fitts—whom the Clinton reformers had long been attacking as fiercely as they had the mayor—unexpectedly jumped into action. He secured grand jury indictments charging beefy Captain Kynette and two aides with conspiracy to commit murder, assault with intent to commit murder, and malicious use of explosives, the first of which carries a possible death penalty. For nine weeks the Kynette trial has been Southern California's biggest political circus. District Attorney Fitts, eagerly re-establishing himself as a legal White Knight, extracted testimony that the Kynette squad of 17 "supersnoopers" got its orders directly from the mayor's brother and secretary, Joseph Shaw, a retired naval lieutenant. Lists of the persons spied on were introduced, including Mayor Shaw's last opponent, John Anson Ford, other local politicians and publishers, District Attorney Buron Rogers Fitts himself. Last week the jury handed down its verdict: the two Kynette aides were innocent of intent to commit murder, Captain Kynette guilty.
The City Council hastily turned down a pending $90,000 appropriation for the Kynette squad, entertained a resolution introduced by Councilman James Hyde and plugged by the Clinton reformers for recall proceedings against Mayor Shaw and his police chief, Joseph Davis.