Good evening, everyone. My name is not in on behalf of romans bookstore, i want to welcome you to our event featuring nathan masters in conversation with david kaplan presenting crooked the Roaring Twenties tale of a corrupt attorney general, a crusading center and the birth of the american political scandal. We have a full calendar of wonderful events in store. If youd like to keep track of whats coming, check out our website. Sign up for our newsletter. Social medias all that good stuff. Just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. Please make sure your phones are on silent so that there arent any interruptions throughout the duration of the event. If youd like to purchase a copy of the book, you may grab one on a lovely display at the bottom of the stairs, conveniently placed near the register. When you get to the split at the stairs, just go ahead and turn right. They are right there. If you plan on getting that signed, we ask that you just please purchase it before doing so. And it is the support of folks like you that vroman says may able to stick around for 129 years now. So thank you for supporting independent bookstores. Oh, thank you. Yes. And now i will introduce our special guests. David kipen founded the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library. Liberal jamie ross. In 2010, a familiar voice on public radio. He also serves as book critic for Los Angeles Magazine and is critic at large for the los angeles times. Nathan masters has hosted and produced the Emmy Award WinningPublic Television series lost l. A. Since 2016 and is the author of hundreds of articles about los angeles history. He works at the usc libraries and crooked is his first book. So everyone, please give a warm welcome to our featured guest. Like not said, welcome. I should just mention that this is not just a book event. This is a book launch. For the first time anywhere we are unveiling nathan crooked and so i think he should probably start by reading and or introducing something. Yeah, id love to read a passage. I want to thank you. First of all, i want to thank my friend david kipen for doing this. Very generous of you. And i want to thank vroman for hosting hosting us from i mean, ive been coming here for for, you know, a pretty good fraction of my life. And this place is i mean, its my favorite bookstore, and theres nowhere else id really want to launch the book. So im really happy to be here. Yeah, im going to start by reading a little bit from chapter one. Im going to skip over the prolog and ill be mindful of our time too. Oh, ill probably skip over a section or two. So this chapter is titled something terrible has happened. Most of washington was still asleep on the morning of memorial day, 1923, when a gunshot rang out from a sixth floor apartment in the fashionable wardman park. In the first Law Enforcement officer on the scene was none other than william j. Billy burns, director of the bureau of investigation. Burns, who happened to live one floor down, was the nations most famous detective. The 20th centurys alan pinkerton. Instantly recognizable in his derby hat and bristled mustache before taking over the agency that would later be immortalized in three initials fbi, hed earned a reputation as a crafty sleuth, for whom no secret was until sorry for whom no secret was unobtainable. It wasnt a sterling reputation. It was true that he sometimes bent the rules or broke the law on a clients behalf for the right price. His Burns InternationalDetective Agency could fix a jury or frame the wrong man for a crime. Nevertheless, his career was marked by real triumph as a u. S. Secret service agent, he tracked down the most accomplished counterfeiter in in u. S. History a forger so good that even the treasury thought his creations were genuine. As a private eye, he saw the infamous 1910 bombing of the los angeles times, which he proved to be an act of domestic terrorism by prounion extremists against the stoutly antiunion institution. Now burns took command of what was, politically speaking, an even more explosive crime scene inside the bedroom of suite 600 e. Burns found the body of a man named jess smith, 15, crumpled at the foot of one of two beds. In his right hand was a 32 caliber revolver. A single bullet had plowed through smiths right temple and lodged itself high in a doorjamb. Blood soaked smiths purple ink. Excuse me, blood soaked. Smiths purple is a tongue twister. I wrote in here. I know its my own my own words to smiths purple silk pajamas, as well as the heavy carpets that must have deadened as far. Most disturbingly, smiths head had apparently fallen so that it was now stuffed improbably inside a metal wastebasket atop the ashes of burned papers. This was clearly a matter for the local authorities, but burns knew better than to summon the police immediately. The situation called for discretion for few, and washington had known as much as the man who now lay before him in a bloody heap. He got, i dont know, a bloody heap is kind of a two segway i think. I think thats a probably a good place to. Yes. Thank you. When in doubt, start with a gunshot and a bloody heap on the floor. Exactly. Yes. This may be the first time, but i promise you, since this book is well on its way to years on the bestseller list, it will not be the last time somebody asks you what your book is about. You want to like practice on us . Sure. Yeah. Its about so, you know, ill tell you, ive actually explained this by telling you how i kind of came across it. Right . I was trying to think of a book topic maybe five years ago, 2018, and i was trying to think of something that might be that might speak to the present times a little bit. So i started thinking about, you know, corrupt president ial administrations, right . And i came across, of course, the harding administration, which is one of the most notoriously corrupt. You know, up there with, you know, grant and maybe nixon and, you know, theres teapot dome, theres, you know, hardings on potential complicity in all the scandals. But i came across the story of a United States senator who started investigating the department of justice. You know, probably the most corrupt attorney general in u. S. History. And then i you know, i started reading along and it turns out that this senator, just as he was closing in on the truth, justice, there was plenty really evidence of corruption in the Justice Department. He finds himself indicted on trumped up charges. And i thought, wow, thats a really good story. And thats thats kind of the book in a nutshell. I hope that wasnt too big of a spoiler, but no, no, no, no, no. Theres plenty worse you. No, once you crack the nut, its not a simple little story. How do you go about i mean. Okay, so you found the story. You knew it was worth telling. And im sure you know, the more you found out about it, the more fascinating it was. But how did you shape it . How did you structure it when youve got this . You know, not small cast of reprobates. Yeah. Not small, cass. And not a small stack of research either. Right. Im talking about thousands and probably 10,000 pages of you know, transcripts from congressional testimony, fbi files, department of justice, records of the National Archives manuscript collections of the library of congress. Yeah. So i assembled all the research. I organized it. You know, i work in a library, so im not a librarian, but i kind of some of its rubbed off on me. I organized everything into a big timeline, and thats actually really helpful. Just seeing how things slide in chronologically. But i, you know, there was a lot of whittling down right . Theres i mean, there was an entire storyline around this crafty detective named gaston means that i just, you know, he appears in the book, but he was he had a big i had to whittle it down to the central conflict between this senator and this attorney general. And it turns out, is one of the most epic feuds, i think, in american political history. Really, there. These two men were in conflict because of opposing political beliefs, because of the situations they found themselves in. And they really grew to hate each other and and basically stopped at nothing to defeat the other the other man. Well, these are your main characters. Why dont you introduce them . Yeah. So the attorney general, the title character in the book is harry doherty. He was he was the Political Force behind warren g. Harding. He was essentially Warren Hardings political mentor. I mean, i dont know how many people here really familiar with Warren Harding, his i mean, if anything, i think theyll theyll know that he often ranks dead last in the president ial rankings. But Doherty Doherty was sort of he he was the he wanted to play the role of kingmaker. He shepherded Warren Harding through his political career, got him elected to, you know, Lieutenant Governor of ohio, the United States senate, which put him in a in a good position to run for president in 1920. He was the darkhorse candidate, a long shot candidate. Harding but but he won with doherty as his campaign manager. Doherty was not he wasnt really a practicing lawyer. He was a lobbyist who accepted, you know, legal fees from powerful corporations in the state of ohio in return for political influence. Right. But he was you know, he had a he had a law degree. And as his reward for getting harding the presidency, he claimed the office of attorney general and proceeded to basically use the department of justice as a as a cupboard of favors. He raided the cupboard to give favors to his friends and also, ultimately prosecutors, enemies and chief among those enemies. Yes. Would be his antagonist. Thats right. Burton k wheeler, who is probably just as obscure as harry doherty, although, you know, i think that the big cultural touchstone is mr. Smith goes to washington, which was actually loosely inspired by the story in this book here, this story. And whats really striking about the story in crooked is that it was a National Sensation at the time, and it was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks and months. So everybody in the 1920s knew the story. But today its almost forgotten. But yeah, and it inspired mr. Smith goes to washington. But yeah, burton kane wheeler was a young firebrand senator from montana. I actually grew up in massachusetts, still had a yankee accent. But but i became a he came out of political and and legal age in montana and he was a really strident progressive. Harry doherty was a quite conservative attorney general who who decided to use the power of the federal government to in favor of the railroads and against the labor unions. And wheeler was a champion of labor. So that was sort of the source of their in it. Thats where they first locked horns. But then wheeler learned that there was there was a lot more going on in the department of justice than just favoring capital over labor. So youre getting into this book, youre doing some research, maybe theres a book in it, maybe there isnt. When did you know you really had a tiger by the tail . Was there a moment in your research when you thought, man, i really got something here. Ive got something that other people wouldnt have noticed or emphasized. Yeah, i mean, it really it really was probably when i read this, you know, i think it was about a paragraph in one of these early histories of the fbi. It was like, what is it named don whiteheads fbi story, talking about a 1950s history of the fbi, but about about a United States senator whos investigating the Justice Department, who then comes under indictment himself. I thought, thats cool. What i needed to do was confirm that there was the source material there to back it up. And it turns out, you know, doherty wrote memoirs which can be trusted only to a limited extent. Wheeler wrote memoirs, extensive oral histories with wheeler. Theres and then i also was able to get access to the department of justice records at the National Archives so i could see sort of the investigation unfold. And then theres also this 3000 page transcript of the congressional hearings that wheeler led into the end of the department of justice. It really was like knowing that theres this nugget of a story, but then being able to tell it in rich detail. Right. And i tried to write this in almost novelistic style, and i wouldnt have been able to do that without those 10,000 pages. I was going to ask you about that. I mean, just as the book begins, youve got this paragraph where you say all the dialog is substantiated. You can point to a transcript. So you can point to, you know, witnesses. How do you tell a story that way . How do you write around it and embroider it or at least sort of sketch in the outlines so that it becomes vivid and yet not, you know, transgress . Yeah, theres a lot of writing around. Youre right. Youre right about that. But its true. I did not embellish. I did not make up anything there. There are a few actually a few instances where i am able to get inside the characters heads. Thats only because they wrote that this is what they were thinking in their memoirs or or in an interview or whatever. And of course, every. Little nugget of information you can find, every scrap of dialog, you know, it was just a treasure when you find it and you have to find a way to use it. And yeah, and then right around the parts where you dont have the source material, right . So like, i mean when, you know, when the body is discovered and you know. Doherty gets the news, its a very vividly described scene how broken up he is. He puts his head in his hands. How much of that is you and how much of that is is your research . Well, i mean, its all of the research. I mean, its just the research, you know, processed by me. And but but, of course, none of its fabricated. Yeah. I happen to have a witness in the room at the time. Really . Yes. Yeah. A man by the name of joel boone, who was the president , hardings personal physician. He was a navy physician, and he was there. He was the one who broke the news about jeff smiths death. And he wrote much later, he wrote a very detailed memoir. So i was able to get those details. Otherwise, that scene would have been pretty plain, right . Well, its anything but plain mental. How do you research a book in the middle of a pandemic . It must have been easy right . Yeah. Yeah, that was quite a challenge. You know, i really lucked out in that i so i started writing the proposal in 2019 and you know, my agent counseled me like, you know, you just you just you Just Enough Research to get the proposal out there will sell the book, and then you go back and do the well. I kind of went overboard, so i, i spent to my ultimate benefit. I spent a lot, a lot of time in washington, dc just tracking down these source materials. And so when they i actually did sit down to write the book in 2020 and had no way to visit the National Archives, the library, congress. I already had that material. It was just sheer luck, really, that i did that. And then and then i, i got some help from, you know, i wanted to track down the text of the original indictment of wheeler and the National Archives, the archivist in denver was helpful enough to just scan it for me, sort of, you know, after books. And i was able, you know, so i was able to a lot of helpful people out in the Library World too. And was there a breakthrough moment at some point when youre you know, youre looking at research and all of a sudden your your heart starts to race and you think, man, this is so good. I cant wait to write this. Yeah, certainly the the scene where the scene where the detectives first starts snooping into wheelers past. And then also the sort of this this weird conspiracy where i was never able to get really down to the bottom truth about what would happen. But this conspiracy to blackmail the attorney general. Yeah, thats hatched in a hotel room in cleveland, ohio. I mean, when i when i saw that, i was like, oh, wow, thats great. Because how often do you hear about, you know, 2 to 2 ordinary citizens trying to blackmail the attorney general happened . Did you visit any of these places . Have you been to teapot dome . No. Pandemic. I wish i could. Right. If not for the pandemic, i would have. I mean, i was in montana. I did a lot of research there. Wheelers papers are divided between bozeman and helena, so i went there. I saw the state capital, but unfortunately not. I didnt go to enough places where i you know, a lot of the events took place. Are you looking forward to visiting them someday . Yeah. Yeah. Like ohio, especially, theres, you know, like theres actually theres really opulent memorial to Warren Harding. Harding died a really popular president. There was there was this National Mourning that hadnt been seen since the death of abraham lincoln. And it was only later, after the truth that just in time, he really did. Yeah, he did. He did. Although, although, you know, to his credit, it seemed like and i get into this in the book, it seemed like right before his death, he was really start starting to clean things up or he was he had an idea to clean things up. But ultimately he died and he left. He left the masters successor. Yeah. And kennedy was going to pull this out of vietnam. I so now a lot of this is happening in 1923. Yeah. 100 years ago. Exactly. Yeah. You can exploit all these all these anniversaries. I mean, thats one of the reasons why i was looking at events is i thought, you know, centennial. Yeah, you got good news paid for that. I mean, most of the events are 1924. So thats next year. But certainly a hard i think hardings death the 100th anniversary thats coming up in august. I believe so yeah. The conversation will get started around that i im man so you mentioned possible parallels to the present day maybe even lessons that we can learn from a book like this. Yeah for example. Yeah, i mean, i dont know. I dont know if i mentioned that in the book. I, i did, i did want readers to sort of draw their own conclusions and make their own connections. I mean, i think one of the lessons is that, that so so theres obviously theres the House Republicans<