Beauty And The Beast

In the late summer of 1933, as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were terrorizing the Southwest, Los Angeles was dealing with their own homegrown gun wielding Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo was Thomas White a twenty-eight-year-old ex-truck driver who did time in both San Quentin and Folsom prison. Juliet was his nineteen-year-old hairdresser girlfriend Burma Adams.

White was arrested for the first time in 1924 for drunkenness, this was followed a few months later for robbery, but he was released. In 1927 he was picked up on a liquor charge but beat the rap. In 1930 he was working as a truck driver when $6000 worth of cigarettes went missing. He was found guilty of grand theft and sentenced from 1 to 10 years at San Quentin where he proved to be a troublesome inmate so was shipped off to Folsom. 

White was paroled in April 1933 and headed to L.A. where he met Burma at a night club. Soon they were a couple and in mid August they started to rob people. Though one of their victims was blinded by a gun shot from White, none were killed. Over the course of the remaining summer, the duo stuck-up a number of people causing a bit of a sensation in the City of Angels.

A stolen car would be their down fall. On one of their jobs, the duo stole a car and brought it to a garage for repairs. On September 6, 1933, police found it and waited for the couple to return to pick it up. When they did, they were followed back to their apartment building, where they had two rooms. Burma had one on the third floor, White on the fourth. 

Four officers entered the building, two in the front, two in the rear. As two of them entered Burma's apartment, two others went to the fourth floor as White was making his way down. The cops identified themselves and told White to halt. The bandit drew his gun and fired two shot before the officers brought him down with three well placed shots. After hearing the shots, Burma, his wife of six days asked, "Did they shoot him?" when told that he probably had been shot she showed no emotion. As they questioned her she kept asking, "Is he dead yet?"

He was. White died a few minutes after the shooting.

Thomas White

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Fake Agent Gets Real Bullet

Just before midnight on September 4, 1933 Los Angeles bid farewell to small time gangster Axel "Three Finger Jack" Anderson. His record showed he had been arrested for burglary in San Francisco in 1925 and again in L.A. in '27.

Stepping up his game, Anderson procured fake credentials showing that he was a Prohibition agent. Earlier in the evening Anderson and two others "confiscated" a load of liquor from a garage. Two hours later, witnesses stated that they saw Anderson in the backseat of a sedan with two other men. A shot rang out, and Anderson fled the sedan and ran towards his own car, which was parked nearby, but his rivals over came him and shot him down in the street. Other reports had it that after fleeing the sedan, his rivals started the car, drove after him and a gunman fired at him from the passenger side window. Either way, Anderson was done for.

Police felt that he was killed by his two companions, who assisted him in stealing the liquor, over an argument over profits. Another thought is that the killers were the original owners of the booze and Anderson was trying to sell it back to them.

Axel Three Finger Jack Anderson

Tinsletown loses two

Earl "Sprout" Withrow and Victor Harmon were bootlegging partners in Los Angeles. In addition to a handful of arrests for liquor, the former had been involved in a shooting with San Francisco rum runners in 1929 but was exonerated, and the latter, who also had some arrests for alcohol, did time in San Quentin for grand theft auto,

On this date in 1933 both men were found dead.They had been beaten and strangled to death someplace and their corpses driven to a secluded dirt road and dumped outside Downey, California. Rival bootlegger Frank Hugo was picked up for the murders after it was learned he had a meeting with Withrow and Harmon the afternoon before their disappearance.

Earl "Sprout" Withrow

Victor Harmon

California dreaming

In 1926, twenty-seven year old Dominic Di Ciolla headed from Chicago to L.A. more than two thousand miles all the way. Whether or not he got his kicks on Route 66 or not is unknown but the former Windy City bad man was attempting to get his piece of Los Angeles bootlegging pie. An ambition that cost him his life; his body was found on this date back in 1931.

Di Ciolla, according to law enforcement, sought to be the criminal king of Los Angeles's Italian colony. He was arrested numerous times on "liquor charges" and twice on suspicion of murder. Reconstructing his death, police believe that he was lured to a remote road about five miles outside of Van Nuys. He put his car in park, got out and crossed the street to a waiting car. As he approached the other car he took off one of his gloves, probably to shake someone's hand. Instead of a friendly handshake however he was greeted with a blast from a shotgun that took off a chunk of his head.

Di Ciolla's killers drove off and left him in the road where he was found in the morning. The head lights of his car still burning.

Dominic Di Ciolla

Paul is dead

Here's another clue for you all the walrus gangster was Paul Robinson, a Los Angeles hoodlum, whom police believed was involved in some sort of  gangland feud. This belief stemmed from the fact that Robinson's bullet riddled corpse was found in a recently dug ditch near a San Mateo golf course.

Police determined that Robinson had been killed in San Francisco and his body taken to the golf course and dropped into the ditch. (I suspect a "hole in one" joke is applicable here so if you have one, by all means leave it in the comments) After Robinson's body was deposited his slayers fired ten more shots into him. Afterwards, the dead man's auto was parked near San Francisco's Presidio district and set on fire.