Highland Park Man Facing Criminal Charges for Illegal Gambling Ring

How the LAPD's anti-abortion unit targeted women and doctors in the pre-abortion era.

Brittney Mejia

LAPD officers boarded the yacht with their guns drawn.

The Westerly yacht had been under surveillance for two months and had a scandalous history. After an explosion, a wealthy couple was found dead on board and their daughter was acquitted of murder charges. The officers now suspected the vessel was a mobile headquarters for an abortion ring.

Danny Dyer steered the nearly 50-foot yacht on the water. His wife was helping another man, who did not have a medical license, perform the procedures. They typically charged $450 per procedure.

On a cool winter morning, as the officers tried to arrest him, Dyer pulled out his gun.

"Detective Danny Galindo warned Dyer with his gun drawn. 'I'm going to kill you.'

On February 24, 1960, the city had an abortion unit.

The unit, part of the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Division, investigated so-called "rogue procedures."

They interviewed young women who went to hospitals for antibiotics after abortions and were reported to the police. They interviewed loved ones of women who died as a result of botched abortions. They monitored and kept files on hundreds of illegal abortion providers. They posed as boyfriends or brothers to trick people into confessing.

The team worked for decades, until the Supreme Court ruled Roe v. Wade in 1973, giving women across the country the legal right to end their pregnancies.

Nearly 50 years later, on a Friday morning in June, the historic decision was handed down. The Supreme Court decision further intensified the debate in U. S. states about how to protect or definitively eliminate access to abortion.

But it also highlights the potential role of law enforcement in the future. Some states and jurisdictions want to give police and prosecutors more power to enforce anti-abortion laws, while others say they want to minimize that role.

No one knows for sure what abortion law enforcement will look like in a post-Roman world, but Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s suggests at least one possibility.

Galindo was a 25-year-old rookie cop in 1947 when Elizabeth Short's body was discovered in a vacant lot. The Black Dahlia was Galindo's first murder case.

He was charismatic and not bad: curly black hair, startling blue eyes, applications sewn into his suit. He had a hero's autobiography: World War II bomber pilot. Shot down a plane over Germany. Taken prisoner of war.

He became a homicide detective and quickly became acquainted with death. Hayland Park stood in a ravine above a headless body found by a Boy Scout. Day after day he breathed in the stench of a corpse crammed into a small room. An 18-year-old young man's life ended, apparently from a jail cell, when a police officer shot him in the neck.

By 1951, Galindo had acquired an extraordinary cause. Not long ago he had become a member of a unit fighting abortion. His job was to uphold a century-old law.

It was a time when TV housewives and mothers, in heels, pearls and neatly tied aprons, dreamed of the perfect American home. Newspaper headlines read, "Housewives Actually Want to See the Perfect Kitchen." Psychiatrists preach that nothing is more important than being a good wife and mother.

But in this city, angels of women and girls die from botched abortions, often as a result of procedures performed by unqualified people.

Hylin Wisman, 22, dies in a motel. Mark Emerson, 16, is thrown into a hospital. A Patricia Lane-esque, 32-year-old worldly worm, left to crumble in a filthy job. Mary Jane Leff, 23, a car driver, dies in a trailer home after leaving a one-year-old boy waiting in her car on the street.

The 32-year-old who had hoped for a career in Hollywood A year-old woman had a botched operation due to a poor role in a movie.

Women who could not arrange a legal abortion died from antiseptic injections, overdoses of very tricky anesthetics, and uterine perforations leading to blood infections.

The abortion department received signals from hospitals to talk about any symptoms of criminal abortions. When women, severely damaged as a result of the brutal procedure, were on their deathbeds, the officers tried to recognize the name of the man who had performed the abortion because of their "dying words".

Although a death was the most legitimate way to start an investigation, the unit also used other methods to identify "abortionists" -- for example, by naming men and women who had performed abortions. In one case, dozens of women visited a doctor's office, leading to a months-long investigation. During surveillance, detectives communicated by walkie-talkie.

In Hollywood style, Galindo played the role of an angry boyfriend dating an abortion provider. He said his girlfriend got sick from the procedure and asked him to pay the hospital bill. When the abortion provider paid, Galindo arrested them.

Women in the police department also helped. After receiving numerous complaints against doctors, Josephine Serrano Collier, the first Latina in the Los Angeles Police Department, pretended to be a distressed patient. For example, Dr. Ralph Reed, who had been in private practice for 28 years, took pity on her and offered to discount her $100 abortion fee by $20. Collier paid him with marked money.

Galindo later investigated the doctor, found the money, and took him away.

When he was arrested, Reed, a Navy lieutenant during World War II, said he had "sincerely tried to help those in need." One publication called him an "underground abortionist."

In 1953, Galindo and his team completed a six-month investigation into George Davis, a retired doctor in his 70s. Davis later testified in defense of an abortion suspect whose surgical instruments were found in his car, drawing their attention. Davis said they were in fact his. The woman was acquitted. Davis was placed under police surveillance.

The women would come to his house at night, sometimes accompanied by friends, under cover of darkness. When they screamed on the operating table, the faceless, gray-haired Davis would tell them to stop. He didn't want the neighbors to hear.

The women would sometimes tell Davis about their situations. One of them got pregnant while a divorce was pending. She came from a pretty strict family, and if she gave birth, "it would bring shame and a lot of humiliation to us."

On Tuesday night last month, Galindo and two other officers raided Davis' modest home in Highland Park. Galindo had been there three years ago when four thieves tied up Davis, ransacked her house, and stole thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry and cash.

At that time, Davis was a suspect, not a victim.

In the bedroom at the back that Davis used as an operating room, there was a general mirror covering a cabinet with surgical equipment. One print was written as "butcher". The police took Davis and the housekeeper.

According to the record, Davis has undergone about 100 abortion surgery to girls from San Francisco and Las Vegas in the past four months. After the arrest, Davis asked Harman Zander if he would be charged for murder.

Teacher, you haven't hit a young woman recently, right?

Davis has not been polluted, whether it was legal or illegal for many years since I opened. "

Davis was convicted of abortion and later appealed and released.

One day in February of the previous year, Galind headed to Figeloore Street to recapture Davis as a member of a group of four. At this time, Davis met them with guns and tear gas in their hands.

After handing over the weapon, the police restrained Davis, his wife, and the housekeeper in the role of a nurse. According to police, the two women have helped doctors to achieve 30 abortions a month.

Three months later, Galind definitely helped search for the Sanfernando Plain. The network of the abortion clinic, which was open, used its own house, beach resort, and huts in the mountains for surgery, and changed the place. Police did not know any cases of death due to these surgery.

Before meeting his wife, Mergery, in 1956, Galind had been dealing with abortions with murder and rape for five years. Galind often asked about the lazy factors of their lives.

"He knew how to gain the trust of women with trauma," Maggie says. "He knew that way."

When he met Martin's abortion worker, the correspondent John Bartrow called them "experts that persuade young women and talk." In a series of three parts of the Saturday Evening Post, Martin depicted Galind as a handsome and kind man who "gently reassure them." Otherwise, "The big man, Sergeant Paul Lupage, who holds his partner, the cigar, talks to them in a severe tone."

"Galind told Martin," For example, any small case of abortion is as strange as murder. "

Doris Klein was working as a reporter for the Valley Times when she began looking into the medical workers who perform abortions, the women who speak out, and the police who investigate them. As one of the few female newcomers in charge of intensive announcing, she wanted to challenge the social rejection of conversation on the subject.

When Klein found The Informants, a person guided her through the Los Angeles Police Department's fight against "abortion." She visited their offices, where detectives kept folders with maps and biographical data on each allegation about a suspect and details of the case examined.

By Galindo's estimate, 70% of the women who fell for their vision background were married. Klein, for example, wonders why so many women are at risk of passing this feature.

"There are almost the same reasons I give as domestic problems," he said. "Most of them - due to the fact that the number of children is so large that they do not have the chance to bear another economic burden."

In the past decade, a six-man detachment of five detectives and a police inspector investigated 80 cases of abortion death, Klein reported in a five-volume series published in 1961. In the first six months of such a year, she reported, there were three abortion deaths in the Los Angeles area.

Among those arrested were chiropractors, osteopaths, nurses, waitresses, and, in the past, real estate agents and secretaries. In two years, one abortion network brought in $2. 5 million, including a secondary school where the procedure was taught. In terms of the amount of money made by those who prepare abortions, it is inferior to illegal gambling and drugs.

Detective Hugh Brown of the same department told Klein that the girls who had abortions were "kind of like crime victims."

"They are treated as witnesses to persecution."

Lois Berman was 19 when she encountered the abortion ward.

As an adolescent, the buff and dark-haired Berman earned her living at a department store on Broadway. At the time, the wave of British penetration was sweeping the country, and in his lyrics, "Everything English is in vogue." What was the uniform number of her manager, Timothy Harrington, who scolded her?

In 1966, when she was about to quit her job, Harrington invited her on a motorcycle ride to the Santa Monica Mountains. Berman didn't wait. The two indulged in unprotected sex.

I even thought he really liked me and wanted to spend time with me," she said in an interview with The Times. I wasn't ready, and as a result of my embarrassment, I didn't tell him that I didn't have contraception.

"Around that time, I found out I was pregnant. I felt like my whole life was falling apart because I wanted to go to college. I had ambitions for life, and this guy had no intention of getting involved with me. I predicted this horrible future.

Berman spent her days sobbing in her room. Her family was not wealthy. She wanted to arrange an abortion. As her lyrics say, there was no other way out.

Harrington found out that the USC Institute was studying Business Explosion on its campus and called the number. He was told he would have to drive to several apartments on North Kenmore Avenue and that a man named Grossman would be holding an event there.

On May 3, the couple went to the apartment complex and met a man who was a doctor there. He told Berman that the procedure was actually quite common when performed by a doctor.

"But when a sleazy guy does it, people die or get infected."

Berman put on a surgical robe and lay on the food, legs in stirrups. She closed her eyes tightly as Grossman put an anesthesia mask on her persona. A woman from the surgery stood near Berman and held her hand.

Something inside her turned and there was a metallic sound. 20 minutes later. The operation was complete.

Grossman told her that if there was blood in the blood, to go to the doctor and tell him that she had in fact had a miscarriage and get some medicine.

"Don't tell anyone about this. If they find out about me, I won't be able to help other girls like you."

Berman went to work the next day. The day after that, Berman went to work. For the next few hours, she felt the blood seeping through her pink clothes. She found a chance to go home, where she changed her clothes and went back to work.

When she returned home in the evening, she was bleeding as if someone had cut her. Worried, she went to Kaiser. Instead of lying, she basically confessed that she had an abortion.

"I don't want to die here. Let's tell the truth."

She even thought her perception remained there.

After this, she recalls, the atmosphere in the ward changed. The director of the gynecology clinic called the police.

The next day, Berman carefully went to the police station at the Metropolis Center. In the lane, she rehearsed her personal story.

Waiting for her were Sergeant John Edwards Jr. of the anti-abortion unit and Ricky. The hard-headed detectives in suits and ties listened to her story.

Okay, Berman, you told me. Come on, talk about the truth. "

The police looked at her bag. She worked for an ophthalmologist, and they took out his business card and asked if he was involved in this case. If she did not confess, he was told to contact him and everyone in her notebook.

"I have all kept secrets for my family and friends.

Berman said everything he knew. I entered an apartment from the alley, but I don't remember my address. The doctor was fai r-skinned, one and a half meters tall, and the color of the hair was like pepper and salt. That Harrington took her.

After the Flat 305 evacuated, Edwards and the other two police officers detained Glossman on May 10. Immediately, he found that his real name was Carl Railsus, that Mexico had a doctor's license but did not have a license in California. He lived in Chura Vista, but had been borrowing an apartment in Los Angeles since last year.

"The next thing I learned was that the trial schedule was decided and I had to testify," says Berman.

In an opposition interrogation, Berman tried to get antibiotics from Kaiser, but said, "I was notified to the police." He confirmed that he would be arrested if he did not state.

She had to testify that her period had been delayed. About the pain felt on the operating table. About what the police were involved in.

When the Ross Police Police Phil Ballone was on the testimony, he deciphered the notebook received from Lalus. There was a name, day, day, time, and phone number. He said that the item "3W" means "three weeks late." Lartus apartments had an anesthetic mask, vaginal mirror, culetto, fluff, alcohol, and blood to the pot. He had been arrested about 100 in two years at an abortion clinic and was familiar with these equipment.

Several times, the lawyer accidentally called Baron a drug expert.

"I'm sorry." Judge, I have seen more drug experts than abortion experts.

Lasus eventually acknowledged for collusion of abortion and abortion. He later made a disadvantageous testimony to Dr. Leon P. Verus, a prominent doctor of Beverly Hills, who was accused by the police for introducing a patient to Laltus. Berser was convicted of the crime.

Then, as in the fall of 1968, the appeals court left Bellas' ruling in force and turned to the state high court to challenge the constitutionality of California's abortion law.

In September 1969, the California Supreme Court handed down what was essentially a grand jury decision. After a 4-3 split vote, the court essentially decided that the centuries-old state law on abortion was vague and, in fact, unconstitutional.

By the time it reached its conclusion, lawmakers had amended the state law to legalize abortion when a woman's mental or physical health was threatened, and even when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. The state Supreme Court, in its own decision, even said it would not rule on the substance of the amendment.

And so the criminalization of abortion in California continued.

In May 1970, Los Angeles Police Department detectives, one of whom was Luveti, raided a hospital in West Los Angeles. Aware of the abortion procedures, they allowed the doctor to complete the procedure. According to police texts, they feared that the woman's life would be in danger if they stopped the abortion. They then took the doctor away.

The officers then took a 23-year-old student from the California Institute of Los Angeles, who was also in the area, and took the woman and two officers away. According to police emails, the woman had been working at the clinic to raise money for her own surgery.

It was the last LAPD raid focused on abortion, the Times wrote. In January 1973, abortion was legalized nationwide by order of the U. S. Supreme Court.

"Once abortion was legalized and the police were no longer involved in such cases, the police breathed a sigh of relief. 'That allowed them to focus their efforts on other things that needed doing.'"

The Los Angeles Police Museum has a unique photo of serial killer Richard Ramirez, popularly known as the "Night Stalker," on display in a window display in Highland Park. On the other side is a faded reddish sweatshirt disguising Gregory Powell, one of the killers in "The Onion Field," a 1963 hit Los Angeles hit that starred a movie and changed the way police worked.

Above is a police pistol and uniform from decades ago. In one, a weathered TV starring Dragnet, a TV series about the work of the Los Angeles Police Department. In one episode, Marco Lopez, playing Danny Galindo, asks an unintelligible tow truck driver in Spanish about the victim.

There are virtually no noticeable symptoms of the Boarding Brigade's constant presence.

Los Angeles Police Sergeant Dylan Wells, a police museum volunteer and amateur historian, first came across a reference to this detail last year while researching Josephine Serrano Collier.

A remnant of that time was left in the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Guide, last reviewed in 2021.

A chapter titled "Abnormal Circumstances" lists methods used to perform abortions, including "creating toxic conditions" and "mechanical shocks aimed at directly damaging the embryo."

"Homicide by abortion is virtually absent in modern law and practice. But the information was nevertheless provided to be used "not only in special cases where illegal abortions may be performed, but also in other death investigations, due to possible changes in the law."

Wells said police "have to adapt to changing things in society, such as the criminalization or decriminalization of certain behaviors."

After the court handed down its "Ro via Wade" ruling, Tom Sherman, a journalist from Delaware, rummaged through his collection of antiques and old historical documents, particularly an old NYPD manual he'd pulled out of a trash can 10 years ago.

The NYPD created its own department after the abortion network became public in the mid-1950s. A 1968 education ballot measure called "Abortion Prevention" detailed how to use the abortion equipment and tails that were installed after women visited a clinic for an abortion.

"It was a strange moment when I dug it up and looked to the future while reading the past," he said.

According to the Gutmama Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, in January 2023, 12 states will introduce laws that will make abortions almost completely prohibited, with very limited exceptions. Doctors who break abortion laws will be subject to criminal penalties.

The Texas court's inevitable decision may put a stop to the widespread use of the mainstay of abortion, mifepristone, which is included in the combination of two drugs used in more than half of abortions in the United States.

Leslie J. Reagan, author of When Abortion Was a Crime, expressed concern about what would happen in states where abortion is banned.

"When abortion is crime, this basically happens." This means that copper support basically has different quality people, which are different. Is unfair and ineque to the class, races, age, and all remaining features, that is, actors and copper staff are actually working as police officers. I care most. "

Currently 7 6-yea r-old Berman has even said that his personal abortion has been "very secretly" for his lifetime. With age, she began to feel guilty about his conclusion.

At present, it contradicts himself, "opposite to abortion, but opposite to choose," and emphasizes the opposition to the crime of this surgery. According to her sentence, ammunition has changed so much that she does not want to fall down when she reminds me of those days.

"I was very happy that the fact that it was actually legalized did not need to experience the fact that I actually spent," she says. Will you be arrested? Am I going to prison? "

Even after the abortion was legalized, Galind continued to investigate the murder, and was then convicted of the murder of Leno and Rosemary Rabika, the followers of Cult's Charles Manson Leslie Van Haoten. Testimony was performed in the r e-occupation. Galind, who was thought to be a member of the Manson murder case, said in court that the "war" engraved on Leno's abdomen was actually seen.

In 1977, he left the police and started working as an investigator at a California advocate university. Later, a personal investigator opened. Galind died in 2010. 88 years old.

One Sunday after autumn, Maruya took a news memo from a yellowed yellow folder. It was written that Galind had expanded his car in front of a broker who is an abortion doctor to keep it from erasing.

Other than that, she wrote about the arrest of Galind in a yacht, where she talked to her wife (this is just a technique that they had a chance to kill him, "said Maruya. Eventually, the dial lowered the revolver and later acknowledged the abortion.

Mersey and her husband had never spoken of abortions, but according to her email, he said, "He was no longer needed to be dragged by police data." According to her email, he even thought this was a violation of women's rights.

"Some healthcare professionals seriously thought that they could help girls, and he had the opportunity to understand it. At the time of this, I was put down to the murder section.

As Maruji mentions abortion, before the criminal act, for the struggle where the husband has dedicated most of his career?

She supports women's choice.