Portland on the Take: Mid-Century Crime Bosses, Civic Corruption & Forgotten Murders

JD Chandler · JB Fisher

nov 2014 · Arcadia Publishing

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In an era when Portland's shipyards thrived, so, too, did corruption. The Red Scare that followed the 1934 Waterfront Strike allowed gangsters to gain control of some of the city's unions. Working in cahoots with high-ranking city officials, criminals like Al Winter and James Elkins gained power and influence, often using "goon squads" of union men and hired criminals to enforce their will. Now authors JD Chandler and JB Fisher bring Portland's days of civic corruption and hidden murders out of the shadows. With unprecedented access to the police investigative files of the Frank Tatum murder of 1947 and the detective notebooks and tape recorder transcripts of Multnomah County sheriff's detective Walter Graven, the authors shed new light on Portland's turbulent mid-twentieth-century past.

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JD Chandler is a writer and public historian living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of "Murder & Mayhem in Portland" and "Hidden History of Portland." His Slabtown Chronicles (PortlandCrime.blogspot.com) and Weird Portland (WeirdPortland.blogspot.com) blogs chronicle the Rose City's history. JB Fisher teaches writing at Portland Community College and came to the field of Portland crime history when he inadvertently discovered hidden above his water heater a stack of old Oregon Journal newspapers about a long-forgotten Oregon mystery. Fisher holds a doctorate in Renaissance English literature and was a Shakespeare professor before returning to the City of Roses where he is now researching and writing about some of Portland's most intriguing unsolved crime cases.