J. D. Chandler Livres

The 1917 election of Mayor George Luis Baker ushered a long era of unscrupulous greed into Portland government. While supposedly enforcing prohibition laws, Baker ordered police chief Leon Jenkins to control and profit from the bootlegging market. Baker filled city coffers and his friends' pockets with booze-soaked cash while sensational headlines like the 1929 affair between policeman Bill Breuning and informant Anna Schrader scandalized the city. Maligned in the press, Schrader executed a bitter campaign to recall the mayor. In 1933, a hired gunman murdered special investigator to the governor Frank Aiken a day before he would have filed a report on corruption in the city government. Authors JD Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy unearth the salacious details of Baker's crooked administration in a revelatory account of prohibition in the Rose City.

In the nineteenth century, the art of photography revolutionized police methods of criminal identification as detectives made collections of criminal portraits in Rogues Galleries. In this engaging collection, J. D. Chandler presents portraits of thirteen infamous criminals from Portland, illuminating the history of crime in that city. Some of them straddled the law and rose to positions of great power, like James Lappeus, Portland's first police chief; Senator John Mitchell; and Tom Johnson, the notorious Black vice-king of Portland. Some were career criminals like Dutch Pete Stroff, who created a regional crime empire based in Portland, and Little Dutch Herman, who ran a murder-for-hire ring from his nightclub, The Wigwam. Others were brutal opportunists, like Portland's most notorious woman of the nineteenth century, Carrie Bradley; mob-enforcer turned serial killer, Douglas Franklin Wright; and Alvin Bud Brown, Portland's forgotten serial killer. All of them lived in Portland and left their bloody mark on the city.

In this engaging narrative, author JD Chandler crafts a people's history of Portland, Oregon, sharing the lesser-known stories of individuals who stood against the tide and fought for liberty and representation: C.E.S. Wood, who documented the conflict between Native Americans and the United States Army; Beatrice Morrow Cannady, founding member of the Portland NAACP and first African American woman to practice law in Oregon; women's rights advocate Dr. Marie Equi, who performed abortions and was an open lesbian; and student athlete Jack Yoshihara, who, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, was barred from participating in the 1942 Rose Bowl. From scandal and oppression to injustice and the brink of revolution, join Chandler as he gives voice to the Rose City's quiet radicals and outspoken activists.