Here’s another front page that was saved in the LAPD scrapbooks at the city archives. This is the Daily News from June 7, 1949.
Notice the bizarre byline: Will O’Wisp. I can’t recall seeing a fake byline on a news story before. The Times used to publish political items by “The Watchman,” but that’s a bit different.
Note to people making 1940s L.A. gangster pictures (this means you, “Gangster Squad”): Our young hooligans used a burp gun rather than an old-fashioned Thompson submachine gun.
ladailymirror.com 
Not ol’ Bill O’Wisp? Edna and Frank O’Wisp’s boy? Nice kid.
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In 1948 starlet Lila Leeds was busted for marijuana possession along with Robert Mitchum. So THAT’S why he had sleepy eyes.
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Looks like a Grease Gun not a Burp Gun. Burp Gun usually refers to a particular Russian automatic weapon. The Grease gun was American, stamped metal firing .45 cal. rounds.
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Sam: The original 1949 story identifies it as a “burp gun”…..
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Is the reference here to the Sergent Jackson who allegedly was the boyfriend of hooker queen Brenda Allen, and who plays such a large part in Charles Stoker’s book on corruption in the LAPD?
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Yes, but…. Don’t fall for the nonsense in Stoker’s “Thicker ‘N’ Thieves,” which is the self-published work of a crackpot (like William Bonelli’s “Billion-Dollar Blackjack” and Vincent Carter’s “LAPD’s Rogue Cops”). I’ve written at great length about the accuracy problems with “Thicker ‘N’ Thieves,” so I won’t go into it again. But basically you can’t take a word of it at face value.
Copies of “Thieves” were once common in Los Angeles (I picked up a signed edition at a Salvation Army thrift store for next to nothing back in the late 1980s or early 1990s), but it gained an assumption of accuracy, became popular and very rare, selling for hundreds of dollars. Then Steve Hodel republished it, so it’s commonly available.
But, really, you can’t trust it. At all.
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Just like you can’t trust the books of its new publisher.
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