 Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, And Corruption In the Rose City
By Phil Stanford
From the wildly popular Portland Tribune columnist comes Portland Confidential: Sex Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City.
List Price: $16.95 Price: $11.87
Product Details:
- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Westwinds Press (August 1, 2004)
- ISBN: 1558687939
Publisher Comments
It may come as a shock to anyone who regards Portland as a haven for enlightened progressive thought, with light rail and lattes. But not too long ago — in fact, as recently as the 1950s — Portland was known throughout the country as a Mecca of vice and sin.
From the wildly popular Portland Tribune columnist comes Portland Confidential: Sex Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City. For decades, Portland had been known as a wide-open town where prostitution, gambling, and drug running were common occurrences. By the 1950s, an opportunistic conman named Big Jim Elkins had taken over the vice industry in Portland and had most of the police brass and local politicos on his payroll.
This entertaining and fascinating story includes characters such as Al Winter, former Portland mob boss who moved on to Las Vegas to open the Sahara Casino; Bill Langley, the Multnomah County district attorney who was caught on tape planning to divvy up payoffs with Seattle mobsters; "Diamond Jim" Purcell, chief of detectives in Portland who helped cover up many of Big Jim's crimes; and Dorothy McCullough "No Sin" Lee who was elected Portland's first woman mayor in 1949 and who vowed to clean up the city. Even a young Bobby Kennedy figures in the story when, in 1957, he gathered up Portland's most notorious characters and brought them back to Washington, D.C., to appear live on television in front of the Senate Rackets committee.
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