12.7.07

F I R S TP R E V587NEXTLAST

Crime and Mystery on the Waterfront
After the Gold Rush the waterfront of San Francisco was a jumble of rotting piers and wharves containing ramshackle warehouses and bars. The maze of rat holes and piles below the piers was a perfect hideout and haven for criminal Shanghai gangs and 'Hack Hawks', who preyed on newly-arriving ships' passengers. In 1863 San Francisco decided to fill in the area and build the Great Seawall, a 12,000-foot long bulkhead that would add 800 acres of land to the city. The project was not completed until 1908 by which time the gangs, having completely lost their sanctuary, were eliminated.

Unfortunately not all crime in the city had ended. San Francisco, like most major cities at that time, was subject to some level corruption and police graft. In 1907 William Biggy was named Police Chief. Biggy, a man of inflexible honesty immediately found himself in conflict with the official and popularly sanctioned vice of the city. His attempts to shut down gambling in Chinatown and prostitution in the Fillmore District met with fierce resistance from both sides of the law. In November of 1908, completely frustrated and without informing his subordinates, Biggy personally raided a well-known brothel owned by a madame named Tessie Walls. The press portrayed the raid as a drunken farce and Biggy as bumbling policeman.

The next day, assailed on all sides, from the press to the politicians to the rest of the police force, Biggy took a police boat from the San Francisco waterfront here across the Bay to Marin County to meet with the Police Commissioner. During the return trip Chief Biggy disappeared from the police boat. His body was found floating in the Bay a week later. While his death was officially ruled an accidental drowning, rumors and questions remained. Years later two events cast more doubt on the actual cause of Biggy's death. First, when Tessie Walls died 30 years later, the primary beneficiary in her will was Biggy's deputy police chief. Secondly, years after Biggy's death, William Murphy, the pilot of the police boat that Biggy had been lost from, was committed to an insane asylum continually raving, "I don't know who did it, but I swear to God I didn't do it!"
[ MAP E-15 ]


0 comments