The above photo, made today in 1933 and signed by a lensman named D. Horvath, has appeared on scores of websites, but never with any information aside from the shot’s date, its provenance in the archive of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the suggestion that it shows two dead gangsters. Well, it’s a crime scene photo, so the criminal part is probably a no-brainer. But the photo holds clues that might help tell a more detailed story.
First, while two gangsters is factual enough, what you actually have here is one man in a pin-striped suit and another in work clothes—work clothes in the sense that he’s wearing a waistcoat with two ink pens wedged in one pocket. He shows a little of his face, and blood has issued from his mouth and nose. That’s probably drainage, rather than bleeding, because there’s so little. We’d say he was shot in the head and died immediately.
The suited man is propped up by something, which upon closer examination appears to be an overturned table. We think anyone who died violently, yet did so in that position, suffered instant death too, so he was also probably shot in the head. Plus that’s the normal target in organized crime shootings.
In the background you see two large metal cans, one with a bullet hole. They could contain almost anything from water to ether. It seems probable that the shooter or shooters weren’t worried about fire or an explosion, but it didn’t matter because one or both cans in fact were empty: the visible bullet hole is at the very bottom of the upper can, yet the floor of the room is dry. These are no household cans, though. They’re industrial. So we can infer that the waistcoated man is a chemist or technician of some sort, and that they were bootleggers, these two. Maybe they transferred booze from cans into bottles in this house.
Somewhere deeper in that LAPD archive there are probably more photos of this murder scene, and we’d be curious to see them, but historical imagery tends to be uploaded to the internet in bits and pieces, if at all. We’ll have to live with the story we’ve concocted. Shot in the head is a rough way to go just for being capitalistic, but when you operate outside the law you take your chances. Usually, anyway. Maybe you have different or better ideas what happened. Feel free to find a larger version of the photo online and do a little visual sleuthing of your own.
