Hymie Miller

"Shuddup, you mugs! I got something to say! Prohibition is over, and it's the birth of a new day for us! From now on, Marko is legitimate!"

In this early scene in A Slight Case of Murder (1938), Edward G Robinson's crime boss explains his plan for a new, strictly legal, operation to his appalled henchmen, played by a great bunch of tough-guy character actors, some of whom crop up in dozens of crime films around this time.

 

We're only interested in one of the goons, however. A guy called Hymie Miller, an extra so insignificant that he has only one IMDB credit to his name, although he was in a few more films than that, including this one. You can't miss him; he's the guy in the hat. No? Okay, he's the guy right in front of the door. This guy:

 

I only know it's him because, three months before the film was released, Hymie was killed, and a newspaper printed this picture, which has a helpful floating arrow of doom above his head: 

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The caption under the picture notes that the film was "a strange coincidental prelude to his own death", which I suppose is true enough.

Here's what happened. Late on Sunday, 14 November, 1937, Hymie Miller locked up the delicatessen that he part-owned, a busy little hang-out off Hollywood Boulevard, and walked home to the Halifax apartments on Yucca Avenue. The night clerk saw him enter the lobby with a man he didn't recognise and go upstairs. Ten minutes later, he saw the man running down the stairs "three steps at a time".⁽²⁾ Before he could decide what to do, his phone rang. It was Hymie, who said: "Quick! Get a doctor! I've been shot!"⁽³⁾ The next day, this news story appeared: 

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The story said: "A gunman fired four shots at close range into Hymie Miller, 31, movie actor and Hollywood cafe owner, as Miller lay in bed in his apartment early today. Miller, cast in the picture "Robin Hood" and many others in minor roles, was wounded critically. His nose was shot off, and bullets pierced his neck, left hand and right thigh ... The gun was held so close to Miller that each shot left a powder burn."

 

He was rushed to hospital, where he gave the police a statement that the night clerk's story, which hadn't yet been heard by the police, would later seem to contradict: "I heard a noise in the room and woke up," he said. "I saw a man dimly in the darkness. Before I could rise up in bed, he fired at me."  Leaving aside the fact that that sounds amazingly lucid for a man whose nose has just been shot off (I assume that's simply due to an innocent lack of care on the part of the police transcriber), what about the mysterious stranger who had walked Hymie home? Hymie didn't mention him; he just told the police that he couldn't give a description of the gunman and said that he had no enemies who might want to kill him. Perhaps, he suggested, the intruder had meant to rob him and had shot him accidentally. 

Before leaving him to the doctors, a photographer took this picture, which the papers were able to use in their stories about his death the next day: 

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It took the police more than a week to pick someone up for the murder. Ten days after Hymie died, they raided the set of Robin Hood (the Errol Flynn version, released the next year, 1938), on which Hymie had been getting some work, and arrested an extra called Johnny Fisher, who they'd been told had been seen arguing with Hymie over a girl. The press, which had for some reason decided to take a light-hearted approach to its coverage of the investigation, got decent comic mileage out of the latest development:

 

"Out at the Adolphus Gardens in Pasadena, where Warner Brothers studio has built a replica of the castle of Nottingham for the filming of 'Robin Hood', the agents of Prosecutor Buron Fitts nabbed ... Fisher, who was disporting himself among the jolly archers, pikemen and cross-bowmen of that legendary bandit who was supposed to have shared his loot with the poor. 

"Fitts' raiders elbowed through the band of movie outlaws and knights in armour just as the merry men were discarding their green forestry suits for peasant goatskins and were making ready to sneak into Nottingham under the very nose of the legendary sheriff to steal the show at a knightly jousting.

"Over the drawbridge came Fitts' men, with modern arms and a John Doe warrant ... And Fisher was dragged off to jail, goatskin suit, leather hat and all. His part was so small that he wasn't even missed from the cast and the filming was resumed."⁽⁷⁾

This is what the Adolphus Busch Gardens in Pasadena looked like that day. Depending on how much of the scene had been shot before the raid took place, Fisher could be one of the extras in this shot:

The detectives worked on Fisher overnight, interrogating him and his roommates, Jack Lumiere and Harry Fielman, who were also movie extras. Investigator John Klein said that the police were able to get "considerable information" out of them, including the fact that Fisher and Hymie had been together until three hours before Miller was shot. Although they decided that Fisher hadn't been the man who shot Hymie, it didn't mean they liked him or wanted him around town. They charged all three men with vagrancy and gave them 24 hours to leave town or face a jail sentence.⁽⁷⁾ (Apparently, the LAPD used to do this all the time when they couldn't make a charge stick on a suspect.)

 

Fisher initially pled guilty to the charge of vagrancy, but then changed his mind and hired a couple of lawyers to fight his case so he could stay in town. In light of later events, this was probably a mistake.

The interrogation had led the police into some interesting areas. They'd learned that Hymie's delicatessen was frequented mainly by small-time criminals and shady characters -- people who "had been known to handle a few race bets and dabble in vice" -- and that some of them worked from time to time, like Hymie and Fisher, as movie extras. Following these leads, they heard rumours that gangsters from New York had moved into the fringes of the motion picture business, that there was "a gigantic, sinister motion picture extra racket in which thousands were victimized" and that Hymie himself had in some way been able to control the calls for work from casting bureaus.⁽⁸⁾

 

How about that? While all those other guys on the set of A Slight Case of Murder that day were striking their best tough-guy poses and trying their hardest to come off like ruthless gangsters, they were standing right beside the real thing. I wonder how many of them knew.

 

The press jumped on the story:

 

"A surprised Hollywood found the makings of a real life gangster plot in its lap today, with a squad of special "gang busting" detectives investigating what was believed a racket collecting thousands of dollars in tribute weekly from movie extras.

 

"District Attorney Buron Fitts claimed to possess evidence that eastern gangsters have invaded Hollywood and are 'organizing' the movie extras ... Hundreds of them, Fitts said it was indicated, must share their pay checks with racketeers who control their jobs. If they fail to pay, they join the army of jobless."⁽⁹⁾

 

The DA took pains to emphasise that the racket was operating outside the Central Casting Bureau, which prided itself on its ability to impartially allocate jobs to Hollywood's 12,000 registered extras using what it called a "mechanical device". Fitts stressed that the gangsters operated through various clubs that were organised among the extras.

 

The investigation into the extras racket became the DA's priority, and  Fisher, the Robin Hood extra who should have been smart enough to get out of town when he had the chance, was rearrested as part of that case.  Hymie's murder, now officially divorced from the major investigation, was left to "four sleuths" to solve.⁽¹⁰⁾

 

In charge of the sleuths was Detective Lieutenant H Leslie Wildey, who had a great idea. That night clerk at Hymie's apartment building -- he'd seen the murderer twice: once walking upstairs and once running downstairs. Why not show him some photographs of some of those shady types from Hymie's delicatessen? Sure enough, the night clerk picked out a picture of Dennis "Danny" Wilson, a former New York prize-fighter and, more recently, movie extra.⁽¹¹⁾ Two other witnesses identified Wilson as the man they'd seen talking to Hymie in the delicatessen earlier that evening.

 

 

That's the guy!

 

But Wilson had skipped town, and was last seen leaving San Francisco for an unknown destination. Further work by the four sleuths revealed that Wilson was, in fact, an east-coast gang member called James Iannone, who, two years earlier, had escaped from a patrol wagon in Brooklyn after being arrested for robbery and had vanished from the New York scene.

 

The police discovered that Hymie and Iannone had operated an extortion racket in New York until Iannone's disappearance, and surmised that Hymie had followed his partner out west to continue the same business in Hollywood. Detective Warren Hudson told the press: "Miller and Iannone, in addition to the 'loan shark' racket, had been engaged here in 'strong-arm jobs', and had, through connection with individuals at film studios, obtained jobs for extras, who in turn had to 'cut' their pay with the pair."⁽¹²⁾

 

The racket was worth thousands of dollars a week, which would be quite a haul even now, and Hymie must have got a decent share of it, even assuming that he had to kick back most of the money to his bosses. Yet he spent his days as an extra, hanging around movie sets for a few dollars a shift. Was his presence on set a reminder to the "genuine" extras that the mobsters had their eye on them? Maybe, but there are only a few non-character actor extras in Hymie's scene in A Slight Case of Murder, so he wouldn't have intimidated many people that day.

 

Perhaps, like all those other nameless hopefuls who've packed in whatever they've been doing and headed for Hollywood, he simply -- and even rather endearingly -- wanted to see himself up on that screen. If a soda jerk or cigarette girl can dream of being discovered and becoming a big movie star, why not a small-time goon?

 

Whatever the case, evidently, something eventually soured Hymie and Iannone's partnership -- some sources said they'd argued over money, some said they'd both gone for the same girl, a blonde called Evelyn Mittelman, others said the gang were worried that Hymie might talk to the police --  and Hymie ended up getting shot in the face. 

 

It wasn't until 1940, more than two years after Hymie was killed, that Iannone was arrested.⁽¹³⁾ Whether he was convicted, I don't know, as the outcome of the case doesn't seem to have been reported (which probably means that he got off). I can say that, whatever the result, he was certainly out by 1950, when he was arrested for killing two witnesses in a narcotics trial,⁽¹⁴⁾ and that he dodged a conviction in that case, too, because he was still active in labour racketeering in 1960, when he was named in a senate investigation.⁽¹⁵⁾ He doesn't seem to have ever seen the inside of a jail cell, which is probably a bit of a shame.

 

And what of Johnny Fisher, the goatskin-clad merry man who was wrongly arrested on suspicion of Hymie's murder and rightly rearrested on suspicion of racketeering? Just after Christmas in 1937, he was put on trial, and three extras -- Benny Baker, Barney Dean and Henry Malton -- testified that he had operated a loan syndicate that was described as involving "one of the 'most colossal' examples of usurous interest rates in recent local history", with loans being made to extras at interest of roughly 1040 per cent a year.⁽¹⁶⁾ On the last day of 1937, Fisher was sent to jail. There seems to have been no doubt that there were other, more senior figures in the racket, but they couldn't be found. Apart from Hymie Miller, of course, but he'd already been taken care of.

 

The report on the trial doesn't detail Fisher's sentence, but it couldn't have been too lengthy, because, a few years later, he showed up back in Hollywood, a movie extra once again. Here he is in a small role as a murderous henchman in Dark Mountain (1944):

 

 

He's the one on the right; the one who isn't Elisha Cook Jr. They're about to drop that packing crate from a great height in order to squash a stupid cop who's about to ruin a perfectly good racket by sticking his big nose into their business.

 

I have no doubt that he appreciated the irony, and that he relished every moment of this scene.  

 

Sources:   (1)The Hammond Times, Nov 23, 1937 (2)and(11)Albuquerque Journal, Nov 27 1937 (3)and(12)Hollywood Noir; Olsen, Richard; XLibris Corporation, 2001 (4)The Oelwein Daily Register, Nov 15 1937 (5)and(8)Dunkirk (NY) Evening Observer, Dec 1 1937 (6)and(7)Jefferson City Post Tribune, Nov 23 1937 (9)The Fresno Bee, Nov 24, 1937 (10)Albuquerque Journal, Nov 25, 1937 (13)The Fresno Bee, March 23 1940 (14)Reno Evening Gazette, March 6 1950 (15)The Oakland Tribune, March 28 1960 (16)Nevada State Journal, Dec 30 1930; mugshot of James Iannone taken from the 1959 report of the Senate Subcommittee on Racketeering.

Comments

[Roommates]

Wow this is cool info thanks for this guys I will show this to some of my friends that might be interested!

[michael Grey]

great story!!! I lived in #205 at the Halifax in 1984 for about 6 months.I worked diredtly behind it at an Auto agency. Quite a place to live. Hookers,some druggies and a lot ofweird types in that area and at the apts as well. I kind of liked it there as it was only $200 a month for rent. And just looking out the window was very entertaining, Anyway great story.