Fortunes — and scoundrels — in early L.A.

Beyond usual names, there’s land ‘genius’ Harry Culver and oilman C.C. Julian.

Sometimes history cold-bloodedly decrees that the difference between a crackpot and a genius comes down to the size of the bank account he winds up with. Sometimes history gets it wrong.

Over the space of a few decades, Silicon Valley has staged its own Wilder West show, with a cast of nerdy outliers that with BS and brilliance have conjured and talked up some completely absurd notions, some unnerving ones and, once in a while, some world-altering ideas that can bear comparison to Thomas Edison’s.

Tech fortunes can arise from spectacular failures and uneasy successes; lately, Elon Musk looks like a man who’s been doing both.

The mantra “move fast and break things” is original to Facebook, but the idea is hardly original.

The vast plain of Los Angeles has had a census book’s worth of high-reward, high-risk chancetakers, visionaries and flimflammers, all plowing their renegade furrows in the land that was never theirs for the taking. But they took it anyway — and manipulated it to their will.

You already know about the pantheon of movie moguls who rose from the grubbiest of jobs — scrap collector, glove maker, soap seller — to earn more money and wield more of a certain kind of power than any American president.

You have heard too of the early masters of the universe of Southern California, the amassers of real estate, which was the same as power — the Huntingtons, Collis and Henry, uncle and nephew, enriched by land and commerce and transportation; and the Otis-Chandler family, dictating the rule book for the emerging L.A., directing its future into oil and aviation and making sure that on terra firma, they and their partners, still-familiar names like Moses Sherman and the two Isaacs (Van Nuys and Lankershim), owned a beefy piece of the San Fernando Valley when civic machinations brought Owens Valley water to it.

Even among the legions of Angelenos with a genius for real estate, Harry Culver stood out. He put little skin of his own into his first development, but he helped to persuade others to invest. As California historian Kevin Starr wrote, Culver used gimmicks and giveaways and stunts like kids’ boxcar races, raffles, parades and, memorably, a polo game played from the running boards of Model Ts.

His genius was in insisting that his salesmen pitch buyers with the upwardly mobile notion of “home” — secure, solid, safe. Taking families out of the “dust, dirt, and smoke” of a city apartment and putting them into houses in a “fresh, pure, health-giving district” was a rise in class and station all by itself. That’s one reason Culver sold some houses complete with pictures, furniture and Victrola, lest families’ unfamiliarity with their new status betray their striving origins.

Much of his sales pitch language, like everything else at the time, was racially coded. Streetsblog LA found that in 1927, Culver approved this message: “The Los Angeles Realty Board recommends that Realtors should not sell property to other than Caucasian in territories occupied by them. Deed and Covenant Restrictions probably are the only way that the matter can be controlled; and Realty Boards should be interested. This is the general opinion of all boards in the state.”

Sharp tactics and hard sells had some salesmen using the slickest of tricks. On empty lots of unlikely desirability, they posted “Sold” signs or dropped bricks and lumber to give the impression of industry and demand. In the real estate boom of the 1880s, there were stories — with truth at the bottom of some of them — of salesmen sticking oranges on the spikes of

Joshua trees to sell highdesert land as fecund for citrus groves. Land was sold without any clear title, to eager buyers who didn’t bother to ask. Land in the bed of the L.A. River was bought readily, and some of it is still in private hands.

And now we come to oil — among Los Angeles’ gifts of agriculture, aviation, real estate and movies, this was the dirty one. The lads of the private, male Uplifters Club out in the Palisades sang lustily, “Yes it’s oil, oil, oil / That makes L.A. boil!”

Two oilmen would come to grief, more or less, in the 1920s.

Back in 1892, Edward L. Doheny had taken a sharpened eucalyptus log and gone chonking into the soil of Echo Park and struck oil. He became rich and respected but was brought to court in the Teapot Dome scandal over allegedly bribing Albert Fall, the secretary of the Interior, with $100,000 for the inside track on oil leases on federal property.

Puzzlingly, the secretary was convicted of taking the bribe but Doheny was acquitted of bribery — maybe because it was his son and his son’s valet who delivered the black satchel of dough to Fall, and the son and his valet had died in a stillmurky murder-suicide in 1929.

This oilman here was not a nabob like Doheny, but his L.A. oil scandal was going on at the same time. C.C. Julian — Courtney Chauncey Julian, a name fit for a stage villain with a big mustache to twirl — came to town with a scheme that would enrich himself and a few others and bankrupt hundreds of his fellow Angelenos.

A Canadian who had worked the oil fields in Texas, he borrowed money to buy four acres of land in Santa Fe Springs, struck oil and decided to leverage his strike into a full-service oil producing and refining company, Julian Petroleum.

So well known was he that people around town called his company by a nickname, “Julian Pete.” Julian sold $11 million worth of stock to 40,000 Angelenos, some rich and famous, some living on hope and orange juice. Julian gave them headlines. He sprawled and brawled, left monster tips, flew in his own plane and abluted in a gilded bathtub.

One night in January 1924, he slugged one of the most famous men in the world, Charlie Chaplin, at Club Petroushka on Hollywood Boulevard. Chaplin was sharing a table with Russian aristocrats and violinist Jascha Heifetz and saw Julian and his buddies kick over a lamp and generally behave like ruffians.

Chaplin asked them to stop; there were ladies present. Julian “lurched toward me,” Chaplin stated, “striking at me while I was seated at the table.” Chaplin hit him back, and Chaplin’s friends — including a Russian novelist who could bend a dime in half — made sure that Julian stayed down. Julian swore he was in San Francisco at the time.

Pretty soon, the squeeze was on. Julian looked to be selling more than his wells could satisfy, but he was still taking in money from new investors to pay others — a classic pyramid operation.

The big oil boys like Standard Oil, the state authorities and the newspapers pretty much locked down his activities, and in 1925, he resigned and gave control to a couple of questionable operators who forged and sold more than three million shares of fake stock. The ritziest pool of investors, which included Sen. Frank Flint and his brother, Motley, still got paid.

But on May 7, 1927, the roof caved in. Julian Petroleum stock was shut down. Thousands lost money, and some lost everything. And so began, as historian and essayist Carey McWilliams wrote, “the long and sordid aftermath involving jury fixing, bribery and murder.”

Julian, who flitted back into town to gin up public sentiment on his radio station, was not tried; the men who were were acquitted. Motley Flint was shot to death in court in an unrelated case by an Inglewood real estate agent who fired three shots, threw the gun

L.A. has had a census book’s worth of chance-takers and flimflammers, all plowing their renegade furrows in land never theirs for the taking.

at Flint and yelled, “This fellow ruined me! He ruined me!”

It seems the only man who went to prison in the Julian Pete scandal was the Los Angeles district attorney, who’d been taking bribes from Julian and repaid him by refusing to prosecute.

But Julian was soon in hot water again, this time with the feds, for oil misdeeds in Oklahoma. He jumped bail and went on the lam to Shanghai under a fake name. Enough of the old Julian remained for him to brag that “some day, when China is peaceful, I will develop the oil fields of northwest China and then maybe I will have the last word with the Standard Oil Company.” But U.S. law was empowering fugitive citizens to be arrested abroad, and in 1930, Julian died by suicide at Shanghai’s Astor Hotel.

Writing in Sunset magazine in 1927, in an article sub-headlined “Why the Horses Laughed in Los Angeles,” Walter V. Woehlke described a master con man — not Julian — who, “whenever the authorities or his creditors go after him… made his followers believe the authorities were their enemies … got their sympathies …and made them put up the money for each new fight.” (It sounds like an early 20th century Trump playbook.)

Woehlke used that to explain why Angelenos were ripe for Julian Oil’s plucking, gullible with the “naïve credulity” that came from seeing a flourishing city rise up quickly from almost nothing. Why couldn’t the same happen to them? “That’s why Los Angeles still fervently believes in Santa Claus.”