Fred Graff
After 20 years on the force Fred Graff had seen plenty of changes at the Los Angeles Police Department. He had been a veteran homicide detective for years but when he started out in the 1920s it was on the chief’s Gun Squad, a 50-man special unit set up to take down rum runners and other gun-toting malcontents. Bringing ’em in dead was the official policy back then. Graff had come to Los Angeles after the First World War. As an enlistee in 1918, he had been sent from Troy Michigan straight to Great Britain. But instead of a ferry ride to France, the 339th Infantry Regiment was shipped off to Archangelsk in Northern Russia to keep the damned Bolsheviks from running off with a mountain of munitions that had been sent for the Tzar’s armies prior to the revolution. Before they even got there, Spanish Flu swept through the ships and eventually took 70 men. After a long winter in Russia, Graff vowed he was done with cold places for good, which was how he ended up in Los Angeles.