William Hobart Usitalo was, by all indications, a “regular guy.” He never owned a business, got arrested, appeared on the society pages, or did anything else to make his name known … until the end. He is found only in sparse public records and the occasional City Directory list. Like millions of his contemporaries, he worked hard to provide a decent life for his family, and maybe put something by for his later years. Unfortunately, he became part of a deadly historical conflict and died – was killed – without achieving those goals.
William was born to Finnish immigrants in Calumet, Michigan on November 10, 1899. The family moved to the Seattle area in 1912-1914, and he was working at a shipyard when he registered for the draft in late 1918. He served with the merchant marine for several years, then married in May 1923. He soon began a long stint as a truck driver, and probably joined the Teamsters union. But the onset of the Great Depression made it hard to find steady work. That gained more urgency when he and his wife had a son, Donald, in the spring of 1931. William drove a moving van for some time in 1933, and then a beer delivery truck. And that began his slide into danger.
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| William and Mary Usitalo. Family Archives. |
Another player in this sad history was Peter Marinoff (Marjanovic). Marinoff did own a business (several, in fact), got arrested, appeared in the society pages, and was otherwise well known to the newspapers. He was born March 11, 1895 in Dalmatia, a coastal region along the Adriatic Sea. He came to this country at the end of 1910 and eventually made his way to Tacoma, Washington. He married in 1916 and they had two children: a son who died as an infant in 1918, and a daughter born in 1922.
Pete began as an auto mechanic and chauffeur, then switched to a sales job. However, he started making some real money as a smuggler after Washington state and then the country went “dry” with Prohibition. He spent 60 days in jail in 1923 for a liquor law violation, but began investing in legal breweries (malt syrup and “near beer”) around 1925. Six years later, he and some other investors incorporated the Northwest Brewing Company in Tacoma. The business did well, with plants in Tacoma and Walla Walla, and two more planned, in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. In the spring of 1933, when Prohibition was clearly on its way out, Pete told reporters that they would have regular beer ready to ship within a month after it again became legal.
Then Marinoff found himself in trouble not of his own making. He had no problem with unionized labor … as an immigrant, he had started at that level himself. All of the company’s employees were represented by the Brewery Workers Union (technically, the union of “Brewery, Flour, Cereal and Soft Drink Workers”). An “industrial” union, they represented all the company’s organized employees: ordinary laborers, boiler-room operators, chemical technicians, deliverymen, and so on. That sometimes put them at odds with “craft” unions, which represent employees in specific crafts/skills, like plumbers, electricians … and truck drivers (Teamsters).
Conflict between the Brewery Workers and Teamsters unions had been festering, off and on, for around thirty years. (The well-documented history of that violent turf war is beyond the scope of this blog.) Everyone expected a huge resurgence in the brewing industry after the repeal of Prohibition, so the Teamsters launched a concerted effort to raid the Brewery Workers membership.
In Washington and Oregon, that made drivers at Marinoff’s Northwest Brewing Company a target. Soon, pickets appeared around the brewery in Tacoma. (Some reports called them “strikers,” but that was a misnomer, since none worked at the facility.) The pickets were not just passive observers. In September, 1934, they invaded the company storage area and smashed cases of beer.
Beside pickets, the Teamsters also recruited teams to trail brewery workers whenever they left the plant. The day after the storage invasion, some of these men assaulted four company drivers, beating them with “lead pipes and bricks.” They also attacked businesses that the brewery supplied, with plate glass windows shattered and other vandalism. The conflict involved the whole state, and both proprietors and patrons were roughed up during some of these raids. A report that specifically mentioned the Northwest Brewing Company came on May 2, 1935, from Portland. Brewery union workers making deliveries there were beaten up, and two police officers who tried to help them were knocked unconscious.
The Brewery union definitely felt the pressure. Whatever security Marinoff had at the Tacoma brewery, the Union decided it wasn’t enough. In mid-May, they hired Harold Hiatt to recruit more guards. Born 20-30 miles west of Portland in 1897, Hiatt had served in the Army, although the war ended before he went overseas. He worked at a shipyard for many years, then sold coal and firewood for a fuel company. He married in 1918, and they had two daughters, one of whom died in 1925. The couple divorced in 1928, with the wife getting custody of the surviving daughter. Like Usitalo, Hiatt scrambled to find work when the Depression hit. The company may have shared the cost of the enlarged guard force, but that was never clearly verified. Hiatt later asserted that he took his orders from the Union’s lead attorney.
One of the guards hired was known as Theodore “Tex” Ferguson. Ferguson was about 27 years old, supposedly unmarried, and originally from Texas. He said he’d arrived in Seattle in the fall of 1934, then came to Tacoma. However, other than what he told police, we know nothing about him. He cannot be reliably traced in any public records. He claimed to be a waiter, but there are indications that he made his living as “muscle” in various labor-management disputes.
Despite the publicity before and after William Usitalo’s death, we know few details about his involvement with the Teamster’s intimidation force. We know that, in late February, 1935, the Seattle brewery he was driving for had some difficulties, including a major lawsuit against them. That may have been when he was laid off. We do not know when he began working for the union, or whether he was a volunteer or received a stipend.
Obviously, he was there on the afternoon and evening of May 24, 1935, when events got out of hand. The catalyst didn’t even involve a beer delivery … the truck was simply sent to have a tire changed. Still, just in case, Hiatt followed along in a car. As garagemen worked on the tire, Teamsters accosted Hiatt, trying to get him to quit. While he was thus distracted, a confederate poured sugar into the car’s gas tank.
Soon after the car and truck returned to the plant, an unidentified caller warned them about the sabotage. Sure the sugar would ruin his engine, Hiatt, along with two other guards, including Tex Ferguson, hurried to another garage to have it cleaned out. This time, a car carrying four Teamsters fell in behind them. Most reports indicate that all of the men had been imported from out of town. Usitalo was driving, but accounts don’t say if the vehicle was his, the union’s, or a rental. They watched from across the street while the guards were in the garage.
It was fairly dark when Hiatt finally came out and drove off. The Teamsters trailed along. At one point, Hiatt stopped, walked back to Usitalo’s car, and told them they were asking for trouble. After that, he engaged in some wild driving, sometimes with his lights off, and managed to lose the pursuers. They picked up a third man and went to help another guard who was supposedly isolated and in trouble. That turned out to be a false alarm. When they headed back toward the brewery, the Usitalo car again found them and followed.
As they turned onto the street leading to the plant, pickets bombarded them with rocks. The side windows were broken and one guard was cut by flying glass. After a moment, Hiatt stopped, and Usitalo pulled up about fifty feet behind them. Here witnesses disagreed as to what happened next. Some said Hiatt got out and shot directly at the rock throwers, but other testimony cast doubt on that. There was no evidence (near misses, bullet scars, etc.) to confirm that Hiatt aimed at the pickets. He perhaps fired warning shots into the air. Whatever the case, some pickets did run away.
Meanwhile, Tex pointed a revolver out the back window and fired several shots at the Teamster vehicle. Hiatt then made a U-turn and sped by the other car. It was now about 11 o’clock and too dark to see clearly. One of Tex’s bullets had struck William Usitalo in the forehead, and he died about three hours later in a local hospital.
The guards were arrested the next morning in Seattle, and were soon charged with murder. Police had found several weapons in the car, including one revolver they identified as the likely death weapon. Tex soon admitted that he had fired the revolver. The suspects all pled self-defense, citing the violent harassment that preceded the assault with rocks. Within a few days, authorities chose to also charge Peter Marinoff as an “accessory before the fact” of murder. He had hired the guards, or at least helped hire them, and supposedly furnished them with guns.
Criminologist Luke S. May was contracted to test Tex’s revolver as the death weapon, and to trace its ownership. It was a .38-caliber Colt, a “Police Special” model. May’s agent found that it had been shipped to a Tacoma hardware store in November 1929, but then it disappeared. The agent reported, “Although they keep records of their stock sold, it does not appear in any of them.”
A technician completed the first comparison between the death bullet and a test slug. He found that all the class characteristics (groove width, twist rate, etc.) matched perfectly, but felt the fine marks were too faint to verify the individual characteristics. The more experienced May then took over … he testified at the trial that the revolver was indeed the death weapon.
Other than the autopsy report, that was about the only hard evidence presented in the trial. The rest featured conflicting testimony about who did what, and who said what. In the end, the jury found the four guilty of manslaughter. Under the law at the time, that called for a sentence of one year in jail up to twenty years in prison. The judge gave the least-involved guard a one-year suspended jail term and just one year to Tex Ferguson, the actual shooter. With credit for time already spent in jail, Tex was free in just three or four months. He cannot be traced after that.
In what seems an odd twist, given that leniency, the judge then slapped Harold Hiatt and Peter Marinoff with twenty-year prison sentences. However, it took little time for the Washington Supreme Court to rule favorably on their appeals. The justices conceded that there were grounds for a new trial for Hiatt, since he was on the scene and had (probably) fired shots that instigated Ferguson’s reaction. Marinoff, on the other hand, was not even in Tacoma at the time. More to the point, the decision stated, “It does not appear to be either unreasonable or unlawful for the managing officer of the brewery to engage and arm guards to protect the property which was in his charge.” Pete was cleared unconditionally, and prosecutors chose to not retry Hiatt.
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| Peter Marinoff. News Photo. |
Hiatt found a job as a guard in Seattle, and was badly injured in another altercation with union pickets. After his recovery, he remained in the area, probably because of Mrs. Usitalo’s suit. He then moved to Wenatchee, where he married again in late 1937. He died young there … in April 1939.
Seeking opportunities away from union strife in Washington, Marinoff opened a brewery in Red Bluff, California during he summer of 1937. Pete had a knack for brewing good beer and selling it at a good price. His company successfully marketed “Marinoff Beer” all over the West. But labor troubles again cropped up – again between unionized brewery workers and the Teamsters. Pete finally gave it up in 1949, thereafter operating an insurance agency.
However, he could not escape his past. The trouble began in 1978 with the publication of a biography of Dave Beck, a leader of northwest Teamsters from about 1920 to 1940. (He later became president of the national Teamsters.) The book contained statements attributed to Beck’s long-time personal secretary. She recalled that Usitalo had been shot to death in 1935, and said, “I don’t know who killed him. Dave says it was Pete Marinoff.”
The author apparently saw this as minor point and didn’t dig quite deep enough. Marinoff, of course, saw dollar signs, and a chance to get back at the man who had caused him so much grief. Not just in 1935, but also in 1948, when Beck’s predatory recruiting tactics ruined his Red Bluff venture. Pete won his defamation suit, but received only a token payment of $10 thousand, not the $300-500 thousand he sought.
Peter Marinoff passed away in April 1983.
| References: Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, Encyclopædia Britannica, Chicago, Illinois (2012). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Scribner, New York (2010). |
| Alan J. Stein, “Violence erupts over beer truck drivers in Seattle during September 1934,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (May 26, 2005). |
| The State of Washington, Respondent, versus H.H. HIATT et al., Appellants, State of Washington, Olympia (Aug 10, 1936). |
| “[Usitalo Case News and Background],” Bellingham Herald, Seattle Star, Seattle Times, Tacoma Ledger, News-Tribune, Tacoma, Union-Record, Seattle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, The Olympian, Olympia, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon; Sacramento Bee, Tahama County News, Red Bluff, California (September 1923 – December 2006) . |
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