Wally Turner climbed out of the swank blue convertible. He shut the door and peered back into the car.

"You look bad," he told Jim Elkins. "You been sick?"

"No," responded Portland's vice king, who was sitting wearily behind the wheel. "Been fightin' with the Teamsters."

That's how it started.

Nearly two decades before The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became famous by breaking the Watergate scandal, there was another journalistic duo that gained national attention: Turner and his fellow Oregonian reporter William Lambert.

Or, as Portland's gangsters would nickname them: Fishface and Bugeyes.

Fishface and Bugeyes' reporting, which exposed a wide-ranging conspiracy to take over Elkins' illegal empire in Portland, ultimately sparked the interest of a U.S. Senate select committee on labor racketeering. The city's public corruption made headlines across the country. Time magazine would call the Rose City revelations "one of the messiest official scandals in Northwest history."

Little, working-class Portland suddenly had a national reputation -- and it wasn't a good one. The news even inspired a B-movie, "Portland Expose." The film's poster read: "Blistering in the newspaper headlines! Nakedly shocking on the screen!"

Turner had arranged that curbside meeting with "Big Jim" Elkins, which took place on a dour winter day in 1956, to find out if misconduct rumors about a local political candidate were true. They weren't, at least according to Elkins, who supposedly knew the secrets of every wayward politician in town. But Turner also had been hearing unsettling talk about the Teamsters for months, and now, unexpectedly, he had an opening. He pressed Elkins to expound on this spat with the union.

Elkins refused to offer details, other than to say he had a fraught "partnership" with Clyde Crosby, the head of Oregon's Teamsters.

Turner knew this could be big, so he teamed up with Lambert to dig into Portland's vice scene. Soon Elkins agreed to cooperate. He laid out for the newsmen what he knew about a scheme by Seattle gangsters and Oregon's Teamsters to strong-arm their way into his local criminal operation. The blockbuster revelation: the Emerald City interlopers were abetted by Multnomah County district attorney -- and rising young political star -- William Langley, who the mobsters sardonically called "Honest Abe."

"We should get rid of the character," Langley told his new underworld partners in one meeting, the "character" being Elkins. "He's cheated me and he's horsing you guys around. You got too much -- you got too damned much patience with him."

This is the conversation that made Elkins decide to open up to Turner and Lambert. He heard Langley say it because he had wired a Portland apartment for sound and lured the district attorney and one of the Seattle gangsters there. Elkins eventually turned over tapes of the conversation to the reporters.

"The suspect nature of the source meant that Lambert and Turner had to double-check everything on the tapes -- three months of risky work once Portland's underworld got wind of what they were doing," former U.S. News & World Report editor Harold Evans wrote in his memoir, "My Paper Chase." "They stayed in hotel rooms, moving often; switched rental cars almost every day; and stored the tapes in a bank vault."

The story the two reporters eventually told in The Oregonian peeled back Portland's facade to show a city in which politicians at almost every level were on the take, and illegal vice operations -- especially those known by the authorities -- thrived.

"The cast of characters ... is so lengthy that the Committee has prepared a three-page directory which carries such identifications as 'Portland bootlegger,' 'Portland bawdy house madam,' 'Seattle gambler,' and so on," a summary of the Senate labor-racketeering committee's work pointed out.

When Robert F. Kennedy, then the committee's aggressive chief counsel, interrogated Teamsters Vice President Frank W. Brewster during a hearing, he said the scope and complicated nature of the Teamsters' ties to underworld figures made the whole situation "a little difficult to understand." Brewster responded: "Well, it might be for you, but it is not for me."

The scandal doused the Portland ambitions of the Teamsters and Seattle gangsters -- and severely undermined Elkins, who had been the top dog in the city's gambling-and-dope game for years.

Langley, for his part, tried to brazen his way through the brouhaha. He claimed Elkins' tapes were "phony," but Big Jim testified against him.

"I asked Mr. Langley if he didn't get his share," Elkins said of a 1955 meeting about a payoff from a well-known gambling maven. "He said a piddling amount from that operation out there, I believe."

Democrats, promising to clean up the city's vice problem, swept into office in the 1956 election -- even though Langley, the face of the public-corruption scandal, was a Democrat. (Democratic Multnomah County Sheriff Terry Schrunk faced his own corruption allegations, but he nevertheless defeated Republican incumbent Fred Peterson in the Portland mayor's race.)

Turner and Lambert, whose work won a Pulitzer Prize, became national figures. Fishface and Bugeyes appeared on network-TV news shows and were featured in Life magazine. In the years since the reporters' brief celebrity, it's become conventional wisdom that public outrage over the corruption they exposed was a turning point for the city.

"The 'progressive Portland' of today has its roots in the scandals of the 1950s, which discredited the old regime and put them on notice that there would be no more business as usual," Portland State University historian Carl Abbott wrote in the introduction to Robert Donnelly's 2011 book "Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland."

"Prostitution, gambling -- those things were cleaned up," former Oregon State Attorney General Robert Y. Thompson said in 1987 of the scandal's fallout. "It brought those things to light."

Phil Stanford, a former Oregonian columnist and author of the rollicking 2004 history "Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Rose City," isn't so sure about that interpretation.

"As always, history is written by the winners," he said via email, insisting that the Democrats' victory in the '56 election didn't mean they were the "good guys" riding to Portland's rescue. "The way I see it, there were no clear-cut good guys or bad guys in that long-ago political battle. Just two opposing groups of politicians, with their own underworld connections, fighting it out for control of the payoff and other civic goodies."

The "Great Portland Vice Scandal," as Stanford calls it, ended Elkins' long reign as the city's vice lord. He died in a car accident in Arizona in 1968. He was 67.

As for Langley: he was removed from the DA's office after a 1957 misdemeanor conviction for "willfully" ignoring evidence and refusing to prosecute illegal gambling. He returned to private practice, his role in the scandal quickly forgotten, before taking early retirement in 1968 so he could focus on his golf game. Known affectionately as "Skinny" by his fellow Portland-area putters, he won the Oregon Junior-Senior Golf Association Championship three times over the years.

"He had a classic swing," said golf pro Larry Lamberger Jr. after Langley died in 1987 at age 70.

Stanford wrote Langley's obituary for The Oregonian, and in it he revisited the 1950s scandal that ended the former district attorney's once-promising political career.

This earned the newspaper some blowback. At least a few longtime Portlanders, it appeared, still thought the city's history of dirty politics should be kept under the rug.

"I think vendetta might be a better word to describe [the obituary]," Northwest Portland resident Harry C. Kendall Jr. wrote in a letter to the editor. "The bad taste exhibited here should not go unchallenged. It would seem to me that this detailed review of unfortunate happenings of 30 years ago was unnecessary, if not downright cruel. Langley's family and many friends will prefer to remember the good man they knew, rather than relive the unfortunate events of the distant past."

-- Douglas Perry