L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

by John Buntin

  Cohen’s job in Chicago was simple: lay low at a large, Jewish-controlled gambling joint on the North Shore and scare off some neighborhood toughs who were trying to squeeze its owners. After years of associating almost entirely with Italians, Mickey “sort of had to relearn Jewish ways.” He rediscovered “real good food on a Jewish style.” He tried not to react violently to perceived slights (“not like [I did] with the Italians”). Then one day three “notorious tough guys”—the people Mickey was supposed to protect the casino against—came calling. Mickey opened fire before they even got through the plate-glass door. By the time the police arrived, two of the men were dead. Despite his insistence that he didn’t start shooting until he saw the man pull his “rod,” Cohen was arrested for murder. Fortunately for Mickey, Chicago was most definitely a city where “the fix” was “in.” To his delight and astonishment, he was released the next morning after a mob representative stopped by the jail and ordered the turnkey to open up. When the jailer protested that he couldn’t let a murder suspect out “just like that,” Mickey’s visitor called for the captain—who let Cohen out “just like that.” The case never went to trial.

  Soon thereafter, Mickey was summoned downtown to the Lexington Hotel to meet Al Capone himself. When Mickey walked into Capone’s office, the most powerful man in Chicago (known to his friends as “Big-Hearted Al”) quietly gripped the pint-sized brawler’s head in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks.

  “After that meeting, it was kind of like a whole new world for me,” Mickey would later claim. “I wasn’t just a punk kid anymore. I was someone who had done something to justify the favor of Al Capone.”

  In truth, Mickey probably amused Capone as much as he impressed him. Mickey had already befriended Al’s little brother Mattie, an avid boxing fan. Cohen had also attracted a measure of attention because, with his broken nose and a nasty, twisting scar under his left eye, he actually looked a lot like a miniature Al Capone. He also dressed like Capone (“admiring the guy as much as I did, I may have tried to copy his ways,” Mickey admitted later), heightening the “Mini-Me” effect. Court jester or respected junior gunman, it hardly mattered. Mickey had Capone’s blessing and that was enough to open the doors of the Chicago underworld. He began to learn how professional criminals really worked.

  “I soon found there were lots of older guys willing to teach me about how to grow up and be good at a particular piece of work I wanted to get to know about,” Mickey would say later, with discreet imprecision.

  Chicago was also a revelation in another way. As his friend the writer Ben Hecht would later put it, “Before coming to Chicago, Mickey knew there were numerous crooks like himself on the outskirts of society. He did not know, however, that there were ten times as many crooks in the respectable seats of government.” Chicago, a city where everything seemed part of the fix, would be Mickey Cohen’s model—and dream—for L.A.

  6

  Comrade Bill

  “With few exceptions, no protection is afforded to the police chiefs in this country. And to this neglect, more than to any other cause, may be attributed the alliance of politics, police and crime.”

  —Berkeley police chief August Vollmer, 1931

  WHILE MICKEY COHEN was befriending members of the Capone family, patrolman Bill Parker was struggling to advance in the Los Angeles Police Department in his own unyielding fashion. He would not pay a bribe for a cheat sheet to the civil service exam; he would not curry favor with the politicians; he would not turn a blind eye to infractions that many other officers in the department saw as routine. It was a hard way to get ahead. But Parker was also surprisingly hard to get rid of.

  After his early heroics, Parker was transferred into a dead-end job at the property division. It didn’t work. Parker was too nosy.

  “There were some irregularities in the handling of confiscated autos,” Parker later recalled (adding, with characteristic self-confidence, “I was too intelligent to conceal things from”).

  He was soon transferred to Hollenbeck Division, which was responsible for patrolling Mickey Cohen’s old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, perhaps the “wettest” part of Los Angeles. By 1931, many police officers had lost their enthusiasm for enforcing Prohibition, which was clearly on the way out. (Its formal repeal would come two years later, in 1933.) Not Bill Parker. He immediately set out to make as many arrests as possible. Puzzled, local bootleggers were soon approaching him to ask what he wanted.

  “I don’t want anything,” Parker angrily replied. “You’re on one side of the fence, and I’m on the other.” Soon thereafter, Parker was summoned to the office of the division inspector.

  “Parker,” he said, “what division would you like to work in?”

  “What do you mean?” he replied, even though he knew full well what was happening. The liquor mob was moving him out.

  “I mean,” the inspector continued, “if you happened to want a transfer, where would you like to go?”

  “Hollywood Division,” Parker replied. Soon thereafter, he was transferred there.

  Hollywood was Los Angeles’s fast growing vice hot spot. But vice arrests were not exactly encouraged in his new division. Parker soon chafed at other patrolmen’s “do nothing” attitude. So one night he decided to protest the policy of nonenforcement by parking directly across the street from a Hollywood house of ill repute in an effort to scare the johns away. The madam was irate, as well she might be. By one estimate, some 500 brothels were employing an estimated 2,200 prostitutes—and paying for police protection on a regular basis. Why should she, a dues-paying madam, be singled out by law enforcement? So out she stormed.

  “Listen, you stupid fuck,” the madam yelled at Parker. “You’re ruining my business by hanging around here.”

  “That’s the general idea,” he replied.

  “What’s the next move?” she asked.

  “The next move is to put you in jail,” he said.

  By the end of the week, Parker had been transferred again.

  Despite such obstinacy, in the summer of 1931, Parker was made acting sergeant. His grades on the civil service exam were simply too good to ignore. Of the 505 officers who’d taken the civil service exam for sergeant, Parker received the fourth highest score. And so on July 1, he was made a sergeant and returned to Hollenbeck Division. For the first time, Parker was in a position to force other officers to adhere to a standard of conduct close to his own. Word quickly got around that when Bill Parker was at the booking desk, there would be no rough stuff.

  “Take him someplace and book him if you want to start that stuff,” Parker told his fellow officers; “you’re not going to hit him here.”

  Such attitudes did not go over well with all of his fellow officers. One night in 1932, matters came to a head when a drunken member of the vice squad announced that he was going to kill Parker—and started fumbling for his gun.

  “I could have killed him, but I knew I could make the doorway,” Parker later recounted. So he ran. His fellow officers laughingly dismissed the entire affair as a joke and “tried to convince me the man’s gun was unloaded,” but Parker would have none of it.

  “I got out,” he said simply. He would later describe it as a night when he almost got killed.

  For Mickey Cohen, boxing and armed robbery had been the path to “the people.” Bill Parker found a very different—but equally unorthodox—path to prominence in the LAPD: He became a union man.

  BY 1929, Los Angeles mayor George Cryer’s claims to be a reformer had worn thin. One year earlier a grand jury investigation had forced the resignation of Kent Parrot’s chosen district attorney and made a hero of the jury foreman, John Porter. With ties to both the Ku Klux Klan and to powerful Protestant clergymen like the Rev. Bob Shuler, Porter was an attractive figure to many Angelenos fed up with the underworld. A thriving used-auto-parts and wrecking business also gave him ample means to fund a political campaign. When Cryer announced that he would not run for a fourth term, Porter th
rew his hat into the race.

  To block the Klansman auto wrecker, Kent Parrot turned to an auto dealer whose only other high-profile supporter was, oddly, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth. Reformers backed the “absolutely incorruptible” city council president William Bonelli (who would later flee to Mexico to avoid an indictment on corruption charges). After a period of uncharacteristic indecision, Harry Chandler and the Times hit upon the local American Legion commander, who frankly (if unhelpfully) acknowledged that he was unprepared to govern the city. With the dominant factions badly divided and the Times, by choosing such an oddball candidate, effectively on the sidelines, Porter won the election. Boss Parrot was no more.

  With Parrot gone, the Combination began to crumble. In the summer of 1930, Charlie Crawford was gunned down in his office by a deranged young assistant district attorney. The Combination was no longer able to keep competitors out, and the price of bootleg booze plummeted. Scotch, which had once commanded $50 a case, now cost only $15, virtually wholesale prices. Gunmen robbed slot machine king Robert Gans; bookmaker Zeke Caress was kidnapped and ransomed for $50,000. Along with Gans, Guy McAfee, the vice squad officer turned vice lord, gradually consolidated his authority over the city’s organized prostitution rings and downtown slot machines. But he was never able to regain the clout that Crawford had wielded.

  For reformers, the weakening of the Combination should have been welcome news—and it was. But Cryer’s demise and Porter’s election presented Parker with a new problem. The new mayor and his most prominent supporters were viciously anti-Catholic, blaming Rome for everything from the assassinations (or attempted assassinations) of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Roosevelt to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It is not surprising that Parker soon took an interest in strengthening rank-and-file officers’ job protection. By doing so, Parker would catch the attention of the most colorful police chief in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, Chief James “Two Gun” Davis.

  THAT THE LAPD, the scourge of union organizers in America’s most vociferously open-shop city, should have had a union movement is ironic. It must be said that officially it did not. Technically, Los Angeles had only the Fire and Police Protective League, officially a fraternal organization. But by the early 1930s it was well along the path to becoming a union.[2]

  The issue that drew in Parker was job security. Simply put, officers didn’t have it. There was no safe way to make a career in the LAPD. Officers like Parker who insisted on following the letter of the law risked their careers (if not their lives) during periods of corruption. Corrupt cops risked their careers during the brief but regular periods of reform that followed revelations of scandal. While policemen were theoretically under civil service protection, in practice the chief of police was still able to dismiss officers virtually at will, and officers who were dismissed lost everything—their pensions, benefits, everything—no matter how close to retirement they might be.

  In 1934, Parker got himself elected as a sergeant representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. He quickly became a forceful advocate for patrolmen’s interests, arguing effectively for a reversal of the pay cuts that had been forced on the department during the early years of the Depression. He also came to the attention of another lawyer-policeman in the department, Earle Cooke. Together, the two men began to lay the groundwork for a change to the city charter that would offer fire and police officers greater protection from political pressure.

  In the summer of 1934, the Fire and Police Protective League petitioned the city council to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would “clarify procedure in disciplinary and removal actions” for firemen and police officers. This modest description was highly misleading. Parker and Cooke weren’t seeking to clarify some minority ambiguity; rather, they were proposing to radically expand the protections police (and fire) officers enjoyed. Under their amendment, charges against policemen would be constrained by a one-year statute of limitations. Policemen would be entitled to counsel, and all hearings would take place before a three-person board of rights whose members consisted of officers of the rank of captain or higher. Six names would be drawn out of a box; the accused policeman would then select the three officers who would sit on the panel. Moreover, the board’s recommendations would be binding. The chief of police would only be able to reduce penalties, not increase them.

  The city council seems to have taken this request calmly. On August 14, 1934, its members agreed to present the Fire and Police Protective League proposal to voters as Amendment No. 12-A.

  The public was not highly attuned to the issue of police discipline. Surveys conducted during the mid-1930s show that the public wanted the police to be disciplined, effective, and nonpolitical. They should be “neat and military” in their appearance; they should take “a professional interest” in their work and be of at least average intelligence; and they should treat “normal” citizens with courtesy. When it came to less “normal” citizens, it was no holds barred. A majority of voters consistently endorsed harsher treatment for “ex-convicts, Negroes, aliens, radicals, and gangsters.”

  Some observers did pick up on what Parker and Cooke were trying to do. The liberal Los Angeles Daily News was one, correctly noting that in claiming the right to police itself the LAPD was effectively removing that right from the city’s politicians. Notwithstanding the record of corruption that Los Angeles politicians had compiled, a significant number of Angelenos were hesitant to grant the department such sweeping protections. When Amendment No. 12-A went before voters on September 27, 1934, it passed by a mere 676 votes, with 84,143 in favor and 83,467 opposed. However, a narrow victory is still a victory. It was the beginning of Bill Parker’s wider reputation in the department. Years later, an article in the newsletter of the LAPD’s American Legion chapter would describe the (amended) Section 202 of the city charter as “our most priceless possession,” and credit “Comrade Bill” as the measure’s “co-author.”

  UNION ACTIVISM is not always the swiftest path to a police executive’s affection, but Parker’s legal work seems to have impressed Chief James Davis. Two more different personalities are hard to imagine. Parker was cerebral and wry. Davis was a peacock. Handsome (in a slightly puffy, heavily pomaded way), the chief loved uniforms, hats (particularly sombreros), braiding, and decorations. The Rev. Bob Shuler, a frequent critic, described him as “a man with pink complexion who looks like he had a massage every morning and his fingernails manicured.” However, few voiced such criticisms directly. Manicured or not, the 240-pound Texan looked as if he could snap most of his critics in half. A close observer of the Los Angeles political scene would later describe him as “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly anti-labor man who saw communist influence behind every telephone poll.” He was also, arguably, insane. One of Davis’s favorite ways to entertain dignitaries visiting the department was to have a member of his beloved pistol-shooting team shoot a cigarette out of his mouth, a la William Tell.

  Davis’s tactics were rough. One of his favorites was “rousting,” described thusly in an admiring 1926 Los Angeles Times profile by police reporter (and Chandler hatchet man) Albert Nathan:

  First the word goes out of the chief’s office that the “rousting” is to begin and is to be kept up for a week.

  Then all of the liquor squads take to the street, armed with pictures of the best known rum runners and the various members of their “mobs,” and begin looking for them.

  As fast as any of the wanted men are located they are seized, handcuffed, loaded into a patrol wagon and escorted to jail. They are then locked up on charges of vagrancy or any other charge which may come to the mind of the arresting officer. In a few hours attorneys appear, writs are secured through the local courts and the prisoners are released…. One by one they are released and then arrested again and again. During a “rousting” a man may be arrested as many as six times, and each time has to stay in jail for one hour to two days before he gets
out. After awhile the wanted men learn that every time they saunter up Spring Street they will be arrested and that they are not even safe in their homes.

  Even at the time, this struck many as unlawful. “The rousting system may, as many contend, be unlawful,” the Times conceded, but no matter: “[T]his is known and records provide it: The system works.”

  Nor were regular citizens exempt from his scrutiny. In 1936, Chief Davis dispatched 126 officers to sixteen highway and rail entry points on the California border to prevent “Okies” fleeing the dustbowl—he called them “the refuse of other states”—from entering California. The Los Angeles papers dubbed it (approvingly) the Bum Blockade. Inspectors from the State Relief Administration reported that officers were “exercising extra-constitutional powers of exclusion, detention, and preemptive arrest” that “seemed more like the border checkpoints of fascist Europe than those of an American state.” Davis responded that 48 percent of the people turned back had criminal records.

  “It is an axiom with Davis that constitutional rights are of benefit to nobody but crooks and criminals, and that no perfectly law-abiding citizen ever has any cause to insist on ‘constitutional rights,’” reported the Los Angeles Record sarcastically. “Chief Davis honestly and sincerely believes that the whole country would be better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten and left to the discretion of the police.”