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

by John Buntin

  Jack Dragna was less understanding. He immediately got hold of Siegel and demanded a meeting with Cohen. Siegel summoned his protege to a meeting that very night, and this time, Mickey came.

  “I didn’t break his ass, just with my hands,” Mickey claimed, by way of self-defense. “He was talking to a fucking copper!”

  Even Siegel was exasperated by this.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with ya?” Siegel exploded. “Don’t ya know ya got to do business with these coppers? Ya wanna be a goddamn gunman all your life?”

  10

  L.A. Noir

  “If you’re going to gamble that kind of money own the casa.”

  —20th Century Fox chairman Joseph Schenck to Hollywood Reporter owner Billy Wilkerson

  BUGSY SIEGEL wasn’t the only person flexing his muscles. So was Mayor Bowron. Bowron disliked the fact that he had such limited formal control over the police department. The 1934 and 1937 charter amendments, which broadened police officers’ job protections and extended them to the chief of police, were a particular sore point, which Bowron repeatedly sought to circumvent. He continued to secretly wiretap the telephone lines of senior police department officials—an activity that arguably constituted a federal felony offense—in order to ensure that the underworld did not reestablish ties with the department. Soon, the mayor was routinely demanding that Chief Hohmann fire officers caught in the wiretaps’ surveillance dragnet. But Bowron, not wanting to acknowledge his illegal wiretapping, refused to explain the basis of these demands, and Hohmann refused to act without evidence. The result was a standoff—and growing tension between the city’s top elected official and its top law enforcement officer.

  Hohmann had been an exemplary police chief—honest and intelligent, enlightened on racial issues, and uninterested in currying favor with others. He curtailed special privileges (such as police cars and drivers for city councilmen) and ended the department’s tradition of strikebreaking. Committed to professionalism, he urged his subordinates to do their duty without fear or favor because, he told them, “the days of ‘Big Shot’ political influence in the police department are over.” He was wrong. After winning reelection in 1941, Bowron turned up the pressure on the chief. An embarrassing corruption trial involving the head of the robbery squad finally persuaded Hohmann to step aside and accept a demotion to deputy chief, clearing the way for a new, more deferential chief, C. B. Horrall.

  As chief, Hohmann had appointed Horrall to a plum position, giving him responsibility for the Central, Hollenbeck, and Newton Street divisions as well as command of the elite Metropolitan Division. Now that he was chief, however, Horrall demoted Hohmann to lieutenant. Under assault from the new chief and distraught about the sudden, tragic death of his son, Hohmann agreed to accept this second, more humiliating position—only to then turn around and sue the department to have his rank restored. Their feud further demoralized the department.

  Bill Parker was demoralized too. In June 1941, he graduated from Northwestern’s Traffic Institute and returned to Los Angeles. As the number two person on the inspector list, Parker had every reason to expect that he would soon receive a promotion. Instead, he found himself trapped in his position as director of the traffic bureau’s accident investigation unit. Chief Horrall routinely passed him over for promotion, blandly noting that “scholastic achievements do not necessarily make the best policemen.” In 1930, Parker had been trapped in the police department by the Great Depression. Now he seemed stuck again, until December 7, 1941, when history provided a way out.

  The news hit official Los Angeles like a thunderclap, as the Associated Press blared

  JAPS OPEN WAR ON U.S. WITH BOMBING OF HAWAII

  Fleet Speeds Out to Battle Invader

  Tokyo Claims Battleship Sunk and Another Set Afire with Hundreds Killed on Island; Singapore Attacked and Thailand Force Landed

  The situation was actually worse than that. The U.S. Pacific fleet was not “speeding out to battle the invader.” The five battleships and three destroyers that made up the backbone of the U.S. Pacific fleet were in fact sinking to the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The California coast was virtually defenseless. No one knew where the Japanese attack fleet would strike next. The situation was so dire that the War Department deliberately withheld information about the strike, lest the news trigger panic. Meanwhile, law enforcement prepared to move against what many saw as a potential “fifth column”—the city’s Japanese American population.

  Los Angeles was home to roughly 38,000 residents born in Japan. Another 70,000 second-generation Japanese Americans, the so-called Nisei, lived in other parts of California. The FBI had already compiled lists of politically “suspect” Japanese Americans. It turned to the LAPD to help round up the subversives.

  Around noon that Sunday, police officer Harold Sullivan, who worked under Parker in the traffic division, was driving down Western Avenue on his way to work, when an acquaintance pulled up beside him at Santa Barbara Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).

  “Did you hear the news?” the man asked.

  “What news?” Sullivan replied.

  “Why, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” the man replied. Sullivan was shocked. Nothing about the attack had been broadcast over the radio. He hurried into work. At about three o’clock, he was summoned into Parker’s office. Parker told him to “get three or four other guys” and report to the local FBI offices. The roundup of Los Angeles’s Japanese American residents was about to begin. That night, federal agents and local officers raided Nisei homes across the region, from San Pedro to Pomona. By morning, some three hundred “subversives” were in police custody; officers and soldiers from Fort MacArthur also secured the largely Japanese fishing fleet at Terminal Island off San Pedro and put the roughly two thousand Nisei who lived on the island under guard. None were permitted to leave without police permission. Ominous reports of weapons found filled the local press. Prominent local officials appealed to the citizenry for loyalty, which Japanese American groups rushed to give. It didn’t help. By Monday, Little Tokyo was shut down. Japanese-language papers were shuttered; banks were padlocked; stores, closed. By midweek, the county jail and an immigration station at Terminal Island were filled with Nisei (as well as a handful of Germans and a smattering of Italians). In February 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which sent all of Los Angeles’s Japanese and Japanese American residents to concentration camps in the interior. In the meantime, the War Department rushed soldiers west, fortifying the beaches, placing anti-aircraft guns throughout the city, and anchoring huge balloons with steel cables over downtown, to entangle low-flying aircraft.

  For once, Bill Parker was too busy to reflect on his grievances. There was a sense that Los Angeles might be attacked at any moment. On Christmas Eve 1941, a Japanese submarine torpedoed an American ship in the Catalina Channel, just south of Los Angeles. On February 23, 1942, another sub shelled an oil storage facility in Ellwood, near Santa Barbara. Two nights later, at 2:25 a.m., the spotlights of L.A.’s civil defense forces roared to life, and anti-aircraft guns from Long Beach to Santa Monica opened fire. “The Battle of Los Angeles” had begun. It raged for two hours—until local authorities realized that jittery nerves, not Japanese bombers, had triggered the fusillade.

  Parker’s job at the traffic division was central to the region’s preparations during this panicky period. Logistics was key to the war in the Pacific, and in Los Angeles, traffic was the key to logistics. Parker was responsible for selecting a network of roads that could function as military highways, developing plans to isolate approaches to the military targets “in the event of military action,” and—should things go really wrong—for developing a master evacuation plan. He oversaw roughly two hundred other officers. Yet no matter how hard or efficiently he worked, as long as Chief Horrall was in command, there seemed to be no real prospect of advancement.

  Parker’s thoughts turned to the military. Perhaps the Army would
recognize his skills. When he sounded out military recruitment officers, the feedback he got was encouraging. Officials at the Army’s Los Angeles procurement office assured him that if he applied, he would undoubtedly receive a commission as a captain—perhaps even as a major. In February, he approached his superiors in the department about taking an unpaid leave to join the Army. At first, they resisted, but Parker was persistent, and eventually he prevailed. On April 13, 1942, he applied for a commission. Remarkably, one of his letters of recommendation was provided by former chief Arthur Hohmann, the man who had sent Parker to the traffic department. The letter represented an interesting turnaround in Hohmann’s attitude toward Parker and provides rare insight into Parker’s character from a close contemporary.

  “Gentlemen,” the letter began. “I have known Capt. William H. Parker of this department for the past thirteen years, and I am glad to commend him … for the following reasons:

  1.I have such a high regard for his knowledge of right and wrong and his sense of public justice that, if I were innocent of an accusation but was thought to be guilty by an entire community of people, I would choose Capt. Parker as my counsel knowing all the while that he would rather see justice done than continue to remain popular with his contemporaries.

  2. If I were in command of an organization of which Capt. Parker was a member (and I have been) and I assigned Capt. Parker to perform some minor and mediocre detail of non-essential work, I would be doing so with the full knowledge that insofar as Capt. Parker was concerned that task would be the most important in the world to him for the time being, and he would do it better than anyone else I know….

  Hohmann concluded by obliquely alluding to Parker’s prickly personality:

  This unusual admixture of fine service quality when found in one personality is very likely to be misunderstood; and, I have observed that sometimes the expression of these qualities by Capt. Parker on occasion of public address, in staff meetings, and in private conversations, has in the past oftentimes caused his motives and objectives to be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and misquoted.

  However, Hohmann continued, these faults have “improved to a marked degree, and I now feel that it would be greatly in the interest of the United States if Capt. Parker were a part of its military establishment in some governmental administrative capacity.”

  While waiting for a response from the Army, Parker made one last effort to advance by taking the examination for deputy chief. He placed first on the eligibility list but was not granted an interview before the Police Commission. Irate, Parker wrote to the Board of the Civil Service Commissioners to protest what he saw as a blatant violation of civil service principles. His protest was ignored. The following spring, almost one year after he had put in his application, Parker received his commission as an Army officer. The thrill he and Helen experienced as they opened the letter from the adjutant general quickly turned to disappointment. Despite assurances that he would be commissioned as a high-ranking officer, Parker was offered a commission as a mere first lieutenant. After consulting with Helen and receiving assurances that promotion would be prompt, Parker decided to accept the commission anyway. After sixteen years of service in the department, Parker was eager to be free.

  His mood improved considerably when he learned that, after a month of basic training at Fort Custer, Michigan, he would be transferred to either Yale University or Harvard for three months of coursework in the Army’s civil affairs training school. Parker moved east in late June, first to Michigan, and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Helen came west from California to be with him. Parker’s time at Harvard was blissful, but in early August, classes were cut short. Lieutenant Parker was assigned to the 2675th Regiment, Allied Control Commission, North African Theater of Operations. On August 27, 1943, he shipped off to Algiers. Helen returned to Los Angeles. Parker’s old patron, former chief James Davis, now the head of security at Douglas Aircraft, had arranged a job for her as an auxiliary policewoman at a Douglas aircraft assembly plant in Santa Monica.

  Bill Parker wasn’t the only person who saw an “out” in the war. So did Mickey Cohen.

  It didn’t take a middle school education to recognize that Bugsy Siegel’s efforts to monopolize the wire business were damned dangerous. According to the LAPD, nearly a dozen people had died in the first few years of what it dubbed “the wire wars.” At some point after the onset of the war, it appears to have dawned on Mickey that he might too. So Cohen decided to enlist.

  Mickey wasn’t exactly a model candidate (though there was no denying his efficiency as a killer). So he decided to grease the skids. It just so happened that his old “Big Brother,” fight referee Abe Roth, was a former Army officer with considerable pull in high places. Cohen asked the silver-tongued Siegel (who, somewhat surprisingly, supported Mickey’s decision to enlist) to give Roth, as Mickey put it, “all that anti-Nazi shit and stuff.” Roth was amenable to Mickey’s request. Even better, he had a connection who could ensure that Mickey’s criminal background didn’t raise any alarms. Mickey was delighted. Assured that “the fix was in,” he headed to Boyle Heights to report to the neighborhood draft board.

  “Lookit,” he told the ladies manning the draft desk. “I want to get into the Army.”

  “What’s your draft status?” he was asked in reply.

  “I ain’t been home for some time,” Mickey replied evasively. (In fact, he had recently been on the lam.) “What’s the big fuss about?” he continued, still confident in his fix. “I want to get in the Army. I’m ready to get in right now. What do I gotta do?”

  The woman behind the desk asked for his name and then vanished into a back office. She emerged with a file—“kind of laughing and smiling.”

  “You can’t get into the Army.” The woman was holding his file. She showed it to him and then explained what it contained. The draft board had designated him a 4-F—not qualified for service in the armed forces—on grounds of mental instability.[8] This was embarrassing, to say the least. Rather than confess, he called his wife and informed her that he’d been made a general. Then he rushed out and purchased a $150 raincoat (“beautiful … tailored real good”)—with epaulettes. He arrived home to find his spouse on the phone, calling everyone she knew and telling everyone, “He’s in the Army! He’s going away again.”

  It was, Mickey thought, a helluva good joke.

  IN ALGERIA, Parker was assigned to the Allied Commission for Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy that had been evacuated by the Germans in October in the face of the Anglo-American assault on Italy that had commenced earlier that year. Notwithstanding his continuing frustration about his lowly rank, Parker seemed to enjoy his experiences as a single military man. (In Sardinia, his commanding officer would comment favorably on his “wide experience, great energy and …”—surprisingly—his “pleasing and happy personality.”) In February 1943, Parker was transferred to England to prepare for Operation OVERLORD—the invasion of Europe. His job was to help draft a police and prison plan for France. Parker would then follow the first wave of the D-day landings as a member of the Army’s civilian affairs division to help organize police operations in areas the Allies recaptured.

  There was, however, one point on which Parker felt lingering unease: Helen. Relations with his wife had been strained. Despite letters that suggest a passionate reunion in Cambridge, in the months leading up to his departure from L.A., Parker’s relationship with Helen had been rocky. It is not entirely clear what the problem was; Helen had rebuffed Bill’s efforts to talk openly about the state of their marriage, assuring him that things were fine and that she remained committed to their marriage. Bill soon heard otherwise from friends back home. Helen, he was told, had an unusually close male friend.

  FOR MICKEY COHEN, the desire to indulge—and bend the rules—meant more business. The first and most important part of it was gambling. Bookies were typically forced to pay $250 a week for the wire that provided racing results and a measure of protection.
That added up. By one estimate, Bugsy Siegel’s bookie take during this period amounted to roughly $500,000 a year. (He also reputedly had a multimillion-dollar salvage business that trafficked in rationed goods as well as a rumored heroin supply route.) Mickey got only a sliver of this cash. However, other Siegel-Cohen enterprises were more than enough to make Mickey a wealthy man. Cohen would later boast that the two men’s loan-sharking operations “reached the proportions of a bank.” They also exercised considerable sway over the city’s cafes and nightclubs, lining up performers, arranging financing, and providing “dispute resolution services.”

  Mickey had his own operations as well, independent of Siegel. By far the most significant was the betting commission office he operated out of the back of a paint store on Beverly Boulevard. There Cohen handled big bets—$20,000, $30,000, even $40,000—from horse owners, agents, trainers, and jockeys who didn’t want to diminish their payouts by betting at the racetracks. Cohen also routinely “laid off” large bets to five or six commission offices around the country. On a busy day, this amounted to anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000, of which Mickey took a 2V2 to 5 percent commission. He also routinely used his insider knowledge to place bets himself.

  That was the serious money side of his business. Then there was the fun stuff, like the La Brea Club, at the corner of La Brea and West Third. Mickey’s personal dinner club featured fancy meals (including rationed wartime delicacies) and a high-stakes craps game. Security was tight: Some evenings, there was as much as $200,000 in cash on the table. He also opened a private club in a mansion in the posh Coldwater Canyon neighborhood, which stretches north from Beverly Hills to Mulholland Drive. There his guests—mainly denizens of the movie colony—could enjoy a good steak, listen to an attractive chanteuse (“who, when the occasion called for it, could also sing a song with a few naughty verses”), and enjoy games of chance at all hours of the night. He likewise dabbled in boxing, managing the leading contender for the title of the lightweight boxing champion of the world, William “Willie” Joyce.