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

by John Buntin

  Parker thought the primary problem was low pay and the low social status of police officers. Others thought the problem had more to do with the department’s standards. The notoriously subpar force of the 1920s had became an elite group by the 1950s. Parker seemed to take pride in the fact that less than 7 percent of the men who passed the civil service examination made it to the academy—and that only a fifth of those made it through the thirteen-week course. The Los Angeles Police Department had a reputation as “the West Point of police training,” and Bill Parker liked it that way. His men were smart (with a minimum IQ of 110) and physically imposing (with a minimum height requirement of five feet, nine inches for men). Just as many who wanted the toughest, most challenging military assignments opted for the Marine Corps, so too were proud, aggressive officers drawn to the LAPD. Of course, they had to be. Doing the work of six thousand with just over four thousand placed unusual demands on the force. The LAPD had to be bigger, faster, more efficient, tougher.

  One generation earlier, Berkeley police superintendent August Vollmer had dreamt of a professional police force whose members would not just uphold the law, but would also assess neighborhood problems like sociologists and address them like social workers. Parker had no interest in doing social work. “Law enforcement officers are neither equipped nor authorized to deal with broad social problems,” he declared. “[W]e deal with effects, not causes.” Eschatology interested him more than sociology. He wanted men who, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, would hold “the thin blue line until society came to its senses.”

  DRAGNET’S success rankled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. So did Parker’s carping about the FBI’s temerity in investigating his department for potential civil rights violations. But irritation turned to anger when Parker informed “Kit” Carson, the special-agent-in-charge (SAC) of the L.A. office, that he intended to push for a resolution supporting a national clearinghouse for information on organized crime at the upcoming conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Parker also informed Carson that he planned to put his name forward as a candidate for the vice presidency of the IACP, a fact Carson promptly relayed to Hoover, along with the SAC’s personal assessment of Parker as “an opportunist of the first order.” This was too much for Hoover. Parker’s clearinghouse could become a rival to the bureau. Parker himself looked suspiciously like a rival to the director. Hoover’s instructions to his underlings were clear: All SACs should contact their friends in the local law enforcement community to sabotage Parker’s campaign. Parker’s election attempt was soundly defeated.

  Hoover was determined to monitor the threat posed by Parker. Instructions went out to the Los Angeles SAC to watch Parker closely. Washington was soon informed that Parker “was often drinking to excess and had the reputation of being obstinate and pugnacious when under the influence of alcohol.” Scrawled Hoover on the bottom of one such memo, “I have no use for this fellow Parker and we should keep our guard up in all dealings with him. H.”

  Parker had acquired a dangerous enemy. But the Los Angeles chief of police was too preoccupied with another adversary to notice.

  17

  The Trojan Horse

  “You should always have a positive side to your program and ACCENTUATE it, but likewise you should use SUBTLE FEAR.”

  —Cong. Norris Poulson, on how to win public office

  BILL PARKER wasn’t willing to tolerate Communists in city government, period. Mayor Fletcher Bowron apparently was. Ironically, the two men’s disagreement on the issue of how deeply authorities should pry into individuals’ Political beliefs would create precisely what both men dreaded most—an opportunity for the underworld to “open” Los Angeles.

  The issue was public housing. During (and immediately after) the war, Los Angeles faced an acute housing shortage. In 1949, Congress responded by passing an act authorizing the construction of more than 800,000 public housing units. Mayor Bowron sought a sizable share for Los Angeles. That summer, the city council unanimously approved a contract between the city’s housing authority and the federal government that provided for the construction of 10,000 units. But public sentiment then started to change. As the housing shortage eased, the need for federally subsidized housing seemed less pressing—and more antithetical to the principle of private ownership. In 1950, Los Angeles’s conservative business community, led by the Los Angeles Times and the chamber of commerce, persuaded the city council to overturn rent control. “Socialist housing,” as they described it, was a natural next target.

  A narrow majority of the city council fell in line. On December 26, 1951, by a vote of 8-7, the city council passed a resolution that directed the city housing agency to halt construction on the public housing units it had already started building. An exasperated Mayor Bowron refused, noting that work had already begun, millions of dollars had been spent, and that a contract with the federal government had already been signed. Bowron offered to renegotiate the agreement and, if necessary, reduce the number of units; however, he refused to stop work entirely. His conservative opponents responded by announcing an anti-public housing referendum for the summer of 1952.

  Bowron had the law on his side. In the spring of 1952, the California Supreme Court ruled that the city council “had no right or power to rescind approval of the project or to cancel or abrogate the agreements.” In late May, the state attorney general announced that in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the anti-public housing referendum, Proposition B, would be invalid, void, and have no force or effect. Still, Bowron recognized that he had a Political problem. He attempted to organize a closed-door colloquium with supporters and opponents of public housing alike to reach some consensus on the issue. But the mayor’s attempts at conciliation were dashed by the release of an LAPD report (requested by the conservative chamber of commerce) that depicted public housing as a breeding ground for juvenile delinquents. Furious, Mayor Bowron accused Parker of delivering “one of the most misleading reports ever issued in my administration.”

  “There is nothing about a public housing project,” the mayor insisted, “which inherently breeds crime.”

  Angelenos apparently disagreed. In June, city residents voted against public housing—379,050 “no’s” versus 258,777 “yeses.” Most politicians would have gotten the message. Not Mayor Bowron. Instead, in a radio address after the election, Bowron questioned whether the electorate “read and understood the question.” This condescending response allowed the Times to accuse the mayor of “saying that the public was so dumb… it didn’t know what it was voting about.”

  Bowron pressed ahead. He now proposed to build 7,000 units. Opponents responded with an explosive charge, claiming that Communists had infiltrated the Los Angeles housing authority. In particular, councilman Ed Davenport alleged that the housing authority’s number two official, Frank Wilkinson, was a member of the Communist Party. The source of the information was the LAPD.

  The charge emerged from a lawsuit involving a small parcel of property just north of downtown with striking views of the city, called Chavez Ravine. The city was proposing to evict a small group of private landowners in order to build public housing. Angry landowners responded by filing a lawsuit. During the trial, someone slipped an attorney for the plaintiffs an LAPD file that linked Wilkinson to the Communist Party. The accusation was a startling one. Wilkinson was the son of Dr. A. M. Wilkinson, a prominent civic activist who had worked closely with Mayor Bowron in the 1930s. The younger Wilkinson had taken loyalty oaths disavowing any connections to the Communist Party on numerous occasions. This time, however, he refused to answer questions about the subject.

  Bowron had no interest in launching what he saw as a witch hunt into the background of a good friend’s son. Wilkinson was a capable public official. That was enough. Morally, this may have been admirable. Politically, it proved disastrous.

  By 1952, Fletcher Bowron had been mayor of Los Angeles for fourteen years. When he first became mayor, he had enjoyed
support from both the left and the right. As the years passed, however, Bowron had drifted ever closer to the more conservative business community. But this had not won him their gratitude. Bowron was still his own man, as the dispute over public housing clearly showed. The business establishment wanted someone more pliable. They now resolved to put a wholly dependable ally into the mayor’s office.

  In December 1952, Times publisher Norman Chandler and Pacific Mutual Insurance president Asa Call summoned Los Angeles’s business elite to a strategy session on the top floor of the Times building. Among the group invited were lawyers Frank Doherty and James Beebe of O’Melveny & Myers and business leaders Neil Petree, Henry Duque, and Preston Hotchkis. The top item on their agenda was choosing a new mayor. Thirty-four names were up for discussion, but when the group got to the sixteenth, everyone agreed that they had found their man. Congressman Norris Poulson was an accountant, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who’d done yeoman’s duty in Congress blocking Arizona’s efforts to secure a larger allotment of water from the Colorado River. The day after Christmas, Norman Chandler called Poulson at his home in Washington and informed the congressman that a group of civic leaders wanted to draft him to run for mayor. Chandler invited Poulson to Los Angeles so that Poulson could hear their pitch. A follow-up letter described the details of their offer. In addition to promising to bankroll Poulson’s campaign “generously,” Chandler’s letter noted that the mayor’s salary was likely to be increased and that Poulson as mayor would be “entitled to strut around in a car (Cadillac) and chauffeur supplied by the city.” Although Poulson privately admitted that he “knew very little about the immediate problems of Los Angeles,” except for the public housing issue (which, of course, he opposed), he quickly agreed to sign on for the race. Times reporter Carlton Williams took charge of launching the congressman as a candidate.

  Despite Parker’s disagreement with Bowron on public housing and Communists in city government, Parker valued the mayor’s dogged commitment to keeping Los Angeles “closed” to the underworld. Parker knew little about Poulson. So he assigned the intelligence division to investigate him. The LAPD quickly uncovered an unsettling connection to Moscow. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles for his meeting with Chandler and his associates, the intelligence division reported, Poulson had checked into a hotel and met with Joe Aidlin, a young attorney with left-wing credentials who had attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Although Aidlin and Poulson had very different political leanings, in 1950 Poulson had sponsored private legislation to prevent the deportation of one of Aidlin’s clients to Russia. He had also stepped in to spare an Aidlin client an appearance before HUAC. The following Christmas, Aidlin had given Poulson a small “liquor refrigerator”—price $157.35—from the Hecht’s department store. Poulson also seems to have realized that accepting this gift made him vulnerable. Soon after agreeing to run for mayor, he sent Aidlin a check for the refrigerator. When he came to Los Angeles to meet with Chandler, he arranged to see Aidlin in order to explain why he was paying for this gift. What Poulson didn’t know was that the LAPD’s intelligence division had bugged Poulson’s hotel room and was listening in.

  No sooner had Poulson returned to D.C., than news of the “Red” refrigerator broke. Specifically, Poulson stood accused of protecting a suspected Communist from having to testify before HUAC in exchange for “a valuable electric refrigerator.” Armed with his canceled checks that showed he had paid for the refrigerator (and bolstered by supportive coverage from the Times and the Hearst papers), Poulson rode the scandal out. However, his troubles with the LAPD had only begun. Several weeks later, Poulson was approached by an athletic young man (a plainclothes detective) who asked the candidate what he would do about the police department if elected.

  “I just casually reached over and touched a microphone which I detected pushing out from his shirt,” Poulson recounted in his unpublished memoirs. Then he walked away.

  The realization that the LAPD was investigating him angered Poulson. But as the campaign progressed, Poulson’s anger toward Parker was modulated by the growing realization that Chief Parker had a point: The “hoodlum element” that Mayor Bowron and Chief Parker constantly warned about was real.

  This realization came slowly. First, Poulson picked up on the fact that there was a deep antipathy toward Chief William Parker in many parts of the community. “I met many, many Democrats and I noticed that they were very anti-Parker,” recollected Poulson. This seemed to be particularly true of the Eastside Jewish community. Poulson’s most important backer there was the newspaper publisher Sam Gach, a former Shaw associate who was also reputed to be a close personal friend of Mickey Cohen. In meetings with Poulson, Gach and associates frequently brought up the subject of Chief Parker.

  “They would say that they did not want to see the city ‘opened up,’ but Parker and his ‘Gestapo’ should be controlled,” recalled Poulson. At first Poulson wholeheartedly agreed. After all, he didn’t like the LAPD’s tough tactics either. But as the weeks passed, Poulson became increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of these discussions and the people who engaged in them. Some seemed very like “the hoodlum element” that Parker and Bowron so often inveighed against. It seemed clear what these people really wanted was a commitment to replace Parker and appoint a more “friendly” Police Commission. In a hard-fought campaign, Poulson wasn’t ready to reject their support, particularly “when I wasn’t positive what they represented.” However, he did decide—“within myself”—that if elected he would run a clean city.

  As the campaign proceeded, Poulson grew increasingly concerned about the unsavory characters flocking to his campaign. The fact that he found himself mingling with the likes of District Attorney Ernest Roll and his wife in such mixed company did nothing to allay his concerns. It was highly worrisome to find the county DA associating with such dubious characters. Poulson also discovered that there was an anti-Parker clique within the police department, just as Mickey Cohen had alleged. On one occasion, Gach took Poulson to the offices of a former LAPD captain who had hung out a shingle in Beverly Hills as an attorney. His specialty was defending officers (and others) against Parker’s “Gestapo” (presumably the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs). There Gach collected a check for $1,200 for pro-Poulson newspaper advertisements and campaign work. The attorney in question (whom Poulson was surprised to see surrounded by four or five uniformed officers) informed the candidate that all he wanted was “a fair deal.” Naturally, Poulson agreed to provide that. Then he took the check and fled.

  Los Angeles has a nonpartisan election system that requires mayoral candidates to win an outright majority in order to become mayor. As a result, mayoral elections are generally a two-step affair: the primary typically narrows the race to two candidates and then a runoff determines the winner. In April 1953, Poulson defeated Mayor Bowron in the primaries, winning 211,000 votes to Bowron’s 178,000. Bowron tried to put a game face on this loss, insisting that he had saved “his best ammunition for the finals.” With Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan at his side, Bowron lashed out against the “the Mammon of First Street” (i.e., Norman Chandler) and “the small group of people who control a vast commercial, financial, agricultural and industrial empire.

  “Norman Chandler should run for mayor himself,” Bowron asserted, before pausing to note that neither Chandler nor many of his coconspirators even lived in Los Angeles. (Chandler lived in Sierra Madre. Beebe and Hotchkis lived in San Marino.)

  But even Ronald Reagan couldn’t save Fletcher Bowron. Mammon retaliated, to devastating effect. Its point of attack was Mayor Bowron’s alleged softness on communism. Its weapon was Chief William Parker.

  On May 18—exactly one week before the general election—the House Subcommittee on Government Operations announced that it would be coming to Los Angeles to hold two days of hearings into how Communists had infiltrated the city’s housing authority. Democratic members of the commi
ttee protested this brazen attempt to influence the election—to no avail. Republican congressman Clare Hoffman insisted he knew nothing about local elections and pressed ahead. The hearings were broadcast on local TV. Three former employees who had refused to answer questions about their potential membership in the Communist Party on an earlier occasion were summoned to repeat the performance for the cameras. The star witness, though, was Parker. After carefully noting that he was appearing at this sensitive time only because the committee had subpoenaed him, Parker proceeded to relate how in early 1952 he had given Mayor Bowron dossiers on ten housing agency figures with radical connections, including a dossier on Frank Wilkinson. At the committee’s instruction, Parker then read the confidential dossier in its entirety. Bowron, he told the committee, had simply thrown the dossier out.

  Parker’s testimony was extremely damaging to the mayor. But Congressman Poulson wasn’t exactly reveling in what looked increasingly like an approaching victory, for as the odds of an upset grew, the underworld became even more overt in its overtures. A former city councilman whom Poulson knew well, Roy Hampton, approached the candidate to offer him “an enormous campaign fund” if he would “pledge to appoint a friendly Police Commission and get rid of Parker.” Again, Poulson begged off, promising only to “investigate this situation thoroughly.”