by James Ellroy
L.A.’s like America. It was that way Then and Now. Everybody dumps on us. Everybody wants to come here, nonetheless. †
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OTASH
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Fred Otash served on LAPD from ’45 to ’55. Whiskey Bill Parker harassed him out. He instinctively and properly distrusted Freddy O. He knew that Freddy O. was cunningly rogue. He had no specific dirt to squeeze him with. He shuffled him from division to division, willy-nilly. Freddy took the cue and split. He became a private eye and went to work for Confidential magazine. He employed illegal surveillance methods and got the goods on celebrity pervs. Freddy was strictly shakedown. Freddy knew how to carve a buck.
Freddy lost his P.I.’s license in a horse-doping snafu. He became a freelance mob lapdog then. Fetch, Freddy, fetch!!!!! Freddy worked for all the godless goombahs. Jack Kennedy was playing bring the brisket with Marilyn Monroe. Sam G., Mr. Chi-Town, was considering a squeeze on the Prez. Freddy hot-wired Peter Lawford’s beachfront fuck pad and got audiotape on Jack in the sack. Freddy told me that Jack was a two-minute man. I live for this kind of insider shit—and don’t tell me you don’t!!!!!
I knew Freddy in his declining years and have deployed him as a character in three of my novels. I dug him—but didn’t respect him. He lacked my humility and sterling strength of character. He tried to crash my own shakedown gig when I was a five-year-old L.A. rackets overlord in 1953. Freddy Otash, ex-LAPD: 1922–1992. Thanks for being there Then. †
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ELMER
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Everything is connected. We are all as one, connected in the spiritus mundi and the gravely groovy big chain of life. Elmer V. Jackson started at the LAPD in ’37. This ID pic portrays him as a carrot-topped youth. Elmer J. worked Administrative Vice in the late ’40s and was a key player in the Brenda Allen vice scandal of ’48–’49. Said scandal toppled Chief C. B. Horrall and ultimately facilitated the reforming regime of the illustrious William H. Parker. Elmer J.’s a supporting player in my most recent novel, Perfidia. John Gregory Dunne used him as the basis for Lieutenant Tom Spellacy in his splendid 1977 novel, True Confessions. Jackson was Brenda A.’s lover. Ambiguous shit went down with her and sparked the entire scandal. The late Mr. Dunne has Brenda Samuels giving Spellacy a head job in the front seat of his car. An ex-con tries to rob them with a tommy gun. Spellacy drills the guy while Brenda’s gobbling him, tonsil-deep. I portray Brenda Allen and Elmer Jackson’s relationship more delicately.
Sergeant Elmer Jackson worked Wilshire Detectives in ’58. He handled the missing-persons inquiry on one Ruth Rita Mercado. Poor Ruth Rita was snuffed by sex creep Harvey Glatman. Harvey Glatman was briefly a suspect in my mother’s murder case. Pierce Brooks, LAPD’s philosopher-king, popped Horror Harv. See, it’s all connected!
Elmer the J was on the job in our 1953 Then. He was a vibrant 38 years old, with Brenda Allen years behind him. He managed to retain his LAPD tenure after the scandal blew over. Bill Parker surely disapproved of him. There’s surely a story here. †
* * *
CHRISTMAS
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Feliz Navidad!
We’re back on Hollyweird Boulevard and southward on the Miracle Mile. The sidewalk trees are out. Folks are well-groomed. There’s no crime as a continuing circumstance anywhere to be seen. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, holiday-dressed.
The Admiral Theater’s running a boss double bill. Gregory Peck toplines an oater. Joe Cotten stars in a crime lox. The Melody Lane is just to the right. That big botched heist shootout is 16 days in the past. Local barflies are still schmoozing it up. The punk-pipsqueaks who ate Sergeant Don Grant’s hot lead are off the critical list. Note the kool kars in style transition. Humpbacked is out, rocket ship is in.
It’s good to be an American, right? It’s good to live in L.A. It doesn’t matter what’s playing. Tuck a short dog of Old Crow in your pocket and nip along with the movies. Head over to Ma Gordon’s Deli, post-flix. It’s the “Home of the Hebrew Hero”—tasty and deadly shit. There’s no hipster riffraff on their computers at Ma’s. There’s just square folks and lonely Joes with big dreams, like you.
You can nosh and stroll down south to the La Brea Tar Pits. You can ponder why no women want you. You can eyeball the statues of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and reflect on eternity. What will the gleaming Miracle Mile look like in, say, 60 years? It’s the sort of shit you teethe on with a double feature, a pint of hooch and a big pastrami sandwich kicking around in you—
Then. †
* * *
ANTHEM
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They’re playing our song.
It’s either the National Anthem or “God Bless America.” The LAPD Band is in full roar. All of the cops are saluting. Many of the civilians have doffed their hats or have placed their hands on their hearts. It’s the ground-breaking ceremony for the new Police Administration Building at 1st and Los Angeles Streets. The celebrated architect Welton Becket designed the space-age modernist structure. It will replace City Hall as the LAPD’s administrative hub and will ultimately and posthumously be named “Parker Center.”
But, fuckers—why mince words or mince at all? City Hall is City Hall. It’s the most magnificent building of L.A. Then and remains the signature building of L.A. Now. It’s the most striking and immediately identifiable seat of municipal government in America today. And, it’s the defiantly donkey-dicked declaration of L.A. and Bill Parker’s LAPD as the epic epicenter and invigorated enforcement arm of film noir.
Yeah, kats—it’s ’53. The LAPD Detective Bureau’s running round-the-clock out of City Hall. What would film noir be without City Hall as an L.A. landmark, L.A. identifier and the fabulously phallic symbol of the fucked-up finger of fate?
Criss Cross, ’49. Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea. Dig it: City Hall’s top-loaded at the start of the flick. There’s an armored-car heist and boocoo sex and death coming up. And what’s the gist?
YOU’RE FUCKED, Daddy-O—and you’re loving it!!!!!
He Walked by Night, ’48. There’s a jejune Jack Webb in this one. A fiend cop-killer’s on the loose. LAPD’s massively mobilizing to bag him. The Detective Bureau’s jam-packed with lurid lowlifes snared in raucous roundups that violate their candy-ass civil rights! City Hall looks good like a motherfucker! Those fucking marble halls gleam!
D.O.A., ’50. Edmond O’Brien’s been dosed with a slow-acting poison and snags his own killer! Man, this cat is cooked! There’s City Hall in the beginning. Soon-to-be dead man O’Brien walks down those long marble halls to tell LAPD Homicide all.
“Mark him dead on arrival” are the last words of the film. The same epitaph could be applied to L.A. Now!!!!!
They’re playing our song.
You can’t go home again.
At least we’ve got History.
At least we’ve got imagination and memory.
At least we’ve got Art. †
Groundbreaking for the police administration building (later renamed Parker Center)
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CHESSMAN
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It’s a grisly artifact, to be sure. And Caryl Chessman, the “Red Light Bandit,” would not burn today—because he did not commit murder. “Chess” fried under the aegis of the “Little Lindbergh Law,” put into effect after the 1933 kidnap/death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The law held that kidnapping with grievous bodily harm carried the possible imposition of the death penalty. Caryl Chessman prowled lovers’ lanes in the Hollywood Hills. He drove a dark car with red cellophane affixed to a side spotlight. He impersonated a policeman and abducted women from the automobiles where they sat spooning with their boyfriends. He walked them at gunpoint to his faux unmarked cop car and coerced sexual acts. He returned them to their automobiles and drove off into the night. It was ’47 into ’48. A woman molested was a woman unjustly and permanently stigmatized. Caryl Chessman branded his own scarlet letter into the i
nnocent flesh of a score of young victims.
He battled the green room for a full dozen years. The green room won in the end. The document pictured foretells Chessman’s 2/19/60 date with lethal gas. Chess won that one. The pellets dropped him two and a half months later.
The great chain of life—and death.
Joseph Wambaugh entered the LAPD Academy that day. It was seven years after Sergeant Don Grant’s tavern shootout at Hollywood and Vine and the man-in-the-swimsuit caper.
Chess sits down in the hot seat. Grant’s watching from the other side of the glass. The eggs drop in the acid. Invisible gas fills the green room.
Chessman dies gasping for breath. It’s a horrible moment that would not have occurred today. It was Then. The death penalty is more sparingly and judiciously imposed Now. It is reserved to punish murderers of the most wanton and evil ilk.
Adios, Chess. You got a retrospectively raw deal. But don’t shit a shitter, baby. I never bought that song and dance that you weren’t the Red Light Bandit. The wages of sin are death. †
* * *
HATS
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Clarence “Red” Stromwall. Max Herman. Eddie Benson. Harry Crowder.
Check their youthful I.D. photos.
Add some years, some pounds, some gravitas, some heft. Add four white fedoras—straw for warm weather, felt for winter days. You’ve got LAPD’s legendary “Hat Squad”—and Whiskey Bill Parker’s “Command Presence” defined.
They worked Robbery from ’49 to ’62. Eddie Benson died from the Big “C” in ’70. Red, Max and Harry went to law school, passed the bar exam and practiced law. Max became a criminal defense lawyer. Harry and Red both became Superior Court judges.
Robbery was LAPD’s “Heavy Squad.” They went after men with guns and notched up bandit killings. The minimum height requirement was 6′ 2″. The Hats all topped that tape. They walked tall, they spoke softly. They were sartorially splendid. They tended not to carry roscoes—because they fucked up the lines of their suits. They never tattled their own exploits, post-LAPD career. They pulled some wild-and-woolly shit and took it to their graves. Did Harry Crowder really dangle a suspect out of an upper-floor window at City Hall until he spilled the goods? What about the heist guy they dangled off the Harbor Freeway? They were strong-arm troubleshooters for Bill Parker—we know that. Robbery suspects who had heard the Hats were on their ass often preemptively turned themselves in. In our beloved Then, there was always the hard way and the easy way. The Hats were very bright guys and nice guys. They did not enjoy dispensing hurt. However, if the application of hurt was required . . .
1953.
Then.
Armed robbery.
Cops hiding in false-front refrigerators, waiting to ambush liquor store heisters. Max, Harry, Eddie and Red. They kept it zipped. They held their mud. They left us to ponder—and yearn for their tales. †
* * *
HANSEN
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He was LAPD’s “Mr. Homicide.”
The title held for ’53, as well as for the decades immediately preceding and following.
He was a tall Bloodhound.
Sergeant Harry Hansen.
His career spanned the Jazz Age to the Sizzling Sixties. He sent husband-slayer Louise Peete to the green room. He was hard at work on the Joseph James Reposo/liquor store–heist snuff in our target year of ’53. He was LAPD’s lead investigator on the most celebrated unsolved murder case in American history.
The victim: Elizabeth Short.
Her moniker: the Black Dahlia.
The Boston girl, bound and hideously tortured. The severed body in the vacant lot at 39th and Norton.
Dylan Thomas wrote, “After the first death, there is no other.”
Harry Hansen worked scores of deaths before and after Betty Short’s. Betty Short was always the first last and death for him. He carried a photo of Betty in his wallet. He talked to her ghost and called her “Elizabeth.” He worked lead after lead after lead, from the 1/15/47 inception of the case, up through his retirement and to the end of his life.
He chased every clue. He assessed every tip and heard out every nut-job theory. He always held that detectives had never talked to the killer. He remained fixated, he remained obsessed. He was a kind man with great good cheer for the world at large. He did not plummet down the deep, dark rabbit whole of obsession. He lived in equanimity and remained forever on task.
He was not the vindictive psycho cop we dig from film noir. He did not carry a necrophile torch for Betty Short. He loved her in an impersonal way commensurate with his assignment of task. Betty Short. The Black Dahlia. Crazy tips still flood the LAPD switchboard—Then to Now. Betty Short and Harry Hansen, heavenly reunited. They know how Betty fell.
No earthly human being shares that ghastly secret! †
* * *
THAD
* * *
He was almost Chief.
He was destined to be Chief.
He was as even-tempered and friendly as Bill Parker was volatile and remote. He missed out on the big job by a quirk of fate off a rat’s pubic hair margin. He was a great detective, while Bill Parker never worked a Detective Division assignment. He became the interim Chief following Parker’s death and held the reins for future Chief Tom Reddin. Ladies, gentlemen and knocked-out numbskull hipsters buying this book in droves—Thad Brown!!!!!
He worked his way up through the ranks during the coruscatingly corrupt pre-Parker era. Policeman, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Inspector, Deputy Chief. Great anti-sabotage work during World War II.
The Brenda Allen vice scandal topples Chief C. B. Horrall. Retired Marine Corps Major General William Worton holds the reins until a new Chief can be appointed, on the basis of civil service exams and a Police Commission vote. General Worton does a crackerjack job as gatekeeper. Brown scores number one on the oral exam. Parker bests him on the written exam. Thad’s got the commission votes, he’s a shoo-in, it’s a lock—but a Commissioner drops dead of a heart attack the day before the vote. The job goes to Whiskey Bill.
How many times have I said this?
It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town—we just live in it.
The great Parker reforms the LAPD. Thad Brown is his Chief of Detectives. Thad’s his main man, his confidential consigliere, his ichiban. Thad presides over the stunningly potent LAPD Detective Bureau of 1950 to 1966.
Interdiction.
Suppression.
Those were Parker’s concepts. The Comprehensive Police Investigation was Thad’s métier. Parker and Brown—American law enforcement’s greatest one-two punch. †
* * *
TOM
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Mayor Tom.
Here’s something you history-phobic hipsters don’t know.
Tom Bradley, L.A.’s longest-serving mayor, was once Lieutenant Tom Bradley, LAPD.
He was Tom “Schoolboy” Bradley when he came on in ’40. It was a less-enlightened era—and Schoolboy Tom got the racial runaround before he was reluctantly admitted to the Police Academy. Schoolboy Tom—the transcendent track star from UCLA. Bradley was an Academy classmate of future Chief Ed Davis. The LAPD badge went from the eagle-top design to the familiar oval shield that year.
Bradley rose to brass-hat status, went to law school part-time and studied for the bar exam during his lag time as the night-watch boss at Wilshire Station.
He was an astute, ambitious policeman-lawyer or lawyer-policeman—take your pick. He exemplified LAPD’s reluctant inclusiveness, even in the pre-Parker era. Lieutenant Tom, Mayor Tom. He honed his deft social skills on the street. Bill Parker disliked him. It wasn’t racial rancor. The two men were simply too much alike.
Tom Bradley—Big City Cop.
Tom Bradley—Big City Mayor! †
Central Station (1896–1955) located at 314 West 1st Street
JAMES ELLROY
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AFTERWORD
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THIS BOOK WAS
BOTH A LABOR OF LOVE AND A STONE GAS TO ASSEMBLE AND WRITE. YOU COULD TELL, COULDN’T YOU?
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The work went down at the Los Angeles Police Museum—the LAPD’s former Northeast Station, in the former Mexican gang turf/current hipster hive of Highland Park. Glynn Martin spearheaded the effort. Joan Renner, Nathan Marsak, Mike Frantantoni, and Megan Martin put together the stunning photographs. These kats are the Museum’s most inspired volunteers; they brought a deep love for L.A. Then to their collating task. They supplied me with brilliantly concise crib sheets. Said sheets inspired my accompanying captions. All of us concocted the 1953-photographs-only concept. It stands as the book’s defining construction.
Some concept.
Some year.
I wish Then were Now.
Where’s William H. Parker now that we really need him?
Demonic humor infused our work sessions. Why mince words, or mince at all? Glynn was born into kop komedy—while Joan, Nathan, Meg, and I came at it sideways. Los Angeles cops are the greatest oral historians and bullshit artists in world annals, and LAPD ’53 is fully intended to express the right-wing absurdist world-view that so often informs their stories. Death and yuks a heartbeat apart. You’ve gotta look and you’ve gotta laff.
