L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  “Shall We Re-Elect Kent Parrot?” echoed the Times. The real contest, it informed its readers, was the judge “or the Boss.”

  Parrot replied by plastering downtown Los Angeles with posters that proclaimed that the real choice was between Chandler and Cryer. On election day, Chandler lost.

  The Times publisher was stunned. The paper had lost control of the mayoralty before, but the Parrot-Cryer “Combination” represented something different and altogether more threatening—a standing alliance that threatened to push Harry Chandler to the margins. The paper hit back. Suddenly, the Times was filled with illuminating stories about how politics under Kent Parrot actually worked and editorials raving about “Boss Parrot” and “the City Hall Gang.” Typical of the newspaper’s new focus on vice was the seventeen-part series on the Cryer administration’s sins published the following year.

  In truth, each camp needed the other—and the LAPD. Chandler wanted the department to address the perception that Los Angeles was wracked by violent crime. He also wanted to retain control of its notorious “Red Squad,” which was known for the hardball tactics it used against radicals and labor organizers. Parrot wanted the exposes to stop, without giving up his control over the police department, which he needed to protect the underworld and maintain the Combination. In short, both sides had good reasons to come to terms, and so in 1926 they did. The deal was simple: The Times would launch no antivice crusades; Parrot would not interfere with the operations of the Red Squad. To seal the agreement, the two sides agreed on a police chief who would satisfy both parties: James “Two Gun” Davis, an intense, blue-eyed Texan who had spent much of his career as a member of the vice squad.

  With a measure of control over the police force restored, the Times began to downplay stories about corruption in the city. Reformers who insisted on continuing their investigations suffered misfortunes. One reform-minded council member was discovered in bed with an attractive young divorcee by LAPD vice raiders. The raiding party that was responding to the supposedly anonymous complaint included the heads of the vice and the intelligence squads—as well as a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. That was the system. Few dared to cross it.

  BILL PARKER also found himself caught in a compromising situation with a woman, though in his case, the woman was his wife. By early 1924, Parker had become convinced that his spouse was seeing other men. On April 28, he found her at home with a young child and, suspecting the child was hers from some previous relationship, he flew into a rage. Francis insisted that the child was her sister’s, which calmed her husband, for a while. In May, Bill and Francis moved in—temporarily—with Bill’s mother and his youngest brother. The atmosphere was charged. Yet Francis refused to change her behavior. Parker, in return, seemed increasingly willing to respond with his fists—by Francis’s account, beating her so badly on one occasion that she lost consciousness.

  Parker tried to focus on his career. Working as a movie usher was no way to make a living, but by the mid-1920s good alternatives were hard to come by. The boom of the early twenties was sputtering to a stop. By 1925, some 600,000 subdivided lots stood vacant across the Los Angeles basin. Nevertheless, Parker soon found a new job as a taxi driver with the Yellow Cab Co., where he was fortunate enough to secure a stand at the newly built Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square, the city’s grandest accommodation. After a year he was promoted to supervisor, but Parker had larger ambitions than managing cabs. He wanted to be a lawyer, like his illustrious grandfather, and in 1924 he enrolled at the Southwestern School of Law.

  Hindered by a full-time job and a crumbling marriage, he made little progress. In early 1925, Francis decided that she had had enough. She left Los Angeles, returned to her hometown of Oregon City, and filed for a divorce, claiming that Parker had “made Plaintiff’s life unbearable and has rendered further cohabitation with the Defendant [Parker] absolutely distasteful and made it utterly impossible for Plaintiff and Defendant to live together as husband and wife.” Bill didn’t bother to respond to the summons to appear in court or to contest the divorce, and on May 9, 1925, a judge in Clackamas County, Oregon, granted Francis’s divorce request and awarded her possession of their one significant asset, “one Upright Sonora Phonograph,” valued at $150.

  Freed of his wife—a woman about whom he would never speak in subsequent years—Parker returned to the study of law with a vengeance. In 1926, he enrolled at a different institution, the Los Angeles College of Law at the University of the West. He also hit upon a new way to make a living while studying to become a lawyer: He decided to apply for a position as a policeman. Hours were flexible; the pay was adequate (about $2,000 a year, roughly what a skilled laborer earned); and benefits were good. Being a policeman was still far from a prestigious job; one public opinion survey from the era found that police officers were more respected than chauffeurs, janitors, and clerks but less respected than machinists and stenographers. But then Bill Parker would not be a policeman forever. Once he got his law degree, he planned to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and make his living as an attorney.

  On April 24, 1926, Parker sat for a civil service exam. The competition was not formidable. Only about two-thirds of the men on the force had finished grade school; a mere one in ten had graduated from high school. Five months later, he received a notice stating that he had scored 85.7 on the exam, making him number 115 on the list of those eligible for a job with the police department. Never again would William Parker score so low on a civil service exam. Still, it was good enough. When his number came up, Parker was offered a position. On August 8, 1927, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. There he made a startling discovery. In Los Angeles, the police didn’t fight organized crime. They managed it.

  * A battle was precisely what it was. In 1910, the steelworkers union had blown up the Times building at First and Broadway, killing more than twenty people. Otis and Chandler responded by beefing up the LAPD and unleashing it on Communists, anarchists, union organizers, and others who threatened Los Angeles’s status as an “open shop” town.

  4

  The Bad Old Good Old Days

  “[A] smart lawyer can keep a crook out of jail… buy or bamboozle a jury, but he cannot prevent the cops from beating the hell out of a crook.”

  —Leslie White, Me, Detective

  FOR THE FIRST FOUR DECADES of its existence, the Los Angeles Police Department led a desultory existence. Founded in 1869 (with six paid men), the force was outmatched from the beginning. While the department proved adept at tasks such as keeping cattle out of the streets and forcing Indians into chain gangs, it showed little ability to curb the startlingly high levels of violence that prompted its creation.

  “The name of this city is in Spanish the city of Angels, but with much more truth might it be called at present the city of Demons,” wrote a visiting divine. “While I have been here in Los Angeles only two weeks, there have been eleven deaths, and only one of them a natural [one].”

  Far from reducing the violence, the police at times contributed to it, as on the memorable occasion when the city marshal (also the city dogcatcher and tax collector) got into a shootout with one of his own officers at the corner of Temple and Main after a dispute over who should receive the reward for capturing and returning a prostitute who had escaped from one of the city’s Chinese tongs.

  “While there are undoubtedly good men upon the police force, the body as a whole is not a matter for our citizens to be proud of,” sighed the Los Angeles Herald in 1900. “It is perfectly obvious to all that the policemen have not been selected for their honesty or fitness, but through political favor and for political purposes…. [Many officers] are over age, some under size, others unfit for duty; some do not pay their just debts, others figure prominently in divorce cases, and some receive money from sporting women for the privilege of soliciting upon the streets.”

  In their defense, it should be noted that police officers received no training and very little support. After being
hired, officers were required to supply themselves with the gear necessary for the job: two uniforms, hats, boots, a revolver, a gun belt and cartridges, handcuffs, and a billy club. For this, they were paid $75 a month at the turn of the century—1ess than a milk deliveryman.

  In theory, policemen of the era were charged with many tasks. Officers not only apprehended criminals, they were also responsible for preparing cases against criminals appearing in court. They picked up loose paper on the streets (blowing paper could spook horses), cleared weeds from abandoned lots, enforced foot-and-mouth disease regulations, notified businessmen of upcoming police auctions, and enforced licensing requirements. Officers also responded to fires and floods. In practice, few applied themselves to their work with much zeal. A 1904 study of the Chicago Police Department found that police officers “spent most of their time not on the streets but in saloons, restaurants, barbershops, bowling alleys, pool halls, and bootblack stands.”

  The activities of plainclothes detectives were more suspect still. When they operated out of saloons and dives—supposedly, in order to better monitor the underworld—it was often difficult to distinguish them from the men they were tasked with policing. Detectives routinely demanded cuts from the pickpockets, pimps, burglars, and bunco men who operated in their areas, often at the behest of local elected officials, who frequently insisted on a cut as well. Most were not particularly good at solving crimes. When something truly serious happened, for instance, the 1910 firebombing of the Los Angeles Times, cities turned to more capable outfits such as the William Burns Detective Agency.

  In 1902, the LAPD’s woes were greatly exacerbated by two ministers’ “discovery” of Los Angeles’s booming crib district, which centered at the time on Sanchez Street, an alley just off the historic plaza. The clergymen immediately set out to publicize the horrors of this “market for human flesh” with a series of vivid pamphlets and books (which sold very well). Inflamed churchmen descended on “hell’s half-acre” to implore its prostitutes and saloonkeepers to renounce their evil ways. When that failed, they turned to the ballot, amending the city charter so as to completely outlaw all forms of prostitution, gambling, and vice within Los Angeles city limits. (Previously, such activities had been explicitly prohibited only within the central business district.) Henceforth, Los Angeles was “closed”—at least in theory.

  The decision to prohibit vice put the LAPD in a difficult if not impossible situation. Faced with the threat of extinction, saloonkeepers, brewery owners, brothel operators, and gambling kingpins threw themselves into politics, donating lavishly to candidates for sheriff, district attorney, superior court judge, city council, and mayor. (Kent Parrot was simply the first to harness these funds in a systematic manner.) Their largesse was likewise available to policemen, particularly to members of the Chinatown and the Metropolitan “purity” squads willing to tip them off when the pressure to mount a raid became irresistible. As a result, officers on the front lines of the effort to police the underworld often faced a stark choice: break the law and accept bribes from the saloonkeepers, madams, and gaming house operators who were bankrolling the politicians or refuse bribes, enforce the law, and risk being fired or assigned to direct traffic on the graveyard shift down at the port of San Pedro. Not everyone chose the path of virtue.

  There were moments when puritanical morals held sway. In 1912, the city council passed legislation prohibiting sexual intercourse with “any person of the opposite sex to whom he or she is not married.” “A platoon of ministers” was sworn in to prowl for vice; parks and public beaches were illuminated and patrolled to prevent hanky-panky. But the reign of the morals police was short-lived. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and the United States’s entry into the First World War flooded Los Angeles with sailors and soldiers—populations renowned for whoring and boozing. Rationing created ample opportunities for black market profits, which in turn led to a surge in the supply of criminals. By the end of the decade, all pretense of enforcing the vice laws had basically come to an end. Los Angeles was run by the business community and the Combination. The LAPD served both as an enforcer.

  It took a while for Patrolman Parker to catch on.

  One night soon after his rookie probationary period had ended, Parker was leaving Central Division station, an imposing Romanesque building that also served as police headquarters up the block from the Times. He had just gotten into his car, ready to head off to an evening of night class at law school, when he saw an automobile weave down the First Street hill and then blow through a red light. The driver of the car was clearly drunk; Parker estimated it was moving at about sixty miles per hour. He took off in pursuit, picking up a madly whistling traffic cop along the way. Eventually, the two policemen succeeded in pulling the driver over. They found a half-empty open bottle in the car. They also discovered that the man they had stopped was John Arrington, a police reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

  Today the police beat is seen as a place where novice reporters go to learn the craft—the bottom of the journalistic food chain. Not so in the 1920s. In those pretelevision days, crime was the sexiest beat in journalism, and the men (and occasionally women) who covered it were important figures. Not only were they star reporters, they also frequently functioned as political hatchet men for their publishers (a job greatly facilitated by reporters’ free access to police files). Reporters supplemented their writing and (ahem) “research” with booze, poker, and occasionally extortion (publicity being something that many people were willing to pay to avoid). Veteran officers rarely crossed them. So it was hardly surprising that when Patrolman Parker hauled reporter Arrington into Central Division station and presented him to the desk sergeant for booking, he was not greeted enthusiastically. On the contrary, the sergeant on duty suggested that Parker let the newsman go. That’s when a defining feature of Bill Parker’s personality emerged: his stubbornness.

  Infuriated at the idea that press credentials somehow inoculated the bearer from prosecution, Parker insisted that “the law was the law.” Reluctantly, the desk sergeant agreed to book the newspaperman. It soon emerged that the open bottle of liquor Parker had discovered in Arrington’s car was a gift from a police captain pal. Reluctantly, Parker’s superiors allowed the case to go to court, where, after many testimonials to the high character and unshakable sobriety of the newsman, a judge dismissed the case. It was Parker’s first lesson in how policing really worked.

  Punishment, the ways in which it was or was not dispensed, provided a compelling introduction to how power was really distributed in Los Angeles. Nowhere were these realities more vivid than inside the dungeon that was the city jail. Every year fifty thousand Angelenos were arrested and passed through its halls—a significant number in a city of a million souls, and a sign that despite widespread corruption, a considerable portion of the department was still prepared to enforce Prohibition and its vice laws. Yet when a person of importance was caught in the net of vice enforcement, the legal apparatus was often forgiving. One night in 1927, the journalist and writer Louis Adamic happened to be on hand at 2:30 a.m. when “a star of world-wide fame, the sister of another famous celebrity, near stars, maids in waiting, and a bevy of attending sheiks and bull fighters” were hauled in “more or less cock-eyed drunk.”

  Adamic then related what happened next:

  “Come along, sister, and give me a hand,” the cop addresses the star. “I’m goin’ to print you.”

  “Not by a damn sight. Let go my arm—take your paw off’n me, you mammal,” she replies indignantly….

  The officer puts a brawny arm of enforcement around a classic waist. This is too much. He is kicked efficiently amidship. Another cop comes to the rescue of his mate. He is assaulted by the remainder of the bevy…. Much swearing, screeching, kicking, pulling of hair, and everything. The cops work methodically and effectively…. The best way of quieting a temperamental and irate movie queen, it has been found, is to sit on her.

  Alas, the fun s
oon came to an end:

  But before this printing process is completed there is a great scurrying down the corridor and a whole brigade of bondsmen, wirepullers and fixers come charging upon the scene. The climax is quickly past. The Records are inspected to see that aliases are used, warnings issued against giving anything to the paper, and the guests prepare to depart. The star, now somewhat sobered, feels that the parting shot is expected of her—an exit is after all an exit—and drawing herself up to her full five feet six inches she withers with a single glance the offending officer who has printed her and declares so that all may hear, “You damn big bum, I’ll let you know that I’m a lady.”

  That was how the elite were treated. In March 1929, two plainclothes officers stopped a Finnish immigrant whom they had mistaken for a suspect. Indignant, the man launched into a tirade about the police that suggested that the man held “radical” political views. The officers responded by hauling him into police headquarters and working him over with brass knuckles. Only after the man, face pulped and bloodied, abjectly proclaimed his newfound admiration for the police was he released. The district attorney brought charges against the officers in question, but they were later dismissed.

  Cops sometimes acted violently because they believed the system was corrupt. “Good men would not serve on juries, nor would they take time from their private interests to act as witnesses in court trials—if they could get out of it,” wrote Leslie White in his 1936 classic, Me, Detective. “Business men and good citizens did not want their homes robbed and their daughters raped, but they did want liquor for themselves, and prostitutes and gambling were good for business.” As a result, some officers took it on themselves to dispense justice. For, as Detective White put it, “[a] smart lawyer can keep a crook out of jail … buy or bamboozle a jury, but he cannot prevent the cops from beating the hell out of a crook.”