L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  The county grand jury was the wildcard in Los Angeles politics. Every year, the county’s fifty superior court judges appointed nineteen people to the jury, which had broad leeway to investigate wrongdoing. At least seventeen of those judges were in the pocket of the Combination; these friendly judges typically ensured that eight to twelve of the grand jury’s members had close ties either to Mayor Frank Shaw’s administration or to the underworld. As a result, grand juries generally managed to avoid uncovering any serious wrongdoing. A clear majority of the 1937 grand jury fit this pattern. When Clinton and three other jurors pressed for an investigation into vice conditions, the grand jury foreman refused. But Clinton was undeterred. Instead, he went directly to Mayor Shaw and asked him to bless an investigation.

  Clinton’s proposal put Shaw in a tough position. If the mayor refused, he risked creating the impression that he had something to hide. So over the objections of Chief Davis, Shaw endorsed Clinton’s investigation. When the group unveiled its name—the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC)—and announced that it would also be investigating municipal malfeasance, Shaw realized he had made a mistake. Clinton’s public statements made it clear that he was targeting more than the city’s brothels and gambling parlors; he was targeting the Combination as a whole. The mayor withdrew his support. CIVIC pressed ahead. Its volunteer investigators soon came up with a tally of vice in Los Angeles: 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines. The rest of the grand jury wasn’t interested. It refused to accept much less publish CIVIC’s report.

  Clinton turned to Judge Bowron for advice. The fifty-year-old Bowron knew the underworld well. During the teens, he’d put himself through law school by working as a city reporter. Then, after serving in the Army during the First World War, he’d gotten a job as the executive secretary to California governor Friend Richardson, who appointed him to superior court. There Bowron turned his attention to the issue of corruption. Three years earlier, in 1934, Bowron had presided over a crusading county grand jury that nearly toppled District Attorney Buron Fitts. (Fitts’s office had dropped a case against a millionaire real estate developer who’d allegedly raped an underage prostitute after the developer entered into a shady business deal with a member of the DA’s family.) Now Bowron suggested that Clinton produce a minority grand jury report. When Clinton did so, the judge with responsibility for presiding over the grand jury ruled that it couldn’t be released. Bowron issued a counterruling, and CIVIC hastily printed and distributed thousands of copies.

  The report was scathing. It found that “underworld profits” were being used to finance the campaigns of “city and county officials in vital positions.” In exchange, local officials were turning a blind eye to a vast network of brothels, “clip joints,” gambling houses, and bookmakers. The report charged that officials from all three of the principal law enforcement agencies in the county, the district attorney’s office, the sheriff’s department, and the LAPD, “work in complete harmony and never interfere with the activities of important figures in the underworld.”

  The counterreaction was swift. Grand jury foreman John Bauer labeled Clinton an “out of control” egomaniac and charged that the cafeteriateur, rather than the underworld, was “Public Enemy #1.” The Los Angeles Times, which was closely allied with District Attorney Fitts, echoed Bauer’s allegations. When a notary appeared before the county grand jury to testify that foreman Bauer was actually a Shaw crony holding lucrative city paint contracts, Fitts, Bauer, and a squad of detectives from the DA’s office arrived, uninvited, at the notary’s house. The detectives then beat the hapless notary so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

  Clinton came under pressure too. His real estate taxes were increased by nearly $7,000, a significant sum during the Depression. Complaints of food poisoning became commonplace. Clinton’s newest cafeteria was denied a permit. But the man the newspapers had dubbed “the Cafeteria Kid” was undeterred. So Clinton’s enemies upped the ante. That October, a bomb exploded in the basement of Clinton’s home in Los Feliz. Fortunately Clinton, his wife, and their three children slept on the other side of the house and were unharmed. The LAPD responded by suggesting the attack was probably just a publicity ruse engineered by Clinton himself—despite the fact that a car seen speeding from the scene had license plates that tied it to the LAPD’s intelligence division.

  The Shaws weren’t the only people playing hardball. So was former LAPD officer Harry Raymond. Raymond was an unsavory character, a twice-fired former vice squad officer with close connections to the old Combination. As the historian Gerald Woods noted dryly, “Few were better qualified to investigate vice than Raymond.” Raymond had gotten involved in a picayune dispute between a friend who’d done work for Mayor Shaw’s 1933 reelection campaign—and felt he was owed $2,900—and Harry Munson, a former Police Commission member who was widely considered to be the liaison between the underworld and the Shaw administration. Despite the fact that Munson’s associates were clearing somewhere between $2 and $4 million a month, Munson refused to pay up. Raymond’s friend decided to sue. Raymond recommended an attorney, who just happened to be Clifford Clinton’s attorney as well.

  Then Raymond himself got busy. His investigation soon uncovered damaging connections between the police department, the underworld, and the Shaw administration. But Raymond didn’t turn this evidence over to Clinton or to prosecutors. Instead, he approached his former colleagues in the police department with a blackmail demand. In response, the decision was made to take Raymond out.

  On the morning of January 14, 1938, Harry Raymond walked into the garage of his modest house at 955 Orme Street in Boyle Heights, got into his car, pressed the starter pedal, and triggered a thunderous explosion that shook the neighborhood. The car and the garage were destroyed—investigators would later determine that a heavy iron water pipe packed with dynamite had been attached to his car’s undercarriage—but Raymond somehow survived, despite suffering 186 shrapnel wounds. The badly wounded Raymond summoned Los Angeles Examiner city editor Jim Richardson to his hospital bedside—and fingered Davis muscleman Earl Kynette.

  “They told me they would get me,” he whispered to the newspaperman. “They put Kynette on me. I’ve known for weeks he and his boys were shadowing me. They had my phone tapped. Somewhere in the neighborhood you’ll find where they had their listening devices. Kynette takes his orders from City Hall and they wanted me out of the way. He’s the one who rigged the bomb.”

  The next morning, Raymond’s allegations were splashed across the front page of the Examiner. Raymond’s attorney quickly reached out to Clifford Clinton and arranged for the wounded blackmailer to claim a more flattering connection to CIVIC. Clinton was happy to portray Raymond as a crusading investigator who had been targeted for termination because he had information that would “blow the lid off Los Angeles.” A wiretapping setup was soon found, just as Raymond had alleged. Neighbors confirmed that Capt. Earl Kynette of the LAPD had indeed been surveilling Raymond in the days leading up to the explosion. Nonetheless, upon returning from a pistol shooting competition in Mexico City, Chief Davis assigned Kynette to investigate the bombing. Kynette in turn suggested that Raymond had blown himself up as part of yet another publicity stunt. This was too much for DA Fitts, who reluctantly opened an investigation into police wrongdoing. To those in the know, the situation was farcical. In a letter to U.S. senator Hiram Johnson, chamber of commerce director Frank Doherty described Fitts’s investigation of the LAPD thusly: “a near psychopathic district attorney is investigating a crooked police department” that is “trying to dispense of or frighten a former crooked member of their crooked force who was spying into their crooked activities.”

  Chief Davis’s career—and Bill Parker’s—hung in the balance. Thanks to the changes in the city charter Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had pushed through, Kynette’s intelligence squad now enjoyed significant legal protections. Those advanta
ges were on full display in the wake of the Raymond bombing. Seven members of Kynette’s intelligence squad refused to testify before the grand jury about the unit’s activities, citing fears of self-incrimination. Although the officers were initially suspended from duty, a review board made up of their fellow officers soon returned the men to work. But the question of Chief Davis’s future—and Bill Parker’s—remained.

  In April 1938, the trial of Earl Kynette and his two associates got under way. The evidence against Kynette was damning. He had personally purchased the steel pipe used in the bombing. The trial also revealed that Kynette had been running a secret spy squad—one that routinely used wiretaps and dictographs to gather information on opponents of the Shaws’ political machine. Among its targets were county supervisor John Anson Ford (who had run for mayor, unsuccessfully, against Frank Shaw in 1937), Judge Bowron, Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer, and fifty other prominent Angelenos. Chief Davis clearly had some questions to answer. But when he took the stand on April 26, Davis was a disaster. Prosecutors had subpoenaed the files of the intelligence division two weeks earlier. They now confronted the chief with evidence that the LAPD intelligence squad had been monitoring county supervisors, judges, newspaper publishers, even a federal agent charged with investigating vice conditions in San Francisco who had considered launching a similar investigation into vice conditions in Los Angeles.

  “Are these men criminals?” demanded one of the prosecutors.

  Davis parried that everyone under observation had a criminal record—a claim that was true only if you counted parking citations. He further alleged that figures such as county supervisor John Anson Ford, Clifford Clinton, and Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer had been in contact “with subversive elements.” When pressed, Davis acknowledged that one of the intelligence squad’s functions had been to investigate people “attempting to destroy confidence in the police department”—as if criticism of the police were itself a crime. Mostly, though, Davis seemed confused. His testimony at times was so incoherent that the presiding judge dismissed Davis’s testimony as “a debris of words.” Kynette was convicted of attempted murder, assault with intent to commit murder, and the malicious use of explosives and sentenced to ten years in prison, along with one other officer.

  In an effort to salvage his position, Chief Davis disbanded the intelligence squad, reassigned more than four dozen officers, and launched sweeping vice raids throughout the city.* But it was too late.

  One year earlier, Mayor Shaw had been easily reelected to a second term in office, entrenching the Chandler-Shaw-Combination triumvirate that effectively ruled Los Angeles. Clinton and the reformers now demanded that Mayor Shaw dismiss Davis as chief of police. Shaw refused. Davis was the linchpin of the arrangement by which the business establishment, the underworld, and his administration shared power. If he gave up control over the police department, the entire arrangement would come tumbling down, as the reformers well knew. Faced with this refusal, Clinton and his allies targeted the mayor himself, launching a recall effort. No big-city mayor had ever been recalled before, but by early July, Clinton had the signatures he needed to put a motion to recall Shaw on the September ballot. Now the reformers needed a candidate. That August, just one month before the election, Judge Bowron agreed to step down from the bench and run as the reform candidate. That September, voters swept Frank Shaw out of office and made Bowron mayor. Bowron immediately turned his attention to purging the LAPD—and getting rid of Chief Davis.

  In theory, thanks to the charter amendments drafted by Bill Parker, Chief Davis enjoyed a bulwark of legal protections. Bowron was determined to override them. Under pressure from the new mayor, the Police Commission resigned en masse. Bowron promptly appointed a new board that was prepared to follow his instructions. Chief Davis wanted to stay and fight. However, Parker warned him that if he fought and lost, he risked losing his $330 monthly pension. Reluctantly, Davis accepted his protege’s advice. In November 1938, he resigned as chief. Parker’s efforts to insulate the chief of police from political pressures had failed.

  Despite his closeness to the former chief, Parker did not initially suffer from Davis’s fall. The new acting chief, Insp. David Davidson, quickly reshuffled the top leadership of the force, but he affirmed Parker’s position as acting captain. He also named Parker “Administrative Officer” for the department—essentially, the assistant chief of police in everything but name. Parker even moved into the previous assistant chief of police’s office. Basically, Davidson was keeping Parker in the same job he’d performed before. Parker seemed to be advancing toward his dream: the chief’s chair. But Mayor Bowron wasn’t done yet with the LAPD.

  MAYOR BOWRON was determined to eradicate the Combination. Shaw’s defeat and Chief Davis’s resignation had clearly dealt the underworld a major blow, but Bowron knew that its tentacles still extended deep into municipal government and into the LAPD. Soon after his election, Bowron invited Jim Richardson, city editor of the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner, the feisty morning paper that was the Times’s fiercest competitor, to join him for lunch at the Jonathan Club downtown to talk strategy. The topic of their discussion was uprooting the Combination once and for all.

  “We’ve got to find out the facts,” Bowron told the newsman over lunch. “We’ve got to get the evidence of how it was operated, who put out the bribe money and who took it. Who are the crooks in the police department and how did the whole setup operate? We can’t do much, hardly anything, until we get that information; and how are we going to get it?”

  “There’s only one way,” Richardson responded. “We’ve got to get somebody to spill his guts.”

  A few days later, Richardson realized someone might be willing to talk: Tony Cornero. During his bootlegging days in the 1920s, Cornero had conducted a guns-blazing feud with Combination leader Milton “Farmer” Page. That feud had ended with Cornero’s arrest, followed by an amazing escape to Canada. In 1929, Cornero had voluntarily returned to the United States and served two years in a federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, in the Puget Sound. He returned to Los Angeles in 1931 and hit upon a characteristically wily scheme. Rather than going up against underworld rivals and the LAPD, Cornero decided to commission gambling ships that would operate in international waters off Santa Monica Bay. Offshore gambling proved a smashing success; Cornero had reveled in one-upping his old land based rivals. But Richardson knew Cornero still held a grudge against his old rivals in what remained of the Combination. The newspaperman thought the old bootlegger-turned-nautical casino operator might well be willing to do them one last bad turn. So he called Cornero and asked if he’d meet secretly with him—and with Mayor Bowron—to help the mayor finish off his old enemies. Cornero readily agreed. A midnight summit was arranged at Bowron’s house, on a hill high above the Hollywood Bowl.

  The night of the meeting, only six people were present—the mayor, his driver, the head of the Police Commission, Richardson and a colleague, and Cornero. Cornero began by explaining how the underworld operated, but what Bowron really wanted were names—names of police officers on the take.

  Cornero handed Bowron a piece of paper. On it was a list of twenty-six compromised police officers. Bowron was thrilled—and puzzled.

  “Thank you, Tony,” the mayor told the gangster. “You have done us a big service. In fact, you’ve done the city of Los Angeles a big service.” He paused and then continued. “But there’s only one thing I can’t understand. I can’t understand why you’re doing this. I mean, I can’t see what’s in it for you?”

  Cornero smiled and then replied. “Well, Your Honor,” he began, “you are not always going to be mayor of Los Angeles. Someday you’ll be out. It may be the next election or ten years from now. I’ve given you the stuff to put the Syndicate out of business. Out it goes! Then comes the day when you’re out too. Then the field is open again. And it will be mine. It will be open for someone else to take over. Do I make myself clear?”
<
br />   “You make it clear all right,” Bowron replied. The meeting was over. It was time to clean house at the LAPD.

  There was just one problem. The testimony of a convicted felon like Tony Cornero was not exactly something that would hold up in court or even in an administrative hearing, given the protections that Bill Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had so painstakingly enacted. So Mayor Bowron and his Police Commission decided to take an extraordinary step. They hired an ex-FBI man to investigate the officers in question and tap their phones. By the end of the investigation, Bowron was confident that the men were indeed corrupt. Over the course of two days, each was summoned to the mayor’s office individually and asked for his resignation. When an officer hesitated—or refused—the mayor reached over to the sound recorder and played an incriminating section of the wiretap. Most of the officers agreed to resign on the spot. In two days, much of the top echelon of the department was gone. Within six months, a dozen more had followed.

  The Combination had finally been smashed. In a world with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel on the loose, it was simply too dangerous for men like Guy McAfee to operate in Los Angeles without police protection. Moreover, it seemed evident that the new mayor was determined to “close” Los Angeles. And so the organized crime figures who had held sway over the L.A. underworld since the 1920s left Los Angeles. Most relocated to a dusty little town in the Nevada desert where gambling was legal and supervision was lax—Las Vegas.