L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  Stoker felt uneasy about betraying fellow officers, even ones who might have broken the law. Parker, Stoker concluded, “was a man compounded out of sheer ruthlessness, a man who would ride rough shod over anyone who got in the way of his becoming Chief of Police.” But he had to concede “that much of what [Parker] had told me about the vice, gambling and pay-off picture in Los Angeles was true.”

  Nonetheless, he ducked the request, saying that he could not testify to anything about which he personally was not 100 percent certain, particularly if it concerned other officers. But Stoker would not stay silent for long.

  The trial of “Happy” Meltzer began on May 5. Meltzer’s defense, as presented by lead defense attorney Sam Rummel, was simple: “We will prove,” declaimed Rummel, “that for a period of one and a half years before Meltzer’s arrest, Lieutenant Rudy Wellpot and Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson kept up a constant extortion of Mickey Cohen.” The Meltzer case, he charged, was “a frame-up” that resulted from Cohen’s refusal to pay off a shakedown demand. Rummel then went on to relate a lengthy and seemingly fantastical story of late-night meetings between Cohen and Jackson in the backs of cars parked off the Sunset Strip, car chases through Beverly Hills, and B-girl payoffs down on Main Street.

  As sensational as it sounded, Rummel’s opening statement wasn’t particularly strong. But when Rummel announced that “sound engineer J. Arthur Vaus” had recordings that would tie Sergeant Jackson to the notorious Hollywood prostitute Brenda Allen and substantiate the defense’s charges that the police had tried to extort money from Cohen, the county grand jury took notice. It decided to open an investigation into the matter—after the upcoming mayoral elections.

  Several weeks before the election, Parker called again and requested another meeting. Stoker agreed. After some throat-clearing about how they were both Catholics and both World War II veterans, Parker got to the point: What did Vaus know about the Brenda Allen investigation in Hollywood?

  Stoker then told Parker his story—without, however, revealing that he had already spoken to the grand jury. According to Stoker, Parker listened encouragingly and then told the sergeant what he knew. There were several sources of corruption in the police administration, he said. One, controlled by Sgt. Guy Rudolph, Chief Horrall’s confidential aide, had the lottery and the numbers rackets. A second source of corruption was Captain Tucker, commander of the elite “Metro” division, which, according to Stoker’s account of his conversation with Parker, focused on milking Chinatown and L.A.’s prostitutes for the police department and for the city council. Finally there were Assistant Chief of Police Joe Reed, Lieutenant Wellpot, and Sergeant Jackson. Stoker claimed that Mayor Bowron was clean but also “a stupid ass, who had no idea what was going on.”

  Why was Parker (allegedly) telling him this?* Stoker claimed that Parker wanted him to go to the grand jury and present his own information—and Parker’s—to them. With an election just weeks away, Parker continued, when the news leaked, Mayor Bowron would be forced to oust Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed. Everyone knew “damned good and well” that he would be the logical man to step into Horrall’s shoes.

  But wouldn’t such a confession risk defeating Mayor Bowron?

  “Hell, no,” Parker (allegedly) replied. “If anything, it will insure [sic] his success.” Bowron’s anti-vice bona fides were impeccable. A scandal that confirmed an ongoing underworld conspiracy would simply shore him up.

  So Stoker agreed to go along, telling Parker that if he could arrange for a grand jury subpoena, Stoker would tell all. He neglected to mention that he had already testified before the grand jury. It was a deception Parker would not forget.

  ON MAY 31, 1949, Mayor Bowron was easily reelected. The following day, on June 1, the county grand jury announced that it was beginning an investigation into corruption on the police force. A week later, the Los Angeles Daily News began to produce a series of stories that appeared to reveal corruption at the highest level of the department. It emerged that the LAPD had been tapping Mickey’s home for nearly two years. What made the story scandalous was not so much that the LAPD had bugged Cohen’s home without a court order but rather that it had listened to Mickey’s every conversation for two years (until the wire was removed) and yet made no move to arrest him. Instead, claimed New York Daily News columnist Florabel Muir, who enjoyed a nationwide following for her flamboyant descriptions of Hollywood crime, the head of the department’s gangster squad had repeatedly attempted to blackmail Cohen with the transcripts.

  There was also the matter of the police fraternizing with Cohen. Sergeant Jackson and Lieutenant Wellpot attempted to explain away the testimony of witnesses who placed them in Cohen’s company (or establishments) and/or in Brenda Allen’s proximity by arguing that they had in fact been involved in a complex undercover operation. Unfortunately for Jackson and Wellpot, Deputy Chief Richard Simon testified that the effort to build a case against Allen had been abandoned long ago. Jackson countered that he had spoken frequently to Allen because she was a valuable police informant. Then the Daily News produced yet another scoop. One year earlier, Jackson had been hailed in the press for killing a two-bit heister named Roy “Peewee” Lewis who had held Jackson up—with a machine gun—while he was necking in a car with his girlfriend. The Daily News now disclosed that the girlfriend in question was Brenda Allen.

  The revelations streamed forth in torrents. Senior members of the department came forward to verify personnel chief Cecil Wisdom’s claim that he had personally informed Chief Horrall of Stoker’s findings concerning Jackson, only to see them ignored. Then the Daily News found “Peewee” Lewis’s partner, who told the paper that he and Peewee had targeted Allen and Jackson because they believed Jackson would have the $900 payoff that Allen delivered every week to the police. County grand jury testimony was supposed to be secret, but with the mayoral election behind them, the press was no longer inclined to do the mayor any favors. By mid-June, the major papers were printing what amounted to transcripts of the preceding day’s testimony.

  Just when a narrative highly prejudicial to the police was starting to take shape, police officers arrested Sergeant Stoker—for burglary. A beautiful policewoman, Audre Davis, came forward and tearfully claimed that love had made her an accomplice in Stoker’s crime. Stoker denied it, insisting he was being targeted for embarrassing the department. (He also noted that Davis was the granddaughter of former Combination boss Charlie Crawford and that her father, former deputy chief Homer Cross, had retired to Las Vegas under suspicious circumstances.) The jury turned to Brenda Allen, who had finally been arrested, for clarification, but she only added to the confusion: She claimed to have paid off both Jackson and Stoker. Then, on July 19, someone opened fire on Mickey Cohen at Sherry’s nightclub on the Sunset Strip, killing one of Cohen’s henchmen and badly injuring a bodyguard provided by state attorney general Fred Howser—the same Fred Howser who had declined to prosecute Cohen for shooting Maxie Shaman four years earlier. Shell casings found across the street led to speculation that the shooter might be a policeman—payback, perhaps, for Mickey’s disclosures about the vice squad.

  At first, Mayor Bowron and the Police Commission defended Chief Horrall, insisting that he and his men were the victims of an underworld conspiracy. But even for a mayor who’d just won reelection, the pressure to do something was too great to resist. The cavalcade of conflicting confessions, the shootings on the Sunset Strip, the wild swirl of accusations and counteraccusations—it was all too much. Action of some sort was required. Politically, it was time for Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed to go. Once again the civil service protections that the chief of police theoretically enjoyed provided no protection. On June 28, Chief Horrall retired.

  Faced with a public safety crisis, Bowron did what politicians in his position do: He turned to a military man. On June 30, Mayor Bowron called General William Worton, a decorated Marine general who had literally retired earlier that day, and asked him if he’d com
e up from Camp Pendleton to discuss serving as the emergency chief of police for Los Angeles.

  * Every division had its own vice squad, which led to frequent jurisdictional confusion. When he first met Jimmy Vaus, Sergeant Stoker was actually just on loan to the Hollywood Division vice squad. (He normally worked out of Central Division.) Administrative vice operated freely throughout the city and worked from headquarters downtown.

  * The veracity of Stoker’s claims is uncertain. While elements ring true, Parker himself would later dismiss them as fabrications.

  13

  Internal Affairs

  “Neither a slave nor a master be…”

  —Bill Parker, quoting Abraham Lincoln, Protective League banquet, June 30, 1949

  GENERAL WORTON’S first instinct was to decline the job. The chances of making a success of it just seemed too small.

  Worton knew all too well what typically befell the well-intentioned outsider who stepped into a corruption scandal. During the mid-1920s, one of his closest friends, Marine Corps general Smedley Butler (aka “The Fighting Quaker”), had agreed to serve as director of public safety in Philadelphia under similar circumstances. At first, Butler accomplished wonders, shutting down speakeasies and brothels and curbing corruption. Then he made the mistake of targeting upper-class watering holes, and was promptly forced out. Butler later described the experience as “worse than any battle I’d been in.” This was saying something, considering that General Butler died in 1940 as the most-decorated officer in the history of the Marine Corps. Los Angeles seemed likely to present similar challenges to Worton. Why bother? After all, as he himself noted, “I owe this city nothing. I’ve never lived here. It’s not my native city.”

  But Mayor Bowron wouldn’t take no for an answer. All day, the mayor and his associates worked on Worton. Former Marine Corps commandant Alexander Vandegrift—one of the corps’s towering figures, the man who had staved off an attempt to absorb the Marines into the Army just two years earlier—likewise lobbied Worton to take the job. Gradually, Worton softened. Compared to commanding the Marine Corps’s Third Amphibious Corps at Okinawa, how challenging could Los Angeles be? And so, at the end of the day, rather than departing from City Hall and returning to the farm in Carlsbad that he and his wife had purchased five years earlier to enjoy in their retirement, Worton raised his hand and was sworn in as L.A.’s emergency chief of police.

  “I’ll be damned if I know why,” he’d later say.

  It didn’t take long for General Worton to discover that he knew even less about policing than he’d thought.

  LIKE OTHER DEPARTMENTS, the LAPD had a distinctly military appearance. Officers were uniformed and armed; ranks were hierarchical; positions had fairly explicit spans of control; and of course, violence and/or the threat of violence was routinely employed. This was no coincidence. Prior to 1937, under Chief James Davis, lines of command in the department had been notoriously unclear. The Red Squad had effectively reported to the business community; irregular officers such as Earl Kynette wielded enormous power; and police badges proliferated so widely that Davis’s successors were forced to issue a new, redesigned badge. After Davis’s ouster, the department’s new leadership had deliberately embraced the military model of organization in an effort to curtail past abuses. Lines of command were laid out; spans of command were tightened; appearance and discipline were emphasized.

  But in other ways, the department’s military appearance was deceptive. Policemen were not military personnel. They were civil servants, with civil service protections that limited their work hours and sharply curtailed the chief’s ability to promote and demote officers. Worton soon realized that he really had no idea how powerful he was—or even if he was in charge. So he decided to find out by doing something dramatic. At the end of his first week on the job, he announced that he was transferring fifty officers, many quite senior, “all over the place.”

  “Deputy chiefs were kicked around here,” Worton later gleefully related. “Captains were shifted [to] where they didn’t want to go.”

  The primary purpose of the personnel move was not so much to place officers where their talents could be better utilized—Worton had no idea who most of these officers were—but rather to find out if he could transfer them. He also figured “that if there was crookedness in the department… it would take the crooks another couple of weeks before they could get on to figuring who they could work with.”

  The results of this experiment were satisfactory. When one “very powerful” local politician threatened to have the new chief’s job if he insisted on transferring a certain officer to the San Fernando Valley, Worton responded that if his decision wasn’t upheld, he was quitting on the spot—to hell with Los Angeles. The transfer was upheld. “To make a long story short… I did have the power,” Worton concluded. Now he had to figure out what he was going to do with it.

  It was clear the LAPD faced two great challenges—eradicating gangsterism and rooting out corruption. By 1949, eradicating gangsterism meant taking down Mickey Cohen. Rooting out corruption, however, was a more treacherous matter. Chief Horrall had retired, but Assistant Chief Joe Reed—who everyone agreed was the man who really ran the department—remained in office, even as rumors of a grand jury indictment swirled. Moreover, both former Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed still enjoyed the strong rhetorical support of Mayor Bowron, who continued to insist that the department had fallen victim to Cohen’s dirty tricks. In order to navigate his way through this morass, General Worton needed guidance from someone who was both familiar with the Los Angeles-and-beyond reproach. One name came up again and again: William H. Parker.

  TO SGT. CHARLES STOKER, Bill Parker was a person “of overweening ambition—a man whose one desire was his objective—the office of Chief of Police.” To many other members of the force, though, Bill Parker was a model for what a policeman should be: smart, assertive, and incorruptible. Parker’s experiences and attitude held a particular appeal to the 1,400 new police officers who joined the department after the war, 90 percent of whom had served in the military. Accustomed to military discipline, these men were also highly attuned to bullshit. Typical of the attitude they brought (though perhaps a bit more cocky than most) was an ex-Navy seaman named Daryl Gates. Gates joined the police in order to earn $290 a month for a few years while working toward a law degree. He definitely did not intend to be—his words—“a dumb cop.” (Gates would serve as chief of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992.)

  But when Gates got to the Los Angeles Police Academy, he was impressed—not by the academy’s “spit and polish” style; as a former Navy man, he’d already had plenty of that. Rather, he was struck by the abilities of his classmates. “I realized that I was one of the most undereducated [people] in the whole class, and probably, clearly, not the smartest,” says Gates. One of his classmates had studied chemistry at Berkeley; another had finished two years of law school. The instructors were even more impressive—“extraordinary,” says Gates. The captain responsible for overseeing the academy was an ex-Marine officer and a former Olympic water polo star. Gates’s lieutenant was Tom Reddin (a future chief of police). The academy’s law instructor was Buck Compton, a UCLA football and baseball star who’d joined the 101st Airborne Division in time for the Normandy invasion (and whose deeds inspired the Stephen Ambrose book Band of Brothers; he would later prosecute Sirhan Sirhan and serve as a California Court of Appeals judge).

  The person who impressed Gates most, though, was Bill Parker.

  Gates met Parker for the first time when Parker came to deliver a lecture on ethics and police history to Gates’s class. “Oh, were we impressed,” recalls Gates. “Oh, man. It was that kind of quality that I saw and really turned me around in terms of what this department was all about.”

  Parker’s speech was confrontational—and riveting. He was not interested in establishing a rapport with the men or presenting himself as “a good guy.” Instead, he started by cutting the men down to size.
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  “You’re coming in, you haven’t done anything to contribute to the stature or the history of this department,” he told the class. “You’ve done nothing. We anticipate that you will do something, but you have [as yet] done nothing. You bring nothing to this department. It is what it is without you.” He then proceeded to explain what the department was and what it should be.

  It was, thought Gates, “an absolutely magnificent speech. It was electric.” This was not a town hall-style affair. Parker entertained no questions. “He came in, gave his speech,” and then left, recalls Gates.

  Parker’s legend was growing: D-day hero. The man who’d reorganized Axis police departments from Sardinia to Munich, purging them of fascists (a feat that seemed to bear more than a little resemblance to cleaning up the LAPD). The officer who’d stood up to Chief Horrall for veterans’ rights, who’d topped both the inspector and the deputy chief promotion eligibility exams yet had to fight for promotions that were rightfully his. As for the ambition, that was obvious too. It had been since the late 1930s.

  General Worton had no problem with ambition. On the contrary, he welcomed it. When he first introduced himself to his commanding staff, “I told each one of them that I wanted them to take a look at me,” Worton said later. “I wanted each one of them to say, ‘How are we going to get that old man’s job away from him?’” The desire to earn the top job was, Worton thought, a healthy thing. “You should all want to be the chief of police of this city,” he’d tell officers during his visits to the division headquarters during his first weeks on the job. “Somehow or other you should be thinking, ‘How am I going to get this so-and-so out of here?’”