by John Buntin
Cohen was placed in solitary confinement. His cell had no windows or furniture, only a toilet and a concrete slab. No toilet paper was provided. Mickey’s request to take a shower was denied. No outside food was permitted. He was not allowed to shave or to see a barber. In order to ensure that no friends on the force did him any favors, Parker and Hamilton instituted rules that barred any officer from interacting with Cohen in any way without having a lieutenant and a third officer present. When his wife, LaVonne, arrived for a visit, she was allowed four minutes—and forced to speak to Cohen through a speaking tube. Even newspapers were restricted, lest someone try to communicate with Mickey through code.
On the fourth day of his confinement, chief U.S. marshal James Boyle came to visit. He professed to be shocked (shocked!) by Cohen’s conditions.
“Mickey, my God, why don’t you let me make arrangements to get you out of here and send you on your way to McNeil Island Penitentiary, where you will at least get some fresh air occasionally and some exercise,” Boyle said, with faux sympathy.
Four days in the hands of the LAPD seemed to have done the trick. “I had to get out of the clutches of certain vultures in the LAPD,” concluded Cohen. His attorney was summoned and (with a police officer present as a witness), he agreed that if Mickey couldn’t take these conditions anymore, he should go ahead and request removal to McNeil Island. So Mickey did so. The next day, on March 13, Cohen was flown to Tacoma to begin serving his federal prison term.
Although their client was absent, Cohen’s attorneys went forward with their appeal. It was rejected. Cohen’s incarceration was now official. He would be eligible for parole in twenty-two months.
LaVonne escaped conviction, after the prosecution decided to drop their unprecedented attempt to go after a mob spouse for her husband’s misdeeds. But Mickey’s incarceration left her in a difficult position. His gang had largely been dismantled; his rivals were ascendant; his assets were scattered (or hidden). The guests who had flocked to Mickey’s table now drifted away. One of the few people who didn’t forget her was Billy Graham. Knowing that LaVonne was probably hard up for money, Graham allegedly arranged for a $5,000 gift to tide her over while Mickey was in prison. He also occasionally sent a car over to pick her up for dinner. On one occasion, soon after he’d had a chance to exchange a few words with Mickey, Graham appealed to LaVonne to turn to the Lord.
“Mickey is in a terrible frame of mind—very bitter, LaVonne,” Graham said, consolingly. “Why don’t you accept Christianity?”
“I am a Christian girl,” said LaVonne. “A Catholic or something—I think.”
Graham pressed on, confident, no doubt, that nothing less than a full-scale born again experience would suffice to save the Cohens.
“You have to give your life to the Lord,” he insisted.
“The only way I would do that is if Mickey would come with me,” LaVonne replied.
So far, at least, he wouldn’t. But the ordeal of McNeil Island was still to come.
FOR CHIEF PARKER, the incarceration of Mickey Cohen should have been a moment to savor. But no sooner had Cohen been locked up, than Parker found himself caught in a series of scandals that threatened his job. The first came on October 7, when a police reserve officer shot and killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old college student, James Woodson Henry, whose only apparent offense was sitting in his car late at night. Henry’s slaying and the poignant newspaper accounts of his parents’ reaction caused a public furor. Parker responded, testily, that he could hardly dispense with the reserves when he was trying to police a city of two million people with a mere 4,189 officers, nearly 2,000 officers short of the police-to-civilian ratio suggested by most policing experts. While this was probably true, the tone of Parker’s rejoinder sparked more attacks on the chief. Chastened, Parker decided to strip the reserves of their firearms. That just angered the people who had originally supported him.
L.A.’s African American community was upset with Parker too, thanks to the California Eagle’s reporting on an incident of police brutality that it claimed was “unsurpassed by the most vicious in the deep South.” The case, which had come to public attention one month earlier, involved twenty-three-year-old George Hunter. Hunter had been waiting for the last Watts car at a Pacific Electric station when a detective allegedly accosted him. After demanding to know why he was there, the detective then insisted that he was drunk. Hunter denied it, but the detective returned with uniformed backup and arrested him. The men shoved him into a small room. There, from 3 a.m. until 7:30 a.m., he was allegedly beaten and slugged unmercifully about the head, face, and body “while being cursed, berated, and reviled with obscene language.”
During the course of the beating, Hunter’s real offense came out. Wrote the Eagle reporter, “Repeatedly, the officer blurted out, ’I’ll teach you, whenever you address an officer, to say ‘sir.’”*
White parents were fearful. The black community was indignant. One major ethnic group remained to be angered—Mexican Americans. But they didn’t have to wait long. A barroom brawl between LAPD officers and a handful of young Latino men was about to explode into the greatest crisis of Chief Parker’s brief tenure.
* To bolster the impression that Bowron was in the underworld’s pocket, Mickey Cohen adorned his Cadillac with a giant sign trumpeting his support for the mayor.
* He was right. After turning state’s witness in 1978, Fratianno confessed to killing the two Tonys. (Demoris, The Last Mafioso, 54.)
* Complaints from the African American community about disrespectful stops and brutal treatment were so commonplace that the Los Angeles Tribune, the city’s other leading black paper, sarcastically teased General Worton when he first became chief for taking them seriously: “So naive is this new chief… that he veritably pounced on a police stenographer… to make a note of the complaints … as if something was going to be done about them!!!” (Los Angeles Tribune, July 14, 1949.)
16
Dragnet
“When any function of government, national or local, gets out of civilian control, it becomes totalitarian.”
—Los Angeles Daily News editorial, March 4, 1952
THE TROUBLE ARRIVED on Christmas Eve 1951, when police received a call about several young men—possibly minors—drinking a bit too heavily at the Showboat Bar, a little joint on Riverside Drive northeast of downtown. Two officers were dispatched to respond. When they arrived, they found a group of seven young men. Five of the men were Latinos—Danny and Elias Rodela, Raymond Marquez, Manuel Hernandez, and Eddie Nora. The other two—Jack and William Wilson—were Anglos. The officers asked to see some ID. The men produced it. None were underage. Nonetheless, the two police officers asked the men to finish their drinks and disperse. That’s when the trouble started.
Exactly what touched off the brawl is unclear. One of the revelers, Jack Wilson, would later say that before he could comply with the officers’ request, he was put in a hammerlock and dragged outside. His friends followed. One accosted one of the officers; a melee broke out. Wilson’s friends would later claim that the scuffle began when they tried to prevent one of the officers from hitting a member of their party with his blackjack; the police insisted they were attacked when they asked one of the men to leave. Despite making free use of their blackjacks, the police officers got the worst of it. One officer got a black eye when one of the men got him into a headlock and punched him. The fight ended when a neighbor with a rifle broke things up. Meanwhile, someone inside the bar had called the police department for backup.
It was just after 2 a.m., Christmas morning.
From the perspective of law enforcement, assaults on police officers were unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances. So the police went back to look for the assailants. Most were picked up immediately and taken to Central Division for booking. Police kicked in the door of the last drinker involved in the brawl, Danny Rodela, at about 4 a.m. They dragged him out of bed, away from his screaming, pregnant wife, all the whil
e hitting him with a blackjack. Unfortunately, the men who were now in custody weren’t the only people who’d been out drinking. So had a great many police officers in the city of Los Angeles.
Christmas was a special holiday for the officers of the LAPD, particularly for those in Central Division. Christmas was tribute day. Dance hall operators, B-girl bar proprietors, and tavern keepers literally put bottles of whiskey out on the corner for their local patrolmen to pick up—an annual ritual of fealty that not even Chief Parker had been able to suppress. Not all of that booze went straight home. A fair amount made its way to an impromptu Christmas party at Central Division. More than a hundred officers were still there, drinking, when rumors started circulating that two officers had gotten roughed up while trying to arrest a group of Mexicans—and that one of the officers had lost an eye. By the time the prisoners were hauled in, an angry mob of officers—more than fifty strong—was ready to teach the prisoners a lesson in respect.
The prisoners were taken into an interrogation room and told to assume a spread-eagled position. Then they were kicked and beaten. The injuries the men suffered speak to the brutality of the police attack. One young man was worked over until his bladder burst. One of the victims was kicked so hard in his temples that his face was partially paralyzed. Another man’s cheekbone was smashed. Frenzied officers slipped and slid across the bloody floor, struggling to land a fist or foot on the prisoners. Some even fought with each other. Onlookers yelled “cop killer,” “get out of the country,” and “Merry Christmas” at the men their fellow officers were pummeling. Between fifteen and fifty officers took part in the attack. Another hundred officers were in the building and had direct knowledge of the assault. When the prisoners were taken to the Lincoln Heights Jail, they were assaulted again. The prisoners were then sent to the Lincoln Heights receiving hospital. Danny Rodela arrived later, when the rumors circulating among the police were even more fantastical. He was beaten so badly that one of his kidneys was punctured. If not for three emergency blood transfusions at the old French hospital, he might well have died. After being treated, the men were returned to jail. Later, on Christmas Day, they were finally bailed out.
No one breathed a word about what had happened. The entire incident might never have come to light but for the beating of Anthony Rios.
Two months after the Christmas beatings, Rios and a friend saw two men, who appeared to be drunk, beating a third man in the parking lot of a cafe at First and Soto Streets in East Los Angeles. Rios attempted to intervene. The two assailants identified themselves as plainclothes officers. Rios demanded their badge numbers—and was promptly threatened with death. Then Rios and his associate were arrested for interfering with police officers. After being booked at Hollenbeck station, Rios was badly beaten. But the LAPD had messed with the wrong Chicano. Rios was an influential member of the Latino community and a Democratic County Central Committee member. He promptly sued Chief Parker and the department for $150,000. (The case was eventually dismissed.) News of his arrest and mistreatment infuriated newly elected city councilman Edward Roybal, L.A.’s first Latino councilman. Nonetheless, prosecutors in the city attorney’s office insisted on prosecuting Rios. As Rios’s February 27 trial date approached, other stories about police brutality and misconduct vis-a-vis Latinos began to come to light.
Parker’s initial response to the Rios “incident” was ham-handed. First, he dismissed accusations of police brutality as “unwarranted.” He warned that unsubstantiated complaints of police brutality were “wrecking the police department.” He wouldn’t even meet with the department’s critics. When Councilman Roybal and a group of concerned citizens sought a meeting with Parker, he referred them to the Police Commission instead. It was in this explosive atmosphere that prosecutors announced plans to bring charges of “battery” and “disturbing the peace” against six of the seven men who had been beaten on Christmas morning by drunken police officers at Central Division station and the Lincoln Heights Jail.
The liberal Daily News and the Mirror, the Chandler-owned tabloid that competed with Hearst’s Herald-Express, started digging. They soon located the victims of the attack and presented their account of events of the evening. The jury impaneled to prosecute the case shared these newspapers’ skepticism about the official version of events. On March 12, it found only two of the six defendants guilty (on two counts of battery and one of disturbing the peace). From the bench, an irate Judge Joseph Call denounced “lawless law enforcement” and announced that “all the perfume in Arabia” would not be enough to “eliminate the stench” of police brutality. The officers involved in the beating, continued the judge, were in his estimation guilty of “assault, battery, assault with a deadly weapon, and five violations of the penal code.”
“The grand jury must end this sort of thing,” the judge concluded. “This should be the first order of business. And indictments should be rendered!”
Local Democrats unanimously passed a resolution condemning the “indifference of city officials… toward brutal police methods against citizens and minority groups.” They also demanded that state attorney general Edmund (Pat) Brown initiate an inquiry into “the person and office of Chief of Police William H. Parker, the Police Commission, and other responsible officials.” Stung, Chief Parker responded by announcing that he had “no objection” to a grand jury investigation. He also belatedly appointed a board of inquiry to investigate the allegations and review the report. This did little to appease his critics. On March 14, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that at the direction of the Justice Department it was opening an investigation into charges of police brutality against the department.
Belatedly, Parker recognized the magnitude of his problem. He abruptly changed tack. The chief now revealed that at the same time he had been publicly complaining of “unfair accusations,” privately, the Bureau of Internal Affairs had been conducting a top-secret, ultrathorough investigation of its own into the beatings. In an unprecedented concession, Parker then turned a 204-page report by Internal Affairs over to the city attorney.
But Parker’s story had some strange holes. When he was asked when the department’s internal investigation had begun, Parker claimed that Internal Affairs had launched a vigorous investigation on December 27. He neglected to mention that many of the officers involved had in fact refused to talk to Internal Affairs.
On March 18, the county grand jury began its own investigation into the incident. Its discoveries quickly found their way into the press.
“Boys Tell Police Beating,” cried the Citizen-News’s banner. “Jurors Told of Slugging on Christmas,” announced the lead article. “Wild Party by 100 Police Described, Youth Tells of Beating at Police Yule Party,” shouted the Examiner. Photos of bruised backs, blackened eyes, and smashed noses filled the papers. Jury foreman Raymond Thompson insisted (and DA Roll agreed) that officers who were suspects be summoned in for a lineup so the seven youths could identify their assailants. This was bitter medicine for Parker. The chief was further embarrassed when details of the initial Internal Affairs report leaked out. Its conclusion—“that none of the prisoners was physically abused in the manner alleged, if at all, while in city jail”—seemed hard to square with the photos of the men’s injuries or with injuries some police officers suffered that night.
Meanwhile, more reports of police brutality were surfacing. A complement of eighteen G-men had moved into the department, requesting access to files and questioning department officials about other allegations of abuse. Parker bitterly criticized the FBI’s investigation, intimating that it was an unwarranted Political vendetta orchestrated by local Democrats and the Truman administration. On March 25, Councilman Roybal announced that his office had received more than fifty complaints of police brutality (ranging from “mere slappings-around” to “hospitalization of the victims with internal injuries”) in the past three months alone and that he was convinced that many of these complaints had merit. Parker’s appearance be
fore the grand jury did little to quiet his critics. One source told the Daily News that the chief’s testimony was marked by “a tendency to make windy speeches in response to simple questions.”
Parker’s job was in danger. The Herald-Express quoted “well-informed politicians” saying that taking potshots at Parker had become the favorite Los Angeles sport—“They’re shooting at him.” The Mirror insisted that it was “time to get to the bottom of these ugly rumblings of sadism and abuse of authority” (although it also carefully hedged its bets by not entirely dismissing “the possibility that Communist Party liners are fomenting antipolice prejudice”). Other papers noted that the average tenure for an LAPD chief was two years—and that Parker had been in office for nineteen months.
It wasn’t just Parker’s job that was in danger. So too was the department’s ability to function autonomously. The first threat to the power and autonomy of the police chief had come just before Parker was made chief, during the scandalous summer of 1949, when the county grand jury took the logical step of examining how well the Police Commission oversaw the department. Its conclusion was that the Police Commission “is virtually nothing more than a licensing agency and cannot take action against officers.” Newspapers such as Hearst’s morning Examiner also took up the cry against “an autonomous, star-chamber court for the police” and a Police Commission that “has no power whatever in the internal affairs of the department.” In time, these demands faded, in part because Parker himself seemed like such a straight arrow. But with what the press now called “Bloody Christmas,” the old concerns returned.
