L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

12 The Double Agent

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”

—Jeremiah

WIRETAPPER JIMMY VAUS couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a cop or a crook—so he tried to be both. In doing so, he set off on a path that led directly to Mickey Cohen.

Vaus first started working for the LAPD almost by accident. In 1946, Vaus was managing a “quiet, high-class” apartment building in Hollywood for a friend while pursuing his true passion: tinkering with electronics. Tenants at the building had started complaining about a dark-haired, well-dressed girl named Marge, whose apartment was frequented by an unusually large number of “men-friends.” Marge was a B-girl downtown who made her living by tricking customers into buying her (watered-down) drinks. It seemed she was now also turning tricks on the side. So Vaus called the LAPD’s Hollywood station, which promptly sent over a young vice squad officer, Charles Stoker.

Vaus explained the problem of Marge and her many “friends” to Stoker and his partner. Stoker knew the type. “Anyone visiting her now?” he asked.

Indeed there was. Vaus gave the officers her apartment number and retreated to his office. A half hour later, Stoker reappeared.

“There’s someone in there with her, all right,” he reported. “We could hear them talking but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. We think we might hear better from outside. Do you have a ladder we could use?”

He did. Ladder supplied, Vaus returned to his office. A few minutes later, the officers were back again.

“I’m afraid we’re stymied, Mr. Vaus,” Stoker informed him. “There doesn’t seem to be any way we can either see or hear what’s going on, and in absence of evidence, we can’t act.”

Vaus was incredulous. “You mean, the vice squad doesn’t have equipment that will enable you, in a case like this, to hear what is going on behind closed doors?” he asked.

“Nope, there’s nothing like that in the Department,” Stoker replied, “in a tone of voice,” Vaus would later recall, “that implied I’d asked him if he’d bought the license plates for his transplanet rocket ship.”

Vaus explained that it would be a simple matter to get officers the proof they needed. All he had to do was plant a concealed microphone in the room and connect it by wire to a recording device outside. Indeed, Vaus modestly continued, he’d be happy to put together such a system himself to help the officers obtain the evidence they needed against Marge.

“Come back tomorrow night, I’ll have it set up and you can listen in,” Vaus said.

Wiring Marge’s room was a snap. When Stoker returned the following night, he was able to overhear Marge discussing prices with a customer. He promptly arrested her. Word of Sergeant Stoker’s new friend soon spread to other vice squad units.^[11] About a week after the arrest of Marge, one of the senior officers from the administrative vice unit downtown approached Vaus with a question. Could he develop a variant on a wiretap that would allow the police to listen in on conversations and also determine what telephone number had been dialed? In other words, the officer explained, “Joe Doaks walks into a drugstore, uses a particular telephone to dial a number and says, ‘Joe, I’ll take two dollars on horse number four in the fifth race today at Rockingham.’ Could the officer working on such a case hear the conversation and know the number that had been dialed?”

The implications of the request were obvious. If the police could tap phone lines and determine whom calls were being made to, they could then pinpoint the locations of bookmakers across Los Angeles. That would give the police a big edge on the underworld.

“I think it can be done,” Vaus replied. In fact, he’d already been working on just such a device, which Vaus dubbed “the impulse indicator.” But it was Officer Stoker who got to it first. His target was not the bookmaking racket but rather the so-called Queen Bee of Hollywood, Hollywood madam Brenda Allen.

PROSTITUTION IN HOLLYWOOD has always been a dynastic affair. Brenda Allen had started out as a streetwalker on West Sixth Street between Union and Alvarado Streets. At some point, Allen caught the eye of Anne Forrester, the Combination’s favorite madam. Allen was a quick understudy, and when Forrester went to jail, Allen took over the high-end prostitution racket. Her particular field of innovation was the call girl. Rather than risk running a “bawdy house,” Allen used a telephone exchange service to manage her 114 girls. It was a lucrative business. Allen’s meticulous ledgers would later reveal takes of as much as $2,400 a day, of which half, the traditional split between madam and girl, went to her.

Charles Stoker had first heard of Brenda Allen when she was a plain streetwalker named Marie Mitchell plying her business downtown. He’d been startled when he returned from the war and learned that she’d become the town’s top madam. The brazenness—and cleverness—of her current arrangements aggravated him, and caused him no end of trouble. Whenever he’d arrest another prostitute, she’d complain bitterly, “Why are you arresting me while Brenda is running full-blast?”

Stoker decided he would try to take down Allen. But even finding her was a challenge. The number of the telephone exchange Brenda used was well known. Obviously, the exchange had Allen’s private number. If he could get it, he could go to the phone company and get an address. But when Stoker approached the telephone exchange service and asked for Allen’s number, it told him to produce a court order. So he went to the DA’s office, where he was “politely but firmly given the brush off.”

Stoker got the number anyway, by waiting outside the telephone exchange office and striking up an acquaintance with one of its female operators. After a week of dating, he had Allen’s private number. A contact at the phone company provided a home address. But even though he now knew where Allen lived, he still couldn’t prove she was orchestrating a call girl ring—until Jimmy Vaus appeared.

During his pursuit of Marge, Stoker had talked quite a bit with Vaus. He’d learned about Vaus’s background as a sound engineer and his Army service. He’d heard about Jimmy’s preacher daddy back in Oklahoma and about the religious radio program Vaus was hoping to launch in L.A. He’d also seen Vaus’s enthusiasm for uncovering vice—and his unusual talents. So when Vaus dropped by Central Division one night and asked if he could go out with Stoker and his partner, it seemed natural to stop by Brenda Allen’s spacious apartment at Ninth and Fedora Streets. There Stoker explained the problem he was having in trying to apprehend her. Stoker was delighted when Vaus responded that listening in on Allen’s phone conversations was no problem at all. In fact, they could do so the very next night.

The following evening, Stoker, his two partners, and Vaus went back to Allen’s apartment, this time with the appropriate wiretapping gear. One of the policemen picked the locks and then the men were in. No one had thought to bring a flashlight, so Vaus lit a match. The fact that they had illegally broken into a private residence without a court order and were now about to tap a phone line—a felony offense—seemed not to trouble the men at all. They located the telephone box, found the pair of terminals that connected to Allen’s apartment, and tapped the line. Vaus had brought a lineman’s handset so that they could listen in.

They didn’t have to wait long for the first call. It was a woman’s voice.

“Hi, Brenda, this is Marie. If anything breaks tonight call me and I’ll go on it.”

“Okay,” Allen answered coolly. “What’ll you be wearing?”

“I’ll have on a full-length mink coat,” the woman replied. “I’ll be waiting for your call. Bye.”

A few minutes later, a man called. “Got anything good tonight?”

“We’ve got some mighty nice books,” Allen answered. “The heroine in one you’d like to read is a beaut! She has long black hair and is about five foot three and would make your reading most—enjoyable.”

“Where can I get that book?” the man asked.

“On the corner of Sunset and La Brea. There is a picture on the front cover of a gal in a long mink coat. How about being there about nine o’clock?”

Stoker was thrilled. He now understood Brenda Allen’s modus operandi. As calls poured in throughout the night, he also began to understand the size of her business. In fact, Allen was getting so many phone calls that the policemen in the basement were overwhelmed. Some system of recording the numbers Brenda was calling was needed. So Stocker turned to Vaus. Could he come up with something?

He could. The next night, Vaus returned with his “impulse indicator.” Within three hours, Sergeant Stoker and his partners had the numbers of twenty-nine johns.

They returned the following night, to listen in… and collect more phone numbers. Then something odd happened. Allen dialed a number that struck Stoker as vaguely familiar. Suddenly it hit him. Allen had just dialed the confidential number of the administrative vice squad downtown. Incredulous, Stoker listened as Allen left a message for a Sergeant Jackson. A few minutes later, Sergeant Jackson called Allen back.

“Honey, I just came into the office and got your message. How’s business?” Jackson asked. He then proceeded to discuss how he planned to slip away from his wife the following day to see Allen. A few minutes later, Allen called another man, to whom she complained bitterly about having to see Jackson.

When Stoker got back to the station, he discovered that “Sergeant Jack son” was Sgt. Elmer Jackson, right-hand man to administrative vice squad head Lt. Rudy Wellpott. From what Stoker had overheard, it sounded like Allen had ensnared Jackson on orders from some unnamed third party, who was probably attempting to manipulate Jackson for some sinister purpose. The next day Stoker called Jackson and told him what he’d overheard. Jackson seemed startled. He assured Stoker that he’d have nothing more to do with Brenda Allen.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Vaus was getting nervous. Wiretapping night after night was risky. Crowded into the basement with Stoker and his partners, Vaus thought they “sounded like a firemen’s brigade.” To minimize the danger of detection, Vaus ran a line from the apartment house down the street to Stoker’s car, where they could listen in. But the night after Stoker’s conversation with Jackson, the new system didn’t seem to be working. There were no calls coming in. As Vaus fiddled with his equipment, he felt a hand grab his arm. He looked up—straight into the face of Brenda Allen. Allen had followed the wire to the police listening post.

Allen unleashed a stream of invective at the policemen. Then she coolly informed Stoker that he was “biting off more than he could chew.” Soon thereafter, Stoker was transferred to Newton Division, where he was assigned to work narcotics. Allen’s display of power disgusted him; nonetheless, Stoker resolved to have nothing more to do with vice. Instead, he concentrated on studying for the upcoming sergeants’ exam, which he aced. In early 1948, he made sergeant—and, to his surprise, was transferred back to the Central Division vice squad. Once again, he was loaned out to Hollywood Division. There he learned that Brenda Allen had opened a brothel—just across the city line, off the Sunset Strip.

Stoker had no intention of letting a jurisdictional inconvenience stop him from making a good arrest. Where the city ended and the county began was famously confusing along the Strip. He decided to go ahead with the raid—and then plead ignorance if he got into trouble. But first, Stoker needed proof about what was happening in Allen’s new establishment. Stoker called a friend, a sporty young executive at “a big Los Angeles firm,” and asked him if he’d like to patronize Hollywood’s most glamorous call house—on urgent city business. The young executive graciously agreed to help out. After calling Allen’s exchange, receiving a call back, and answering her questions, he was invited over. Four beautiful girls were produced for his selection. At the end of the evening, the executive announced his intention to become a regular. He also asked Allen if he could bring some friends from the office on his next visit. The two “friends” Stoker had in mind were rookie officers at Hollywood vice.

But now that the raid was ready, Stoker’s commanding officer hesitated. He told Stoker that he needed to offer the sheriff’s vice squad the chance to make the raid first. When Stoker called on Capt. Carl Pearson, county vice squad commander, Pearson paused, as if he was uncertain about how to react to the news of Stoker’s imminent raid. Then he suggested that Stoker talk to Chief of Police Horrall’s confidential aide on vice matters, Sgt. Guy Rudolph. A meeting was arranged at the offices of private investigator Barney Ruditsky. There Stoker was surprised to encounter an old friend, Jimmy Vaus.

Vaus had recently stopped working for Stoker, explaining that he was too busy starting his new electronics business. But it now emerged that he’d set up a wiretapping substation at Ruditsky’s offices—for Sergeant Rudolph. Rudolph told Stoker that Allen was under surveillance and that it was only a matter of time until arrests were made. Stoker agreed to delay his raid. He thought no more about Vaus’s presence at this meeting. Nor did Sgt. Rudolph look into Vaus’s background. It was a fateful mistake. Had the police bothered to investigate Vaus’s past, they would have discovered that the pudgy, eager-to-please minister’s son with the cherubic face was also a petty criminal, a thief, and a hustler. In short, he was just the sort who might be willing to sell what he knew about the Brenda Allen-administrative vice squad connection to someone else who might be interested in it—someone like Mickey Cohen.

“THE HEART is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” said the prophet Jeremiah. “Who can know it?”

Certainly not Jimmy Vaus. Parts of his story were true: He was a preacher’s son, and he did enjoy being with lawmen. Unfortunately, the self-taught electronics wizard also couldn’t seem to stay clear of the law. In the years leading up to World War II, Vaus had been convicted of robbing a man in Beverly Hills—of $14. He had also been arrested for impersonating a police officer. He ran into similar difficulties during the war. Indeed, only his proficiency with a new technology called radar prevented him from being dishonorably discharged for misusing Army funds.

Two facts about Vaus’s character eluded his LAPD interlocutors. The first was his avarice. The second was his growing sense of resentment. Vaus had developed marvelous eavesdropping tools for the police: a fake cane that, when pressed against a door, could detect what was said on the other side; a telescoping rod that could attach a tiny mike to a hotel room window several stories up; a remote wiretapping device that allowed police to monitor conversations from several miles away. However, he hadn’t made any money from these endeavors. At first, the excitement and gratitude shown by the police (plus, no doubt, the thrill of playing policeman) was enough. Vaus was even flown to Washington, D.C., to teach a class on eavesdropping at the FBI. But after a while, Vaus began to feel aggrieved by the lack of payments. As he later put it, “The thrill of the chase was marred by the penny-pinching of the officials.”

Not that Vaus reserved his electronic talents exclusively for the LAPD. He also worked closely with Barney Ruditsky on sensitive assignments for clients such as Errol Flynn (who had a problem with underage girls). So when Harry Grossman in Ruditsky’s office called Vaus in late 1948 and told him “there’s a fellow I want you to meet” with a business proposition, Vaus was naturally curious.

“Who is it?” he asked

“Mickey Cohen,” Grossman replied.

“Mickey Cohen!”

Even then it was a name Vaus knew. His first thought was one of pleasure that someone so important would want to see him.

“Where am I supposed to meet him?” asked Vaus.

“In his haberdashery around the corner from our office.”

“Tell him I’ll drop over.”

Vaus quickly had second thoughts. What if the meeting with Mickey was some kind of trap? Or worse still, what if Vaus’s work for the police department had infringed on one of Mickey’s enterprises and Mickey knew about it?

VAUS HAD NEVER BEEN in Michael’s Haberdashery before. Stepping in, he was dazzled. “The walls were of highly polished walnut and most of the merchandise was behind sliding doors,” wrote Vaus soon after the initial meeting. “Only a few ties, with a silk sheen, lay on the counter. A luxurious robe on a model and a pile of finely woven shirts indicated the garments for sale—at fabulous prices.”

A clerk, “tailored to the nth degree,” was watching Vaus closely, pencil-thin eyebrow raised. Vaus felt intensely conscious of “my not-too-fat wallet.”

“I’m Jimmy Vaus,” he said.

A quick phone call later, and Vaus was being escorted into the rear of the store, to Mickey Cohen’s private office.

A steel-plated door separated Cohen’s office from the haberdashery. Once again, Vaus was struck by “the lavish, expensive fittings.”

“There was a beautiful television set in one corner suspended from the ceiling,” Vaus later recalled. “The lighting was indirect. Toward the back was a circular desk.” There, beneath a huge picture of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a large swivel chair, sat Mickey Cohen.

Vaus was impressed: “He was short, stocky and solidly built. His tailoring was exquisite and his grooming impeccable. Not a hair was out of place. His eyes flashed, sizing one up, and then shifted to something else.”

Eyeing Vaus coldly, the great man finally spoke.

“Vaus, I understand that you’re the man who planted a microphone in my home for the police department. Is that right?”

It was with great relief that Vaus denied this allegation. “I don’t even know where you live!” he responded.

“If there were a microphone in my home, do you think you could locate it and take it out for me?” Mickey asked, sounding slightly less severe.

“Mr. Cohen, you’ve got me all wrong,” Vaus responded. “I’m in the business of putting them in, not of taking them out.”

Mickey again fixed a cold gaze on him. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a “reel-sized roll” of hundred-dollar bills—the biggest wad Jimmy Vaus had ever seen. In a slow, deliberate motion, Cohen peeled off one C-note, then a second, then a third. Visions of hand-painted ties, tailored suits, and “chromium accessories for my car” floated through Vaus’s mind. Before he knew it, he was on his way to the Cohen abode, accompanied by Cohen lieutenant Neddie Herbert.

When he entered the house, Vaus had to pause to catch his breath. The contrast between the lifestyles of the gangster and the policeman left him dumbstruck:

No cop had a home this luxurious. It had obviously been decorated by a professional—only they would be this bold in their color combinations. Lemon-yellow, shades of mauve and bold tones of blue harmonized with the gleaming woodwork and indirect lighting.

Confronted with such opulence, Vaus’s moral faculties, which were clearly weak to begin with, failed him entirely. “It would have been very hard to persuade a man that it was wrong to have the money sufficient to buy these creature comforts,” Vaus concluded. He rushed back to his workshop and spent the night feverishly tinkering with an ultrasensitive pickup coil and a high-gain amplifier that he hoped would be capable of detecting the tiny electromagnetic current of a small bug. The following day Vaus returned to the Cohen abode on Moreno Avenue. After carefully sweeping the house, he detected a small electrical current. A carpenter was called in to cut a hole in the floor. Vaus lowered himself into the space under the house and soon found a microphone and amplifier connected to a wire. He disconnected it with a sickening feeling, for he knew that as he did so someone at the listening end was hearing their bug go dead—and that that person was a cop. Instead, he thought about what he’d buy with Mickey’s money.

Neddie Herbert was delighted with Vaus’s work. He asked him to stay so he could show Mickey the bug. Two hours later, when Cohen appeared, Vaus explained where and how he’d found the listening device. Mickey pulled out the roll again and peeled off a few more C-notes—a bonus for his good work. Then he offered Vaus a job.

It was a delicate moment.

Even the covetous wiretapper understood that working for both the LAPD and the city’s top organized-crime boss would be a dicey proposition. But when Cohen explained what he had in mind—no lawbreaking, just consulting work—Vaus decided that working for the police and for the city’s leading gangster need not be mutually exclusive. After all, was removing a bug placed illegally in Mickey Cohen’s house really worse than nabbing some poor john by helping the vice squad mike his hotel room? Or breaking into a basement to plant an illegal bug? So he took the job—and took on a double life.

For eight months, Vaus pulled it off. Indeed, he thrived. With Mickey’s backing, Vaus opened an electronics shop in the same Sunset Strip complex that housed Cohen’s haberdashery and Cohen henchman “Happy” Meltzer’s jewelry shop. Of course, it didn’t last. By early 1949, Mickey had become fed up with what he saw as efforts by the vice squad to extort money from him. When police arrested “Happy” Meltzer, Cohen decided to hit back. His tool was Jimmy Vaus.

Vaus had told Cohen about the wiretaps he had done for Sergeant Stoker and about the conversations he’d overheard between Sergeant Jackson and Brenda Allen. Now he offered to help Mickey secure recordings he could use against the police. Vaus’s idea was that Cohen should arrange a meeting with Lieutenant Wellpot and Sergeant Jackson at which he, Vaus, would record their extortion attempt. Mickey agreed at once. Soon after Meltzer’s arrest, he contacted Jackson and Wellpott and asked to meet the two officers in his car, just off the 9000 block of Sunset. Jackson and Wellpot arrived in good spirits, presumably because they expected Mickey to agree to a payoff. They left angry when he didn’t. Mickey, however, was delighted. Thanks to Vaus’s efforts, Cohen now had clear evidence that the LAPD was trying to blackmail him—or so he believed. Now Mickey decided to put this evidence before the public—by bringing Vaus and his incriminating tapes to light at Meltzer’s trial, which was set to commence on May 5, 1949.

Chief Horrall’s boys had pushed Mickey Cohen too far, and now they would pay.

MICKEY COHEN wasn’t the only person stalking Chief Horrall and the corrupt clique around him. So was Bill Parker.

In August 1947, Parker finally made inspector and was moved first to Hollywood Division and then to the San Fernando Valley bureau—far removed from the power centers in the department. But Bill Parker wasn’t entirely contained. As one of the few lawyers in the department and as the architect of Section 202, Parker was a natural choice to serve as the prosecutor for the personnel bureau in trial board hearings. It was a position that gave Parker access to some of the most sensitive information in the department. He soon ran across the name of a certain sergeant—Charlie Stoker. Stoker (along with several members of Hollywood vice) had been involved in an altercation at the Gali-Gali cocktail lounge in Hollywood. A few months later, Stoker received a call from Parker, who wanted to meet with him. Stoker knew the inspector only by reputation—“a highly ambitious man,” thought Stoker. Stoker, who was Catholic, also knew that Parker was known for looking out for Catholics on the force. So he agreed. But when the two men met, it wasn’t the Gali-Gali cocktail lounge Parker wanted to discuss. It was the Hollywood vice squad.

Stoker allowed as to how he’d seen some questionable behavior.

Parker wasn’t surprised. The entire unit was riddled with corruption, he told Stoker. He then proceeded to run down a list of specific instances of drunkenness, brutality, and extortion. Parker further informed Stoker that he intended to do everything he could to see that the current squad was dismissed. If Stoker was willing to testify to malfeasance on the squad, Parker allegedly promised he would see to it that Stoker headed the next Hollywood vice squad.

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?^[12] 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 come up from Camp Pendleton to discuss serving as the emergency chief of police for Los Angeles.

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.

“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?’”

That Bill Parker was almost certainly thinking precisely that bothered General Worton not at all. On July 15, Angelenos woke up to the news that General Worton had moved Inspector Parker to a newly created position in his office. His duties, General Worton told the Los Angeles Times (“in cryptic Marine general style”) would be “anything I want him to do.” In fact, the meaning of Worton’s move was obvious: Asst. Chief Joe Reed was being eased out. Worton’s bland denials—when pressed by reporters, he simply observed that Reed had a civil service position and that the only way to vacate it was for him to resign or be removed on charges (of the sort that the county grand jury was then preparing)—only confirmed his intent. The smart money had Parker pegged as Worton’s new number two. But roughly a week after Worton announced that he was bringing Parker into his office, the interim chief announced that he wanted Parker to head an entirely new bureau, Internal Affairs.

FOR DECADES, vice and its attendant, corruption, had been ineradicable parasites on the body of the LAPD. The cycle of scandal, reform, and then scandal again had driven city politics for decades. Reform-minded police chiefs had tried everything to eradicate it, putting administrative vice under the chief’s tight control; disbanding administrative vice; ignoring vice; suppressing it. Internal Affairs represented something new: an entire bureau focused solely on investigating misconduct and corruption within the LAPD. Worton emphasized its importance by moving Deputy Chief Richard Simon, who headed the patrol bureau, out of City Hall and moving Parker and Internal Affairs in.

It was the perfect position for Bill Parker, for a number of reasons. First, it gave him more authority to pursue and root out corruption than he’d ever had before (vastly more authority than he had enjoyed as lead prosecutor for the department trial board). Second, it allowed him to pursue his long-cherished goal of shoring up police autonomy. By demonstrating that the department was capable of policing itself, Parker hoped to defang the small but vocal group of activists and critics who had begun to call for a board of civilians to review complaints against the department. Finally, the position gave Parker access to information—to the department’s deepest secrets, both real and imagined. A new element mingled with feelings of respect—fear. Fear about what Parker was learning—and about how he might use it.

General Worton and his new team moved quickly. Under his predecessor, Chief Horrall, lines of command had grown murky. Worton clarified them, creating an organizational chart where authority and responsibility for every major function were clearly assigned. He doubled the training period for cadets at the police academy to ninety days, established a new corrections division, and ended the practice of automatically assigning all rookie officers to either the Lincoln Heights jail or traffic duty downtown, both of which tended to sour new officers on police work. The two gangster squads he inherited (each with roughly a dozen men) were combined into a single intelligence squad and instructed to work closely with the FBI and the San Francisco Police Department on antimob activities. Worton also divided the detective bureau between two inspectors, diminishing the power of that fiefdom, and placed the vice, robbery, and homicide squads under Deputy Chief Hohmann. Vice squad officers across the city were dispersed to other units. (Leaving officers in vice for years on end was, Worton thought, an invitation to corruption.) So were hundreds of other officers. The practice of accepting gifts of any sort was banned, at least in theory. The position of assistant chief was abolished too. The chief of police would no longer be able to pass responsibility for running the department to someone else.

General Worton was also keenly interested in departmental morale. Closer acquaintance with the LAPD had convinced Worton that, contrary to public perception, LAPD officers were generally dedicated and honest. But the Brenda Allen scandal had badly dented the department’s self-confidence. “They didn’t have the esprit of a good combat unit,” Worton would later tell a reporter. So he set out to instill it, using the Corps’s tried-and-true methods. The police academy became even more like Quantico. “Military bearing” became a prime objective for all LAPD officers. Worton also instituted aggressive inspections, with an emphasis on spit and polish. He often conducted them himself. Where his predecessor, Chief Horrall, had seemed content to leave departmental matters to others, General Worton was everywhere.

“He would be out prowling at night, and some guy would stop somebody to write a ticket, and this big, black car would pull up behind him, and when the officer was finished this little guy would come walking over and say, ‘Hi. I’m the chief,’” recalls Bob Rock (a future acting chief). He quickly became a popular figure with his men. “He made a really diligent effort to relate to the people, to the department,” says Rock.

Worton’s personal style—and his efforts to instill military pride in the department—proved popular, particularly with the department’s new officers, most of whom had served in the military during the war. Initially, Worton had worried about moving too quickly in this direction. However, in short order, average patrolmen were snapping to attention and saluting sharply when he appeared (even though he never formally instituted salutes).

PARKER MOVED decisively too, quickly forcing the resignation of an officer who’d been involved in a controversial shooting earlier in the year. It was an accomplishment that attracted considerable good publicity—and not the only one. One of Parker’s duties for former chief James Davis had been to handle the press, and he knew how to keep his name in the headlines. On August 28, Parker presided over a huge Fire and Police dinner, lavishing praise on guest-of-honor Mayor Bowron (for seven years of regular pay raises). The following month, at a meeting of the California American Legion’s three hundred top officials, Parker received a well-publicized assignment to promote “Americanism” after the convention listened to an up-and-coming Republican congressman from Whittier—Richard Nixon—warn of the dangers of a Communist insurrection. Integral to the success of this campaign, from Parker’s perspective, was the removal of the cancer of organized crime, which cultivated base appetites and weakened the country when it needed to be preparing for the coming struggle with Soviet Russia. That meant dealing with the likes of Mickey Cohen.

The problems posed by Mickey were manifold. First, there was the criminal activity he was involved in. In the fall of 1949, as the county grand jury was attempting to sort out the welter of charges and countercharges between Mickey and the LAPD, another embarrassing case was headed to court, this one involving a bookmaking front company called the Guarantee Finance Corporation.

Located in unincorporated county territory, Guarantee Finance was perhaps the most audacious bookmaking operation in 1940s Los Angeles. With 74 telephones in its central gambling room, Guarantee Finance employed more than 170 runners and handled gambling in excess of $7,000,000 a year. (It was also happy to arrange high-interest loans for clients with gambling debts.) The LAPD administrative vice squad identified the operation almost immediately but found that the sheriff’s vice squad was strangely uninterested in shutting it down. Frustrated, Sgt. James Fisk took matters into his own hands and raided the establishment, destroying equipment and removing betting markers. A few months later, with the operation still running, Fisk carried out a second raid. This prompted sheriff department captain Al Guasti (“Iron Man” Contreras’s successor as the supervisor of the Sunset Strip) to write then-Assistant Chief of Police Joe Reed a stern letter, warning the LAPD to keep its nose out of county business. Finally, in early 1949, the state corporation commission raided the bookmaking operation and shut its operations down. The wholesale gambling operation the state raid revealed was yet another embarrassing testament to the reach of the underworld into Los Angeles.

The second thing that made Mickey seriously inconvenient was the fact that someone kept trying to kill him—in a sloppy and inept fashion. On August 2, a pipe bomb intended for Mickey exploded across the street from Cohen’s Brentwood house, upsetting the neighbors and, by extension, their elected representatives. It would not do to have a resident of Brentwood die in the cross fire of a gang war. Worton decided to go after Mickey with everything he had. His first step was to sic the new intelligence squad on Cohen.

On August 3, officers searched the apartment of Cohen associate Mike Howard (Meyer Horowitz) after getting a tip that he might be dealing drugs. They didn’t find any narcotics, but they did discover two unlicensed pistols. So they hauled in Howard and sent two LAPD detectives and a federal Bureau of Narcotics agent over to Cohen’s house to question him about the incident.

Mickey was not happy to find police officers at his door.

“What the hell do you want?” he snarled. When he found out what they’d come to ask him about—some gun charge involving an associate—he lost it. Didn’t they realize that he had guests (among them Earl Brown, Life’s crack crime writer, and Al Ostro of the San Francisco Daily News) and that it was dinnertime? He asked if the police had a warrant. They didn’t.

“Well then go fuck yourself,” Mickey told them. “And tell the chief to go fuck himself.” Then, for good measure, he added, “Get the hell off my property, you sons of bitches.”

The officers retreated. But two weeks later, in a clear indication that the police were playing by new rules, they returned and arrested him for using obscene and insulting language against a police officer. Mickey got out on bail, and a trial date was set for September 15, 1949.

The press was delighted. Mickey’s journalist guests testified that Mickey had indeed questioned the legitimacy of the law officers’ births. Cohen’s situation looked dire, but his attorneys had a trick up their sleeves. To back his assertion that calling someone a “son of a bitch” wasn’t obscene, Rummel pointed to none other than President Harry Truman, who had recently called columnist Drew Pearson the exact same thing. The courtroom laughed, the jurors retired to deliberate, and four hours later Mickey Cohen once again walked out a free man.

Within weeks, his name was back in the papers, this time in connection with one of the biggest trials in recent Hollywood history, the trial of actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum had been busted by the sheriff’s department vice squad with a joint of marijuana at a party in the Hollywood Hills, in a raid whose timing was so fortuitous as to be suspicious. Nonetheless, he was convicted and shipped off to prison for a brief stint behind bars (accompanied by a photographer from Life magazine). Now Paul Behrmann, a former business manager and actors’ agent who had once represented Mitchum (but who had since gotten into troubles of his own with the law) came forward with a startling tale. Behrmann told DA William Simpson that Cohen was running a sex-and-extortion ring that specialized in capturing big-time businessmen and actors in compromising situations. Cohen’s stable of accomplices supposedly included a party girl named “Bootsie” and the twenty-four-year-old redheaded assistant to “French lover teacher” Claude Marsan. The suggestion was made that Mitchum, too, had been set up by Cohen.

With Mickey on the loose, every day seemed to bring a new humiliation for Los Angeles area law enforcement. But the LAPD was also squeezing Cohen. Mickey had demonstrated his clout by sparking the scandal that led to Chief Horrall’s ouster, but in General Worton, Cohen had arguably found a cure that was worse than the disease. It wasn’t that Cohen felt fundamentally threatened by Worton; Mickey was convinced that the general “knew little or nothing of the workings of this office.” However, since Chief Horrall’s forced retirement, the LAPD had gone all out to make Mickey’s life miserable. Constant surveillance made it difficult for Mickey to do business. A grand jury had begun to investigate Cohen’s (protected) gambling operations in Glendale. There were reports that the FBI had also begun an investigation. But the worst blow of all had come from a small outfit convened at Gov. Earl Warren’s behest the previous summer, the Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime. Although the state legislature had been careful to make the commission as toothless as possible (for example, denying its four investigators subpoena power), the commission had an asset whose tenacity could not be easily blunted—chief counsel Warren Olney III.

OLNEY CAME from one of California’s most distinguished families. His grandfather was one of the founders of the Sierra Club; his father had been a justice on the California Supreme Court. Olney himself was one of Governor Warren’s closest and most valued associates. He was also something of an authority on interstate gambling and the racing wire. As the head of the California attorney general’s criminal division in the late 1930s (when Warren had been the state attorney general), Olney had begun to investigate bookmaking in California, with a particular focus on Moses Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service. At first, Olney had struggled to figure out what was so important about the wire service. But after three days at Reno’s Bank Club, it came to him. The tout sheets, the hot tips, the fluctuating pari-mutuel prices, the odds at the gate, the conditions of the track—all of that was really just a distraction. Bookies needed the wire so that they could quickly roll $2 bets from one race into $2 bets on the next race. Most gamblers weren’t reading the Daily Racing Form, looking for an inside edge. They were betting on race after race just like gambling junkies played slots.

“Bookmaking has nothing to do with horse races,” Olney concluded. “It’s a strict lottery—nothing more than that.” The wire delivered the information that made it possible to place bet after bet, hour after hour.

This system was generating immense amounts of money for Mickey Cohen. According to LAPD estimates, in mid-1949, Mickey had about five hundred bookmakers paying for protection (typically, $40 per week for every telephone in their operation plus $5 a week per agent). Even if the average bookie had only two telephones, this would have generated more than $160,000 a month. In exchange for such princely sums, Mickey provided attorneys and bail money for bookmakers unfortunate enough to be arrested. This service was famously speedy. In one notorious case, vice squad officers arrested a bookmaker at 3:05 p.m. only to be presented twenty-six minutes later with a bail bond and a writ of habeas corpus, signed by a judge and duly executed, ordering them to release the arrested bookie. Cohen also provided insurance against clients who engaged in “past posting”—placing bets after the race was over—in the form of a menacing visit to bettors who tried to cheat. After these visits, bettors rarely persisted in their claims.

Olney realized that there was a simple way to end it all: cut the wire. An investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission revealed that all the bookmakers in California were supplied over a single telegraphic wire leased from Western Union by the Continental Press service.^[13] Continental then telegraphed information on odds, post times, track conditions, and results to “drops” across the nation. The Special Crime Study Commission identified eight in Southern California—front companies with unclear ownership structures and bland names such as Consolidated Publish Inc. and Southwest News. The system was fast but also vulnerable. Olney’s investigators discovered that Western Union’s contract with Continental gave state law enforcement authorities the power to request that the wire be terminated if they suspected it was being used, directly or indirectly, in violation of California law. Clearly, Continental’s services were being used to violate California law, but when Olney directed the state attorney general’s office to that provision, it did nothing. Finally, after months of pressure from Olney and his commission, Attorney General Howser ended his foot-dragging and presented Western Union with such a request. Western Union disconnected the wire, throwing bookmaking in California into chaos.

The halt was temporary. A mysterious new entity, the Illinois News Association, soon appeared with a request to provide a new telegraphic wire service. When the public utilities commission declined to authorize it, the “news association” sued in federal court—and lost. Undeterred, the news association appealed and sought a temporary resumption of wire service, pending the outcome of its appeal request. Attorney General Howser, ever solicitous of the underworld, declined to provide attorneys to defend the public utilities commission’s action. Despite lacking counsel, the state utilities commission again prevailed.

The interruption of the wire service had a dramatic impact on gambling in Los Angeles. Without the wire, the ability to roll money quickly from one race into the next was greatly diminished. The most profitable gambling establishments, the so-called horse parlors, where bettors came into a room and placed cash bets directly, one race after the other, disappeared almost overnight. Instead, bettors were directed to call “runners,” who took bets over the phone (customers were given an unlisted number and a code word) and then relayed them back to a central office, where bookies collected information via long-distance telephone calls. Volume diminished, and, as the time required to receive results increased from a few minutes to half an hour or longer, the risk of “past posting” increased. The single most lucrative source of Syndicate revenues in the Southland was being squeezed.

Mickey Cohen felt the pinch. But the impact of the wire shutoff wasn’t limited to his pocketbook. The wire service was not just a source of vast profits for the Syndicate: Because every serious bookie needed it, the wire was also a tool for licensing and organizing gambling in every big city across the country. “[T]he inevitable result [of its termination],” predicted Olney, “will be the disorganization of bookmaking and the eradication of the organization upon which the Capone Syndicate could and would have based its organizat ion of the California underworld.” Cohen understood the threat. But he was preoccupied with a more pressing problem: the people who kept trying to kill him.

Mickey accepted the fact that his chosen profession entailed risks. That local crazies like Maxie Shaman would occasionally come at him was no surprise. What was a surprise was that professional hit men would repeatedly try to kill him. Bugsy Siegel had died because he’d angered virtually every other top figure in the Syndicate. Mickey hadn’t. On the contrary, he’d gotten the nod to take over Bugsy’s book. Manhattan mobster Frank Costello, the most influential Mob boss in the country, backed him. So did the Cleveland outfit, a far larger presence in Los Angeles than is commonly realized. A rogue hit of the sort attempted at Sherry’s—one that endangered civilians and nearly killed a policeman—seemed like something no professional criminal would do.

But not only had someone made the attempt, they were continuing to do so. And if they couldn’t touch Mickey directly, they were prepared to do the next best thing. They would target the members of his gang. Ironically, it was Cohen’s sense of street justice (and his instinct for good PR) that made him vulnerable.

THE TROUBLE STARTED when William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner splashed across its front page the sad story of a widow who had refused to pay a $9 radio repair bill she regarded as excessive. The radio repairman in question, Al Pearson, responded by initiating a lawsuit that led to the eventual fire sale of the widow’s home, which he then purchased for $26.50. He allowed her to stay on as a tenant paying $10 a week in rent. Outraged policemen at nearby Wilshire station took up a collection.

Pearson’s business practices had long attracted unfavorable attention: Police Commission chief investigator Harry Lorenson would later describe him as “the most dishonest businessman in the entire city.” When Cohen heard about the incident, he saw an opportunity to burnish his image. He and seven of his boys went over to West Adams to talk with Pearson about returning the widow’s house. When Pearson refused to yield to reason, Mickey’s cohorts gave the recalcitrant radio repairman a severe beating, cracking his skull and fracturing his right arm—before a large crowd of cheering neighbors.

As Cohen was leaving the scene to get into his car, one of his henchmen, a three-hundred-pound former prizefighter named Jimmy Rist, rushed up.

“Hey, the guy’s got a thing back there that listens to things!” he informed Mickey. “He’s got everything on it that went on.”

“Well, take that son of a bitch machine out of there,” Cohen snapped, before jumping into his Cadillac and heading back to his office. Rist hurried back to Pearson’s shop to carry out Mickey’s orders. What Rist didn’t know was that a neighborhood photobug had been shooting pictures of the entire episode from across the street.

Rist and his associates managed to grab the recorder. But in their haste to get away, Mickey’s men made an illegal U-turn. Two rookie patrol officers spotted the car and put on their flashers. A two-block chase ensued, during which time a tire iron, a riding whip, and two pistols were thrown from the car. Cohen’s men then pulled over. They were promptly arrested and taken down to the Wilshire Division station for booking. When Mickey heard about the arrest, he placed a call—to the chief of the Wilshire Division detective bureau, who hurried into the station. There he confronted the rookies, telling them they had ten minutes to get the guns, tire irons, hot plates, and stolen recorder back into Cohen’s men’s car. He then ordered their release.

That would have been that but for the photographer. Late that evening, Cohen got a call from a contact at the Los Angeles Times, informing him that a photographer had come in earlier that evening and, for $100, sold the paper negatives of his men being arrested (not realizing what he could have gotten for the negatives from Mickey). Mickey rushed down to the Times building and attempted to buy the negatives, but it was too late. The Times broke the story that tied Mickey’s men to Pearson’s beating, prompting Mickey to skip town. The lieutenant and sergeant involved in releasing Mickey’s men were suspended and then sacked. The press had a field day. Hearst’s Examiner likened widow Elsie Philips to Snow White; Mickey’s men were dubbed the seven dwarves. Cohen and his gunmen (who included the hapless “Happy” Meltzer) were arrested. As was Mickey’s habit, he quickly posted bail: $100,000 for himself, $25,000 to 50,000 for each of the dwarves. A trial was scheduled for October. Then, on September 2, 1949, Cohen henchman Frank Niccoli disappeared.

Mickey immediately suspected foul play. What he didn’t yet understand was that the Dragna crew was moving to eliminate him with the assistance of his supposed friend from Cleveland, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.

In the world of organized crime, where loyalty is paramount, tribal segregation has long been the norm. But Mickey had always been different. His organization in Los Angeles had drawn on two disparate groups, Jews from New York (like the late, lamented Hooky Rothman) and Italians from Cleveland or New Jersey (like Joe and Fred Sica). Fratianno was supposed to be part of Mickey’s Italian Cleveland contingent. Like Mickey, Fratianno had enjoyed a long run as a holdup man. Unlike Mickey, Jimmy had had the bad luck of being arrested while shaking down a bookmaker in 1937 and shipped off to prison. When Fratianno got out of the pen in 1945, Cohen helped him move to L.A., even springing for an expensive sanitarium sojourn to help cure Fratianno’s consumption.

Far from responding gratefully to Mickey’s gestures, Fratianno drifted into the sphere of Jack Dragna and his ambitious nephew Louis Tom, both of whom chafed at the notion of a Jew running the rackets. The Dragna circle soon felt comfortable enough with Fratianno to enlist him as a conspirator in an effort to regain control of the Los Angeles underworld—by rubbing out Mickey. “The Weasel” was happy to help. Their first target was Cohen henchman Frank Niccoli, who also happened to be one of Fratianno’s old stickup buddies from Cleveland. At Dragna’s behest, Jimmy called up Niccoli and asked him to come over for a drink. He let Niccoli finish it before having him strangled. The killers then stripped off Niccoli’s clothes, stuffed the body in a mail sack, and threw it in the back of their car. A few hours later, Niccoli was interred with a sack of lime in a vineyard in Cucamonga. Niccoli’s car was then abandoned at LAX.

It took Mickey several days to realize that Niccoli was missing. But Superior Court Judge Thomas Ambrose was not impressed by Cohen’s claim that something awful had happened. The judge suspected that Niccoli had simply flown the coop. Reports that Niccoli had been sighted in Mexico filtered in. Police officers were dispatched to search for him in Texas. When Niccoli didn’t appear in court on October 3, the first day of the trial, the $50,000 Mickey had put down as bail was forfeited.

Then, on October 10, another Cohen henchman, Davey Ogul, vanished. His car turned up two days later. Again the judge rejected Mickey’s claims that foul play was involved and, when the dead man failed to present himself in court, Mickey was out another $25,000. With the police breathing down his neck, it was practically impossible to do business anyway. So on October 13 Mickey took the humiliating step of instructing his remaining henchmen to return to jail, where their safety would be guaranteed.

But where is true safety in this world? Surely not in jail. The constant attempts on his life, his miraculous escapes from death—it was enough to make a man think of Providence, for as the Psalmist said, “It is thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.”

Mickey Cohen wasn’t a religious man. But in the autumn of 1949, God came calling at 513 South Moreno in the form of an unlikely duo: Cohen wiretapper Jimmy Vaus and a charismatic young evangelist named Billy Graham.

14 The Evangelist

“He has the making of one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.”

—the Rev. Billy Graham, commenting on Mickey Cohen

THE YEAR 1949 had been a disastrous one for Jimmy Vaus. “Happy” Meltzer’s trial and the revelations that followed had exposed him as a double agent and placed him in considerable legal peril. And so it was that driving home late one Saturday night in November, filled with mournful thoughts, listening to the original singing cowboy, radio host Stuart Hamblen, Jimmy Vaus heard something that would change his life.

“A few nights ago,” began Hamblen, “I went to the Big Tent at Washington and Hill, and after I heard Billy Graham preach, I accepted Christ as my personal Savior.” Hamblen was so committed to Jesus, he continued, that he was selling his racehorses—save for his sentimental favorite, the champion Thoroughbred El Lobo.

This was serious. Everyone who listened to Hamblen’s radio program knew he was crazy about the horses (as well as other not-strictly-religious activities such as coon-hunting and skirt-chasin’). “He meant business if he were selling his horses,” concluded Vaus.

The next day was a Sunday. Vaus went to the beach. It was foggy and cold. He dropped by Mickey Cohen’s house in Brentwood. Mickey wasn’t home. He drove down to a bar on Washington Boulevard—and then realized, with a start, that he was headed straight for the Billy Graham revival meeting.

By November 1949, everyone in Los Angeles knew about Billy Graham. One month earlier, the lantern-jawed young evangelist with the fierce blue eyes and the booming voice had arrived in town with plans to hold a series of old-fashioned tent revival meetings. The idea was quaint. The messenger wasn’t. Graham was Hollywood’s idea of what a minister should be—a six-foot, two-inch booming baritone who wore sharp, double-breasted suits and flashy ties. Nonetheless, Graham’s campaign for Christ might well have remained a modest affair but for the mysterious intervention of William Randolph Hearst. Soon after Graham arrived in town, the editors at the morning Los Angeles Examiner and the evening Herald-Express received a terse telegram from San Simeon: “Puff Graham.” The city’s largest morning tabloid responded with typical élan. Graham noticed that suddenly “reporters and cameramen were crawling all over the place.” Stories about Graham’s “Crusade for Christ” played across the front pages of the two papers for weeks, as did breathless accounts of the goings-on within what was now dubbed “the Canvas Cathedral” (“the largest revival tent in history”). Modest crowds became impassioned mobs. And so that Sunday evening Jimmy Vaus found himself squeezing onto a back bench under the big tent, one of the roughly six thousand people who’d come to hear Graham speak.

“You know,” Graham boomed through the tent, “there’s a man in this audience tonight who has heard this story many times before, and who knows this is the decision he should make…. This is your moment of decision.”

Suddenly, Vaus found himself gliding up the isle toward the platform at the front of the tent where Graham was standing. Then he was down on his knees. He left in a daze. As he was exiting the tent, a photographer’s light-bulb flashed. The next day, newspaper readers awakened to the headline WIRE-TAPPER VAUS HITS SAWDUST TRAIL.

Celebrity criminal Jimmy Vaus had been born again.

It was with some nervousness that Vaus drove over to Mickey’s house to explain his conversion. November had not been a good month for Mickey. After forfeiting bail on his disappearing gunmen, Mickey needed to be able to show more income from legitimate sources. So he announced plans to sell his haberdashery. Cohen carried it out with unusual style. A huge sign appeared in the haberdashery’s window: MICKEY COHEN QUITS! A spotlight danced across the Los Angeles sky from the doomed store, as if its closing were a movie premiere. Curious Angelenos responded by the hundreds, helping themselves to a look into Mickey’s luxurious lair (as well as a chance to purchase $25 ties at $10 prices). Vaus feared that Mickey’s mood might be bad. But when he arrived at 513 Moreno, he found the gangster in good spirits. When Vaus informed Mickey that he was “going back to the Church, back into Christianity,” Cohen responded, good-naturedly, “Well, what the hell else ya been?”

No, no, Vaus explained. “You’re not a Christian till you give your life to Lord Jesus Christ and are born again.”

Mickey was a bit unclear on the born-again thing but told Vaus “that was fine with him.” Vaus summoned his courage and plowed ahead. He intended to go straight, he told Mickey, despite the financial hardships this would entail. Cohen wished him the best of luck and offered a gift of $1,500 that he happened to have in his bedroom. Vaus declined. Now that he had resolved to walk with the Lord, he didn’t think it would be right to take such a sum from a notorious gangster. He left with only $500.

Vaus’s conversion became the talk of the city. Billy Graham’s star ascended ever higher. Graham then offered Vaus a job as a junior spokesperson, essentially, someone who would accompany Graham on his crusades and testify to the power of faith. Vaus, in turn, offered Graham something enticing: the prospect of “saving” Mickey Cohen. He arranged for Graham and radio host Stuart Hamblen to stop by the Cohen residence for a visit. Cohen’s housekeeper served them hot chocolate and cookies. The men got along well. A few weeks later, Graham invited Cohen to attend a private meeting “of Hollywood personalities.” At the meeting, Graham asked people who wanted him to pray for them to hold up their hands.

“Mickey lifted his hand,” Graham later recounted, “and I am sincerely convinced that he wanted God.”

The effort to convert Mickey Cohen had begun.

BILLY GRAHAM’S PRAYERS were apparently effective. At 4:15 a.m. on February 6, 1950, the radar alarm designed by Jimmy Vaus went off. Mickey grabbed a shotgun and peeked out the front door. Seeing nothing, he went back to his wife’s bedroom. No sooner had he gotten into LaVonne’s bed than a massive explosion rocked the house. Windows throughout the neighborhood were blown out; police officers at a station three miles away felt the shock waves. When Cohen opened his eyes, his roof and most of the front of his house, including the bedroom where he normally slept, were gone. His first thought was of Tuffy (who slept beside him in an exact replica of Mickey’s bed, save for the fact that his bedcovering was monogrammed “TC” rather than “MC”). Fortunately for the terrier, he had followed Mickey to LaVonne’s bedroom that night. Police arrived to find Mickey in his bathrobe, shaking his head at his closet of ruined $300 suits.

Police later estimated that twenty-eight sticks of dynamite had been placed under the Cohen residence. Providence—or Lady Luck—seemed to be keeping a vigil over Mickey Cohen.

Three days later, the critical witness in the beating case of rapacious radio repairman Al Pearson came before the jury. Hazel Pearson was Al’s daughter-in-law; she worked in his shop and had witnessed the attack the previous spring. But instead of offering testimony that would send Mickey and his surviving henchmen to the pen, Hazel turned on her father-in-law, whom she described as a crook and a chiseler.

“I’ve never really liked the man,” Hazel told the all-female jury. One month later, Mickey Cohen was acquitted.

MICKEY COHEN wasn’t the only person toying with a conversion experience. Interim police chief William Worton was also reaching some startling conclusions about how the LAPD should operate and how it should be run. His ideas put him on a collision course with Bill Parker.

Worton had taken over as the LAPD’s emergency chief the previous July. The city charter provided for a sixty-day term, renewable once. However, when September arrived, Mayor Bowron was not ready to dispense with General Worton’s services. So the city attorney was prevailed upon to issue an opinion that allowed him to continue in office. General Worton’s “temporary” appointment was extended into the winter—and then again into the spring of 1950. If Mayor Bowron had had his druthers, it seems clear he would have simply appointed General Worton chief of police. But the city charter was explicit: The next chief of police had to come from within the department. It seemed an insuperable obstacle. But Worton was convinced that there was a way he could continue to direct the department without running afoul of the city charter. He would simply change what the chief of police did.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s organization was unusual. Everyone described General Worton as the police chief, but in fact he was not technically in charge of the department. The Police Commission was. Worton was technically the department’s “general manager.” The organizational chart clearly put him under the five-member civilian board appointed by the mayor, much as corporate CEOs answer to their companies’ boards. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, the Police Commission provided almost no direction to—much less oversight of—the department. There were a number of reasons for this. Unlike a corporate board whose members come primarily from business backgrounds similar to that of their CEOs, the police commissioners were civilians, not police professionals. As a result, they simply didn’t have the knowledge or experience to evaluate how the chief and the department were doing.

They also didn’t have the time. In addition to supervising the police department, the commission was also responsible for licensing a whole range of businesses (auto-repair shops, pawnshops, dance halls, and so forth) and approving activities (parades, public dances) that might involve the police department. This licensing task alone was enough to fully occupy the commission, which typically met one morning a week. The commission also relied almost entirely on police department personnel to conduct its investigations. Finally, even if the commission had decided to go after the department’s general manager, the chief of police enjoyed something no CEO had: civil service protection. No wonder Police Commissions often made only the barest pretense of directing the department. By the end of Chief Horrall’s tenure, the police chief no longer even met with the commission on a regular basis.

The more time General Worton spent in office, the more convinced he became that the entire system was flawed. The notion that the department answered to a board of civilians was nothing more than a polite fiction—and was exposed as such whenever the police department had something sensitive to handle, such as a brutality complaint. These were dealt with internally, by department personnel alone. This rubbed Worton the wrong way. So too did the fact that while the mayor was held to account, politically, for the conduct of the police department, he exercised only indirect influence over the department, through his appointees to the Police Commission.

A better model was needed, Worton concluded, and it wasn’t hard to find one. Police departments in New York, Chicago, and Detroit all operated under a different management structure. In those cities, the mayor appointed a single civilian commissioner or superintendent to supervise the department. This commissioner or superintendent answered to the mayor. Day-to-day police department operations were run by a top-uniformed officer—in the NYPD, the chief of department. The Marine Corps had a similar structure. There the top-uniformed officer—the commandant—ran operations but answered to a civilian, the secretary of the Navy. Worton believed that the LAPD would benefit from a similar structure.

During the fall of 1949, he fleshed out his plan for reorganizing the department. It called for a non-civil-service commissioner who would be appointed by the mayor (subject to city council approval) to a three-year term. This commissioner would be responsible for setting goals for the department and would directly run important bureaus such as internal affairs, planning and accounting, records and identification, and communications. A uniformed police chief would serve under him and direct actual law enforcement activities. Worton believed such a reorganization could be accomplished without amending the city charter. As to who this new commissioner would be, most observers assumed that the candidate Worton had in mind was himself.

Mayor Bowron liked the idea. But Worton’s plan quickly encountered opposition from powerful forces—and from at least one member of his inner circle, Bill Parker. The disciplinary system that struck Worton as ill conceived was among Parker’s proudest accomplishments. With the department’s top job once again in reach, Parker had no intention of standing aside while an outsider gutted the system he had created. He boldly criticized General Worton’s proposed reforms. He insisted that a five-member civilian Police Commission whose members were each appointed to five-year terms would be more independent and responsive to the public than a single commissioner who answered only to the mayor would be.

“You’ll get a bad city administration someday,” Parker warned.

For months, the police department had stood by meekly while Mayor Bowron extended General Worton’s emergency term of office in legally dubious ways and considered plans to unilaterally reorganize the department. Now the forces of the status quo ante counterattacked. General Worton had suggested that the department could be reorganized without a charter amendment. A chorus of voices arose to question this sweeping claim. Reluctantly, Mayor Bowron agreed that his acting police chief’s plan would have to be submitted to the voters for their approval. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that the only person who was really enthusiastic about this idea was Worton himself. Finally Mayor Bowron gave in and announced that he’d be scheduling an examination to select a new chief in the spring of 1950. Some two dozen LAPD officers promptly announced that they would sit for the examination, among them Bill Parker.

On July 10, participants’ scores were announced. Parker placed first. Thad Brown and Roger Murdock placed a distant second and third. That same day, General Worton notified the Police Commission that he wished to step down from his position at the end of the month. Legally, Mayor Bowron could select any of the top three candidates, but everyone knew that the choice was really between the two heavyweights, Brown or Parker. Both men now attempted to rally their allies. In Parker’s case, that meant the American Legion and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including its new archbishop (soon to be cardinal), James Francis McIntyre. By 1948, there were 650,000 Roman Catholics in Los Angeles, and another 55,000 were arriving from across the country every year. Msgr. Thomas O’Dwyer, the top aide to Archbishop McIntyre, sent a pointed letter to Mayor Bowron, noting Parker’s many qualifications.

These were powerful backers, but Thad Brown, arguably, had even stronger allies. The LAPD had long been a strikingly Protestant organization: All but one of its previous chiefs had been Protestants. Almost all of them had also been Freemasons, as were many of the officers on the force. Brown was both. He also enjoyed the quiet support of the underworld. Thad Brown was in no way corrupt, but neither was he seen as a zealot who would attempt to eradicate the underworld altogether. The Los Angeles Times also supported Brown. In early August, it reported that three of the five Police Commissioners—clubwoman Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman—had settled on Brown. The Police Commission’s sole African American member, J. Alexander Somerville, and Irving Snyder, the commission’s Jewish member, supported Parker. Brown had the votes to become police chief—if he could keep them. For at that very moment, Agnes Albro was dying of breast cancer. Already, she was confined to bed. Brown’s supporters knew they needed to move quickly. Duque and Newman proposed to convene a meeting at Albro’s house to select Brown as chief. Parker vehemently objected. A meeting in a private residence would be illegal, he warned the commissioners, a clear violation of California’s open meeting requirements. Brown’s supporters paused. As they were debating the issue, Agnes Albro passed away.

The race was now a toss-up. “In the newspapers, it was a bigger story than baseball or the heat wave,” wrote one contemporary observer. “[T]he reporters smoked out secret meetings all through City Hall. Meetings between the Mayor and his Police Commissioners; between the Mayor and the candidates; between the commissioners and the candidates.”

On August 2, Mayor Bowron, General Worton, and the four members of the Police Commission sat down together. Exactly what was said was unclear, but after the meeting one of Thad Brown’s supporters decided to switch his support to Parker. (Many years later, Thad Brown would claim that he had withdrawn his name from consideration because he didn’t want “Bill Parker behind me, with his knife out.”) To send a message of strong support for the new chief, the sole remaining Brown holdout agreed to join the pro-Parker majority in order to make the vote unanimous. And so, later that very day, the Police Commission voted unanimously to make William H. Parker Los Angeles’s fortieth chief of police.

Mayor Bowron was notably lukewarm about their choice. When asked by a reporter if the appointment “met with his approval,” Bowron declined to answer, suggesting instead that “all statements should come from the Police Commission.”

Chief Parker waved off the mayor’s lack of support. “The action of the Police Commission this afternoon was gratifying and confirms my belief that the Chief of Police must be selected without political influence,” he told the press later that day.

The reality was otherwise. Parker had politicked—and prevailed. But many doubted that he would retain the position for very long.

“I know I’m supposedly coming in with a life expectancy of two weeks,” he told the press after being sworn in. “We’ll see.”

15 “Whiskey Bill”

“There is a sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country.”

—Sen. Estes Kefauver, 1950

IT HAD BEEN a rotten vacation. Mickey had left Los Angeles a month earlier with a leisurely agenda of business and pleasure in mind. In Phoenix, he wanted to visit brother Harry and check out some drugstores he was considering purchasing. But the Phoenix police department had quickly run him out of town. The same thing had happened in Texas, where he owned an oil well. Then, when Mickey Cohen arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago on August 3, 1950, he learned that Bill Parker had been appointed chief of police. It was upsetting. “I had joints all over town, and I needed the police for coordination,” Cohen would later say. Instead, the Police Commission had selected “the one cop who really gave me trouble.” Just when it seemed like things could not get worse, Chicago detectives picked him up for an evening of questioning. He was released the next day and told to get out of town.

Mickey Cohen was getting too famous for his own good. Not only had he gained a dangerous new enemy in the person of Los Angeles’s new police chief, he had also attracted the attention of a curious outsider, U.S. senator Estes Kefauver.

A FRESHMAN SENATOR from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver was a man of great ambition and considerable guile. In 1948, after an unremarkable decade in the House as a pro-Roosevelt, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority Democrat, Kefauver took advantage of a feud between incumbent U.S. senator Tom Stewart and Tennessee party boss Ed “The Red Snapper” Crump and slipped into the Senate. There the Yale Law School-educated senator with the vaguely Lincoln-esque looks impressed his peers with his intelligence (he had authored an academic book on monopolies)—and his womanizing (“the worst in the Senate,” according to William “Fishbait” Miller, the House doorkeeper).

At some point in 1949, Kefauver hit upon the idea of investigating organized gambling. This was not a popular notion among his Senate colleagues. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois relied on Cook County to offset Republican voters downstate. He was not eager to start an investigation that might expose the inner workings of Chicago politics. But Kefauver had picked his topic wisely. By 1950, organized crime had become a subject of great interest to the public. Books such as Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Chicago Confidential had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Municipal Association held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke passionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win passage of a measure authorizing “a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities.” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran—of Nevada—responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas’s strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman.

The killing itself was hardly unusual: Kansas City had long been controlled by one of the country’s most notorious “machines,” one that did not shy away from occasional acts of violence. What made this particular slaying noteworthy was the fact that President Truman himself was a product of that same machine. (He owed both his first victory in politics—his election as a county judge in 1922—and his 1934 election to the U.S. Senate to “Boss Tom” Pendergast’s Kansas City machine.) Even though “Boss Tom” had died five years earlier, the slaying in Kansas City stoked public concerns about underworld connections to government officials. Amid the ensuing controversy, the Special Senate Committee on the Investigation of Syndicated Crime in Interstate Commerce—soon known simply as the Kefauver Committee—was finally impaneled. Faced with fallout from the Kansas City slaying, President Truman also gave the Kefauver Committee a potent new tool: access to the income tax records of suspected gambling bosses. Thus armed, Kefauver revealed the investigative strategy that would catapult him to national fame. Instead of summoning witnesses to Washington, the press-savvy senator announced that his committee and its investigators would hold a series of hearings in fourteen cities across the country on “how the national crime syndicate could be smashed.” In November, Senator Kefauver arrived in Los Angeles. Atop his list of witnesses was Mickey Cohen.

When Mickey received a subpoena to appear before the Kefauver Committee at the federal building downtown, all of Los Angeles expected fireworks. But when the committee convened at 9 a.m., there was no Mickey Cohen. Indignant, the commission sent investigators out to his house in Brentwood to search for the witness. They found Mickey asleep in bed. While the committee waited, Mickey got dressed with excruciating slowness. (“Being the fine dressed man I try to be, it takes time for me to get ready for an appearance.”) The hearings had “been blown up so big … like a Hollywood premiere,” and Cohen wanted to look the part of a Hollywood star. He did.

From the minute he entered a crowded courtroom in Los Angeles’s federal building, “Mickey was the star of the show,” reported Time magazine. Wearing “a natty brown suit, brown tie and deep black scowl,” Cohen faced “a whole battery of newsmen, photographers, movie cameras and tape recorders.”

Surveying them in much the same spirit that a feudal lord might survey his vassals, Cohen was overheard commenting, “I could spit on the sidewalk and it would make headlines.”

A reporter asked the question on everyone’s mind: Wasn’t Mickey disrespecting the U.S. Senate by arriving late?

“Lookit, nobody notified me about the time,” Mickey responded testily. “All I got was a call to come down here, and I came down, and I’m here.”

For the next five hours, Mickey put on a remarkable show. One month earlier in Chicago, Harry “The Muscle” Russell, the Chicago Outfit’s Florida representative, had flustered the Kefauver Committee by citing the Fifth Amendment (which protects against self-incrimination) as a justification for refusing to answer any questions from the committee. Mickey had no such hesitation. Speaking easily, almost casually, without notes and rarely pausing to consult attorneys Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson, Cohen denied every allegation thrown at him:

“I ain’t never muscled no one in my life.”

“I ain’t never offered no policeman a bribe.”

“I never pistol-whipped anyone.”

“I ain’t never been with no prostitute.”

“I never had no part of a fix.”

“I never strong-armed nobody in my life.”

It was a bravura recitation of lies. But there was one issue Mickey couldn’t wish away—his income.

Other Mob bosses had carefully constructed front companies or bought in to legitimate businesses in order to account for their large incomes. Frank Costello, the so-called prime minister of the underworld, insisted that he was merely a semiretired real estate investor. Jack Dragna claimed that he was a vineyard owner and banana importer. Aside from a few desultory investments (in grocery stores and a women’s shoulder-pad manufacturer), Mickey had not. Even Michael’s Haberdashery had never made much pretense of being a going concern. Instead, Mickey maintained that he was just a former bookmaker who now earned a modest living from gambling. But he lived like a pasha in a $120,000 house in Brentwood and purchased new Cadillacs every year for himself and his wife (to say nothing of his $15,000 armored car).

Anyone who bothered to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation could see that there was something suspicious about such lavish expenditures. The problem was squaring such spending with the era’s high income tax rates. In 1950, a taxpayer who earned $100,000 could expect to hand nearly $60,000 of that to the federal government and another $5,000 to the state of California, leaving about $35,000 for himself. Double that hypothetical income to $200,000, and the taxpayer was left with a mere $50,000 in after-tax income. Yet by his own acknowledgment, Mickey had spent more than $200,000 on his house and about $30,000 on Cadillacs. Investigators also estimated that Cohen kept roughly eighteen men on his payroll; at his declared pay rate of “$75 to $100 a week,” that added another $85,000 or so to his expenses. In order to generate, say, $125,000 in legitimate after-tax income, Mickey would had to have paid taxes on a declared yearly income of nearly a million dollars. He wasn’t even close. Instead, the tax returns he had filed with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the late 1940s reported annual incomes as low as $6,000 a year—just twice the national average income.

This should have led the Bureau of Internal Revenue to take a closer look at Mickey’s finances, as it had done nearly two decades earlier in the case of Al Capone. Yet remarkably, as Warren Olney noted in the final report of the Special Crime Study Commission—a report that came out the same month that Senator Kefauver was interrogating Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles—“there has never been a racketeer, hoodlum, or gangster of first rank importance convicted of income tax fraud in California.” Nor, according to comments made by Treasury Department officials at a conference on organized crime in the spring of 1949, were any such cases in the works. Local Bureau of Internal Revenue agents had actually tried to start an investigation several years earlier. But after their superiors discovered the probe, they’d been detailed to other assignments.

The Kefauver Committee had no intention of letting Mickey off so lightly. During their questioning, committee members homed in on Mickey’s massive expenditures and minimal income. Grudgingly, Cohen admitted to a $40,000 home (far less than its actual value) with $48,000 worth of home furnishings. That still left a gap of $210,000 in unaccounted-for income. When pressed about the discrepancy by chief counsel Rudolph Halley, Cohen replied that over the past four years, he had borrowed about $300,000, most of which, he added, had been spent on lawyers’ fees as a result of the constant “harassment from the LAPD.”

Halley asked if there were any notes or collateral that could document these loans.

Mickey said there were not. People had lent him money, Cohen continued, because “they just happen to like me.”

“How do you maintain that kind of credit?” Sen. Charles Tobey of New Hampshire asked.

Mickey cracked his first smile. “It’s getting very weak, Senator.”

The audience chuckled. By the end of the week, the investigators were gone. When a reporter asked Cohen what he thought of the experience, Mickey cracked, “All them congressional committees are a joke, a gimmick for the furtherance of a politician.” Bill Parker worried him much more.

DURING PARKER’S first month on the job, four different emissaries approached him with variations on a single proposal: appointing a gambling “czar.” Ostensibly, this person’s job would be to curb gambling, but Parker felt his interlocutors were actually more interested in organizing it. Fearing a frame-up, Parker spoke openly about these overtures at a countywide meeting of law enforcement officers later that month. He was convinced that the various attempts to snuff out Mickey Cohen suggested that the Syndicate was preparing to move into Los Angeles in force. Los Angeles, which Parker described, in language harkening back to the 1920s, as “the last white spot among the great cities of America,” risked becoming Chicago. The LAPD was determined to resist this, he told his audiences. But he warned, “I do not know how long this can be continued. There are men here ready to get their tentacles into the city and drain off large sums of money through gambling activities of various kinds.”

Parker argued that if the forces of law and order were to prevail, a counteroffensive was needed. For too long, gangsters had taken advantage of the fact that when things got “hot” in one of Los Angeles County’s forty-five-odd municipalities, they could just move to another. At a meeting of regional law enforcement officials, Parker proposed a new approach—a central intelligence bureau that pooled resources from all of the region’s law enforcement agencies and pursued gangsters wherever they attempted to hide. Representatives from the three dozen law enforcement agencies present readily agreed to participate in such an effort. But Parker’s ambitions were larger still.

“This plan goes deeper than a means of saving Los Angeles from the stigma of vice,” Parker continued. “We are protecting the American philosophy of life. It is now clear that Russia is hoping we will destroy ourselves as a nation through our own avarice, greed, and corruption in government. Hence, this program has a wider application than in the Los Angeles area alone.” Parker envisioned a national consortium of departments committed to information-sharing.

The assembled group was, according to one account of the meeting, “startled,” both by the scope of Parker’s ambitions and by his tone. In his first speeches as chief-of-police-elect, Parker had struck a hopeful—even humble—note, committing himself and his officers to the “reasonable enforcement of the law and respect for the rights and dignity of the individual—to work for the community, not rule it.” But already another side of Chief Parker was appearing—the profoundly pessimistic observer of American decline, the Spengler of City Hall.

Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. “We have become a great nation in a material sense,” Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. “But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.

“Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness,” continued Parker ominously. “It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past.”

Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.

Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to “cut up the town.” The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen’s attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the 1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prostitution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn’t bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.^[14]

The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.

The idea of an intelligence division wasn’t new: Chief James E. Davis had one in the 1930s; Chief Horrall had one in the 1940s. Other units such as administrative vice and the gangster squad routinely did intelligence work too, as the bugging of Mickey Cohen’s house demonstrated. But most previous intelligence work had relied heavily on wiretaps and a style of interrogation that could be summarized as “pinch-’em-and-sweat-’em.” When General Worton took over the department, he wanted something different—analysis, predictions, and actionable information of the sort that military commanders received from their intelligence outfits. In short, he wanted a policing version of the Army’s G-2 intelligence system.

Parker shared Worton’s enthusiasm for operational intelligence. During the war, one of the new chief’s most important jobs had been reorganizing and de-Nazifying the Munich police department. At the time, he had been struck by the parallels between de-Nazification and clearing the LAPD of corrupt police officers with ties to the underworld. Now that Parker was chief, he set out to realize General Worton’s vision. He expanded the unit to roughly three dozen officers and appointed his most trusted associate in the department, James Hamilton, to head its operations. Both men agreed that traditional policing techniques simply did not work against the Syndicate. In the early 1940s, Bugsy Siegel had killed with impunity—and then been killed with equal impunity by a professional gunman who escaped without leaving a trace. More recently, even the most basic questions about Mickey Cohen were not fully resolved. Consider the case of Sam Rummel. Why was he, rather than Mickey, meeting to “cut up” Los Angeles? Was he Mickey’s mouthpiece and junior partner, as most people assumed? Or was he playing a more subtle game? In Chicago, for instance, many astute observers of the Outfit believed that the real power rested not with so-called leaders such as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana but rather with the men who stayed in the background, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, and Murray Humphreys. Might Rummel likewise be calling the shots in Los Angeles? These were the kinds of questions the intelligence division was tasked with answering.

The intelligence division didn’t just watch and analyze. According to former gangster squad member Jack O’Mara, a favorite tactic was to drive new arrivals up into Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Hills to “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ’em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland.” O’Mara had his own way of driving the lesson home: He’d “put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, ‘You want to sneeze?’ Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?”

Mickey’s men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry’s, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, “Now you’ve had it, you motherfucker!”

“When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac,” Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. “It went over the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed.”

Otash wasn’t on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.

“Our main purpose is to keep anyone from getting ‘too big,’” Hamilton told a San Francisco newspaper years later, in discussing the exploits of his intelligence squad. “When we get word that someone has ‘juice,’ that he’s trying to ‘fix things,’ and thinks he can, then we’re after him.

“We’re selfish about it—damned selfish. Because we know that that’s the kind of a guy who’s going to wreck your police department if he can. And we’re going to stop him—one way or the other.”

It would not be long before the unit got a dramatic test of its abilities.

AS KEFAUVER ATTEMPTED to untangle the Los Angeles underworld, the county grand jury was digging into the Guarantee Finance case. Connections to Mickey Cohen were everywhere. Sam Rummel was Guarantee Finance’s attorney. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s accountant, was its accountant. The company’s books included one item in particular that caught the grand jury’s attention: $108,000 for “juice”—payoff money. The fact that the LAPD had repeatedly (albeit extralegally) raided Guarantee Finance (which was located in unincorporated county territory), only to draw a written rebuke from the sheriff’s department, made it fairly clear who was on the take. So did the astonishing testimony of Undersheriff Arthur C. Jewell before the Kefauver Committee. When pressed, Undersheriff Jewell insisted that neither he nor Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz had heard the name “Guarantee Finance” until state authorities had brought it to their attention. More astonishing still was Jewell’s response to another question. The committee asked him to outline areas of illegal activities that he suspected—suspected—Mickey Cohen might be involved in. By the fall of 1950, every newspaper reader in Los Angeles could have answered this question at length. Not Undersheriff Jewell.

“Personally, I cannot, sir; that is honest and sincere,” he told committee members.

Afterward, the county grand jury decided to look more closely at the evidence tying the sheriff’s department to Guarantee Finance. The top leadership of the sheriff’s department promised to cooperate. A secret meeting was convened to discuss investigation plans. The group of attendees was a small one: the foreman of the county grand jury, a representative of the district attorney’s office, three county law enforcement officials, and two “servers” who would deliver affidavits to witnesses the grand jury planned to call. A list of targets—most of whom were represented by Rummel—was drawn up.

The very next day, the targets scattered. Someone had leaked the list.

The secret strategy meeting had been held on a Wednesday. The witnesses the county grand jury had intended to subpoena scattered the following day, on Thursday. On Sunday, an extraordinary rendezvous occurred. Sheriff’s department captain Al Guasti, vice squad commander Carl Pearson, and vice squad sergeant Lawrence Schaffer met clandestinely with Rummel. The apparent purpose of the meeting was to coordinate a strategy whereby Rummel would cooperate with the investigation in a way that protected both himself and the sheriff’s department.

Later that evening, at about 1:30 a.m., Rummel arrived back at his house in Laurel Canyon, high above what is today West Hollywood. As he walked from his floodlit garage up the steps to his Spanish colonial, a twelve-gauge shotgun roared out from behind a hedge on the property some twenty-nine feet away. The blast hit Rummel in the neck. Blood sprayed across the walk. As the getaway car screeched away—most likely up to Mulholland or over the Santa Monica Mountains into the Valley—Rummel lay on the steps, dying but not dead.

The police got there first. By the time Parker himself arrived, with Jack Donahoe, Rummel had breathed his last breath. Surprisingly, police quickly found the murder weapon—a 1910 double-barreled Remington shotgun propped in the crook of a tree. A few minutes later, Mickey Cohen arrived, wearing a pair of slacks over his pajamas. Brushing past the police cordon, he rushed in to console Rummel’s widow. Upstairs came the commotion of police setting up a command post in Rummel’s den. A police lieutenant soon appeared.

“Cohen, the chief wants you upstairs.”

“All right, I’ll be up there,” Cohen responded. But he made no move to leave the sobbing widow.

“No, he wants you up there right now,” the lieutenant persisted.

Bill Parker was the last person Mickey Cohen wanted to see. By his own accounting, he was “still hot about Parker becoming chief of police.” Now there he was, surrounded by obsequious aides rushing to and fro, sitting behind Rummel’s desk, with Jack Donahoe standing at his side. So when Parker “starts off with this bullshit,” Cohen lost it.

“Lookit, ya punk son of a bitch. As far as I’m concerned, ya should no more be chief of police than a fucking two-dollar pimp,” screamed Cohen.

Suddenly, like a vet handling an angry cat, big Jack Donahoe was holding Mickey up by his neck.

“He’s crazy!” Parker exclaimed. “Get him out of here. I don’t want to talk to him anymore.”

Mickey was hustled off. “[I]’m a son of a bitch if I didn’t have his fingermarks on my throat for six days after,” he said later.

THE NEXT DAY Chief Parker vowed he would find the killer. The new chief needed a win. The Los Angeles Times had supported his opponent; the mayor was cool to him; even the person who had done more than any other to smooth his ascent to the top—William Worton—was turning into an impediment. On the same day that Parker himself had been sworn in as chief, Bowron had named Worton to the Police Commission. Instead of the usual group of civilians who provided oversight in name only (and who in reality met once a week to hear license applications), Parker would have to answer to a board that included his former boss. This, undoubtedly, was Mayor Bowron’s point.

But solving the case wouldn’t be easy. The LAPD really had only one concrete piece of evidence—the murder weapon itself. It was extremely unusual to find a weapon at the scene of a professional hit. By leaving it, the killer was basically giving law enforcement the middle finger. But in this case, the killer’s confidence was misplaced. In an astonishing feat of police work, the LAPD managed to trace the weapon back to Riley, Kansas, to a pawnshop frequented by a tough hood who’d recently relocated to the Los Angeles area, Tony Broncato. Broncato and his partner, Tony Trombino, were a pair of freelance gunmen who’d been questioned in connection with every major shooting in Los Angeles since Bugsy Siegel’s rub-out. Unfortunately, the two Tonys had also recently turned up dead, both shot in the back of the head in a parked car just north of Sunset.

Parker suspected the Dragna crew. He and Hamilton immediately grabbed seven top suspects, including most of Dragna’s muscle, and brought them into a suite of rooms they’d reserved at the Ambassador Hotel. (Reporters had staked out police headquarters, which were then located in City Hall, and Parker didn’t want news of the interrogation to leak to the press.) For three days and nights, police officers interrogated the suspects, turning over alibis, looking for inconsistencies, bluffing, and threatening the suspects (who were denied sleep and access to their lawyers). As the interrogation progressed, Parker became increasingly confident that Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno had been the triggerman. The police even had a witness—an elderly woman who lived across the street from the crime scene. She had seen someone who fit Fratianno’s physical description step out of the backseat of the doomed men’s car immediately after the shooting. Parker was elated. There was just one problem—district attorney Ernest Roll. He felt the case against Fratianno was weak.

“The Weasel” had an alibi. A waitress at a cafe owned by another Dragna associate, Nick Licata, said he’d been in her company the entire night of the killing. Parker thought she was lying.^[15] But when the waitress told the grand jury Roll had reluctantly convened that two detectives had paid her a visit and attempted to persuade her to retract her statement by burning her with cigarettes, Roll declined to proceed with the case. The chief was furious, but Roll was unyielding. There would be no indictment. Parker’s effort to bring Rummel’s killers to justice had failed. Worse, Parker was beginning to suspect that DA Roll did not share the new police chief’s interest in bringing the underworld to heel.

The LAPD proved more pliable.

Parker inherited a department with pressing problems. Los Angeles had added more than 400,000 residents during and after the Second World War, yet the police department numbered just under 4,200 officers. For a city fast approaching a population of two million people, this was a grossly inadequate number. If the department was to maintain order, it would have to do so through the most focused deployment of resources possible.

Parker moved quickly to make the department more efficient. His first act was to simplify the bureaucracy. Divisions such as business, public information, internal affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice were swept into a new bureau of administration. Under the organizational chart he inherited from General Worton, fourteen department and division heads reported directly to the chief. In the new structure, that number was reduced to eight. Parker also created a new division of planning and research, which turned its attention to everything from record-keeping procedures for chronic drunkards to training manuals to deployment patterns. The 1950 annual report epitomized the new spirit. Where previous annual reports had been dull, monochromatic, and light on statistics, Parker’s first report was full of color and photographs, clear in its explanation of the department’s structure, and full of relevant tables of statistics about the department’s activities and about the problems it faced.

Parker’s reorganization gave him more time to focus on his top priority—staying in office. There were three threats that particularly worried him. The first was a recall movement aimed at Mayor Bowron and financed by the underworld. The second was an effort at the state level to legalize gambling in California, which Parker feared would corrupt the citizenry and tempt politicians with irresistible pots of money. The third, more amorphous, threat came from political attacks on the department.

Parker realized what many of his predecessors had not—namely, that a police chief’s authority ultimately depended on the level of public support he enjoyed. In ousting chiefs Davis, Hohmann, and Horrall, Mayor Bowron had repeatedly demonstrated that when the mayor wanted something, civil service protections counted for very little. Parker was also keenly aware of the fact that the average tenure of the typical LAPD chief was just two years. He was determined to avoid that fate by transforming himself into a politician to be reckoned with.

It was not an easy task. Parker did not have the backslapping personality of the typical politician. His wit was dry; his manner, reserved. He was impatient with fools. The slight Boston accent he acquired during his time in the military added a further touch of hauteur. He often spoke with an angry intensity born of resentment and conviction. But he could also be charming. People respected him—and not just in the police department. Since returning to Los Angeles after the war, Parker had risen steadily in the Fire and Police Protective League and in the American Legion. This bespoke political skills of the first order. As the head of Chief Davis’s small public affairs bureau, Parker had worked closely with Davis to build support for the department, hosting lunches at the police academy, providing shooting demonstrations, and courting friends in the business community and the movie colony. He now set about using these skills to protect his new position.

From day one, Parker acted like a politician who would soon be up for reelection. The new chief maintained a frantic public schedule. He accepted almost every invitation to speak and was soon making two speeches a day, followed by another round of speeches in the evening. It was an exhausting pace, one that necessitated many hours in the car. Parker needed a driver. He asked Internal Affairs to choose a suitable candidate from among the Police Academy’s recent graduates. The person selected was Daryl Gates.

Gates was the perfect physical specimen of what an LAPD officer should be: five foot, eleven inches tall and two hundred pounds of muscle. (His fellow cadets at the police academy had called him “The Bear.”) He’d grown up in Highland Park, a working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown, served in the Navy during the war, returned to L.A., gotten married, and gone to the University of Southern California on the GI Bill. Like young Bill Parker, Gates wanted to be an attorney. But when his wife unexpectedly got pregnant during his senior year at USC, Gates needed a job that would support his family. He saw a job with the LAPD as a sinecure where he could finish his college degree and save some money for law school. Like Bill Parker, he was very sharp. Of the five thousand applicants who took the police entrance test, Gates placed ninth.

On Gates’s first day of duty, he reported early to the office of the chief of police. When Parker arrived, Gates failed to recognize him and attempted to block him from entering the chief’s office. When it came time to drive Parker back to his home in Silver Lake at the end of the day, Gates scrambled to open the back door for the chief, just as General Worton’s driver had done. Parker stepped around him and got into the front seat instead. Now Gates was really nervous. He scrambled back to the driver’s seat and settled in behind the wheel of the new Buick Dynaflow that was the chief’s official vehicle. But he couldn’t find the clutch.

Finally, in an even voice, Parker said, “You’ve never driven an automatic shift.”

“No, sir,” Gates conceded, miserably. “I don’t have the slightest idea how to drive this car.”

“Well, get out,” Parker said. The two men switched places, and Parker drove home, with Gates in the passenger seat. He then instructed his new driver to wait there. Parker climbed up the steps and exchanged a few words with Helen. Then he came back down and taught his new driver how to operate an automatic transmission.

No word of reproach was ever uttered.

Fortunately, Daryl Gates was a fast learner, for he soon discovered that there were many evenings when Bill Parker was unable to drive himself home. Parker was a drinker—a heavy one. During the day, he was brilliant and disciplined—“a real iron ass,” says Gates. Liquor never passed his lips. But nighttime was different. Out having dinner, after giving his speech, Parker sometimes loosened up and started drinking—and kept drinking. According to Gates, he drank “until his words slurred and stairs became a hazard.” Disciplinarian by day, drunkard by night—it was a difficult balancing act. It was also a dangerous one.

In the fall of 1950, the day before Chief Parker was due to testify before the Kefauver Committee in Los Angeles, Captain Hamilton got a tip that the underworld was planning to take out the chief. The rub-out was supposed to happen that very night. That evening, Chief Parker was scheduled to address the Breakfast Club, a prominent business and social group, at its clubhouse in Atwater Village. Coming from downtown, the chief would typically pass through Griffith Park. The hit was supposed to occur on one of its secluded roads.

Parker reacted to the news of the planned hit calmly. Instead of canceling his appearance, he simply instructed Gates to choose a different route. He didn’t even leave his wife at home. Instead, Helen sat in the backseat, holding a loaded shotgun. Gates and Parker arrived safely, but even though Hamilton had arranged for extra security at the event, Gates remained antsy. After arriving, scanning the crowd, and seeing no unfamiliar faces, Gates went outside and waited in the car. A few hours later, as things were winding down, Helen Parker came out to the car—without her husband. The minutes passed. Finally, a concerned Gates got out of the car and went to look for the chief. There was no sign of him in the hall. Worry turned to panic. Gates ran outside to alert the extra officers Hamilton had positioned outside the venue. The frantic officers searched the hall—no Parker. Finally, they found him, in a hidden barroom nursing a bourbon.

AS THE KEFAUVER HEARINGS PROGRESSED, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Internal Revenue found itself increasingly embarrassed. Warren Olney’s Special Crime Study Commission had documented a striking indifference on the part of the bureau’s San Francisco office to the activities of well-known crime figures. Meanwhile, the Kefauver Committee’s chief investigator (himself a veteran of Olney’s working group) was closing in on Mickey Cohen.

The most incriminating information came from the committee’s hearings in Miami, where senators had heard testimony from a West Palm Beach bookmaker/real estate mogul named John O’Rourke. Like other big bookmakers, O’Rourke routinely “laid off” particularly big bets on other bookmakers around the country. He was also a big gambler in his own right. Mickey was a favorite partner. When quizzed about how much business he had done with Cohen, O’Rourke came up with an eye-popping $3 million figure. O’Rourke also told the astonished committee members that he’d lost roughly $80,000 to Cohen, without ever meeting Mickey in person.

When Cohen himself appeared before the committee, he was asked about this $3 million sum. Mickey insisted that the figure was misleading: $3 million was the total sum wagered, not his profit. But that still left $80,000 undeclared gambling profits. Embarrassed by such revelations, in early 1951, the Bureau of Internal Revenue commenced a vigorous investigation into Cohen’s finances. A federal grand jury was soon summoning Cohen associates for closed-door hearings.

From the start, Mickey sensed trouble.

Cohen had long maintained that he was a gambler, not a gangster. Now, he told his reporter-acquaintances that he was done with even that. “Every-thing is going to be legitimate…. I’m tired…. I want to keep things peaceful,” Mickey told the press. Brother Harry reemerged too, informing the press that he’d purchased a drugstore in Tucson and that Mickey was going to manage it. Wife LaVonne was reportedly supportive; the Arizona state pharmacy board was not. There were other signs of divestment too. The Los Angeles newspapers were buzzing with rumors that Mickey was in negotiations to sell his armored Cadillac, first to President Juan Peron of Argentina, then to Mexican President Miguel Aleman Valdes. Mickey was also sighted dining at a Sunset Strip nightclub with the Reverend Billy Graham.

It was no use. On April 6, 1951, Cohen and LaVonne were indicted on charges of allegedly evading $156,000 in income taxes between 1946 and 1948. The maximum penalty faced by the couple was twenty years in the federal penitentiary system. Still, Cohen seemed remarkably confident. On the day of the bail hearing, Mickey showed up without an attorney and, to the chagrin of Asst. U.S. Attorney Ray Kennison, convinced U.S. District Judge William Mathes to set bail at a mere $5,000. A trial date was set for early June. But there was one more spectacle scheduled before then.

Mickey was now hard-pressed for cash. The government had frozen access to the various safety deposit boxes he’d opened (under various aliases) across town. Worse, Mickey had to demonstrate to the court that the money for his defense was coming from legitimate sources. So Cohen sought out Marvin Newman, auctioneer to the stars, who in turn placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times trumpeting, “The Year’s Most Interesting Auction… furnishings from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mickey Cohen, Nationally Prominent Personality …” More than ten thousand people showed up for the preview. The auction itself was something of a dud. Tuffy’s mahogany bed sold for just $35.

In truth, Cohen was in desperate shape. Sam Rummel, Cohen’s longtime attorney who had delivered him from every previous legal scrape, was dead. Rummel’s partner, Vernon Ferguson, was dying of brain cancer. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s longtime accountant, had turned state’s witness (though he did die suddenly of a [natural] heart attack before the trial began). In short, Cohen was going to trial utterly unprepared.

The trial began on June 4, with the prosecution asserting that it would show that Cohen had spent some $340,000 between 1946 and 1948. To the press, Mickey displayed the old bravado, confidently predicting at the end of the trial’s first day that he would “beat the rap.” Perhaps he really was confident. But this time, Mickey misunderstood the odds. In previous cases, such as the one recently brought against Cohen and his minions in connection with the beating of the widow-robbing radio repairman Al Pearson, Cohen had been able to present himself as something of a Robin Hood (or plead self-defense). This time, his lavish lifestyle was on trial. To secure a conviction, all the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to do was persuade jurors that Cohen had “willfully” avoided paying his taxes.

The prosecution’s strategy for doing this was simple: parading witnesses before the grand jury to testify about Cohen’s profligate spending in the late 1940s. All told, more than a hundred people were called. Furrier A. Lispey recounted delivering a $3,000 mink and a $2,400 marten cape to LaVonne. A maitre d’ was brought in to recount a $600 tip. An Italian shoemaker was brought in to tell the jury about how he custom-made “two or three” pairs of shoes a week for Mr. Cohen at a cost of $65 a pair (and up). Bail bondsman Louis Glasser testified that Cohen’s house and lot in Brentwood was worth a quarter of a million dollars. John O’Rourke, whose testimony in Miami before the Kefauver Committee had done so much to put Mickey in the feds’ crosshairs, was also brought in to testify. He now claimed that Mickey had won between $60,000 and $70,000 from him in the past three years.

Perhaps the hardest to bear of all, though, was the prosecution’s final witness—LaVonne’s interior decorator. “This woman,” Cohen would later rant, “who many claim robbed me of $40,000 or $50,000, got on the stand and finished me off exactly as the prosecution wanted the job done.”

At the end of each witness’s testimony, prosecutors added to a running chart of Cohen’s spending. As the numbers climbed higher—Cohen’s spending for 1947 added up to $180,000, a figure considerably higher than the $27,000 declared on his taxes—Mickey could feel the jury turning against him. His new attorneys seemed unable to stop the bleeding. Mickey tried to say that he’d lost large sums to O’Rourke in Miami as well, but O’Rourke denied it. He insisted that he never won more than a thousand dollars or so from Cohen. Attempts to assert that other expenditures had been reimbursed (and thus should not count as expenses that pointed to a large undeclared income) were likewise unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the prosecution produced evidence that Cohen had safety deposit boxes registered under fake names and stuffed with cash all over the city, Prosecutors portrayed them as further evidence of willful tax avoidance. Things were going so poorly for the defense that one day a reporter pulled Cohen aside and asked him if he knew what he was doing. The impression from the gallery, the reporter said, was that Mickey “was being thrown to the lions.”

Cohen’s mood darkened. His behavior became more erratic. The following day, a bailiff had to restrain Cohen when he lunged toward a Bureau of Internal Revenue agent. At other times, such as when he lingered to autograph copies of his old friend Jimmy Vaus’s new book, Why I Quit… Syndicated Crime (which Mickey had written the preface to), he was the preening Hollywood celebrity.

The smoking gun, however, came in the form of a net worth statement, signed by Mickey himself, that stated he had earned $244,163.15 in taxable income over a three-year period. Cohen felt blindsided. He’d never understood or paid attention to such things. Keeping him clean was Sackman’s job. Instead, by getting Mickey to sign this statement, Sackman had virtually ensured a conviction. On June 20, the court reached their verdict. Cohen was found guilty of three charges of income tax evasion and on one charge of falsifying a Bureau of Internal Revenue net worth statement. A sentencing date was set for early July. Cohen’s fate was now in Judge Ben Harrison’s hands.

Three weeks later, Cohen returned to court. Judge Harrison began his remarks on a remarkably mild note. “Los Angeles must take part of the responsibility for what has happened to [Cohen],” the judge began. “He was permitted to operate here as a betting commissioner with what I think was the virtual acquiescence of law enforcement officials.”

The judge then expounded on the “questionable environment” in which the “personable” gambler had been raised. He also noted the many letters he had received testifying to Mickey’s good side, prompting the exasperated assistant U.S. attorney to interject that the proceedings risked becoming “a society for the admiration of the good qualities of Mickey Cohen.” While acknowledging that Mickey had “been a good son to his mother,” the prosecutor reminded the judge that “he is here for the bad things he did.”

Judge Harrison shifted course, saying that he saw no prospect of Cohen resisting the temptation of easy money.

Mickey interjected. “Right now, I could go into the drugstore business in Arizona if the authorities hadn’t stopped me,” he said pleadingly. But Judge Harrison brushed this aside. Instead, he sentenced Cohen to a five-year prison term, to be served at the McNeil Island federal penitentiary off the coast of Washington State in the Puget Sound. He also fined Mickey $40,000 and ordered him to pay the government the $156,000 he owed in back taxes for the years 1946-1948, plus the cost of the trial itself, another $100,000.

Cohen was stunned. It was, he would later claim, “the only crime in my whole life of which I can say I am absolutely innocent.”

A request for bail was denied. Instead, Cohen was sent immediately to the county jail. A game of cat and mouse began. Cohen’s attorneys filed a series of motions requesting that their client be allowed to post bail pending a decision on his appeals request. In November, a federal judge ordered Cohen released on bail. But before he could be released, prosecutors succeeded in winning an injunction and then in overturning the order. If Cohen wanted to persist in appealing his conviction, he would do so from jail. In an effort to dissuade him from doing so, law enforcement authorities set out to make Cohen’s life behind bars as miserable as possible. Federal authorities insisted that Cohen be held in isolation and denied access to any visitors other than LaVonne and his attorneys. Only one exception was made to the no-visitors rule and that was for the Rev. Billy Graham, who stood by the little gangster.

“I am praying that after Mickey Cohen has paid his debt to society, he will give his heart and life to Christ,” Graham told Time magazine that summer. “He has the making of one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.”

The feds’ unsavory strategy to convince Mickey to drop his appeal request should have worked. To someone like Mickey, whose normal routine involved rising around noon, showering for an hour or so, and then changing into fresh (if not new) clothes and shoes, imprisonment wasn’t just an ordeal; it was torture. At least, it should have been. But the feds had a problem: head jailer Charles Fitzgerald, whom Mickey would later describe as “a very good friend.” Fitzgerald was a humanitarian. Under his supervision, Mickey had a way of gaining access to certain indulgences—multiple baths a day instead of just one a week, ready access to a good barber, fresh clothes, and food from outside. Cohen also found ways to exercise his innate talents: Rumor had it that he was running a variety of gambling rackets from the inside.

Eventually, the newspapers got wind of these indulgences and started reporting on Cohen’s behind-bars shenanigans. In response, the federal government dispatched an investigator to Los Angeles to tighten controls. Care packages from LaVonne and the multiple baths a day were ended. Greatly stressed, Fitzgerald retired, and a new jailer was appointed. He immediately summoned Cohen to his office and “in a very excited manner that also carried an apologetic tone” informed Mickey that measures would have to be taken to knock down the rumors in the papers. Mickey replied calmly that there was no satisfying the press: If he was put into solitary confinement on the roof, he told his new jailer, some newspaper would surely report it was penthouse living. Little did Mickey know that his life was about to take a turn for the worse.

One day in early 1952, soon after Mickey’s awkward interview with the new warden, Cohen was rudely awakened at five in the morning and, without even being given a chance to put on his socks or shoes, brought into the chief jailer’s office. There he found the Justice Department representative and two U.S. marshals waiting for him, along with an order to transfer him immediately to the city-run Lincoln Heights Jail. Mickey Cohen was about to enter the domain of Chief William H. Parker.

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.’”^[16]

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.

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 while 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 before 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.

Of course, Chief Parker was not without allies. He continued to command support from the city’s many Legionnaires, from Los Angeles’s Catholic hierarchy, and, now that he was defending it, from the force itself. Defenders pointed to the accomplishments of his traffic bureau, which had reduced vehicular homicides by half in nine years and made Los Angeles the safest big city in the world to drive in. The chamber of commerce applauded his reorganization of the department and the cost-saving innovations of the new research and planning bureau. The Los Angeles Times was also warming to the new chief. At a (supposedly) off-the-record meeting of civic and business leaders at the California Club (called so that Chief Parker could present his perspective on the current controversy), Parker complained that the allegations of unchecked police brutality were the result of the liberal Daily News’s vendetta against him.

But the most potent defense of the LAPD did not come from the city’s business establishment or its dominant newspaper. It came from Hollywood, in the form of a fledgling new television show called Dragnet.

DEAD BODIES, distressed dames, and dangerous games. Bombshell blondes and wisecracking private eyes. High heels, handguns, and homicide. Lonely days, rainy nights, and “streets that were dark with something more than night.” During the 1920s and ’30s, magazines such as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Gun Molls created a new genre of writing—pulp fiction (so named after the cheap pulp paper on which the magazines were printed). Schlocky and shocking, full of stock characters and lurid tales, the pulps quickly attracted big readerships. Surprisingly, they also attracted gifted writers, among them Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, who, in the 1930s, penned great books that in the 1940s became even greater movies—for example, The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Farewell, My Lovely; The Postman Always Rings Twice. In 1946, French film critic Nino Frank gave this style of filmmaking a name—“film noir.”

Then there was the noir radio drama Pat Novak for Hire.

Pat Novak took the classic private investigator formula to the nth degree. Set on the San Francisco waterfront, it featured a world-weary boat captain with a weakness for corny quips and a knack for getting involved in other people’s affairs. The show’s opening lines set the blase, world-weary tone: “Sure, I’m Pat Novak, for hire …” the show began, to the sound of foghorns on the waterfront. Invariably, Novak would agree to investigate a minor case—which led straight to murder. The dialogue was pure camp. Streets were “as deserted as a warm bottle of beer.” Dames who “made Cleopatra look like Apple Mary” appeared in Novak’s office at dusk, and spoke in voices “hot and sticky—like a furnace full of marshmallows.” What made it work was the tremulous, intimate voice of Pat Novak himself—a twenty-six-year-old voice actor named Jack Webb.

Jack Webb had grown up poor, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. Early on he developed a passion for jazz and the cinema. During the war, Webb worked as a clerk for the U.S. Army Air Force in Del Rio, Texas (though later press accounts made him a B-26 crew member). Afterward, he married a young singer/actress he’d met at a jazz club before the war, Julie London—the Julie London. (During the war, London was a popular pinup girl. None of Webb’s comrades believed that the gangly, intense twenty-two-year-old knew her—until he produced a letter.) In 1946, Webb moved to San Francisco and landed a job as a disk jockey at a local ABC-affiliated radio station, KGO. There Webb and his writing partner, Richard Breen, created Pat Novak for Hire. The sensitive yet cynical PI and his extraordinarily kitschy dialogue quickly attracted a loyal following. However, Webb’s big break came in 1948, when a Hollywood casting director heard one of Webb’s “private-eye plays” and offered him a part in a new Eagle-Lion film, He Walked by Night (1948).

Eagle-Lion was a little studio with dreams of becoming the next Warner Bros. He Walked by Night was inspired by the recent murder of a California Highway patrolman. The film told the story of the LAPD’s efforts to catch the burglar-turned-cop-killer; its highlight was an extended, real-time chase through the streets (and sewers) of Los Angeles. Webb’s role was a minor one: He played the part of a technician in the crime investigation lab (in real life, Lt. Lee Jones). However, the movie shaped his career in two critical ways. The first influence was stylistic. He Walked by Night began with an opening disclaimer: “The record is set down here factually—as it happened. Only the names are changed—to protect the innocent.” Its opening shot was an aerial pan of the city, with a dramatic voice-over: “This is Los Angeles. Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, as the Spanish named her. The fastest growing city in the nation …” The film also had a decidedly documentary flavor. It presented its story as one “taken from the files of the detective division.” All of these elements would later appear in Jack Webb’s most famous creation. The second influence was LAPD Det. Sgt. Marty Wynn, whom Webb met on the set.

Wynn had been provided by the LAPD as a technical advisor to the producers (one of whom, ironically, was Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s liaison to Hollywood, who had recently been released from the federal penitentiary after a prison sentence was mysteriously commuted). Although Wynn was supposed to instruct the director in the fine points of police procedure, once the filming got under way, he didn’t have much to do. Neither did Jack Webb. As a result, both men spent a lot of time in the commissary. There the two fell to talking. When Wynn found out that Webb was a radio actor who played the part of a private eye, he took to teasing him about the silliness of radio programs like Pat Novak.

“It makes every cop in the country laugh when they hear this nonsense on the radio,” Wynn told Webb. “Why doesn’t somebody show how detectives really break a crime?”

Wynn told Webb that he ought to do it right.

“I can arrange for you to have access to cases in the police files,” he told the actor. “Maybe you could do something with them.”

“I doubt it, Marty,” Webb responded, noting that “the fiction shows have such high ratings.” But the idea stuck with Webb. In fact, he had recently started sketching out another show about a lonely PI, tentatively titled Joe Friday, Room Five. What if Friday became a police officer instead? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Several weeks later, Webb called Wynn and told him that he was thinking about starting a new kind of police drama, one that portrayed police work as it really was. Wynn was pleased and, true to his word, arranged for Webb to start spending some time with Wynn and his partner, Vance Brasher.

Webb’s hunger for details and verisimilitude was voracious. “How do you frisk a suspect?” “How do you kick in a door?” “How do you clean your gun?” Jack Webb was a question a minute. He was soon spending all his free time at police department headquarters in City Hall. He got permission to start taking classes at the police academy. He was learning what it meant to be a detective.

Now he needed a name. The Cop was quickly dismissed as disrespectful. The Sergeant was too military. One day during a brainstorming session, writer Herb Ellis and Webb were talking about an earlier radio program, Calling All Cars, when Ellis asked Webb, “What do they call it when cops go all out to catch a crook?”

“They put out a dragnet,” Webb responded.

That was it. “Dragnet.” Now Webb had to find a network that would broadcast his show.

His first choice, CBS, passed. No blondes, no Humphrey Bogart-style Sam Spade, no audience was the network’s prediction. Webb disagreed. Authenticity was what would make his show unique. Webb went to NBC. It was desperate for programming, having recently lost prized performers Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, and Amos ‘n’ Andy to CBS—so desperate it was willing to give a true-to-life police documentary a go. There was just one condition: Webb had to have access to LAPD case files.

This was not necessarily an easy sell. Pat Novak for Hire had presented policemen in an almost uniformly bad light. (Nearly every episode featured a dumb, brutal police officer who hinders, threatens, and sometimes beats Novak as he attempts to solve the case.) So it was with some uncertainty that Wynn and Brasher took Webb to meet their captain, Jack Donahoe. They were fortunate in their choice. The good-natured Donahoe agreed to provide case notes to help Webb work up a pilot program that he could present to then-Asst. Chief Joe Reed. Webb was delighted when Reed pronounced the pilot “good and accurate.” The show then went to Chief Horrall, who informed Webb “he was on the right track, reflecting the day-to-day drudgery of police work.” It wasn’t exactly the reaction Webb was hoping for, but it got Webb what he needed—a departmental blessing and access to its case notes. In June 1949, the first episode of radio Dragnet went on the air, Friday evening at 10:00 p.m.

From the start, Webb was fanatical about getting the details right. Five soundmen were employed to create a range of more than three hundred special effects. Wherever possible, the program used actual recordings from the department. Soundmen staked out the City Hall garage to capture the roar of police cruisers speeding away; they also recorded the everyday background noise of City Hall. When a script called for a long-distance phone call from Los Angeles to Fountain Green, Utah, sound engineers placed a real call, and recorded the relay clicks and point-to-point operator comments. Terminology was precise and correct. A suggestion to replace “attention all units” with the more dramatic “calling all cars” was brushed aside. Understatement rather than the exaggerated accents, over-the-top sound effects, and histrionic acting that characterized most crime radio programs was the order of the day. The most important part of the new program, though, was its central character, played by Jack Webb himself, Sgt. Joe Friday.

In those days, your typical homicide detective had a very distinctive look. “His suits are not cheap, though they don’t always look well pressed,” wrote newspaperwoman Agnes Underwood, “and while not loud, would hardly be called dark, conservative business numbers.” Their ties, however, “shout like a movie homicide detective.”

If they are foppish about their ties, they are vainer in their searches to turn up the snazziest bands for their wrist watches…. The bands are dreams of matinee idols’ jewelers: gold stretch, mesh, hand-tooled leather, or carved silver. If one of these lads keeps looking at his watch, he’s not worried about the time, he’s trying to display his newest bracelet to his associates, even if he has to roll back his shirt cuff to guarantee they’ll see it.

There was “nothing sissy about the bracelet competitions,” Underwood continued, “for the bands bind brawny wrists, backing up tremendous fists, made more lethal by heavy rings on the third finger of the left hand. That’s one reason they don’t get beaten up like movie detectives; they know how to use those fists.”

Joe Friday (as played by Jack Webb) was different. He was young, tall, and almost painfully slim. (Despite being six feet tall, he weighed a mere 165 pounds, just five pounds over the LAPD’s minimum weight.) He dressed casually, in sports coats and a tie, but his demeanor was anything but casual. Friday was an organization man, professional through and through, courteous in his interactions with others, but determined to resolve the case before him. Contrary to the image that later emerged, Friday was not an emotionless automaton. In fact, his most famous phrase, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is one he never uttered. Nor was the original Joe Friday the painfully square detective of the 1960 series who battled “killer reefer.” Dragnet was vérité, like reality TV. At the same time, Joe Friday was the perfect noir hero, a jaded idealist, strangely single, who walked the mean streets of Los Angeles but who himself was “neither tarnished nor afraid.”

The radio program’s success was modest. It had enough listeners to keep it on the air (it eventually settled in on Thursdays, at 10:30 p.m.) but not enough to make it a true hit. Nonetheless, its unorthodox depiction of orthodox police work attracted avid fans. Police officers were delighted; single women were enthralled. (Many seemed to view the unattached Friday as a desirable catch; Webb was deluged with proposals.) Dragnet soon picked up a sponsor, the cigarette company Liggett & Myers, thus ensuring the program’s survival. It also attracted the attention of the nation’s self-styled number one lawman, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

In Dragnet, the bureau saw a new opportunity to burnish its image. So the FBI spoke to Liggett & Myers. Just a month after it had picked up the radio program, the cigarette company presented Webb and NBC with an unexpected demand: Henceforth every program would end with a tribute to a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy.

Webb, NBC, and the LAPD responded by raising hell. Neither Webb nor NBC liked the idea of a sponsor dictating creative decisions. Moreover, the FBI’s demand missed the point of the show. Dragnet was all about the day-to-day work of an ordinary police sergeant. The FBI’s National Academy was for high-ranking officers. Honoring only them would offend ordinary patrolmen. Moreover, everyone knew that the FBI already had its own radio program (This Is Your F.B.I.). Rather than provoking a fight with the bureau, Webb and NBC decided to drop the tribute entirely.

Soon after the tribute disappeared, two agents appeared at NBC’s L.A. studio and demanded to know what had happened to the idea of honoring an FBI Academy graduate. NBC blamed the LAPD. This was reported directly to Hoover. Worse, the memo to the director stated that the LAPD was talking trash about the bureau, telling the network that the FBI was “in bad repute with police departments across the country.” The memo claimed that the LAPD had even threatened to cease cooperating with the program if the FBI was honored. Hoover was upset. He retaliated by ending FBI participation in LAPD training and refusing to admit LAPD officers to the bureau’s prestigious National Academy. Although the alleged slight to the bureau had occurred before Parker became chief, the freeze extended to Chief Parker’s tenure, for reasons that are unclear. When Parker took office, he did not receive the customary letter of congratulations from the director.

Whether Parker knew about his department’s transgressions or picked up on the terrible snub he had received from Hoover is also unclear. Passing through Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1951, Parker was granted a personal meeting with Hoover. Later, according to the FBI’s L.A. special agent in charge (whose responsibilities included relaying all gossip regarding the bureau to FBI headquarters in Washington), the new chief “was very flattering in his expressions toward the Director and for the leadership he provides in law enforcement.” But Parker’s deference was short lived. He and the LAPD were on the verge of a series of steps that would transform the director’s frigidity into outright hostility.

BY 1951, both Webb and NBC were eager to expand the radio program into a new medium—television. That meant winning the support of Bill Parker. At first, Parker was hesitant. Truth be told, he didn’t much like Hollywood. The new chief blamed movies like The Keystone Cops for propagating an image of policemen as nincompoops. In letters to his wife, Helen, during the Second World War, he complained about having to pay to watch Hollywood films abroad. However, he did appreciate how effective moving pictures could be. During his days at the traffic division, he’d been involved in making informational films intended to educate drivers about how to use the freeways that were beginning to crisscross the basin. He understood the power of the moving picture. But the experience that really brought home to Parker just how powerful an advertisement Dragnet had become for the department came when he attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Miami in the fall of 1951. Everywhere he went, people addressed him as “Friday.”

Still, Parker hesitated. A radio program was one thing. A television show was another. It was hard to imagine one that would live up to his own high vision for the department. But Webb was ardent in making his case—and explicit in his promises. The department would review every script. Essentially, Parker would serve as a senior producer for the show. Total commitment to the highest ideals of police professionalism would be the program’s goal. Eventually Parker relented and gave Webb permission to shoot the pilot in City Hall. The episode was pulled from one of the most dramatic radio programs, “The Case of the Human Bomb.” Webb was not allowed to use the LAPD’s modern badge, the Series 6, though. Instead, he was restricted to the old Eagle badge—in case things went wrong.

The episode aired on Sunday, December 16, 1951. First came the famous music: dum-da-dum-dum. Pause. Dum-da-dum-dum-DUM. Then, as a picture of an LAPD sergeant’s badge filled the screen, the voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Several bars of music followed, then an aerial image of Los Angeles filled the screen—and the voice of Sgt. Joe Friday filled the air. “This is the city…Two million people. In my job, you get a chance to meet them all. I’m a cop.” (How Webb managed to use the word “cop,” which Parker strongly objected to, is unclear.) Parker was pleased by the dramatic story, in which Webb disarmed a bomber bent on toppling City Hall. The critics were impressed too. The New York Times praised the show’s “terseness and understatement.” Other critics hailed “the leisurely camera work, the restrained acting, and the crisp, sparing dialogue.” Said the Hollywood Reporter, “Just about everything good that can be said about a TV film show can be said about Dragnet. This series is going to do more to raise the rest of the country’s opinion of Los Angeles than any other show of any kind.” Webb was given permission to start using the department’s modern badge.

On January 3, 1952, Dragnet began appearing every other Thursday night on NBC. The radio drama continued as well, growing in popularity as the television show got established. To help review Webb’s various and growing productions for accuracy, Parker reached down to one of the officers in his public relations bureau, Gene Roddenberry, who was paid $25 per script. Roddenberry was soon writing freelance scripts of his own for shows like Mr. District Attorney while also helping Chief Parker with his speeches. Then, just as Dragnet’s first run of fourteen episodes was coming to an end, the Bloody Christmas scandal broke. The people of Los Angeles were about to experience a serious case of cognitive dissonance. Which was the truer face of the LAPD: the carefully controlled professionalism of Sgt. Joe Friday, or the brutal realities of the Lincoln Heights Jail on a drunken Christmas Eve night?

Parker’s initial response to the crisis—attack the department’s critics and claim that the police department was the real victim—had been clumsy. One of the reasons for Parker’s ambivalent response may well have been his own sense of personal responsibility. The commanding officer at Central Division whom investigators would later fault for the violence was Lt. Harry Fremont. Deputy Chief Harold Sullivan, who at the time headed the LAPD’s patrol bureau, had resisted putting Fremont into Central Division, warning that he “was a good detective but a drunk.” Sullivan even went so far as to put his reservations in writing. Parker ignored the warning. Yet in the aftermath of the beating, it was Sullivan who got transferred. Fortunately for Parker, Sullivan never breathed a word of what had happened.

Soon after his ill-received first appearance before the county grand jury, Parker changed tack. By the end of March, the newspapers were reporting that Internal Affairs was assisting the grand jury in its probe. Parker was also hinting broadly that the department might discipline officers even before the grand jury completed its investigation. Although he continued to speak out powerfully—even provocatively—in defense of the force, Parker now had a new goal: to show that no one could investigate the police department as thoroughly as the police department itself. In short, Sergeant Friday was on the job. He delivered on these promises. In the spring of 1952, the grand jury indicted eight officers on charges of “assault with force likely to do great bodily harm.” Ultimately four officers were given prison sentences, a fifth officer was fined, and three officers were acquitted.

Parker went further. He ordered the transfer of fifty-four police officers with connections to Bloody Christmas, including two deputy chiefs, two inspectors, four captains, five lieutenants, and six sergeants. Another thirty-three officers were suspended, many based on evidence inadmissible in court. As it became clear that the police department was conducting a massive purge, what pressure there was to oust Parker and reform Section 202 abated. The chief still handled criticism poorly. When in their final report the grand jury faulted Parker for conditions in the jail, he couldn’t resist issuing a furious retort, prompting columnist Florabel Muir and the editorial board of the Examiner to chide the chief for failing to acknowledge the department’s foot-dragging in the matter. But the criticism now seemed a minor one. The opportunity to remove the chief from office for malfeasance, in accordance with civil service protections, was closing. Parker was determined that it would never open again.

DRAGNET wasn’t the only television program that went on the air in 1952 and profoundly influenced the Los Angeles Police Department’s self-image. In April 1952, just months after the first airing of Dragnet, another show appeared that was arguably equally influential—even though it aired on KNBH, the local NBC station, for only a few months—The Thin Blue Line. The title referred to a famous incident during the 1854 Crimean War when the British Army’s 93rd Highland tegiment—drawn up only two lines deep rather than the customary four—routed a Russian cavalry force of 2,500 men. The producer—and star—was none other than Chief William H. Parker.

The purpose of The Thin Blue Line was unabashedly propagandistic—to counter “current attempts to undermine public confidence in the Police Department” and “instill greater confidence in the police service.” Although Parker recognized the need “to bring to the audience the type of information in which they are interested,” the show he had in mind was no Dragnet. Rather, The Thin Blue Line featured a panel of experts (almost always including Chief Parker himself) and a moderator, supplied by the studio. Even in 1952, this seemed a bit dull. After only five months, KNBH (which had always seen the program as public service programming, not compelling entertainment) pulled the plug on the broadcast. Nonetheless, The Thin Blue Line was enormously important—not as a television show, but as a metaphor. The notion that the police was all that stood between society and the void, between order and chaos, between “Americanism” and communism, was thrilling—but also treacherous. In this worldview, civilians were corrupt, weak. (“The American people are like children as far as gambling is concerned—they must be kept away from this temptation,” Parker told the Herald-Express in October, when asked to comment on a ballot initiative that would bring Nevada-style legalized gambling to California.) Organized crime furthered this corruption and, by doing so, threatened the nation’s very survival.

“Soviet Russia believes that the United States contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, to wit: avarice, greed, and corruption,” declared Parker in one often-quoted speech. “Russia believes we are rewriting the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, another nation that became great and collapsed from its internal weakness.”

Parker believed that a great conflict had commenced with Soviet Russia. War was already under way in Korea. To prevail in this conflict, the United States would need the virtues of Sparta, not the indulgences of the Sunset Strip. In short, Mickey Cohen and his ilk weren’t just criminals. They were the unwitting agents of international communism. Police officers were thus on the front lines of protecting civilization itself.

In this vital role, Parker wanted only the very best. The 4,100-officer department was, virtually everyone agreed, terribly short staffed. Both the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the International City Managers Association believed that a ratio of three officers per thousand residents was the absolute minimum for a force capable of securing an urban area. The city of Los Angeles and its two million residents had just two police officers per thousand residents. To meet IACP standards, Los Angeles would need a minimum of two thousand new police officers. Yet the department couldn’t even fill existing vacancies.

Parker thought the primary problem was low pay and the low social status of police officers. Others thought the problem had more to do with the department’s standards. The notoriously subpar force of the 1920s had became an elite group by the 1950s. Parker seemed to take pride in the fact that less than 7 percent of the men who passed the civil service examination made it to the academy—and that only a fifth of those made it through the thirteen-week course. The Los Angeles Police Department had a reputation as “the West Point of police training,” and Bill Parker liked it that way. His men were smart (with a minimum IQ of 110) and physically imposing (with a minimum height requirement of five feet, nine inches for men). Just as many who wanted the toughest, most challenging military assignments opted for the Marine Corps, so too were proud, aggressive officers drawn to the LAPD. Of course, they had to be. Doing the work of six thousand with just over four thousand placed unusual demands on the force. The LAPD had to be bigger, faster, more efficient, tougher.

One generation earlier, Berkeley police superintendent August Vollmer had dreamt of a professional police force whose members would not just uphold the law, but would also assess neighborhood problems like sociologists and address them like social workers. Parker had no interest in doing social work. “Law enforcement officers are neither equipped nor authorized to deal with broad social problems,” he declared. “[W]e deal with effects, not causes.” Eschatology interested him more than sociology. He wanted men who, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, would hold “the thin blue line until society came to its senses.”

DRAGNET’S success rankled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. So did Parker’s carping about the FBI’s temerity in investigating his department for potential civil rights violations. But irritation turned to anger when Parker informed “Kit” Carson, the special-agent-in-charge (SAC) of the L.A. office, that he intended to push for a resolution supporting a national clearinghouse for information on organized crime at the upcoming conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Parker also informed Carson that he planned to put his name forward as a candidate for the vice presidency of the IACP, a fact Carson promptly relayed to Hoover, along with the SAC’s personal assessment of Parker as “an opportunist of the first order.” This was too much for Hoover. Parker’s clearinghouse could become a rival to the bureau. Parker himself looked suspiciously like a rival to the director. Hoover’s instructions to his underlings were clear: All SACs should contact their friends in the local law enforcement community to sabotage Parker’s campaign. Parker’s election attempt was soundly defeated.

Hoover was determined to monitor the threat posed by Parker. Instructions went out to the Los Angeles SAC to watch Parker closely. Washington was soon informed that Parker “was often drinking to excess and had the reputation of being obstinate and pugnacious when under the influence of alcohol.” Scrawled Hoover on the bottom of one such memo, “I have no use for this fellow Parker and we should keep our guard up in all dealings with him. H.”

Parker had acquired a dangerous enemy. But the Los Angeles chief of police was too preoccupied with another adversary to notice.

17 The Trojan Horse

“You should always have a positive side to your program and ACCENTUATE it, but likewise you should use SUBTLE FEAR.”

—Cong. Norris Poulson, on how to win public office

BILL PARKER wasn’t willing to tolerate Communists in city government, period. Mayor Fletcher Bowron apparently was. Ironically, the two men’s disagreement on the issue of how deeply authorities should pry into individuals’ Political beliefs would create precisely what both men dreaded most—an opportunity for the underworld to “open” Los Angeles.

The issue was public housing. During (and immediately after) the war, Los Angeles faced an acute housing shortage. In 1949, Congress responded by passing an act authorizing the construction of more than 800,000 public housing units. Mayor Bowron sought a sizable share for Los Angeles. That summer, the city council unanimously approved a contract between the city’s housing authority and the federal government that provided for the construction of 10,000 units. But public sentiment then started to change. As the housing shortage eased, the need for federally subsidized housing seemed less pressing—and more antithetical to the principle of private ownership. In 1950, Los Angeles’s conservative business community, led by the Los Angeles Times and the chamber of commerce, persuaded the city council to overturn rent control. “Socialist housing,” as they described it, was a natural next target.

A narrow majority of the city council fell in line. On December 26, 1951, by a vote of 8-7, the city council passed a resolution that directed the city housing agency to halt construction on the public housing units it had already started building. An exasperated Mayor Bowron refused, noting that work had already begun, millions of dollars had been spent, and that a contract with the federal government had already been signed. Bowron offered to renegotiate the agreement and, if necessary, reduce the number of units; however, he refused to stop work entirely. His conservative opponents responded by announcing an anti-public housing referendum for the summer of 1952.

Bowron had the law on his side. In the spring of 1952, the California Supreme Court ruled that the city council “had no right or power to rescind approval of the project or to cancel or abrogate the agreements.” In late May, the state attorney general announced that in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the anti-public housing referendum, Proposition B, would be invalid, void, and have no force or effect. Still, Bowron recognized that he had a Political problem. He attempted to organize a closed-door colloquium with supporters and opponents of public housing alike to reach some consensus on the issue. But the mayor’s attempts at conciliation were dashed by the release of an LAPD report (requested by the conservative chamber of commerce) that depicted public housing as a breeding ground for juvenile delinquents. Furious, Mayor Bowron accused Parker of delivering “one of the most misleading reports ever issued in my administration.”

“There is nothing about a public housing project,” the mayor insisted, “which inherently breeds crime.”

Angelenos apparently disagreed. In June, city residents voted against public housing—379,050 “no’s” versus 258,777 “yeses.” Most politicians would have gotten the message. Not Mayor Bowron. Instead, in a radio address after the election, Bowron questioned whether the electorate “read and understood the question.” This condescending response allowed the Times to accuse the mayor of “saying that the public was so dumb… it didn’t know what it was voting about.”

Bowron pressed ahead. He now proposed to build 7,000 units. Opponents responded with an explosive charge, claiming that Communists had infiltrated the Los Angeles housing authority. In particular, councilman Ed Davenport alleged that the housing authority’s number two official, Frank Wilkinson, was a member of the Communist Party. The source of the information was the LAPD.

The charge emerged from a lawsuit involving a small parcel of property just north of downtown with striking views of the city, called Chavez Ravine. The city was proposing to evict a small group of private landowners in order to build public housing. Angry landowners responded by filing a lawsuit. During the trial, someone slipped an attorney for the plaintiffs an LAPD file that linked Wilkinson to the Communist Party. The accusation was a startling one. Wilkinson was the son of Dr. A. M. Wilkinson, a prominent civic activist who had worked closely with Mayor Bowron in the 1930s. The younger Wilkinson had taken loyalty oaths disavowing any connections to the Communist Party on numerous occasions. This time, however, he refused to answer questions about the subject.

Bowron had no interest in launching what he saw as a witch hunt into the background of a good friend’s son. Wilkinson was a capable public official. That was enough. Morally, this may have been admirable. Politically, it proved disastrous.

By 1952, Fletcher Bowron had been mayor of Los Angeles for fourteen years. When he first became mayor, he had enjoyed support from both the left and the right. As the years passed, however, Bowron had drifted ever closer to the more conservative business community. But this had not won him their gratitude. Bowron was still his own man, as the dispute over public housing clearly showed. The business establishment wanted someone more pliable. They now resolved to put a wholly dependable ally into the mayor’s office.

In December 1952, Times publisher Norman Chandler and Pacific Mutual Insurance president Asa Call summoned Los Angeles’s business elite to a strategy session on the top floor of the Times building. Among the group invited were lawyers Frank Doherty and James Beebe of O’Melveny & Myers and business leaders Neil Petree, Henry Duque, and Preston Hotchkis. The top item on their agenda was choosing a new mayor. Thirty-four names were up for discussion, but when the group got to the sixteenth, everyone agreed that they had found their man. Congressman Norris Poulson was an accountant, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who’d done yeoman’s duty in Congress blocking Arizona’s efforts to secure a larger allotment of water from the Colorado River. The day after Christmas, Norman Chandler called Poulson at his home in Washington and informed the congressman that a group of civic leaders wanted to draft him to run for mayor. Chandler invited Poulson to Los Angeles so that Poulson could hear their pitch. A follow-up letter described the details of their offer. In addition to promising to bankroll Poulson’s campaign “generously,” Chandler’s letter noted that the mayor’s salary was likely to be increased and that Poulson as mayor would be “entitled to strut around in a car (Cadillac) and chauffeur supplied by the city.” Although Poulson privately admitted that he “knew very little about the immediate problems of Los Angeles,” except for the public housing issue (which, of course, he opposed), he quickly agreed to sign on for the race. Times reporter Carlton Williams took charge of launching the congressman as a candidate.

Despite Parker’s disagreement with Bowron on public housing and Communists in city government, Parker valued the mayor’s dogged commitment to keeping Los Angeles “closed” to the underworld. Parker knew little about Poulson. So he assigned the intelligence division to investigate him. The LAPD quickly uncovered an unsettling connection to Moscow. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles for his meeting with Chandler and his associates, the intelligence division reported, Poulson had checked into a hotel and met with Joe Aidlin, a young attorney with left-wing credentials who had attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Although Aidlin and Poulson had very different political leanings, in 1950 Poulson had sponsored private legislation to prevent the deportation of one of Aidlin’s clients to Russia. He had also stepped in to spare an Aidlin client an appearance before HUAC. The following Christmas, Aidlin had given Poulson a small “liquor refrigerator”—price $157.35—from the Hecht’s department store. Poulson also seems to have realized that accepting this gift made him vulnerable. Soon after agreeing to run for mayor, he sent Aidlin a check for the refrigerator. When he came to Los Angeles to meet with Chandler, he arranged to see Aidlin in order to explain why he was paying for this gift. What Poulson didn’t know was that the LAPD’s intelligence division had bugged Poulson’s hotel room and was listening in.

No sooner had Poulson returned to D.C., than news of the “Red” refrigerator broke. Specifically, Poulson stood accused of protecting a suspected Communist from having to testify before HUAC in exchange for “a valuable electric refrigerator.” Armed with his canceled checks that showed he had paid for the refrigerator (and bolstered by supportive coverage from the Times and the Hearst papers), Poulson rode the scandal out. However, his troubles with the LAPD had only begun. Several weeks later, Poulson was approached by an athletic young man (a plainclothes detective) who asked the candidate what he would do about the police department if elected.

“I just casually reached over and touched a microphone which I detected pushing out from his shirt,” Poulson recounted in his unpublished memoirs. Then he walked away.

The realization that the LAPD was investigating him angered Poulson. But as the campaign progressed, Poulson’s anger toward Parker was modulated by the growing realization that Chief Parker had a point: The “hoodlum element” that Mayor Bowron and Chief Parker constantly warned about was real.

This realization came slowly. First, Poulson picked up on the fact that there was a deep antipathy toward Chief William Parker in many parts of the community. “I met many, many Democrats and I noticed that they were very anti-Parker,” recollected Poulson. This seemed to be particularly true of the Eastside Jewish community. Poulson’s most important backer there was the newspaper publisher Sam Gach, a former Shaw associate who was also reputed to be a close personal friend of Mickey Cohen. In meetings with Poulson, Gach and associates frequently brought up the subject of Chief Parker.

“They would say that they did not want to see the city ‘opened up,’ but Parker and his ‘Gestapo’ should be controlled,” recalled Poulson. At first Poulson wholeheartedly agreed. After all, he didn’t like the LAPD’s tough tactics either. But as the weeks passed, Poulson became increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of these discussions and the people who engaged in them. Some seemed very like “the hoodlum element” that Parker and Bowron so often inveighed against. It seemed clear what these people really wanted was a commitment to replace Parker and appoint a more “friendly” Police Commission. In a hard-fought campaign, Poulson wasn’t ready to reject their support, particularly “when I wasn’t positive what they represented.” However, he did decide—“within myself”—that if elected he would run a clean city.

As the campaign proceeded, Poulson grew increasingly concerned about the unsavory characters flocking to his campaign. The fact that he found himself mingling with the likes of District Attorney Ernest Roll and his wife in such mixed company did nothing to allay his concerns. It was highly worrisome to find the county DA associating with such dubious characters. Poulson also discovered that there was an anti-Parker clique within the police department, just as Mickey Cohen had alleged. On one occasion, Gach took Poulson to the offices of a former LAPD captain who had hung out a shingle in Beverly Hills as an attorney. His specialty was defending officers (and others) against Parker’s “Gestapo” (presumably the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs). There Gach collected a check for $1,200 for pro-Poulson newspaper advertisements and campaign work. The attorney in question (whom Poulson was surprised to see surrounded by four or five uniformed officers) informed the candidate that all he wanted was “a fair deal.” Naturally, Poulson agreed to provide that. Then he took the check and fled.

Los Angeles has a nonpartisan election system that requires mayoral candidates to win an outright majority in order to become mayor. As a result, mayoral elections are generally a two-step affair: the primary typically narrows the race to two candidates and then a runoff determines the winner. In April 1953, Poulson defeated Mayor Bowron in the primaries, winning 211,000 votes to Bowron’s 178,000. Bowron tried to put a game face on this loss, insisting that he had saved “his best ammunition for the finals.” With Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan at his side, Bowron lashed out against the “the Mammon of First Street” (i.e., Norman Chandler) and “the small group of people who control a vast commercial, financial, agricultural and industrial empire.

“Norman Chandler should run for mayor himself,” Bowron asserted, before pausing to note that neither Chandler nor many of his coconspirators even lived in Los Angeles. (Chandler lived in Sierra Madre. Beebe and Hotchkis lived in San Marino.)

But even Ronald Reagan couldn’t save Fletcher Bowron. Mammon retaliated, to devastating effect. Its point of attack was Mayor Bowron’s alleged softness on communism. Its weapon was Chief William Parker.

On May 18—exactly one week before the general election—the House Subcommittee on Government Operations announced that it would be coming to Los Angeles to hold two days of hearings into how Communists had infiltrated the city’s housing authority. Democratic members of the committee protested this brazen attempt to influence the election—to no avail. Republican congressman Clare Hoffman insisted he knew nothing about local elections and pressed ahead. The hearings were broadcast on local TV. Three former employees who had refused to answer questions about their potential membership in the Communist Party on an earlier occasion were summoned to repeat the performance for the cameras. The star witness, though, was Parker. After carefully noting that he was appearing at this sensitive time only because the committee had subpoenaed him, Parker proceeded to relate how in early 1952 he had given Mayor Bowron dossiers on ten housing agency figures with radical connections, including a dossier on Frank Wilkinson. At the committee’s instruction, Parker then read the confidential dossier in its entirety. Bowron, he told the committee, had simply thrown the dossier out.

Parker’s testimony was extremely damaging to the mayor. But Congressman Poulson wasn’t exactly reveling in what looked increasingly like an approaching victory, for as the odds of an upset grew, the underworld became even more overt in its overtures. A former city councilman whom Poulson knew well, Roy Hampton, approached the candidate to offer him “an enormous campaign fund” if he would “pledge to appoint a friendly Police Commission and get rid of Parker.” Again, Poulson begged off, promising only to “investigate this situation thoroughly.”

Just days before the election, Poulson went to breakfast with someone he would later identify only as “a former deputy district attorney and now the vice president of a Los Angeles and nationally known institution.” When he arrived, the candidate was startled to find the shady ex-LAPD-captain-turned-attorney and a well-known “Las Vegas gambling man” waiting for him. As he sat down to breakfast, Poulson was “really scared.” The men got right to it: They offered Poulson $35,000 if he would agree to name three men to the five-member Police Commission. Poulson tried to stall. The men then insisted that “I go out and talk in the gambler’s car.” Even though he suspected that he was being maneuvered into a “bugged” car, Poulson was too frightened to refuse.

“I talked in circles,” Poulson wrote in his memoirs. A few days later, on April 7, Poulson defeated Bowron, 53 to 47 percent, and became Los Angeles’s next mayor. Yet as Poulson left the Gaylord Hotel downtown to go to his campaign headquarters to celebrate his victory, he was “filled with mixed emotions.” Thoughts of Cadillacs, chauffeurs, and a nice raise seemed far away. Poulson now had to worry about how he could avoid “opening up the town” in light of the fact that “some of the people who had supported me thought I would.” Some of these people were very rough. Poulson had to decide whether he would face them with Chief Parker and his intelligence division or without them.

18 The Magna Carta of the Criminal

“The voice of the criminal, the Communist, and the self-appointed defender of civil liberties cries out for more and more restrictions upon police authority.”

—Chief William Parker

POLICE TACTICS WERE TOUGH.

In early 1952, Chicago Outfit bosses Tony (“Joe Batters” aka “Big Tuna”) Accardo and Sam Giancana decided to pay a visit to Johnny Roselli in Los Angeles en route to a vacation in Las Vegas. Accardo was well aware of the LAPD intelligence division’s practice of reviewing passenger manifests so that it could intercept suspected gangsters. As a result, he took the precaution of booking his ticket as “Mr. S. Mann.” Giancana booked a separate ticket as “Michael Mancuso” and avoided any interaction with Accardo on the flight. But when the two underworld figures (and Accardo’s doctor) arrived, the LAPD’s airport squad quickly identified the Chicago Mob bosses. Accardo and his associates left the airport with a police tail.

Accardo’s party proceeded to Perino’s restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles’s poshest dining establishment. There the men passed a pleasant meal under the watchful eye of a contingent of plainclothes policemen. As the men were finishing their meal, Lt. W C. Hull stepped up to the table and ordered the men to produce identification. They did. The police then frisked the men, removing $12,000 in cash, at which point they were driven back to the airport and put on the next flight to Las Vegas.

The men who had stalked Accardo and Giancana came from Capt. James Hamilton’s intelligence division. Its two watch lieutenants, seven sergeants, and twenty-six patrolmen (and women) conducted operations of remarkable scope. One team of officers worked full time on background checks, reviewing credit reports, bank account information, utility bills, and the like in order to monitor underworld attempts to infiltrate legitimate businesses. Another team specialized in electronic surveillance. (Olney’s commission said only that “a considerable amount of information is obtained in this manner.”) A three-man airport unit, manned by officers chosen for their ability to memorize hundreds of mug shots of gangsters from across the country, monitored Los Angeles International Airport twenty hours a day. It was this unit that spotted Accardo and Giancana.

Visiting gangsters were sent packing, with no regard for legal niceties. Hoodlums who were L.A. residents, such as Cohen henchmen Frank and Joe Sica, were tracked constantly by two-man teams of officers. These officers were not subtle. Indeed, the department openly stated “this scrutiny may at times border on harassment and [be aimed at] driving the subject hoodlum from our jurisdiction.” The police wanted people to know they were being watched; they wanted the bad guys to feel uncomfortable. They also wanted associates of criminals to feel uncomfortable. Intelligence division officers routinely visited businessmen and casual acquaintances of known hoodlums and asked them to prove that they weren’t involved in underworld activities by ending the relationships. The goal was to make it difficult and unpleasant for the subject of surveillance to meet with others, transact business, or have friends.

The intelligence division was also the unit that was watching mayor-elect Norris Poulson.

At first, Poulson sympathized with those who railed against Parker’s “secret police.” But after getting a firsthand look at the underworld, he was more understanding of police tactics. His own experiences had left him with no doubt that the underworld was actively attempting to regain control of Los Angeles. Nonetheless, Parker’s black-hat operations were disturbing. No target was off limits. Indeed, soon after Parker took office, conservative councilman Ed Davenport was enraged to find two policemen hiding in a closet listening in on a meeting Davenport was having with some businessmen constituents. Local politicians saw the unit as Parker’s Praetorian guard. So did Parker himself. In a letter to a priest who had written to request details about the unit, Parker openly explained that one of the division’s missions was to protect the chief from political attack. In addition to “exceptional traits of characters,” Parker wrote that officers who hoped to be assigned to intelligence had to be “trustworthy to the Office of the Chief of Police.” The reason Parker provided for this extraordinary requirement was an interesting one: “While such loyalty to the Office might be interpreted by some to be of a personal nature”—as indeed it clearly was—“we believe such loyalty to be to the integrity of the department.” Loyalty to Parker had become tantamount to police integrity.

Then there were the intelligence division files. The division maintained an alphabetical master card file “on all persons who have been brought to our attention.” The protocol was precise: 5 × 8 card with name, physical description, photo, address, phone number, description and license of car, friends, activities, and associations. These cards were then cross-indexed with the general criminal files. Fed by the intelligence division’s investigations and by a clipping service that monitored twenty newspapers across the country, the files grew quickly. How quickly was a closely held secret. No judge could subpoena these files. No Police Commission could review them, for, in another extraordinary decision, Chief Parker had ruled that these were not actually official police files. Rather, they were the personal property of the chief of police.

The potential for the abuse of power was obvious—indeed, Poulson himself had experienced it during his mayoral campaign. Yet far from expressing contrition, Chief Parker seemed to take pleasure in dropping hints about just how much he knew. “In my conversations with him,” Poulson would later recall, “he would inadvertently tell what he knew about this person or that…. I later found out that Chief Parker had a file on MANY PEOPLE and not all communist suspects.” Indeed, Parker continued to keep Poulson under surveillance, even after he became mayor. In most cities, this alone would have been a firing offense. But Parker was protected by several formidable defenses. The first was the legal defenses he had drafted in the thirties. As the liberal Daily News noted, Parker’s 1930s reforms meant that the Police Commission “can’t hire unless there is a vacancy and it can’t create a vacancy unless there is grave cause and then only after a hearing.” The second was his department’s growing reputation as—in policing expert O. W. Wilson’s constantly cited phrase—“the county’s best big city police department.” Just weeks before the Poulson-Bowron runoff election, the Governor’s Commission on Organized Crime had issued a report praising the LAPD for its success in keeping eastern gangsters out. (It warned that they were resettling in Palm Springs instead.) Tangling with a chief whose work was garnering such accolades carried big political risks.

There was a third reason to keep Parker in office as well: fear. Los Angeles was rife with rumors that gamblers and racketeers had already “cut the town up.” Poulson knew from personal experience that these rumors had some basis in fact. Firing Chief Parker would have been tantamount to inviting the underworld interests who had so frightened the mayor during his campaign to open shop in Los Angeles. Poulson viewed Parker as an admirable law enforcement officer but a “cold-blooded, self-centered individual.” Ultimately, though, Poulson feared the Mob more than his chief of police. Chief Parker, announced Poulson a few weeks before his swearing in, would stay.

“Chief Parker is to remain on the job on the basis of what he does from now on,” Poulson pointedly told the Los Angeles Times. “It will be up to the Chief to produce and to prove to the new Police Commission—and to me—that he is the proper man to remain at the head of the Police Department.”

Although he had concluded that firing Parker was simply too dangerous (politically and personally), Poulson was determined to restrain him. The mayor’s strategy for doing this was to appoint a Police Commission that “would not kowtow to Chief Parker but at the same time would support a clean city and law enforcement.” Since Bowron’s appointees had resigned, Poulson had a chance to appoint all five police commissioners. To head the commission, Poulson turned to his top assistant, attorney Jack Irwin. Other members included John Ferraro, a former USC All-American football star who was the son-in-law of state Sen. George Luckey, one of Poulson’s major Democratic backers. He also added Michael Kohn, a prominent Jewish lawyer, and Herbert Greenwood, an African American attorney who had worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One member of the old commission, Emmett McGaughey, a former G-man-turned-advertising executive (who was also in Poulson’s church), agreed to stay on.

The message Poulson intended to send was clear: A new, more assertive Police Commission was taking over. But Poulson’s stern tone and high-powered appointments didn’t obscure an even more important fact: Chief Parker had just become the first police chief since 1913 to survive a change in administration. By not selecting his own candidate to be Los Angeles’s top cop, Poulson was in effect conceding that his police chief was too valuable to lose. The LAPD had just taken a huge step toward the kind of autonomy Bill Parker had long dreamed of.

Parker’s enemies warned the new mayor that he was making a mistake. Two weeks after Poulson was sworn in, former Police Commission member Hugh Irey published a two-part open letter to the new mayor in the Los Angeles Mirror. Its purpose, in the author’s words, was to present “irrefutable facts to show that it is physically impossible for the Police Commission—under the present system—to be more than a figurehead for the Chief of Police.” Irey described Parker as “probably the most powerful official in the city.” He insisted that his goal was not to attack Parker, whom he described as a man of integrity, but rather to offer a critique of a flawed system. But Irey did paint a disturbing portrait of the police department under the new chief. He called attention to the chief’s $85,000 “secret service fund.” He described how the commission was powerless to conduct its own investigation into brutality cases, lacking even the authority to review the material used by the chief to formulate the report he presented to the board on any given incident. In conclusion, Irey called for full-time, paid commissioners, with investigators drawn from the detectives’ bureau (which unlike the three other plainclothes units—Internal Affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice—did not work directly under Parker’s personal supervision).

“Until these recommendations … are put into effect the Los Angeles Police Commission will continue to be a mere figurehead and rubber stamp for the Chief of Police—one of the most powerful and autocratic officials in the city,” warned Irey.

Parker just scoffed.

“I’ve told the Police Commissioners repeatedly that anytime three of them are against me to let me know and I’ll retire,” he replied.

This was disingenuous. No Police Commission would ever act against the mayor on such an important issue, and Mayor Poulson had made it clear that he could not do without Parker. Irey’s warnings were ignored. No changes were made to the organization of the commission. The department would continue to be run as Parker’s personal fiefdom. Local observers marveled at Parker’s triumph.

“Hardly anyone likes Parker, a contentious, abrasive individual who will never give Dale Carnegie lessons on ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’” wrote the Los Angeles Daily News. Yet Parker had achieved something that his predecessors had not. He had become irreplaceable.

POULSON HOPED that his Police Commission would be able to restrain Chief Parker. But the limitations of the commission’s structure and the dependencies on the department it fostered soon reasserted themselves. The commission met just one afternoon a week, typically for no more than an hour and a half. Most of its meetings were devoted to humdrum licensing tasks, okaying requests for parades, licensing pawnshops, vetting requests by churches to hold rummage sales, approving applications for dance halls. Its only staff were police department personnel. On those occasions when it did take up larger, policing issues, it relied on the police for guidance. Not surprisingly, the course of action it elected to pursue was almost always the one the department itself would have chosen.

If those weren’t constraints enough, Chief Parker set out to actively win over the Police Commission’s most important member, former Poulson campaign manager Jack Irwin. By the end of his first year in office, Irwin was routinely siding with Chief Parker over his old friend the mayor. Poulson would later blame Parker for wrecking his friendship with Irwin. Slowly, Chief Parker was gaining the upper hand.

POULSON STRUGGLED in his dealings with the chief. Parker prided himself on his analytic approach to problems, but Poulson found him to be a volatile and unpredictable partner. At times, Parker seemed to accept that the city’s elected officials had an important role in governing the department, as in setting salaries. At other times, even the most basic attempts by Mayor Poulson to guide the department would set Parker off. In the spring of 1954, for instance, Mayor Poulson (an accountant by training) and City Administrative Officer Samuel Leask decided to take a close look at Parker’s budget request for the coming year. In doing so, Leask discovered that 750 officers were working at clerical and office tasks that seemed to require no special policing skills. Another 56 officers were guarding 200 low-risk chronic drunks at the Bouquet Valley police farm, a facility commonly known as the dude ranch. Transferring those officers to the field would dramatically increase the number of cops on the street without altering the standards Parker insisted had provided the city with the world’s greatest police force. Surely, some of the other officers could be diverted to more arduous work as well, Poulson and Leask reasoned.

But when Leask presented the idea to Parker, the chief reacted angrily. It wasn’t so much the substance of the idea that annoyed Parker. Over the course of the preceding two years, Parker himself had released 109 officers for fieldwork by hiring civilian substitutes. Rather, Parker objected to the idea that Sam Leask—a man who knew nothing about policing—could swoop in and find inefficiencies that Parker had missed. At a public meeting on the police department’s budget chaired by the mayor, Parker made no attempt to conceal his pique. The chief repeatedly interrupted Leask’s attempts to present his analysis, going so far as to inform the astonished mayor that the management and budget of the police department were “his [meaning Parker’s] own business.” Parker’s behavior was so boorish that Mayor Poulson, who was chairing the meeting, finally stepped in and asked Parker to let Leask speak.

Parker exploded, shouting, as he jabbed his finger at the city’s chief elected official, that he would not be “intimidated” by the mayor. He even threatened to resign.

Mayor Poulson was astonished.

“You talk like you’re offended and that we have no right to ask you how your department functions and how the taxpayers’ money is spent,” Poulson told Parker. “You immediately get angry. You talk like we were sticking our nose into something that wasn’t our business. It is our business and there’s no use you getting red in the face.”

It was classic Parker. The chief prided himself on being rational and fact-driven; he often described critics as “emotional” or “hysterical.” But in fact, Parker himself was a highly emotional man whose responses to “attacks” (real or perceived) were often more than a little hysterical. Eventually, Parker calmed down. However, he continued to resist the mayor’s dictates. In the years that followed, Parker allowed the percentage of civilian employees in the department to rise only incrementally, from 23.3 percent to 25 percent.

This policy of resistance came at a high cost. Tight budgets, high standards, and attrition continued to take a terrible toll on the department. In a memo to the Police Commission in the spring of 1954, Parker noted that in July 1955 the department would have 4,453 sworn personnel—roughly the same number of officers the department had when he had become chief of police in August 1950. Yet during this same period, Los Angeles had added more than 120,000 new residents. The city was growing; its police department was not.

So far, the consequences of this situation had been minimal. Despite the comparatively small size of the LAPD, Los Angeles’s crime rate remained slightly lower than in other big cities. However, crime was growing fast—faster even than the city’s population. Yet while Parker desperately wanted more officers, he rejected the idea that the police had any connection to the crime rate.

“You can blame the situation on your police if you wish,” he told the city council during an appearance in late 1953. “You can lay it in their laps, if you want to. Blame them even for social problems over which they have little control…. But let’s be practical and realistic. The police do not create crime problems…. Nothing is solved by hysteria.”

“I wish that crime were a simple plague to be solved by isolating a troublesome microbe, but it is not,” Parker declared in a 1953 speech on crime and belief. “I wish it could be eliminated materialistically, by continually supplying Americans with chrome fixtures, softer beds, and shorter work hours, but I know that it cannot be thus eradicated. Certainly I do wish that the police had it within their power to solve the problem alone, but I know that they cannot.” Only by restoring the citizenry’s belief in the sanctity of the law could chaos be avoided, he concluded.

Parker’s speeches called his audiences to a sterner morality. But the chief’s worldview was fatalistic, and his analysis of society’s problems discouraged practical responses. It was one thing to argue that the police weren’t responsible for the increase in crime. But Parker seemed to be suggesting that neither police efforts nor any “materialistic” initiatives could address the rise in crime. Politically, this was a convenient proposition for everyone. It allowed Parker to avoid questions about why what was supposedly the nation’s best police force was presiding over such dramatic increases in crime, and it allowed politicians to avoid raising taxes to expand a department run by a man many of them distrusted. It was easier to flatter the chief for creating the country’s greatest police force, one that could do more with less.

But of course, Parker still faced the challenge of policing a growing city with a stagnant police force. The key to doing more with less was intelligence. Intelligence kept the underworld from buying politicians, corrupting police officers, and controlling the police department. Intelligence was the key to taking the fight to the underworld, and in the mid-1950s, the underworld seemed to be the locus of serious crime in Los Angeles. But the department’s ability to collect intelligence was about to suffer a series of blows from an unexpected and formidable adversary—the courts.

FOR DECADES, police departments had enjoyed wide latitude in how they went about apprehending criminal suspects. In 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that evidence improperly or illegally obtained could not be used at trial—a principle known today as the exclusionary rule. But the exclusionary rule applied only to federal law enforcement agencies. For local law enforcement, the proof was in the pudding. If the evidence was incriminating, courts typically asked few questions about how it was obtained. Only the most flagrant examples of police misconduct could bestir most judges to exclude evidence. The result was corner-cutting. Civil liberties advocate Hugh Manes would later note that between 1931 and 1962, the LAPD served only 631 search warrants, about 20 a year, a shockingly low number. Police routinely responded to truly serious crimes by throwing dragnets around entire neighborhoods and “tossing” hotels, motels, and even private homes in search of potential suspects. Yet in its 1949 decision Wolf v. Colorado, the court reiterated its opinion that the exclusionary rule did not apply to local law enforcement agencies.

Of course, not every method was legal. Federal statutes prohibited wiretapping, as did California state law. The prohibition was absolute: No provision was provided for law enforcement agencies to seek court permission to tap a phone line. Parker understandably viewed this as a major problem. But the department did have a work-around; it simply broke into people’s homes and businesses and installed dictographs. The police department reasoned that since these were stand-alone recording devices that did not involve “tapping” a phone line, they were legal, end of story. The courts agreed—until November 1953, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Irvine v. California.

The case involved a suspected bookmaker (Irvine) who’d been targeted by the Long Beach Police Department. Officers had brought in a locksmith to make copies of the man’s house keys, entered his house, and then installed a dictograph in his bedroom closet—all without a search warrant. The evidence obtained from the “bug” was the basis of the man’s subsequent conviction. During his first trial in state court, the bookmaker had argued that by breaking into his house without a warrant, police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. The state court disagreed, as did the state appeals court. So Irvine petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, successfully.

On February 8, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. It noted that repeatedly entering the petitioner’s home without a warrant “was a trespass and probably a burglary.” The majority opinion described dictographs as “frightening instruments of surveillance and invasion of privacy, whether [used] by the policeman, the blackmailer, or the busybody.

“That officers of the law would break and enter a home, secrete such a device, even in a bedroom, and listen to the conversation of the occupants for over a month would be almost incredible if it were not admitted,” the majority continued. “Few police measures have come to our attention that more flagrantly, deliberately, and persistently violated the fundamental principle declared by the Fourth Amendment as a restriction on the Federal Government.” But the court nonetheless concluded that this restriction was one that applied only to the federal government.

“[I]n a prosecution in a State Court for a State crime, the Fourth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson in the 5-4 majority decision. As a result, the court declined to overturn the conviction. However, in what Earl Warren biographer Jim Newton describes as the “extraordinary” final paragraph of the opinion, Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Warren took the highly unusual step of noting that federal law allowed for the prosecution of police officers who, acting under color of authority, willfully deprived a person of a federal right such as the right to be secure in one’s home. The two justices then directed the court clerk to forward a copy of the record in this case, together with a copy of this opinion, to the U.S. attorney general for possible prosecution.

Parker was dumbfounded—and outraged. The highest court in the land had essentially described one of the most valuable tools in law enforcement—the dictograph—as something evil. In Parker’s opinion, this description was incorrect and, in light of dictographs’ long history as useful law enforcement tools, bizarre.

“Since the advent of appropriate electronic devices, the police of this state have utilized such devices to gather information and evidence concerning criminal activities,” Parker responded three months later, in a speech at the Biltmore Hotel marking National Crime Prevention Week. He insisted that they did so in ways that were tightly controlled. Section 6539(h) of the California Penal Code allowed dictographs only when expressly authorized by the head of a police force or by the district attorney. The evidence thus obtained, Parker insisted, had been invaluable in the department’s fight against organized crime:

A reputed overlord of crime in this area is now serving a term in a federal prison as a result of a prosecution in which information obtained through the use of dictographic equipment contributed materially. Two reputed members of the Mafia, who escaped federal prosecution for narcotic violations when a key witness against them was found murdered, were recently convicted of crimes in the courts of this state based upon evidence obtained through a dictograph installation. The reputed head of the local Mafia is now awaiting deportation, largely as the result of a local conviction obtained through the use of a dictographic installation. One such installation alone aided our department in solving forty-three serious crimes.

If anything, Parker continued, California’s total ban on wiretapping was too restrictive. Attempts by Parker and other chiefs to create a mechanism that would allow them to ask a court for permission to intercept telegraphs and tap telephones based on probable cause had stalled in the legislature, creating what Parker described in one speech as providing “a Yalu river sanctuary within the vast telegraphic and telephonic communications network of the United States within which to plan and transact their illegal activities with impunity.” Parker’s allusion—a reference to the river redoubt from which the Chinese Army had attacked U.S. forces during the Korean War—could hardly have been more pointed.

The position of Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Earl Warren must have been particularly galling. As California’s attorney general, Warren had not hesitated to brush aside legalistic objections in his pursuit of justice (most notably, when he personally directed a police raid on Tony Cornero’s gambling ship, the SS Rex, despite a court ruling that it was operating outside of California’s territorial waters). Yet now, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Warren seemed intent on imposing unprecedented new restrictions on law enforcement. The timing, in Parker’s opinion, was terrible. Between 1950 and 1953, the LAPD had actually become smaller as Los Angeles grew. The city’s crime rate was growing at an ever faster rate—a trend Parker described to the city council as “a very frightening thing.” Yet instead of giving the police greater power, the judiciary was imposing new restrictions. Parker believed that by criticizing the use of dictographs (which have “solved countless serious crimes”), the court was raising the prospect that police officers might be prosecuted for what had long been standard operating procedure. In one speech, he asked his audience to consider the officer who responded to a call and saw a housewife, prone on the floor, a probable suicide attempt at death’s very door. Any officer worth his salt would kick in the door and race the woman to the hospital to pump her stomach. Was this to be treated now as trespassing, kidnapping, and rape?

“Certainly society cannot expect the police to risk criminal prosecution when their only sin is the valid enforcement of the law as they have been led to understand the law,” Parker concluded.

This was a sensitive—and not entirely hypothetical—subject for Parker. For by his third year as chief, he himself had emerged as a major target of lawsuits. The first had come after the Bloody Christmas beating. More serious was a 1951 lawsuit filed by civil rights attorney A. L. Wirin, lead attorney for the Southern California Civil Liberties Union. Since both the state and federal court systems were as yet unprepared to exclude evidence gathered illegally by local police departments, Wirin sought to shut down the LAPD’s surveillance activities in another fashion—by enjoining the police department from using public money to illegally install dictographs. Parker once again detected the hand of Moscow. At a hearing, he blurted out his suspicions that the Minsk-born Wirin (whose initials stood for “Abraham Lincoln”) was a Communist.

Wirin’s attempts to rein in the LAPD’s surveillance operations attracted broad sympathy—not least from the city’s elected officials. That spring, two councilmen, Harold Harby and Ernest Debs, discovered that their work telephones had been wiretapped. Both pointed at the police. Parker vehemently denied the allegation, blaming the underworld instead. Given the history of wiretapping in City Hall, many doubted this denial. Just two days after the councilmen had accused the department of illegally listening in, the Los Angeles Times reported that the new police administration building nearing completion around the corner from City Hall was chockablock with bugs and listening devices. This provided little reassurance to the city’s already fearful political establishment.

Chief Parker was determined to defend—and expand—his surveillance tools. To do so, he turned to the television show Dragnet. By 1954, Dragnet had become the second most popular television show in the country (after I Love Lucy). The radio version (which now aired Sunday nights) also continued to attract a large audience. NBC was eager to create a feature film-length version of the show. The LAPD was prepared to offer Jack Webb a particularly juicy case file to serve as the basis of the script—one that involved a spectacular gang murder—but it came with a catch. The case was solved only after the police turned to extreme tactics, including near-constant police harassment and constant surveillance. Webb accepted the deal. As a result, audiences were treated to a movie with an unusual hero—the LAPD intelligence division. With its assistance (and a skillfully placed bug), Webb cracked the case of a gangland hit—only to run into trouble in the courtroom. There, after underworld witnesses refused to testify, Friday expresses his frustration at being unable to use a wiretap too.

A female juror objects. “How do we know that all you policemen wouldn’t be running around listening to all our conversations?” she asks.

“We would if you talked murder,” Friday snaps back.

Even Parker supporters, such as the in-house publication of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, The Tidings, were somewhat disconcerted by the film’s depiction of harsh police tactics. But Parker insisted that such misgivings were misinformed.

“Far from being a threat to our freedom,” Parker wrote in the pages of the California Law Review the following spring, “the use of modern technological devices by the police may well be their most powerful tool in combating our internal enemies, and a vital necessity in the protection of our nation’s security, harmony, and internal well-being.”

In addition to trying to win public support for less restrictive wiretapping laws, Parker also sought broader legal protections for his officers. In the fall of 1954, Parker kicked off a campaign to persuade allies in the state legislature to pass a law shielding law enforcement officers from the threat of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits for actions taken in the routine course of their work. But just weeks after Parker floated this proposal, state attorney general Pat Brown made an announcement that preempted Parker’s efforts. Brown suggested that local district attorneys henceforth consider prosecuting police officers who broke into citizens’ homes to install dictographs without a court order. Then, on April 27, 1955, the California Supreme Court suddenly and unexpectedly issued a ruling that threatened to destroy what Parker had so carefully built.

The case of Cahan v. California bore a striking resemblance to Irvine. This time it was the LAPD that had broken into the property of a suspected bookmaker, thirty-one-year-old Charlie Cahan. He was a big-time bookie, with a clearinghouse near the Coliseum, an elaborate call-back system to avoid police detection, and a network of backup “spots” across the city where debtors could place bets in person. The LAPD estimated that he was handling about $6 million a year, and his lifestyle showed it. According to an LAPD intelligence dossier, Cahan had “concubines, liquor by the case, a lavish penthouse, Cadillacs.” Cahan had emerged from nowhere and become an important player virtually overnight. Many assumed he was paying for police protection. He wasn’t. On the contrary, Chief Parker had instructed the intelligence division in no uncertain terms that he wanted “this son of a bitch in jail.”

So the intelligence division sent a man disguised as a termite inspector into the building housing Cahan’s accountants to install a dictograph. The recordings secured a conviction, and Cahan was fined $2,000, sentenced to nine days in prison, and given a five-year-probation. Cahan appealed the decision. An appeals court rejected it, but when Cahan took his case to the California Supreme Court, it was accepted. A narrow 4-3 majority threw out Cahan’s conviction.

“We have been compelled to [void the conviction and impose new evidentiary guidelines] because other remedies have completely failed to secure compliance with constitutional provisions on the part of police officers,” wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the majority opinion. He continued, “The courts under the old rule have been constantly required to participate in, and in effect condone, the lawless activities of law enforcement.”

Traynor served notice that such practices were now coming to an end. The court struck down a California law that allowed courts to accept evidence, regardless of the manner in which it was obtained. Henceforth evidence improperly acquired would be thrown out—period. This was a fairly extreme remedy. Few other states imposed the exclusionary rule in such a blanket fashion. But the court insisted that the stakes justified such a draconian remedy.

“Today one of the foremost concerns is the police state,” declared Justice Traynor bluntly. “Recent history has demonstrated all too clearly how short the step is from lawless although efficient enforcement of the law to the stamping out of human rights.”

Parker’s reaction was apoplectic. He described the ruling as “a terrible blow to efficient law enforcement” and warned that the decision “will probably set law enforcement back fifty years.”

“The positive implication drawn from the Cahan case is that activities of the police are a greater social menace than are the activities of the criminal,” he told the press. “This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.” State assistant attorney general Clarence Linn agreed, calling the ruling “the Magna Carta of the criminal.” In a meeting with the Mirror, the chief revealed that in the month following the Cahan decision, arrests had plummeted across the board: bookmaking arrests, down 42 percent; narcotics, down 38 percent; weapons, down 20 percent. A headline in the Mirror-News captured the chief’s sentiments perfectly: “Criminals Laugh at L.A. Police, Says Chief. Underworld Rejoices in Ruling.”

Cahan offended Parker on many levels. As an attorney, he believed the ruling was ill considered and flew in the face of the doctrine of stare decisis, which held that courts should generally stand by earlier decisions. As a lawman, he found it insulting. But the new restrictions imposed by the courts on the police also worried Parker for a more immediate reason. For on October 9, 1955, after three years, eight months, and sixteen days in the joint, Mickey Cohen walked out of prison a free man.

19 The Enemy Within

“He is intent on being a respectable member of society as a senatorial nominee on getting elected. The odds are three to one that Mickey Cohen, if not stopped by a bullet, will wind up a Rotarian.”

—Ben Hecht

WHEN MICKEY COHEN stepped off the ferry from McNeil Island at the little town of Steilacoom, near Tacoma, the press was waiting. Mickey didn’t seem surprised. Even after three years in prison, he accepted press attention as his due. In fact, Cohen seemed more relaxed—and more chatty—than ever before. When asked what his next plans were, Mickey indicated that he was leaning toward opening a bar and grill, “maybe in Beverly Hills or the Miracle Mile”—this despite the fact that Cohen still owed Uncle Sam $156,123. In fact, he told the assembled press, he and a few partners had already hired an architect to draw up plans. The news was instantly telegraphed to L.A., where official reaction was not long in coming.

“There is not a chance that anyone with Cohen’s record would be given a liquor license,” declared Phil Davis, the Southern California liquor administrator for the state board of equalization. “I can’t say he would be very welcome in Beverly Hills,” agreed Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson. The Los Angeles City Council voted en masse against a liquor license for Cohen, despite the fact that the city council had no say in such matters. As for Chief Parker, he suspected that Mickey’s restaurant was nothing but a sham. When a reporter asked the chief if Parker had any plans to put Cohen under surveillance, he replied tersely, “The German army didn’t come over and tell their plans to the Allies.”

When talking to the press, Cohen projected a jaunty self-confidence. But to those who knew him well, Mickey seemed changed. Despite his long history of violence, both in the ring and on the street, he appeared to have been badly shaken by his experiences in prison.

“When I was on the Island, I saw things I couldn’t believe myself. And I thought I’d seen everything,” Mickey said later. One night in particular had driven home the brutality and indifference of prison authorities:

The middle of the night, a fella a couple of cells down starts screamin’. I call the guard and we go together to see what’s the matter with the guy. The light in his cell don’t turn on and the guard has to use a flashlight. The screamer is lying in a pool of blood two inches deep. When the guard investigates he discovers that this guy was trying to give himself some fun by sticking an electric light bulb up his behind. In the middle of his enjoyment the glove had busted….

More startling, even, than this was what happened next: After being treated at the infirmary, the man “got a black mark for destroying government property.”

Cohen was determined never to return to prison again. His aversion to further incarceration was so great that Mickey was prepared to take a desperate step: He would go straight. He decided to start by doing something that for an unlettered gangster was remarkable: He would write a book. Of course, as someone who was basically illiterate, Mickey couldn’t really do this on his own. Fortunately for Cohen, Hollywood’s most famous screenwriter was about to come calling.

SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Mickey’s return to Los Angeles, the screenwriter Ben Hecht was talking with the director Otto Preminger. Hecht was Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, the person responsible for such films as Scarface (the first gangster movie), The Front Page (based on his days as a newspaperman in Chicago), Gone with the Wind (an uncredited rewrite), His Girl Friday, Spellbound, and Notorious. Preminger was an Austrian Jewish emigre with a deep interest in abnormal psychology and crime. (His father had been the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) His breakout hit was the 1944 noir thriller Laura, which told the story of a detective investigating the slaying of a beautiful young woman who had been murdered despite—or because of—her ability to make men love her. As the investigation progressed, the detective himself fell under her spell. Laura’s success made Preminger one of the top directors in Hollywood. In 1955, he had begun work on another noir drama, The Man with the Golden Arm. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, the film told the story of a heroin addict (Frank Sinatra) with dreams of big band greatness. The aspiring drummer gets clean in prison, but after his release, he encounters two old temptations, heroin and Kim Novak. (He succumbs to one.) Hecht was helping Preminger with the screenplay. Although Preminger was not unfamiliar with the American underworld—he was, among other things, the lover of the world-famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee—it still wasn’t his native idiom. One day, Hecht realized that he knew someone who could provide Preminger with just the right sort of color—Mickey Cohen.

It took a while to find Cohen. The haberdashery was long since closed. The Moreno manse in Brentwood had been sold. The papers had reported LaVonne’s new address in West Los Angeles—a nice apartment just off Santa Monica Boulevard near the Fox back lot (today’s Century City)—but Cohen wasn’t living there. Eventually, Hecht tracked him down at the Westwood Motor Inn, Mickey’s temporary work address. Cohen suggested that Hecht stop by his apartment for a visit.

On the appointed day, Hecht arrived at a small, nondescript apartment building. The only outward sign of Cohen’s residency within was a gleaming new Cadillac (“as luxurious and roomy as a hearse,” thought Hecht). When Hecht arrived, Mickey was in the shower. It was his third of the day.^[17] Hecht knew this could take a while, so he looked around. The apartment was tiny—“so small it was almost impossible to walk swiftly in it without bumping into the walls”—but tastefully (indeed, professionally) decorated (albeit in a “bourgeois” fashion). It was also crammed with luxury items.

“There are thirty pressed and spotless suits crowded in the closet, all in tan shades,” jotted Hecht in his notebooks. “Twenty-five Chinese, Japanese, and Persian robes of silk hang there and thirty-five pairs of glistening shoes stand on the floor, neatly.”

Finally, Mickey himself appeared—“nude, dressed only in green socks held up by maroon garters.” He seemed lost in thought, scarcely bothering to acknowledge Hecht. Instead, he put on a new Panama hat and wandered about the small room, powdering himself with talcum, washing his hands, and looking for the perfect suit. Every twenty minutes or so, Mickey would dash over to the phone, place a call, and proceed to have a lengthy cryptic conversation “devoid of proper names.” (Cohen was convinced—no doubt correctly—that his phones were tapped.) Two hours later, the two men left for dinner at Fred Sica’s place.

Hecht was fascinated by Cohen’s odd behavior. But Mickey soon did something that was even more surprising. He started talking. When Hecht had first met Cohen in 1947 at Hecht’s home in Oceanside, Cohen had been “a calm, staring man in a dapper pastel suit.” He had conveyed an unmistakable air of menace (only slightly offset by his ice-cream-and-French-pastry-fueled pudginess). In those days, Mickey sometimes went for days without saying a word.

Not anymore. The postprison Cohen was a conversationalist, at least when the mood came over him. When Hecht brought Preminger over to meet the notorious gangster, Cohen freely recounted stories of his underworld days, explaining the intricacies of the bookie business. In the process, Mickey greatly confused the director, who mistook one of Mickey’s bookmaking phrases, “laying a horse” (which simply means wagering that a certain horse will lose), for a sexual act. (After the meeting, Preminger reportedly turned to Hecht and declared, “My God! Why would you take me to meet a man who lays horses?!”) Mickey had even begun work on a book about his life. When he showed it to Hecht, the Oscar-winning screenwriter was astonished. Cohen’s work in progress was actually pretty good. Never before had Hecht seen the criminal mind bared so openly and artlessly. But Cohen wasn’t just interested in reliving his glory days. His goal, he told Hecht, was nothing less than redemption.

“I’m a different man than the wild hot Jew kid who started stickin’ up joints in Cleveland, who lived from heist to heist in Chicago and Los Angeles,” he told Hecht.

“What changed you?” Hecht asked.

“First, common sense,” Cohen replied. “Then I wanted the respect of people—not just people in the underworld.” However, the deepest change was more visceral: “I lost the crazy heat in my head,” he told Hecht, “even though I seen enough dirty crooked double-crosses to keep me mad for a hundred years.”

Mickey assured Hecht that he was now determined to go straight. Indeed, he had already picked a new profession. He had become a florist.

Mickey insisted that he had returned to Los Angeles “stone broke.” But soon after his homecoming, Cohen somehow became the proprietor of a chain of greenhouses, with headquarters at 1402 Exposition Avenue near Normandie. Exposition Avenue was a long way from Mickey’s old haunts on Sunset, but Cohen did his best to display the old razzle-dazzle, renaming the chain Michael’s Greenhouses and telling the papers that he was “chucking the rackets for tropical foliage.” Among his first visitors were the officers of the LAPD intelligence squad. To its officers, Mickey confided the “real” reason he had gone into the business. Exotic flowers, he told the officers, was “a tremendous racket… out of this world.”

LaVonne thought Mickey had finally gone crazy. One month after Michael’s Greenhouses came into existence, she filed for divorce. Cohen was understanding. “LaVonne had married a dashing, colorful rough-tough hoodlum and when I came home she found me quite a bit different,” he piously informed the press. Cohen’s parole officers seemed to believe in Cohen’s reformation. There was just one problem: No one had much use for a gangster who had been scared straight.

“When I was a gangster like those characters in the movies, I tell you everybody admired me, including even the press,” Mickey told Hecht one night. “Now look at the situation…. [S]ince I came home”—Cohen’s preferred euphemism for getting out of jail—“the general public including the newspapers have been actin’ sour at me, as if they were sore at my having reformed and bein’ now a law abiding citizen.

“So help me, it’s unusual. I ask myself, ‘Can it be that the public prefers the type of person I was to the type of citizen I am now?’”

Mickey already knew the answer to that question. Of course they did.

One night after midnight, as Hecht sat at Cohen’s table at one of the nightclubs he frequented nearly every evening, Hecht realized what Cohen had become. “It is a gilgul I’m sitting with”—a soul suspended between the stages of reincarnation. “Life won’t let him in. A desperate Mickey is at the cafe table—not Mickey, the gun-flourishing heister, but a lonely knocker at the door.”

Chief Parker would have none of it. Cohen was a hoodlum through and through. If Mickey thought tropical plants were a “tremendous racket,” they probably were. Parker wanted every angle covered. Make sure Cohen’s not strong-arming people into buying exotic tropical plants, Parker told the intelligence division. The chief’s suspicions proved well founded: Several restaurateurs and bar owners confidentially informed the squad that Mickey had demanded that they pay $1,000 a month to rent a plastic fern—or else. Parker made it clear that he wanted Hamilton’s men to watch every move Mickey made.

The LAPD wasn’t the only law enforcement outfit tracking Cohen. So were agents from the Treasury Department. Mickey had resolutely refused to pay the federal government any of the back taxes he owed. He justified his inaction by claiming to be broke. When questioned about his new Cadillac and his lavish wardrobe, Cohen replied blandly that he enjoyed only what his friends gave (or loaned) him. Given Cohen’s history of extortion, this seemed more than a little suspicious. So FBI headquarters instructed the Los Angeles office to put Cohen under surveillance. In short order, Cohen had a discreet complement of G-men with him on his nocturnal nightclub outings. What they witnessed confirmed the bureau’s suspicions. Cohen, they reported, was routinely dropping $200 or $300 a night and generally spending money at a rate that only the most lucrative greenhouse in the world could provide.

The LAPD intelligence division was likewise uncovering evidence that Cohen was less reformed than he was letting on to his friend Ben Hecht. One source informed the division that Mickey was attempting to strong-arm a local linen business. The LAPD also heard rumors that Cohen, along with his old pal the great lightweight boxer Art “Golden Boy” Aragon, was fixing fights. LaVonne even called off the divorce and got back together with Mickey. Everything pointed to a full-fledged return to the life of crime.

IN THE FALL OF 1956, the LAPD gained another ally in its fight against organized crime: the thirty-year-old chief counsel of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, Robert Kennedy.

By 1956, the Kennedys were one of America’s best-known families. Bobby’s maternal grandfather, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston, as well as a congressman. Father Joseph was one of the country’s most powerful businessmen, a prominent Wall Street investment banker, ex-ambassador to the Court of St. James, a former movie magnate (and Gloria Swanson’s lover), and a high-end bootlegger. The oldest son, Joe Jr., whom Joe Sr. had been grooming for the presidency, had been killed during the Second World War; in 1946, the Navy had recognized his sacrifice by naming a destroyer after him. His brother Jack had stepped in and commenced on a remarkable rise to prominence. His Harvard College thesis, While England Slept, was published and became a best-selling book. During the war, he served on a PT boat. When it was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, Lieutenant Kennedy kept his head and saved most of his men, a feat of bravery that won him a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (and a front-page story in the the New York Times). In 1946, he was elected to the House of Representatives from his grandfather’s old district (after Joe Sr. bought out the incumbent). In 1952, Jack was elected to the U.S. Senate. Earlier that year, in 1956, Jack wrote another best-selling book, Profiles in Courage.

In comparison, Bobby had struggled. An indifferent student, he bounced from school to school before landing at Milton Academy. He got into Harvard, but his grades there weren’t good enough to continue on to the business or law school, so he went to the University of Virginia law school instead. Upon graduating (in the middle of his class), he went to work on his brother’s successful Senate campaign, where he distinguished himself with his dogged hard work. Kennedy then worked briefly for perhaps the most notorious committee in the history of the U.S. Senate—Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—before joining Arkansas senator John McClellan’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations as its chief counsel and staff director. There Kennedy and his boss, Senator McClellan, hit upon another subject—governmental corruption. This was an issue that provoked distinct unease in urban Democrats, many of whom were indebted to municipal machines. But Bobby brushed away such reservations. His first target would be New York City. There he discovered the world of the Irish NYPD—and the underworld.

KENNEDY’S FIRST STEP as staff director of the investigations subcommittee was to approach the Federal Bureau of Investigation for assistance. He was startled to learn that the FBI knew virtually nothing about corruption or organized crime at the city level. It simply wasn’t within the bureau’s jurisdiction, he was told. So he turned instead to the federal Bureau of Narcotics, the precursor to today’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Two agents, Angelo Zurelo and Joseph Amato, took Bobby under their wing. They explained to Kennedy that much of the crime in New York (including, contrary to popular myth, the narcotics trade) was organized and controlled by the Sicilian mafia. They also introduced Kennedy to their partners in the New York Police Department’s intelligence division, an outfit whose personnel consisted of largely Irish detectives straight out of a Damon Runyon story.

It was love at first sight.

Kennedy had long been fascinated by the experiences of his less fortunate Irish brethren. At Harvard, older brother Jack had joined an elite “final” club and generally gravitated toward what his sister Eunice would later describe as “Long Island sophisticates.” Bobby sought out war veterans on the GI Bill. In the NYPD, Bobby found the ultimate tough-guy Irish institution. Kennedy couldn’t get enough of it. Unbeknownst to his family or friends back in D.C., Kennedy was soon accompanying narcotics raiding parties on their nighttime forays. Often, the Bureau of Narcotics and the police would team up. Unrestrained by the Fourth Amendment, the local cops would kick in the door; narcotics agents would then storm in to make the arrests. Defendants’ rights were essentially nil. Street justice was a common sight. One night, when Kennedy was out on a ridealong, the police burst into an apartment and found a man sexually abusing a two-year-old. While Kennedy watched, the police threw the man out a window as punishment.

Kennedy also fell in with the New York press, who plied him with stories of corruption in the trade union movement. They explained the unholy alliances that often resulted, whereby unions made use of the mob’s “muscle,” and the mobs tapped union treasuries for their own illicit businesses. Press and police alike were impressed by young Bobby’s spunk. He was a fighter, figuratively and literally. One night at a bar, after an evening of rousting with the police, a fellow drinker—a big, tough-looking fellow—recognized Kennedy (who appeared regularly in the papers) and treated him to a stream of colorful insults about his family and his father. Kennedy (five foot, ten inches and 160 pounds) calmly invited the much bigger man to step outside. When the man stood up, Kennedy spun around and smashed him square in the face, breaking the man’s nose. Everyone was impressed by Bobby’s willingness to fight dirty, but his reporter friends wondered if he was really tough enough to take on organized crime.

The Syndicate, they stressed, was truly dangerous. Just look at what had happened to the crusading labor columnist Victor Riesel in the spring of 1956. One night, just after midnight, Reisel had stepped out onto a silent 51st Street and noticed a young man strolling toward him. It was the last thing Riesel ever saw. The man hurled a vial of sulfuric acid in Riesel’s face, permanently blinding him. Rumor had it that the man behind the attack was Johnny Dio, a Lucchese family capo and a notorious labor union racketeer.

When told about Dio’s activities, Kennedy vowed to go after him, but his reporter pals pushed him to go further. Shouldn’t his committee be taking a broader look at the question of labor racketeering? Kennedy hesitated. The Senate Labor Committee might not appreciate having a young upstart intrude on their turf. Labor unions were also an important Democratic Party constituency. A high-profile investigation would undoubtedly ruffle feathers in the party. It was Washington, D.C.-based newsman Clark Mollenhoff who ultimately found the right button to push. Mollenhoff told Kennedy that racketeers were moving into the Teamsters Union in the Midwest and, in effect, dared Kennedy to check it out. When Bobby hesitated, Mollenhoff went straight for the hot button. What, are you scared? he taunted Kennedy. Are you afraid?

Soon thereafter, in August 1956, Kennedy announced that the Senate investigations subcommittee would expand its attention to the broader field of labor racketeering.^[18] His first target was the nation’s biggest and most powerful union—the Teamsters. Kennedy had heard rumors that mobsters had infiltrated various locals as part of an effort to gain control of the Teamsters’ $250 million pension fund. But there was a problem. His reporter friends notwithstanding, Kennedy had very little information to go on. The NYPD intelligence division had some information, but it was limited to New York. The Bureau of Narcotics had a wealth of information, but it was focused on narcotics. There was one police department, though, that had made a name for itself with its relentless war on organized crime—the Los Angeles Police Department. On November 14, 1956, Kennedy and former G-man-turned-congressional-investigator Carmine Bellino flew out to Los Angeles to meet Chief Parker and intelligence division head James Hamilton. To prevent the press from getting wind of their visit, the two men traveled in secret. Kennedy used an alias, Mr. Rodgers. It would prove to be an eventful meeting.

PARKER took Kennedy’s visit seriously. He directed Hamilton and Lt. Joseph Stephens, who headed the department’s labor squad, to take the afternoon to meet with the Senate investigators. The men hit it off immediately. Kennedy and Bellino were impressed—and alarmed—by the material the LAPD had amassed. One example of the kinds of “strong arm” tactics employed by the mob in Southern California made a particularly vivid impression on Kennedy. It concerned a union organizer who’d gone to San Diego in defiance of warnings from the local mob. Soon after arriving, the man had been assaulted. According to Kennedy’s later recounting of the story, he woke up the next day “covered in blood” and with “terrible pains in his stomach.” With difficulty, he made it back to a hospital in Los Angeles, where doctors performed emergency surgery and, according to Kennedy, “removed from his backside a large cucumber.” The man was later warned that if he ever returned to San Diego, he’d come back with a watermelon.

Urban myth or actual event? It didn’t matter. Kennedy believed it had happened. It steeled his resolve to act.

At the end of the afternoon, Hamilton walked Kennedy out to the parking lot behind “the glass house” (as the new police administration building was called). It had been a productive day. The LAPD’s wealth of information about corruption in the Teamsters reinforced Kennedy’s belief that he was on to something big. So did subsequent meetings arranged by Hamilton and Stephens, which put Kennedy and Bellino in direct contact with a variety of employers, union leaders, employees, and confidential informants. Kennedy and Bellino heard from dissident members of the longshoremen’s union, who complained of the leadership’s radicalism and “red” sympathies. They heard from union organizers (again in San Diego) who’d been beaten up by goons after attempting to organize retail clerks and about a Los Angeles plumbers and steamfitters local that was resisting mob attempts to muscle in on building contracts. More to the point, they heard about how local Teamsters were colluding with selected employers—employers with strong mob ties—to corner the garbage removal market in Los Angeles. Hamilton concluded by suggesting that Kennedy and Bellino take their fact-finding mission to Portland, Oregon, where crusading journalists had uncovered a wealth of incriminating evidence about corruption in the Teamsters local.

Hamilton and Kennedy met as strangers but ended the day as friends. Henceforth, the LAPD intelligence division would be an important (if largely unheralded) source of intelligence to Robert Kennedy. Kennedy’s relationship with Chief Parker was different. The two men would never be friends in the way that Hamilton and Kennedy were; their personal styles were too different. But ideologically, the two men were largely in sync. In addition to sharing a faith (Roman Catholicism) and a creed (anti-communism), the two men shared a worldview: Both saw the underworld as the enemy within.

There was another similarity. Both men were battling their own internal enemies. Bobby was prone to depression (“Black Bobby,” his older brother rather insensitively called him) and also to fits of anger that occasionally propelled him to violence. As a young man, Parker had shared this impulse to violence too. But the more dangerous demon for Los Angeles’s proud chief of police was the demon of drink. Nowhere was that demon more in evidence than at an annual event called the Mobil Economy Run.

The Mobil Economy Run (sponsored by the Mobil Oil corporation and the U.S. Auto Club) was a coast-to-coast race designed to test the fuel efficiency of automobiles under real-life driving conditions. Automakers competed fiercely for the right to proclaim their cars the most fuel efficient in their class. But the Mobil Economy Run had another, less advertised, purpose as well. It was also a tremendous booze-fueled junket. Every year, Mobil rented a train for VIPs that ran north from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Yosemite, and Sun Valley (and thence onward east) or west to Albuquerque and then to Sun Valley and points east. Every year, Mobil invited the LAPD’s chief of police and deputy chief for traffic.

On the job, Parker was a straight arrow. He took a dim view of patrol officers receiving “gifts” from merchants on their beat (though they still did). He abhorred ticket fixing and insisted on observing the strict letter of the law. Off the job (and with a little liquor in his system), he could be quite different. The Mobil Economy Run’s VIP trains were all about liquoring up company guests. As soon as the train left L.A.’s Union Station, the shades came down and the bar opened. It remained open, 24/7, for the remainder of the trip.

As if determined to avoid temptation, Parker stayed away from the Mobil Economy Run during his first year as chief. In 1952, however, he succumbed. Two years later, he went along with traffic chief Harold Sullivan. The Examiner’s automotive reporter, Slim Bernard, came too. Bernard was a character much beloved for his high jinx, so no one was surprised when, after a few drinks, Bernard somehow produced Salvation Army uniforms at the stop in Albuquerque and set out to recruit “soldiers” to solicit donations at the station. What was surprising was that Parker was happy to join the fun. Completely sloshed, he pounded away on a drum while his fellow revelers collected donations. It was a scene that made Parker’s traveling companion Harold Sullivan, who didn’t shy away from a few drinks on occasion himself, distinctly uncomfortable.

It got worse. By the time they reached Sun Valley, Parker (drinking all the while) was ready to lead a conga line through the hotel lobby and down the escalator. From Sullivan’s perspective, Parker’s behavior went well beyond boozy good fun. “He was drinking, and he had a problem,” says Sullivan simply of Parker on that trip.

Parker himself presumably saw things in a different light. From that year forward, he was a Mobil Economy Run regular.

Fast-forward three years.

One day in the spring of 1957, the special bell on Sullivan’s desk rang to indicate that the chief wanted to talk to him immediately. Such summons were dreaded by the deputy chiefs. Parker didn’t hold regular staff meetings. By 1957, he had become quite hands off about the management of divisions that weren’t under his direct control. Sullivan sometimes went weeks without discussing traffic matters with the chief. When Sullivan or another deputy chief was summoned, it typically meant that Parker was angry about something and intended to chew him out. Nonetheless, Sullivan promptly hurried down the hall to Parker’s office. He was relieved to find the chief looking pensive.

“I’ve got a little problem,” Parker told Sullivan, almost sheepishly.

“What is it?” Sullivan replied.

“Mayor Poulson wants to go on the Economy Run,” Parker replied. Sullivan didn’t see the difficulty. Mobil Oil would surely be delighted to have the mayor come along for the ride.

“Just call the manager and tell him that,” said Sullivan. Although he was disinclined to ask favors, Parker did. Just as Sullivan predicted, the Mobil Economy Run was more than happy to extend an invitation to Mayor Poulson At the last minute, though, Poulson bowed out and sent a press aide in his stead. The aide was astonished by how much Parker drank—and (in Sullivan’s words) by “what an asshole he made of himself.” In short, he reported to Poulson that Los Angeles’s lauded police chief was a common drunk of the worst sort. When Parker got back, the mayor confronted Parker about his public drinking, saying it was an embarrassment to the city. Parker vowed to sober up, but the binges (which typically began after work hours at the speaking engagements that filled Parker’s evenings) continued—until his drinking habit brought him face to face with the possibility of a violent death.

The turning point came during a family trip to Tucson. Parker was there with his wife, Helen; his brother Joe; and his sister-in-law. The four of them were at a restaurant in Phoenix. Parker was “pulled as tight as a rubber band” that evening. The Mafia, he explained to Joe, was moving into Los Angeles. Parker was glum. He had a few B&Bs—Benedictine and brandies—too many to drive home. The next day, a subordinate called to say that one of the Los Angeles papers was reporting that a Mob figure had spotted Parker, drunk, in a Phoenix restaurant. Horrified, Parker never had another drink again.