L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора John Buntin (ч. notes)

Примечания

1

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

2

It was also something of a racket. According to historian Gerald Woods, wealthy Angelenos purchased $1,000 memberships that brought with them preferential treatment for parking and speeding violations. (Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 324.)

3

In truth, when viewed in the context of the time, the tactics championed by Chief Davis are not as outrageous as they first appear. Most police reformers believed that improving police officers’ shooting skills was an effective deterrent to the gangsterism that plagued urban America. “Rousting” was a standard law enforcement tool. The Bum Blockade was less extreme than the transient forced labor camps proposed by the city’s Committee on Indigent Alien Transients one year earlier. Advocates of wholesale fingerprinting were common too. August Vollmer, a Berkeley police chief and professor who became a hero to progressives in the 1920s, openly endorsed “a system of checking the movements of persons traveling from one state to another.” (Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society, 24.)

4

Lansky, Luciano, and others generally spoke of “the Syndicate” rather than “the Mafia,” which more properly referred to the Italian subset of the organized crime world.

5

Bookies offered bettors a lower “take” than racetracks such as Santa Anita (which, in addition to the house take, also collected a small tax on bets wagered), as well as better odds.

6

The Citizen-News wryly noted that the infamous gambling joint at 732 North Highland had been raided by Lieutenant Hoy, “under whose able protection it has operated all these years.”

7

Surely, this was the strangest yachting party in the history of Hollywood. The group included barber/boxing manager Champ Segal; the nephew of British foreign secretary (later prime minister) Anthony Eden; Jean Harlow’s father-in-law; and a German-American captain who was also an informant for the FBI. The captain suspected the treasure expedition was actually a resupply operation for Brooklyn mob boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who was on the lam. The expedition ended with Champ Segal being formally indicted on charges of mutiny. (He was later acquitted.) Neither treasure nor Louis Buchalter was found. (Muir, Headline Happy, 169-72.)

8

Mickey would later insist that this classification reflected a simple misunderstanding. During an earlier court appearance, his attorney had gotten into “a beef” with a judge. The “beef” had escalated into “a big hurrah,” which ended with Mickey being forced to submit to a psychological examination. Evidently, he failed. (Cohen, In My Own Words, 64-65.)

9

Annenberg purchased the General News Bureau from Chicago gambler Mont Tennes in 1927, just a few years before states such as California began to legalize horse racing and permit pari-mutuel on-track betting to bolster state revenues. The result was a huge boom in horse betting—and a vast new business for Annenberg (who also owned the Daily Racing Form). Just how big became evident after federal prosecutors indicted Annenberg for income tax evasion and began to dig into his businesses. Prosecutors were startled to discover that the General News Service (later renamed the Nationwide News Services, after another wire service Annenberg purchased) was AT&T’s fifth largest customer. (Moore, The Kefauver Committee, 18.)

10

Hill herself was not there; she had left town several days earlier after a spat with Siegel and gone to Paris. (Jennings, We Only Kill Each Other, 189-90.)

11

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

12

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

13

Legalized pari-mutuel betting (where the odds reflect at-track wagers calculated by a pari-mutuel machine) was legal in California, but off-track bookmaking was banned, as it was in every state save Nevada. That made it impossible for Continental to collect information openly. So instead it employed undercover “signalers” or “wigglers” who transmitted odds and race results through a complicated set of signals to outside observers who typically monitored the track with high-powered binoculars and quickly relayed information to the Continental Press “drops.” Drops were typically little more than a large room with fifteen to twenty telephones (each carefully registered to a false name), placed on a rack before a loudspeaker. At the beginning of the racing day, calls were placed to subscribing bookmakers and left open all day. When information came in from Chicago, an operator at the drop read it into a microphone that broadcast it out through the loudspeaker and into the battery of phones, which bookmakers on the other end heard instantly and simultaneously. The system was remarkably fast (for the pre-Internet era). Bookmakers in L.A. (who, incidentally, placed the vast majority of bets on out-of-state races) could get results from the New Orleans race tracks in as little as a minute and a half. (California Special Crime Study Commission report, March 17, 1949, 72, 79-80.)

14

To bolster the impression that Bowron was in the underworld’s pocket, Mickey Cohen adorned his Cadillac with a giant sign trumpeting his support for the mayor.

15

He was right. After turning state’s witness in 1978, Fratianno confessed to killing the two Tonys. (Demoris, The Last Mafioso, 54.)

16

Complaints from the African American community about disrespectful stops and brutal treatment were so commonplace that the Los Angeles Tribune, the city’s other leading black paper, sarcastically teased General Worton when he first became chief for taking them seriously: “So naive is this new chief… that he veritably pounced on a police stenographer… to make a note of the complaints … as if something was going to be done about them!!!” (Los Angeles Tribune, July 14, 1949.)

17

Mickey’s demands on the building’s hot water heater were a major source of contention with the management. At his old house in Brentwood, Cohen had installed a special water heater designed for a motel. Because even that proved inadequate, Mickey had his plumber install a hotel-sized hot water heater instead.

18

There was another reason for Bobby Kennedy’s interest in crime and municipal corruption as well, a political reason. That same August, big brother Jack made an unexpected—and ultimately unsuccessful—attempt to become Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson’s running mate. The person he lost out to was none other than Sen. Estes Kefauver, who had come to national attention via his campaign against organized crime. Bobby hoped the Kennedy family would benefit in a similar fashion from his new investigation. (Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 73.)

19

The LAPD apparently encouraged the use of tough tactics in black neighborhoods as well. As Deputy Chief Thad Brown later told historian Gerald Woods, “You could send Negro officers to do tough jobs in the black belt, and there would be no beef.” (Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 460.)

20

Parker was also buffeted from another direction—by demands that the police department do more to crack down on crime. In late 1957, the city council formally complained to the chief about “soaring” vice conditions in South-Central Los Angeles (as the area around Watts was coming to be described). Mayor Poulson weighed in as well, complaining that prostitution, bookmaking, and narcotics “flourished without apparent restraint” between 40th and 56th Streets on Central Avenue and Aaron Boulevard. Chief Parker replied, testily, that he’d be happy to clean up the area if city officials found funding to increase the size of the vice squad by 363 percent.

21

As is often the case with Cohen, the truth is difficult to ascertain. Early FBI reports portray Mickey as an active participant in the prostitution racket—if not as an outright pimp. See, for instance, FBI file #92-HQ-3156, Subject: “Meyer Harris Cohen,” memo dated October 8, 1960.

22

On May 14, an all-white coroner’s jury acquitted the officer involved in the point-blank shooting of one of the men at the mosque, Ronald X Stokes. Stokes had been shot with his hands raised because the officer who killed him felt endangered. The jury’s deliberations took less than thirty minutes. The Black Muslims were not treated so leniently. Despite Broady’s efforts, on July 14, 1963, eleven members of the Nation of Islam were convicted on a variety of charges and given prison sentences ranging from one to ten years. (“Sentences Reimposed on 11 Black Muslims,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1965.)

23

In November 13, 1965, Saturday Review article, King offered the following explanation of why rioting had broken out in Los Angeles: “Los Angeles could have expected riots because it is the luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites. Watts is closer to it and yet further from it than any other Negro community in the country. The looting in Watts was a form of social protest very common through the ages as a dramatic and destructive gesture of the poor toward symbols of their needs.”

24

During the same interview, Parker also made it clear that “less than one percent” of L.A. County’s 600,000 African American residents were involved in the violence.

25

Former intelligence division chief Daryl Gates would later insist this was much ado about nothing: “Many of those ‘files’ were 3 × 5 index cards used to reference files which contained only newspapers clippings.” Even if this is true, that still meant that the LAPD had collected, by Gates’s own estimation, “highly sensitive information” roughly 100,000 “subversives.” This was intelligence gathering on a very large scale. (Gates, Chief, 226.)

26

Denny lived only because four other neighborhood residents—African Americans all—saw what was happening on television and rushed out to the intersection in question. Finding Denny, one member of the party, a truck driver, drove him to a nearby hospital, where a team of five surgeons [two of them African Americans] managed to save his life. (Cannon, Official Negligence, 308-309.)