L.A. Noir (29 page)

“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.
^*
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.