L.A. Noir (14 page)

The night of the meeting, only six people were present—the mayor, his driver, the head of the Police Commission, Richardson and a colleague, and Cornero. Cornero began by explaining how the underworld operated, but what Bowron really wanted were names—names of police officers on the take.

Cornero handed Bowron a piece of paper. On it was a list of twenty-six compromised police officers. Bowron was thrilled—and puzzled.

“Thank you, Tony,” the mayor told the gangster. “You have done us a big service. In fact, you’ve done the city of Los Angeles a big service.” He paused and then continued. “But there’s only one thing I can’t understand. I can’t understand why you’re doing this. I mean, I can’t see what’s in it for you?”

Cornero smiled and then replied. “Well, Your Honor,” he began, “you are not always going to be mayor of Los Angeles. Someday you’ll be out. It may be the next election or ten years from now. I’ve given you the stuff to put the Syndicate out of business. Out it goes! Then comes the day when you’re out too. Then the field is open again. And it will be mine. It will be open for someone else to take over. Do I make myself clear?”

“You make it clear all right,” Bowron replied. The meeting was over. It was time to clean house at the LAPD.

There was just one problem. The testimony of a convicted felon like Tony Cornero was not exactly something that would hold up in court or even in an administrative hearing, given the protections that Bill Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had so painstakingly enacted. So Mayor Bowron and his Police Commission decided to take an extraordinary step. They hired an ex-FBI man to investigate the officers in question and tap their phones. By the end of the investigation, Bowron was confident that the men were indeed corrupt. Over the course of two days, each was summoned to the mayor’s office individually and asked for his resignation. When an officer hesitated—or refused—the mayor reached over to the sound recorder and played an incriminating section of the wiretap. Most of the officers agreed to resign on the spot. In two days, much of the top echelon of the department was gone. Within six months, a dozen more had followed.

The Combination had finally been smashed. In a world with Mickey
Cohen and Bugsy Siegel on the loose, it was simply too dangerous for men like Guy McAfee to operate in Los Angeles without police protection. Moreover, it seemed evident that the new mayor was determined to “close” Los Angeles. And so the organized crime figures who had held sway over the L.A. underworld since the 1920s left Los Angeles. Most relocated to a dusty little town in the Nevada desert where gambling was legal and supervision was lax—Las Vegas.

Mayor Bowron was exultant. “We’ve broken the most powerful ring that ever had an American city in its grip,” he exulted to Richardson. “We’ve swept the police department clean for the first time in many years.”

The sphere of police autonomy that Bill Parker had so laboriously constructed also seemed to have been swept away.

For four years, Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had worked to restrict politicians’ authority over the LAPD. On paper, chief and officers alike now enjoyed substantial legal protections. Yet when the stakes were high, those protections proved to be worthless. In a matter of months, Bowron had forced out the entire senior leadership of the police department, without a prosecutor indicting a single officer, without the Police Commission acting on a single complaint, without a single review board convening. The prospect of a powerful, independent police chief must have seemed impossibly remote.

Yet the triumph of the politicians was not complete. When Bowron’s new Police Commission attempted to rescind the city charter amendments that Cooke and Parker had written—returning disciplinary authority to the chief of police (and thus to the mayor and Police Commission who appointed and oversaw him)—the city council objected. Nor did the council embrace reformers’ proposals for a new city charter, one that would have greatly strengthened the mayor’s rather limited powers over the executive branch of government. In short, the legal protections Parker’s charters had created remained, even as Mayor Bowron drained them of their significance. They simply lay fallow, waiting for a chief who would have the skill and knowledge to breathe life into them.

      IN MAY 1939, Parker got his first clear shot at becoming that chief.

In theory, promotion in the LAPD was strictly meritocratic. Under ordinary circumstances, officers sat for promotional exams roughly every two years. A written exam typically accounted for 95 percent of their scores; the remaining 5 percent was determined by an oral exam and by seniority. Officers were then ranked by their results and placed on a promotional list,
from which all new appointments had to be made. But the onset of the Great Depression—and the appearance of Joe Shaw—had disrupted this process. Between 1929 and 1936, hiring in the department had essentially been frozen. In 1936, Joe Shaw had overseen a new round of civil service examinations—and, rumor had it, helpfully sold answers to the questions for all fifty positions waiting to be filled. The department’s promotion lists were so suspect that Mayor Bowron’s new Police Commission decided to start from scratch. It threw out the previous lists and announced a new round of competitive examinations. Among the positions up for grabs was that of chief of police.

The acting chief of police, David Davidson, disclaimed any interest in the job, saying he preferred “not to be pushed around every time a new administration took office.” Capt. R. R. McDonald was known to be the mayor’s favorite, yet Bowron’s handpicked Police Commission nonetheless announced that it would make a purely meritocratic choice. The candidate who placed highest on the civil service exam would be the Police Commission’s choice.

One hundred seventy-one officers sat for the written examination for chief, including acting captain Bill Parker. Thirty-one were called back to complete the oral portion of the test. Once again, Parker was among the top group. On June 15, 1939, Parker received his score from the Board of Civil Service Commissioners: He had received a final grade of 78.1, which placed his name eighth on the tentative eligible list. The name at the top came as a surprise to everyone: Lt. Arthur Hohmann. After several weeks of hemming and hawing, the Police Commission decided to recognize Hohmann’s ranking and appointed him chief.

From the first, Bill Parker was in his sights. The services rendered to Chief Davis now stood Parker in bad stead. “Parker’s loyalty and zealous attention to his office was now misinterpreted as blind loyalty to organizations and individuals and his past performance as an efficient, courageous and honest officer was discounted,” wrote a friendly superior officer, B. R. Caldwell, four years after the event. Hohmann immediately created a new headquarters division—and announced that he would command it himself. R. R. McDonald was made administrative officer. Acting captain Bill Parker—now Lieutenant Parker—was out.

Demoralized by his de facto demotion and worried that he would never shake the Davis stigma, Parker seriously considered leaving the force and becoming a full-time attorney. He even lined up a few legal cases he could work on as a private attorney and drafted a letter of resignation, but at the last minute, Parker’s old boss from his time at Hollywood Division, Capt. B. R. Caldwell, stepped in. Caldwell was a Parker admirer. He intervened
to secure a position for Parker in the traffic accident investigation division, which he headed. This was not an inconsequential position. Managing traffic was a major problem in the world’s most car-oriented big city. Traffic accidents were also a major cause of death, killing 533 people in 1941, more than ten times the number of people murdered that year. Despite feeling bruised by his treatment, Parker agreed to stay on.

Parker now had something to prove. In February 1940, he took the examination for captain and placed second on the promotion list. That May, Chief Hohmann recognized his achievement by appointing him captain. In September, Parker took the examination for Inspector of Police and again placed second. Soon thereafter, Parker won a fellowship award to Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute. In the fall of 1940, he left for Chicago to study the fine points of traffic control for nine months.

The Combination got in one final dig at the new order. That fall, the generally reliable
Hollywood Citizen-News
broke the story of Bowron and Jim Richardson’s secret meeting with Tony Cornero, in a highly misleading fashion:
NEW VICE SETUP IN LOS ANGELES
, proclaimed the banner headline.
TONY CORNERO, MAYOR BOWRON AND EXAMINER CITY EDITOR IN SECRET

MIDNIGHT MEETING AT MAYOR’S HOUSE.
It turned out that Bowron’s driver was on the Combination’s payroll. Although the charge that the mayor had met with Cornero to divvy up Los Angeles was completely untrue, Bowron felt he had to respond, and so, with no little ruthlessness, he turned against the man who had decapitated the Combination, Tony Cornero.

The gambling fleet Cornero operated just offshore had long been an embarrassment. Mayor Bowron now decided that it was intolerable, so he turned up the pressure on California attorney general Earl Warren and Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz by publicly calling on them to shut down the gaming fleet. With the attention of the public upon them, Sheriff Biscailuz and Santa Monica police chief Charles Dice set out in a fleet of water taxis to arrest the offshore crime lord, who they insisted had strayed into California waters. In court, however, Cornero sprung a surprise. Santa Monica Bay, he argued, was not actually a bay at all but rather a bight, a large coastal indentation. That put his ships in international waters, out of the reach of the California courts. An appeals court agreed, and Tony “the Hat” (now “the Commodore”) returned to action.

After much head-scratching, Attorney General Warren decided to try another tack: He announced that Cornero’s gambling fleet was a “nuisance,” which the state of California had the power to abate. A cease-and-desist warning was issued. When Cornero refused to comply, a raiding party was sent out to capture his flagship, the SS
Rex
. Cornero insisted the raiding party’s members were pirates. For nine days, “the Commodore” held the
raiders off with a fire hose before succumbing to hunger and surrendering the ship. The courts rejected Cornero’s claims that he was a victim of piracy, and the California Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court had erred in its analysis of coastal geography. Santa Monica Bight returned to being Santa Monica Bay. Tony Cornero was out of luck for a second time.

Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, on the other hand, couldn’t have been luckier. Mayor Bowron had shut down first the Combination and then Tony Cornero. Los Angeles’s homegrown criminal underworld had scurried off to Las Vegas. The Los Angeles underworld was now Siegel’s to command. What made the situation even sweeter was that as his influence was growing, his identity as a notorious eastern gangster remained virtually unknown. It wasn’t until a wiseacre NYPD detective decided to give the Los Angeles DA’s chief investigator a scare that the LAPD awoke to the fact that its nightmare of “eastern gangsters” moving into the city had already come true. The struggle for control of Los Angeles was about to move into a new phase, one that would put Bugsy Siegel and his top lieutenant, Mickey Cohen, in direct conflict with the LAPD.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY Buron Fitts was in a tricky position. Angelenos were in a reforming mood—and Buron Fitts was the antithesis of reform. In 1936, Fitts had won reelection after essentially purchasing 12,000 votes along Central Avenue. (The
Hollywood Citizen-News
later reported that the underworld had spent $2 million—more than $30 million in today’s dollars—to fund Fitts’s campaign.) Knowing of his vulnerability on issues of corruption, when the Raymond bombing scandal broke, Fitts had acted with uncharacteristic vigor, ultimately convicting Joe Shaw on sixty-three counts of selling city jobs and promotions. Still, with a tough reelection campaign approaching, Fitts needed to do more. So in 1939, Fitts sent his chief investigator, Johnny Klein, to Manhattan. New York City district attorney Tom Dewey had made a name for himself by prosecuting gangsters. Klein’s brief was to learn what he could about eastern gangsters who might be trying to infiltrate the City of Angels.

A former Hollywood fur salesman, Klein was not known as the savviest of investigators. When he arrived at NYPD headquarters on Centre Street to examine the department’s gangster files, one of the detectives decided to have a little fun with him. He pulled forth a mug shot of Benjamin Siegel—taken in Dade County, Florida, where Siegel had been arrested for speeding.

“Now there’s an outstanding citizen named Bugsy Siegel,” the detective told the DA’s investigator.

“Never heard of him,” Klein replied.

“You never heard of him? Why, Johnny, this guy is one of the worst killers in America, and he’s living right in your backyard.” The detective continued, “Dewey wants this guy and would give anything to lay hands on him.”

Bugsy Siegel
was
one of the worst killers in America—the FBI would later credit him with carrying out or participating in some thirty murders—but his
whereabouts were hardly a secret. Every crime reporter in New York knew that Siegel was actually in New York at that very moment, staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (where he had lived for much of the 1920s, two floors below “Lucky” Luciano). And it had been a long time since Bugsy Siegel was running around indiscriminately knocking people off. Nonetheless, Klein promptly telegrammed the news of this discovery back to Los Angeles. The DA’s office immediately sent a raiding party to Siegel’s Beverly Hills residence—along with a reporter from the
Los Angeles Examiner
, which was delighted to have another gangster to crusade against.