L.A. Noir (7 page)

In theory, policemen of the era were charged with many tasks. Officers not only apprehended criminals, they were also responsible for preparing cases against criminals appearing in court. They picked up loose paper on the streets (blowing paper could spook horses), cleared weeds from abandoned lots, enforced foot-and-mouth disease regulations, notified businessmen of upcoming police auctions, and enforced licensing requirements. Officers also responded to fires and floods. In practice, few applied themselves to their work with much zeal. A 1904 study of the Chicago Police Department found that police officers “spent most of their time not on the streets but in saloons, restaurants, barbershops, bowling alleys, pool halls, and bootblack stands.”

The activities of plainclothes detectives were more suspect still. When they operated out of saloons and dives—supposedly, in order to better monitor the underworld—it was often difficult to distinguish them from the men they were tasked with policing. Detectives routinely demanded cuts from the pickpockets, pimps, burglars, and bunco men who operated in their areas, often at the behest of local elected officials, who frequently insisted on a cut as well. Most were not particularly good at solving crimes. When something truly serious happened, for instance, the 1910 firebombing of the
Los Angeles Times
, cities turned to more capable outfits such as the William Burns Detective Agency.

In 1902, the LAPD’s woes were greatly exacerbated by two ministers’ “discovery” of Los Angeles’s booming crib district, which centered at the time on Sanchez Street, an alley just off the historic plaza. The clergymen immediately set out to publicize the horrors of this “market for human flesh” with a series of vivid pamphlets and books (which sold very well). Inflamed churchmen descended on “hell’s half-acre” to implore its prostitutes and saloonkeepers to renounce their evil ways. When that failed, they turned to the ballot, amending the city charter so as to completely outlaw all forms of prostitution, gambling, and vice within Los Angeles city limits. (Previously, such activities had been explicitly prohibited only within the central business district.) Henceforth, Los Angeles was “closed”—at least in theory.

The decision to prohibit vice put the LAPD in a difficult if not impossible situation. Faced with the threat of extinction, saloonkeepers, brewery owners, brothel operators, and gambling kingpins threw themselves into politics, donating lavishly to candidates for sheriff, district attorney, superior court judge, city council, and mayor. (Kent Parrot was simply
the first to harness these funds in a systematic manner.) Their largesse was likewise available to policemen, particularly to members of the Chinatown and the Metropolitan “purity” squads willing to tip them off when the pressure to mount a raid became irresistible. As a result, officers on the front lines of the effort to police the underworld often faced a stark choice: break the law and accept bribes from the saloonkeepers, madams, and gaming house operators who were bankrolling the politicians or refuse bribes, enforce the law, and risk being fired or assigned to direct traffic on the graveyard shift down at the port of San Pedro. Not everyone chose the path of virtue.

There were moments when puritanical morals held sway. In 1912, the city council passed legislation prohibiting sexual intercourse with “any person of the opposite sex to whom he or she is not married.” “A platoon of ministers” was sworn in to prowl for vice; parks and public beaches were illuminated and patrolled to prevent hanky-panky. But the reign of the morals police was short-lived. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and the United States’s entry into the First World War flooded Los Angeles with sailors and soldiers—populations renowned for whoring and boozing. Rationing created ample opportunities for black market profits, which in turn led to a surge in the supply of criminals. By the end of the decade, all pretense of enforcing the vice laws had basically come to an end. Los Angeles was run by the business community and the Combination. The LAPD served both as an enforcer.

It took a while for Patrolman Parker to catch on.

One night soon after his rookie probationary period had ended, Parker was leaving Central Division station, an imposing Romanesque building that also served as police headquarters up the block from the
Times
. He had just gotten into his car, ready to head off to an evening of night class at law school, when he saw an automobile weave down the First Street hill and then blow through a red light. The driver of the car was clearly drunk; Parker estimated it was moving at about sixty miles per hour. He took off in pursuit, picking up a madly whistling traffic cop along the way. Eventually, the two policemen succeeded in pulling the driver over. They found a half-empty open bottle in the car. They also discovered that the man they had stopped was John Arrington, a police reporter for the
Los Angeles Daily News
.

Today the police beat is seen as a place where novice reporters go to learn the craft—the bottom of the journalistic food chain. Not so in the 1920s. In those pretelevision days, crime was the sexiest beat in journalism, and the men (and occasionally women) who covered it were important figures. Not only were they star reporters, they also frequently functioned as political
hatchet men for their publishers (a job greatly facilitated by reporters’ free access to police files). Reporters supplemented their writing and (ahem) “research” with booze, poker, and occasionally extortion (publicity being something that many people were willing to pay to avoid). Veteran officers rarely crossed them. So it was hardly surprising that when Patrolman Parker hauled reporter Arrington into Central Division station and presented him to the desk sergeant for booking, he was not greeted enthusiastically. On the contrary, the sergeant on duty suggested that Parker let the newsman go. That’s when a defining feature of Bill Parker’s personality emerged: his stubbornness.

Infuriated at the idea that press credentials somehow inoculated the bearer from prosecution, Parker insisted that “the law was the law.” Reluctantly, the desk sergeant agreed to book the newspaperman. It soon emerged that the open bottle of liquor Parker had discovered in Arrington’s car was a gift from a police captain pal. Reluctantly, Parker’s superiors allowed the case to go to court, where, after many testimonials to the high character and unshakable sobriety of the newsman, a judge dismissed the case. It was Parker’s first lesson in how policing really worked.

Punishment, the ways in which it was or was not dispensed, provided a compelling introduction to how power was really distributed in Los Angeles. Nowhere were these realities more vivid than inside the dungeon that was the city jail. Every year fifty thousand Angelenos were arrested and passed through its halls—a significant number in a city of a million souls, and a sign that despite widespread corruption, a considerable portion of the department was still prepared to enforce Prohibition and its vice laws. Yet when a person of importance was caught in the net of vice enforcement, the legal apparatus was often forgiving. One night in 1927, the journalist and writer Louis Adamic happened to be on hand at 2:30 a.m. when “a star of world-wide fame, the sister of another famous celebrity, near stars, maids in waiting, and a bevy of attending sheiks and bull fighters” were hauled in “more or less cock-eyed drunk.”

Adamic then related what happened next:

Alas, the fun soon came to an end:

That was how the elite were treated. In March 1929, two plainclothes officers stopped a Finnish immigrant whom they had mistaken for a suspect. Indignant, the man launched into a tirade about the police that suggested that the man held “radical” political views. The officers responded by hauling him into police headquarters and working him over with brass knuckles. Only after the man, face pulped and bloodied, abjectly proclaimed his newfound admiration for the police was he released. The district attorney brought charges against the officers in question, but they were later dismissed.

Cops sometimes acted violently because they believed the system was corrupt. “Good men would not serve on juries, nor would they take time from their private interests to act as witnesses in court trials—if they could get out of it,” wrote Leslie White in his 1936 classic,
Me, Detective
. “Business men and good citizens did not want their homes robbed and their daughters raped, but they did want liquor for themselves, and prostitutes and gambling were good for business.” As a result, some officers took it on themselves to dispense justice. For, as Detective White put it, “[a] smart lawyer can keep a crook out of jail … buy or bamboozle a jury, but he cannot prevent the cops from beating the hell out of a crook.”

So some did. People arrested by the police were often detained for days—sometimes even for weeks—before being brought before a judge. Prisoners were frequently held incommunicado—no contact with family or friends, much less an attorney—until they confessed. When faced with hardened cons, the police routinely shifted prisoners into cold, dark cells without beds or chairs or into “sweat boxes.” They also resorted to “the third degree.” Typically, this involved round-the-clock questioning and sleep deprivation, a form of torture that almost always produced the desired confession. When it didn’t—or if the police were simply pissed—the “third degree” could also involve beating prisoners with clubs, fists, or
rubber hoses. Central Division station even had a special cell where such beatings occurred. “Screams have been heard and complaints from prisoners are frequent,” reported one investigation of jail conditions.

Parker would later describe this period as “the bad old good old days.”

Remarkably, the LAPD was actually less violent than most big-city police departments. In Chicago, prisoners were routinely beaten with phone books, manacled and hung from pipes, and teargassed. Still, Los Angeles was clearly not a city where people were equal under the law. Parker soon came to the sickening realization that Los Angeles “was in the clutch of hoodlums.”
Dumb
hoodlums: IQ tests administered in the early twenties found that a significant number of police officers were “low-grade mental defectives.”
Drunken
, dumb hoodlums. Sometimes, Parker would later recall, “I was the only sober man in the office.”

Not reassuring words from a man who was almost certainly an alcoholic.

Parker’s second arrest was more successful. Gazing out the window as he was riding home on one of the yellow Los Angeles Railway streetcars that crisscrossed the city, Parker noticed a man running toward his streetcar, carrying a woman’s fur coat. Panting heavily, the man stepped onto the streetcar. He was a big guy—over six feet tall, probably weighing at least two hundred pounds—with long arms; small, deep-set eyes; and a broad chest. Something about him looked familiar. Then Parker realized that he matched the description of a man wanted by the San Francisco police who had terrorized the city for weeks by attacking people with a long knife.

Parker edged over to the man and asked, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “Say, where’d you get that coat?”

“What’s it to you?” the man snarled, turning away.

Parker told the man he was a policeman and patted him down. He found—and confiscated—a long-bladed knife. Convinced that he had happened across the wanted man, Parker signaled for the motorman to stop—and informed the suspect that he was under arrest. Then he pulled the man off the streetcar and dragged him, “protesting and resisting,” to a police call box, where he called for a patrol wagon. At police headquarters, the department confirmed that Parker had nabbed the man San Franciscan papers had taken to calling Jack the Ripper.

It was a major coup for a rookie officer. His superiors, doubtless, were not pleased. A rookie had no right to make such an arrest: A savvier officer would have allowed a more senior officer to take the credit. But then no one thought Bill Parker was savvy; on the contrary, he was either one of
the dumbest men on the force or one of the most obstinate. Either way, he needed to be taught a lesson. So when Central Division got word one day that a shopkeeper had taken two employees hostage, the lieutenant on duty knew just who to send.

“He’s got a repeating shotgun,” the lieutenant said. “Take it away from him and bring him in.”

“Yes, sir,” Parker responded, and hurried to the shop.

When Parker arrived at the store, he saw the shopkeeper through the glass of the locked door, pacing and waving his gun. The owner saw Parker, too, and yelled at him to get back. Instead of waiting for backup, Parker went up to the store and calmly knocked on the door.

“Keep out,” the owner yelled. Parker knocked again. The man with the shotgun approached the door—and started lamenting his troubles. Parker indicated that he just couldn’t hear him clearly.