L.A. Noir

To Melinda
—and the boys

Prologue

part one
The Fallen City

1:
The Mickey Mouse Mafia

2:
The “White Spot”

3:
The Combination

4:
The Bad Old Good Old Days

part two
The Struggle for Authority

5:
“Jewboy”

6:
Comrade Bill

7:
Bugsy

8:
Dynamite

9:
Getting Away with Murder (Inc.)

10:
L.A. Noir

11:
The Sporting Life

part three
The Enemy Within

12:
The Double Agent

13:
Internal Affairs

14:
The Evangelist

15:
“Whiskey Bill”

16:
Dragnet

17:
The Trojan Horse

18:
The Magna Carta of the Criminal

19:
The Enemy Within

part four
All the Way or Nothing

20:
The Mike Wallace Interview

21:
The Electrician

22:
Chocolate City

23:
Disneyland

24:
Showgirls

25:
The Muslim Cult

26:
The Gas Chamber

27:
Watts

28:
R.I.P.

   
Epilogue

   
Acknowledgments

   
Notes

   
Select Bibliography

   
Credits

OTHER CITIES have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Advertised to the world as the Eden at the end of the western frontier, the settlement the Spaniards named El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles turned out to be something very different—not the beatific Our Lady the Queen of the Angels advertised by its name but rather a dark, dangerous blonde.

For more than sixty years, writers and directors from Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski and James Ellroy have explored L.A.’s origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes in fiction and films like
The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown
, and
L.A. Confidential
. In the process, they created the distinctive worldview known as noir, where honor is in short supply and where Los Angeles invariably proves to be a femme fatale. Yet this preoccupation with a mythic past has obscured something important—the true history of noir Los Angeles.

For more than forty years, from Prohibition through the Watts riots, politicians, gangsters, businessmen, and policemen engaged in an often-violent contest for control of the city. Their struggle shaped the history of
Los Angeles, the future of policing, and the course of American politics. In time, two primary antagonists emerged. The first was William H. Parker, Los Angeles’s greatest and most controversial chief of police. His nemesis was Los Angeles’s most colorful criminal, featherweight boxer-turned-gangster Mickey Cohen.

      IN 1920 Los Angeles surpassed San Francisco as California’s largest city. It was a moment of triumph for
Los Angeles Times
publisher Harry Chandler, who had arrived four decades earlier when the city of angels was a dusty, water-starved pueblo of ten thousand souls. Chandler and his associates worked tirelessly to build a metropolis, relentlessly promoting the fledgling city and ruthlessly securing the water needed to support it (a campaign made famous by the film
Chinatown)
. Yet 1920 was also the year that witnessed the emergence of a major threat to their authority. The threat came from Prohibition. For years, Harry Chandler and the so-called business barons had supplied local politicians with the advertising, the publicity, and the money they needed to reach the city’s new residents. In exchange, they gained power over the city government. But with the imposition of Prohibition, a new force appeared with the money and the desire to purchase L.A.’s politicians: the criminal underworld. To suppress it, the business community turned to the Los Angeles Police Department. The underworld also looked to the LAPD—for protection.

In 1922, Bill Parker and Mickey Cohen entered this drama as bit players in the struggle for control of Los Angeles. In 1937, Parker emerged as a protégé of Los Angeles’s top policeman while Mickey became the enforcer for L.A.’s top gangster. In 1950, they became direct rivals, each dedicated to the other’s destruction. Two characters more different from each other would be hard to imagine. Parker arrived in Los Angeles in 1922 from Deadwood, South Dakota, a proud, ambitious seventeen-year-old, one of the tens of thousands of migrants who were moving west to Southern California in what the journalist Carey McWilliams described as “the largest internal migration in the history of the American people.” He hoped to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a pioneering prosecutor on the western frontier, and make a career for himself in the law. But instead of opportunity, Parker found in Los Angeles temptation. Instead of becoming a prominent attorney, he became a cop, a patrolman in the Los Angeles Police Department. Coldly cerebral
(Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry, a onetime LAPD officer and Parker speechwriter, reputedly based the character Mr. Spock on his former boss), intolerant of fools, and famously
incorruptible (in a department that was famously corrupt), Parker persevered. Gradually he rose. Between 1934 and 1937, he masterminded a campaign to free the police department from the control of gangsters and politicians, only to see his efforts undone by a blast of dynamite and a sensational scandal. Then, in 1950, another scandal (this one involving 114 Hollywood “pleasure girls”) made Parker chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, a position he would hold for sixteen controversial years.

In contrast, Mickey Cohen wasn’t troubled by self-examination until much later in life (when he would grapple with the question of going “straight”). Born Meyer Harris Cohen in 1913 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Mickey arrived in Los Angeles with his mother and sister at the age of three. By the age of six, he was hustling newspapers on the streets of Boyle Heights. At the age of nine, he began his career in armed robbery with an attempt to “heist” a movie theater in downtown L.A. using a baseball bat. His talent with his fists took the diminutive brawler to New York City to train as a featherweight boxer. His skill with a .38 took him into the rackets, first in Cleveland, then in Al Capone’s Chicago. In 1937, Mickey returned to Los Angeles to serve as gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s right-hand man. It was a job that put him on a collision course with Bill Parker.

For three decades, from the Great Depression to the Watts riots, Parker and Cohen—the policeman and the gangster—would engage in a struggle for power, first as lieutenants to older, more powerful men, then directly with each other, and finally with their own instincts and desires. In 1956, Chief Parker’s war against Mickey Cohen and organized crime in L.A. attracted the attention of a young Senate investigator with political ambitions named Robert Kennedy. It also antagonized FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and created an extralegal, wiretap-driven style of policing that eerily prefigures the tactics being used in today’s war on terror. In the 1960s, it would incite the Watts riots and help propel Ronald Reagan into the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Their contest would involve some of the most powerful—and colorful—figures of the twentieth century: press magnates Harry Chandler and his nemesis, William Randolph Hearst; studio head Harry Cohn of Columbia; entertainers Jack Webb, Frank Sinatra, Lana Turner, and Sammy Davis Jr.; and civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The outcome of their struggle would change the history of Los Angeles, set race relations in America on a dangerous new path, and chart a problematic course for American policing.

Parker and Cohen’s struggle for control of the city also changed them. Ultimately, like any good noir tale, the story of the rivalry between the
young hoodlum with a second-grade education who became the king of the L.A. underworld and the obstinate young patrolman from Deadwood who created the modern LAPD brings us back to the question that Los Angeles always seems to pose: Is Our Lady the Queen of the Angels the dark angel, or do we simply bring our own darkness to her?

“[A] dead-rotten law enforcement setup rules in this county and city with an iron hand.”

—LAPD Sgt. Charlie Stoker, 1950