L.A. Noir (39 page)

It was love at first sight.

Kennedy had long been fascinated by the experiences of his less fortunate Irish brethren. At Harvard, older brother Jack had joined an elite “final” club and generally gravitated toward what his sister Eunice would later describe as “Long Island sophisticates.” Bobby sought out war veterans on the GI Bill. In the NYPD, Bobby found the ultimate tough-guy Irish institution. Kennedy couldn’t get enough of it. Unbeknownst to his family or friends back in D.C., Kennedy was soon accompanying narcotics raiding parties on their nighttime forays. Often, the Bureau of Narcotics and the police would team up. Unrestrained by the Fourth Amendment, the local cops would kick in the door; narcotics agents would then storm in to make the arrests. Defendants’ rights were essentially nil. Street justice was a common sight. One night, when Kennedy was out on a ridealong, the police burst into an apartment and found a man sexually abusing a two-year-old. While Kennedy watched, the police threw the man out a window as punishment.

Kennedy also fell in with the New York press, who plied him with stories of corruption in the trade union movement. They explained the unholy alliances that often resulted, whereby unions made use of the mob’s “muscle,” and the mobs tapped union treasuries for their own illicit businesses. Press
and police alike were impressed by young Bobby’s spunk. He was a fighter, figuratively and literally. One night at a bar, after an evening of rousting with the police, a fellow drinker—a big, tough-looking fellow—recognized Kennedy (who appeared regularly in the papers) and treated him to a stream of colorful insults about his family and his father. Kennedy (five foot, ten inches and 160 pounds) calmly invited the much bigger man to step outside. When the man stood up, Kennedy spun around and smashed him square in the face, breaking the man’s nose. Everyone was impressed by Bobby’s willingness to fight dirty, but his reporter friends wondered if he was really tough enough to take on organized crime.

The Syndicate, they stressed, was truly dangerous. Just look at what had happened to the crusading labor columnist Victor Riesel in the spring of 1956. One night, just after midnight, Reisel had stepped out onto a silent 51st Street and noticed a young man strolling toward him. It was the last thing Riesel ever saw. The man hurled a vial of sulfuric acid in Riesel’s face, permanently blinding him. Rumor had it that the man behind the attack was Johnny Dio, a Lucchese family capo and a notorious labor union racketeer.

When told about Dio’s activities, Kennedy vowed to go after him, but his reporter pals pushed him to go further. Shouldn’t his committee be taking a broader look at the question of labor racketeering? Kennedy hesitated. The Senate Labor Committee might not appreciate having a young upstart intrude on their turf. Labor unions were also an important Democratic Party constituency. A high-profile investigation would undoubtedly ruffle feathers in the party. It was Washington, D.C.-based newsman Clark Mollenhoff who ultimately found the right button to push. Mollenhoff told Kennedy that racketeers were moving into the Teamsters Union in the Midwest and, in effect, dared Kennedy to check it out. When Bobby hesitated, Mollenhoff went straight for the hot button. What, are you scared? he taunted Kennedy. Are you afraid?

Soon thereafter, in August 1956, Kennedy announced that the Senate investigations subcommittee would expand its attention to the broader field of labor racketeering.
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His first target was the nation’s biggest and most powerful union—the Teamsters. Kennedy had heard rumors that mobsters
had infiltrated various locals as part of an effort to gain control of the Teamsters’ $250 million pension fund. But there was a problem. His reporter friends notwithstanding, Kennedy had very little information to go on. The NYPD intelligence division had some information, but it was limited to New York. The Bureau of Narcotics had a wealth of information, but it was focused on narcotics. There was one police department, though, that had made a name for itself with its relentless war on organized crime—the Los Angeles Police Department. On November 14, 1956, Kennedy and former G-man-turned-congressional-investigator Carmine Bellino flew out to Los Angeles to meet Chief Parker and intelligence division head James Hamilton. To prevent the press from getting wind of their visit, the two men traveled in secret. Kennedy used an alias, Mr. Rodgers. It would prove to be an eventful meeting.

      PARKER took Kennedy’s visit seriously. He directed Hamilton and Lt. Joseph Stephens, who headed the department’s labor squad, to take the afternoon to meet with the Senate investigators. The men hit it off immediately. Kennedy and Bellino were impressed—and alarmed—by the material the LAPD had amassed. One example of the kinds of “strong arm” tactics employed by the mob in Southern California made a particularly vivid impression on Kennedy. It concerned a union organizer who’d gone to San Diego in defiance of warnings from the local mob. Soon after arriving, the man had been assaulted. According to Kennedy’s later recounting of the story, he woke up the next day “covered in blood” and with “terrible pains in his stomach.” With difficulty, he made it back to a hospital in Los Angeles, where doctors performed emergency surgery and, according to Kennedy, “removed from his backside a large cucumber.” The man was later warned that if he ever returned to San Diego, he’d come back with a watermelon.

Urban myth or actual event? It didn’t matter. Kennedy believed it had happened. It steeled his resolve to act.

At the end of the afternoon, Hamilton walked Kennedy out to the parking lot behind “the glass house” (as the new police administration building was called). It had been a productive day. The LAPD’s wealth of information about corruption in the Teamsters reinforced Kennedy’s belief that he was on to something big. So did subsequent meetings arranged by Hamilton and Stephens, which put Kennedy and Bellino in direct contact with a variety of employers, union leaders, employees, and confidential informants. Kennedy and Bellino heard from dissident members of the longshoremen’s union, who complained of the leadership’s radicalism and “red” sympathies.
They heard from union organizers (again in San Diego) who’d been beaten up by goons after attempting to organize retail clerks and about a Los Angeles plumbers and steamfitters local that was resisting mob attempts to muscle in on building contracts. More to the point, they heard about how local Teamsters were colluding with selected employers—employers with strong mob ties—to corner the garbage removal market in Los Angeles. Hamilton concluded by suggesting that Kennedy and Bellino take their fact-finding mission to Portland, Oregon, where crusading journalists had uncovered a wealth of incriminating evidence about corruption in the Teamsters local.

Hamilton and Kennedy met as strangers but ended the day as friends. Henceforth, the LAPD intelligence division would be an important (if largely unheralded) source of intelligence to Robert Kennedy. Kennedy’s relationship with Chief Parker was different. The two men would never be friends in the way that Hamilton and Kennedy were; their personal styles were too different. But ideologically, the two men were largely in sync. In addition to sharing a faith (Roman Catholicism) and a creed (anti-communism), the two men shared a worldview: Both saw the underworld as the enemy within.

There was another similarity. Both men were battling their own internal enemies. Bobby was prone to depression (“Black Bobby,” his older brother rather insensitively called him) and also to fits of anger that occasionally propelled him to violence. As a young man, Parker had shared this impulse to violence too. But the more dangerous demon for Los Angeles’s proud chief of police was the demon of drink. Nowhere was that demon more in evidence than at an annual event called the Mobil Economy Run.

The Mobil Economy Run (sponsored by the Mobil Oil corporation and the U.S. Auto Club) was a coast-to-coast race designed to test the fuel efficiency of automobiles under real-life driving conditions. Automakers competed fiercely for the right to proclaim their cars the most fuel efficient in their class. But the Mobil Economy Run had another, less advertised, purpose as well. It was also a tremendous booze-fueled junket. Every year, Mobil rented a train for VIPs that ran north from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Yosemite, and Sun Valley (and thence onward east) or west to Albuquerque and then to Sun Valley and points east. Every year, Mobil invited the LAPD’s chief of police and deputy chief for traffic.

On the job, Parker was a straight arrow. He took a dim view of patrol officers receiving “gifts” from merchants on their beat (though they still did). He abhorred ticket fixing and insisted on observing the strict letter of the law. Off the job (and with a little liquor in his system), he could be quite different. The Mobil Economy Run’s VIP trains were all about liquoring up company guests. As soon as the train left L.A.’s Union Station, the shades
came down and the bar opened. It remained open, 24/7, for the remainder of the trip.

As if determined to avoid temptation, Parker stayed away from the Mobil Economy Run during his first year as chief. In 1952, however, he succumbed. Two years later, he went along with traffic chief Harold Sullivan. The
Examiner’s
automotive reporter, Slim Bernard, came too. Bernard was a character much beloved for his high jinx, so no one was surprised when, after a few drinks, Bernard somehow produced Salvation Army uniforms at the stop in Albuquerque and set out to recruit “soldiers” to solicit donations at the station. What was surprising was that Parker was happy to join the fun. Completely sloshed, he pounded away on a drum while his fellow revelers collected donations. It was a scene that made Parker’s traveling companion Harold Sullivan, who didn’t shy away from a few drinks on occasion himself, distinctly uncomfortable.

It got worse. By the time they reached Sun Valley, Parker (drinking all the while) was ready to lead a conga line through the hotel lobby and down the escalator. From Sullivan’s perspective, Parker’s behavior went well beyond boozy good fun. “He was drinking, and he had a problem,” says Sullivan simply of Parker on that trip.

Parker himself presumably saw things in a different light. From that year forward, he was a Mobil Economy Run regular.

Fast-forward three years.

One day in the spring of 1957, the special bell on Sullivan’s desk rang to indicate that the chief wanted to talk to him immediately. Such summons were dreaded by the deputy chiefs. Parker didn’t hold regular staff meetings. By 1957, he had become quite hands off about the management of divisions that weren’t under his direct control. Sullivan sometimes went weeks without discussing traffic matters with the chief. When Sullivan or another deputy chief was summoned, it typically meant that Parker was angry about something and intended to chew him out. Nonetheless, Sullivan promptly hurried down the hall to Parker’s office. He was relieved to find the chief looking pensive.

“I’ve got a little problem,” Parker told Sullivan, almost sheepishly.

“What is it?” Sullivan replied.

“Mayor Poulson wants to go on the Economy Run,” Parker replied. Sullivan didn’t see the difficulty. Mobil Oil would surely be delighted to have the mayor come along for the ride.

“Just call the manager and tell him that,” said Sullivan. Although he was disinclined to ask favors, Parker did. Just as Sullivan predicted, the Mobil Economy Run was more than happy to extend an invitation to Mayor Poulson At the last minute, though, Poulson bowed out and sent a press aide in
his stead. The aide was astonished by how much Parker drank—and (in Sullivan’s words) by “what an asshole he made of himself.” In short, he reported to Poulson that Los Angeles’s lauded police chief was a common drunk of the worst sort. When Parker got back, the mayor confronted Parker about his public drinking, saying it was an embarrassment to the city. Parker vowed to sober up, but the binges (which typically began after work hours at the speaking engagements that filled Parker’s evenings) continued—until his drinking habit brought him face to face with the possibility of a violent death.

The turning point came during a family trip to Tucson. Parker was there with his wife, Helen; his brother Joe; and his sister-in-law. The four of them were at a restaurant in Phoenix. Parker was “pulled as tight as a rubber band” that evening. The Mafia, he explained to Joe, was moving into Los Angeles. Parker was glum. He had a few B&Bs—Benedictine and brandies—too many to drive home. The next day, a subordinate called to say that one of the Los Angeles papers was reporting that a Mob figure had spotted Parker, drunk, in a Phoenix restaurant. Horrified, Parker never had another drink again.