Part 1 (1/2)

L.A. noir.

The struggle for the soul of America's most seductive city.

by John Buntin.

Prologue

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.She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn't reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn't often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde...Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.-Raymond Chandler, The Big SleepFor 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 The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential 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 surpa.s.sed San Francisco as California's largest city. It was a moment of triumph for Los Angeles Times 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 a.s.sociates 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 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 a.s.sociates 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) 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 protege 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 (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. 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?

1.

The Mickey Mouse Mafia.

”[A] dead-rotten law enforcement setup rules in this county and city with an iron hand.”-LAPD Sgt. Charlie Stoker, 1950 MICKEY COHEN was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted-hit up for $20,000-no. Anyone who read the tabloids in post-World War II Los Angeles knew that extortion was Mickey's racket, along with book-making, gambling, loan-sharking, slot machines, narcotics, union agitation, and a substantial portion of the city's other illicit pastimes. In the years following Benjamin ”Bugsy” Siegel's ill-fated move to Las Vegas, Mickey Cohen had become the top mobster on the West Coast. And the tart-tongued, sharp-dressed, pint-sized gangster, whom the more circ.u.mspect newspapers described tactfully as ”a prominent figure in the sporting life world,” hadn't gotten there by being easily intimidated-certainly not by midlevel police functionaries. Yet in October 1948 that is precisely what the head of the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad set out to do.

Cohen was no stranger to the heat. During his first days in Los Angeles as Bugsy Siegel's enforcer, he had been instructed to squeeze Eddy Neales, the proprietor of the Clover Club. Located on the Sunset Strip, an unincorporated county area just outside of Los Angeles city limits, the Clover Club was Southern California's poshest gaming joint. It reputedly paid the L.A. County Sheriff's Department a small fortune for protection. The squad that provided it, led by Det. George ”Iron Man” Contreras, had a formidable reputation. People who crossed it died. According to Cohen, one member of the unit had been the triggerman on eleven killings. So when Neales sicced Contreras's men on Cohen, he undoubtedly expected that the sheriff's men would scare Mickey stiff.

Contreras tried. Cohen was picked up and brought in to receive a warning: If he didn't lay off Neales, the next warning would come in the form of a bullet to the head.

Mickey wasn't impressed. A few nights later, he sought out Contreras's top gunman.

”I looked him up and said to him, 'Let me tell you something: to me you're no cop. Being no cop I gotta right to kill you-so come prepared. The next time I see you coming to me I'm going to hit you between the eyes.'”

It was an effective warning. ”He felt I was sincere,” Mickey later reported. The cops backed down. Until now.

THE FACT OF THE MATTER was, Mickey Cohen was in an uncharacteristically vulnerable position that fall. Two months earlier, on Wednesday, August 18, as Cohen was putting the final touches on his newest venture, a sw.a.n.k men's clothing shop on Sunset Boulevard named Michael's Haberdashery, three gunmen had charged into the store and opened fire, wounding two Cohen henchmen and killing his top gunman, Hooky Rothman. Mickey himself was in the back bathroom was.h.i.+ng his hands, something the obsessive-compulsive gangster did fifty or sixty times a day. Trapped, he hid in a stall, atop a toilet, awaiting his death. But instead of checking to see that they'd gotten their man-item number one on the professional hitman's checklist-the gunmen fled. A few minutes later the incredulous driver of the gunmen's crash car saw Mickey scurry to safety out the front door.

Cohen had survived, but great damage had been done. As Siegel s.h.i.+fted his attention to Las Vegas, Mickey had taken over his old boss's Los Angeles operations-as well as Siegel's organized crime connections back East. The attempted hit on Cohen not only showed that Mickey was vulnerable, it suggested that Bugsy's powerful friends had no particular commitment to his protege's survival. In short, Mickey looked weak, and in the underworld, weakness attracts predators. So when the head of the LAPD administrative vice squad called just weeks after the attempted rub-out to inform Cohen that they ”had him down for a ten to twenty thousand dollar contribution” for the upcoming reelection campaign of inc.u.mbent mayor Fletcher Bowron, Mickey knew what was happening. This was not an opportunity for good, old-fas.h.i.+oned graft: Bowron had devoted his career to eradicating the underworld. Rather, this was a sign that the vice squad now viewed him as prey rather than predator.

”Power's a funny thing,” Cohen would later muse. ”Somebody calls your hole card, and [if you can't show you aren't bluffing] it's like a dike-one little hole can blow the whole thing.”

Paying would only confirm his weakness. Cohen refused.

Administrative vice's response was not long in coming. Just after midnight on the evening of January 15, 1949, five officers watched two Cadillacs depart from Michael's Haberdashery. They set off in pursuit. At the corner of Santa Monica and Ogden Drive, two miles west of Los Angeles city limits, the police pulled over the Cadillac containing Cohen, his driver, and Harold ”Happy” Meltzer, a sometime Cohen gunman who also had a jewelry shop in the same building as Cohen's haberdashery. A firearm was conveniently found on Meltzer, who was arrested. (It later disappeared, making it impossible to determine whether or not the gun had been planted.) Several days later, Mickey received a phone call offering to settle matters for $5,000. The vice squad was sending Cohen one last message: Hand over the cash or the gloves come off.

Mickey was furious. For years he had helped cops who got injured on the job and dispensed Thanksgiving turkeys to families in need at division captains' request. He'd given munic.i.p.al judges valuable horse tips. He'd wined and dined the administrative vice squad's commanding officers, Lt. Rudy Wellpot and Sgt. Elmer Jackson, at the Brown Derby and Dave's Blue Room, presented their girlfriends with expensive gifts, and treated them as VIPs at his nightclub-hangout on Beverly Boulevard, Slapsie Maxie's. The police had responded by breaking into his new house in Brentwood, stealing his address books, and swaggering around town with almost unbearable arrogance, routinely telling waiters who arrived with the check at the end of evening to ”send it to Mickey Cohen.” It was time to teach the LAPD a lesson it would never forget about who was running this town. The vice squad had called his hole card; now Mickey would show them he was holding the equivalent of a pair of bullets (two aces)-in the form of a recording that tied the vice squad to a thirty-six-year-old redheaded ex-prost.i.tute named Brenda Allen.

BRENDA ALLEN was Hollywood's most prosperous madam, in part because she was so cautious. Rather than take on the risks that came with running a ”bawdy house,” Allen relied on a telephone exchange service to communicate with her clients, clients who were vetted with the utmost care. While Allen would occasionally insert chaste ads in actors' directories or distribute her phone number to select cabbies, bartenders, and bellhops, she prided herself on serving the creme de la creme of Los Angeles. It was rumored that she even ran a Dun & Bradstreet check on prospective customers to ensure their suitability. Those who were accepted were rewarded with Allen's full and carefully considered attention. All of her girls were a.n.a.lyzed as to their more intimate characteristics, which were then carefully noted on file cards for cross-tabulation with her clients' preferences. The selection Allen offered was considerable. By 1948, she had 114 ”pleasure girls” in her harem. She also had a most unusual partner and lover: Sergeant Jackson of the LAPD administrative vice squad, the same policeman who was trying to shake down Mickey Cohen.

Needless to say, Sergeant Jackson's connection to Brenda Allen was not common knowledge. Even someone as well informed as Mickey Cohen might never have learned of it-but for the fact that another member of the police department had recently blackmailed Mickey with a transcription of certain sensitive conversations that Mickey had conducted at home. The shakedown tipped Mickey off to the fact that the LAPD had gotten a bug into his house. So he asked his friend Barney Ruditsky for help. Ruditsky, a former NYPD officer, was now Hollywood's foremost private eye. He specialized in doc.u.menting the infidelities of the stars (then as now, a business that relied heavily on illegal electronic surveillance). Cohen asked Ruditsky if he could recommend someone to sweep his house in Brentwood for eavesdropping devices. Ruditsky could: an electronics whiz named Jimmy Vaus. Vaus found the bug, and Mickey hired him on the spot. Soon thereafter, Vaus let Mickey in on a little secret: He was also a wiretapper for a sergeant on the Hollywood vice squad. Vaus told Cohen he had recordings linking Sergeant Jackson to Brenda Allen. That information was Cohen's ace in the hole. He decided to play it at henchman ”Happy” Meltzer's trial.

The trial began on May 5, 1949. In his opening statement, attorney Sam Rummel laid out Meltzer's defense. ”We will prove through testimony that the two men first sought $20,000, then $10,000, then $5,000 from Cohen in return for their promise to quit hara.s.sing him,” Rummel declared. As a defense, this was ho-hum stuff: Gangsters were always insisting they'd been framed. But when Cohen appeared with ”sound expert” Jimmy Vaus and a mysterious sound-recording machine, the press took notice, especially after Cohen confidentially informed them that he had recordings that would ”blow this case right out of court.”

The timing of Cohen's accusation was potentially explosive. Inc.u.mbent mayor Fletcher Bowron was up for reelection on June 1. The mayor had based his entire reelection campaign on his record of keeping Los Angeles's underworld ”closed” and the city government clean. Now Mickey was claiming that he had evidence that would show that senior police officials were on the take. Fortunately for Mayor Bowron, most of the city's newspapers strongly supported his reelection. So did the county grand jury impaneled every year to investigate munic.i.p.al wrongdoing. A mistrial was hastily declared. Cohen's allegations received only light coverage. Mayor Bowron was handily reelected. Only then did the Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Daily News break the story: break the story: BIG EXPOSE TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK: INSIDE STORY TELLS BIG EXPOSE TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK: INSIDE STORY TELLS BRENDA'S CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE POLICE, BY SGT. CHARLES STOKER! BRENDA'S CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE POLICE, BY SGT. CHARLES STOKER!

It turned out that Vaus's contact on the Hollywood vice squad, Sgt. Charles Stoker, had gone before the criminal complaints committee of the county grand jury the day before Cohen and Vaus showed up in court with the wire recordings. There Stoker had told the committee about overhearing Brenda Allen's conversations with Sergeant Jackson. It then emerged that Sgt. Guy Rudolph, confidential investigator for the chief of police, had gotten wind of Jackson's connection to Allen fourteen months earlier and had asked police department technician Ray Pinker to set up another wiretap. But that investigation had mysteriously stalled, and the recordings had then disappeared.

Spurred by these revelations and by Cohen's charges, the county grand jury opened an investigation. In mid-June it began subpoenaing police officers. Chief Clarence B. Horrall insisted that he had never been informed of the allegations swirling around the vice squad; high-ranking officers stepped forward to insist that he had been. Brenda Allen volunteered that Sergeants Stoker and Jackson had both been on the take. The head of the LAPD gangster squad abruptly retired. Every day brought a new revelation. The Daily News Daily News revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey's house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK'd a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, a.s.st. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet-if he could survive to collect. revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey's house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK'd a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, a.s.st. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet-if he could survive to collect.

JUST A FEW WEEKS LATER, Mickey was driving home to his house in Brentwood for dinner with his wife, LaVonne, and the actor George Raft. Mickey had outfitted his $150,000 home at 513 Moreno Avenue with the most advanced security gear of the time, including an ”electronic eye” that could detect intruders and trigger floodlights. The goal was to illuminate anyone who approached the house. But of course the security system also illuminated him him when he got home in the evening. This was a serious problem when there was a hitman hiding in the empty lot next door, as there was that night. when he got home in the evening. This was a serious problem when there was a hitman hiding in the empty lot next door, as there was that night.

As Mickey started to swing into his driveway and the lights came on, the gunman opened fire, pumping slugs into Mickey's car. Mickey dropped to the floorboard. Without looking over the dashboard, he wrenched his blue Caddy back onto the road and floored it. He made it about two blocks before beaching the car on a curb. Fortunately, the gunman was gone. So Mickey went home. Despite bleeding from cuts inflicted by the shattered gla.s.s, Mickey waved off the questions about what had happened and insisted on proceeding with dinner-New York strip and apple pie, Raft's favorite. The actor would later say that Mickey had looked ”a little mussed up.”

Cohen didn't report the matter to the police. (Why advertise his vulnerability further?) The attack might never have come to light but for a tip from Cohen's auto-body shop to the police... and Mickey's decision to commission a $25,000 armored Cadillac and test it at the police academy firing range. When the press broke the story, Cohen replied nonchalantly, ”Well, where else? You can't test it [by opening fire]... on the street for Christ's sake!” Posed before his ma.s.sive new armored car, the sad-eyed, five-foot-three-inch gangster (five-foot-five in lifts) looked like nothing so much as Mickey Mouse. Gangsters in other cities marveled about Mickey's good luck-and sn.i.g.g.e.red about L.A.'s ”Mickey Mouse Mafia.”

Still, someone clearly was trying to kill him, albeit rather ineptly. It might have seemed like a good time to lie low. But that was a feat Cohen seemed const.i.tutionally incapable of. Thanks to the tabloids, Mickey was a celebrity, one of the biggest in town, and he acted the part, courting the press, squiring ”budding starlets” around town (although in private his tastes inclined more to exotic dancers), and frequenting hot nightclubs like Ciro's, the Trocadero, and the Mocambo.

The evening of Tuesday, July 19, 1949, was a typical one for Mickey. After dining with Artie Samish, chief lobbyist for the state's liquor interests and one of the most powerful men in Sacramento, Mickey and his party of henchmen, starlets, and reporters repaired to one of his favorite hangouts, Sherry's, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip that was owned by his friend Barney Ruditsky. Standing watch outside was a curious addition to Mickey's crew: Special Agent Harry Cooper, from the state attorney general's office. After the attempted hit at Michael's Haberdashery, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department had insisted-somewhat counterintuitively-on disarming Cohen's men and checking them frequently for weapons, to make sure they stayed unarmed. As a result, Mickey was essentially unprotected. Samish had arranged to provide a little extra protection in the form of Special Agent Cooper.

By 3:30 a.m., Mickey was ready to call it a night. Ruditsky went outside and did a quick sweep of the parking lot. Everything looked clear. Two of Cohen's men went to bring around his Cadillac (one of the regular ones, Mickey being embroiled in a dispute with the California Highway Patrol about the excessive weight of his armored car). A valet went to get Cohen pal Frankie Niccoli's Chrysler, and at 3:50 a.m., Mickey and his party stepped outside. Almost immediately a shotgun and a high-powered .30-06 rifle opened up from an empty lot across the street, and members of Mickey's party started to drop.

One of them was newspaper columnist Florabel Muir, who had been lingering inside over the morning paper as Mickey's party exited. Muir (who frankly admitted to hanging around Mickey in hopes that some shooting would start) now charged outside, into the gunfire. One of Cohen's top thugs, Neddie Herbert, had been hit and was lying wounded on the ground. Special Agent Cooper was staggering about, clutching his stomach with one hand and waving his pistol with the other. Then Muir saw Mickey, ”right arm hung limp, and blood spreading on his coat near the shoulder” running toward Cooper. With his one good arm Cohen grabbed the sagging six-foot-tall lawman and stuffed him into Niccoli's Chrysler. Cohen piled in as well, and the Chrysler zoomed off-to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital. Thanks to Mickey's quick reaction, Cooper lived. The more seriously wounded Herbert wasn't so fortunate; he died four days later. Mickey himself escaped with only a shoulder wound. Florabel Muir got her exclusive, along with a sprinkling of buckshot in her bottom.

Later that night, policemen found automatic Savage and Remington shotguns in the empty lot across the street from Sherry's. A ballistics test determined that the buckshot slugs used were standard-issue police riot-control sh.e.l.ls. Muir also noted with interest that the deputy sheriffs who seemed so diligent in ensuring that Cohen's crew was firearms-free had vanished a few minutes before the shooting.

The papers, of course, were thrilled. ”The Battle of the Sunset Strip!” the press dubbed it. But who was behind the hit? Mayor Bowron blamed Manhattan crime boss Frank Costello. Others pointed to Jack Dragna, a local Italian crime boss who'd reluctantly accepted direction from Bugsy Siegel but who was known to dislike Mickey. Sergeant Stoker, the former vice officer turned county grand-jury witness, claimed the triggerman was LAPD. Cohen himself was confused by the attack. But Mickey did know one thing: He could deal with an underworld rival like Dragna. But in order to thrive as a crime lord in Los Angeles, Mickey needed a friendly-or at least tolerant-chief of police in office.

For the moment, that was impossible. In the wake of Chief Horrall's ouster, Mayor Bowron had appointed, on an emergency basis, a no-nonsense former Marine general named William Worton to run the department. One of Worton's first acts was to reconst.i.tute the LAPD's intelligence division. Its top target: Mickey Cohen. Fortunately for Cohen, Worton was only a temporary appointment; civil service rules required the Police Commission to hire from within the department. That meant Cohen would have a chance to put a more friendly man in the position, and the diminutive gangster already knew exactly who he wanted: Thaddeus Brown, a former detective who'd headed the homicide department before winning promotion to deputy chief of patrol in 1946.

Brown was a big teddy bear of a man, enormously popular with the department's detectives and well regarded by the underworld, too. As chief of detectives, Brown insisted on knowing every detective's confidential sources. As a result, he had a wide range of acquaintances. He saw the underworld's denizens as human beings, not evil incarnate. As a result, Cohen had something of a soft spot for the man the papers called ”the master detective.” Brown had another, even more influential backer in Norman Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times. The support Norman could offer was not purely rhetorical. The Chandler family had long maintained a special-almost proprietary-interest in the LAPD. Indeed, for more than two decades the city's dominant newspaper had made it clear that a voice in police affairs was the sine qua non of the paper's political support. It was widely known that Norman Chandler controlled three of the Police Commission's five votes-and that Chandler expected them to vote for Thad Brown as chief.

In short, Brown's ascension seemed inevitable. However, it was not automatic. The Police Commission could not simply vote to promote the ”master detective.” Since 1923, the chief of the LAPD had been chosen under the civil service system. As a result, applicants for the top position had to take an elaborate civil service exam, composed of a written test and an oral examination. The results of the written test typically accounted for 95 percent of the total score; the oral exam plus a small adjustment for seniority contributed the other 5 percent. Candidates then received a total score and were ranked accordingly. The Police Commission was allowed to choose from among the top three candidates.

To no one's surprise, Thad Brown got the top score. What was surprising was who came in second: Deputy Chief William H. Parker, the head of the Bureau of Internal Affairs. A decorated veteran of the Second World War, wounded in Normandy during the D-day invasion, Parker had helped to den.a.z.ify munic.i.p.al police forces in Italy and Germany as the Allies advanced. He now wanted to purge the LAPD of corruption-and Los Angeles of organized crime-in much the same way. Mickey Cohen was determined to make sure that Parker never got that chance.

”I had gambling joints all over the city,” Mickey later explained, ”and I needed the police just to make sure they ran efficiently.” Bill Parker would not make things go smoothly.

One of the things that any crime lord needs is a line on the Police Commission, and Cohen had it. His contacts there a.s.sured him that three of the five commissioners-Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman-favored Brown. That left only Irving Snyder and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, the sole African American police commissioner, in favor of Parker. Mickey was convinced that ”the fix” was in and that Brown would be the next chief of police. The only obstacle Brown faced, Cohen's connections informed him, was that Brown's selection might be seen as a personal triumph for the little gangster. On their advice, Cohen decided to leave town for the actual decision-making period-”just to blow off any stink that could possibly come up.” Along with his sometime bodyguard Johnny Stompanato (who was also known as one of Hollywood's most notorious gigolos) and his Boston terrier, Tuffy, L.A.'s underworld boss set off on a leisurely road trip to Chicago.

Cohen arrived in Chicago to shocking news. The day before the Police Commission vote, Brown-supporter Agnes Albro had unexpectedly died. The following day, the commission had voted to name Bill Parker the next chief of police. The battle for control of Los Angeles was about to begin in earnest. Though Mickey didn't know it, it was a fight Bill Parker had been preparing for his entire life.

2.

The ”White Spot”

”Wherein lies the fascination of the Angel City! Why has it become the Mecca of tourists the world over? Is it because it is the best advertised city in the United States? Is it that it offers illimitable opportunities for making money and eating fruit? Hardly that. After all the pamphlets of the real estate agents, the boosters' clubs, the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Commerce have been read, something remains unspoken-something that uncannily grips the stranger”-Willard Huntington Wright, 1913 BEFORE IT WAS A CITY, Los Angeles was an idea.

Other cities were based on geographical virtues-a splendid port (San Francisco, say, or New York), an important river (St. Louis), a magnificent lake (Chicago). But nothing about the arid basin of Los Angeles (other than its mild weather) suggested the site of a great metropolis. So the men who built Los Angeles decided to advertise a different kind of virtue: moral and racial purity. Los Angeles, a settlement founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, was reenvisioned as ”the white spot of America,” a place where native-born, white Protestants could enjoy ”the magic of outdoors inviting always... trees in blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time” as well as ”mystery, romance, charm, splendor,” all safe among others of their kind. It was an image relentlessly promoted by men like Harry Chandler, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times and one of Southern California's most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpa.s.sed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn't true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice. and one of Southern California's most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpa.s.sed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn't true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice.