L.A. Noir (27 page)

Worton had taken over as the LAPD’s emergency chief the previous July. The city charter provided for a sixty-day term, renewable once. However, when September arrived, Mayor Bowron was not ready to dispense with General Worton’s services. So the city attorney was prevailed upon to issue an opinion that allowed him to continue in office. General Worton’s “temporary” appointment was extended into the winter—and then again into the spring of 1950. If Mayor Bowron had had his druthers, it seems clear he would have simply appointed General Worton chief of police. But the city charter was explicit: The next chief of police had to come from within the department. It seemed an insuperable obstacle. But Worton was convinced that there was a way he could continue to direct the department without running afoul of the city charter. He would simply change what the chief of police did.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s organization was unusual. Everyone described General Worton as the police chief, but in fact he was not technically in charge of the department. The Police Commission was. Worton was technically the department’s “general manager.” The organizational chart clearly put him under the five-member civilian board appointed by the mayor, much as corporate CEOs answer to their companies’ boards. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, the Police Commission provided almost no direction to—much less oversight of—the department. There were a number of reasons for this. Unlike a corporate board whose members come primarily from business backgrounds similar to that of their CEOs, the police commissioners were civilians, not police professionals. As a result, they simply didn’t have the knowledge or experience to evaluate how the chief and the department were doing.

They also didn’t have the time. In addition to supervising the police department, the commission was also responsible for licensing a whole range of businesses (auto-repair shops, pawnshops, dance halls, and so forth) and approving activities (parades, public dances) that might involve the police department. This licensing task alone was enough to fully occupy the
commission, which typically met one morning a week. The commission also relied almost entirely on police department personnel to conduct its investigations. Finally, even if the commission had decided to go after the department’s general manager, the chief of police enjoyed something no CEO had: civil service protection. No wonder Police Commissions often made only the barest pretense of directing the department. By the end of Chief Horrall’s tenure, the police chief no longer even met with the commission on a regular basis.

The more time General Worton spent in office, the more convinced he became that the entire system was flawed. The notion that the department answered to a board of civilians was nothing more than a polite fiction—and was exposed as such whenever the police department had something sensitive to handle, such as a brutality complaint. These were dealt with internally, by department personnel alone. This rubbed Worton the wrong way. So too did the fact that while the mayor was held to account, politically, for the conduct of the police department, he exercised only indirect influence over the department, through his appointees to the Police Commission.

A better model was needed, Worton concluded, and it wasn’t hard to find one. Police departments in New York, Chicago, and Detroit all operated under a different management structure. In those cities, the mayor appointed a single civilian commissioner or superintendent to supervise the department. This commissioner or superintendent answered to the mayor. Day-to-day police department operations were run by a top-uniformed officer—in the NYPD, the chief of department. The Marine Corps had a similar structure. There the top-uniformed officer—the commandant—ran operations but answered to a civilian, the secretary of the Navy. Worton believed that the LAPD would benefit from a similar structure.

During the fall of 1949, he fleshed out his plan for reorganizing the department. It called for a non-civil-service commissioner who would be appointed by the mayor (subject to city council approval) to a three-year term. This commissioner would be responsible for setting goals for the department and would directly run important bureaus such as internal affairs, planning and accounting, records and identification, and communications. A uniformed police chief would serve under him and direct actual law enforcement activities. Worton believed such a reorganization could be accomplished without amending the city charter. As to who this new commissioner would be, most observers assumed that the candidate Worton had in mind was himself.

Mayor Bowron liked the idea. But Worton’s plan quickly encountered opposition from powerful forces—and from at least one member of his
inner circle, Bill Parker. The disciplinary system that struck Worton as ill conceived was among Parker’s proudest accomplishments. With the department’s top job once again in reach, Parker had no intention of standing aside while an outsider gutted the system he had created. He boldly criticized General Worton’s proposed reforms. He insisted that a five-member civilian Police Commission whose members were each appointed to five-year terms would be more independent and responsive to the public than a single commissioner who answered only to the mayor would be.

“You’ll get a bad city administration someday,” Parker warned.

For months, the police department had stood by meekly while Mayor Bowron extended General Worton’s emergency term of office in legally dubious ways and considered plans to unilaterally reorganize the department. Now the forces of the status quo ante counterattacked. General Worton had suggested that the department could be reorganized without a charter amendment. A chorus of voices arose to question this sweeping claim. Reluctantly, Mayor Bowron agreed that his acting police chief’s plan would have to be submitted to the voters for their approval. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that the only person who was really enthusiastic about this idea was Worton himself. Finally Mayor Bowron gave in and announced that he’d be scheduling an examination to select a new chief in the spring of 1950. Some two dozen LAPD officers promptly announced that they would sit for the examination, among them Bill Parker.

On July 10, participants’ scores were announced. Parker placed first. Thad Brown and Roger Murdock placed a distant second and third. That same day, General Worton notified the Police Commission that he wished to step down from his position at the end of the month. Legally, Mayor Bowron could select any of the top three candidates, but everyone knew that the choice was really between the two heavyweights, Brown or Parker. Both men now attempted to rally their allies. In Parker’s case, that meant the American Legion and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including its new archbishop (soon to be cardinal), James Francis McIntyre. By 1948, there were 650,000 Roman Catholics in Los Angeles, and another 55,000 were arriving from across the country every year. Msgr. Thomas O’Dwyer, the top aide to Archbishop McIntyre, sent a pointed letter to Mayor Bowron, noting Parker’s many qualifications.

These were powerful backers, but Thad Brown, arguably, had even stronger allies. The LAPD had long been a strikingly Protestant organization: All but one of its previous chiefs had been Protestants. Almost all of them had also been Freemasons, as were many of the officers on the force. Brown was both. He also enjoyed the quiet support of the underworld. Thad Brown was in no way corrupt, but neither was he seen as a zealot
who would attempt to eradicate the underworld altogether. The
Los Angeles Times
also supported Brown. In early August, it reported that three of the five Police Commissioners—clubwoman Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman—had settled on Brown. The Police Commission’s sole African American member, J. Alexander Somerville, and Irving Snyder, the commission’s Jewish member, supported Parker. Brown had the votes to become police chief—if he could keep them. For at that very moment, Agnes Albro was dying of breast cancer. Already, she was confined to bed. Brown’s supporters knew they needed to move quickly. Duque and Newman proposed to convene a meeting at Albro’s house to select Brown as chief. Parker vehemently objected. A meeting in a private residence would be illegal, he warned the commissioners, a clear violation of California’s open meeting requirements. Brown’s supporters paused. As they were debating the issue, Agnes Albro passed away.

The race was now a toss-up. “In the newspapers, it was a bigger story than baseball or the heat wave,” wrote one contemporary observer. “[T]he reporters smoked out secret meetings all through City Hall. Meetings between the Mayor and his Police Commissioners; between the Mayor and the candidates; between the commissioners and the candidates.”

On August 2, Mayor Bowron, General Worton, and the four members of the Police Commission sat down together. Exactly what was said was unclear, but after the meeting one of Thad Brown’s supporters decided to switch his support to Parker. (Many years later, Thad Brown would claim that he had withdrawn his name from consideration because he didn’t want “Bill Parker behind me, with his knife out.”) To send a message of strong support for the new chief, the sole remaining Brown holdout agreed to join the pro-Parker majority in order to make the vote unanimous. And so, later that very day, the Police Commission voted unanimously to make William H. Parker Los Angeles’s fortieth chief of police.

Mayor Bowron was notably lukewarm about their choice. When asked by a reporter if the appointment “met with his approval,” Bowron declined to answer, suggesting instead that “all statements should come from the Police Commission.”

Chief Parker waved off the mayor’s lack of support. “The action of the Police Commission this afternoon was gratifying and confirms my belief that the Chief of Police must be selected without political influence,” he told the press later that day.

The reality was otherwise. Parker had politicked—and prevailed. But many doubted that he would retain the position for very long.

“I know I’m supposedly coming in with a life expectancy of two weeks,” he told the press after being sworn in. “We’ll see.”

IT HAD BEEN a rotten vacation. Mickey had left Los Angeles a month earlier with a leisurely agenda of business and pleasure in mind. In Phoenix, he wanted to visit brother Harry and check out some drugstores he was considering purchasing. But the Phoenix police department had quickly run him out of town. The same thing had happened in Texas, where he owned an oil well. Then, when Mickey Cohen arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago on August 3, 1950, he learned that Bill Parker had been appointed chief of police. It was upsetting. “I had joints all over town, and I needed the police for coordination,” Cohen would later say. Instead, the Police Commission had selected “the one cop who really gave me trouble.” Just when it seemed like things could not get worse, Chicago detectives picked him up for an evening of questioning. He was released the next day and told to get out of town.

Mickey Cohen was getting too famous for his own good. Not only had he gained a dangerous new enemy in the person of Los Angeles’s new police chief, he had also attracted the attention of a curious outsider, U.S. senator Estes Kefauver.

      A FRESHMAN SENATOR from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver was a man of great ambition and considerable guile. In 1948, after an unremarkable decade in the House as a pro-Roosevelt, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority Democrat, Kefauver took advantage of a feud between incumbent U.S. senator Tom Stewart and Tennessee party boss Ed “The Red Snapper” Crump and slipped into the Senate. There the Yale Law School-educated senator with the vaguely Lincoln-esque looks impressed his peers with his intelligence (he had authored an academic book on monopolies)—and his
womanizing (“the worst in the Senate,” according to William “Fishbait” Miller, the House doorkeeper).

At some point in 1949, Kefauver hit upon the idea of investigating organized gambling. This was not a popular notion among his Senate colleagues. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois relied on Cook County to offset Republican voters downstate. He was not eager to start an investigation that might expose the inner workings of Chicago politics. But Kefauver had picked his topic wisely. By 1950, organized crime had become a subject of great interest to the public. Books such as Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s
Chicago Confidential
had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Municipal Association held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke passionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win passage of a measure authorizing “a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities.” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran—of Nevada—responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas’s strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman.

The killing itself was hardly unusual: Kansas City had long been controlled by one of the country’s most notorious “machines,” one that did not shy away from occasional acts of violence. What made this particular slaying noteworthy was the fact that President Truman himself was a product of that same machine. (He owed both his first victory in politics—his election as a county judge in 1922—and his 1934 election to the U.S. Senate to “Boss Tom” Pendergast’s Kansas City machine.) Even though “Boss Tom” had died five years earlier, the slaying in Kansas City stoked public concerns about underworld connections to government officials. Amid the ensuing controversy, the Special Senate Committee on the Investigation of Syndicated Crime in Interstate Commerce—soon known simply as the Kefauver Committee—was finally impaneled. Faced with fallout from the Kansas City slaying, President Truman also gave the Kefauver Committee a potent new tool: access to the income tax records of suspected gambling bosses. Thus armed, Kefauver revealed the investigative strategy that would catapult him to national fame. Instead of summoning witnesses to Washington, the press-savvy senator announced that his committee and its investigators would hold a series of hearings in fourteen cities across the country on “how the national crime syndicate could be smashed.” In November,
Senator Kefauver arrived in Los Angeles. Atop his list of witnesses was Mickey Cohen.