L.A. Noir (51 page)

In fact, Yorty did have some worrisome connections. One of his earliest and strongest supporters was Jimmy Bolger, the man the Shaws had put into former chief James Davis’s office as a secretary (and minder). After Davis’s forced resignation, Bolger had found refuge on the Board of Public Works, which for many years was the bastion of the old Frank Shaw camp. Bolger was a notorious figure, one widely considered to have been a direct link to the underworld in the 1930s. It was natural that Parker would be concerned about his reappearance. Yorty was less understanding. Like Poulson before him, he was soon fuming about the LAPD’s “Gestapo-like tactics” and complaining that the incumbent mayor was attempting to scare law-and-order voters with the specter of Parker’s dismissal.

Ultimately, however, it was race that decided the election.

One day before the general election, on May 30, Memorial Day, a black youth attempted to sneak onto a merry-go-round at Griffith Park. An attendant tried to make the seventeen-year-old pay. At this point, accounts of what happened diverge. The attendant and his employer claimed they were
assaulted; others claimed that the seventeen-year-old fare-jumper was roughed up. A fight broke out; police officers rushed to the scene; and soon a mini-riot was under way, pitting roughly two hundred black rioters against a considerably smaller number of policemen. Dozens of black rioters and four LAPD officers were injured in the brawl.

The next day, newspapers splashed news of the incident across their front pages. The
Los Angeles Times
insisted that the incident was not a race riot—and that Los Angeles was not Alabama. But the city’s African American voters drew a different conclusion. Voters in South Los Angeles shifted decisively toward Yorty, who won by sixteen thousand votes. That shift, wrote the
Los Angeles Times
one week later, was “perhaps the single biggest factor in Mayor Poulson’s defeat.”

It now fell to Mayor Yorty to decide what he would do with his police chief. At his first postelection press conference, Yorty’s tone was harsh.

“I have confidence in [Parker] as an administrator, but as a public relations expert I think he could stand a lot of schooling and a lot of direction,” Yorty told the press. In the days that followed, Yorty was even more outspoken in his criticisms of the department. It was “perfectly obvious,” he told reporters, that “the department was used to check the history, from childhood to current date, of everybody even remotely connected with my campaign and even my [law] clients.” Asked if the mayor-elect thought Parker was aware of such activities, Yorty replied, “[H]e had to be.” Yorty further described such activities as illegal and vowed to investigate the department further after he was sworn in on July 1. There was thus considerable anticipation about the outcome of the two men’s first private meeting. Reporters observed a grim-faced Chief Parker heading into his conference with the mayor. They also noted what reporters described as “a bulging briefcase.” The two men emerged all smiles. An understanding had been reached. Yorty would replace most of the men on the Police Commission, but Parker would stay on as chief, with the mayor’s full support.

Rumor had it that Chief Parker had shown Mayor Yorty his file.

      “BLACK AND BLUE” brawls at Griffith Park were just one of Parker’s worries. By the time Mayor Yorty took office, Southern California police agencies had identified a new and altogether more worrisome adversary. Police called it The Muslim Cult. Its members preferred the Nation of Islam.

In the fall of 1959, the LAPD circulated a briefing and training memo
from the Culver City Police Department that set forth the basic facts about the organization (as law enforcement understood it):

      THE REPORT acknowledged that “to date, there have been relatively few ‘incidents’ attributed to the ‘Muslims’ on the local scene;” however, it predicted that it was only a matter of time until a clash occurred.

“Any organizat ion that advocates racial hatred must provide violence and action to satisfy the appetites of its members and to stimulate its program,” wrote the Culver City police. When it did, police predicted that officers would find a formidable adversary in the group’s paramilitary arm, the so-called Fruit of Islam.

“These men are selected for their physical prowess and are adept at aggressive tactics and Judo,” continued the memo:

Little did the Culver City police anticipate that the LAPD would fire the first shot.

      AT ABOUT eleven on Friday night, April 27, 1962, Officers Frank Tomlinson and Stanley Kensic spotted two Negro males standing behind the open trunk of a 1954 Buick outside of the Muslim Temple at 5606 South Broadway, Mosque 27. The two men seemed to be examining something in a black garment bag. Despite the fact that he was getting married the next day, Kensic decided to stop and ask the two men some questions. Tomlinson, who was completing his one-year rookie probation period that very night, flicked on the cruiser’s lights, and the officers double-parked near the two men. Kensic asked if the men were Black Muslims.

“Yes, sir,” came the prompt reply.

The officers had heard about the dangerous new cult before. Seven months earlier, two Black Muslims had gotten into a brawl at a market on Western Avenue near Venice Boulevard, when the manager attempted to stop them from distributing their newspaper,
Mr. Muhammad Speaks
, outside. Since then, police had received regular warnings about the Muslims at roll call. As a precaution, Kensic and Tomlinson decided to frisk the men for weapons. They found none. They then checked the Buick’s tags against their hot list of stolen cars. Again, nothing. The officers asked the two men where the clothes came from. Monroe X Jones was beginning to explain that he worked for a drycleaner, when the officers decided to separate the two men. Kensic would later testify that he said, “Come with me.” Fred X Jingles, the other party present, heard something different: “Let’s separate these niggers.”

Jingles pushed away Kensic’s hands. Although he wasn’t fighting back, the attitude worried Kensic, who promptly grabbed Jingles’s arm and spun him around, slamming the man onto the trunk of the Buick. A bystander ran into the temple to call for help. Instead of going limp, Jingles
fought back. Jones now slipped away from Officer Tomlinson and pulled Kensic off his friend. A fight broke out. As Tomlinson ran to help his partner, he was grabbed by another Muslim. The scene was briefly interrupted when a black off-duty special deputy driving down Broadway stopped and fired a warning shot. Officer Tomlinson now had a chance to regain control of the situation. But instead of composing himself, drawing his gun, ordering the crowd to freeze, and then radioing for help, Tomlinson pulled out his sap and attempted to hit the nearest Muslim. At that very moment, the black special deputy motorist fired into the crowd, wounding Jingles. In the confusion, Jones grabbed Kensic’s gun—and shot Tomlinson. An African American policeman who happened to be driving by jumped out and fired a shot into the air to disperse the crowd. Then he radioed for help. Meanwhile, Black Muslims were racing back to the temple from across the neighborhood.

Police cruisers poured into the neighborhood. Instead of sealing off the area and ascertaining just what had happened, officers charged the building, swinging nightsticks wildly. Two Muslims who fought with the police were shot. So were two who sought to flee or surrender. One died; another was permanently disabled. Four more men were badly injured. Other Muslims fought back, ineffectually. Inside the men’s room, police beat a dozen of the men who’d been involved in the melee. The battle was over.

The following day, Chief Parker went to visit Officer Kensic at Central Receiving Hospital. Afterward, Parker called the Friday-night incident “the most brutal conflict I’ve seen” in his thirty-five years on the force and described Kensic’s injuries as the result of a vicious attack by a “hate organization which is dedicated to the destruction of the Caucasian race.”

The Nation of Islam sent in one of its most prominent leaders too—its “national minister,” Malcolm X. At a press conference at the Statler Hilton Hotel (which Malcolm X began with the sobering words “Seven innocent, unarmed black men were shot in cold blood”), the controversial Black Muslim leader denounced Chief Parker as a man “intoxicated with power and his own ego.”

But Malcolm X wasn’t there for funeral publicity. He was determined to bring the LAPD to justice. Suspecting that police would seek to prosecute the men it had arrested in order to justify the seven shootings, he set to work lining up the services of one of the city’s most respected African American attorneys, Earl Broady. A former policeman and now a proud resident of Beverly Hills, Broady initially rejected these overtures. He thought of Black Muslims as riffraff and saw Parker as a reformer, albeit an autocratic one. However, Malcolm X’s persistence and his lucid explanations of what was
at stake—plus the largest retainer fee Broady had ever been offered—eventually prevailed.
^*

Malcolm X’s efforts put the NAACP in an awkward situation. Although he was loath to associate his organization with the Nation of Islam, executive director Roy Wilkins suspected there was considerable truth to Malcolm X’s version of what had happened. Eventually, the NAACP decided to join the civil suit. Meanwhile, the LAPD counterattacked. Parker arranged for a group of Negro leaders, many of them ministers hostile to the Black Muslims, to endorse a campaign to eradicate the Nation of Islam. But when the group convened before the county board of supervisors on May 8, protesters shouted them down. Both the ministers and the supervisors were shaken. Not since the days of the Zoot Suit Riots, said one supervisor, had he felt such tension. The ministers decided to amend their request. Now, they proposed to work with the police to eradicate the Nation of Islam
and
police brutality. Three days later a group of twenty-five ministers met with Chief Parker. But when one of the participants, Rev. H. H. Brookins, broached a recent order to require two officers per car in Negro areas, Chief Parker declared, “I didn’t come here to be lectured,” and stalked out. Horrified, the head of the Police Commission persuaded Parker to return. But at the end of the meeting Parker complained that “the Negro people” seemed unable to conduct a civil exchange with him.

This was too much. Rev. J. Raymond Henderson decided to hold a protest at his Second Baptist Church, one of the largest congregations in the west. On the evening of Sunday, May 13, nearly three thousand people packed the church, among them the exotic Muslim leader from New York, Malcolm X. As a non-Christian, he was not allowed to step into the worship area. But when he rose from his front-row seat and asked to address the audience, Reverand Henderson allowed him to proceed. Malcolm X’s speech was so mesmerizing, an undercover LAPD officer reported, that when Reverend Henderson tried to interrupt his diatribe about police brutality, the reverend’s own congregation booed their minister into silence.

The LAPD was losing the black community.

In early June, a group called the United Clergymen for Central Los Angeles denounced Parker as “anti-Negro” and asked Mayor Yorty to personally
investigate complaints of verbal and physical brutality. Parker responded that this was nothing more than an attempt by Communist sympathizers to use the technique of the “Big Lie” against the department. Mayor Yorty rushed to his police chief’s defense.

“I doubt if there is any city in the United States with more Negroes in government than Los Angeles,” Yorty told the press, noting that he himself was a member of the NAACP and that both his civil service and police commissions were dominated by minorities. This was technically true. The Police Commission’s five members did include a black attorney, a Latino doctor, and a Jewish lawyer. But these men hardly served as Parker’s boss. On the contrary, Parker himself had chosen at least one of the minority members, African American attorney Elbert Hudson. As for the constant drumbeat of allegations about police brutality, Yorty dismissed them as “wild and exaggerated” and echoed Parker’s suggestion that they were Communist inspired. That summer Parker flew to Washington, D.C., to brief Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the Black Muslim menace.