L.A. Noir (6 page)

At first, much of this business was handled by precocious entrepreneurs like Tony “the Hat” Cornero, who, at the age of twenty-two, gave up his job as a taxi driver in San Francisco, moved south to Los Angeles, and started hijacking other bootleggers’ liquor. In short order,
he
was the bootlegger bringing in the good Scotch, four thousand cases a run on his yacht the SS
Lilly
(whose home port was Vancouver, British Columbia). The stocky, granite-faced bootlegger with the white Stetson hats, pearl-colored gloves, and the flashing gray eyes quickly became one of Southern California’s most colorful (and quotable) criminals, known for his pungent verbal broadsides against Prohibition. By one estimate, Cornero controlled about a third of Scotch imports coming into the region in these early years. However, Cornero and his gang did not have the field entirely to themselves. Another more powerful criminal cabal was plotting his demise.

In the big eastern cities, crime was largely an immigrant affair. Not in Los Angeles. Fittingly, the “white spot” of America also had a largely American-born criminal overclass. Its ringleader was Charlie “The Gray Wolf” Crawford, owner of the popular Maple Bar at Maple and Fifth Street. Crawford had learned his chops in Seattle during the years that city served as the staging ground for the turn-of-the-century Klondike gold rush in Alaska. However, in the early teens, Crawford was run out of town
after he and a close associate, pimp Albert Marco, openly negotiated a lease with the city for a five-hundred-“crib” brothel on Beacon Hill. Crawford was careful not to repeat his mistakes in Los Angeles. The Maple Bar was an intimate affair. While everyone could drink downstairs, only friends of Charlie were allowed upstairs to play craps or roulette or to patronize the prostitutes. Older and wiser, Crawford prospered in Los Angeles. But it was the onset of Prohibition in 1920 that made him big.

Crawford got back in touch with Marco, who, from his base in Seattle, was able to start importing high-grade Canadian Scotch from British Columbia. The pipeline they opened to L.A. was so lucrative that Marco soon decided to move to Southern California too. There Crawford introduced him to slot machine king Robert Gans, Milton “Farmer” Page, and former LAPD vice squad officer Guy “Stringbean” McAfee. Crawford also had the all-important connection to Kent Parrot. He and his associates were prepared to pay handsomely for favors from the department, and Parrot set out to become the man who would satisfy that desire. In order to do that, he needed to establish his control over the police. Chief Oaks’s firing—followed, in short order, by the appointment of Captain Heath as chief of police—left no doubt about who controlled the department.

In Seattle, Crawford had overreached. Expanding prostitution beyond the red-light district (today’s Pioneer Square), partnering with Seattle police chief “Wappy” Wappenstein to use the force to collect $10 a week from the city’s prostitutes—it had been too explicit, too open. In Los Angeles, the gradations of protection were more subtle. Rather than making the police direct partners, as they had in Seattle, in Los Angeles, the police were simply encouraged to crack down on Combination competitors such as Tony Cornero.

Cornero tried to buy his way out, reputedly contributing $100,000 to Mayor Cryer’s second reelection campaign. But the Cryer administration just took the money and continued with the pressure. Cornero would later blame the police for some $500,000 in losses during this period. In contrast, Parrot associates such as Crawford, Page, and Marco received very different treatment from the criminal justice system. When Page was involved in his second shootout in four months at the notorious Sorrento Cafe in early 1925—self-defense, he claimed—he was promptly released on bail by Judge Craig, Parrot’s mentor. Crackdowns on the establishments of Crawford associates likewise had a way of fizzling out: One deputy sheriff reported that on two occasions he witnessed LAPD patrol cars departing Page-owned casinos he and his colleagues were about to raid. When on yet another occasion an inexperienced young patrolman arrested pimp Marco for assault with a deadly weapon, two veteran detectives
stepped in and reduced the charge to “disturbing the peace,” a decision the city prosecutor defended even after it emerged that Marco, a noncitizen, was ineligible for a concealed weapons permit. So how did he get one? It turned out that Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz, later Los Angeles County’s longest-serving sheriff, had given him a license. The LAPD wasn’t the only organization doing Charlie Crawford’s friends favors.

In exchange for such kid-gloves treatment, Crawford and his associates gave Parrot the money he needed to run expensive political campaigns—and to resist the dictates of Harry Chandler, an assertive multimillionaire with a printing press. This alliance between city hall and the underworld was soon dubbed the Combination. The Combination supplied the money; the backlash against Chandler’s reactionary political positions (he was opposed, for instance, to the cheap public power supplied by the Boulder [later Hoover] Dam) supplied many of the votes. With underworld money and populist political positions on such issues as public energy, Parrot and Mayor Cryer shrewdly built a base of supporters.

The Combination got its first true test in the mayoral election of 1925, which pitted incumbent Mayor Cryer against a conservative judge hand-picked by Harry Chandler. At issue was the question of who would control Los Angeles.

“Mr. Cryer, how much longer is Kent Parrot going to be the defacto Mayor of Los Angeles?” thundered the judge in his campaign appearances.

“Shall We Re-Elect Kent Parrot?” echoed the
Times
. The real contest, it informed its readers, was the judge “or the Boss.”

Parrot replied by plastering downtown Los Angeles with posters that proclaimed that the real choice was between Chandler and Cryer. On election day, Chandler lost.

The
Times
publisher was stunned. The paper had lost control of the mayoralty before, but the Parrot-Cryer “Combination” represented something different and altogether more threatening—a standing alliance that threatened to push Harry Chandler to the margins. The paper hit back. Suddenly, the
Times
was filled with illuminating stories about how politics under Kent Parrot actually worked and editorials raving about “Boss Parrot” and “the City Hall Gang.” Typical of the newspaper’s new focus on vice was the
seventeen-part
series on the Cryer administration’s sins published the following year.

In truth, each camp needed the other—and the LAPD. Chandler wanted the department to address the perception that Los Angeles was wracked by violent crime. He also wanted to retain control of its notorious “Red Squad,” which was known for the hardball tactics it used against radicals and labor organizers. Parrot wanted the exposes to stop, without giving up his
control over the police department, which he needed to protect the underworld and maintain the Combination. In short, both sides had good reasons to come to terms, and so in 1926 they did. The deal was simple: The
Times
would launch no antivice crusades; Parrot would not interfere with the operations of the Red Squad. To seal the agreement, the two sides agreed on a police chief who would satisfy both parties: James “Two Gun” Davis, an intense, blue-eyed Texan who had spent much of his career as a member of the vice squad.

With a measure of control over the police force restored, the
Times
began to downplay stories about corruption in the city. Reformers who insisted on continuing their investigations suffered misfortunes. One reform-minded council member was discovered in bed with an attractive young divorcee by LAPD vice raiders. The raiding party that was responding to the supposedly anonymous complaint included the heads of the vice and the intelligence squads—as well as a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
. That was the system. Few dared to cross it.

      BILL PARKER also found himself caught in a compromising situation with a woman, though in his case, the woman was his wife. By early 1924, Parker had become convinced that his spouse was seeing other men. On April 28, he found her at home with a young child and, suspecting the child was hers from some previous relationship, he flew into a rage. Francis insisted that the child was her sister’s, which calmed her husband, for a while. In May, Bill and Francis moved in—temporarily—with Bill’s mother and his youngest brother. The atmosphere was charged. Yet Francis refused to change her behavior. Parker, in return, seemed increasingly willing to respond with his fists—by Francis’s account, beating her so badly on one occasion that she lost consciousness.

Parker tried to focus on his career. Working as a movie usher was no way to make a living, but by the mid-1920s good alternatives were hard to come by. The boom of the early twenties was sputtering to a stop. By 1925, some 600,000 subdivided lots stood vacant across the Los Angeles basin. Nevertheless, Parker soon found a new job as a taxi driver with the Yellow Cab Co., where he was fortunate enough to secure a stand at the newly built Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square, the city’s grandest accommodation. After a year he was promoted to supervisor, but Parker had larger ambitions than managing cabs. He wanted to be a lawyer, like his illustrious grandfather, and in 1924 he enrolled at the Southwestern School of Law.

Hindered by a full-time job and a crumbling marriage, he made little progress. In early 1925, Francis decided that she had had enough. She left
Los Angeles, returned to her hometown of Oregon City, and filed for a divorce, claiming that Parker had “made Plaintiff’s life unbearable and has rendered further cohabitation with the Defendant [Parker] absolutely distasteful and made it utterly impossible for Plaintiff and Defendant to live together as husband and wife.” Bill didn’t bother to respond to the summons to appear in court or to contest the divorce, and on May 9, 1925, a judge in Clackamas County, Oregon, granted Francis’s divorce request and awarded her possession of their one significant asset, “one Upright Sonora Phonograph,” valued at $150.

Freed of his wife—a woman about whom he would never speak in subsequent years—Parker returned to the study of law with a vengeance. In 1926, he enrolled at a different institution, the Los Angeles College of Law at the University of the West. He also hit upon a new way to make a living while studying to become a lawyer: He decided to apply for a position as a policeman. Hours were flexible; the pay was adequate (about $2,000 a year, roughly what a skilled laborer earned); and benefits were good. Being a policeman was still far from a prestigious job; one public opinion survey from the era found that police officers were more respected than chauffeurs, janitors, and clerks but less respected than machinists and stenographers. But then Bill Parker would not be a policeman forever. Once he got his law degree, he planned to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and make his living as an attorney.

On April 24, 1926, Parker sat for a civil service exam. The competition was not formidable. Only about two-thirds of the men on the force had finished grade school; a mere one in ten had graduated from high school. Five months later, he received a notice stating that he had scored 85.7 on the exam, making him number 115 on the list of those eligible for a job with the police department. Never again would William Parker score so low on a civil service exam. Still, it was good enough. When his number came up, Parker was offered a position. On August 8, 1927, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. There he made a startling discovery. In Los Angeles, the police didn’t fight organized crime. They managed it.

FOR THE FIRST FOUR DECADES of its existence, the Los Angeles Police Department led a desultory existence. Founded in 1869 (with six paid men), the force was outmatched from the beginning. While the department proved adept at tasks such as keeping cattle out of the streets and forcing Indians into chain gangs, it showed little ability to curb the startlingly high levels of violence that prompted its creation.

“The name of this city is in Spanish the city of Angels, but with much more truth might it be called at present the city of Demons,” wrote a visiting divine. “While I have been here in Los Angeles only two weeks, there have been eleven deaths, and only one of them a natural [one].”

Far from reducing the violence, the police at times contributed to it, as on the memorable occasion when the city marshal (also the city dogcatcher and tax collector) got into a shootout with one of his own officers at the corner of Temple and Main after a dispute over who should receive the reward for capturing and returning a prostitute who had escaped from one of the city’s Chinese tongs.

“While there are undoubtedly good men upon the police force, the body as a whole is not a matter for our citizens to be proud of,” sighed the
Los Angeles Herald
in 1900. “It is perfectly obvious to all that the policemen have not been selected for their honesty or fitness, but through political favor and for political purposes…. [Many officers] are over age, some under size, others unfit for duty; some do not pay their just debts, others figure prominently in divorce cases, and some receive money from sporting women for the privilege of soliciting upon the streets.”

In their defense, it should be noted that police officers received no training and very little support. After being hired, officers were required to supply themselves with the gear necessary for the job: two uniforms, hats,
boots, a revolver, a gun belt and cartridges, handcuffs, and a billy club. For this, they were paid $75 a month at the turn of the century—1ess than a milk deliveryman.