L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Prosecutors tried to put a positive spin on the situation, trumpeting LoCigno’s conviction as the first successful prosecution of a gangland murder in two decades. In fact, Mickey Cohen had escaped again.

      THE WHALEN SHOOTING quickly moved off the front pages, replaced by politics. That July Democrats were meeting in Los Angeles to nominate the Democratic presidential candidate. Between July 11 and 15, some 45,000 visitors would descend on the city for the convention. Police Commission member John Ferraro had been chosen to be chairman of the convention’s public safety committee. Ferraro, in turn, would rely heavily on Parker and the roughly three hundred officers he planned to detail to the event.

Defending the Democratic Party was, in some ways, an unlikely assignment for Chief Parker, who had become a high-profile antagonist of the party’s California branch. In 1956, Parker had expressed strong support for the reelection of President Dwight Eisenhower. Parker also had close ties to the Nixon campaign through Norris Poulson’s old campaign manager, Jack Irwin, who had joined the Police Commission after Poulson’s election. There he quickly became a strong Parker fan. Irwin was also a friend of Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee for president that year. Irwin’s connection to the vice president (and his ties to Chief Parker) worried J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director feared that if Nixon was elected, he might attempt to ease out Hoover and replace him with Parker.

Parker was actually a double threat. Politically, he was closer to the GOP Personally he was closer to the Kennedy camp, thanks to his relationship with Bobby. The services he would offer Sen. Jack Kennedy during the convention would further solidify Parker’s Kennedy connections.

The convention began under a suffocating blanket of smog that left delegates with watery eyes and burning throats. Jacqueline Kennedy, four months pregnant, stayed away from Los Angeles entirely. Jack stayed with a few bachelor friends in a penthouse apartment in Hollywood owned by the comedian Jack Haley. Bobby stayed with brother-in-law Peter Lawford in Santa Monica. Joe Sr. monitored activities from the Beverly Hills mansion of his old friend Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s longtime mistress.

From the start, Parker put the LAPD at the Kennedys’ disposal. At the opening reception on Sunday, Jack Kennedy, Bobby and Ethel, and Ted and Joan appeared, escorted by fifteen white-helmeted police officers and a thirty-person plainclothes detail. (In contrast, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, his wife Lady Bird, and their two daughters were left to greet the crowd on their own, assisted only by volunteer “Johnson girls” handing out long-stemmed roses as a band played the Johnson campaign song, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”) In general, though, security was light. There was no Secret Service protection. The Kennedy campaign asked that just one officer be assigned full-time to Jack. That proved insufficient. Well-wishers hemmed him in everywhere, stopping him to introduce themselves, to shake hands, to say hello. These encounters were sometimes quite frightening: on two occasions, enthusiastic supporters nearly tore off Kennedy’s coat. Eventually, the campaign asked for backup. Parker upped the detail to four. Instead of mingling with the delegates, Kennedy’s unit started to move him through freight elevators and basement kitchens.

The LAPD also proved to be useful during the convention. On Wednesday, July 13, 1960, some six hundred supporters of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s nominee in 1952 and 1956, swarmed the Figueroa Street entrance of the Sports Arena, where the convention was being held. Although Stevenson insisted that he was not interested in being the party’s candidate, his supporters were determined to nominate him. So they settled on the desperate stratagem of blockading the convention and then charging the floor, with the hope that they would be able to take control of the convention proceedings. The police quickly intervened, rushing forces to the entrance in order to break the blockade.

When Kennedy cinched the nomination, Parker was pleased. Yet despite Parker’s genuine admiration for the Kennedy brothers, there were things about the family that made him uneasy. Several months after the convention, Parker went to visit his younger brother Joe and his sister-in-law Jane. One evening after dinner, the topic turned to the Kennedys. Bill made a fleeting comment, that “he would never believe” the things the Kennedys were involved in. Joe would later speculate that Bill spurned a job with the administration in Washington because he did not care to associate with the likes of the actor Peter Lawford and his good friend, Frank Sinatra.