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

In September 1975, Mickey checked into UCLA Medical Center, complaining of pain from an ulcer. It turned out he had stomach cancer. His doctors informed him that he had only months to live. Mickey used the time to relate his life story to the writer John Peer Nugent. The highly idiosyncratic result was In My Own Words. The following summer, Mickey Cohen died at home in his sleep, leaving $3,000 in cash, which the IRS promptly took. With back taxes, penalties, and interest, he still owed the U.S. government $496,535.23.

Epilogue

“This city is plagued by hostility, rage and resentment. It could happen again.”

—former FBI director William Webster, October 1992

IN 1969, LAPD officer-turned-councilman Tom Bradley decided to challenge incumbent mayor Sam Yorty for the city’s top elected office. Bradley presented himself as a statesman who would address the city’s biggest issues—rapid transit, business growth, racial harmony. His base of support came primarily from the city’s African American community, which made up nearly 20 percent of the population, and from the liberal, heavily Jewish Westside, but it also included some surprising members of the city’s downtown business community, most notably the Los Angeles Times. To this formidable challenge, Yorty responded with a simple and devastating rejoinder: If Bradley was elected, Yorty charged, the police force would resign en masse, leaving (white) Angelenos defenseless before the (black and brown) criminal hordes.

Just before the vote, chief of police Tom Reddin resigned to take a job as a news commentator (at a salary of $100,000 a year). Rumors immediately arose that Reddin had left rather than face the possibility of serving under Mayor Bradley. Despite Reddin’s denials that politics played a role in his decision, Bradley lost the general election.

Reddin’s decision to step down gave Gates another shot at the chief’s position. This time, however, the recently divorced inspector scored poorly on the oral portion of the civil service exam and placed third on the list. At the top was Deputy Chief Ed Davis, whom the historian Gerald Woods would later describe as “a Protestant version of Bill Parker.” Like Parker, Davis was an innovator. His concept of “team policing” (which Davis referred to as “the basic car plan”) called for assigning officers to small geographic areas where they could work with residents to identify and solve crime problems. It prefigured what is today called community policing. Davis also eliminated the practice of awarding black officers low scores on the oral component of civil service exams, which had long limited the promotion of African Americans. But if Davis’s reforms were in some ways progressive, his personal style was not. Like Parker, he was also an outspoken cultural conservative. No one was safe from his derision. White liberals were derided as “swimming-pool Communists.” Homosexuals were “fruits.” In general, Davis encouraged his officers to treat “the counterculture” as an enemy.

Few dared to complain. In 1973, Bradley once again challenged Yorty, along with California state assembly speaker Jesse Unruh and former police chief Tom Reddin. This time, Bradley was the front-runner. He carefully crafted a “law and order” platform that promised unyielding support for the police. This time, he won, beating Yorty soundly in another runoff to become Los Angeles’s first African American mayor.

It took Bradley two more years to take control of the Police Commission. Only then, in 1975, did the commission order the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division and Organized Crime Intelligence Division (the successors to Parker and Reddin’s intelligence division) to destroy the intelligence files the department had amassed over the course of the preceding four-odd decades. Some two million dossiers were shredded.^* But both intelligence divisions were retained. Together, they continued to employ nearly two hundred officers.

      IN JANUARY 1978, after eight years as chief of police, Ed Davis resigned in order to pursue a career in politics. He was not interested in running for mayor. (“That position has no power. I have more power than the mayor.”) Only one position in California state government seemed like a clear step up—being governor. By making a run for statewide office, Davis gave Daryl Gates the opportunity he had been dreaming of since his very first days in the department, when Chief Parker first began to school him as his successor.

Mayor Bradley didn’t want him. The mayor was fed up with what his associates referred to as “the LAPD mentality”—an attitude that even Daryl Gates would later describe as “independence bordering on arrogance.” Standing in his way was the system Bill Parker had created.