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

“You’re coming in, you haven’t done anything to contribute to the stature or the history of this department,” he told the class. “You’ve done nothing. We anticipate that you will do something, but you have [as yet] done nothing. You bring nothing to this department. It is what it is without you.” He then proceeded to explain what the department was and what it should be.

It was, thought Gates, “an absolutely magnificent speech. It was electric.” This was not a town hall-style affair. Parker entertained no questions. “He came in, gave his speech,” and then left, recalls Gates.

Parker’s legend was growing: D-day hero. The man who’d reorganized Axis police departments from Sardinia to Munich, purging them of fascists (a feat that seemed to bear more than a little resemblance to cleaning up the LAPD). The officer who’d stood up to Chief Horrall for veterans’ rights, who’d topped both the inspector and the deputy chief promotion eligibility exams yet had to fight for promotions that were rightfully his. As for the ambition, that was obvious too. It had been since the late 1930s.

General Worton had no problem with ambition. On the contrary, he welcomed it. When he first introduced himself to his commanding staff, “I told each one of them that I wanted them to take a look at me,” Worton said later. “I wanted each one of them to say, ‘How are we going to get that old man’s job away from him?’” The desire to earn the top job was, Worton thought, a healthy thing. “You should all want to be the chief of police of this city,” he’d tell officers during his visits to the division headquarters during his first weeks on the job. “Somehow or other you should be thinking, ‘How am I going to get this so-and-so out of here?’”

That Bill Parker was almost certainly thinking precisely that bothered General Worton not at all. On July 15, Angelenos woke up to the news that General Worton had moved Inspector Parker to a newly created position in his office. His duties, General Worton told the Los Angeles Times (“in cryptic Marine general style”) would be “anything I want him to do.” In fact, the meaning of Worton’s move was obvious: Asst. Chief Joe Reed was being eased out. Worton’s bland denials—when pressed by reporters, he simply observed that Reed had a civil service position and that the only way to vacate it was for him to resign or be removed on charges (of the sort that the county grand jury was then preparing)—only confirmed his intent. The smart money had Parker pegged as Worton’s new number two. But roughly a week after Worton announced that he was bringing Parker into his office, the interim chief announced that he wanted Parker to head an entirely new bureau, Internal Affairs.

      FOR DECADES, vice and its attendant, corruption, had been ineradicable parasites on the body of the LAPD. The cycle of scandal, reform, and then scandal again had driven city politics for decades. Reform-minded police chiefs had tried everything to eradicate it, putting administrative vice under the chief’s tight control; disbanding administrative vice; ignoring vice; suppressing it. Internal Affairs represented something new: an entire bureau focused solely on investigating misconduct and corruption within the LAPD. Worton emphasized its importance by moving Deputy Chief Richard Simon, who headed the patrol bureau, out of City Hall and moving Parker and Internal Affairs in.

It was the perfect position for Bill Parker, for a number of reasons. First, it gave him more authority to pursue and root out corruption than he’d ever had before (vastly more authority than he had enjoyed as lead prosecutor for the department trial board). Second, it allowed him to pursue his long-cherished goal of shoring up police autonomy. By demonstrating that the department was capable of policing itself, Parker hoped to defang the small but vocal group of activists and critics who had begun to call for a board of civilians to review complaints against the department. Finally, the position gave Parker access to information—to the department’s deepest secrets, both real and imagined. A new element mingled with feelings of respect—fear. Fear about what Parker was learning—and about how he might use it.