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

      PARKER took Kennedy’s visit seriously. He directed Hamilton and Lt. Joseph Stephens, who headed the department’s labor squad, to take the afternoon to meet with the Senate investigators. The men hit it off immediately. Kennedy and Bellino were impressed—and alarmed—by the material the LAPD had amassed. One example of the kinds of “strong arm” tactics employed by the mob in Southern California made a particularly vivid impression on Kennedy. It concerned a union organizer who’d gone to San Diego in defiance of warnings from the local mob. Soon after arriving, the man had been assaulted. According to Kennedy’s later recounting of the story, he woke up the next day “covered in blood” and with “terrible pains in his stomach.” With difficulty, he made it back to a hospital in Los Angeles, where doctors performed emergency surgery and, according to Kennedy, “removed from his backside a large cucumber.” The man was later warned that if he ever returned to San Diego, he’d come back with a watermelon.

Urban myth or actual event? It didn’t matter. Kennedy believed it had happened. It steeled his resolve to act.

At the end of the afternoon, Hamilton walked Kennedy out to the parking lot behind “the glass house” (as the new police administration building was called). It had been a productive day. The LAPD’s wealth of information about corruption in the Teamsters reinforced Kennedy’s belief that he was on to something big. So did subsequent meetings arranged by Hamilton and Stephens, which put Kennedy and Bellino in direct contact with a variety of employers, union leaders, employees, and confidential informants. Kennedy and Bellino heard from dissident members of the longshoremen’s union, who complained of the leadership’s radicalism and “red” sympathies. They heard from union organizers (again in San Diego) who’d been beaten up by goons after attempting to organize retail clerks and about a Los Angeles plumbers and steamfitters local that was resisting mob attempts to muscle in on building contracts. More to the point, they heard about how local Teamsters were colluding with selected employers—employers with strong mob ties—to corner the garbage removal market in Los Angeles. Hamilton concluded by suggesting that Kennedy and Bellino take their fact-finding mission to Portland, Oregon, where crusading journalists had uncovered a wealth of incriminating evidence about corruption in the Teamsters local.

Hamilton and Kennedy met as strangers but ended the day as friends. Henceforth, the LAPD intelligence division would be an important (if largely unheralded) source of intelligence to Robert Kennedy. Kennedy’s relationship with Chief Parker was different. The two men would never be friends in the way that Hamilton and Kennedy were; their personal styles were too different. But ideologically, the two men were largely in sync. In addition to sharing a faith (Roman Catholicism) and a creed (anti-communism), the two men shared a worldview: Both saw the underworld as the enemy within.

There was another similarity. Both men were battling their own internal enemies. Bobby was prone to depression (“Black Bobby,” his older brother rather insensitively called him) and also to fits of anger that occasionally propelled him to violence. As a young man, Parker had shared this impulse to violence too. But the more dangerous demon for Los Angeles’s proud chief of police was the demon of drink. Nowhere was that demon more in evidence than at an annual event called the Mobil Economy Run.

The Mobil Economy Run (sponsored by the Mobil Oil corporation and the U.S. Auto Club) was a coast-to-coast race designed to test the fuel efficiency of automobiles under real-life driving conditions. Automakers competed fiercely for the right to proclaim their cars the most fuel efficient in their class. But the Mobil Economy Run had another, less advertised, purpose as well. It was also a tremendous booze-fueled junket. Every year, Mobil rented a train for VIPs that ran north from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Yosemite, and Sun Valley (and thence onward east) or west to Albuquerque and then to Sun Valley and points east. Every year, Mobil invited the LAPD’s chief of police and deputy chief for traffic.

On the job, Parker was a straight arrow. He took a dim view of patrol officers receiving “gifts” from merchants on their beat (though they still did). He abhorred ticket fixing and insisted on observing the strict letter of the law. Off the job (and with a little liquor in his system), he could be quite different. The Mobil Economy Run’s VIP trains were all about liquoring up company guests. As soon as the train left L.A.’s Union Station, the shades came down and the bar opened. It remained open, 24/7, for the remainder of the trip.