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

Now was just such a time. Chandler quickly recruited George Cryer, a former assistant city attorney (who bore a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson), to run for mayor. To manage his campaign, Cryer chose a former University of Southern California football star-turned-attorney, Kent Kane Parrot (pronounced “Perot”), a protege of one of Chandler’s closest allies in local politics, Superior Court Judge Gavin Craig.

At first, everything went well. Cryer ran an extremely well-funded campaign, and voters, at the Los Angeles Times‘s urging, obligingly elected him mayor. Kent Parrot became his chief of staff. Mayor Cryer then set out to find a chief of police who could crack down on vice.

The mayor’s first choice, a determined reformer, quit within a matter of months, frustrated at resistance within the department. Cryer’s second choice, a war hero with no experience in police work, launched a vigorous crackdown on prostitution in the downtown hotels. But that was the wrong kind of crackdown. The image of lawlessness was bad, but certain types of lawlessness (notably prostitution and gambling) were widely seen as being good for business, as long as they were done discreetly. Outraged hoteliers soon forced his resignation. Clearly, cleaning up Los Angeles would require a delicate touch.

If Mayor Cryer was disheartened, he didn’t show it. He turned next to detective Louis Oaks, who’d won acclaim for rescuing a society matron from kidnappers. But, alas, he too stumbled. First the chief was observed frequenting one of the very hotels his predecessor had attempted to close down, in the company of not one but two ladies of the night. Then he was arrested in San Bernardino in the backseat of a car with a half-dressed woman and a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

This was embarrassing, to be sure, but it was not what ended his policing career. Chief Oaks was fired only after he crossed Mayor Cryer’s right-hand man, Kent Parrot. Parrot had his own man in the police department, Capt. Lee Heath. Captain Heath acted as Parrot’s proxy, transferring personnel without the chief’s permission and shaking down tour operators to raise funds for the Parrot-Cryer machine. Such behavior from a subordinate was problematic, to say the least. So Chief Oaks decided to dismiss Captain Heath. Parrot responded by having Oaks fired instead. He then made Heath chief.

By firing Oaks and replacing him with Heath, Kent Parrot was sending a clear message: The LAPD was now under his personal control. Harry Chandler was shocked—and furious. The LAPD was supposed to be under his control. For more than a decade, Chandler and his fiercely antiunion father-in-law, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, had relied on the LAPD to do battle with radicals and union organizers.^* Parrot was supposed to be a business community loyalist, Harry Chandler’s man on the mayor’s staff. Instead, Parrot was building a rival power, one underwritten by L.A.’s booze-fueled underworld, not Harry Chandler.

Bootlegging had been a profitable pastime in Southern California since 1916, when California passed a dry law during the First World War that sought to conserve alcohol for military industrial purposes. The passage of the Volstead Act in 1920 implemented Prohibition nationwide in a far more draconian form, by outlawing beer and wine as well as spirits. It was the Volstead Act that made bootlegging a big business. Within months, high-speed motorboats were unloading Mexican and Canadian booze onto beaches from San Diego to Santa Barbara, primarily from Canadian ships that plied the route from Vancouver to Mexico. Meanwhile, convoys of trucks, many with hidden compartments, made their way up the so-called Bootleg Highway from Tecate to Tijuana to San Diego and thence to L.A. By the most conservative estimate, some 3,700,000 gallons of liquor were being illegally imported every year. Most of that was cheap hooch. However, authorities estimated that the most sophisticated bootleggers were also bringing about 150,000 cases of Scotch a year into Los Angeles. The markup on the Scotch was $35 a case, meaning that the bootleggers were grossing more than $5 million a year—about $50 million in today’s dollars—on Scotch alone.