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

On July 18, Parker’s old rival, chief of detectives Thad Brown, was sworn in as chief of police. This time, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to convey his congratulations. The new chief responded in the proper fashion. (“It is encouraging to know that I may rely upon your confidence and support in the great task that lies ahead,” gushed Brown in reply.) But Thad Brown was only an interim chief. From the beginning, he made it clear that he would not take part in the civil service examination that would select the next permanent chief of police.

During his life, Parker had made no secret of who he thought the next chief should be. “Meet Gates,” he’d tell other (more senior) officers in the department. “This officer is going to be chief someday.” But a few months before his death, Parker had confided to his young protege his doubts that this would come to pass.

“I’ve always thought you would be the next chief, but if I have to leave now, you’re too young,” he told Gates. “You don’t even have your twenty years in.”

“What difference does that make?” Gates asked.

“You can’t afford to take this job unless you have twenty years, and you have your retirement benefits. Because if something happens, if you’re forced to resign, you wouldn’t want to stay at a lower rank. So you’d leave and you wouldn’t have anything,” Parker replied. Parker died when Gates had been on the force for nineteen years. Nonetheless, after Parker’s death when the civil service exam for a new chief was held, Gates took the test, as an inspector. But the top score—and the position of chief—went instead to Gates’s old instructor at the Police Academy, Tom Reddin. One of Reddin’s first actions was to request the intelligence file on himself.

“The notions in it,” he later recalled, “were almost laughable, and most of them were wrong.” But this did not lead Reddin to disband the intelligence unit. Instead, he expanded its operations further. Even the department’s oldest friends fell within its purview, including the former attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy.

      IN EARLY 1968, Robert Kennedy began a last-minute campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. On June 5, Kennedy scored a huge win over front-runner Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic primary. The celebration party was held at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.

In 1960, the LAPD had provided security to John F. Kennedy during the Democratic convention. (Secret Service protection was not then offered to candidates before they became the nominee.) The LAPD would normally have provided security at the Ambassador. However, Kennedy’s staff wanted no police officers to be visible. Just two months earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. The presence of uniformed officers at the Ambassador was seen as simply too provocative. Instead they relied solely on former FBI agent William Barry and two professional athletes he employed.

“Kennedy’s people were adamant, if not abusive, in their demands that the police not even come close to the senator while he was in Los Angeles,” recalled Daryl Gates.

But under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been the end of the story. For many years, the LAPD had secretly protected (and monitored) the activities of visiting VIPs by ensuring that local livery companies used undercover policemen as drivers. Most VIPs never knew, but Kennedy’s people did. They arranged for their own driver. As a result, there was no chance that a plainclothes LAPD officer would be at Kennedy’s side when, shortly after midnight, the candidate slipped out of the fifth-floor ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, where he’d just delivered a rousing victory speech and, exiting through its kitchen, encountered Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian angry about Kennedy’s support of Israel during the Six-Day War. As Kennedy was shaking hands with a busboy, Sirhan stepped out from beside a refrigerator and opened fire with a .22 caliber pistol. Two bullets entered the senator’s upper torso. One, fired from a distance of one inch away, entered the back of his head.

Four LAPD patrol cars were circling the Ambassador. The police arrived within minutes, after Kennedy’s entourage, which included Kennedy’s bodyguard and the writer George Plimpton, had wrestled Sirhan to the ground. Kennedy was rushed to the Central Receiving Hospital, and then taken across the street to Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery. It was no use. Twenty-six hours later, at 1:44 a.m., June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead.

      SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, the warden at the federal penitentiary in Springfield called Mickey Cohen into his office.

“There’s a call from Washington, and he’s going to call back, like, say, one o’clock, so get showered and prepared,” he said, brusquely.