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

      IN EARLY 1937, working once more through the Fire and Police Protective League, Parker launched an effort to amend section 1999 of the city charter—this time, to extend civil service protections to the chief of police. The ballot initiative Parker drafted consisted of a single sentence: “Shall proposed charter amendment No. 14-A, amending section 1999 of the Charter clarifying the civil service status of the Chief of Police, providing that he shall not be removed except for cause and after hearing before the Board of Civil Service Commissioners, be ratified?” It seemed a modest change, but its potential consequences were immense. If it passed, the position of chief of police would no longer serve at the pleasure of the Police Commission (and the mayor who appointed its members). Instead, once sworn in, the chief of police would have a “substantial property right” in his position. The chief of police could be suspended or fired only if found guilty of a specific set of publicly aired charges after a “full, fair and impartial hearing” before the city’s Board of Civil Service Commissioners. Needless to say, in a city as corrupt as Los Angeles, a full hearing was something that Mayor Shaw would never be prepared to risk. In short, Proposition 14-A would dramatically strengthen Chief Davis’s position vis-a-vis the Shaws. On Tuesday, April 6, 1937, the electorate of Los Angeles approved it by a vote of 79,336 to 69,380.

It was an amendment that would change the history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department, long subordinate to some combination of the mayor, the underworld, or the business community (or sometimes all three), now had the legal protection it needed to emerge as a power in its own right.

It also had a potent new adversary. The same year Bill Parker was attempting to erect a ring of legal protections around the chief’s office that neither corrupt politicians nor the remnants of the Combination could breach, one of the most formidable figures in the history of American organized crime arrived in Los Angeles. His name was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Mickey Cohen was his muscle.

^* It was also something of a racket. According to historian Gerald Woods, wealthy Angelenos purchased $1,000 memberships that brought with them preferential treatment for parking and speeding violations. (Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 324.)

^* In truth, when viewed in the context of the time, the tactics championed by Chief Davis are not as outrageous as they first appear. Most police reformers believed that improving police officers’ shooting skills was an effective deterrent to the gangsterism that plagued urban America. “Rousting” was a standard law enforcement tool. The Bum Blockade was less extreme than the transient forced labor camps proposed by the city’s Committee on Indigent Alien Transients one year earlier. Advocates of wholesale fingerprinting were common too. August Vollmer, a Berkeley police chief and professor who became a hero to progressives in the 1920s, openly endorsed “a system of checking the movements of persons traveling from one state to another.” (Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society, 24.)

7

Bugsy

“Booze Barons of other climes are just bootleggers in Los Angeles. Gangsters can never build another Chicago here.”

—LAPD statement, 1931

BY 1937, Bugsy Siegel was one of the most important men in organized crime. During the 1920s, Siegel and his partner, Meyer Lansky, had made names for themselves in the New York City underworld as fearless stickup men, bootleggers, and muscle-for-hire. In 1927, Siegel participated in one of the earliest efforts to coordinate bootlegging on the Atlantic seaboard. Two years later, Lansky helped organize a national crime “syndicate” at a meeting of the nation’s top crime bosses in Atlantic City. In 1931, Siegel reputedly took part in the successful hit on Joe “the Boss” Masseria—the man young Mickey Cohen had seen in the bleachers at Stillman’s—at a restaurant on Coney Island. The assassination made Charles “Lucky” Luciano (a longtime Lansky friend) the boss of New York and made the loose group organized by Lansky, which would soon come to be known as the Syndicate, the underworld’s preeminent institution.^* In short, Siegel was a figure the likes of which the L.A. underworld had never seen before. Yet Siegel did not originally move west to play the heavy. Instead, like generations of migrants before and since, he came west with dreams of health, wealth, and leisure.