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

From the first, Bill Parker was in his sights. The services rendered to Chief Davis now stood Parker in bad stead. “Parker’s loyalty and zealous attention to his office was now misinterpreted as blind loyalty to organizations and individuals and his past performance as an efficient, courageous and honest officer was discounted,” wrote a friendly superior officer, B. R. Caldwell, four years after the event. Hohmann immediately created a new headquarters division—and announced that he would command it himself. R. R. McDonald was made administrative officer. Acting captain Bill Parker—now Lieutenant Parker—was out.

Demoralized by his de facto demotion and worried that he would never shake the Davis stigma, Parker seriously considered leaving the force and becoming a full-time attorney. He even lined up a few legal cases he could work on as a private attorney and drafted a letter of resignation, but at the last minute, Parker’s old boss from his time at Hollywood Division, Capt. B. R. Caldwell, stepped in. Caldwell was a Parker admirer. He intervened to secure a position for Parker in the traffic accident investigation division, which he headed. This was not an inconsequential position. Managing traffic was a major problem in the world’s most car-oriented big city. Traffic accidents were also a major cause of death, killing 533 people in 1941, more than ten times the number of people murdered that year. Despite feeling bruised by his treatment, Parker agreed to stay on.

Parker now had something to prove. In February 1940, he took the examination for captain and placed second on the promotion list. That May, Chief Hohmann recognized his achievement by appointing him captain. In September, Parker took the examination for Inspector of Police and again placed second. Soon thereafter, Parker won a fellowship award to Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute. In the fall of 1940, he left for Chicago to study the fine points of traffic control for nine months.

The Combination got in one final dig at the new order. That fall, the generally reliable Hollywood Citizen-News broke the story of Bowron and Jim Richardson’s secret meeting with Tony Cornero, in a highly misleading fashion: NEW VICE SETUP IN LOS ANGELES, proclaimed the banner headline. TONY CORNERO, MAYOR BOWRON AND EXAMINER CITY EDITOR IN SECRET

MIDNIGHT MEETING AT MAYOR’S HOUSE. It turned out that Bowron’s driver was on the Combination’s payroll. Although the charge that the mayor had met with Cornero to divvy up Los Angeles was completely untrue, Bowron felt he had to respond, and so, with no little ruthlessness, he turned against the man who had decapitated the Combination, Tony Cornero.

The gambling fleet Cornero operated just offshore had long been an embarrassment. Mayor Bowron now decided that it was intolerable, so he turned up the pressure on California attorney general Earl Warren and Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz by publicly calling on them to shut down the gaming fleet. With the attention of the public upon them, Sheriff Biscailuz and Santa Monica police chief Charles Dice set out in a fleet of water taxis to arrest the offshore crime lord, who they insisted had strayed into California waters. In court, however, Cornero sprung a surprise. Santa Monica Bay, he argued, was not actually a bay at all but rather a bight, a large coastal indentation. That put his ships in international waters, out of the reach of the California courts. An appeals court agreed, and Tony “the Hat” (now “the Commodore”) returned to action.

After much head-scratching, Attorney General Warren decided to try another tack: He announced that Cornero’s gambling fleet was a “nuisance,” which the state of California had the power to abate. A cease-and-desist warning was issued. When Cornero refused to comply, a raiding party was sent out to capture his flagship, the SS Rex. Cornero insisted the raiding party’s members were pirates. For nine days, “the Commodore” held the raiders off with a fire hose before succumbing to hunger and surrendering the ship. The courts rejected Cornero’s claims that he was a victim of piracy, and the California Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court had erred in its analysis of coastal geography. Santa Monica Bight returned to being Santa Monica Bay. Tony Cornero was out of luck for a second time.