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

At first, Mayor Bowron and the Police Commission defended Chief Horrall, insisting that he and his men were the victims of an underworld conspiracy. But even for a mayor who’d just won reelection, the pressure to do something was too great to resist. The cavalcade of conflicting confessions, the shootings on the Sunset Strip, the wild swirl of accusations and counteraccusations—it was all too much. Action of some sort was required. Politically, it was time for Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed to go. Once again the civil service protections that the chief of police theoretically enjoyed provided no protection. On June 28, Chief Horrall retired.

Faced with a public safety crisis, Bowron did what politicians in his position do: He turned to a military man. On June 30, Mayor Bowron called General William Worton, a decorated Marine general who had literally retired earlier that day, and asked him if he’d come up from Camp Pendleton to discuss serving as the emergency chief of police for Los Angeles.

^* Every division had its own vice squad, which led to frequent jurisdictional confusion. When he first met Jimmy Vaus, Sergeant Stoker was actually just on loan to the Hollywood Division vice squad. (He normally worked out of Central Division.) Administrative vice operated freely throughout the city and worked from headquarters downtown.

^* The veracity of Stoker’s claims is uncertain. While elements ring true, Parker himself would later dismiss them as fabrications.

13

Internal Affairs

“Neither a slave nor a master be…”

—Bill Parker, quoting Abraham Lincoln, Protective League banquet, June 30, 1949

    GENERAL WORTON’S first instinct was to decline the job. The chances of making a success of it just seemed too small.

Worton knew all too well what typically befell the well-intentioned outsider who stepped into a corruption scandal. During the mid-1920s, one of his closest friends, Marine Corps general Smedley Butler (aka “The Fighting Quaker”), had agreed to serve as director of public safety in Philadelphia under similar circumstances. At first, Butler accomplished wonders, shutting down speakeasies and brothels and curbing corruption. Then he made the mistake of targeting upper-class watering holes, and was promptly forced out. Butler later described the experience as “worse than any battle I’d been in.” This was saying something, considering that General Butler died in 1940 as the most-decorated officer in the history of the Marine Corps. Los Angeles seemed likely to present similar challenges to Worton. Why bother? After all, as he himself noted, “I owe this city nothing. I’ve never lived here. It’s not my native city.”

But Mayor Bowron wouldn’t take no for an answer. All day, the mayor and his associates worked on Worton. Former Marine Corps commandant Alexander Vandegrift—one of the corps’s towering figures, the man who had staved off an attempt to absorb the Marines into the Army just two years earlier—likewise lobbied Worton to take the job. Gradually, Worton softened. Compared to commanding the Marine Corps’s Third Amphibious Corps at Okinawa, how challenging could Los Angeles be? And so, at the end of the day, rather than departing from City Hall and returning to the farm in Carlsbad that he and his wife had purchased five years earlier to enjoy in their retirement, Worton raised his hand and was sworn in as L.A.’s emergency chief of police.

“I’ll be damned if I know why,” he’d later say.

It didn’t take long for General Worton to discover that he knew even less about policing than he’d thought.

      LIKE OTHER DEPARTMENTS, the LAPD had a distinctly military appearance. Officers were uniformed and armed; ranks were hierarchical; positions had fairly explicit spans of control; and of course, violence and/or the threat of violence was routinely employed. This was no coincidence. Prior to 1937, under Chief James Davis, lines of command in the department had been notoriously unclear. The Red Squad had effectively reported to the business community; irregular officers such as Earl Kynette wielded enormous power; and police badges proliferated so widely that Davis’s successors were forced to issue a new, redesigned badge. After Davis’s ouster, the department’s new leadership had deliberately embraced the military model of organization in an effort to curtail past abuses. Lines of command were laid out; spans of command were tightened; appearance and discipline were emphasized.