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

      DURING PARKER’S first month on the job, four different emissaries approached him with variations on a single proposal: appointing a gambling “czar.” Ostensibly, this person’s job would be to curb gambling, but Parker felt his interlocutors were actually more interested in organizing it. Fearing a frame-up, Parker spoke openly about these overtures at a countywide meeting of law enforcement officers later that month. He was convinced that the various attempts to snuff out Mickey Cohen suggested that the Syndicate was preparing to move into Los Angeles in force. Los Angeles, which Parker described, in language harkening back to the 1920s, as “the last white spot among the great cities of America,” risked becoming Chicago. The LAPD was determined to resist this, he told his audiences. But he warned, “I do not know how long this can be continued. There are men here ready to get their tentacles into the city and drain off large sums of money through gambling activities of various kinds.”

Parker argued that if the forces of law and order were to prevail, a counteroffensive was needed. For too long, gangsters had taken advantage of the fact that when things got “hot” in one of Los Angeles County’s forty-five-odd municipalities, they could just move to another. At a meeting of regional law enforcement officials, Parker proposed a new approach—a central intelligence bureau that pooled resources from all of the region’s law enforcement agencies and pursued gangsters wherever they attempted to hide. Representatives from the three dozen law enforcement agencies present readily agreed to participate in such an effort. But Parker’s ambitions were larger still.

“This plan goes deeper than a means of saving Los Angeles from the stigma of vice,” Parker continued. “We are protecting the American philosophy of life. It is now clear that Russia is hoping we will destroy ourselves as a nation through our own avarice, greed, and corruption in government. Hence, this program has a wider application than in the Los Angeles area alone.” Parker envisioned a national consortium of departments committed to information-sharing.

The assembled group was, according to one account of the meeting, “startled,” both by the scope of Parker’s ambitions and by his tone. In his first speeches as chief-of-police-elect, Parker had struck a hopeful—even humble—note, committing himself and his officers to the “reasonable enforcement of the law and respect for the rights and dignity of the individual—to work for the community, not rule it.” But already another side of Chief Parker was appearing—the profoundly pessimistic observer of American decline, the Spengler of City Hall.

Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. “We have become a great nation in a material sense,” Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. “But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.

“Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness,” continued Parker ominously. “It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past.”

Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.

Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to “cut up the town.” The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen’s attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the 1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prostitution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn’t bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.^*

The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.