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

The idea of an intelligence division wasn’t new: Chief James E. Davis had one in the 1930s; Chief Horrall had one in the 1940s. Other units such as administrative vice and the gangster squad routinely did intelligence work too, as the bugging of Mickey Cohen’s house demonstrated. But most previous intelligence work had relied heavily on wiretaps and a style of interrogation that could be summarized as “pinch-’em-and-sweat-’em.” When General Worton took over the department, he wanted something different—analysis, predictions, and actionable information of the sort that military commanders received from their intelligence outfits. In short, he wanted a policing version of the Army’s G-2 intelligence system.

Parker shared Worton’s enthusiasm for operational intelligence. During the war, one of the new chief’s most important jobs had been reorganizing and de-Nazifying the Munich police department. At the time, he had been struck by the parallels between de-Nazification and clearing the LAPD of corrupt police officers with ties to the underworld. Now that Parker was chief, he set out to realize General Worton’s vision. He expanded the unit to roughly three dozen officers and appointed his most trusted associate in the department, James Hamilton, to head its operations. Both men agreed that traditional policing techniques simply did not work against the Syndicate. In the early 1940s, Bugsy Siegel had killed with impunity—and then been killed with equal impunity by a professional gunman who escaped without leaving a trace. More recently, even the most basic questions about Mickey Cohen were not fully resolved. Consider the case of Sam Rummel. Why was he, rather than Mickey, meeting to “cut up” Los Angeles? Was he Mickey’s mouthpiece and junior partner, as most people assumed? Or was he playing a more subtle game? In Chicago, for instance, many astute observers of the Outfit believed that the real power rested not with so-called leaders such as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana but rather with the men who stayed in the background, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, and Murray Humphreys. Might Rummel likewise be calling the shots in Los Angeles? These were the kinds of questions the intelligence division was tasked with answering.

The intelligence division didn’t just watch and analyze. According to former gangster squad member Jack O’Mara, a favorite tactic was to drive new arrivals up into Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Hills to “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ’em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland.” O’Mara had his own way of driving the lesson home: He’d “put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, ‘You want to sneeze?’ Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?”

Mickey’s men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry’s, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, “Now you’ve had it, you motherfucker!”

“When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac,” Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. “It went over the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed.”

Otash wasn’t on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.

“Our main purpose is to keep anyone from getting ‘too big,’” Hamilton told a San Francisco newspaper years later, in discussing the exploits of his intelligence squad. “When we get word that someone has ‘juice,’ that he’s trying to ‘fix things,’ and thinks he can, then we’re after him.

“We’re selfish about it—damned selfish. Because we know that that’s the kind of a guy who’s going to wreck your police department if he can. And we’re going to stop him—one way or the other.”

It would not be long before the unit got a dramatic test of its abilities.