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

      THE NEXT DAY Chief Parker vowed he would find the killer. The new chief needed a win. The Los Angeles Times had supported his opponent; the mayor was cool to him; even the person who had done more than any other to smooth his ascent to the top—William Worton—was turning into an impediment. On the same day that Parker himself had been sworn in as chief, Bowron had named Worton to the Police Commission. Instead of the usual group of civilians who provided oversight in name only (and who in reality met once a week to hear license applications), Parker would have to answer to a board that included his former boss. This, undoubtedly, was Mayor Bowron’s point.

But solving the case wouldn’t be easy. The LAPD really had only one concrete piece of evidence—the murder weapon itself. It was extremely unusual to find a weapon at the scene of a professional hit. By leaving it, the killer was basically giving law enforcement the middle finger. But in this case, the killer’s confidence was misplaced. In an astonishing feat of police work, the LAPD managed to trace the weapon back to Riley, Kansas, to a pawnshop frequented by a tough hood who’d recently relocated to the Los Angeles area, Tony Broncato. Broncato and his partner, Tony Trombino, were a pair of freelance gunmen who’d been questioned in connection with every major shooting in Los Angeles since Bugsy Siegel’s rub-out. Unfortunately, the two Tonys had also recently turned up dead, both shot in the back of the head in a parked car just north of Sunset.

Parker suspected the Dragna crew. He and Hamilton immediately grabbed seven top suspects, including most of Dragna’s muscle, and brought them into a suite of rooms they’d reserved at the Ambassador Hotel. (Reporters had staked out police headquarters, which were then located in City Hall, and Parker didn’t want news of the interrogation to leak to the press.) For three days and nights, police officers interrogated the suspects, turning over alibis, looking for inconsistencies, bluffing, and threatening the suspects (who were denied sleep and access to their lawyers). As the interrogation progressed, Parker became increasingly confident that Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno had been the triggerman. The police even had a witness—an elderly woman who lived across the street from the crime scene. She had seen someone who fit Fratianno’s physical description step out of the backseat of the doomed men’s car immediately after the shooting. Parker was elated. There was just one problem—district attorney Ernest Roll. He felt the case against Fratianno was weak.

“The Weasel” had an alibi. A waitress at a cafe owned by another Dragna associate, Nick Licata, said he’d been in her company the entire night of the killing. Parker thought she was lying.^* But when the waitress told the grand jury Roll had reluctantly convened that two detectives had paid her a visit and attempted to persuade her to retract her statement by burning her with cigarettes, Roll declined to proceed with the case. The chief was furious, but Roll was unyielding. There would be no indictment. Parker’s effort to bring Rummel’s killers to justice had failed. Worse, Parker was beginning to suspect that DA Roll did not share the new police chief’s interest in bringing the underworld to heel.

The LAPD proved more pliable.

Parker inherited a department with pressing problems. Los Angeles had added more than 400,000 residents during and after the Second World War, yet the police department numbered just under 4,200 officers. For a city fast approaching a population of two million people, this was a grossly inadequate number. If the department was to maintain order, it would have to do so through the most focused deployment of resources possible.

Parker moved quickly to make the department more efficient. His first act was to simplify the bureaucracy. Divisions such as business, public information, internal affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice were swept into a new bureau of administration. Under the organizational chart he inherited from General Worton, fourteen department and division heads reported directly to the chief. In the new structure, that number was reduced to eight. Parker also created a new division of planning and research, which turned its attention to everything from record-keeping procedures for chronic drunkards to training manuals to deployment patterns. The 1950 annual report epitomized the new spirit. Where previous annual reports had been dull, monochromatic, and light on statistics, Parker’s first report was full of color and photographs, clear in its explanation of the department’s structure, and full of relevant tables of statistics about the department’s activities and about the problems it faced.