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

Just days before the election, Poulson went to breakfast with someone he would later identify only as “a former deputy district attorney and now the vice president of a Los Angeles and nationally known institution.” When he arrived, the candidate was startled to find the shady ex-LAPD-captain-turned-attorney and a well-known “Las Vegas gambling man” waiting for him. As he sat down to breakfast, Poulson was “really scared.” The men got right to it: They offered Poulson $35,000 if he would agree to name three men to the five-member Police Commission. Poulson tried to stall. The men then insisted that “I go out and talk in the gambler’s car.” Even though he suspected that he was being maneuvered into a “bugged” car, Poulson was too frightened to refuse.

“I talked in circles,” Poulson wrote in his memoirs. A few days later, on April 7, Poulson defeated Bowron, 53 to 47 percent, and became Los Angeles’s next mayor. Yet as Poulson left the Gaylord Hotel downtown to go to his campaign headquarters to celebrate his victory, he was “filled with mixed emotions.” Thoughts of Cadillacs, chauffeurs, and a nice raise seemed far away. Poulson now had to worry about how he could avoid “opening up the town” in light of the fact that “some of the people who had supported me thought I would.” Some of these people were very rough. Poulson had to decide whether he would face them with Chief Parker and his intelligence division or without them.

18 The Magna Carta of the Criminal

“The voice of the criminal, the Communist, and the self-appointed defender of civil liberties cries out for more and more restrictions upon police authority.”

—Chief William Parker

POLICE TACTICS WERE TOUGH.

In early 1952, Chicago Outfit bosses Tony (“Joe Batters” aka “Big Tuna”) Accardo and Sam Giancana decided to pay a visit to Johnny Roselli in Los Angeles en route to a vacation in Las Vegas. Accardo was well aware of the LAPD intelligence division’s practice of reviewing passenger manifests so that it could intercept suspected gangsters. As a result, he took the precaution of booking his ticket as “Mr. S. Mann.” Giancana booked a separate ticket as “Michael Mancuso” and avoided any interaction with Accardo on the flight. But when the two underworld figures (and Accardo’s doctor) arrived, the LAPD’s airport squad quickly identified the Chicago Mob bosses. Accardo and his associates left the airport with a police tail.

Accardo’s party proceeded to Perino’s restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles’s poshest dining establishment. There the men passed a pleasant meal under the watchful eye of a contingent of plainclothes policemen. As the men were finishing their meal, Lt. W C. Hull stepped up to the table and ordered the men to produce identification. They did. The police then frisked the men, removing $12,000 in cash, at which point they were driven back to the airport and put on the next flight to Las Vegas.

The men who had stalked Accardo and Giancana came from Capt. James Hamilton’s intelligence division. Its two watch lieutenants, seven sergeants, and twenty-six patrolmen (and women) conducted operations of remarkable scope. One team of officers worked full time on background checks, reviewing credit reports, bank account information, utility bills, and the like in order to monitor underworld attempts to infiltrate legitimate businesses. Another team specialized in electronic surveillance. (Olney’s commission said only that “a considerable amount of information is obtained in this manner.”) A three-man airport unit, manned by officers chosen for their ability to memorize hundreds of mug shots of gangsters from across the country, monitored Los Angeles International Airport twenty hours a day. It was this unit that spotted Accardo and Giancana.

Visiting gangsters were sent packing, with no regard for legal niceties. Hoodlums who were L.A. residents, such as Cohen henchmen Frank and Joe Sica, were tracked constantly by two-man teams of officers. These officers were not subtle. Indeed, the department openly stated “this scrutiny may at times border on harassment and [be aimed at] driving the subject hoodlum from our jurisdiction.” The police wanted people to know they were being watched; they wanted the bad guys to feel uncomfortable. They also wanted associates of criminals to feel uncomfortable. Intelligence division officers routinely visited businessmen and casual acquaintances of known hoodlums and asked them to prove that they weren’t involved in underworld activities by ending the relationships. The goal was to make it difficult and unpleasant for the subject of surveillance to meet with others, transact business, or have friends.

The intelligence division was also the unit that was watching mayor-elect Norris Poulson.