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

The Shaws weren’t the only people playing hardball. So was former LAPD officer Harry Raymond. Raymond was an unsavory character, a twice-fired former vice squad officer with close connections to the old Combination. As the historian Gerald Woods noted dryly, “Few were better qualified to investigate vice than Raymond.” Raymond had gotten involved in a picayune dispute between a friend who’d done work for Mayor Shaw’s 1933 reelection campaign—and felt he was owed $2,900—and Harry Munson, a former Police Commission member who was widely considered to be the liaison between the underworld and the Shaw administration. Despite the fact that Munson’s associates were clearing somewhere between $2 and $4 million a month, Munson refused to pay up. Raymond’s friend decided to sue. Raymond recommended an attorney, who just happened to be Clifford Clinton’s attorney as well.

Then Raymond himself got busy. His investigation soon uncovered damaging connections between the police department, the underworld, and the Shaw administration. But Raymond didn’t turn this evidence over to Clinton or to prosecutors. Instead, he approached his former colleagues in the police department with a blackmail demand. In response, the decision was made to take Raymond out.

On the morning of January 14, 1938, Harry Raymond walked into the garage of his modest house at 955 Orme Street in Boyle Heights, got into his car, pressed the starter pedal, and triggered a thunderous explosion that shook the neighborhood. The car and the garage were destroyed—investigators would later determine that a heavy iron water pipe packed with dynamite had been attached to his car’s undercarriage—but Raymond somehow survived, despite suffering 186 shrapnel wounds. The badly wounded Raymond summoned Los Angeles Examiner city editor Jim Richardson to his hospital bedside—and fingered Davis muscleman Earl Kynette.

“They told me they would get me,” he whispered to the newspaperman. “They put Kynette on me. I’ve known for weeks he and his boys were shadowing me. They had my phone tapped. Somewhere in the neighborhood you’ll find where they had their listening devices. Kynette takes his orders from City Hall and they wanted me out of the way. He’s the one who rigged the bomb.”

The next morning, Raymond’s allegations were splashed across the front page of the Examiner. Raymond’s attorney quickly reached out to Clifford Clinton and arranged for the wounded blackmailer to claim a more flattering connection to CIVIC. Clinton was happy to portray Raymond as a crusading investigator who had been targeted for termination because he had information that would “blow the lid off Los Angeles.” A wiretapping setup was soon found, just as Raymond had alleged. Neighbors confirmed that Capt. Earl Kynette of the LAPD had indeed been surveilling Raymond in the days leading up to the explosion. Nonetheless, upon returning from a pistol shooting competition in Mexico City, Chief Davis assigned Kynette to investigate the bombing. Kynette in turn suggested that Raymond had blown himself up as part of yet another publicity stunt. This was too much for DA Fitts, who reluctantly opened an investigation into police wrongdoing. To those in the know, the situation was farcical. In a letter to U.S. senator Hiram Johnson, chamber of commerce director Frank Doherty described Fitts’s investigation of the LAPD thusly: “a near psychopathic district attorney is investigating a crooked police department” that is “trying to dispense of or frighten a former crooked member of their crooked force who was spying into their crooked activities.”

Chief Davis’s career—and Bill Parker’s—hung in the balance. Thanks to the changes in the city charter Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had pushed through, Kynette’s intelligence squad now enjoyed significant legal protections. Those advantages were on full display in the wake of the Raymond bombing. Seven members of Kynette’s intelligence squad refused to testify before the grand jury about the unit’s activities, citing fears of self-incrimination. Although the officers were initially suspended from duty, a review board made up of their fellow officers soon returned the men to work. But the question of Chief Davis’s future—and Bill Parker’s—remained.