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

—Bill Parker, quoting Abraham Lincoln, Protective League banquet, June 30, 1949

    GENERAL WORTON’S first instinct was to decline the job. The chances of making a success of it just seemed too small.

Worton knew all too well what typically befell the well-intentioned outsider who stepped into a corruption scandal. During the mid-1920s, one of his closest friends, Marine Corps general Smedley Butler (aka “The Fighting Quaker”), had agreed to serve as director of public safety in Philadelphia under similar circumstances. At first, Butler accomplished wonders, shutting down speakeasies and brothels and curbing corruption. Then he made the mistake of targeting upper-class watering holes, and was promptly forced out. Butler later described the experience as “worse than any battle I’d been in.” This was saying something, considering that General Butler died in 1940 as the most-decorated officer in the history of the Marine Corps. Los Angeles seemed likely to present similar challenges to Worton. Why bother? After all, as he himself noted, “I owe this city nothing. I’ve never lived here. It’s not my native city.”

But Mayor Bowron wouldn’t take no for an answer. All day, the mayor and his associates worked on Worton. Former Marine Corps commandant Alexander Vandegrift—one of the corps’s towering figures, the man who had staved off an attempt to absorb the Marines into the Army just two years earlier—likewise lobbied Worton to take the job. Gradually, Worton softened. Compared to commanding the Marine Corps’s Third Amphibious Corps at Okinawa, how challenging could Los Angeles be? And so, at the end of the day, rather than departing from City Hall and returning to the farm in Carlsbad that he and his wife had purchased five years earlier to enjoy in their retirement, Worton raised his hand and was sworn in as L.A.’s emergency chief of police.

“I’ll be damned if I know why,” he’d later say.

It didn’t take long for General Worton to discover that he knew even less about policing than he’d thought.

      LIKE OTHER DEPARTMENTS, the LAPD had a distinctly military appearance. Officers were uniformed and armed; ranks were hierarchical; positions had fairly explicit spans of control; and of course, violence and/or the threat of violence was routinely employed. This was no coincidence. Prior to 1937, under Chief James Davis, lines of command in the department had been notoriously unclear. The Red Squad had effectively reported to the business community; irregular officers such as Earl Kynette wielded enormous power; and police badges proliferated so widely that Davis’s successors were forced to issue a new, redesigned badge. After Davis’s ouster, the department’s new leadership had deliberately embraced the military model of organization in an effort to curtail past abuses. Lines of command were laid out; spans of command were tightened; appearance and discipline were emphasized.

But in other ways, the department’s military appearance was deceptive. Policemen were not military personnel. They were civil servants, with civil service protections that limited their work hours and sharply curtailed the chief’s ability to promote and demote officers. Worton soon realized that he really had no idea how powerful he was—or even if he was in charge. So he decided to find out by doing something dramatic. At the end of his first week on the job, he announced that he was transferring fifty officers, many quite senior, “all over the place.”

“Deputy chiefs were kicked around here,” Worton later gleefully related. “Captains were shifted [to] where they didn’t want to go.”

The primary purpose of the personnel move was not so much to place officers where their talents could be better utilized—Worton had no idea who most of these officers were—but rather to find out if he could transfer them. He also figured “that if there was crookedness in the department… it would take the crooks another couple of weeks before they could get on to figuring who they could work with.”

The results of this experiment were satisfactory. When one “very powerful” local politician threatened to have the new chief’s job if he insisted on transferring a certain officer to the San Fernando Valley, Worton responded that if his decision wasn’t upheld, he was quitting on the spot—to hell with Los Angeles. The transfer was upheld. “To make a long story short… I did have the power,” Worton concluded. Now he had to figure out what he was going to do with it.