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

Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. “We have become a great nation in a material sense,” Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. “But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.

“Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness,” continued Parker ominously. “It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past.”

Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.

Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to “cut up the town.” The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen’s attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the 1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prostitution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn’t bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.^[14]

The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.

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?”