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

At first, much of this business was handled by precocious entrepreneurs like Tony “the Hat” Cornero, who, at the age of twenty-two, gave up his job as a taxi driver in San Francisco, moved south to Los Angeles, and started hijacking other bootleggers’ liquor. In short order, he was the bootlegger bringing in the good Scotch, four thousand cases a run on his yacht the SS Lilly (whose home port was Vancouver, British Columbia). The stocky, granite-faced bootlegger with the white Stetson hats, pearl-colored gloves, and the flashing gray eyes quickly became one of Southern California’s most colorful (and quotable) criminals, known for his pungent verbal broadsides against Prohibition. By one estimate, Cornero controlled about a third of Scotch imports coming into the region in these early years. However, Cornero and his gang did not have the field entirely to themselves. Another more powerful criminal cabal was plotting his demise.

In the big eastern cities, crime was largely an immigrant affair. Not in Los Angeles. Fittingly, the “white spot” of America also had a largely American-born criminal overclass. Its ringleader was Charlie “The Gray Wolf” Crawford, owner of the popular Maple Bar at Maple and Fifth Street. Crawford had learned his chops in Seattle during the years that city served as the staging ground for the turn-of-the-century Klondike gold rush in Alaska. However, in the early teens, Crawford was run out of town after he and a close associate, pimp Albert Marco, openly negotiated a lease with the city for a five-hundred-“crib” brothel on Beacon Hill. Crawford was careful not to repeat his mistakes in Los Angeles. The Maple Bar was an intimate affair. While everyone could drink downstairs, only friends of Charlie were allowed upstairs to play craps or roulette or to patronize the prostitutes. Older and wiser, Crawford prospered in Los Angeles. But it was the onset of Prohibition in 1920 that made him big.

Crawford got back in touch with Marco, who, from his base in Seattle, was able to start importing high-grade Canadian Scotch from British Columbia. The pipeline they opened to L.A. was so lucrative that Marco soon decided to move to Southern California too. There Crawford introduced him to slot machine king Robert Gans, Milton “Farmer” Page, and former LAPD vice squad officer Guy “Stringbean” McAfee. Crawford also had the all-important connection to Kent Parrot. He and his associates were prepared to pay handsomely for favors from the department, and Parrot set out to become the man who would satisfy that desire. In order to do that, he needed to establish his control over the police. Chief Oaks’s firing—followed, in short order, by the appointment of Captain Heath as chief of police—left no doubt about who controlled the department.

In Seattle, Crawford had overreached. Expanding prostitution beyond the red-light district (today’s Pioneer Square), partnering with Seattle police chief “Wappy” Wappenstein to use the force to collect $10 a week from the city’s prostitutes—it had been too explicit, too open. In Los Angeles, the gradations of protection were more subtle. Rather than making the police direct partners, as they had in Seattle, in Los Angeles, the police were simply encouraged to crack down on Combination competitors such as Tony Cornero.

Cornero tried to buy his way out, reputedly contributing $100,000 to Mayor Cryer’s second reelection campaign. But the Cryer administration just took the money and continued with the pressure. Cornero would later blame the police for some $500,000 in losses during this period. In contrast, Parrot associates such as Crawford, Page, and Marco received very different treatment from the criminal justice system. When Page was involved in his second shootout in four months at the notorious Sorrento Cafe in early 1925—self-defense, he claimed—he was promptly released on bail by Judge Craig, Parrot’s mentor. Crackdowns on the establishments of Crawford associates likewise had a way of fizzling out: One deputy sheriff reported that on two occasions he witnessed LAPD patrol cars departing Page-owned casinos he and his colleagues were about to raid. When on yet another occasion an inexperienced young patrolman arrested pimp Marco for assault with a deadly weapon, two veteran detectives stepped in and reduced the charge to “disturbing the peace,” a decision the city prosecutor defended even after it emerged that Marco, a noncitizen, was ineligible for a concealed weapons permit. So how did he get one? It turned out that Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz, later Los Angeles County’s longest-serving sheriff, had given him a license. The LAPD wasn’t the only organization doing Charlie Crawford’s friends favors.