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

In exchange for such kid-gloves treatment, Crawford and his associates gave Parrot the money he needed to run expensive political campaigns—and to resist the dictates of Harry Chandler, an assertive multimillionaire with a printing press. This alliance between city hall and the underworld was soon dubbed the Combination. The Combination supplied the money; the backlash against Chandler’s reactionary political positions (he was opposed, for instance, to the cheap public power supplied by the Boulder [later Hoover] Dam) supplied many of the votes. With underworld money and populist political positions on such issues as public energy, Parrot and Mayor Cryer shrewdly built a base of supporters.

The Combination got its first true test in the mayoral election of 1925, which pitted incumbent Mayor Cryer against a conservative judge hand-picked by Harry Chandler. At issue was the question of who would control Los Angeles.

“Mr. Cryer, how much longer is Kent Parrot going to be the defacto Mayor of Los Angeles?” thundered the judge in his campaign appearances.

“Shall We Re-Elect Kent Parrot?” echoed the Times. The real contest, it informed its readers, was the judge “or the Boss.”

Parrot replied by plastering downtown Los Angeles with posters that proclaimed that the real choice was between Chandler and Cryer. On election day, Chandler lost.

The Times publisher was stunned. The paper had lost control of the mayoralty before, but the Parrot-Cryer “Combination” represented something different and altogether more threatening—a standing alliance that threatened to push Harry Chandler to the margins. The paper hit back. Suddenly, the Times was filled with illuminating stories about how politics under Kent Parrot actually worked and editorials raving about “Boss Parrot” and “the City Hall Gang.” Typical of the newspaper’s new focus on vice was the seventeen-part series on the Cryer administration’s sins published the following year.

In truth, each camp needed the other—and the LAPD. Chandler wanted the department to address the perception that Los Angeles was wracked by violent crime. He also wanted to retain control of its notorious “Red Squad,” which was known for the hardball tactics it used against radicals and labor organizers. Parrot wanted the exposes to stop, without giving up his control over the police department, which he needed to protect the underworld and maintain the Combination. In short, both sides had good reasons to come to terms, and so in 1926 they did. The deal was simple: The Times would launch no antivice crusades; Parrot would not interfere with the operations of the Red Squad. To seal the agreement, the two sides agreed on a police chief who would satisfy both parties: James “Two Gun” Davis, an intense, blue-eyed Texan who had spent much of his career as a member of the vice squad.

With a measure of control over the police force restored, the Times began to downplay stories about corruption in the city. Reformers who insisted on continuing their investigations suffered misfortunes. One reform-minded council member was discovered in bed with an attractive young divorcee by LAPD vice raiders. The raiding party that was responding to the supposedly anonymous complaint included the heads of the vice and the intelligence squads—as well as a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. That was the system. Few dared to cross it.

      BILL PARKER also found himself caught in a compromising situation with a woman, though in his case, the woman was his wife. By early 1924, Parker had become convinced that his spouse was seeing other men. On April 28, he found her at home with a young child and, suspecting the child was hers from some previous relationship, he flew into a rage. Francis insisted that the child was her sister’s, which calmed her husband, for a while. In May, Bill and Francis moved in—temporarily—with Bill’s mother and his youngest brother. The atmosphere was charged. Yet Francis refused to change her behavior. Parker, in return, seemed increasingly willing to respond with his fists—by Francis’s account, beating her so badly on one occasion that she lost consciousness.

Parker tried to focus on his career. Working as a movie usher was no way to make a living, but by the mid-1920s good alternatives were hard to come by. The boom of the early twenties was sputtering to a stop. By 1925, some 600,000 subdivided lots stood vacant across the Los Angeles basin. Nevertheless, Parker soon found a new job as a taxi driver with the Yellow Cab Co., where he was fortunate enough to secure a stand at the newly built Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square, the city’s grandest accommodation. After a year he was promoted to supervisor, but Parker had larger ambitions than managing cabs. He wanted to be a lawyer, like his illustrious grandfather, and in 1924 he enrolled at the Southwestern School of Law.