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

      IN EARLY 1937, working once more through the Fire and Police Protective League, Parker launched an effort to amend section 1999 of the city charter—this time, to extend civil service protections to the chief of police. The ballot initiative Parker drafted consisted of a single sentence: “Shall proposed charter amendment No. 14-A, amending section 1999 of the Charter clarifying the civil service status of the Chief of Police, providing that he shall not be removed except for cause and after hearing before the Board of Civil Service Commissioners, be ratified?” It seemed a modest change, but its potential consequences were immense. If it passed, the position of chief of police would no longer serve at the pleasure of the Police Commission (and the mayor who appointed its members). Instead, once sworn in, the chief of police would have a “substantial property right” in his position. The chief of police could be suspended or fired only if found guilty of a specific set of publicly aired charges after a “full, fair and impartial hearing” before the city’s Board of Civil Service Commissioners. Needless to say, in a city as corrupt as Los Angeles, a full hearing was something that Mayor Shaw would never be prepared to risk. In short, Proposition 14-A would dramatically strengthen Chief Davis’s position vis-a-vis the Shaws. On Tuesday, April 6, 1937, the electorate of Los Angeles approved it by a vote of 79,336 to 69,380.

It was an amendment that would change the history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department, long subordinate to some combination of the mayor, the underworld, or the business community (or sometimes all three), now had the legal protection it needed to emerge as a power in its own right.

It also had a potent new adversary. The same year Bill Parker was attempting to erect a ring of legal protections around the chief’s office that neither corrupt politicians nor the remnants of the Combination could breach, one of the most formidable figures in the history of American organized crime arrived in Los Angeles. His name was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Mickey Cohen was his muscle.

7 Bugsy

“Booze Barons of other climes are just bootleggers in Los Angeles. Gangsters can never build another Chicago here.”

—LAPD statement, 1931

BY 1937, Bugsy Siegel was one of the most important men in organized crime. During the 1920s, Siegel and his partner, Meyer Lansky, had made names for themselves in the New York City underworld as fearless stickup men, bootleggers, and muscle-for-hire. In 1927, Siegel participated in one of the earliest efforts to coordinate bootlegging on the Atlantic seaboard. Two years later, Lansky helped organize a national crime “syndicate” at a meeting of the nation’s top crime bosses in Atlantic City. In 1931, Siegel reputedly took part in the successful hit on Joe “the Boss” Masseria—the man young Mickey Cohen had seen in the bleachers at Stillman’s—at a restaurant on Coney Island. The assassination made Charles “Lucky” Luciano (a longtime Lansky friend) the boss of New York and made the loose group organized by Lansky, which would soon come to be known as the Syndicate, the underworld’s preeminent institution.^[4] In short, Siegel was a figure the likes of which the L.A. underworld had never seen before. Yet Siegel did not originally move west to play the heavy. Instead, like generations of migrants before and since, he came west with dreams of health, wealth, and leisure.

Siegel first visited Los Angeles in 1933 to check in on his childhood friend George Raft. Raft, a nightclub dancer in New York, had become a Hollywood star by playing gangsters like Bugsy in the movies. (His breakthrough role came in the 1932 movie Scarface as the coin-flipping sidekick to the Al Capone-esque Paul Muni.) It was not the most auspicious year for a first visit to Los Angeles. That spring, a massive earthquake had leveled a wide swath of Long Beach, killing more than fifty people and badly shaking the confidence of the region. A quarter of the working-age population was unemployed. A vast hobo encampment (nicknamed “The Jungle”) had spread along the Los Angeles River. Siegel was entranced.