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

Fight manager Eddie Meade offered to make some introductions. Over dinner at Ruby Foo’s, Meade introduced Mickey to the head of the LAPD’s Hollywood vice squad, who agreed to let Mickey open a joint at Santa Monica and Western—“door open like a candy store, three-ticket windows,” Mickey recalled fondly. When the day’s horse racing was done, Mickey and his crew took the sheets off the walls and opened up for blackjack and poker. All the games were on the square, and the action was excellent—until, less than four months after Mickey had opened his joint, the LAPD gangster and robbery detail moved in and arrested Cohen and his top associates on suspicion of robbery. Mickey was upset. Didn’t he have a deal with the police? Not exactly, his police contacts informed him. Cohen had a deal with Hollywood vice, but not with the gangster and robbery detail. And that squad had no intention of letting Mickey build up operations within city limits.

This attitude angered Mickey. Los Angeles, he fumed, was the exact opposite of eastern cities. “[I]t was a syndicate—a combination like the syndicate in Chicago or the syndicate in New York. But here, gambling and everything like they did in Jersey, Chicago, and New York was completely run by cops and stool pigeons.”

Then, on the morning of January 14, 1938, an explosion ripped apart a modest house at 955 Orme Street and changed everything.

8 Dynamite

“We’ve got to get somebody to spill his guts.”

—Jim Richardson, city editor, Los Angeles Examiner

IT WASN’T BUGSY SIEGEL or Mickey Cohen who toppled the Combination. Nor, despite Bill Parker’s efforts, was it an honest cop. Los Angeles’s ruling clique was brought down by a thirty-seven-year-old cafeteria owner named Clifford Clinton.

In a city awash in sin and suffering, Clifford Clinton was a righteous man. Stranger still, he was also a rich one, thanks to one of Southern California’s hottest trends, the cafeteria. Cafeterias were to 1930s Los Angeles what coffee shops were to 1990s Seattle—ubiquitous, wildly popular, and very profitable. (In 1923, one writer punned that “Southern California” could with equal accuracy be called Sunny Cafeteria.) In 1931, Clinton took the basic idea and gave it a fantastical twist by opening Clifton’s Pacific Seas, which featured a giant waterfall, jungle murals, and a Polynesian grass hut inspired by his explorations in the South Pacific, as well as a meditation garden inspired by the Garden of Gethsemane. In 1935, Clinton began work on a second establishment, the Brookdale cafeteria, which evoked Clinton’s Northern California childhood with an interior that included redwood trees and a stream that fell over a waterfall before meandering through the cafeteria (past a tiny toy chapel perched upon a rocky escarpment). However, it was Clinton’s response to the Great Depression that made his name.

Clinton had always been proud of his food. His cafeteria’s motto was “Dine Free unless Delighted,” and he meant it. The teetotaler son of Salvation Army officers, Clinton also had strong moral principles. As the Depression deepened, he went out of his way to help Angelenos in distress, offering customers a full meal (soup, salad, bread, Jell-O, and coffee) for a nickel. When it became clear that a nickel was too much for many, he opened a basement cafeteria in his South Hill Street establishment where the less fortunate could get vegetable soup over brown rice for a mere penny. (Clinton would later estimate that he served roughly a million penny meals over the course of the decade.) Demand was so great for the so-called caveteria that patrons lined up three hours before the restaurant opened for a meal.

Clinton’s introduction to politics was accidental. In 1935, county supervisor John Anson Ford asked the thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner to inspect food operations at the County General Hospital. Clinton uncovered instances of waste and favoritism that were costing the county $120,000 a year. Retaliation was not long in coming. Soon thereafter, Clinton was visited by city health inspectors and cited for numerous violations. But Shaw’s minions had messed with the wrong man. Outraged, Clinton persuaded Ford to suggest him for the 1937 county grand jury. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron agreed to put forward his name, and when the 1937 grand jury convened that February, Clinton was among its members.