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

Siegel saw the potential to do something even larger. Las Vegas was within driving distance of Los Angeles. As air-conditioning in automobiles improved, it would be an increasingly easy drive. And of course, gambling in Nevada was legal. But when Siegel made an offer on El Rancho Vegas, Hull turned him down. Instead, he decided to sell the property to an associate of Conrad Hilton. So two years later Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and other Syndicate figures purchased another, more traditional property downtown, the El Cortez. It was an excellent investment, but Siegel wanted something more. By 1945, he was looking for another investment opportunity. It was Billy Wilkerson who would provide it.

Wilkerson was the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, the first movie-biz trade daily, and the man behind the Sunset Strip’s choicest nightclubs. Wilkerson was also one of Hollywood’s most ardent gamblers. His first nightclub, the Club Trocadero (“the Troc”) was known for its backroom card game. Industry giants including Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and Sam Goldwyn routinely played poker there with $20,000 chips. Wilkerson followed with Ciro’s in 1939 and LaRue’s in 1944. In the process, he shifted the locus of Los Angeles nightlife to an empty stretch of Sunset Boulevard just outside of the city limits that would soon become known as the Sunset Strip.

Wilkerson was a gambling addict. Often, he’d leave for a week or more for the nearest destination where gambling was legal—Las Vegas. During the first half of 1944, Wilkerson hit a particularly bad streak, losing almost a million dollars, a loss so large that it may have forced him to unload Ciro’s. Finally, Joseph Schenck, then chairman of 20th Century Fox and a personal friend of Wilkerson’s, gave him some advice.

“If you are going to gamble that kind of money,” Schenck told Wilkerson, “own the casa.”

So Wilkerson decided to build a casino—a grand one, as stylish as Ciro’s, as swank as Monte Carlo, an air-conditioned luxury resort surrounded by beautiful grounds and a golf course. He would call it the Flamingo Club. Las Vegas might well have come into existence as Billy Wilkerson’s town, if not for a raid one evening on the swank Sunset Towers apartment of Siegel pal Allen Smiley. Siegel and his friend the actor George Raft were visiting. The police burst in to find Siegel placing a few bets on horse races. Siegel and Smiley (but not Raft) were promptly arrested on bookmaking charges. Bugsy was indignant. All he’d been doing, he claimed, was dialing in a $1,000 bet on a race at Churchill Downs. The notion that he, personally, would be making book on some two-bit horse race was insulting. The idea that some dumb cop could just burst in and arrest him on some trumped up charge was intolerable. It was time, he resolved, to turn his full attention to Las Vegas. In the interim, Mickey Cohen could run Los Angeles.

      AS THE BEVERLY HILLS police were harassing Bugsy Siegel, Bill Parker was preparing for D-day.

The invasion of Normandy began on June 6. Parker landed five days later—and was promptly wounded in a German strafing attack, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. The news was slow to reach Los Angeles. It is a measure of Parker’s standing in Los Angeles that when it did, the Los Angeles Times carried the following item on page two of the paper:

Lt. Parker Wins Purple Heart

Lt. William H. Parker, on miltary leave from his duties as a captain in charge of the accident prevention bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been awarded the Purple Heart for injuries received in action in France, it was learned here yesterday.

He was wounded over the right eyebrow by a machine-gun bullet fired from one of two Nazi planes strafing a column of American vehicles in Normandy, according to reports.

He is serving with Army military government in France. Parker resides here at 2214 India St.

Mayor Bowron was among those who wrote Parker to wish him a speedy recovery. Chief Horrall was not.

For Parker, one brush with death seems to have been more than enough. On August 18, he wrote Helen to tell her that he’d drafted a letter “requesting that I be released from the army.” Parker had what appeared to be a good case. The LAPD desperately needed experienced policemen. Throughout the war years, it had operated with only about two thousand officers, five hundred less than its authorized level. Felonies had increased by 50 percent from 1942 to 1943 alone. Juvenile delinquency was also rising quickly. But in his memo to the adjutant general, Parker chose not to emphasize Los Angeles’s needs. Instead, he presented his own grievances.