by Steve Hodel
In researching Parrot's early days in Los Angeles, hoping to find an early photograph to compare to the one my father had taken, I contacted his old alma mater. They didn't have one, but they were able to provide me with his classmates' prophetic reference to him in his 1909 law school yearbook, Stare Decisis:
Not all the pumice of our college town
Can smooth the roughness of this New York clown.
On a personal note, I have only seen my father stumble, falter, and find himself at a loss for words on two occasions. The first was in 1965, when he met my wife, his ex-mistress, Kiyo, in the lobby of the Biltmore. The second occurred some three years before his death, during a weekend visit in San Francisco, at Sunday brunch. Knowing Father always had a reason for choosing specific names, and knowing that my older brother Michael Paul's namesake was chosen from Mother's close friendship with renowned bacteriologist and "microbe hunter" Paul De Kruif, and my younger brother, Kelvin George, was named after Father, I asked him what was the source of my own middle name, Kent. Who had I been named after? It seemed as if he was caught off guard, as he hemmed and hawed nervously and finally came out with a most implausible, "Oh, no reason. It's just a nice-sounding name, that's all." Though surprised, I took his statement at face value. Armed with today's biographical knowledge, the photograph, their twenty-year friendship, and Father's admiration for the man and his influence and power, I submit that Father chose to honor his old friend, Kent Parrot, by making me his namesake.
Tony Cornero, aka Tony Canaris and Tony Cornero Stralla, got his start in California during Prohibition. A San Francisco cab driver in the early 1920s, he began as a rum-runner, overseeing the unloading and distribution of contraband liquor from ships off the California coast. Smaller boats would taxi the precious cargo to deserted beaches, where Cornero would then receive and coordinate the shipments throughout Los Angeles and Southern California.
On March 11, 1925, the L.A. Record headlines read, "Jail Rum 'King' with $50,000 Liquor." At the time of his arrest, after a raid in which the authorities seized his high-grade scotch whisky, Canadian bourbon, and French champagne, reporters quoted him as saying, "I've had nothing but misfortune. I've been in the business over three years. I've been hijacked, fined, and robbed of over $500,000. I have paid out more than $100,000 for police protection, which I never got. This present beef means a long stretch for me. It's a bum business." Cornero's girlfriend told the Record that Cornero "made $500,000 in 2 years." Cornero, of course, did what he did, paid who he had to, the charges "went away," and by his thirties he became a millionaire, having succeeded in his self-described "off shore drilling."
By 1937, twelve years after his bust, Tony was promoted to "Admiral Cornero" and owned several large gambling ships off the coast of Los Angeles just outside the three-mile limit. From the pier at Santa Monica, customers could take a twenty-five-cent, ten-minute ride and be drinking the best imported liquor and shooting dice or playing blackjack aboard his lush floating casino, which was triple the size of any of those offered in Las Vegas in those early years before Benny (Bugsy) Siegel built the Flamingo. Night after night, Angelenos lined up by the thousands to try their luck against his blackjack dealers or at the shipboard crap tables. While Cornero's offshore investment profits were a tightly guarded secret, they have been estimated at a nightly net of $30,000.
Like many other local successful businessmen, Cornero bought himself a home in Beverly Hills alongside such prominent neighbors as Benny Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Cornero remained a major crime figure in Los Angeles for almost twenty-five years, though he remained strictly local and did not ally himself with the East Coast or Chicago-based Cosa Nostra families. As a result, he always remained an outsider, never able to establish any onshore gambling establishments, because police and sheriffs quickly shut them down as soon as he started them up. Gangsters Jack Dragna, Benny Siegel — an early investor in Cornero's floating casino the Rex — and Johnnie Rosselli, together with the help of corrupt mayor Frank Shaw and well-positioned, high-ranking officers within LAPD and LASD, would maintain control of city business, gambling, and prostitution throughout Los Angeles.
In 1938, LAPD captain Earle Kynette headed the department's Intelligence Squad. As part of his intelligence-gathering, he wiretapped Mayor Frank Shaw's opposition candidate, fifty or more prominent Los Angeles citizens, and retired LAPD detective Harry Raymond, at that time employed by the reform candidate to obtain information relating to corruption within the mayor's office and LAPD. Kynette and members of his squad decided that Raymond was getting too close to the truth, so they placed a bomb in his car. When he turned the ignition key the explosion totally demolished the vehicle and blew hundreds of pieces of shrapnel into Raymond's body. He was rushed to the hospital, where, in critical condition and about to succumb from his injuries, he put in a call to the crime-fighting city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, James Richardson, who rushed to Raymond's bedside. Believing he had only minutes to live, Raymond whispered the name of his assailant into Richardson's ear and made him promise he would see to it that Kynette would be prosecuted.
Miraculously, Raymond survived, and, though a cover-up was attempted by then LAPD chief James Davis — who had the gall to put Captain Kynette in charge of the car-bombing investigation — the facts eventually came out. Kynette was charged and convicted of the attempted murder of his brother officer and sentenced to a ten-year prison term. Mayor Frank Shaw, under whose auspice the crime was allegedly carried out, was promptly voted out of office in September 1938, replaced by the reform candidate Fletcher Bowron.
In his recently published The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, State Librarian Kevin Starr had this to say about city reformers Clifford Clinton and Fletcher Bowron, and their investigation and revelations of the Shaw regime in 1937:
Los Angeles, Clinton discovered, was supporting an intricate network of brothels, gambling houses, and clip joints, all of it run by well-organized syndicates headed by gambler Guy McAfee and Bob Gans, chief concessionaire of slot machines throughout the city, with attorneys Kent Parrot and Charles Kradick serving as mouthpieces. Obviously, a number of police were on the take for so many operations — an estimated six hundred brothels, three hundred gambling houses, eighteen hundred bookie joints, twenty-three thousand slot machines — to be flourishing, (p. 168)
Within his first two months in office, Mayor Bowron forced LAPD police chief James Davis to retire, after the bombing investigation showed that, while Davis's memory was hazy about specific details, "perhaps" he had, after all, ordered Raymond and fifty other city reformers to be placed under surveillance by Kynette's Intelligence Squad. Bowron then met in secret with his good friend James Richardson and asked him to help identify and rid Los Angeles of the corrupt politicians and police officers on the take.
As Richardson wrote in For the Life of Me, he simply picked up the telephone, called Tony Cornero at his Beverly Hills home, and set up a meeting to see if Cornero would be willing to help him and the mayor. Cornero, ever the entrepreneur and quick to size up a good deal, agreed to meet with Richardson and Mayor Bowron.
The three met in secret at the mayor's home in the Hollywood Hills, where Cornero told Mayor Bowron that he knew all about corruption within the LAPD. In fact, he said, according to Richardson's account, '"I've got their names all written down on this slip of paper.' And he handed Bowron the paper. . . the mayor read the names of twenty-six of the highest ranking officers in the department."
Bowron hired an ex-FBI agent to investigate all twenty-six, most of whom were the department's most powerful commanders. The mayor's investigator conducted wiretapping and surveillance of all those Cornero had named. One by one they were called before the mayor, who demanded their resignation. If anyone protested or refused to resign, Bowron simply played his tape-recorded conversations. End of story.
According to an official LAPD history of "the Purge" and Mayor Bowron s campaign to reform the LAPD, as written in Los Angeles
Police Department 1869-1984:
On the morning of March 3, 1939, the Commissioners struck. Citing Charter Section 181, which authorized the retirement of any officer eligible for pension "for the good of the Police Department," the Mayor, supported by the Police Board, requested the immediate resignation of 2 3 [sic] high-ranking officers. Included in the "forced retirement" were former Chief (now Deputy Chief) Roy Steckel, Chief of Detectives Joe Taylor, Assistant Chief George Allen, 11 captains and 9 lieutenants. Within the next six months 45 high-ranking officers resigned, (p.82)
After the purge of what by LAPD's reckoning was sixty-eight high-ranking officers, Tony Cornero's own troubles began. The syndicate had been conducting its own surveillance against the reformers by placing its man inside city hall. Unbeknownst to Mayor Bowron, his trusted driver was working as a paid informant for the very crime bosses he was fighting. The driver reported back on the Cornero/Richardson/Bowron secret meeting, and the syndicate leaked the news to the press, claiming that Bowron had "made a deal with Cornero, promising him control of vice and prostitution throughout the city."
Bowron, left with no alternative, and to prove to his constituency that he was not in league with any gangster, was forced to turn on Cornero and promptly ordered law enforcement to shut down his gambling ships as an illegal operation. Richardson reported that Cornero, while he initially came out swinging in defense of his ships' being legal and outside the jurisdiction of the courts, eventually took the whole thing in stride and resigned himself to the political and philosophical ironies, all with relatively good humor.
Like many gangsters of his day, Cornero was romanticized, and fact soon became fiction: in the 1943 movie Mr. Lucky, Cary Grant portrayed Cornero as a charming draft-dodging gambler and closet patriot putting the big woo on elegant socialite Laraine Day.
In reality, Cornero was no different than Ben Siegel or Mickey Cohen. Behind the comical Runyonesque slang and purported good humor was a powerfully positioned, politically connected, stone-cold sociopathic killer. Gangsterism was big business in the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, and each crime boss had his own retinue of lawyers and businessmen through whom they owned the men who ran city hall and the police and sheriff's departments. They had the power and the money to make any investigation vanish, and they and those who worked for them were inoculated against criminal prosecution.
When I looked at my father's photographs of Kent Parrot, Tom Evans, and the young Fred Sexton, I realized that the latter two of them were connected to some of the most powerful bosses in the Los Angeles crime syndicates, maybe even having begun their own criminal careers as young henchmen or drivers during Prohibition. George and Fred likely remained connected to these crime figures for the next three decades. I reflected on what Sexton's daughter "Mary Moe" had told me about her father's youth:
After Dad's death, I discovered something rather strange. He had all these different bank accounts in different names. I don't know what that was all about. . . He used to make his money when he was young from having a floating crap game. I know he made good money. I think he knew Tony Cornero, but I'm not sure. My father's dad was a bootlegger and gambler. My dad's third wife told me she destroyed all Fred's papers and records after he died.
I suspect my father's relationship with the Los Angeles underworld changed dramatically from his early days as a cab driver hustling downtown for whatever he could make from the high tippers at the Biltmore.
But Father abandoned his role as chauffeur after he left Los Angeles and then returned as a medical doctor and skilled surgeon. No need for street hustling now, no longer any need to threaten a passenger in his hack to "cough up the fare or I'll bust you in the nose." That was all behind him.
By 1939, as head of L.A. County's venereal disease control office, his relationship with the top crime bosses would put him on a far more powerful footing because, as a respected physician and a man of influence in his own right, perhaps even as their consigliere-medico, he would be allowed inside the center ring.
In addition, we see his documented association with elite members of the California Club and its spin-off, the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, where he came in contact with millionaire businessmen and shared any professional secrets they cared to impart. Perhaps a little bartering could be conducted between them. The doctor could provide prescriptions for prostitutes and drugs for wives and daughters. The businessmen could provide money and protection and share their information with my father, the kind of information that translated into power and influence.
I suspected another source of privileged information that was independently available to Father was the repository of medical files in his possession at his First Street Medical Clinic. There, at his venereal disease clinic, he discreetly treated the rich, the famous, and the powerful for any complications resulting from their personal and private indiscretions. This sensitive information gave George Hodel a tremendous source of power — leverage for exacting favors, or for downright extortion. These suspicions were again, unexpectedly and dramatically, confirmed by my mother's old friend Joe Barrett. By 2002, after our many talks, I had come to think of Joe affectionately as my "Franklin House mole." I was grateful for the friendship he had shown Mother and her three young sons during those difficult "gypsy" years. Joe spoke of his many conversations with my mother during 1948 and 1949, when he roomed at Franklin House. He recalled her interactions with Walter Huston; her working and writing dialogue for John Huston's soon-to-be-released The Treasure of Sierra Madre; the stories of Father's cruelty and his beatings of both her and us three boys. But here let us focus on what is relevant, namely, why George Hodel felt himself not only above the law but seemingly impervious to arrest.
"Your Mother, Dorothy, and I would talk for hours at the Franklin House," Joe said:
in the courtyard, the kitchen, in the living room, and in my studio. Dorothy had an elegant mind. Our talks were almost always when George was away from home. Just the two of us. She talked of many things. Here is what I recall her telling me about the First Street Clinic. It was a place where primarily the rich and famous were treated for venereal disease. Top people from the movie industry. Directors, producers, actors, and also police officials. She told me it was a very active place, especially in the late thirties and early to mid-forties, before penicillin had been discovered. George had a partner, a Japanese doctor, who had developed a special treatment, which drew celebrities and important people. The socially elite came to be treated, along with their girlfriends and prostitutes. Dorothy said that George kept detailed files on all his patients and that in her words, "The files made for some interesting income." Those were Dorothy's exact words.
Barrett's words verified my suspicions. In 1940s L.A., George Hodel knew too much about too many people in high places. He had all the files and all the names. He knew everything. And now we know from what Mother told Joe Barrett that not only did he possess that highly incriminating information, he was using it to his full advantage. He was actively extorting the rich for cash and the powerfully connected for protection. The medical files under his lock and key were his insurance. Unquestionably, George Hodel made it known to those in power that should anything happen to him, either by way of arrest or personal harm, the knowledge and files he possessed would be made public.*
George Hodel was, in a word, too hot to handle. Knowing this, whatever constraints or concerns he may have felt when he first went on his murder spree must have fallen away. Not only was he a genius, he was untouchable.
* * *
*Clearly the Tamar arrest in October 1949 was an aberration. The autonomous Juvenile detectives, unaware of Dr. Hodel's Gangster Squad/Homicide protectors, had acted too quickly, but Tamar's disclosures, which involved not just her father but sixteen others, could not be ignored. It was another example of LAPD's right hand not knowing what the left had done. All Dad's LAPD confederates could do was assure him that they would assist from the inside in helping him "beat the rap."
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nbsp; 27
Dahliagate: The Double Cover-up
Sixty years ago Los Angeles politicians had the best police department that money could buy. LAPD was part of the political machine that ran this city. We must never allow ourselves to return to those days.
— Bernard Parks, LAPD chief of police
Jonathan Club Breakfast, April 9, 2002
Deputy Chiefs Thaddeus Finis Brown and William Henry Parker:
Their Fight for Power
IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE some understanding of the political dynamics at work within the Los Angeles Police Department in the fall of 1949 through the summer of 1950. While the local press was blasting away at the LAPD with charges of inefficiency and corruption, the DA's office, as we have just learned, believed that some police officers and detectives were destroying evidence, covering up the facts, even protecting a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French investigations. Also, the DA believed, LAPD commanders were receiving extensive payoffs in return for protection they were offering local gangsters.
By February 1950 public opinion about the LAPD was at an all-time low, worse even than it had been a decade earlier when the sixty-eight high-ranking officers had "resigned."
As the heirs apparent to the chief's office, LAPD deputy chiefs Parker and Brown knew that their careers, and indeed the department's collective survival, were at stake. Another major scandal could put a knife right into the heart of the LAPD. Neither man could allow this to happen, no matter what the cost, no matter what scandals had to be covered up. Both Brown and Parker desperately needed to shepherd the department through its current difficulties, hoping they could implement their own remedies at a later date.