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

by John Buntin

  Things were going so well that Cohen took a step that only the most well organized criminals could pull off: He turned his Burbank bookie joint into a casino. At first, it was a dingy place, with “an old broken-down” craps table in a room so small “that when someone wanted to go to the bathroom, the dealer had to leave the end of the table.” However, it did have the advantage of a friendly police chief and a prime location—just a block or two from the Warner Bros. lot. In short order, cowboys, Indians, grass-skirted Polynesian maidens, and other extras were cramming into the former stockyard, which soon began a process of rapid expansion. Occasionally, Burbank police chief Elmer Adams (a sometime dinner guest at the Cohen household and the happy owner of a suspiciously large yacht) would bestir himself to shut down Cohen’s operations, but never for long. Mickey also began to dream of opening a high-end haberdashery shop.

  For Cohen, it was a golden period. But Bugsy Siegel was discontented. Despite his considerable successes, Bugsy found Los Angeles to be a frustrating place to do business. To the low-or midlevel hoodlum, the pell-mell of government jurisdictions and municipalities in the Los Angeles basin—forty-six in Los Angeles County alone—was a godsend. But for Siegel, who wanted to organize the entire area, it was a frustrating inconvenience. Even organizing the city of Los Angeles presented nearly insurmountable hurdles. According to Cohen, Siegel never succeeded in establishing a numbers game in Los Angeles not because the police force was honest but rather because he had to negotiate deals on a division-by-division basis. Siegel wanted to find a better way. So did his old partner Meyer Lansky.

  Meyer and Bugsy had grown up together on the streets of New York, but after Prohibition ended, the two men had gone in different directions. Siegel had tried to set himself up as a wealthy sportsman in the movie colony; Lansky had tried to establish himself as a businessman in the molasses business. Both failed in these endeavors—Siegel due to bad luck in the stock market, Lansky after federal agents connected his molasses business to illicit distilleries in Ohio and New Jersey that were trying to dodge excise taxes. As a result, both returned to the underworld. But where Siegel delighted in strongarm stuff (leaning on bookies, union extortion, etc.), Lansky concentrated on casinos. Still, the two men stayed in touch. In the early 1940s, Siegel and Lansky invested together in the Colonial Inn, a lavish casino in Hallandale, Florida. Although the Colonial Inn was a remarkable success, it still ran the risks that came with all illegal activities. As a result, both Lansky and Siegel began to explore alternatives. Lansky looked across the Florida Straits to Cuba. Siegel looked across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas.

  In 1931, the state of Nevada, desperate to raise revenues, had legalized gambling. The most immediate beneficiary of this move was Reno, which was situated on the busy Union Pacific Line between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. However, gambling entrepreneurs also noticed the sleepy town of Las Vegas, some 250 miles east of Los Angeles. By the late 1930s, former Los Angeles crime bosses such as Tony Cornero and former Combination boss Guy McAfee had opened operations there in an attempt to capitalize on a minor boom brought about by the construction of the Hoover Dam southeast of the city. Siegel noticed it too after he started persuading Las Vegas bookmakers to sign up for a Syndicate-controlled racing wire. Siegel and his Phoenix-based associate Moe Sedway could hardly miss the fact that Las Vegas users of the wire alone were soon providing Siegel with about $25,000 a month in revenue. No wonder he and Sedway dubbed their Vegas service “the Golden Nugget Wire service.”

  Still, Las Vegas was slow to establish itself as a gambling destination. It was hot. It was inaccessible. Compared to the classy “carpet joints” of, say, Saratoga Springs, the casinos of downtown Las Vegas, with their sawdust floors and hokey western themes, weren’t much to look at. That began to change in 1941, when hotelier Tommy Hull opened El Rancho Vegas. Instead of being located downtown, El Rancho Vegas was outside the city, on the highway to Los Angeles. With its flamboyant Mission styling, manicured sixty-acre spread, steakhouse, night-club-style entertainment, and comfortable accommodations, El Rancho Vegas wasn’t just a casino, it was a destination. (Today, this once forlorn part of Clark County is the Las Vegas Strip.)

  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 Par
ker, 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.

  “At the time I was interviewed for the commission by the Procurement Officer it was represented to me that I would receive a grade no lower than Captain as the requisition called for commissions in the grades of Captain and Major,” Parker wrote, with obvious bitterness. “The Procurement Officer further stated that I would be recommended for the higher grade.” He concluded with this legalistic (and hubristic) flourish:

  I respectfully submit that by reason of my grade there is no position in prospect in the U.S. Army commensurate with my qualifications and thereby I request relief from active duty under the provisions of Paragraph 3, War Department Letter A.G. 210.85 (30 December 1943) PO-A-A 12 January 1944, at the expiration of my accumulated leave.

  The Army was not persuaded. Parker’s request was denied.

  In a letter to Helen, Parker reacted by comparing himself to Christ on the road to Golgotha. He was clearly lonely and afraid of losing Helen. Parker’s other correspondents continued to speak of a particularly close relationship she had with a certain male “friend.” It seems clear that the relationship was a romantic one (although it is not clear whether it was merely an extended flirtation or an adulterous fling). For Parker, it must have seemed like a nightmare. It was his first marriage all over again. Distressed, Parker wrote to his bank in September asking it to cut off Helen’s access to his bank account.

  This was hardly an action that would go unnoticed. In early October, Helen discovered that her financial lifeline had been sundered. Far from showing chagrin at being found out, Helen went on the offensive, penning her husband a furious letter. Addressed to “First Lt. Wm. H. Parker” from “Policewoman A. Parker” (Amelia being Helen’s Christian name), subject line “Being a Good Soldier,” the letter boldly castigated Parker for his two-faced behavior:

  Last nite at about four-thirty I arrived at 2214 India Street, after a day at the plant and the usual long trek home, to find a letter written by you on the 28th of September. The salutation was “My Darling” and the closing line was “Goodnite my dear and may thy dreams be untroubled.”

  A very strange missive to receive from you in view of the activity you have taken against me in the past couple of weeks.

  At this point, her tone switched from sarcasm to anger. She castigated Parker for cutting off access to the family bank account—without notice—while he was continuing to whisper sweet nothings in his letters. She informed him that the week’s vacation she’d taken off from work had been for purposes of locating a new residence after a dispute with her unreasonable landlord, not, as Parker presumably implied in some missing letter, for some tryst. She also made passing references to her loneliness—a tacit justification for her “friendship” with the mysterious “H.J.”

  “So now I come to the end of a story about ‘a good soldier,’” she concluded, “and the end of sixteen years … sixteen long years when I had hoped you had built some faith in me as your wife plus being a pal thru those horrible ‘political battles’ and those many happy occasions when we hunted and fished together, not alone at Topaz but up north and also in the Black Hills.” Her final line was pointed: “True, everything has an ending.”

  That Helen’s initial response had been to march down to her local bank to open her own bank account she did not reveal. (The manager, a friend of Bill’s, refused, prompting Helen to fume, “Were Bill’s friends everywhere?”)

  Parker’s retreat was swift, his capitulation total—or nearly so. He was desperate to shore up relations with Helen; he simply couldn’t stand the prospect of another marriage disintegrating. In his subsequent letters to her, Parker was both apologetic and a bit defensive about the “the direct and harsh tactics” he had used in an effort “to learn the truth.” (At one point, he would later even go so far as to suggest that “when you pause in retrospection you will realize the justice involved.”) Now Helen had the upper hand, and she used it. It was she who would decide whether the marriage would endure or end.

  On February 24, 1945, she wrote the decisive letter. She had spoken with “a man of religion” who had persuaded her to persevere in the marriage. Bill responded by reiterating his unwavering love for her—and warning that “the element of INDECISION must never be allowed to reenter our relationship”:

  If other circumstances should arise in the future that should again throw you into a sea of doubt as to whether or not you should continue in our marriage relationship,… while you make up your mind as to what you desire to do you cannot expect me to stand by knowing that my entire happiness hangs in the balance and compel me to accept such a situation with the only compensation that you might possibly decide in my favor. I never want to go through that mental agony again and I do not believe that you should expect me to.

  Helen accepted these conditions. Never again would she risk breaking with Bill. Henceforth, his life—and his career—would be her central concern.

  ALTHOUGH PARKER HAD NOT SUCCEEDED in winning early discharge, his complaints did result in a promising new assignment—as executive officer for the G-5 section, HQ Seine Division. There he participated in the liberation of Paris (accompanying one of the first food convoys into the city). He also achieved the long-sought goal of being promoted to the rank of captain. In the spring of 1945, Parker was assigned to the U.S. Group Control Council for Germany where he renewed his acquaintance with one of the most influential figures in American policing, Col. O. W. Wilson. A star student of the pioneering police chief and criminologist August Vollmer at Berkeley in the 1920s, Wilson had gone on to be a trailblazing police chief in Wichita, Kansas. Among his innovations was the use of marked patrol cars for routine patrol duties. (Previously, departments including the LAPD had relied on officers walking the beat.) In time, the two men would radically reshape American policing, Parker by his work in Los Angeles and Wilson through his writings and, later, by his work as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department in the 1960s.

  Parker’s first assignment in liberated Germany was to reorganize the Munich police force—in two months. At first, it seemed a daunting task. Organizationally, the German bureaucracy was unfamiliar. Moreover, the city was swarming with suspicious characters with opaque agendas who were trying to ingratiate themselves with the city’s new occupying power. A conspiratorial milieu, tangled alliances, pervasive corruption, and extensive vice—it was all very Los Angeles.

  “All my life I have been accused of being too suspicious of my fellow man,” he confessed to Helen in one letter from Frankfurt. But in his efforts to reorganize the Munich and Frankfurt police departments, Parker found his skeptical approach to human nature fully borne out. “If I were permitted to relate the details of the situation that faces me,” Parker boasted in another letter, “it would rival the wildest fiction.”

  Parker was clearly relieved to move away from the topic of his marriage to safer subjects, such as his grievances against his superiors at the LAPD. He was particularly concerned that Chief Horrall and his allies would attempt to thwart his return to the department.

  “The present system of oral grading permits the superior officers to grade the candidates, as you know,” he wrote in another letter to his spouse. “My position would not be too good if I had to be graded by the men who were appointed to their positions from behind me on the list. Furthermore I don’t believe the Chief feels kindly toward me…. My present attitude is ‘to hell with them.’ I do not desire to be submitted
to the ignominy of being passed up again.”

  In fact, the LAPD seems to have been eager to get Parker back. That summer, Chief Horrall contacted the Army to request that Parker be discharged from the service so that he could return to duty with the LAPD. Horrall also wrote Parker directly, claiming “the Department never did recover from the losses sustained when you left” and stating “the sooner you get back, the better and more secure everyone will feel.” This was enough to prompt Parker to renew his efforts to win his release from the Army. Though reluctant to lose such an efficient officer (and worried that Parker’s superiors in the Los Angeles Police Department were less enthusiastic than they let on), Colonel Wilson reluctantly agreed, and in September 1945, Parker was discharged from the Public Safety Division. The following month he came home to California.

  He returned to a city transformed. The bucolic Los Angeles of blue skies, sunshine, and orange groves had disappeared (or at least withdrawn to wealthy Westside enclaves like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood). In its place was a new Manchester, a dark, industrial city.

  Los Angeles’s transformation had occurred suddenly—so suddenly that it could almost be traced to a single day: July 26, 1943. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times published a bewildered article on the transformation:

  CITY HUNTING FOR SOURCE OF “GAS ATTACK”

  Thousands Left with Sore Eyes and Throats by Irritating Fumes

  With the entire downtown area engulfed by a low-hanging cloud of acrid smoke yesterday morning, city health and police authorities began investigations to determine the source of the latest “gas attack” that left thousands of Angelenos with irritated eyes, noses and throats.