by John Buntin
During the course of the beating, Hunter’s real offense came out. Wrote the Eagle reporter, “Repeatedly, the officer blurted out, ’I’ll teach you, whenever you address an officer, to say ‘sir.’”[16]
White parents were fearful. The black community was indignant. One major ethnic group remained to be angered—Mexican Americans. But they didn’t have to wait long. A barroom brawl between LAPD officers and a handful of young Latino men was about to explode into the greatest crisis of Chief Parker’s brief tenure.
16
Dragnet
“When any function of government, national or local, gets out of civilian control, it becomes totalitarian.”
—Los Angeles Daily News editorial, March 4, 1952
THE TROUBLE ARRIVED on Christmas Eve 1951, when police received a call about several young men—possibly minors—drinking a bit too heavily at the Showboat Bar, a little joint on Riverside Drive northeast of downtown. Two officers were dispatched to respond. When they arrived, they found a group of seven young men. Five of the men were Latinos—Danny and Elias Rodela, Raymond Marquez, Manuel Hernandez, and Eddie Nora. The other two—Jack and William Wilson—were Anglos. The officers asked to see some ID. The men produced it. None were underage. Nonetheless, the two police officers asked the men to finish their drinks and disperse. That’s when the trouble started.
Exactly what touched off the brawl is unclear. One of the revelers, Jack Wilson, would later say that before he could comply with the officers’ request, he was put in a hammerlock and dragged outside. His friends followed. One accosted one of the officers; a melee broke out. Wilson’s friends would later claim that the scuffle began when they tried to prevent one of the officers from hitting a member of their party with his blackjack; the police insisted they were attacked when they asked one of the men to leave. Despite making free use of their blackjacks, the police officers got the worst of it. One officer got a black eye when one of the men got him into a headlock and punched him. The fight ended when a neighbor with a rifle broke things up. Meanwhile, someone inside the bar had called the police department for backup.
It was just after 2 a.m., Christmas morning.
From the perspective of law enforcement, assaults on police officers were unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances. So the police went back to look for the assailants. Most were picked up immediately and taken to Central Division for booking. Police kicked in the door of the last drinker involved in the brawl, Danny Rodela, at about 4 a.m. They dragged him out of bed, away from his screaming, pregnant wife, all the while hitting him with a blackjack. Unfortunately, the men who were now in custody weren’t the only people who’d been out drinking. So had a great many police officers in the city of Los Angeles.
Christmas was a special holiday for the officers of the LAPD, particularly for those in Central Division. Christmas was tribute day. Dance hall operators, B-girl bar proprietors, and tavern keepers literally put bottles of whiskey out on the corner for their local patrolmen to pick up—an annual ritual of fealty that not even Chief Parker had been able to suppress. Not all of that booze went straight home. A fair amount made its way to an impromptu Christmas party at Central Division. More than a hundred officers were still there, drinking, when rumors started circulating that two officers had gotten roughed up while trying to arrest a group of Mexicans—and that one of the officers had lost an eye. By the time the prisoners were hauled in, an angry mob of officers—more than fifty strong—was ready to teach the prisoners a lesson in respect.
The prisoners were taken into an interrogation room and told to assume a spread-eagled position. Then they were kicked and beaten. The injuries the men suffered speak to the brutality of the police attack. One young man was worked over until his bladder burst. One of the victims was kicked so hard in his temples that his face was partially paralyzed. Another man’s cheekbone was smashed. Frenzied officers slipped and slid across the bloody floor, struggling to land a fist or foot on the prisoners. Some even fought with each other. Onlookers yelled “cop killer,” “get out of the country,” and “Merry Christmas” at the men their fellow officers were pummeling. Between fifteen and fifty officers took part in the attack. Another hundred officers were in the building and had direct knowledge of the assault. When the prisoners were taken to the Lincoln Heights Jail, they were assaulted again. The prisoners were then sent to the Lincoln Heights receiving hospital. Danny Rodela arrived later, when the rumors circulating among the police were even more fantastical. He was beaten so badly that one of his kidneys was punctured. If not for three emergency blood transfusions at the old French hospital, he might well have died. After being treated, the men were returned to jail. Later, on Christmas Day, they were finally bailed out.
No one breathed a word about what had happened. The entire incident might never have come to light but for the beating of Anthony Rios.
Two months after the Christmas beatings, Rios and a friend saw two men, who appeared to be drunk, beating a third man in the parking lot of a cafe at First and Soto Streets in East Los Angeles. Rios attempted to intervene. The two assailants identified themselves as plainclothes officers. Rios demanded their badge numbers—and was promptly threatened with death. Then Rios and his associate were arrested for interfering with police officers. After being booked at Hollenbeck station, Rios was badly beaten. But the LAPD had messed with the wrong Chicano. Rios was an influential member of the Latino community and a Democratic County Central Committee member. He promptly sued Chief Parker and the department for $150,000. (The case was eventually dismissed.) News of his arrest and mistreatment infuriated newly elected city councilman Edward Roybal, L.A.’s first Latino councilman. Nonetheless, prosecutors in the city attorney’s office insisted on prosecuting Rios. As Rios’s February 27 trial date approached, other stories about police brutality and misconduct vis-a-vis Latinos began to come to light.
Parker’s initial response to the Rios “incident” was ham-handed. First, he dismissed accusations of police brutality as “unwarranted.” He warned that unsubstantiated complaints of police brutality were “wrecking the police department.” He wouldn’t even meet with the department’s critics. When Councilman Roybal and a group of concerned citizens sought a meeting with Parker, he referred them to the Police Commission instead. It was in this explosive atmosphere that prosecutors announced plans to bring charges of “battery” and “disturbing the peace” against six of the seven men who had been beaten on Christmas morning by drunken police officers at Central Division station and the Lincoln Heights Jail.
The liberal Daily News and the Mirror, the Chandler-owned tabloid that competed with Hearst’s Herald-Express, started digging. They soon located the victims of the attack and presented their account of events of the evening. The jury impaneled to prosecute the case shared these newspapers’ skepticism about the official version of events. On March 12, it found only two of the six defendants guilty (on two counts of battery and one of disturbing the peace). From the bench, an irate Judge Joseph Call denounced “lawless law enforcement” and announced that “all the perfume in Arabia” would not be enough to “eliminate the stench” of police brutality. The officers involved in the beating, continued the judge, were in his estimation guilty of “assault, battery, assault with a deadly weapon, and five violations of the penal code.”
“The grand jury must end this sort of thing,” the judge concluded. “This should be the first order of business. And indictments should be rendered!”
Local Democrats unanimously passed a resolution condemning the “indifference of city officials… toward brutal police methods against citizens and minority groups.” They also demanded that state attorney general Edmund (Pat) Brown initiate an inquiry into “the person and office of Chief of Police William H. Parker, the Police Commission, and other responsible officials.” Stung, Chief Parker responded by announcing that he had “no objection” to a grand jury investigation. He also belatedly appointed a board of inquiry to investigate th
e allegations and review the report. This did little to appease his critics. On March 14, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that at the direction of the Justice Department it was opening an investigation into charges of police brutality against the department.
Belatedly, Parker recognized the magnitude of his problem. He abruptly changed tack. The chief now revealed that at the same time he had been publicly complaining of “unfair accusations,” privately, the Bureau of Internal Affairs had been conducting a top-secret, ultrathorough investigation of its own into the beatings. In an unprecedented concession, Parker then turned a 204-page report by Internal Affairs over to the city attorney.
But Parker’s story had some strange holes. When he was asked when the department’s internal investigation had begun, Parker claimed that Internal Affairs had launched a vigorous investigation on December 27. He neglected to mention that many of the officers involved had in fact refused to talk to Internal Affairs.
On March 18, the county grand jury began its own investigation into the incident. Its discoveries quickly found their way into the press.
“Boys Tell Police Beating,” cried the Citizen-News’s banner. “Jurors Told of Slugging on Christmas,” announced the lead article. “Wild Party by 100 Police Described, Youth Tells of Beating at Police Yule Party,” shouted the Examiner. Photos of bruised backs, blackened eyes, and smashed noses filled the papers. Jury foreman Raymond Thompson insisted (and DA Roll agreed) that officers who were suspects be summoned in for a lineup so the seven youths could identify their assailants. This was bitter medicine for Parker. The chief was further embarrassed when details of the initial Internal Affairs report leaked out. Its conclusion—“that none of the prisoners was physically abused in the manner alleged, if at all, while in city jail”—seemed hard to square with the photos of the men’s injuries or with injuries some police officers suffered that night.
Meanwhile, more reports of police brutality were surfacing. A complement of eighteen G-men had moved into the department, requesting access to files and questioning department officials about other allegations of abuse. Parker bitterly criticized the FBI’s investigation, intimating that it was an unwarranted Political vendetta orchestrated by local Democrats and the Truman administration. On March 25, Councilman Roybal announced that his office had received more than fifty complaints of police brutality (ranging from “mere slappings-around” to “hospitalization of the victims with internal injuries”) in the past three months alone and that he was convinced that many of these complaints had merit. Parker’s appearance before the grand jury did little to quiet his critics. One source told the Daily News that the chief’s testimony was marked by “a tendency to make windy speeches in response to simple questions.”
Parker’s job was in danger. The Herald-Express quoted “well-informed politicians” saying that taking potshots at Parker had become the favorite Los Angeles sport—“They’re shooting at him.” The Mirror insisted that it was “time to get to the bottom of these ugly rumblings of sadism and abuse of authority” (although it also carefully hedged its bets by not entirely dismissing “the possibility that Communist Party liners are fomenting antipolice prejudice”). Other papers noted that the average tenure for an LAPD chief was two years—and that Parker had been in office for nineteen months.
It wasn’t just Parker’s job that was in danger. So too was the department’s ability to function autonomously. The first threat to the power and autonomy of the police chief had come just before Parker was made chief, during the scandalous summer of 1949, when the county grand jury took the logical step of examining how well the Police Commission oversaw the department. Its conclusion was that the Police Commission “is virtually nothing more than a licensing agency and cannot take action against officers.” Newspapers such as Hearst’s morning Examiner also took up the cry against “an autonomous, star-chamber court for the police” and a Police Commission that “has no power whatever in the internal affairs of the department.” In time, these demands faded, in part because Parker himself seemed like such a straight arrow. But with what the press now called “Bloody Christmas,” the old concerns returned.
Of course, Chief Parker was not without allies. He continued to command support from the city’s many Legionnaires, from Los Angeles’s Catholic hierarchy, and, now that he was defending it, from the force itself. Defenders pointed to the accomplishments of his traffic bureau, which had reduced vehicular homicides by half in nine years and made Los Angeles the safest big city in the world to drive in. The chamber of commerce applauded his reorganization of the department and the cost-saving innovations of the new research and planning bureau. The Los Angeles Times was also warming to the new chief. At a (supposedly) off-the-record meeting of civic and business leaders at the California Club (called so that Chief Parker could present his perspective on the current controversy), Parker complained that the allegations of unchecked police brutality were the result of the liberal Daily News’s vendetta against him.
But the most potent defense of the LAPD did not come from the city’s business establishment or its dominant newspaper. It came from Hollywood, in the form of a fledgling new television show called Dragnet.
DEAD BODIES, distressed dames, and dangerous games. Bombshell blondes and wisecracking private eyes. High heels, handguns, and homicide. Lonely days, rainy nights, and “streets that were dark with something more than night.” During the 1920s and ’30s, magazines such as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Gun Molls created a new genre of writing—pulp fiction (so named after the cheap pulp paper on which the magazines were printed). Schlocky and shocking, full of stock characters and lurid tales, the pulps quickly attracted big readerships. Surprisingly, they also attracted gifted writers, among them Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, who, in the 1930s, penned great books that in the 1940s became even greater movies—for example, The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Farewell, My Lovely; The Postman Always Rings Twice. In 1946, French film critic Nino Frank gave this style of filmmaking a name—“film noir.”
Then there was the noir radio drama Pat Novak for Hire.
Pat Novak took the classic private investigator formula to the nth degree. Set on the San Francisco waterfront, it featured a world-weary boat captain with a weakness for corny quips and a knack for getting involved in other people’s affairs. The show’s opening lines set the blase, world-weary tone: “Sure, I’m Pat Novak, for hire …” the show began, to the sound of foghorns on the waterfront. Invariably, Novak would agree to investigate a minor case—which led straight to murder. The dialogue was pure camp. Streets were “as deserted as a warm bottle of beer.” Dames who “made Cleopatra look like Apple Mary” appeared in Novak’s office at dusk, and spoke in voices “hot and sticky—like a furnace full of marshmallows.” What made it work was the tremulous, intimate voice of Pat Novak himself—a twenty-six-year-old voice actor named Jack Webb.
Jack Webb had grown up poor, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. Early on he developed a passion for jazz and the cinema. During the war, Webb worked as a clerk for the U.S. Army Air Force in Del Rio, Texas (though later press accounts made him a B-26 crew member). Afterward, he married a young singer/actress he’d met at a jazz club before the war, Julie London—the Julie London. (During the war, London was a popular pinup girl. None of Webb’s comrades believed that the gangly, intense twenty-two-year-old knew her—until he produced a letter.) In 1946, Webb moved to San Francisco and landed a job as a disk jockey at a local ABC-affiliated radio station, KGO. There Webb and his writing partner, Richard Breen, created Pat Novak for Hire. The sensitive yet cynical PI and his extraordinarily kitschy dialogue quickly attracted a loyal following. However, Webb’s big break came in 1948, when a Hollywood casting director heard one of Webb’s “private-eye plays” and offered him a part in a new Eagle-Lion film, He Walked by Night (1948).
Eagle-Lion was a little studio with dreams of becoming the next Warner Bros. He Walked by Night was insp
ired by the recent murder of a California Highway patrolman. The film told the story of the LAPD’s efforts to catch the burglar-turned-cop-killer; its highlight was an extended, real-time chase through the streets (and sewers) of Los Angeles. Webb’s role was a minor one: He played the part of a technician in the crime investigation lab (in real life, Lt. Lee Jones). However, the movie shaped his career in two critical ways. The first influence was stylistic. He Walked by Night began with an opening disclaimer: “The record is set down here factually—as it happened. Only the names are changed—to protect the innocent.” Its opening shot was an aerial pan of the city, with a dramatic voice-over: “This is Los Angeles. Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, as the Spanish named her. The fastest growing city in the nation …” The film also had a decidedly documentary flavor. It presented its story as one “taken from the files of the detective division.” All of these elements would later appear in Jack Webb’s most famous creation. The second influence was LAPD Det. Sgt. Marty Wynn, whom Webb met on the set.
Wynn had been provided by the LAPD as a technical advisor to the producers (one of whom, ironically, was Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s liaison to Hollywood, who had recently been released from the federal penitentiary after a prison sentence was mysteriously commuted). Although Wynn was supposed to instruct the director in the fine points of police procedure, once the filming got under way, he didn’t have much to do. Neither did Jack Webb. As a result, both men spent a lot of time in the commissary. There the two fell to talking. When Wynn found out that Webb was a radio actor who played the part of a private eye, he took to teasing him about the silliness of radio programs like Pat Novak.