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

by John Buntin

  Just days before the election, Poulson went to breakfast with someone he would later identify only as “a former deputy district attorney and now the vice president of a Los Angeles and nationally known institution.” When he arrived, the candidate was startled to find the shady ex-LAPD-captain-turned-attorney and a well-known “Las Vegas gambling man” waiting for him. As he sat down to breakfast, Poulson was “really scared.” The men got right to it: They offered Poulson $35,000 if he would agree to name three men to the five-member Police Commission. Poulson tried to stall. The men then insisted that “I go out and talk in the gambler’s car.” Even though he suspected that he was being maneuvered into a “bugged” car, Poulson was too frightened to refuse.

  “I talked in circles,” Poulson wrote in his memoirs. A few days later, on April 7, Poulson defeated Bowron, 53 to 47 percent, and became Los Angeles’s next mayor. Yet as Poulson left the Gaylord Hotel downtown to go to his campaign headquarters to celebrate his victory, he was “filled with mixed emotions.” Thoughts of Cadillacs, chauffeurs, and a nice raise seemed far away. Poulson now had to worry about how he could avoid “opening up the town” in light of the fact that “some of the people who had supported me thought I would.” Some of these people were very rough. Poulson had to decide whether he would face them with Chief Parker and his intelligence division or without them.

  18

  The Magna Carta of the Criminal

  “The voice of the criminal, the Communist, and the self-appointed defender of civil liberties cries out for more and more restrictions upon police authority.”

  —Chief William Parker

  POLICE TACTICS WERE TOUGH.

  In early 1952, Chicago Outfit bosses Tony (“Joe Batters” aka “Big Tuna”) Accardo and Sam Giancana decided to pay a visit to Johnny Roselli in Los Angeles en route to a vacation in Las Vegas. Accardo was well aware of the LAPD intelligence division’s practice of reviewing passenger manifests so that it could intercept suspected gangsters. As a result, he took the precaution of booking his ticket as “Mr. S. Mann.” Giancana booked a separate ticket as “Michael Mancuso” and avoided any interaction with Accardo on the flight. But when the two underworld figures (and Accardo’s doctor) arrived, the LAPD’s airport squad quickly identified the Chicago Mob bosses. Accardo and his associates left the airport with a police tail.

  Accardo’s party proceeded to Perino’s restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles’s poshest dining establishment. There the men passed a pleasant meal under the watchful eye of a contingent of plainclothes policemen. As the men were finishing their meal, Lt. W C. Hull stepped up to the table and ordered the men to produce identification. They did. The police then frisked the men, removing $12,000 in cash, at which point they were driven back to the airport and put on the next flight to Las Vegas.

  The men who had stalked Accardo and Giancana came from Capt. James Hamilton’s intelligence division. Its two watch lieutenants, seven sergeants, and twenty-six patrolmen (and women) conducted operations of remarkable scope. One team of officers worked full time on background checks, reviewing credit reports, bank account information, utility bills, and the like in order to monitor underworld attempts to infiltrate legitimate businesses. Another team specialized in electronic surveillance. (Olney’s commission said only that “a considerable amount of information is obtained in this manner.”) A three-man airport unit, manned by officers chosen for their ability to memorize hundreds of mug shots of gangsters from across the country, monitored Los Angeles International Airport twenty hours a day. It was this unit that spotted Accardo and Giancana.

  Visiting gangsters were sent packing, with no regard for legal niceties. Hoodlums who were L.A. residents, such as Cohen henchmen Frank and Joe Sica, were tracked constantly by two-man teams of officers. These officers were not subtle. Indeed, the department openly stated “this scrutiny may at times border on harassment and [be aimed at] driving the subject hoodlum from our jurisdiction.” The police wanted people to know they were being watched; they wanted the bad guys to feel uncomfortable. They also wanted associates of criminals to feel uncomfortable. Intelligence division officers routinely visited businessmen and casual acquaintances of known hoodlums and asked them to prove that they weren’t involved in underworld activities by ending the relationships. The goal was to make it difficult and unpleasant for the subject of surveillance to meet with others, transact business, or have friends.

  The intelligence division was also the unit that was watching mayor-elect Norris Poulson.

  At first, Poulson sympathized with those who railed against Parker’s “secret police.” But after getting a firsthand look at the underworld, he was more understanding of police tactics. His own experiences had left him with no doubt that the underworld was actively attempting to regain control of Los Angeles. Nonetheless, Parker’s black-hat operations were disturbing. No target was off limits. Indeed, soon after Parker took office, conservative councilman Ed Davenport was enraged to find two policemen hiding in a closet listening in on a meeting Davenport was having with some businessmen constituents. Local politicians saw the unit as Parker’s Praetorian guard. So did Parker himself. In a letter to a priest who had written to request details about the unit, Parker openly explained that one of the division’s missions was to protect the chief from political attack. In addition to “exceptional traits of characters,” Parker wrote that officers who hoped to be assigned to intelligence had to be “trustworthy to the Office of the Chief of Police.” The reason Parker provided for this extraordinary requirement was an interesting one: “While such loyalty to the Office might be interpreted by some to be of a personal nature”—as indeed it clearly was—“we believe such loyalty to be to the integrity of the department.” Loyalty to Parker had become tantamount to police integrity.

  Then there were the intelligence division files. The division maintained an alphabetical master card file “on all persons who have been brought to our attention.” The protocol was precise: 5 × 8 card with name, physical description, photo, address, phone number, description and license of car, friends, activities, and associations. These cards were then cross-indexed with the general criminal files. Fed by the intelligence division’s investigations and by a clipping service that monitored twenty newspapers across the country, the files grew quickly. How quickly was a closely held secret. No judge could subpoena these files. No Police Commission could review them, for, in another extraordinary decision, Chief Parker had ruled that these were not actually official police files. Rather, they were the personal property of the chief of police.

  The potential for the abuse of power was obvious—indeed, Poulson himself had experienced it during his mayoral campaign. Yet far from expressing contrition, Chief Parker seemed to take pleasure in dropping hints about just how much he knew. “In my conversations with him,” Poulson would later recall, “he would inadvertently tell what he knew about this person or that…. I later found out that Chief Parker had a file on MANY PEOPLE and not all communist suspects.” Indeed, Parker continued to keep Poulson under surveillance, even after he became mayor. In most cities, this alone would have been a firing offense. But Parker was protected by several formidable defenses. The first was the legal defenses he had drafted in the thirties. As the liberal Daily News noted, Parker’s 1930s reforms meant that the Police Commission “can’t hire unless there is a vacancy and it can’t create a vacancy unless there is grave cause and then only after a hearing.” The second was his department’s growing reputation as—in policing expert O. W. Wilson’s constantly cited phrase—“the county’s best big city police department.” Just weeks before the Poulson-Bowron runoff election, the Governor’s Commission on Organized Crime had issued a report praising the LAPD for its success in keeping eastern gangsters out. (It warned that they were resettling in Palm Springs instead.) Tangling with a chief whose work was garnering such accolades carried big political risks.

  There was a third reason to keep Parker in o
ffice as well: fear. Los Angeles was rife with rumors that gamblers and racketeers had already “cut the town up.” Poulson knew from personal experience that these rumors had some basis in fact. Firing Chief Parker would have been tantamount to inviting the underworld interests who had so frightened the mayor during his campaign to open shop in Los Angeles. Poulson viewed Parker as an admirable law enforcement officer but a “cold-blooded, self-centered individual.” Ultimately, though, Poulson feared the Mob more than his chief of police. Chief Parker, announced Poulson a few weeks before his swearing in, would stay.

  “Chief Parker is to remain on the job on the basis of what he does from now on,” Poulson pointedly told the Los Angeles Times. “It will be up to the Chief to produce and to prove to the new Police Commission—and to me—that he is the proper man to remain at the head of the Police Department.”

  Although he had concluded that firing Parker was simply too dangerous (politically and personally), Poulson was determined to restrain him. The mayor’s strategy for doing this was to appoint a Police Commission that “would not kowtow to Chief Parker but at the same time would support a clean city and law enforcement.” Since Bowron’s appointees had resigned, Poulson had a chance to appoint all five police commissioners. To head the commission, Poulson turned to his top assistant, attorney Jack Irwin. Other members included John Ferraro, a former USC All-American football star who was the son-in-law of state Sen. George Luckey, one of Poulson’s major Democratic backers. He also added Michael Kohn, a prominent Jewish lawyer, and Herbert Greenwood, an African American attorney who had worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One member of the old commission, Emmett McGaughey, a former G-man-turned-advertising executive (who was also in Poulson’s church), agreed to stay on.

  The message Poulson intended to send was clear: A new, more assertive Police Commission was taking over. But Poulson’s stern tone and high-powered appointments didn’t obscure an even more important fact: Chief Parker had just become the first police chief since 1913 to survive a change in administration. By not selecting his own candidate to be Los Angeles’s top cop, Poulson was in effect conceding that his police chief was too valuable to lose. The LAPD had just taken a huge step toward the kind of autonomy Bill Parker had long dreamed of.

  Parker’s enemies warned the new mayor that he was making a mistake. Two weeks after Poulson was sworn in, former Police Commission member Hugh Irey published a two-part open letter to the new mayor in the Los Angeles Mirror. Its purpose, in the author’s words, was to present “irrefutable facts to show that it is physically impossible for the Police Commission—under the present system—to be more than a figurehead for the Chief of Police.” Irey described Parker as “probably the most powerful official in the city.” He insisted that his goal was not to attack Parker, whom he described as a man of integrity, but rather to offer a critique of a flawed system. But Irey did paint a disturbing portrait of the police department under the new chief. He called attention to the chief’s $85,000 “secret service fund.” He described how the commission was powerless to conduct its own investigation into brutality cases, lacking even the authority to review the material used by the chief to formulate the report he presented to the board on any given incident. In conclusion, Irey called for full-time, paid commissioners, with investigators drawn from the detectives’ bureau (which unlike the three other plainclothes units—Internal Affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice—did not work directly under Parker’s personal supervision).

  “Until these recommendations … are put into effect the Los Angeles Police Commission will continue to be a mere figurehead and rubber stamp for the Chief of Police—one of the most powerful and autocratic officials in the city,” warned Irey.

  Parker just scoffed.

  “I’ve told the Police Commissioners repeatedly that anytime three of them are against me to let me know and I’ll retire,” he replied.

  This was disingenuous. No Police Commission would ever act against the mayor on such an important issue, and Mayor Poulson had made it clear that he could not do without Parker. Irey’s warnings were ignored. No changes were made to the organization of the commission. The department would continue to be run as Parker’s personal fiefdom. Local observers marveled at Parker’s triumph.

  “Hardly anyone likes Parker, a contentious, abrasive individual who will never give Dale Carnegie lessons on ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’” wrote the Los Angeles Daily News. Yet Parker had achieved something that his predecessors had not. He had become irreplaceable.

  POULSON HOPED that his Police Commission would be able to restrain Chief Parker. But the limitations of the commission’s structure and the dependencies on the department it fostered soon reasserted themselves. The commission met just one afternoon a week, typically for no more than an hour and a half. Most of its meetings were devoted to humdrum licensing tasks, okaying requests for parades, licensing pawnshops, vetting requests by churches to hold rummage sales, approving applications for dance halls. Its only staff were police department personnel. On those occasions when it did take up larger, policing issues, it relied on the police for guidance. Not surprisingly, the course of action it elected to pursue was almost always the one the department itself would have chosen.

  If those weren’t constraints enough, Chief Parker set out to actively win over the Police Commission’s most important member, former Poulson campaign manager Jack Irwin. By the end of his first year in office, Irwin was routinely siding with Chief Parker over his old friend the mayor. Poulson would later blame Parker for wrecking his friendship with Irwin. Slowly, Chief Parker was gaining the upper hand.

  POULSON STRUGGLED in his dealings with the chief. Parker prided himself on his analytic approach to problems, but Poulson found him to be a volatile and unpredictable partner. At times, Parker seemed to accept that the city’s elected officials had an important role in governing the department, as in setting salaries. At other times, even the most basic attempts by Mayor Poulson to guide the department would set Parker off. In the spring of 1954, for instance, Mayor Poulson (an accountant by training) and City Administrative Officer Samuel Leask decided to take a close look at Parker’s budget request for the coming year. In doing so, Leask discovered that 750 officers were working at clerical and office tasks that seemed to require no special policing skills. Another 56 officers were guarding 200 low-risk chronic drunks at the Bouquet Valley police farm, a facility commonly known as the dude ranch. Transferring those officers to the field would dramatically increase the number of cops on the street without altering the standards Parker insisted had provided the city with the world’s greatest police force. Surely, some of the other officers could be diverted to more arduous work as well, Poulson and Leask reasoned.

  But when Leask presented the idea to Parker, the chief reacted angrily. It wasn’t so much the substance of the idea that annoyed Parker. Over the course of the preceding two years, Parker himself had released 109 officers for fieldwork by hiring civilian substitutes. Rather, Parker objected to the idea that Sam Leask—a man who knew nothing about policing—could swoop in and find inefficiencies that Parker had missed. At a public meeting on the police department’s budget chaired by the mayor, Parker made no attempt to conceal his pique. The chief repeatedly interrupted Leask’s attempts to present his analysis, going so far as to inform the astonished mayor that the management and budget of the police department were “his [meaning Parker’s] own business.” Parker’s behavior was so boorish that Mayor Poulson, who was chairing the meeting, finally stepped in and asked Parker to let Leask speak.

  Parker exploded, shouting, as he jabbed his finger at the city’s chief elected official, that he would not be “intimidated” by the mayor. He even threatened to resign.

  Mayor Poulson was astonished.

  “You talk like you’re offended and that we have no right to ask you how your department functions and how the taxpayers’ money is spent,” Poulson told Parker. “You immediately get a
ngry. You talk like we were sticking our nose into something that wasn’t our business. It is our business and there’s no use you getting red in the face.”

  It was classic Parker. The chief prided himself on being rational and fact-driven; he often described critics as “emotional” or “hysterical.” But in fact, Parker himself was a highly emotional man whose responses to “attacks” (real or perceived) were often more than a little hysterical. Eventually, Parker calmed down. However, he continued to resist the mayor’s dictates. In the years that followed, Parker allowed the percentage of civilian employees in the department to rise only incrementally, from 23.3 percent to 25 percent.

  This policy of resistance came at a high cost. Tight budgets, high standards, and attrition continued to take a terrible toll on the department. In a memo to the Police Commission in the spring of 1954, Parker noted that in July 1955 the department would have 4,453 sworn personnel—roughly the same number of officers the department had when he had become chief of police in August 1950. Yet during this same period, Los Angeles had added more than 120,000 new residents. The city was growing; its police department was not.

  So far, the consequences of this situation had been minimal. Despite the comparatively small size of the LAPD, Los Angeles’s crime rate remained slightly lower than in other big cities. However, crime was growing fast—faster even than the city’s population. Yet while Parker desperately wanted more officers, he rejected the idea that the police had any connection to the crime rate.

  “You can blame the situation on your police if you wish,” he told the city council during an appearance in late 1953. “You can lay it in their laps, if you want to. Blame them even for social problems over which they have little control…. But let’s be practical and realistic. The police do not create crime problems…. Nothing is solved by hysteria.”