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

by John Buntin

  “I wish that crime were a simple plague to be solved by isolating a troublesome microbe, but it is not,” Parker declared in a 1953 speech on crime and belief. “I wish it could be eliminated materialistically, by continually supplying Americans with chrome fixtures, softer beds, and shorter work hours, but I know that it cannot be thus eradicated. Certainly I do wish that the police had it within their power to solve the problem alone, but I know that they cannot.” Only by restoring the citizenry’s belief in the sanctity of the law could chaos be avoided, he concluded.

  Parker’s speeches called his audiences to a sterner morality. But the chief’s worldview was fatalistic, and his analysis of society’s problems discouraged practical responses. It was one thing to argue that the police weren’t responsible for the increase in crime. But Parker seemed to be suggesting that neither police efforts nor any “materialistic” initiatives could address the rise in crime. Politically, this was a convenient proposition for everyone. It allowed Parker to avoid questions about why what was supposedly the nation’s best police force was presiding over such dramatic increases in crime, and it allowed politicians to avoid raising taxes to expand a department run by a man many of them distrusted. It was easier to flatter the chief for creating the country’s greatest police force, one that could do more with less.

  But of course, Parker still faced the challenge of policing a growing city with a stagnant police force. The key to doing more with less was intelligence. Intelligence kept the underworld from buying politicians, corrupting police officers, and controlling the police department. Intelligence was the key to taking the fight to the underworld, and in the mid-1950s, the underworld seemed to be the locus of serious crime in Los Angeles. But the department’s ability to collect intelligence was about to suffer a series of blows from an unexpected and formidable adversary—the courts.

  FOR DECADES, police departments had enjoyed wide latitude in how they went about apprehending criminal suspects. In 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that evidence improperly or illegally obtained could not be used at trial—a principle known today as the exclusionary rule. But the exclusionary rule applied only to federal law enforcement agencies. For local law enforcement, the proof was in the pudding. If the evidence was incriminating, courts typically asked few questions about how it was obtained. Only the most flagrant examples of police misconduct could bestir most judges to exclude evidence. The result was corner-cutting. Civil liberties advocate Hugh Manes would later note that between 1931 and 1962, the LAPD served only 631 search warrants, about 20 a year, a shockingly low number. Police routinely responded to truly serious crimes by throwing dragnets around entire neighborhoods and “tossing” hotels, motels, and even private homes in search of potential suspects. Yet in its 1949 decision Wolf v. Colorado, the court reiterated its opinion that the exclusionary rule did not apply to local law enforcement agencies.

  Of course, not every method was legal. Federal statutes prohibited wiretapping, as did California state law. The prohibition was absolute: No provision was provided for law enforcement agencies to seek court permission to tap a phone line. Parker understandably viewed this as a major problem. But the department did have a work-around; it simply broke into people’s homes and businesses and installed dictographs. The police department reasoned that since these were stand-alone recording devices that did not involve “tapping” a phone line, they were legal, end of story. The courts agreed—until November 1953, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Irvine v. California.

  The case involved a suspected bookmaker (Irvine) who’d been targeted by the Long Beach Police Department. Officers had brought in a locksmith to make copies of the man’s house keys, entered his house, and then installed a dictograph in his bedroom closet—all without a search warrant. The evidence obtained from the “bug” was the basis of the man’s subsequent conviction. During his first trial in state court, the bookmaker had argued that by breaking into his house without a warrant, police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. The state court disagreed, as did the state appeals court. So Irvine petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, successfully.

  On February 8, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. It noted that repeatedly entering the petitioner’s home without a warrant “was a trespass and probably a burglary.” The majority opinion described dictographs as “frightening instruments of surveillance and invasion of privacy, whether [used] by the policeman, the blackmailer, or the busybody.

  “That officers of the law would break and enter a home, secrete such a device, even in a bedroom, and listen to the conversation of the occupants for over a month would be almost incredible if it were not admitted,” the majority continued. “Few police measures have come to our attention that more flagrantly, deliberately, and persistently violated the fundamental principle declared by the Fourth Amendment as a restriction on the Federal Government.” But the court nonetheless concluded that this restriction was one that applied only to the federal government.

  “[I]n a prosecution in a State Court for a State crime, the Fourth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson in the 5-4 majority decision. As a result, the court declined to overturn the conviction. However, in what Earl Warren biographer Jim Newton describes as the “extraordinary” final paragraph of the opinion, Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Warren took the highly unusual step of noting that federal law allowed for the prosecution of police officers who, acting under color of authority, willfully deprived a person of a federal right such as the right to be secure in one’s home. The two justices then directed the court clerk to forward a copy of the record in this case, together with a copy of this opinion, to the U.S. attorney general for possible prosecution.

  Parker was dumbfounded—and outraged. The highest court in the land had essentially described one of the most valuable tools in law enforcement—the dictograph—as something evil. In Parker’s opinion, this description was incorrect and, in light of dictographs’ long history as useful law enforcement tools, bizarre.

  “Since the advent of appropriate electronic devices, the police of this state have utilized such devices to gather information and evidence concerning criminal activities,” Parker responded three months later, in a speech at the Biltmore Hotel marking National Crime Prevention Week. He insisted that they did so in ways that were tightly controlled. Section 6539(h) of the California Penal Code allowed dictographs only when expressly authorized by the head of a police force or by the district attorney. The evidence thus obtained, Parker insisted, had been invaluable in the department’s fight against organized crime:

  A reputed overlord of crime in this area is now serving a term in a federal prison as a result of a prosecution in which information obtained through the use of dictographic equipment contributed materially. Two reputed members of the Mafia, who escaped federal prosecution for narcotic violations when a key witness against them was found murdered, were recently convicted of crimes in the courts of this state based upon evidence obtained through a dictograph installation. The reputed head of the local Mafia is now awaiting deportation, largely as the result of a local conviction obtained through the use of a dictographic installation. One such installation alone aided our department in solving forty-three serious crimes.

  If anything, Parker continued, California’s total ban on wiretapping was too restrictive. Attempts by Parker and other chiefs to create a mechanism that would allow them to ask a court for permission to intercept telegraphs and tap telephones based on probable cause had stalled in the legislature, creating what Parker described in one speech as providing “a Yalu river sanctuary within the vast telegraphic and telephonic communications network of the United States within which to plan and transact their illegal activities with impunity.” Parker’s allusion—a reference to the river redoubt from which the Chinese Army had attacked U.S. forces
during the Korean War—could hardly have been more pointed.

  The position of Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Earl Warren must have been particularly galling. As California’s attorney general, Warren had not hesitated to brush aside legalistic objections in his pursuit of justice (most notably, when he personally directed a police raid on Tony Cornero’s gambling ship, the SS Rex, despite a court ruling that it was operating outside of California’s territorial waters). Yet now, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Warren seemed intent on imposing unprecedented new restrictions on law enforcement. The timing, in Parker’s opinion, was terrible. Between 1950 and 1953, the LAPD had actually become smaller as Los Angeles grew. The city’s crime rate was growing at an ever faster rate—a trend Parker described to the city council as “a very frightening thing.” Yet instead of giving the police greater power, the judiciary was imposing new restrictions. Parker believed that by criticizing the use of dictographs (which have “solved countless serious crimes”), the court was raising the prospect that police officers might be prosecuted for what had long been standard operating procedure. In one speech, he asked his audience to consider the officer who responded to a call and saw a housewife, prone on the floor, a probable suicide attempt at death’s very door. Any officer worth his salt would kick in the door and race the woman to the hospital to pump her stomach. Was this to be treated now as trespassing, kidnapping, and rape?

  “Certainly society cannot expect the police to risk criminal prosecution when their only sin is the valid enforcement of the law as they have been led to understand the law,” Parker concluded.

  This was a sensitive—and not entirely hypothetical—subject for Parker. For by his third year as chief, he himself had emerged as a major target of lawsuits. The first had come after the Bloody Christmas beating. More serious was a 1951 lawsuit filed by civil rights attorney A. L. Wirin, lead attorney for the Southern California Civil Liberties Union. Since both the state and federal court systems were as yet unprepared to exclude evidence gathered illegally by local police departments, Wirin sought to shut down the LAPD’s surveillance activities in another fashion—by enjoining the police department from using public money to illegally install dictographs. Parker once again detected the hand of Moscow. At a hearing, he blurted out his suspicions that the Minsk-born Wirin (whose initials stood for “Abraham Lincoln”) was a Communist.

  Wirin’s attempts to rein in the LAPD’s surveillance operations attracted broad sympathy—not least from the city’s elected officials. That spring, two councilmen, Harold Harby and Ernest Debs, discovered that their work telephones had been wiretapped. Both pointed at the police. Parker vehemently denied the allegation, blaming the underworld instead. Given the history of wiretapping in City Hall, many doubted this denial. Just two days after the councilmen had accused the department of illegally listening in, the Los Angeles Times reported that the new police administration building nearing completion around the corner from City Hall was chockablock with bugs and listening devices. This provided little reassurance to the city’s already fearful political establishment.

  Chief Parker was determined to defend—and expand—his surveillance tools. To do so, he turned to the television show Dragnet. By 1954, Dragnet had become the second most popular television show in the country (after I Love Lucy). The radio version (which now aired Sunday nights) also continued to attract a large audience. NBC was eager to create a feature film-length version of the show. The LAPD was prepared to offer Jack Webb a particularly juicy case file to serve as the basis of the script—one that involved a spectacular gang murder—but it came with a catch. The case was solved only after the police turned to extreme tactics, including near-constant police harassment and constant surveillance. Webb accepted the deal. As a result, audiences were treated to a movie with an unusual hero—the LAPD intelligence division. With its assistance (and a skillfully placed bug), Webb cracked the case of a gangland hit—only to run into trouble in the courtroom. There, after underworld witnesses refused to testify, Friday expresses his frustration at being unable to use a wiretap too.

  A female juror objects. “How do we know that all you policemen wouldn’t be running around listening to all our conversations?” she asks.

  “We would if you talked murder,” Friday snaps back.

  Even Parker supporters, such as the in-house publication of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, The Tidings, were somewhat disconcerted by the film’s depiction of harsh police tactics. But Parker insisted that such misgivings were misinformed.

  “Far from being a threat to our freedom,” Parker wrote in the pages of the California Law Review the following spring, “the use of modern technological devices by the police may well be their most powerful tool in combating our internal enemies, and a vital necessity in the protection of our nation’s security, harmony, and internal well-being.”

  In addition to trying to win public support for less restrictive wiretapping laws, Parker also sought broader legal protections for his officers. In the fall of 1954, Parker kicked off a campaign to persuade allies in the state legislature to pass a law shielding law enforcement officers from the threat of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits for actions taken in the routine course of their work. But just weeks after Parker floated this proposal, state attorney general Pat Brown made an announcement that preempted Parker’s efforts. Brown suggested that local district attorneys henceforth consider prosecuting police officers who broke into citizens’ homes to install dictographs without a court order. Then, on April 27, 1955, the California Supreme Court suddenly and unexpectedly issued a ruling that threatened to destroy what Parker had so carefully built.

  The case of Cahan v. California bore a striking resemblance to Irvine. This time it was the LAPD that had broken into the property of a suspected bookmaker, thirty-one-year-old Charlie Cahan. He was a big-time bookie, with a clearinghouse near the Coliseum, an elaborate call-back system to avoid police detection, and a network of backup “spots” across the city where debtors could place bets in person. The LAPD estimated that he was handling about $6 million a year, and his lifestyle showed it. According to an LAPD intelligence dossier, Cahan had “concubines, liquor by the case, a lavish penthouse, Cadillacs.” Cahan had emerged from nowhere and become an important player virtually overnight. Many assumed he was paying for police protection. He wasn’t. On the contrary, Chief Parker had instructed the intelligence division in no uncertain terms that he wanted “this son of a bitch in jail.”

  So the intelligence division sent a man disguised as a termite inspector into the building housing Cahan’s accountants to install a dictograph. The recordings secured a conviction, and Cahan was fined $2,000, sentenced to nine days in prison, and given a five-year-probation. Cahan appealed the decision. An appeals court rejected it, but when Cahan took his case to the California Supreme Court, it was accepted. A narrow 4-3 majority threw out Cahan’s conviction.

  “We have been compelled to [void the conviction and impose new evidentiary guidelines] because other remedies have completely failed to secure compliance with constitutional provisions on the part of police officers,” wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the majority opinion. He continued, “The courts under the old rule have been constantly required to participate in, and in effect condone, the lawless activities of law enforcement.”

  Traynor served notice that such practices were now coming to an end. The court struck down a California law that allowed courts to accept evidence, regardless of the manner in which it was obtained. Henceforth evidence improperly acquired would be thrown out—period. This was a fairly extreme remedy. Few other states imposed the exclusionary rule in such a blanket fashion. But the court insisted that the stakes justified such a draconian remedy.

  “Today one of the foremost concerns is the police state,” declared Justice Traynor bluntly. “Recent history has demonstrated all too clearly how short the step is from lawless although efficient enforcement of the law to the stamping out of human right
s.”

  Parker’s reaction was apoplectic. He described the ruling as “a terrible blow to efficient law enforcement” and warned that the decision “will probably set law enforcement back fifty years.”

  “The positive implication drawn from the Cahan case is that activities of the police are a greater social menace than are the activities of the criminal,” he told the press. “This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.” State assistant attorney general Clarence Linn agreed, calling the ruling “the Magna Carta of the criminal.” In a meeting with the Mirror, the chief revealed that in the month following the Cahan decision, arrests had plummeted across the board: bookmaking arrests, down 42 percent; narcotics, down 38 percent; weapons, down 20 percent. A headline in the Mirror-News captured the chief’s sentiments perfectly: “Criminals Laugh at L.A. Police, Says Chief. Underworld Rejoices in Ruling.”

  Cahan offended Parker on many levels. As an attorney, he believed the ruling was ill considered and flew in the face of the doctrine of stare decisis, which held that courts should generally stand by earlier decisions. As a lawman, he found it insulting. But the new restrictions imposed by the courts on the police also worried Parker for a more immediate reason. For on October 9, 1955, after three years, eight months, and sixteen days in the joint, Mickey Cohen walked out of prison a free man.

  19

  The Enemy Within

  “He is intent on being a respectable member of society as a senatorial nominee on getting elected. The odds are three to one that Mickey Cohen, if not stopped by a bullet, will wind up a Rotarian.”

  —Ben Hecht

  WHEN MICKEY COHEN stepped off the ferry from McNeil Island at the little town of Steilacoom, near Tacoma, the press was waiting. Mickey didn’t seem surprised. Even after three years in prison, he accepted press attention as his due. In fact, Cohen seemed more relaxed—and more chatty—than ever before. When asked what his next plans were, Mickey indicated that he was leaning toward opening a bar and grill, “maybe in Beverly Hills or the Miracle Mile”—this despite the fact that Cohen still owed Uncle Sam $156,123. In fact, he told the assembled press, he and a few partners had already hired an architect to draw up plans. The news was instantly telegraphed to L.A., where official reaction was not long in coming.