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

by John Buntin

  Forced to choose between Chief Parker and his critics, L.A.’s elected politicians went with the police. In March 1966, the city council voted to commend Chief Parker for his management of the department and the “pattern of realistic human relations” he had established with the city’s African American community. Only three members of the council, Tom Bradley, Gilbert Lindsay, and Billy Mills, voted against this curiously worded expression of support.

  Parker’s popularity dissuaded the city’s elected officials from criticizing him directly. “It’s most plausible that Chief Parker is the most powerful man in Los Angeles,” mused Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler to a Washington Post reporter that summer. “He is the white community’s savior, their symbol of security.”

  Privately, however, many recognized that Parker was the major obstacle to improved race relations in the city. On March 4, 1966, an FBI agent who’d attended a special panel on Watts at the National Association of District Attorneys in Tucson reported on his conversation with L.A. district attorney Evelle Younger and Judge Earl Broady, a member of the McCone Commission and an African American. Both Younger and Broady described Parker’s “ingrained action [sic] against Negroes” as “the major stumbling block to any problem of effective community relations.” Younger also identified the LAPD’s failure to recognize or promote black officers as a major problem. Both men said that they believed Parker would have resigned by now if not for demands from civil rights groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality that he step down. (Parker didn’t want to lose face.) Younger also confided that Chief Parker was a very sick man. Less than a week later, Parker was hospitalized for “a temporary cardiac incapacity.” Not until June 1 was Parker able to resume command of the department.

  On July 5, 1966, Chief Parker sent a memorandum to the city council that represented a serious attempt to come to terms with the city’s public safety needs. In it, Parker returned to one of his favorite themes: the need to increase the size of the LAPD. The memo noted that in October 1965, L.A.’s ratio of police officers per thousand residents had fallen to a mere 1.87—little more than half of New York’s 3.31 officers per thousand. Yet while L.A.’s population had risen 17 percent since 1958 (and serious crime had risen 47 percent), the size of the police department had actually fallen. One table comparing the number of police per 1,000 residents in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles made a powerful case for Parker’s argument that Los Angeles had made a disastrous decision to underinvest in its police force:

  The memo concluded by noting that “if the recommended [police] manpower rate for 1958 were projected to a police-officer-per-thousand ratio in 1965, Los Angeles would need 11,010 police officers”—double the size of the current force. As for the chances of this happening, even Parker considered the idea “academic.” Thanks to his insistence on high standards (of a certain sort), the LAPD couldn’t even fill the much smaller number of positions that were currently available. But Parker’s fundamental analysis was almost certainly correct. Los Angeles was underpoliced—criminally so. It still is.

  On the evening of July 16, 1966, Bill Parker went to a banquet at the Statler Hilton Hotel to receive an award from the Second Marine Division, which was celebrating its seventeenth annual reunion. He received a plaque citing him as one of the nation’s foremost police chiefs. After a few brief remarks, he walked back to his table, where Helen was sitting, while a thousand Marine Corps veterans gave him a standing ovation. He sat down, then, suddenly, he leaned back and started gasping for air. Slowly he crumpled to the floor. His heart had finally failed him. After almost thirty-nine years on the force, Chief William H. Parker was dead. He was sixty-one years old.

  The public responded to Parker’s death with an outpouring of grief. Mayor Yorty declared himself to be “shocked and heart-broken.”

  “Los Angeles and America will sadly miss our courageous and beloved Police Chief Parker,” Yorty declared. “He was a monument of strength against the criminal elements.”

  Governor Pat Brown (a frequent Parker antagonist) praised the chief for his “courageous commitment to the rule of law.” Even adversaries such as A. L. Wirin had admiring words. Although they had “disagreed sharply on most subjects,” the civil liberties attorney declared, “I have admired him throughout the years as an efficient and dedicated police officer.”

  Said councilman Tom Bradley, “I regret the death of a man who did much to change the image and practices of the police department, although he often spoke from emotion without considering the effect of his words.”

  Only Thomas Kilgore, the western representative for Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, seemed willing to dissent: “His death will be a loss in the sense he put together a strong, disciplined police force. But I think his death will be a relief to the minority community, who believe he woefully misunderstood the social revolution taking place.”

  At the funeral home, Parker’s casket was given a twenty-four-hour police honor guard. The day before the funeral, Parker’s body was brought to the City Hall rotunda to lie in state. More than three thousand mourners came to pay their respects and view Parker’s body. The funeral itself was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following day at St. Vibiana’s cathedral. Police and church officials alike were caught off guard by the massive turnout. Thousands of Angelenos—including Gov. Pat Brown, Republican gubernatorial nominee Ronald Reagan, and Mayor Sam Yorty—and police chiefs from sixty cities filled the cathedral for the requiem high mass, with Cardinal James Francis McIntyre as the officiant. Another 1,500 people lined Main Street to listen to the mass on loudspeakers and, afterward, to observe the hearse carrying Parker’s body, escorted by 150 LAPD motorcycle officers. The funeral procession to Parker’s grave site at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery was seven miles long. There, a military honor guard buried Chief Parker with full honors while the American Legion Police Post 381 band played “Hail to the Chief” as the casket was moved to the grave site. Taps was played, a rifle volley fired, and then Chief Parker was lowered into the earth.

  28

  R.I.P.

  “I don’t want to be rude, but I got to beg off this thing.”

  —Mickey Cohen

  WILLIAM PARKER was dead, but the system he had created lived on.

  On July 18, Parker’s old rival, chief of detectives Thad Brown, was sworn in as chief of police. This time, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to convey his congratulations. The new chief responded in the proper fashion. (“It is encouraging to know that I may rely upon your confidence and support in the great task that lies ahead,” gushed Brown in reply.) But Thad Brown was only an interim chief. From the beginning, he made it clear that he would not take part in the civil service examination that would select the next permanent chief of police.

  During his life, Parker had made no secret of who he thought the next chief should be. “Meet Gates,” he’d tell other (more senior) officers in the department. “This officer is going to be chief someday.” But a few months before his death, Parker had confided to his young protege his doubts that this would come to pass.

  “I’ve always thought you would be the next chief, but if I have to leave now, you’re too young,” he told Gates. “You don’t even have your twenty years in.”

  “What difference does that make?” Gates asked.

  “You can’t afford to take this job unless you have twenty years, and you have your retirement benefits. Because if something happens, if you’re forced to resign, you wouldn’t want to stay at a lower rank. So you’d leave and you wouldn’t have anything,” Parker replied. Parker died when Gates had been on the force for nineteen years. Nonetheless, after Parker’s death when the civil service exam for a new chief was held, Gates took the test, as an inspector. But the top score—and the position of chief—went instead to Gates’s old instructor at the Police Academy, Tom Reddin. One of Reddin’s first actions was to request the intelligence file on himself.

  “The notions in it,�
�� he later recalled, “were almost laughable, and most of them were wrong.” But this did not lead Reddin to disband the intelligence unit. Instead, he expanded its operations further. Even the department’s oldest friends fell within its purview, including the former attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy.

  IN EARLY 1968, Robert Kennedy began a last-minute campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. On June 5, Kennedy scored a huge win over front-runner Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic primary. The celebration party was held at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.

  In 1960, the LAPD had provided security to John F. Kennedy during the Democratic convention. (Secret Service protection was not then offered to candidates before they became the nominee.) The LAPD would normally have provided security at the Ambassador. However, Kennedy’s staff wanted no police officers to be visible. Just two months earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. The presence of uniformed officers at the Ambassador was seen as simply too provocative. Instead they relied solely on former FBI agent William Barry and two professional athletes he employed.

  “Kennedy’s people were adamant, if not abusive, in their demands that the police not even come close to the senator while he was in Los Angeles,” recalled Daryl Gates.

  But under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been the end of the story. For many years, the LAPD had secretly protected (and monitored) the activities of visiting VIPs by ensuring that local livery companies used undercover policemen as drivers. Most VIPs never knew, but Kennedy’s people did. They arranged for their own driver. As a result, there was no chance that a plainclothes LAPD officer would be at Kennedy’s side when, shortly after midnight, the candidate slipped out of the fifth-floor ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, where he’d just delivered a rousing victory speech and, exiting through its kitchen, encountered Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian angry about Kennedy’s support of Israel during the Six-Day War. As Kennedy was shaking hands with a busboy, Sirhan stepped out from beside a refrigerator and opened fire with a .22 caliber pistol. Two bullets entered the senator’s upper torso. One, fired from a distance of one inch away, entered the back of his head.

  Four LAPD patrol cars were circling the Ambassador. The police arrived within minutes, after Kennedy’s entourage, which included Kennedy’s bodyguard and the writer George Plimpton, had wrestled Sirhan to the ground. Kennedy was rushed to the Central Receiving Hospital, and then taken across the street to Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery. It was no use. Twenty-six hours later, at 1:44 a.m., June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead.

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, the warden at the federal penitentiary in Springfield called Mickey Cohen into his office.

  “There’s a call from Washington, and he’s going to call back, like, say, one o’clock, so get showered and prepared,” he said, brusquely.

  When Cohen returned, he found his old pal the columnist Drew Pearson on the line. Needless to say, it was highly unusual for the warden of a federal prison to put a newspaper columnist through to an inmate.

  “We’re going for [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey for president,” Pearson informed him, “and I’ll assure you that if he becomes our president, you’re going to be given a medical parole.”

  This sounded good. Naturally, though, Mickey wanted to know why Pearson was willing to do such a tremendous favor.

  “I’m gonna use you again in the campaign against Nixon,” Pearson informed him. When Nixon first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950, his campaign manager and attorney, Murray Chotiner, had asked Mickey Cohen to raise $75,000 for the campaign, a considerable sum in those days. Cohen responded by throwing a fund-raiser at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Said Cohen later: “It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money, there wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.” Cohen had told Pearson about it. Now the columnist wanted to go public with the information.

  Cohen was amenable. He’d long since soured on Nixon, whom he considered to be a “rough hustler, like a goddamn small-town ward politician” who dressed like “maybe… a three-card Monte dealer” and was an anti-Semite to boot. “Go ahead if that’s the way to go,” Cohen replied.

  A series of accusatory columns by Pearson duly appeared. Mickey was ecstatic. Pearson assured him that a medical parole was simply a matter of time.

  “I got a definite promise from LBJ that one way or another, if Humphrey wins or loses, you’re going to get a parole or a medical parole at least,” Pearson assured him. News of the payoff spread throughout Washington. Rival columnist Jack Anderson ran a story saying that President Lyndon Johnson was considering a Cohen pardon as a reward for “dirt” Cohen had provided to Drew Pearson on Richard Nixon.

  Cohen wrote brother Harry to let him know that “the fix was in.” It wasn’t. Humphrey lost, and LBJ left office without granting Mickey a medical parole. Mickey didn’t even bother to ask his old acquaintance Richard Nixon. There was nothing for Cohen to do but serve out the remainder of his sentence.

  ON JANUARY 6, 1972, Mickey was released from the Springfield federal penitentiary. Despite extensive physical therapy for nearly a decade, Mickey still needed help with the most basic tasks, such as getting dressed and standing up. Age, ice cream, and, of course, his nearly fatal braining with the lead pipe had made Mickey an old man. But life beckoned still. The night before his release, Cohen bade good-bye to such dear friends as Johnny Dio. “Before you leave a prison after eleven years of being incarcerated,” he said later, “the most exciting day is the day before.”

  Once again, a crowd of reporters gathered for Cohen’s release. The frumpy little man who emerged wearing a white T-shirt, windbreaker, and rolled-up chinos bore little resemblance to the suave prisoner who had entered prison a decade earlier. “To hell with this rotten joint,” Cohen muttered, as he was helped to brother Harry, who’d come to pick him up—in a brand-new white Cadillac. Their first stop was Hamby’s restaurant in downtown Springfield, where Mickey gorged himself—two orders of ham and eggs, three glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a Danish pastry. Then he got a shave, a haircut, a massage, and a manicure. As always, he left a tip that was “extraordinary … particularly for a small town.” Then he went to a hotel and showered “for a couple of hours, I guess.”

  From Springfield, Mickey and Harry, along with a young man named Jim Smith, who suddenly appeared in the capacity of caretaker, drove to Hot Springs, to visit bootlegger Owney “The Killer” Madden’s widow and soak in the waters. (Owney had passed away during Mickey’s time in the joint.) Cohen hoped that the hot springs would help him “correct my walking at least forty to fifty percent, anyway.” Instead, several weeks of hydrotherapy weakened him badly. The food, however, was marvelous. The manager of the Arlington Hotel “still remembered me from my heydays” and made sure Mickey got plenty of Italian cuisine.

  “They brought out big silver things full of food, and the chef himself was out there dishing it out—every kind of pasta, every kind of chicken, veal, everything you could imagine,” Cohen recalled.

  Then it was on to New Orleans, to see Carlos Marcello. (“We talked about the old times, among other things.”) Only then did Mickey Cohen return to Los Angeles.

  What he found there stunned him. The Sunset Strip he had once known was gone. Its elegant nightclubs were shuttered. Teenage punks and rock ‘n’ roll had taken over what had once been Hollywood’s grandest boulevard. Elegance was no more. Broads now walked around “with skirts up to their neck.” Harry and Cohen caretaker Jim Smith tried to explain the fashion for miniskirts and, well, the sixties, but it was hard to understand. Even crime was bewildering and different.

  “Today, it’s a whole new setup, because you got punks running around. Kids go in, and people give them their money, and they still kill them afterwards,” Mickey lamented. In fact, Mickey Cohen was about to discover just how strange the new criminal underworld was.

  In February 1974, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hear
st, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley by one of the decade’s most bizarre criminal terrorist groups, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Founded by an escaped African American convict who had adopted the nom de guerre “Cinque” (after the leader of the 1839 slave ship rebellion on the Amistad), the SLA espoused a strange blend of Maoist terrorism and Black Power ideology. In the early 1970s, the group assassinated a popular African American Berkeley school superintendent. Several members were convicted and incarcerated for the killing. Hearst was originally seized in order to facilitate a hostage exchange. But two months after her kidnapping, the story took a bizarre twist: Hearst took part in a bank robbery—as an SLA member. The video footage of Patty Hearst—who had adopted the name Tania—was a news sensation. The Bay Area was now too hot for the SLA. So Cinque decided to go south to his hometown of Los Angeles. That’s when Patty’s father Randolph called Mickey Cohen.

  Mickey Cohen had always revered William Randolph Hearst.

  “He was a benefactor for me throughout my career and when I needed him,” Mickey would later explain, perhaps in reference to the Hearst papers’ favorable coverage of Mickey during the Al Pearson beating trial. “There was nothing the Hearst people could call on me for that I would refuse or not attempt to do.”

  So when Randolph Hearst called Mickey (at the recommendation of the San Francisco Chronicle’s crime reporter) and asked if he’d be willing to use his contacts in the underworld to locate Patty, Cohen was happy to oblige. Calling on certain acquaintances in the African American “sporting world,” Cohen soon made contact with some figures who might—or might not—have been SLA members or associates. A half dozen meetings ensued, all of them preceded by elaborate, multicar evasive maneuvers intended to throw off any cops who were trailing Cohen. Mickey was frankly jittery at the early meetings. Although he respected SLA members for their skill as lamsters, Cohen didn’t get the underground anti-Vietnam War movement. The SLA guys, in turn, viewed Cohen as a “square” because he didn’t drink and had never tried drugs. After a while, though, things got chummy. So chummy that Cohen felt a deal was within reach. Through his reporter-contact at the Chronicle, Cohen summoned Patty’s parents down from San Francisco to L.A.