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

by John Buntin

  They met over dinner at Gatsby’s. Patty’s mother was nervous, probably because the maitre d’ came over early to inform them that they were being monitored by men from the LAPD intelligence division. She told Mickey that she was worried that her daughter might now be so committed to the SLA that she would not return to her parents’ custody willingly. That didn’t seem to concern Mickey. But what Catherine Hearst said next did.

  “We may be making a mistake bringing Patty back,” Mrs. Hearst continued quietly. “We may be bringing her back to do thirty, forty years in prison.”

  That was it for Mickey.

  “Lookit,” he told them, “if the situation is such that you folks don’t know whether she’s going to go to prison or not, I don’t want no part of it.” It was against Cohen’s code of ethics to send a lamster to prison. Cohen was done with the Hearsts.

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

  Mickey’s muscle days were over. But as the threat of violence that had long been associated with him dissipated, he now became what, arguably, he’d long wanted to be—a celebrity. When he went to the fights, real celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Redd Foxx would come over to say hello. (Mickey appreciated the fact that Sinatra always greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and the more formal “Michael.”) Although Cohen’s tips were sadly reduced (“I maybe used to tip a barber twenty dollars, I maybe tip five dollars now”), he still wore tailor-made clothes and luxurious robes. He still dined at restaurants such as Chasen’s, Perino’s, and Mateo’s, even though it now took him four or five hours to get dressed to his standards. At theaters such as the Shubert, Cohen was a fixture on opening night. His sources of income remained mysterious. (His attorneys had won a settlement from the government for failing to protect Cohen in prison; however, the government had reclaimed most of the money as payment owed it for overdue taxes.) Friends like Frank Sinatra once more kicked in “gifts” to tide him over. Rumor had it that Cohen had resumed bookmaking.

  In September 1975, Mickey checked into UCLA Medical Center, complaining of pain from an ulcer. It turned out he had stomach cancer. His doctors informed him that he had only months to live. Mickey used the time to relate his life story to the writer John Peer Nugent. The highly idiosyncratic result was In My Own Words. The following summer, Mickey Cohen died at home in his sleep, leaving $3,000 in cash, which the IRS promptly took. With back taxes, penalties, and interest, he still owed the U.S. government $496,535.23.

  Epilogue

  “This city is plagued by hostility, rage and resentment. It could happen again.”

  —former FBI director William Webster, October 1992

  IN 1969, LAPD officer-turned-councilman Tom Bradley decided to challenge incumbent mayor Sam Yorty for the city’s top elected office. Bradley presented himself as a statesman who would address the city’s biggest issues—rapid transit, business growth, racial harmony. His base of support came primarily from the city’s African American community, which made up nearly 20 percent of the population, and from the liberal, heavily Jewish Westside, but it also included some surprising members of the city’s downtown business community, most notably the Los Angeles Times. To this formidable challenge, Yorty responded with a simple and devastating rejoinder: If Bradley was elected, Yorty charged, the police force would resign en masse, leaving (white) Angelenos defenseless before the (black and brown) criminal hordes.

  Just before the vote, chief of police Tom Reddin resigned to take a job as a news commentator (at a salary of $100,000 a year). Rumors immediately arose that Reddin had left rather than face the possibility of serving under Mayor Bradley. Despite Reddin’s denials that politics played a role in his decision, Bradley lost the general election.

  Reddin’s decision to step down gave Gates another shot at the chief’s position. This time, however, the recently divorced inspector scored poorly on the oral portion of the civil service exam and placed third on the list. At the top was Deputy Chief Ed Davis, whom the historian Gerald Woods would later describe as “a Protestant version of Bill Parker.” Like Parker, Davis was an innovator. His concept of “team policing” (which Davis referred to as “the basic car plan”) called for assigning officers to small geographic areas where they could work with residents to identify and solve crime problems. It prefigured what is today called community policing. Davis also eliminated the practice of awarding black officers low scores on the oral component of civil service exams, which had long limited the promotion of African Americans. But if Davis’s reforms were in some ways progressive, his personal style was not. Like Parker, he was also an outspoken cultural conservative. No one was safe from his derision. White liberals were derided as “swimming-pool Communists.” Homosexuals were “fruits.” In general, Davis encouraged his officers to treat “the counterculture” as an enemy.

  Few dared to complain. In 1973, Bradley once again challenged Yorty, along with California state assembly speaker Jesse Unruh and former police chief Tom Reddin. This time, Bradley was the front-runner. He carefully crafted a “law and order” platform that promised unyielding support for the police. This time, he won, beating Yorty soundly in another runoff to become Los Angeles’s first African American mayor.

  It took Bradley two more years to take control of the Police Commission. Only then, in 1975, did the commission order the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division and Organized Crime Intelligence Division (the successors to Parker and Reddin’s intelligence division) to destroy the intelligence files the department had amassed over the course of the preceding four-odd decades. Some two million dossiers were shredded.[25] But both intelligence divisions were retained. Together, they continued to employ nearly two hundred officers.

  IN JANUARY 1978, after eight years as chief of police, Ed Davis resigned in order to pursue a career in politics. He was not interested in running for mayor. (“That position has no power. I have more power than the mayor.”) Only one position in California state government seemed like a clear step up—being governor. By making a run for statewide office, Davis gave Daryl Gates the opportunity he had been dreaming of since his very first days in the department, when Chief Parker first began to school him as his successor.

  Mayor Bradley didn’t want him. The mayor was fed up with what his associates referred to as “the LAPD mentality”—an attitude that even Daryl Gates would later describe as “independence bordering on arrogance.” Standing in his way was the system Bill Parker had created.

  Los Angeles’s civil service code still required the Police Commission to select a new chief from one of the top three scorers on the combined written/oral promotional exam, although it had been amended to provide for the possibility of an outside candidate. Rumor had it that Santa Monica police chief George Tielsch (who’d previously headed the Seattle Police Department) was Bradley’s top choice. But at the end of the examination process, Daryl Gates was number one on the eligibility list.

  The Police Commission hesitated. Selecting someone other than the top-ranked candidate would be a big Political risk. As it considered its choice, police commissioner Jim Fisk asked for a private meeting with Gates.

  Fisk had been one of the LAPD’s most talented new officers. Like Bradley, he had joined the department in 1940. He quickly established himself as one of the department’s bravest policemen and routinely topped the civil service examinations. However, Fisk also had a reputation as a liberal. He was passed over by Parker for a position as deputy chief in the mid-1950s. Tapped to lead the department’s community relations effort after Watts, he was passed over for the position of chief after Parker died, despite having the highest civil service score. When Reddin retired, the Police Commission again ignored Fisk’s top score to select Ed Davis as police chief. Fisk left to teach at UCLA until he was summoned back by Mayor Bradley. As a member of the Police Commission, he was supposedly one of the department’s five bosses. As a result, Fisk might well have expected that whe
n he asked Gates to be more “flexible”—to show some willingness to take direction from the Police Commission—the assistant chief would have responded positively.

  “Okay. What issue do you want me to compromise on?” Gates replied.

  The Police Commission was under pressure to contain the department’s rising costs (which were increasing, in no small measure, as a result of a pay increase Gates himself had championed as assistant chief). Fisk explained that he and his fellow commissioners felt that one way to mitigate the problem would be to prune the number of upper-level positions in the department. Gates listened noncommittally. He knew that one of his rivals for the top position, deputy chief Bob Vernon, had presented the commission with a detailed plan for trimming top management. Yet when Gates appeared before the full Police Commission and was asked if he’d be willing to eliminate upper-management positions, his reply was a simple “No.”

  “Why not?” Fisk asked.

  “You know,” Gates replied, “you people are really amazing. On the one hand, you talk very strongly about affirmative action, about moving blacks and Hispanics and women up in the organization. At the same time you want to cut out all of these top jobs. How are you going to have vacancies to move people into when you’ve slashed all these positions from the top?”

  It was a remarkably insouciant response—and vintage Gates. Instead of offering a concession that would allow the Police Commission to choose him and save face, Gates was in effect daring them to pick someone else. They didn’t have the nerve to. On March 24, 1978, Daryl Gates was named the next chief of police. He was sworn in four days later. The system that Bill Parker had created could not be broken. Chief Gates soon settled in as a chief in the Parker mold. Then came the evening of Saturday, March 2, 1991. As in Watts, it started with the California Highway Patrol.

  TIM AND MELANIE SINGER were a husband-and-wife Highway Patrol team. On the night of March 2, they were patrolling the Foothill Freeway north of Los Angeles. They were headed toward Simi Valley when, in their rearview mirror, they spotted a white Hyundai gaining on them, fast. They pulled over and watched it blow past at upward of a hundred miles per hour. They gave chase, but the car ignored the patrol car’s sirens. Instead, it accelerated. Units from the LAPD joined the chase. The Hyundai exited the freeway on Paxton Street, maintaining speeds of up to eighty-five miles per hour on residential streets, and tore through a red light at Van Nuys and Foothills, nearly causing a collision, before a pickup truck that was partially blocking the road brought the car to a stop just beyond the intersection of Osborne and Foothills, near the darkened entrance to Hansen Dam Park.

  There were three passengers in the car, all black men. Two passengers got out and, following police instructions, lay down prone on the ground. The driver of the car hesitated and then slowly climbed out. Across the street, the sirens and police helicopter awakened a plumbing supply store manager, who’d recently purchased a video camera. He dressed and stumbled out to his balcony with the camcorder. Then he turned it on and captured nine minutes and twenty seconds of footage that showed a large black man charging the police. An officer swung his baton at the man, knocking him down. The officer kept swinging as the man writhed across the ground. A large group of officers stood by, arms folded. The man was then taken into custody. The videographer was disturbed by what seemed to be a brutal and blatant example of “street justice.” The next day, he offered his tape first to the LAPD and then to CNN. Neither was interested. On Monday, the videographer took it to a local television station, KTLA. That evening, KTLA put the tape up on the ten o’clock news. By Tuesday morning, CNN (which had an affiliate agreement with KTLA) had started to put an edited version on the air, one that had cut out the driver’s initial charge at the police. NBC had a tape by later in the day. The beating of Rodney King was now playing endlessly across the country.

  The LAPD hierarchy was shocked by what they saw, although many commanders saw something very different from what the public did. LAPD Sgt. Charles Duke, a martial arts consultant, was distressed by how ineffectively the arresting officer used his baton. Other officers were disturbed by the failure of the supervising sergeant to make use of the large numbers of officers who had arrived at the scene and stood by watching. But the brass had no interest in examining the possibility that poor training had played a role in the beating. Instead, Chief Gates described the beating as an “aberration” and promised a full investigation. Mayor Bradley vowed that “appropriate action” would be taken against the officers involved. County DA Ira Reiner immediately convened a grand jury and within two weeks of the incident, four of the officers involved were indicted.

  Mayor Bradley decided the time was right to assert his authority over the police department—authority that, legally, he did not have. On April 1, he announced the formation of “an independent commission” on the Los Angeles Police Department. Its chairman was attorney Warren Christopher, former vice chairman of the McCone Commission, deputy attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, deputy secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, and a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, the city’s most powerful law firm. The day after announcing the appointment, Bradley asked Gates for his resignation. Gates refused.

  The Police Commission, whose members were Bradley loyalists, met secretly (in violation of state law) and then informed the chief that they were voting to put him on unpaid leave to investigate “serious allegations of mismanagement.” This angered the chief. It was Mayor Bradley, not he, who had recently been dogged by a series of allegations about improper entanglements with businessmen seeking favors from the city. Gates said he’d see them in court. The city council, led by John Ferraro, pressured the Police Commission to reinstate Gates. Finally, after a judge issued a restraining order against the commission’s attempted action, Ferraro managed to persuade Bradley and Gates to agree to a truce. Privately, though, Gates had come to believe that Bradley “had brought to Los Angeles a rat’s nest of impropriety not seen since the days of the Shaw regime of the 1930s.” Meanwhile, the prosecutors’ case against the officers involved in the beating moved forward.

  Three months later, on July 9, the Christopher Commission issued its report—and called for Chief Gates’s resignation. Its conclusions were damning. The report described a department with a small number of “problem officers,” who employed deadly force yet who never seemed to receive serious punishment. The commission criticized the department’s retreat from community policing and spoke directly to the culture Daryl Gates had inherited and intensified:

  L.A.P.D. officers are trained to command and to confront, not to communicate. Regardless of their training, officers who are expected to produce high citation and arrest statistics and low response times do not also have time to explain their actions, to apologize when they make a mistake, or even to ask about problems in a neighborhood.

  The historian Lou Cannon would later characterize the Christopher Commission report as “an impressive and penetrating indictment of the Los Angeles Police Department and its ‘siege mentality.’” But Cannon noted that it was also seriously flawed.

  One of the commission’s most troubling findings was that the LAPD harbored a number of officers with racist sentiments. The evidence for this proposition came primarily from the text messages officers had sent to each other from their patrol cars’ MDT units. Over the course of six months, the commission had reviewed six million text messages. Most had been about routine police matters, but a small yet “disturbing” subset suggested a culture of excessive force and racism. Examples cited included references to “kicking” witnesses, “queen cars,” and—worst of all—“monkey-slapping time.” It looked bad—Christopher would describe these texts as “abhorrent”—but only to someone who knew nothing at all about police lingo. “Kicking” a suspect meant releasing him. “Monkey-slapping time” was slang for goofing off. A “queen car” was not an automobile driven by homosexuals but rather a unit from a station assigned to a special duty. When the po
lice department reviewed the texts in question (and eliminated phrases such as “Praise the lord and pass the ammunition” from the list of objectionable statements), it found 277 references to incidents that appeared to involve misconduct and 12 racial slurs—out of 6 million text messages. It is hard to imagine any big-city police department (or, for that matter, any institution at all) doing better. Not surprisingly, Gates responded by calling the group’s report “a travesty.”

  Inaccurate though it was in many of its details, the Christopher Commission nonetheless identified what was in many ways the deepest source of tension between Bradley and Gates—namely, the police chief’s extraordinary lack of accountability to the city’s elected officials. That more than anything was Parker’s legacy. Warren Christopher proposed to end it. Under a ballot proposition endorsed by his commission, the Police Commission would select three candidates, rank their preferences, and then send the list to the mayor to make the final choice, subject to the city council’s approval. The Police Commission would be able to fire the chief at any point, with the mayor’s concurrence. (The city council would also be able to overturn the Police Commission and mayor’s decision with a two-thirds vote.)

  Gates immediately recognized that the true goal of the commission was “controlling the police.” Protege of Bill Parker that he was, he vowed to fight it. Otherwise, “the chief would be silenced by the politicians and subject to the mayor’s every whim…. The L.A.P.D. would become politicized for the first time since the corrupt 1930s.”