Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  Who was actually governing the city and why were the police powerless to stop crime?

  1While a sample was taken, no real test was ever completed, as was standard operating procedure. At $250-$500 for a half-hour's work, it was an excellent financial decision to inform all women they were pregnant.

  *The organizational structure of the Gangster Squad and their duties and responsibilities within the Homicide Division have been explained at length in an earlier chapter. This is the same detective unit that had, in January 1947, "assisted" in the investigation of the Black Dahlia murder and had discredited two key witnesses, the Johnsons, and their positive identification of the probable killer, "Mr. Barnes, " who had checked into their Washington Boulevard hotel with Elizabeth Short.

  26

  George Hodel: Underworld

  Roots — The "Hinkies"

  "AS YOUR LAST ACT OF LOVE FOR ME you must dispose of all my effects." This was, as noted, Father's order to June after he suffered a stroke in 1998 and planned on taking his life. He did not want June to handle his personal effects either while he was still alive or after his death. There were secrets he wanted buried with his ashes.

  Father wanted his photo album destroyed because it contained his only link to Elizabeth Short, and we now know why. But he had said "all my effects." Were there other links to his past that he also wanted erased? I now know that the answer was yes.

  Among these personal effects to be destroyed were his early photographs, which June had showed me on a visit to San Francisco some months after Father's death. The photographs, which had been taken in the mid-1920s, had been shown in a Pasadena art gallery as part of his one-man show. There were architectural photos of early L.A. — Long Beach oil derricks, downtown buildings, all artistically composed — plus many portraits: a black man, an oil rigger, construction workers, and others with hard faces, rough men whose visages were etched by years of cunning.

  There was also a group of savvy street-smart faces from the 1920s. Who were these men? Friends? Were they people he knew when he was driving a cab in L.A.? His wife didn't know. Perhaps they were nobodies, forgotten people from a distant past. June kept the originals but allowed me to make copies for myself.

  Among these photographs were six men I was curious about and wanted to identify. Cops have a term for men with faces like these: we call them hitikies. "Hinky" is a combination of "suspicious," "evasive," "dirty," or just plain up to no good. And these faces were hinky; they had too much experience with what cops normally see — the dark side of life. They had eyes that said, this guy has seen and known hard anger and brutality. These were criminal eyes, gangster eyes, part shifty, part confrontational, mostly desensitized — thoroughly tough. I wanted to know who they were and why they were part of his past.

  To date I have not been able to obtain positive identifications on all of these men, but in exhibit 60 I do have tentative identifications for three of them.

  Exhibit 60

  George Hodel photos taken circa 1925

  Photograph 1: Kent Kane Parrot, tentative ID

  Photograph 2: Tom Evans (age approx. 26), tentative ID

  Photograph 3: Fred Sexton (age approx. 19), tentative ID

  Photographs 4, 5, 6: Unidentified to date

  Based on the fact that three of the six photograph subjects were connected with L.A.'s underworld, there is a strong probability the remaining three have gangster connections as well. I believe that George Hodel and Fred Sexton were either full-fledged henchmen of an early crime gang, or, at least, remained close friends and associates for the next twenty-five years. To me, these photographs are more dark shadows from George Hodel's past, which might well connect him to notorious gangsters and killers of the time.

  Photo 2 is especially compelling: it's of Tom Evans at age twenty-six, the convicted rum-running, drug-smuggling con man we have earlier identified as Tony Cornero's bodyguard, the same man who, in his words, was "rousted" by LAPD in 1949 under suspicion of the kidnappings and murders of both Mimi Boomhower and Jean Spangler. These photographs show that Evans was linked to George Hodel as far back as 1925. What was my father, who prided himself on his intelligence, erudition, and culture, doing hanging around with a thug like Tom Evans? Perhaps the answer lies in photograph 1, which, I suspect, is a much younger picture of early L.A.'s least familiar but most powerful syndicate boss, the notorious Kent Kane Parrot.

  Kent Kane Parrot arrived in Los Angeles to attend law school at the University of Southern California in 1907, the same year Father was born. He was a big man, six foot two, and possessed a magnetic personality. He obtained his law degree and was admitted to the state bar.

  Parrot was a deal-maker with phenomenal "people skills," whose real talent lay in his ability to bring together people of diametrically opposed beliefs and lifestyles — conservatives and liberals, prohibitionists and rum-runners — to establish some common causes that would allow them to unite. He didn't do this out of the goodness of his heart. A consummate broker, he pocketed handsome commissions either in hard cash or by somehow making his clients beholden to him in exchange for some future payment in the coin of power or influence. Through his ability to forge relationships, Parrot got himself into politics, which he once defined very simply as "people in motion." And that's exactly how he played the game.

  By 1924, Kent Parrot had become the power behind the throne in Los Angeles municipal politics. In the 1921 race for mayor, he successfully selected and got elected George Cryer, who became known as "Parrot's Puppet," at which point Parrot quickly aligned himself with Los Angeles's vice lords, including the young bootlegging czar Tony Cornero. Parrot, while publicly discreet in his dealings with the underworld, would entertain its members and broker relationships among them at his private apartment at the city's newest and finest downtown hotel, the Biltmore, about which he once boasted, "Everyone in the state of California has possibly been there in the official line."

  As Parrot's influence and power grew, he placed more and more importance in the Los Angeles Police Department. Wielding payoffs, bagmen, and vice-supervisors, Parrot wound up with most of LAPD in his pocket and, though out of the public eye, became the most powerful man in Los Angeles politics from the 1920s through the 1940s. Citizen Kent Kane Parrot's word was law, because he owned the law.

  In researching Parrot's early days in Los Angeles, hoping to find an early photograph to compare to the one my father had taken, I contacted his old alma mater. They didn't have one, but they were able to provide me with his classmates' prophetic reference to him in his 1909 law school yearbook, Stare Decisis:

  Not all the pumice of our college town

  Can smooth the roughness of this New York clown.

  On a personal note, I have only seen my father stumble, falter, and find himself at a loss for words on two occasions. The first was in 1965, when he met my wife, his ex-mistress, Kiyo, in the lobby of the Biltmore. The second occurred some three years before his death, during a weekend visit in San Francisco, at Sunday brunch. Knowing Father always had a reason for choosing specific names, and knowing that my older brother Michael Paul's namesake was chosen from Mother's close friendship with renowned bacteriologist and "microbe hunter" Paul De Kruif, and my younger brother, Kelvin George, was named after Father, I asked him what was the source of my own middle name, Kent. Who had I been named after? It seemed as if he was caught off guard, as he hemmed and hawed nervously and finally came out with a most implausible, "Oh, no reason. It's just a nice-sounding name, that's all." Though surprised, I took his statement at face value. Armed with today's biographical knowledge, the photograph, their twenty-year friendship, and Father's admiration for the man and his influence and power, I submit that Father chose to honor his old friend, Kent Parrot, by making me his namesake.

  Tony Cornero, aka Tony Canaris and Tony Cornero Stralla, got his start in California during Prohibition. A San Francisco cab driver in the early 1920s, he began as a rum-runner, overseeing the unloading and distr
ibution of contraband liquor from ships off the California coast. Smaller boats would taxi the precious cargo to deserted beaches, where Cornero would then receive and coordinate the shipments throughout Los Angeles and Southern California.

  On March 11, 1925, the L.A. Record headlines read, "Jail Rum 'King' with $50,000 Liquor." At the time of his arrest, after a raid in which the authorities seized his high-grade scotch whisky, Canadian bourbon, and French champagne, reporters quoted him as saying, "I've had nothing but misfortune. I've been in the business over three years. I've been hijacked, fined, and robbed of over $500,000. I have paid out more than $100,000 for police protection, which I never got. This present beef means a long stretch for me. It's a bum business." Cornero's girlfriend told the Record that Cornero "made $500,000 in 2 years." Cornero, of course, did what he did, paid who he had to, the charges "went away," and by his thirties he became a millionaire, having succeeded in his self-described "off shore drilling."

  By 1937, twelve years after his bust, Tony was promoted to "Admiral Cornero" and owned several large gambling ships off the coast of Los Angeles just outside the three-mile limit. From the pier at Santa Monica, customers could take a twenty-five-cent, ten-minute ride and be drinking the best imported liquor and shooting dice or playing blackjack aboard his lush floating casino, which was triple the size of any of those offered in Las Vegas in those early years before Benny (Bugsy) Siegel built the Flamingo. Night after night, Angelenos lined up by the thousands to try their luck against his blackjack dealers or at the shipboard crap tables. While Cornero's offshore investment profits were a tightly guarded secret, they have been estimated at a nightly net of $30,000.

  Like many other local successful businessmen, Cornero bought himself a home in Beverly Hills alongside such prominent neighbors as Benny Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Cornero remained a major crime figure in Los Angeles for almost twenty-five years, though he remained strictly local and did not ally himself with the East Coast or Chicago-based Cosa Nostra families. As a result, he always remained an outsider, never able to establish any onshore gambling establishments, because police and sheriffs quickly shut them down as soon as he started them up. Gangsters Jack Dragna, Benny Siegel — an early investor in Cornero's floating casino the Rex — and Johnnie Rosselli, together with the help of corrupt mayor Frank Shaw and well-positioned, high-ranking officers within LAPD and LASD, would maintain control of city business, gambling, and prostitution throughout Los Angeles.

  In 1938, LAPD captain Earle Kynette headed the department's Intelligence Squad. As part of his intelligence-gathering, he wiretapped Mayor Frank Shaw's opposition candidate, fifty or more prominent Los Angeles citizens, and retired LAPD detective Harry Raymond, at that time employed by the reform candidate to obtain information relating to corruption within the mayor's office and LAPD. Kynette and members of his squad decided that Raymond was getting too close to the truth, so they placed a bomb in his car. When he turned the ignition key the explosion totally demolished the vehicle and blew hundreds of pieces of shrapnel into Raymond's body. He was rushed to the hospital, where, in critical condition and about to succumb from his injuries, he put in a call to the crime-fighting city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, James Richardson, who rushed to Raymond's bedside. Believing he had only minutes to live, Raymond whispered the name of his assailant into Richardson's ear and made him promise he would see to it that Kynette would be prosecuted.

  Miraculously, Raymond survived, and, though a cover-up was attempted by then LAPD chief James Davis — who had the gall to put Captain Kynette in charge of the car-bombing investigation — the facts eventually came out. Kynette was charged and convicted of the attempted murder of his brother officer and sentenced to a ten-year prison term. Mayor Frank Shaw, under whose auspice the crime was allegedly carried out, was promptly voted out of office in September 1938, replaced by the reform candidate Fletcher Bowron.

  In his recently published The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, State Librarian Kevin Starr had this to say about city reformers Clifford Clinton and Fletcher Bowron, and their investigation and revelations of the Shaw regime in 1937:

  Los Angeles, Clinton discovered, was supporting an intricate network of brothels, gambling houses, and clip joints, all of it run by well-organized syndicates headed by gambler Guy McAfee and Bob Gans, chief concessionaire of slot machines throughout the city, with attorneys Kent Parrot and Charles Kradick serving as mouthpieces. Obviously, a number of police were on the take for so many operations — an estimated six hundred brothels, three hundred gambling houses, eighteen hundred bookie joints, twenty-three thousand slot machines — to be flourishing, (p. 168)

  Within his first two months in office, Mayor Bowron forced LAPD police chief James Davis to retire, after the bombing investigation showed that, while Davis's memory was hazy about specific details, "perhaps" he had, after all, ordered Raymond and fifty other city reformers to be placed under surveillance by Kynette's Intelligence Squad. Bowron then met in secret with his good friend James Richardson and asked him to help identify and rid Los Angeles of the corrupt politicians and police officers on the take.

  As Richardson wrote in For the Life of Me, he simply picked up the telephone, called Tony Cornero at his Beverly Hills home, and set up a meeting to see if Cornero would be willing to help him and the mayor. Cornero, ever the entrepreneur and quick to size up a good deal, agreed to meet with Richardson and Mayor Bowron.

  The three met in secret at the mayor's home in the Hollywood Hills, where Cornero told Mayor Bowron that he knew all about corruption within the LAPD. In fact, he said, according to Richardson's account, '"I've got their names all written down on this slip of paper.' And he handed Bowron the paper. . . the mayor read the names of twenty-six of the highest ranking officers in the department."

  Bowron hired an ex-FBI agent to investigate all twenty-six, most of whom were the department's most powerful commanders. The mayor's investigator conducted wiretapping and surveillance of all those Cornero had named. One by one they were called before the mayor, who demanded their resignation. If anyone protested or refused to resign, Bowron simply played his tape-recorded conversations. End of story.

  According to an official LAPD history of "the Purge" and Mayor Bowron s campaign to reform the LAPD, as written in Los Angeles Police Department 1869-1984:

  On the morning of March 3, 1939, the Commissioners struck. Citing Charter Section 181, which authorized the retirement of any officer eligible for pension "for the good of the Police Department," the Mayor, supported by the Police Board, requested the immediate resignation of 2 3 [sic] high-ranking officers. Included in the "forced retirement" were former Chief (now Deputy Chief) Roy Steckel, Chief of Detectives Joe Taylor, Assistant Chief George Allen, 11 captains and 9 lieutenants. Within the next six months 45 high-ranking officers resigned, (p.82)

  After the purge of what by LAPD's reckoning was sixty-eight high-ranking officers, Tony Cornero's own troubles began. The syndicate had been conducting its own surveillance against the reformers by placing its man inside city hall. Unbeknownst to Mayor Bowron, his trusted driver was working as a paid informant for the very crime bosses he was fighting. The driver reported back on the Cornero/Richardson/Bowron secret meeting, and the syndicate leaked the news to the press, claiming that Bowron had "made a deal with Cornero, promising him control of vice and prostitution throughout the city."

  Bowron, left with no alternative, and to prove to his constituency that he was not in league with any gangster, was forced to turn on Cornero and promptly ordered law enforcement to shut down his gambling ships as an illegal operation. Richardson reported that Cornero, while he initially came out swinging in defense of his ships' being legal and outside the jurisdiction of the courts, eventually took the whole thing in stride and resigned himself to the political and philosophical ironies, all with relatively good humor.

  Like many gangsters of his day, Cornero was romanticized, and fact soon became fiction: in the 1943 movie Mr. Lu
cky, Cary Grant portrayed Cornero as a charming draft-dodging gambler and closet patriot putting the big woo on elegant socialite Laraine Day.

  In reality, Cornero was no different than Ben Siegel or Mickey Cohen. Behind the comical Runyonesque slang and purported good humor was a powerfully positioned, politically connected, stone-cold sociopathic killer. Gangsterism was big business in the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, and each crime boss had his own retinue of lawyers and businessmen through whom they owned the men who ran city hall and the police and sheriff's departments. They had the power and the money to make any investigation vanish, and they and those who worked for them were inoculated against criminal prosecution.

  When I looked at my father's photographs of Kent Parrot, Tom Evans, and the young Fred Sexton, I realized that the latter two of them were connected to some of the most powerful bosses in the Los Angeles crime syndicates, maybe even having begun their own criminal careers as young henchmen or drivers during Prohibition. George and Fred likely remained connected to these crime figures for the next three decades. I reflected on what Sexton's daughter "Mary Moe" had told me about her father's youth:

  After Dad's death, I discovered something rather strange. He had all these different bank accounts in different names. I don't know what that was all about. . . He used to make his money when he was young from having a floating crap game. I know he made good money. I think he knew Tony Cornero, but I'm not sure. My father's dad was a bootlegger and gambler. My dad's third wife told me she destroyed all Fred's papers and records after he died.