LAPD '53

by James Ellroy

  The victim had a sweet deal going. His Pasadena pad cost him 50 G’s, back when that was gooooooood gelt. He had his front-office harem. A gardener at the DeVorss crib said he only saw Mr. DeVorss on one occasion. It was a few weeks before the shooting. “He seemed to be sobbing, crying.”

  Why? †

  * * *

  PACOIMA

  * * *

  JUNE 23

  We’re out in the Valley hotbox hellhole hamlet of Pacoima. Ritchie Valens hailed from there. He was a pachuco pinup boy and three-hit wonder out of ’58 and ’59. “La Bamba” and “Donna,” remember? Gooey prom-nite tunes. I used to peep a girl named Donna Weiss in junior high. She was fine as wine, ese!!!!! “Donna” always brings Donna back to me. Rockin’ Ritchie died in an overcelebrated plane crash. He was Then and is Now Pacoima’s favorite son.

  That was later, ese. This is Now—back when Now is 6/23/53.

  There’s a big, abandoned trailer. There’s a bludgeoned-dead dead man inside. He’s Herman Hodges, age 35. LAPD detectives have reconstructed his last cross-country drive.

  He left St. Louis on 5/22/53. He was accompanied by a Negro man—35, 5′ 8″ to 5′ 10″, 135 lbs, slender build, medium dark, long protruding nose, dressed in dark blue denim jacket, dark trousers, dark-colored felt hat with the brim cut off. It is believed that the male Negro killed Hodges and drove off in the truck part of the truck-trailer after their L.A. arrival on 6/14/53. The truck was found abandoned in Bakersfield, 7/3/53. No physical evidence was found in either the truck or the trailer. The case remained unsolved as of 3/14/54.

  It’s a bustling third-world crime scene. There’s a nine-days-dead man in the trailer. Local Pacoimaites are huddling and digging on the white man’s show. LAPD Lieutenant E. W. Smith theorizes this:

  The two men made their final delivery, drove to the vacant lot and parked the truck and trailer. They crawled into the trailer and went to sleep. The suspect bided his time and killed Hodges then.

  Who is the male Negro with the long protruding nose? †

  * * *

  WILLIE

  * * *

  MAY 11

  One more time, kats—the walls were closing in on him.

  Willie B. Miller lived with his wife, Clara Mae, in Watts. He started drinking and slashed Clara Mae’s throat with a cleaver. The three Miller kids remained unharmed in the pad.

  Willie called his sister-in-law and told her he whacked Clara Mae. The sister-in-law called her sister, Mrs. Willie R. Womack, and spread the news. Mrs. Womack drove to Clara Mae’s house. Willie Miller snapped rifle shots at her from the porch. A neighbor called LAPD. The Battle of Watts was on!

  Officers L. L. Lipe and William Lesner sped over, Code 3. Willie fired a shot, smashed the windshield and grazed Officer Lipe in the arm. The officers hopped from their black-and-white and laid down return fire.

  Reinforcements arrived. A dozen prowl cars and police motorcycles hit the location. Willie’s pad was surrounded. There’s NO EXIT!!!!! Officers called out for Willie to surrender. Willie ducked back inside his crackerbox crib and sent a rifle shot wiiiiiiiild.

  The cops lobbed two tear-gas bombs through a front window. The pad filled with noxious fumes. Willie staggered outside with his rifle. “Drop it, Willie.” “Drop it, Willie”—the cops warbled that warning. Willie’s looking dat baaaaaaaaad grim reaper straight in the snout. An armored arsenal is pointed at him, with a big bull’s-eye pinned to his chest.

  Then Willie “drops it.” Then Willie puts his hands up.

  Why’d you do it, Willie? Give us the straight shit on that.

  Willie told his sister-in-law: “Clara made me shoot her.” That was a lie. Willie slashed her with a cleaver.

  It was just one of those days. The walls were closing in. Implosion, explosion. Boiling point. The “I’ve-had-enough syndrome,” redux. †

  * * *

  PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

  * * *

  AUGUST 18

  This photograph brings to mind the recently OD’d actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in his hambone portrayal of writer Truman Capote. It’s not the late Mr. Hoffman or the late Mr. Capote. It’s a dead bank robber named Louis W. Hammert.

  Mr. Hammert, 34, did an eight-year fed jolt for bank robbery and was paroled from the McNeil Island pen on 5/9/52. His pre-jolt heist turf was Washington and Oregon. He’s in L.A. now. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, but Louis W. Hammert has chosen to ignore that. It’s August ’53. He rolls the dice and comes up double-zero. He clouts a bank on 6th and Spring in downtown L.A. The eagle-eyed chief guard, Herman Miller, blasts his pudgy ass. Hammert expires in the jail ward at County General several days later.

  Hoffman and Capote died too young. Hammert died right on cue. Morgue jockeys, medical examiners and homicide cops are irrepressible cut-ups. Someone decked Hammert out in shades and a straw fedora. It’s howlarious shit, all the way.

  This foto caption is devotedly dedicated to my main-man mentor, Joseph Wambaugh. Jolting Joe served on the LAPD from ’60 to ’74 and went on to create the modern police novel as we now know it. I was a minor miscreant about town when I read Joe’s early books: The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, The Onion Field and The Choirboys. They were my L.A., vividly reconceived and retold from a sternly authoritarian and provocatively funny perspective. Those books rendered me ashamed and ultimately repentant for my lawless actions and doubled me over with a ceaseless barrage of street humor. Sex yuks, race-derived guffaws. Dope-fiend and diseased-drag-queen hilarity. Profoundly profane, and always striking my own chord of theocratic Tory rectitude melded with street jive. Many cops think and talk like I do. No other writers do. What is this strain of humor, distilled to its essence? It’s the male world in extremis, gone hilariously mad. †

  * * *

  BABY ELLROY

  * * *

  MARCH 4

  Happy Birthday, Dipshit Ellroy—you just hit the Big 0-5!!!!!

  It’s 3/4/53. I’m celebrating with Sergeant John O’Grady, Lenny Bruce, Ava Gardner, Charlie “Bird” Parker and John Coltrane at the Club Zombie. We’re bennie-buzzed and about to head out to the Admiral Theater for a midnite screening of the film noir Split Second. It’s a subgenre of one: “A-bomb noir.” Hard-hearted heist men herd hostages to a hideout in the Nevada desert. They think they’re safe—but the Army’s about to test a big A-bomb right there!!!!!

  The flick’s a gas. It co-stars my main mujer—alluring Alexis Smith! I’m grok-king it—but O’Grady gets called away to a suicide at the Highland Park Station jail.

  What a waste of time! Cops call callouts like this “trash runs.” The decedent is a despondent dude named Manny the Molester. He hung himself with his belt in his jail cell. Men will go to any and all lengths to be HUNG.

  Manuel S. Pazo, age 26. A lizardlike Lincoln Heights loser. LAPD popped him at Albion Street and Avenue 17. Bystanders eyeballed him mauling a 15-year-old girl. She told LAPD that Manny the Molester tried to get her to smoke a reefer. She refused. Manny beat her and tore her clothing.

  Easy come, easy go. Manny’s dead. Note his retroactive resemblance to President Barack Obama.

  O’Grady splits Highland Park Station and re-rendezvous with the gang at Dave’s Blue Room on the surging Sunset Strip. We crash crêpe suzettes and dig into Dom Pérignon ’39. Alexis Smith drops by the table. She slips me her phone number on the Q.T. I tell her I’ll call her from the secret phone in my crib at my parents’ pad at West Hollyweird. Her voice goes low as she calls me “baby.” I say, “Don’t call me that—you’re touching a nerve.”

  The gang laffs. O’Grady regales us with a tale of Manny the Molester’s suicide. It’s the hard-charging L.A. of 1953. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town—and we live in it. †

  * * *

  LOS VATOS

  * * *

  OCTOBER 31

  Happy Halloween, muchachos! God-forsaken goblins are out on the prowl. Yeah, it’s another wave of machismo-mangled Mexican murder. One Mex marauder is
muerto. Mayhem boils in Boyle Heights.

  We’re at 3072 Oregon Street. Ray Barreala and his sister Gloria are hosting a barrio bash for White Fence gang members. The clock hits 11 p.m. Six youths from a rival gang show up, with rifles. This is a treacherous trick-or-treat. One youth points his piece at Joe Louis Vasquez, age 19. Vasquez falls, dead. The youths ex-cape in a lite-colored ’50 Ford.

  It’s another outbreak of Rat Pack Violence. And it’s not Mickey Mouse misogynists Frank Sinatra, Dino Martin, Sambo Davis and Peter Lawford beating up their wives and girlfriends.

  Six suspects get popped for the Vasquez snuff. It’s another futile and fucked-up fatality in the ongoing L.A. Rat Pack Wars. These repugnant rodents roam East L.A and lope through Lincoln Heights. They’ve chewn up Chavez Ravine. They’ve demonized Dogtown in Glassell Park. They’re dick-deep in narcotics peddling, armed robbery, burglary, bookmaking, gambling and insidious incursions into rival-gang turf. Get this: There’s a gang called the “Valley Cut-downs.” They’re a “baby” group with members ranging from ages 9 to 17. They’re pridefully pre-feminist, with four or five girl members. The Lower Alpine gang has been in several shooting scrapes with members of the Macy Street gang. The Lower Alpines are well known to be bad borrachos, with a pervy penchant for drunkenness. The West Temple gang is admirably inclusive, and includes Anglo and Negro members, as well as those of Mexican descent. The Rose Hill gang supplies maryjane and horse to youths in Pasadena, Alhambra, San Gabriel and Boyle Heights.

  “Whirl is king.”

  Some ancient Greek said that. Socrates, Aristotle—one of those cats. It’s all Greek to me. Hey, Socrates! Wasn’t he a member of the Parthenon Patriarchs gang? †

  * * *

  HANDS

  * * *

  FEBRUARY 22

  See those hands? They’re the hands of a killer. He killed a friend of his. They’d been friends for five years. The beef occurred on 2/22/53. It’s a spur-of-the-moment drunk beef. It’s another instance of Demon Don DeLillo’s “neon epic of Saturday night.” Our players are Clarence E. Vickery, Jr., age 33. He’s an aircraft worker. He’s the killer. The dead guy is Paul M. Kenney, age 42. He’s a grocer. Both men live in the dog-dick San Fernando Valley town of Sun Valley.

  The tiff goes down at a gas station on Foothill Boulevard. The men had been barhopping and were shitfaced drunk. Vickery told LAPD that Kenney attacked him. “I tried to avoid a fight,” the admitted killer said. “Kenney came at me with his hands up and hit me in the mouth.”

  Woooooooo!—it’s on! Vickery said, “I knocked him down and his head hit the pavement. I picked him up and hit him again, and then I kicked him several times in the face and head.”

  It was enough. Vickery sensed that it was enough. He hailed a motorist and told him to call an ambulance. He waited for LAPD to show up. Paul M. Kenney was later pronounced DOA at Valley Receiving Hospital.

  The issue of ethnic identity attended this brawl. LAPD Officer T. J. Tighe arrived at the scene and felt for Kenney’s pulse. There was none. Officer Tighe said, “This man is dead.”

  Vickery said, “Good. I’m glad I killed him. I had to show him that the goddamned Dutch will never be as good as a Scotchman.”

  See those hands? They’re the hands of a killer. See Clarence E. Vickery, Jr.? He’s a pudgy putz proudly preening for his 10 seconds in the slimelight. He’ll draw a two-spot at Chino. Big-time armed robbers processing out after a dime jolt in Folsom and Big Q will surgically survey his punk ass and call him “Killer.” Check out Clarence E. Vickery, Jr. as he stands in the Now of ’53 Then. He’ll wake up in the Valley Division Jail the next morning. He’ll have sobered up. He’ll think, “Shit. I killed my old pal Paul.” †

  * * *

  FREAK

  * * *

  JUNE 25

  Dig this photo from a ’53 obscenity case. It’s copycat, all the way. We’re back in Hollyweird. We’ve had the Melody Lane tavern shootout, that forced oral copulation deal, and now this slide through the slime.

  The pad is on Grace Avenue, a hilly hive sandwiched between Cahuenga and Wilcox. The crime is a perved-out B&E, strongly inspired by a ’40s Chi-Town case.

  Billy Heirens, the teenage burglar/rape-o/killer from the Windy City. He broke, he entered, he assaulted, he slayed. He lipstick-wrote “Stop me before I kill more” on a mirror in one of his victim’s homes. He was apprehended a short time later. He was too young to fry in the chair. He drew a life jolt in Joliet and squawked his innocence. Bad Billy, the lachrymose lunatic. Always making with that baleful babble of boo-hoo.

  Cowardly, punk motherfucker. They should have fried his underaged untermensch ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  And he inspired this twisted shit:

  The man B&E’d. He didn’t steal, he didn’t molest—it wasn’t a hot prowl with a sleeping woman on the premises. He reconnoitered, he redecorated, he inscribed, he pleaded, he beseeched, he boasted, he offered, he adorned.

  And—the fucker laid on some lewd lunatic love.

  There’s no file on this caper. This leads me to fan fantasy flames. Ooooooooooh, he’s got it baaaaaad for the lady of the house. He snuck in and purloined panties on priapically previous break-ins. He’s followed her home from Hal’s Nest and Don the Beachcomber’s. He digs her swervy sway as she treks trippingly up Grace Avenue. He sticks to the shadows and lurks. The woman’s nylon stockings go scree-scree. It madly metastasizes into the beat of torrid tom-toms in his head.

  He’s a passive putz. He’s never been laid. He spends all his gelt on girlie mags and burlesque shows downtown. He’s hung like a light switch. He lives in a sleazoid residential hotel. He wants seeeeexxxxxx and looooooooove—but he crossed the line into punk pathology a dog’s age back. He’s a creepy criminal now. He’ll crazily cross the line one day. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. LAPD will bag his punk ass. †

  * * *

  EAGLE

  * * *

  The Lone Eagle.

  Check this motor officer out. He’s perched on the newly completed Hollywood Freeway, looking east. We’ve got Silver Lake and the Hollywood Hills off to the north. The Eagle is wearing one of those heavy-ass shearling bomber jackets that nobody looks good in Now—because they were only meant to be worn in work-day-professional context Then. I’ve owned a half dozen of them—and I always looked like a buffoon. Why? Because I’m not a motorcycle cop and I’ve never piloted a B-52 on a bombing run over Germany.

  The Lone Eagle’s something else.

  He’s proud. He’s wary. He’s a devotee of the strange and bizarre, and he’s an ardent proponent of the stern rule of law. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. He’s the henchcat to L.A.’s Il Gattopardo. Parker’s got him on a long leash. He’s staring out in muted wonder at this great innovation—THE FREEWAY.

  He’s gassing on the freeway, L.A., America and the world—exactly as it is in Then’s Now. He doesn’t want to see this magical concrete ribbon get fucked up with crunched metal, shattered glass and spilled blood. He’s looking for infractions that might contribute to sloth and chaos. He’s poised to righteously interdict and suppress. †

  * * *

  BEEFCAKE

  * * *

  It is a great city Now. It was a great city in the Then this photo was snapped in. I’ve dumped on L.A. Now in the course of writing the text for this book—but the truth is I can’t live anywhere else. L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation. My probationary period is long over. L.A.: It’s where I go when women divorce me. L.A.: I have to be here to scrounge script deals and movie moolah. L.A.: Most of the people I love are here. L.A.: The town that made me, and that I must return to, again and again.

  L.A.’s a movie town. Jack Kerouac does a riff on L.A. cops in On the Road. He castigates their hard-hearted enforcement methods and ponders the he-man handsomeness of the policemen of the era. Command Presence was an essential William H. Parker construction. Command Presence diverted, deflected and interdicted crime all by itself. Parker wanted presentab
le young men to stand out front in his good-looking town in the business of good looks. Note the recruiting poster on display at the ’53 L.A. County Fair. Dragnet is now on TV. The unhandsome Jack Webb and Ben Alexander impart a Joe Everyman as Sergeant Joe Friday and poky Frank Everyman as Officer Frank Smith vibe. A caricatured Hal Handsome peers from the poster. He vibes Übermensch in blue. He has to look good—it’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and Whiskey Bill wants his boys perfectly etched.

  Imagery.

  A tall man in the foreground is approaching the poster, with a big smile. The fucker looks like Cary Grant. He’s probably hot to enlist.

  Kerouac disdained L.A. cops. They weren’t chubby, prone to chump-change corruption and lacked simple human heart. Yes, they were by and large fit. Yes, almost none of them sought handouts. No, their hearts weren’t up for grabs in a programmatically permissive way.