"Ben Siegel wants to see you." (No one called Siegel "Bugsy" to his face.) "Ben who?" Mickey responded, vainly attempting to project innocence.
"Ben Siegel, a name you got to stand attention to," Champ replied sharply. Then, no doubt aware of how touchy Mickey was, he shifted tone. "Look, do me a favor and come on up" (to the Hollywood YMCA). Bugsy routinely spent his afternoons there, working the bag and enjoying the sauna, and he wanted to talk to Cohen. Mickey agreed.
When Mickey arrived at the Hollywood Y, he was greeted at the door by Champ and by one of Bugsy"s men.
"Mr. Siegel is expectin" you," the man said curtly. He led Mickey and Champ down to the sweat room. Siegel emerged, clad in a towel and with a big smile on his face.
"Take a walk, Champ," Siegel said. Champ left. Siegel turned to Mickey.
"You were supposed to contact me when you got here," he said.
"I didn"t get around to you yet," Mickey responded sullenly. "I wanted to see my family. I been busy."
"Pretty big score you got this morning," said Siegel.
Mickey said nothing.
"I want you to kick back the money," said Siegel.
"I don"t know what you"re talking about," Mickey replied.
Siegel smiled. "You"re a good boy, but you"re a little crazy. I want you to kick back that money."
"I wouldn"t kick back no money for my mother," snarled Mickey. "I don"t give a f.u.c.k who or what it is. When I go on a score and I put up my life and my liberty on the score, I wouldn"t kick back to n.o.body."
"You heard what I said," Siegel said coldly.
"Go take a f.u.c.k for yourself," said Mickey. And with that, he stalked out.
Champ was waiting just outside the door. Incredulous, he ran after Cohen. "A remark like that means the death penalty," he told his charge. But Mickey was defiant.
The next day Mickey Cohen was picked up by the cops and thrown into a jail cell. Whether county or city police made the pinch is unclear. Mickey was not arraigned before a judge; there was no pretense of bringing charges. He was simply held incommunicado without bail. On day nine, Champ got him released. Again, Siegel summoned Mickey-this time to a meeting at the offices of Siegel"s attorney, Jerry Giesler. Dragna a.s.sociate Johnny Roselli was there as well, representing both the local Italian mob and the Chicago "Outfit" (the new name for the old Capone gang). Even to the craziest SOB in the world, it must have been clear that Mickey was now dealing directly with New York and Chicago. Not surprisingly, there was-as Mickey liked to say-"a meeting of the minds." Cohen was now fully under Siegel"s arm. It was time to organize L.A., "eastern style."
MICKEY knew Eddy Neales and liked him-"a real nice sort of fellow," he"d say later, but someone "with California ways," meaning, someone who couldn"t understand or accept what the Syndicate was. Neales just wanted to do his own thing. When Cohen pressed Neales"s partner Curly Robinson about accepting Siegel as a partner, Robinson stalled. Siegel soon grew impatient with the act. He decided to send a message, meaning, he decided to send Mickey.
Mickey hit Neales"s bookmaking operation first, targeting his commission office. Neales was in the office at the time. Cohen roughed him up, whacking him "across the mouth a few times." Instead of taking the hint, Neales went into hiding. Through his partner, Neales tried to send Mickey a conciliatory message, explaining "that he meant nothing but the best for me, but that I was too hot-tempered and had too much heat on me to join forces." Neales also warned Mickey (presciently) that his attempt "to establish things as they are in the East could never fit into the program in this part of the United States."
Mickey would have none of it. Next he hit the Clover Club itself. After raiding the cage and relieving the off tables of their cash, Mickey turned his attention to the customers, relieving one leggy young blonde of a diamond necklace. She was Betty Grable, who during the 1940s would become one of Hollywood"s biggest stars.
(Years later, columnist Florabel Muir would introduce the two at a Hollywood party. Embarra.s.sed, Cohen stammered out an apology, "if it was me." Grable just smiled. "We were insured anyway," she graciously replied.) Neales was upset. He switched gears, threatening Siegel with police retaliation. Siegel wasn"t frightened.
"That Mexican son of a b.i.t.c.h thinks he"s comin" in with me," Siegel told Cohen. "Keep on him."
Cohen hit Neales"s joints across the city five more times, wrecking each in the process. As a reward for doing Siegel"s bidding, Mickey kept the proceeds from the heists for himself. When Neales turned to the sheriff"s department for help, Cohen refused to back off. (Mickey"s late-night visit to Deputy Sheriff Contreras"s men wasn"t the only factor in the sheriff department"s decision to stop protecting Neales. Siegel also seems to have made a $125,000 payment to purchase some leeway from the department.) So Neales turned next to Jimmy Fox, a tough old Irishman known for his proficiency with handguns and for his excellent connections. (Fox had once shot three men in a downtown hotel room and been acquitted, implausibly, on grounds of self-defense.) As soon as Siegel heard that Neales had engaged Fox, he offered Mickey five grand to rub him out.
Soon after receiving this contract, Mickey was approached by two pharmacists, who also ran a profitable bookmaking operation out of their drugstore at the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. They were having some problems with Fox. The pharmacists told Mickey that Fox was demanding a meeting the following evening-presumably, to put the squeeze on them-and asked if he could come too. Mickey told them he"d be glad to come and settle their problems. The pharmacist-bookmakers, dismayed by the notion that the baby-faced little fellow before them was supposed to stand between themselves and Fox, suggested that Cohen bring a few extra hands. Mickey was noncommittal.
The meeting was at the house of one of the bookmakers. Mickey arrived early, alone. When Fox arrived, he was not happy to see Mickey there, waiting for him in the kitchen. The bookmakers and one of their wives were there too. Fox got personal.
"Ya know, I"m going to tell ya something, Mickey," Fox began. "I had trouble with your brother Harry years before, and ya know, your brother ran out on me. So my feelings towards you ain"t so G.o.dd.a.m.n good anyway-"
He got no further. Mickey whipped out his .38 and shot Fox on the spot. (By way of justification, Cohen later explained that Harry "was particularly close to me.") The bookmakers were stunned, then hysterical. The host"s wife lost her voice for several months. Mickey calmly left-and headed downtown to the Olympic Auditorium to catch a prizefight. He didn"t know if Fox was alive or dead and he didn"t care. As he was leaving the auditorium, he was grabbed by Det. Jack Donahoe, one of the LAPD"s toughest (and most upright) officers.
"You dirty son of a b.i.t.c.h," said the six-foot-one, 225-pound detective to Mickey, as he placed him under arrest. "You kill a man, and you go see a prizefight?"
For three days, Mickey languished in jail-until it became clear that Fox was going to live. Mickey claimed that Fox had drawn on him and that he had fired in self-defense. The tough Irishman declined to contradict him or comment in any way on the shooting. Cohen was released.
Imprisonment hadn"t improved his mood. He blamed Eddy Neales for his three days in jail. One night while he was out with a hooker, Cohen decided that he was going to take care of Neales once and for all. Somehow he managed to acquire a key to Neales"s apartment. Telling his "date" to wait in the car, Mickey slipped in and waited for the rival underworld figure to come home.
"I"m in the joint waiting to put his lights out, I hear him start opening the door. I"m ready to hit him" but then "some sixth sense told him something," Mickey later recounted. Neales "shut the door real quick and ran"-back to his business partner Curly Robinson. Eddy Neales was done with organized crime in Los Angeles. Robinson called Mickey to capitulate.
Unfortunately, Mickey"s men didn"t get the message fast enough. Around midnight, one of Neales"s men left his Sheridan Road apartment house-alone-to get some cigarettes. Rounding the corner, he ran into Mickey"s right-hand man, Hooky Rothman. This is something that no rational person ever wanted to do. A hundred and ninety pounds and built like a bull, Hooky inspired trepidation in even the toughest toughs. He was an idiot savant of a.s.sa.s.sination, brilliant at plotting a complex killing but either unable or unwilling to engage in conversation with another person. (His standard courtship line, Mickey"s crew joked, was "h.e.l.lo goil," followed by silence.) "If there was a piece of work to be done, Hooky stopped eating, drinking and sleeping till it was done," Mickey commented later, approvingly.
When Neales"s man saw Hooky, he was greatly relieved that the feud was over. "Hi ya, Hooky," he greeted Mickey"s man. Hooky gunned him down on the spot.
"It was a bad tragedy," Mickey later reflected, "but it ended okay." Hooky was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. Eddy Neales moved to Mexico City, just to be safe. Siegel and Cohen had run their leading bookmaking rival out of town. But the Los Angeles underworld was still not entirely under their control. The problem was the LAPD.
During his first year or so back in Los Angeles, Cohen focused on avoiding the police. Not until he met the legendary gambler Nick "the Greek" Dandolos did he realize he"d also have to deal with it.
Over dinner one night at the Brown Derby, Dandolos had a heart-to-heart with Mickey.
"You"re doing it all the hard way," Nick the Greek told the uncharacteristically attentive young heister. "A smart kid doesn"t have to go on the heavy to make a living." There was a better way-bookmaking.
Mickey liked "going on the heavy." As he would later tell the screenwriter Ben Hecht, "winning a street fight, knockin" over a score, havin" enough money to buy the best hats-I lived for them moments." However, Cohen had conducted so many heists during his short time in Los Angeles that he risked becoming recognizable. So at Dandolos"s suggestion, he decided to go visit the Santa Anita racetrack, fifteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, to see this business that Siegel was so interested in. He was stunned by what he saw there.
"Fifty thousand people are shovin" their money across a betting counter in open sight," he exclaimed with astonishment. Within three days, Mickey was a racetrack bookie, taking bets at his spot along the track rail. When the Pinkertons shut him down, Mickey decided to open a bookie joint of his own. Of course, to do so, Mickey would need police protection.
Fight manager Eddie Meade offered to make some introductions. Over dinner at Ruby Foo"s, Meade introduced Mickey to the head of the LAPD"s Hollywood vice squad, who agreed to let Mickey open a joint at Santa Monica and Western-"door open like a candy store, three-ticket windows," Mickey recalled fondly. When the day"s horse racing was done, Mickey and his crew took the sheets off the walls and opened up for blackjack and poker. All the games were on the square, and the action was excellent-until, less than four months after Mickey had opened his joint, the LAPD gangster and robbery detail moved in and arrested Cohen and his top a.s.sociates on suspicion of robbery. Mickey was upset. Didn"t he have a deal with the police? Not exactly, his police contacts informed him. Cohen had a deal with Hollywood vice, but not with the gangster and robbery detail. And that squad had no intention of letting Mickey build up operations within city limits.
This att.i.tude angered Mickey. Los Angeles, he fumed, was the exact opposite of eastern cities. "[I]t was a syndicate-a combination like the syndicate in Chicago or the syndicate in New York. But here, gambling and everything like they did in Jersey, Chicago, and New York was completely run by cops and stool pigeons."
Then, on the morning of January 14, 1938, an explosion ripped apart a modest house at 955 Orme Street and changed everything.
* Lansky, Luciano, and others generally spoke of "the Syndicate" rather than "the Mafia," which more properly referred to the Italian subset of the organized crime world. Lansky, Luciano, and others generally spoke of "the Syndicate" rather than "the Mafia," which more properly referred to the Italian subset of the organized crime world.* Bookies offered bettors a lower "take" than racetracks such as Santa Anita (which, in addition to the house take, also collected a small tax on bets wagered), as well as better odds. Bookies offered bettors a lower "take" than racetracks such as Santa Anita (which, in addition to the house take, also collected a small tax on bets wagered), as well as better odds.
8.
Dynamite.
"We"ve got to get somebody to spill his guts."-Jim Richardson, city editor, Los Angeles Examiner Los Angeles Examiner IT WASN"T BUGSY SIEGEL or Mickey Cohen who toppled the Combination. Nor, despite Bill Parker"s efforts, was it an honest cop. Los Angeles"s ruling clique was brought down by a thirty-seven-year-old cafeteria owner named Clifford Clinton.
In a city awash in sin and suffering, Clifford Clinton was a righteous man. Stranger still, he was also a rich one, thanks to one of Southern California"s hottest trends, the cafeteria. Cafeterias were to 1930s Los Angeles what coffee shops were to 1990s Seattle-ubiquitous, wildly popular, and very profitable. (In 1923, one writer punned that "Southern California" could with equal accuracy be called Sunny Cafeteria.) In 1931, Clinton took the basic idea and gave it a fantastical twist by opening Clifton"s Pacific Seas, which featured a giant waterfall, jungle murals, and a Polynesian gra.s.s hut inspired by his explorations in the South Pacific, as well as a meditation garden inspired by the Garden of Gethsemane. In 1935, Clinton began work on a second establishment, the Brookdale cafeteria, which evoked Clinton"s Northern California childhood with an interior that included redwood trees and a stream that fell over a waterfall before meandering through the cafeteria (past a tiny toy chapel perched upon a rocky escarpment). However, it was Clinton"s response to the Great Depression that made his name.
Clinton had always been proud of his food. His cafeteria"s motto was "Dine Free unless Delighted," and he meant it. The teetotaler son of Salvation Army officers, Clinton also had strong moral principles. As the Depression deepened, he went out of his way to help Angelenos in distress, offering customers a full meal (soup, salad, bread, Jell-O, and coffee) for a nickel. When it became clear that a nickel was too much for many, he opened a bas.e.m.e.nt cafeteria in his South Hill Street establishment where the less fortunate could get vegetable soup over brown rice for a mere penny. (Clinton would later estimate that he served roughly a million penny meals over the course of the decade.) Demand was so great for the so-called caveteria that patrons lined up three hours before the restaurant opened for a meal.
Clinton"s introduction to politics was accidental. In 1935, county supervisor John Anson Ford asked the thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner to inspect food operations at the County General Hospital. Clinton uncovered instances of waste and favoritism that were costing the county $120,000 a year. Retaliation was not long in coming. Soon thereafter, Clinton was visited by city health inspectors and cited for numerous violations. But Shaw"s minions had messed with the wrong man. Outraged, Clinton persuaded Ford to suggest him for the 1937 county grand jury. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron agreed to put forward his name, and when the 1937 grand jury convened that February, Clinton was among its members.
The county grand jury was the wildcard in Los Angeles politics. Every year, the county"s fifty superior court judges appointed nineteen people to the jury, which had broad leeway to investigate wrongdoing. At least seventeen of those judges were in the pocket of the Combination; these friendly judges typically ensured that eight to twelve of the grand jury"s members had close ties either to Mayor Frank Shaw"s administration or to the underworld. As a result, grand juries generally managed to avoid uncovering any serious wrongdoing. A clear majority of the 1937 grand jury fit this pattern. When Clinton and three other jurors pressed for an investigation into vice conditions, the grand jury foreman refused. But Clinton was undeterred. Instead, he went directly to Mayor Shaw and asked him to bless an investigation.
Clinton"s proposal put Shaw in a tough position. If the mayor refused, he risked creating the impression that he had something to hide. So over the objections of Chief Davis, Shaw endorsed Clinton"s investigation. When the group unveiled its name-the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC)-and announced that it would also be investigating munic.i.p.al malfeasance, Shaw realized he had made a mistake. Clinton"s public statements made it clear that he was targeting more than the city"s brothels and gambling parlors; he was targeting the Combination as a whole. The mayor withdrew his support. CIVIC pressed ahead. Its volunteer investigators soon came up with a tally of vice in Los Angeles: 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines. The rest of the grand jury wasn"t interested. It refused to accept much less publish CIVIC"s report.
Clinton turned to Judge Bowron for advice. The fifty-year-old Bowron knew the underworld well. During the teens, he"d put himself through law school by working as a city reporter. Then, after serving in the Army during the First World War, he"d gotten a job as the executive secretary to California governor Friend Richardson, who appointed him to superior court. There Bowron turned his attention to the issue of corruption. Three years earlier, in 1934, Bowron had presided over a crusading county grand jury that nearly toppled District Attorney Buron Fitts. (Fitts"s office had dropped a case against a millionaire real estate developer who"d allegedly raped an underage prost.i.tute after the developer entered into a shady business deal with a member of the DA"s family.) Now Bowron suggested that Clinton produce a minority grand jury report. When Clinton did so, the judge with responsibility for presiding over the grand jury ruled that it couldn"t be released. Bowron issued a counterruling, and CIVIC hastily printed and distributed thousands of copies.
The report was scathing. It found that "underworld profits" were being used to finance the campaigns of "city and county officials in vital positions." In exchange, local officials were turning a blind eye to a vast network of brothels, "clip joints," gambling houses, and bookmakers. The report charged that officials from all three of the princ.i.p.al law enforcement agencies in the county, the district attorney"s office, the sheriff"s department, and the LAPD, "work in complete harmony and never interfere with the activities of important figures in the underworld."
The counterreaction was swift. Grand jury foreman John Bauer labeled Clinton an "out of control" egomaniac and charged that the cafeteriateur, rather than the underworld, was "Public Enemy #1." The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times, which was closely allied with District Attorney Fitts, echoed Bauer"s allegations. When a notary appeared before the county grand jury to testify that foreman Bauer was actually a Shaw crony holding lucrative city paint contracts, Fitts, Bauer, and a squad of detectives from the DA"s office arrived, uninvited, at the notary"s house. The detectives then beat the hapless notary so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
Clinton came under pressure too. His real estate taxes were increased by nearly $7,000, a significant sum during the Depression. Complaints of food poisoning became commonplace. Clinton"s newest cafeteria was denied a permit. But the man the newspapers had dubbed "the Cafeteria Kid" was undeterred. So Clinton"s enemies upped the ante. That October, a bomb exploded in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Clinton"s home in Los Feliz. Fortunately Clinton, his wife, and their three children slept on the other side of the house and were unharmed. The LAPD responded by suggesting the attack was probably just a publicity ruse engineered by Clinton himself-despite the fact that a car seen speeding from the scene had license plates that tied it to the LAPD"s intelligence division.
The Shaws weren"t the only people playing hardball. So was former LAPD officer Harry Raymond. Raymond was an unsavory character, a twice-fired former vice squad officer with close connections to the old Combination. As the historian Gerald Woods noted dryly, "Few were better qualified to investigate vice than Raymond." Raymond had gotten involved in a picayune dispute between a friend who"d done work for Mayor Shaw"s 1933 reelection campaign-and felt he was owed $2,900-and Harry Munson, a former Police Commission member who was widely considered to be the liaison between the underworld and the Shaw administration. Despite the fact that Munson"s a.s.sociates were clearing somewhere between $2 and $4 million a month, Munson refused to pay up. Raymond"s friend decided to sue. Raymond recommended an attorney, who just happened to be Clifford Clinton"s attorney as well.
Then Raymond himself got busy. His investigation soon uncovered damaging connections between the police department, the underworld, and the Shaw administration. But Raymond didn"t turn this evidence over to Clinton or to prosecutors. Instead, he approached his former colleagues in the police department with a blackmail demand. In response, the decision was made to take Raymond out.
On the morning of January 14, 1938, Harry Raymond walked into the garage of his modest house at 955 Orme Street in Boyle Heights, got into his car, pressed the starter pedal, and triggered a thunderous explosion that shook the neighborhood. The car and the garage were destroyed-investigators would later determine that a heavy iron water pipe packed with dynamite had been attached to his car"s undercarriage-but Raymond somehow survived, despite suffering 186 shrapnel wounds. The badly wounded Raymond summoned Los Angeles Examiner Los Angeles Examiner city editor Jim Richardson to his hospital bedside-and fingered Davis muscleman Earl Kynette. city editor Jim Richardson to his hospital bedside-and fingered Davis muscleman Earl Kynette.
"They told me they would get me," he whispered to the newspaperman. "They put Kynette on me. I"ve known for weeks he and his boys were shadowing me. They had my phone tapped. Somewhere in the neighborhood you"ll find where they had their listening devices. Kynette takes his orders from City Hall and they wanted me out of the way. He"s the one who rigged the bomb."
The next morning, Raymond"s allegations were splashed across the front page of the Examiner Examiner. Raymond"s attorney quickly reached out to Clifford Clinton and arranged for the wounded blackmailer to claim a more flattering connection to CIVIC. Clinton was happy to portray Raymond as a crusading investigator who had been targeted for termination because he had information that would "blow the lid off Los Angeles." A wiretapping setup was soon found, just as Raymond had alleged. Neighbors confirmed that Capt. Earl Kynette of the LAPD had indeed been surveilling Raymond in the days leading up to the explosion. Nonetheless, upon returning from a pistol shooting compet.i.tion in Mexico City, Chief Davis a.s.signed Kynette to investigate the bombing. Kynette in turn suggested that Raymond had blown himself up as part of yet another publicity stunt. This was too much for DA Fitts, who reluctantly opened an investigation into police wrongdoing. To those in the know, the situation was farcical. In a letter to U.S. senator Hiram Johnson, chamber of commerce director Frank Doherty described Fitts"s investigation of the LAPD thusly: "a near psychopathic district attorney is investigating a crooked police department" that is "trying to dispense of or frighten a former crooked member of their crooked force who was spying into their crooked activities."
Chief Davis"s career-and Bill Parker"s-hung in the balance. Thanks to the changes in the city charter Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had pushed through, Kynette"s intelligence squad now enjoyed significant legal protections. Those advantages were on full display in the wake of the Raymond bombing. Seven members of Kynette"s intelligence squad refused to testify before the grand jury about the unit"s activities, citing fears of self-incrimination. Although the officers were initially suspended from duty, a review board made up of their fellow officers soon returned the men to work. But the question of Chief Davis"s future-and Bill Parker"s-remained.
In April 1938, the trial of Earl Kynette and his two a.s.sociates got under way. The evidence against Kynette was d.a.m.ning. He had personally purchased the steel pipe used in the bombing. The trial also revealed that Kynette had been running a secret spy squad-one that routinely used wiretaps and dictographs to gather information on opponents of the Shaws" political machine. Among its targets were county supervisor John Anson Ford (who had run for mayor, unsuccessfully, against Frank Shaw in 1937), Judge Bowron, Hollywood Citizen-News Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer, and fifty other prominent Angelenos. Chief Davis clearly had some questions to answer. But when he took the stand on April 26, Davis was a disaster. Prosecutors had subpoenaed the files of the intelligence division two weeks earlier. They now confronted the chief with evidence that the LAPD intelligence squad had been monitoring county supervisors, judges, newspaper publishers, even a federal agent charged with investigating vice conditions in San Francisco who had considered launching a similar investigation into vice conditions in Los Angeles. publisher Harlan Palmer, and fifty other prominent Angelenos. Chief Davis clearly had some questions to answer. But when he took the stand on April 26, Davis was a disaster. Prosecutors had subpoenaed the files of the intelligence division two weeks earlier. They now confronted the chief with evidence that the LAPD intelligence squad had been monitoring county supervisors, judges, newspaper publishers, even a federal agent charged with investigating vice conditions in San Francisco who had considered launching a similar investigation into vice conditions in Los Angeles.
"Are these men criminals?" demanded one of the prosecutors.
Davis parried that everyone under observation had a criminal record-a claim that was true only if you counted parking citations. He further alleged that figures such as county supervisor John Anson Ford, Clifford Clinton, and Hollywood Citizen-News Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer had been in contact "with subversive elements." When pressed, Davis acknowledged that one of the intelligence squad"s functions had been to investigate people "attempting to destroy confidence in the police department"-as if criticism of the police were itself a crime. Mostly, though, Davis seemed confused. His testimony at times was so incoherent that the presiding judge dismissed Davis"s testimony as "a debris of words." Kynette was convicted of attempted murder, a.s.sault with intent to commit murder, and the malicious use of explosives and sentenced to ten years in prison, along with one other officer. publisher Harlan Palmer had been in contact "with subversive elements." When pressed, Davis acknowledged that one of the intelligence squad"s functions had been to investigate people "attempting to destroy confidence in the police department"-as if criticism of the police were itself a crime. Mostly, though, Davis seemed confused. His testimony at times was so incoherent that the presiding judge dismissed Davis"s testimony as "a debris of words." Kynette was convicted of attempted murder, a.s.sault with intent to commit murder, and the malicious use of explosives and sentenced to ten years in prison, along with one other officer.
In an effort to salvage his position, Chief Davis disbanded the intelligence squad, rea.s.signed more than four dozen officers, and launched sweeping vice raids throughout the city.* But it was too late. But it was too late.
One year earlier, Mayor Shaw had been easily reelected to a second term in office, entrenching the Chandler-Shaw-Combination triumvirate that effectively ruled Los Angeles. Clinton and the reformers now demanded that Mayor Shaw dismiss Davis as chief of police. Shaw refused. Davis was the linchpin of the arrangement by which the business establishment, the underworld, and his administration shared power. If he gave up control over the police department, the entire arrangement would come tumbling down, as the reformers well knew. Faced with this refusal, Clinton and his allies targeted the mayor himself, launching a recall effort. No big-city mayor had ever been recalled before, but by early July, Clinton had the signatures he needed to put a motion to recall Shaw on the September ballot. Now the reformers needed a candidate. That August, just one month before the election, Judge Bowron agreed to step down from the bench and run as the reform candidate. That September, voters swept Frank Shaw out of office and made Bowron mayor. Bowron immediately turned his attention to purging the LAPD-and getting rid of Chief Davis.
In theory, thanks to the charter amendments drafted by Bill Parker, Chief Davis enjoyed a bulwark of legal protections. Bowron was determined to override them. Under pressure from the new mayor, the Police Commission resigned en ma.s.se. Bowron promptly appointed a new board that was prepared to follow his instructions. Chief Davis wanted to stay and fight. However, Parker warned him that if he fought and lost, he risked losing his $330 monthly pension. Reluctantly, Davis accepted his protege"s advice. In November 1938, he resigned as chief. Parker"s efforts to insulate the chief of police from political pressures had failed.
Despite his closeness to the former chief, Parker did not initially suffer from Davis"s fall. The new acting chief, Insp. David Davidson, quickly reshuffled the top leadership of the force, but he affirmed Parker"s position as acting captain. He also named Parker "Administrative Officer" for the department-essentially, the a.s.sistant chief of police in everything but name. Parker even moved into the previous a.s.sistant chief of police"s office. Basically, Davidson was keeping Parker in the same job he"d performed before. Parker seemed to be advancing toward his dream: the chief"s chair. But Mayor Bowron wasn"t done yet with the LAPD.
MAYOR BOWRON was determined to eradicate the Combination. Shaw"s defeat and Chief Davis"s resignation had clearly dealt the underworld a major blow, but Bowron knew that its tentacles still extended deep into munic.i.p.al government and into the LAPD. Soon after his election, Bowron invited Jim Richardson, city editor of the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner Los Angeles Examiner, the feisty morning paper that was the Times"s Times"s fiercest compet.i.tor, to join him for lunch at the Jonathan Club downtown to talk strategy. The topic of their discussion was uprooting the Combination once and for all. fiercest compet.i.tor, to join him for lunch at the Jonathan Club downtown to talk strategy. The topic of their discussion was uprooting the Combination once and for all.
"We"ve got to find out the facts," Bowron told the newsman over lunch. "We"ve got to get the evidence of how it was operated, who put out the bribe money and who took it. Who are the crooks in the police department and how did the whole setup operate? We can"t do much, hardly anything, until we get that information; and how are we going to get it?"
"There"s only one way," Richardson responded. "We"ve got to get somebody to spill his guts."
A few days later, Richardson realized someone might be willing to talk: Tony Cornero. During his bootlegging days in the 1920s, Cornero had conducted a guns-blazing feud with Combination leader Milton "Farmer" Page. That feud had ended with Cornero"s arrest, followed by an amazing escape to Canada. In 1929, Cornero had voluntarily returned to the United States and served two years in a federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, in the Puget Sound. He returned to Los Angeles in 1931 and hit upon a characteristically wily scheme. Rather than going up against underworld rivals and the LAPD, Cornero decided to commission gambling ships that would operate in international waters off Santa Monica Bay. Offsh.o.r.e gambling proved a smashing success; Cornero had reveled in one-upping his old land based rivals. But Richardson knew Cornero still held a grudge against his old rivals in what remained of the Combination. The newspaperman thought the old bootlegger-turned-nautical casino operator might well be willing to do them one last bad turn. So he called Cornero and asked if he"d meet secretly with him-and with Mayor Bowron-to help the mayor finish off his old enemies. Cornero readily agreed. A midnight summit was arranged at Bowron"s house, on a hill high above the Hollywood Bowl.
The night of the meeting, only six people were present-the mayor, his driver, the head of the Police Commission, Richardson and a colleague, and Cornero. Cornero began by explaining how the underworld operated, but what Bowron really wanted were names-names of police officers on the take.
Cornero handed Bowron a piece of paper. On it was a list of twenty-six compromised police officers. Bowron was thrilled-and puzzled.
"Thank you, Tony," the mayor told the gangster. "You have done us a big service. In fact, you"ve done the city of Los Angeles a big service." He paused and then continued. "But there"s only one thing I can"t understand. I can"t understand why you"re doing this. I mean, I can"t see what"s in it for you?"
Cornero smiled and then replied. "Well, Your Honor," he began, "you are not always going to be mayor of Los Angeles. Someday you"ll be out. It may be the next election or ten years from now. I"ve given you the stuff to put the Syndicate out of business. Out it goes! Then comes the day when you"re out too. Then the field is open again. And it will be mine. It will be open for someone else to take over. Do I make myself clear?"
"You make it clear all right," Bowron replied. The meeting was over. It was time to clean house at the LAPD.
There was just one problem. The testimony of a convicted felon like Tony Cornero was not exactly something that would hold up in court or even in an administrative hearing, given the protections that Bill Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had so painstakingly enacted. So Mayor Bowron and his Police Commission decided to take an extraordinary step. They hired an ex-FBI man to investigate the officers in question and tap their phones. By the end of the investigation, Bowron was confident that the men were indeed corrupt. Over the course of two days, each was summoned to the mayor"s office individually and asked for his resignation. When an officer hesitated-or refused-the mayor reached over to the sound recorder and played an incriminating section of the wiretap. Most of the officers agreed to resign on the spot. In two days, much of the top echelon of the department was gone. Within six months, a dozen more had followed.
The Combination had finally been smashed. In a world with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel on the loose, it was simply too dangerous for men like Guy McAfee to operate in Los Angeles without police protection. Moreover, it seemed evident that the new mayor was determined to "close" Los Angeles. And so the organized crime figures who had held sway over the L.A. underworld since the 1920s left Los Angeles. Most relocated to a dusty little town in the Nevada desert where gambling was legal and supervision was lax-Las Vegas.
Mayor Bowron was exultant. "We"ve broken the most powerful ring that ever had an American city in its grip," he exulted to Richardson. "We"ve swept the police department clean for the first time in many years."
The sphere of police autonomy that Bill Parker had so laboriously constructed also seemed to have been swept away.
For four years, Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had worked to restrict politicians" authority over the LAPD. On paper, chief and officers alike now enjoyed substantial legal protections. Yet when the stakes were high, those protections proved to be worthless. In a matter of months, Bowron had forced out the entire senior leadership of the police department, without a prosecutor indicting a single officer, without the Police Commission acting on a single complaint, without a single review board convening. The prospect of a powerful, independent police chief must have seemed impossibly remote.
Yet the triumph of the politicians was not complete. When Bowron"s new Police Commission attempted to rescind the city charter amendments that Cooke and Parker had written-returning disciplinary authority to the chief of police (and thus to the mayor and Police Commission who appointed and oversaw him)-the city council objected. Nor did the council embrace reformers" proposals for a new city charter, one that would have greatly strengthened the mayor"s rather limited powers over the executive branch of government. In short, the legal protections Parker"s charters had created remained, even as Mayor Bowron drained them of their significance. They simply lay fallow, waiting for a chief who would have the skill and knowledge to breathe life into them.
IN MAY 1939, Parker got his first clear shot at becoming that chief.
In theory, promotion in the LAPD was strictly meritocratic. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, officers sat for promotional exams roughly every two years. A written exam typically accounted for 95 percent of their scores; the remaining 5 percent was determined by an oral exam and by seniority. Officers were then ranked by their results and placed on a promotional list, from which all new appointments had to be made. But the onset of the Great Depression-and the appearance of Joe Shaw-had disrupted this process. Between 1929 and 1936, hiring in the department had essentially been frozen. In 1936, Joe Shaw had overseen a new round of civil service examinations-and, rumor had it, helpfully sold answers to the questions for all fifty positions waiting to be filled. The department"s promotion lists were so suspect that Mayor Bowron"s new Police Commission decided to start from scratch. It threw out the previous lists and announced a new round of compet.i.tive examinations. Among the positions up for grabs was that of chief of police.
The acting chief of police, David Davidson, disclaimed any interest in the job, saying he preferred "not to be pushed around every time a new administration took office." Capt. R. R. McDonald was known to be the mayor"s favorite, yet Bowron"s handpicked Police Commission nonetheless announced that it would make a purely meritocratic choice. The candidate who placed highest on the civil service exam would be the Police Commission"s choice.
One hundred seventy-one officers sat for the written examination for chief, including acting captain Bill Parker. Thirty-one were called back to complete the oral portion of the test. Once again, Parker was among the top group. On June 15, 1939, Parker received his score from the Board of Civil Service Commissioners: He had received a final grade of 78.1, which placed his name eighth on the tentative eligible list. The name at the top came as a surprise to everyone: Lt. Arthur Hohmann. After several weeks of hemming and hawing, the Police Commission decided to recognize Hohmann"s ranking and appointed him chief.
From the first, Bill Parker was in his sights. The services rendered to Chief Davis now stood Parker in bad stead. "Parker"s loyalty and zealous attention to his office was now misinterpreted as blind loyalty to organizations and individuals and his past performance as an efficient, courageous and honest officer was discounted," wrote a friendly superior officer, B. R. Caldwell, four years after the event. Hohmann immediately created a new headquarters division-and announced that he would command it himself. R. R. McDonald was made administrative officer. Acting captain Bill Parker-now Lieutenant Parker-was out.
Demoralized by his de facto demotion and worried that he would never shake the Davis stigma, Parker seriously considered leaving the force and becoming a full-time attorney. He even lined up a few legal cases he could work on as a private attorney and drafted a letter of resignation, but at the last minute, Parker"s old boss from his time at Hollywood Division, Capt. B. R. Caldwell, stepped in. Caldwell was a Parker admirer. He intervened to secure a position for Parker in the traffic accident investigation division, which he headed. This was not an inconsequential position. Managing traffic was a major problem in the world"s most car-oriented big city. Traffic accidents were also a major cause of death, killing 533 people in 1941, more than ten times the number of people murdered that year. Despite feeling bruised by his treatment, Parker agreed to stay on.
Parker now had something to prove. In February 1940, he took the examination for captain and placed second on the promotion list. That May, Chief Hohmann recognized his achievement by appointing him captain. In September, Parker took the examination for Inspector of Police and again placed second. Soon thereafter, Parker won a fellowship award to Northwestern University"s Traffic Inst.i.tute. In the fall of 1940, he left for Chicago to study the fine points of traffic control for nine months.
The Combination got in one final dig at the new order. That fall, the generally reliable Hollywood Citizen-News Hollywood Citizen-News broke the story of Bowron and Jim Richardson"s secret meeting with Tony Cornero, in a highly misleading fashion: broke the story of Bowron and Jim Richardson"s secret meeting with Tony Cornero, in a highly misleading fashion: NEW VICE SETUP IN LOS ANGELES NEW VICE SETUP IN LOS ANGELES, proclaimed the banner headline. TONY CORNERO, MAYOR BOWRON AND EXAMINER CITY EDITOR IN SECRET TONY CORNERO, MAYOR BOWRON AND EXAMINER CITY EDITOR IN SECRET MIDNIGHT MEETING AT MAYOR"S HOUSE. It turned out that Bowron"s driver was on the Combination"s payroll. Although the charge that the mayor had met with Cornero to divvy up Los Angeles was completely untrue, Bowron felt he had to respond, and so, with no little ruthlessness, he turned against the man who had decapitated the Combination, Tony Cornero. It turned out that Bowron"s driver was on the Combination"s payroll. Although the charge that the mayor had met with Cornero to divvy up Los Angeles was completely untrue, Bowron felt he had to respond, and so, with no little ruthlessness, he turned against the man who had decapitated the Combination, Tony Cornero.
The gambling fleet Cornero operated just offsh.o.r.e had long been an embarra.s.sment. Mayor Bowron now decided that it was intolerable, so he turned up the pressure on California attorney general Earl Warren and Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz by publicly calling on them to shut down the gaming fleet. With the attention of the public upon them, Sheriff Biscailuz and Santa Monica police chief Charles Dice set out in a fleet of water taxis to arrest the offsh.o.r.e crime lord, who they insisted had strayed into California waters. In court, however, Cornero sprung a surprise. Santa Monica Bay, he argued, was not actually a bay at all but rather a bight, a large coastal indentation. That put his ships in international waters, out of the reach of the California courts. An appeals court agreed, and Tony "the Hat" (now "the Commodore") returned to action.
After much head-scratching, Attorney General Warren decided to try another tack: He announced that Cornero"s gambling fleet was a "nuisance," which the state of California had the power to abate. A cease-and-desist warning was issued. When Cornero refused to comply, a raiding party was sent out to capture his flagship, the SS Rex Rex. Cornero insisted the raiding party"s members were pirates. For nine days, "the Commodore" held the raiders off with a fire hose before succ.u.mbing to hunger and surrendering the ship. The courts rejected Cornero"s claims that he was a victim of piracy, and the California Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court had erred in its a.n.a.lysis of coastal geography. Santa Monica Bight returned to being Santa Monica Bay. Tony Cornero was out of luck for a second time.
Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, on the other hand, couldn"t have been luckier. Mayor Bowron had shut down first the Combination and then Tony Cornero. Los Angeles"s homegrown criminal underworld had scurried off to Las Vegas. The Los Angeles underworld was now Siegel"s to command. What made the situation even sweeter was that as his influence was growing, his ident.i.ty as a notorious eastern gangster remained virtually unknown. It wasn"t until a wiseacre NYPD detective decided to give the Los Angeles DA"s chief investigator a scare that the LAPD awoke to the fact that its nightmare of "eastern gangsters" moving into the city had already come true. The struggle for control of Los Angeles was about to move into a new phase, one that would put Bugsy Siegel and his top lieutenant, Mickey Cohen, in direct conflict with the LAPD.
* The The Citizen-News Citizen-News wryly noted that the infamous gambling joint at 732 North Highland had been raided by Lieutenant Hoy, "under whose able protection it has operated all these years." wryly noted that the infamous gambling joint at 732 North Highland had been raided by Lieutenant Hoy, "under whose able protection it has operated all these years."