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

In 1922, Bill Parker and Mickey Cohen entered this drama as bit players in the struggle for control of Los Angeles. In 1937, Parker emerged as a protégé of Los Angeles’s top policeman while Mickey became the enforcer for L.A.’s top gangster. In 1950, they became direct rivals, each dedicated to the other’s destruction. Two characters more different from each other would be hard to imagine. Parker arrived in Los Angeles in 1922 from Deadwood, South Dakota, a proud, ambitious seventeen-year-old, one of the tens of thousands of migrants who were moving west to Southern California in what the journalist Carey McWilliams described as “the largest internal migration in the history of the American people.” He hoped to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a pioneering prosecutor on the western frontier, and make a career for himself in the law. But instead of opportunity, Parker found in Los Angeles temptation. Instead of becoming a prominent attorney, he became a cop, a patrolman in the Los Angeles Police Department. Coldly cerebral (Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, a onetime LAPD officer and Parker speechwriter, reputedly based the character Mr. Spock on his former boss), intolerant of fools, and famously incorruptible (in a department that was famously corrupt), Parker persevered. Gradually he rose. Between 1934 and 1937, he masterminded a campaign to free the police department from the control of gangsters and politicians, only to see his efforts undone by a blast of dynamite and a sensational scandal. Then, in 1950, another scandal (this one involving 114 Hollywood “pleasure girls”) made Parker chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, a position he would hold for sixteen controversial years.

In contrast, Mickey Cohen wasn’t troubled by self-examination until much later in life (when he would grapple with the question of going “straight”). Born Meyer Harris Cohen in 1913 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Mickey arrived in Los Angeles with his mother and sister at the age of three. By the age of six, he was hustling newspapers on the streets of Boyle Heights. At the age of nine, he began his career in armed robbery with an attempt to “heist” a movie theater in downtown L.A. using a baseball bat. His talent with his fists took the diminutive brawler to New York City to train as a featherweight boxer. His skill with a .38 took him into the rackets, first in Cleveland, then in Al Capone’s Chicago. In 1937, Mickey returned to Los Angeles to serve as gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s right-hand man. It was a job that put him on a collision course with Bill Parker.

For three decades, from the Great Depression to the Watts riots, Parker and Cohen—the policeman and the gangster—would engage in a struggle for power, first as lieutenants to older, more powerful men, then directly with each other, and finally with their own instincts and desires. In 1956, Chief Parker’s war against Mickey Cohen and organized crime in L.A. attracted the attention of a young Senate investigator with political ambitions named Robert Kennedy. It also antagonized FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and created an extralegal, wiretap-driven style of policing that eerily prefigures the tactics being used in today’s war on terror. In the 1960s, it would incite the Watts riots and help propel Ronald Reagan into the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Their contest would involve some of the most powerful—and colorful—figures of the twentieth century: press magnates Harry Chandler and his nemesis, William Randolph Hearst; studio head Harry Cohn of Columbia; entertainers Jack Webb, Frank Sinatra, Lana Turner, and Sammy Davis Jr.; and civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The outcome of their struggle would change the history of Los Angeles, set race relations in America on a dangerous new path, and chart a problematic course for American policing.

Parker and Cohen’s struggle for control of the city also changed them. Ultimately, like any good noir tale, the story of the rivalry between the young hoodlum with a second-grade education who became the king of the L.A. underworld and the obstinate young patrolman from Deadwood who created the modern LAPD brings us back to the question that Los Angeles always seems to pose: Is Our Lady the Queen of the Angels the dark angel, or do we simply bring our own darkness to her?

PART ONE The Fallen City

1 The Mickey Mouse Mafia

“[A] dead-rotten law enforcement setup rules in this county and city with an iron hand.”

—LAPD Sgt. Charlie Stoker, 1950