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

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

To Melinda

—and the boys

“This is the city—Los Angeles, California. I work here. I’m a cop.”

—Sgt. Joe Friday, Dragnet

“A cop-syndicate rules this city with an iron hand.”

—Mickey Cohen, gangster

“The only time to worry is when they tell the truth about you.”

—William H. Parker, chief, Los Angeles Police Department

Prologue

OTHER CITIES have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Advertised to the world as the Eden at the end of the western frontier, the settlement the Spaniards named El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles turned out to be something very different—not the beatific Our Lady the Queen of the Angels advertised by its name but rather a dark, dangerous blonde.

She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn’t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde…

Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

For more than sixty years, writers and directors from Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski and James Ellroy have explored L.A.’s origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes in fiction and films like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. In the process, they created the distinctive worldview known as noir, where honor is in short supply and where Los Angeles invariably proves to be a femme fatale. Yet this preoccupation with a mythic past has obscured something important—the true history of noir Los Angeles.

For more than forty years, from Prohibition through the Watts riots, politicians, gangsters, businessmen, and policemen engaged in an often-violent contest for control of the city. Their struggle shaped the history of Los Angeles, the future of policing, and the course of American politics. In time, two primary antagonists emerged. The first was William H. Parker, Los Angeles’s greatest and most controversial chief of police. His nemesis was Los Angeles’s most colorful criminal, featherweight boxer-turned-gangster Mickey Cohen.

      IN 1920 Los Angeles surpassed San Francisco as California’s largest city. It was a moment of triumph for Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, who had arrived four decades earlier when the city of angels was a dusty, water-starved pueblo of ten thousand souls. Chandler and his associates worked tirelessly to build a metropolis, relentlessly promoting the fledgling city and ruthlessly securing the water needed to support it (a campaign made famous by the film Chinatown). Yet 1920 was also the year that witnessed the emergence of a major threat to their authority. The threat came from Prohibition. For years, Harry Chandler and the so-called business barons had supplied local politicians with the advertising, the publicity, and the money they needed to reach the city’s new residents. In exchange, they gained power over the city government. But with the imposition of Prohibition, a new force appeared with the money and the desire to purchase L.A.’s politicians: the criminal underworld. To suppress it, the business community turned to the Los Angeles Police Department. The underworld also looked to the LAPD—for protection.