Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ profiling, random traffic stops, raids on gay bars, warrantless home break-ins, and the promotion of ordinary misdemeanors to felonies whenever possible. The relentless, virtually industrialized policing of the southern and eastern districts of the city, as well as gay Hollywood, automatically became its own self-justification. Mob invaders from the East and Red conspirators were just the frosting on Parker’s cake. White-collar crime, meanwhile, was scarcely acknowledged.

      The Scalp Collection

      Parker, like his archenemy J. Edgar Hoover, was also a master extortionist. He had learned the black arts during his three years as an administrative assistant to corrupt and brutal Chief James Davis, for whom, according to Domanick, “he gathered information on the professional and personal lives of elected and appointed officials and prominent citizens.”¹⁰ One ranking veteran of the Parker era said that his boss employed a “Soviet model of intelligence—to collect as much as possible about any number of suspicious individuals because commanders never knew when the information could be useful.”¹¹ One of his first acts in office was to expand the intelligence squad into a full division and later, in 1956, to establish a clearinghouse that shared with other law enforcement agencies the LAPD’s thousands of dossiers on subversives as well as mobsters, drug dealers and gamblers.¹² Carlton Williams, the Times’s city hall correspondent and chief hatchet man for the Chandlers in local politics, also had access to the files and frequently used them against his paper’s opponents.¹³

      Parker bugged everything: the city jail, all LAPD phone calls, city council offices, the hotel rooms of candidates, and private residences.¹⁴ He also made the sledgehammer LAPD standard equipment. His men routinely raided homes and businesses without warrant, knocking down doors and smashing everything inside. In a 1955 case, People v. Cahan, California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor expressed amazement at Parker’s warrantless empire of surveillance and his force’s enthusiasm for the destruction of suspects’ property. Parker raged against having his “hands tied” by the ruling against the LAPD in this case, but he continued, if more clandestinely, his illegal surveillance of politicians and suspected criminals.¹⁵

      His scalp collection was impressive. At the beginning of his tenure, he had put a silver stake through the heart of public housing by exposing, in a televised hearing, Frank Wilkinson, the public relations officer of the LA Housing Authority, as a supposed Communist.¹⁶ In 1957 he attempted to destroy the political career of a woman named Ethel Narvid who worked for liberal Valley council member (later congressmember) James Corman. Parker claimed he had evidence that she was a Communist, but Corman, who had the moral backbone missing in many other members of the council, ignored the chief and made her his deputy. The significance of this otherwise-obscure episode, Domanick argues, is that it was a “sign of how closely Bill Parker was monitoring and influencing local political affairs that he would invest himself trying to defeat a staff member of a freshman on a fifteen-member city council.”¹⁷

      He stalked bigger game the following year, during one of the most important elections in state history. Challenging generations of Republican control over the governorship, Democrat Pat Brown was locked in a bitter contest with US Senator William Knowland, an archconservative who was also sponsoring a right-to-work amendment on the ballot. In Southern California, Democratic National Committee member Paul Ziffren was Brown’s crucial liaison with Hollywood moguls and Jewish political donors. Two years earlier, Ziffren had urged Brown, then attorney general, to investigate Parker’s intelligence division for its rampant disregard of constitutional rights.¹⁸ The LAPD’s revenge was to pass on to the Knowland camp—probably via the Times’ Carlton Williams—information that Ziffren, an entertainment lawyer originally from Chicago, was associated with mob members. In Parker’s universe, of course, this might simply entail knowing Frank Sinatra, whom Parker considered “totally tied to the Mafia.”¹⁹

      But Brown and the Democrats swept the elections, taking control of both houses in Sacramento for the first time in a century, with a well-known enemy of Parker, LA Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk, elected state attorney general. Mosk subsequently repulsed several attempts by Parker to repeal the Cahan decision and restore wiretapping on a broad scale. The chief spied on both Brown and Mosk, but the governor was beyond his reach. Mosk wasn’t. “In July 1963 detectives observed that Mosk boarded a plane for Mexico City with a twenty-three year old woman who was not his wife. Either one of the department’s detectives flew to Mexico or arranged with private detectives to set up a camera and focus it on the window of their hotel room.” In short order Mosk abandoned plans to run for the US Senate. Brown appointed him to the California Supreme Court as compensation.²⁰

      Thanks to James Ellroy and other pulp writers, Chief Parker still rules postwar Los Angeles in the imagination. Indeed, he’s the only public figure from the 1950–66 period, aside from celebrity gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, that anyone today is likely to know about. Yet an important and proud chapter in Parker’s biography remains obscure: his service during the Second World War as the designer of the Police and Prisons Plan for the Normandy invasion. Army Captain Parker subsequently accompanied Patton’s Third Army to Paris (earning a Purple Heart en route) and then helped denazify police forces in Germany, where he served under Orlando Wilson, another police reformer with an authoritarian style. (In 1960 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley appointed Wilson as the city’s superintendent of police.) Parker, in other words, had the exhilarating experiences of administering martial law and rebuilding police institutions from scratch. In his study of Black radicalism and the LAPD, historian Bruce Tylor suggests that martial law remained Parker’s favored paradigm, at least for policing South Central L.A.²¹

      The LAPD not only enforced law within the ghetto; it enforced the ghetto itself. Glenn Souza, who graduated from the police academy in 1959, described the department as “completely segregated and by any definition extremely racist,” attesting, “Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Chief William H. Parker was god.” Assigned to the University Division (south of USC), he was amazed at the scope of LAPD power over the Black community: “We were a mercenary army unofficially empowered to arrest anyone at any time for any cause.” One cause was violation of the unwritten curfew that excluded Black people from white residential districts after dark. Souza reminisced:

      Black people could not venture north of Beverly or much west of La Brea after dark without a strongly documented purpose. In Hollywood Division, a Negro was an automatic “shake” or field interview with the resultant warrant check or match-up to some vague crime report. A favored location for these shakes was the call box at Outpost Canyon and Mulholland Drive. If there was absolutely no way to arrest the suspect, he was told to start walking.²²

      Almena Loman, a community journalist and newspaper publisher, once summed up the universal experience of law-abiding Blacks in dealings with the LAPD: “They’re rude, overbearing, and they make the simple act of giving you a ticket an exercise in the deprival of your dignity and adulthood.”²³ In July 1960 the NAACP and the ACLU, with attorney Hugh Manes as spokesperson, backed Councilman Roybal’s efforts to revive an initiative from the 1940s to establish a civilian police review board.²⁴ Parker was infuriated by the proposal and unleashed his supporters. The vice president of the Police and Fire Protective League, Captain Ed Davis (a future LAPD chief, 1969–78), denounced it as “shocking” and “an opening wedge for machine politics,” while an angry letter to Roybal warned that his proposal would turn the City of Angels into the “City of Demons.”²⁵

      Parker himself reserved a signature rant for a coroner’s jury in 1960 that found one of his men guilty of “criminal homicide” in the death of a 16-year-old Black high school student. “The same forces and philosophies backing the Castro regime in Cuba,” he warned, were behind the finding.²⁶ Meanwhile he simply ignored the charge made by Miller’s Eagle that the police protected the “Spook Hunters”—white gangs based in the industrial suburbs east of Alameda that also had affiliates in Inglewood and neighborhoods west of Vermont. “The Spooks,” СКАЧАТЬ