Suicide, March 3, Central City
That’s why I can so soaringly summarize the era. I was five years old Then. I’m 67 Now. My superpowers have metamorphosed into magical memory. That’s how you know I can deliver the dish with valid verisimilitude.
I’m out on the prowl. I’ve seen everything that you’re about to see in this book. I’m preemptively precocious. I’m crime-crazed. I’m invisible and crawl through the crazy cracks in my all-L.A. world. I know things. I know this above all else:
It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. We just live in it.
William H. Parker III. The greatest American policeman of the 20th century.
LAPD Chief: ’50 to ’66.
Reformer. Reactionary. Town-tamer. Progressive. Profligate, pious, soused on the sauce.
Bill Parker was Los Angeles ’53. He was a tub-thumping theocrat. He possessed a pulsing passion for the stern rule of law. He was a brilliantly gifted attorney-at-law. He tempered his deeply held belief in the ordered society with a reluctant—but still pointed—regard for civil liberties. He knew the law and understood the limits of aggressive policework. He stamped out monetary corruption in the LAPD and vigorously punished crooked cops. He loathed and feared chaos—in large part because of his alcoholic affliction and chaotic temperament. His authoritarian mind-set was stunningly suited to the implementation of large-scale urban policing. Bill Parker believed in interdicting crime as it occurred and preempting it whenever possible. He deployed proactive methods. Stop potential suspects. Isolate and detain them. Determine their criminal intent or the lack of it. The ordered society comes with a price. That old saw proves itself true: Freedom isn’t free.
Parker enraged civil libertarians. His brusque manner drew heat. He defended his methods with ineluctable logic and sterling wit. Cops are cops. They are ad hoc investigators, disruptors and interdictors of crime. They are not sociologists. They do not judge the perpetrators and victims of crime, nor do they or should they plumb the societal causes that might cause crime to exist. Rigorous enforcement saves lives and reduces the level of depravity and chaos in society—moment to moment, crime to crime, roust to roust. If crime rates are higher in Negro and Mexican enclaves, those indigenous populations will sustain the highest level of interdiction. Said interdiction will provide for a greater degree of safety for the law-abiding majorities of those enclaves. If this creates a sense of persecution, too bad. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. The root causes do not apply. Your right to hit your neighbor ends where his nose begins. Your shitty childhood and the established facts of historical racism do not mean shit. William H. Parker championed the ideal of the ordered society for all citizenries. William H. Parker’s cops interdicted and suppressed too vigorously on some occasions. Overzealous interdictors and suppressors were rebuked and punished or ducked under the radar of detection. William H. Parker surely erred on the side of aggressive policework, but hardly in proportion to the degree that his methods succeeded. Bill Parker and the LAPD—“occupying fascist army?” Bullshit—Then and Now. Crime was—and is—individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. It remains a continuing circumstance that must be interdicted and suppressed—Now as Then. And—why mince words or mince at all—cops must feel free to judiciously kick ass.
L.A. looked gooooood in 1953. Bill Parker’s boys provided full-time cop sanitation. Bill Parker was L.A.’s El Jefe. I was the five-year-old dipshit kid with wild powers. Why mince words? I was a peeper, a voyeur, a baby fiend gassed on it all. I grooved the ordered society with lunar-looped Lutheran fervor and snout-snagged subversive subscents.
Bebop—blazingly blasting, blasphemously black.
Film noir—fractiously fronting its main theme: You’re fucked.
Let’s talk bop. All the heavies were then gigging on South Central Avenue. Bill Parker’s boys surveilled the surface, but did not join the scene. A pity, that. I would have grokked Whiskey Bill, flying on a snootful of jungle juice. Dig it: He’s grooving to mud shark miscegenation at the Club Alabam. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker—no relation—is bleating, blatting, honking and hiccuping “A Night in Tunisia.” Reefer smoke hangs humid. The music is decadently discordant. It’s the sock-it-to-me sonics of interminable chord changes off a recognizable main theme. It’s music for cultured cognoscenti that Bill Parker cannot acknowledge. It takes brains and patience to groove the gist of this shit. It’s the musical equivalent of the chaos Bill Parker deplores.
Five-year-old Ellroy is there, watching the Bird take flight. Everybody’s chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. The place is one big corroded iron lung. I’ve got a spike in my arm, I’m orbiting on Big “H,” I knew I’d write the text for this book one day, so I’ve got my voyeur’s cap on. My babysitter is an LAPD Narco cop named John O’Grady, aka “The Big O.” We drove down to darktown in O’Grady’s narc ark. O’Grady’s notorious. He’s a rogue cop. He’s got a hard-on to hurl hurt on hopheads. Jazz musicians gore his goat. They’re instigators of insolent insurrection—but he instinctively digs their shit. He’s gone too far, already. He popped a drummer named Geordie Hormel and got his dick in the wringer. Hormel was a scion of the Hormel meatpacking clan. He popped William Hopper, later to co-star as Paul Drake on the Perry Mason TV show. Bad Bill Hopper was the son of Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper. Oops.
Bebop is insurrectionist music. It’s all about oppression, musical taboo and breaking with the slavery of established form. De facto segregation is implicitly portrayed in many of the pix in this book. Note the Negroes in the margins of white crime scene photos. They’re bebop balefully eyeballing the upshot of the White Man’s bad bidness, while the LAPD takes charge. The southside pix are Jim Crow de-luxe. Colored folk congregate and gesticulate within them. It’s ’53. The year is Then and a training ground for chants of “Freedom Now!” Those chants will take hold a decade hence. Bill Parker could not, would not, and did not heed them—because they came backed by civil disorder, and he would not acknowledge the solvency of any grievance that caused chaos and served to disrupt the ordered society that he wished so dearly and served so assiduously to preserve. He sought to quash chaos in the ’65 Watts riot and was right to do so. William H. Parker was a visionary law-enforcement officer. William H. Parker was a hidebound drunk. Saul Bellow wrote, “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” Parker did not know that, or chose not to integrate it into his professional thinking. Parker’s inflexible police methods did not cause the ’65 riot, nor was the ’92 riot caused by the actions of his police chief successors or LAPD cops on the street. Violent reaction to any perceived injustice is never permissible within a free society. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale.
You dig the trade-off, don’t you?
We needed Whiskey Bill Parker’s methods in 1953. We need a reinstatement of them today. Parker’s beloved Pueblo Grande built up and out during the time of his stewardship. He could not contain its growth nor curtail its change of complexion. He wanted to keep it the way it was Then. I cannot fault him for that. It’s why I’m writing the text for this book. Then to Now. All notions of the civil contract and the ordered society have been trashed. Where’s Whiskey Bill Parker when we really need him?
Now to Then. We’re back at the Club Alabam. Five-year-old Ellroy’s geezing Big “H.” The Big O is rousting Lenny Bruce for maryjane and making him his sniveling snitch. Bird has flown off the bandstand and has been replaced by tenor sax king Dexter Gordon.
Dex is a six-foot-six mulatto with a billy-goat beard. He’s a whole string of cars on a loooooooooong soul train. He resembles a kold kat you’ll see in a daily bulletin later in this book.
The scurvy skeezix pictured is your ultimate low-life hype. He’s known to “play the saxophone.” He “habituates pool halls and can be found at jam sessions.” He lives off of women. He’s an occasional pimp. He’s a low substrata 459 man—an “acquaintance burglar.”
He befriends people. He wins their trust. He acclimates himself to their pads and makes sure that their doors are left unlocked. He enters the pads while his friends are out and robs the fools blind.
The nomenclature of criminal activity fascinates and enthralls us. This is not 211 armed robbery or 187 homicide. This is the low-end, feed-your-arm, lazy-man hustle. You can laugh at it and still feel good about life on earth. “Acquaintance burglar.” Nobody could make this up. I couldn’t make this up. Wait!!!—isn’t that him, right now?
Yeah, it is. He’s hitting Miles Davis up for a handout, right there at a ringside seat. John O’Grady drops Lenny Bruce like a hot turd and takes off after the cat. Lenny’s at loose ends. He sees me and sidles over. He says, “Hey, Ellroy. What’s shaking, baby?”
I say, “Nuthin’ but the leaves on the motherfuckin’ tree.”
An invigorating dialogue ensues. It’s all bebop, boss bitches and our priapic prospects on this noxious night in L.A. ’53. Lenny tells me there’s a sneak peek at the Wiltern Theater. Dig it: Sterling Hayden in Crime Wave.
It’s L.A.
It’s ’53.
It’s film noir.
Of course—we’ve gotta go.
Bebop soundtracks this book. Film noir serves as our sinematic subtext and kineticized visual cohort. Both genres deride authority and yet ride shotgun to a book that honors authority and extols America’s most august police agency. Film noir has been overanalyzed and scrutinized as much as the LAPD. It’s most immediate cinematic precedent is German Expressionism. It is allegedly a reaction to, and rebuttal of, excesses of the postwar Red Scare. The latter is both true and false and must be judged as philosophically self-serving. The Hollywood Ten pilloried is small potatoes when compared to Stalin’s postwar purges and iron curtain aggression. Film noir is most tellingly a reaction to the 30-year transit of horror that began with World War I and lasted through V-J Day and the beginning of America’s noble effort to resuscitate Europe with the Marshall Plan. 1953 found us 40 years into an all-new world terror. War, famine, totalitarian alliance, hundreds of millions dead. War profiteering, coups, overthrows, the A-bomb. Refugee film talent, adrift in Hollywood—many artists Jewish and left-wing. The Russian left betrayed them as Hitler rounded up and murdered them. Now, they’re in Hollywood—working on cheap-o crime flicks and suffused with justifiably paranoid heebie-jeebies. The film studios are here. It’s cheap to work on location here. The crime film has a built-in latitude that allows for social critique. Thus, film noir is primarily L.A.-based and oozes pervert potential. Thus, any police film shot on location in L.A. is implicitly a film about the LAPD. Thus, this book targets film noir aficionados. Thus, this book is seamlessly compatible to film noir. Thus, five-year-old Ellroy and Lenny Bruce are jungled-up at the Wiltern Theater for André De Toth’s Crime Wave.
De Toth had solid film noir cred. He was European. He lost an eye in a Nazi-Commie street brawl, circa ’28, and wore a rakish eye patch. Sterling Hayden stars in Crime Wave.
Hayden was a onetime pinko. He ratted out fellow travelers to government committees and harbored unnecessary guilt. Said guilt did not stop him from going for the gelt in his portrayal of an LAPD bruiser.
Hayden’s Lieutenant Sims is a vivid explicator of Bill Parker’s mission of interdiction. He’s maladjusted and vexed from a recent withdrawal from cigarettes. He’s uncannily intelligent. His physical presence is on a par with many of the cops pictured in this book. Street presence promotes suppression without the use of force. The implied threat of “we’ll kick your ass” carries more pop than asses kicked wholesale and packs a humanist punch that even pinkos and peaceniks can groove. The LAPD was an ass-kicking entity in 1953. The LAPD kicked my ass on three notable occasions in the late ’60s and early ’70s and stretched me onto the straight and narrow. Read these words and skim the photographs that follow this text. You may well make a startling connection. It may prompt you to wonder what came first: the chicken or the egg.
Were the police photographs collected in this book suggested by the film noir style, or was film noir a stylistic offshoot of cop pix?
Crime Wave suggests a reciprocal synchronicity. It was shot in ’52 and released in ’54. It’s got that transitional look that so informs LAPD ’53. The old L.A.’s getting a modernist makeover. Spaceship cars are on the rise, humpbacked cars are on the wane. Buildings are going low, flat and angular. Isolated structures stand out, juxtaposed against vacant lots. Chinatown looks freshly painted and garishly redone. City streets look significantly wider than they do today. That’s because of a scarcity of parked cars and passing motorists. Crime Wave bids the viewer to watch this—L.A.’s on the rise, and what you’re seeing won’t last much longer.
Crime Wave is our bebopped sister flick. It’s as kinetic as LAPD ’53 is gorgeously static. The action carries us through nonstop days and nights. The film has a “hopped-up/fuck sleep/we’re out to score” feel. It’s all roadblocks, APBs, LAPD squadrooms. Oooooooooooooh, Daddy-O—the heat is on!!!!! Crashed-out cons are out to take down a Glendale B of A. The heist is masterminded by noted film noir greaseball Ted de Corsia. The hunky young Charles Bronson is Bad Ted’s aide-de-camp. They need a skilled pilot to fly them down to Mexico, post-heist. Ex-con Gene Nelson fits that bill. Gene’s shacked up with his she-wolf wife, Phyllis Kirk. He’s a small-plane pilot trying to go straight. “Straight” doesn’t quite fit Gene Nelson. He’s a tad minty and seems unequal to the She-wolf. Nelson was a onetime Broadway dancer. That marks him suspect from the get-go.
Crime Wave abounds with psychopathic bad behavior. The great Timothy Carey chews scenery as a lunatic lech out to loin-lock the She-wolf. Lieutenant Sims lets the heist go down and busts it up in progress. Death reigns in the end. Sims cuts Queen Gene and the She-wolf loose to return to their shitty lives. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag and tosses it.
Ooooooooooooh, Daddy-O—there’s that film noir rush! The ambiguous gesture, the futile undercurrent, the pervading knowledge that the whole game is rigged. Winner take nothing. No exit, baby. Film noir makes us smug even as it belittles our status as human beings. Who gives a shit? It’s L.A. ’53, and we’re making the scene.
Crime Wave is a tight flick and a vivid visual toast to L.A. Then. It’s the ultimate companion piece to LAPD ’53—because it codifies period archetypes and gives you what the book can’t.
The LAPD Detective Bureau at City Hall.
It’s open all nite.
It’s small compared to every other squad bay that you’ve seen in movies.
We tried to dig up archival squadroom shots—and failed. Crime Wave delivers the goods. André De Toth shot his film on the actual locations. Note the tightly pressed office spaces and low ceilings. Note the crammed-in desks and the welter of night creatures smooshed up on hard wooden benches. Groove it—there’s NO EXIT!!!!! It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and your ass is fucking grass!!!!! There’s Lieutenant Sims, played by six-foot-five Sterling Hayden. He’s having a shit day. He’s got the big bone for the She-wolf, but she just slinked off with her homo hubby. Sims is looking for a scapegoat punching bag—and YOU fit the bill!!!!!
It’s film noir.
You’re fucked.
The green room up at San Quentin calls your name.
Vous êtes l’Étranger.
You are Camus’ The Stranger—striated and stripped bare. The gas chamber looms.
Why do we live for this shit?
In large part, it’s this:
It allows us to time travel. We’re back in a less circumspect time, constrained by rigid laws that we believe in but violate with a wink. Booze and tobacco are not yet demonized. Sex has not been overscrutinized, debunked and vulgarized past comprehension. We’re hip, slick and cool. We’re denizens of a private world within the real world. The constraints and moral censures of 1953 protect us. We’re time travelers with the gift of retrospection. We know what happened in the end and feel securely at home. “Home” is film noir’s fatalistic worldview—which condones our bad conduct, because the game is rigged. You can’t go home again, but art allows us to linger. I’ll never shack with the She-wolf at the Beverly Hills Hotel—but the photographs in LAPD ’53 place me within the context to dream.
Every photograph in this book is a flashpoint rendering of the chaos that Whiskey Bill Parker sought to suppress. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Our flashpoints are a daily occurrence. It’s all juxtaposition.
Juxtapose Crime Wave against the LAPD propaganda vehicle Dragnet. The former gives us the proportionate topography of 1953. The latter gives us the language and buttoned-up professionalism of the LAPD, exactly as Bill Parker wished to see it portrayed. Cops spew penal code numbers. The number 459 connotes a panty-sniffing hot-prowl burglar, out to peep brassieres draped over a bathtub ledge. Maybe the lady of the pad is sleeping in the next room. The hot-prowl man can snatch her purse and catch a glimpse of skin. Of course, Dragnet left the good shit to your imagination. The number 187 connotes a stiff and demands the explication of motive. Dragnet seeks to render the pix in this book prosaic. Crime Wave renders them brutally poetic—because it provides us with the ever-vivid context of the time that Dragnet does not. We look at pictures because we’ve looked at pictures and we’ve learned how to look at pictures along the way. “Every picture tells a story” is bullshit. Captioned pictures provide perfunctory vignettes and urge us to turn the page. Great pictures urge us to create our own stories. Pictures depicting horror and pathos make us look once, turn away and look again. Dragnet was TV pabulum. It was moderately entertaining and whitewashed the menace and brute glamour of policework. Jack Webb’s Joe Friday was a snooze compared to Sterling Hayden’s Lieutenant Sims. You have a book in your hands. Stunning photographs are crying out, “Look at me and ponder what this means.” Bebop, film noir, slinky she-wolves. What’s the overall connection? It’s art and sex in a time of stratification and repression. Bill Parker was our main man Then. He’s keeping the L.A. streets safe—and in that capacity he’s granting art and sex and the two commingled an astoundingly subversive power. Bill Parker’s our main man Now. Art and sex are in the shitter, because subversion has been branded, Internetted and malignantly monetized. Movies and TV shows are visual aids to help us more cogently appreciate still pictures. The converse equally applies. L.A. Now is vilely explicit. It’s all safe-sex billboards and glittering light displays for alcoholic beverages and apocalyptic feature films. L.A. Then was elliptical and implicit. Look once, look away, look again. Compose a story as you view those feet sticking out from under that morgue sheet. Glimpse the swervy details of sudden catastrophe and the moment of police intervention. Pretend that you’re viewing these pix in their historical moment. You cannot digitally alter, enhance, or denude them. Your sole options are look again or look away.
Newspapers taught us how to look Then. Evil deeds, bad behavior, snappy prose and pix. Newsprint pixels obscured details and whetted our appetite for high-contrast black and white. The L.A. Times, L.A. Herald, L.A. Examiner and Mirror News. Big local coverage. Crime stories serialized as breaking leads accrued. Jazzy murder cases recounted—from the time the body is found to the moment the killer sucks gas in the green room at Big Q.
Accompanied by news pix. Bodies tucked under sheets, with morgue tags hooked to big toes. Arrows pointing to death houses, pads, cribs, shacks. Stern cops attending hellhound fiends in extremis. What Don DeLillo called “the neon epic of Saturday night.”
One crime ruled the L.A. dailies in 1953. Burbank caught the squeal and brought in LAPD for more muscle. We’re bebopping back to 3/9/53. I’ve got the words, the LAPD archive’s got the photos. That big black arrow is pointing to a pad on Parkman Avenue. It’s the Mabel Monohan snuff.
You know this caper. It inspired the Hollywood weeper I Want to Live! Susan Hayward wins the Oscar. She burns in the green room for a crime she did not commit. Fuck that shit!!!!! Barbara Graham was a stone junkie and a stone killer!!!!! She deserved to fry!!!!! The wages of sin are death!!!!!
Here’s the real gist. I am not speaking with forked tongue, readers! I am telling it like it is!
Mabel Monohan was yo old gray-haired granny. Her son-in-law was an L.A./Vegas gambler named Tutor Scherer. A bullshit rumor circulated throughout the underworld. Said rumor: Mabel Monohan always held a hundred G’s to help the cat out of scrapes. It was apocryphal jive and urban legend. But two vicious slime-bags named Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo believed it.
These cocksuckers were as evil as evil gets. They were strongarm 211 men and coldhearted killers. They went on a spree in the gold country, up near Sacramento. They slaughtered a local family for six grand in grocery store receipts. Dad, mom, three children. One kid survived. Perkins and Santo shot them and dumped them in the trunk of dad’s car.
Perkins and Santo—evil motherfuckers. Now, they’re hipped on Mabel M’s hundred G’s. That’s a score—and they’ve only got to snuff one old lady to get it.
The humps round up a home-invasion gang. There’s a deep sea diver on the skids named John True. There’s a 211 pro named Baxter Shorter. Perkins and Santo are jivedup with a hype/ho/gang cooze named Barbara Graham. Oooooooooh, my rasty readers—she’s got fallen-patrician good looks, a calculating hophead mien—and she probably wears high black boots and nothing else with Dorothy Malone panache!!!!! Oh, yeah—five-year-old Ellroy’s got it baaaaaaaaaad for Bad Babs!!!!!
Here’s the plan:
Babs knocks on Mabel M’s door. She acts distraught, reports a traffic accident and asks to use the phone. The good-hearted Mabel opens the door a crack. The muscle boys crash in.
It’s cake from there on. They squeeze Mabel. She forfeits the gelt. They kill her and get away clean.
Yeah, it seems sound. But—there’s no gelt. It’s a zero-sum proposition.
Mabel opens the door. Barbara Graham ladles on the boo-hoo. Our boys crash in behind her. Mabel delivers the dish: there’s no hundred G’s.
Babs pistolwhips her. Santo and Perkins beat on her. Baxter Shorter and John True look on, horrified. They weren’t up for this.
Shorter flees. He splits to a pay phone and calls an ambulance. He reports an accident and mistakenly spiels the wrong address. Mabel Monohan dies. The gang disperses. Burbank PD grabs the squawk. LAPD provides backup. A massive manhunt begins.
Underworld informants come forth. This crime horrified a slew of low-tide losers eager to violate gangland snitch codes. The cops clock that hundred-grand rumor and soon peg it as the source of the crime. And—the grapevine’s buzzing that two plug uglies have been talking up a Mabel Monohan score. Their names: Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo.
An APB goes out.
Perkins, Santo and Bad Babs go underground.
The fuzz grab John True and Baxter Shorter. They turn snitch and blab state’s evidence. Perkins and Santo kidnap Shorter from his pad on Bunker Hill, drive him to nearby mountains and whack him. Tips flood the Burbank PD and LAPD switchboards. One proves valid. Cops raid a nearby lust nest/hideout. Perkins, Santo and Bad Babs are caught in a thigh-throbbing threeway!!!
Homicide, May 6, El Monte
The case is a sinsation. It gets huge ink and local TV play. Barbara Graham nests in stir and launches a hankie-holding campaign to save herself from the green room. It better work, sister—J. Miller “Gas Chamber” Leavy is prosecuting the case for the L.A. D.A.’s Office. He’s the Kapital Kase Kahuna—and he comes to win.
There’s the prelude to the trial. Bad Babs waxes weepy and protests her innocence. She’s got a little boy from an absentee marriage. He’s good for beaucoup boo-hoo. Behind-the-scenes machinations begin.
LAPD brings in a rookie cop to soft-soap Babs and get her to admit Murder One. He’s a handsome, heavy-hung Harry—just Babs’s type. No soap—Babs don’t dish shit. The fuzz fear that Babs will get pregnant, in an effort to thwart the hot seat. Any and all men visiting her are carefully monitored. It’s rumored that Babs goes lez in stir. A bitchin’ babe fighting a drunk-driving beef is enlisted to seduce and entrap her. Racy napkin notes bounce back and forth in the women’s jail. Alas—there’s no Sapphic seduction, no furtive footage, no audiotape and no snitch. Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo go to trial.
Hear those low chords pop pianissimo? It’s the funeral march from Chopin’s Second Sonata. J. Miller Leavy’s coming in for the kill.
The trial proceeds. It’s a rout. Graham, Perkins and Santo are convicted and sentenced to death. The green room wails their names.
Babs sticks to her innocent-woman-wronged tale. She mainlines public sympathy. Her little boy is a great P.R. foil. San Quentin, death row, protracted appeals. The green room on 6/3/55.
Babs admits her guilt to Warden Harley Teets the preceding night. Perkins holds his shit. Sissified sinner Jack Santo bitch-squeals fo his momma.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhh—the pellets drop. Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh—that burnt-almond smell and exsanguination.
It’s the ugliest crime story I know. Check the police bulletins reprinted in this book. Scrutinize Graham, Perkins and Santo. Read their faces. Look for indications that they possess such sheer cruelty. Read their eyes. You’ll see nothing but attitude and emptiness. You’re looking at the cold heart of L.A. ’53.
But hurt hearts, hot hearts and hard hearts pulse more prominently in our Pueblo Grande. It’s the throb of the boomtown masses. It begets epidemic opportunism. L.A.’s building up and out. The San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys are exponentially increasing growth zones. Pastel-painted hotbox huts and faux ranch houses—more and more built every day. No down payment. G.I. Bill loans. Returning World War II and Korean War vets hitting L.A. in swarms. The two valleys run heat-hazed and humid. These cheap new cribs absorb and trap heat. Sometimes that heat gets to you and unleashes this kraaaaaaazy jungle juju. A cat named Fredericks chops up his wife and buries parts of her in his backyard. He dumps the bulk of her in the trunk of his car and takes his kids on vacation. They know that momma’s missing, but they don’t know that she’s closer than they think. Dig the photo spray in this book. Note the cops wielding shovels in their shirtsleeves. Note the size of the pad. It’s roughly the dimension of a POW camp sweatbox. It’s the same size and same style as the cribs all around it. No down payment. Easy credit terms. It’s a compression cave. The Korean commies are shrieking gobbledyGOOK and want you to repugnantly renounce the U.S.A. Your old lady’s jabbering in the next room—and you start thinking KNIFE. L.A.’s an opportunist’s zone. Murder feels like an opportunity. The walls are closing in on you. It’s fucking hot. The houses all around you look just like yours. You could chop her and get away with it. You watch Dragnet every Thursday night. You know how the L.A. cops act and think. You know you can fool them.
The valleys are hot. The L.A. opportunities are hotter. Fuddy-duddy Mayor Fletch Bowron is out. Gladhanding growth czar Norris Poulson is in. There’s talk of major league baseball teams to oust the Gilmore Field bush leaguers. There’s Wrigley Field down in darktown—a mingle zone for Whitey and the Black Man. Colored folk stick to themselves, whatever their color. Negroes stick south of Washington Boulevard and east of the U.S.C. campus. Mexicans inhabit Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights and far-flung Pacoima. The Japanese are more widely assimilated—despite their status as our World War II foes. This suits Whiskey Bill Parker—because it serves the greater good of the ordered society. The emerging L.A. freeway system is hemming it all in. We’re two freeways in, with many more slated to go. The Arroyo Seco has been running since ’40 and links downtown to Pasadena. The just-completed Hollywood Freeway links downtown to Hollywood and bleeds into Route 101 northbound. “Bleed” says it all. Freeway systems are handy escape routes for hit-and-run armed robbers and all criminals of the smash-and-grab/go-in-hard-and-stupid school. Freeway on and off ramps are nesting spots for winos and body-dump spots for itinerant killers.
There’s the issue of elevated perspective, as it pertains to this book. There’s L.A. Now, there’s L.A. Then. More-recent crime scene pix feature the classic freeway overpass shot of a dead dude splattered on the pavement. You don’t get that in the L.A. Then of LAPD ’53. We’re dealing with flatland and hillside L.A., linked by surface streets. The relative absence of freeways explains the lack of zoom-lens, wide-angle, high-vantage-point, Hollywood-Sign-in-the-background art pix in this august volume. We’re in tight. The photo framing replicates the L.A. of the time. We assume limitless growth, we’ve engaged the concept, we know we’ve got growing room. There’s valleys to populate, mountain ranges to plunder, slum-land to bulldoze. All that is horizontal. Don’t forget the vertical. City Hall is the tallest building in L.A. ’53, and it’s no skyscraper. That’s why growth czar Mayor Norris Poulson is always smiling that year. He knows that L.A. will get a major league ball club sooner or later—but he doesn’t know that he’ll have to pull a huge landgrab and evict impoverished Mexicans in order to break ground for the home field. Whiskey Bill Parker is always smiling in ’53. Why? He’s got L.A. right where he wants it—which is exactly the way it is Now—back when Then was Now and there was no Then and Now between ’53 and ’15. It was Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and we just lived in it Then. Now, it’s 2015—and Whiskey Bill’s 48 years muerto. And L.A. Now is beyond cosmetic repair and control—while L.A. Then is a wiggy land of naiveté, beauty and stratification.
Nostalgia. You indulge the practice for all the right and wrong reasons.
Police nostalgia.
Why are pictures of dead people at crime scenes so beautiful?
Because they’re always somebody else, and it’s unlikely that we’re going to get shivved at a flophouse on East 5th Street. Because the accretion of filmic detail suggests a world both akin to and apart from our own. Because the subconscious roils with buried images and synaptic fragments culled from racial memory and our lifetimes aswirl in the ever-evolving spiritus mundi that we call History—and to touch the borders of horrific life Then affirms our own earthly transits of Now, as it reaffirms them as both luminously unique and flat-affect banal—because in the end we are all united as one being possessed of one soul, and in the end art is the merger of the living and the dead, enjoined in reconciliation.
I believe that the theocratic William H. Parker would have understood this metaphysic. I believe that he likened his LAPD stewardship to that of a Utopian ruler—all the while knowing that said Utopia would ultimately ripen, soften and decay into the ever-expanding, overpopulated, billboard-blighted shithole that is L.A. Now. Parker saw the beginning of the descent and erroneously chalked it up to rowdy black folks enlivened by dope, watermelon and rebellion. He made petulant and intemperate remarks, racist by all sane standards, and permanently besmirched his sterling legacy. William H. Parker was Il Gattopardo—L.A.’s equivalent of the Sicilian patriarch in Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s novel and Luchino Visconti’s film. The Leopard’s world changed out from under him. There was always trouble in paradise—and he superbly interdicted and suppressed it. Sicily, 1830. L.A., 1953. It was Bill Parker’s town. We just lived in it. And in those early days of Parker’s reign, the entire populace lived swaddled in properly militaristic and patriarchal safety. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. The crimes so artfully pictured on these pages are equally balanced between rank predation and heartbreaking human folly. William H. Parker was a heartbreakingly stern and rigid man with the grandiose and chaotic inner life common to drunks. He accounted himself only to God and lacked the earthly quality of pity. This vacancy buttressed his astonishingly fierce devotion to task and blinded him to the portents of change swirling all around him. His tragic flaw was inextricably linked to the source of his greatness. William H. Parker would have admired the cold proficiency of the photographs in this book. William H. Parker would deride their sad humanity.
Our photographs largely depict low-rent L.A. and the sad demography of trouble in paradise. The viewer must supply the expanded context of Greater L.A., buffed and gleaming. The streets were wide. There was no bumper-to-bumper traffic to blitz egress and spatial perspective. The Spanish colonial building style predominated. The lack of tall buildings made the bright blue sky fall flat, in the manner of Bill Parker’s native South Dakota prairie. The Pacific Ocean and a long mountain range enclosed us to the west and north. The south and east were nothing but sheer exploitable land.
My mother first saw L.A. in 1938. She was wowed by it and thought she might be happy here. She was murdered in L.A. 20 years later. William H. Parker died eight years on. Ciao, Gattopardo. We all owe you more tears than you shall see us pay.
The funeral line ran hundreds of cars and at least two miles long. It was 1966 and a new Then much different than the 1953 Then of this book. I watched the hearse move westward on Wilshire Boulevard. I was 18 years old. Wilshire still sparkled but did not quite gleam.
LAPD was out in force. There were thousands of blue uniforms. A great many American flags swirled.
Time toss. 1953, 1966, 2015. Pictorial history as a shared stream of consciousness. The blue forge. The red, white and blue. Progress brings devolution. It may yet create a fresh wave of interdictive constraint. Only our one soul united remains. †
MARCH 6
Here’s a change-up pitch. It’s a welcome relief from all our preceding gore. We’re inside the chambers of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. Note the dark wood and marble, the kids’ Christmas drawings on the walls—holdovers from the ’52 holiday season. They backdrop strange juju on 3/5/53.
It started with a zoning hearing in the Hall of Records. Mr. Sam Emerson and his wife requested a zone change for their subdivision in the far-flung L.A. County hamlet of Palmdale. Their request was denied by a vote of four to one. That one pro-Emerson vote was cast by Supervisor Raymond V. Darby. Yeah, Supervisor Darby thought that the Emersons were within their legal rights—but he told Mr. Emerson this:
“All you want to do is sell this land to a lot of suckers.”
Emerson demanded an apology.
Darby refused and said, “Well, I think you’re a nasty person.”
Emerson launched a right hand and clipped Darby on the chin. Darby teetered, but did not fall.
Bailiffs seized Emerson. Darby made them release him. Darby went to his office and began breathing hard. He soon collapsed, unconscious. Two firemen were summoned and administered oxygen. Darby was wheeled out on a stretcher.
The man had a history of heart disease and a bad case of arterial sclerosis. Mr. Emerson’s blow most likely sent him into a state of extreme agitation and shock. He died in the hospital later that day. A coroner’s inquest ruled Darby’s death to be homicidal. Legal proceedings were mandated. Emerson was ultimately exonerated.
Palmdale now houses 157,000 dusty souls. It was a desert dump Then. It remains one Now. †
NOVEMBER 26 & 11
Here’s a twosky—both from November ’53. We’ve got close-quarters gunfire at two locations, both fleabag hotels—one in East L.A., one in Hollyweird.
The East L.A. job was out of Narco Division. Detectives K. C. Soderman and Robert Conrad were prowling the premises of 2055 East 7th Street. They were searching for dope stashes among the hotel’s residents. A male Mexican named Edward Gonzalez aroused their suspicion. They found two pieces of white cotton—common dope fiend paraphernalia—in his shirt pocket, along with a cap of Big “H” wadded into a chewing gum wrapper.
Gonzalez said, “I got to see my wife and kids.” He shoved Soderman and took off running. Soderman and Conrad yelled for him to halt. He kept running. Conrad’s gun discharged and sent a shot into Gonzalez’s side. Gonzalez hit the floor. The bullet sluiced through him and hit the wall.
Soderman called for a meat wagon. They ultimately booked Gonzo and two more male Mexicans on suspicion of State Narcotics Code violations.
It was an in and out, clean caper. It’s 1953. That was Then. The world was cleaner than it is Now. A minor dope bust, a single shot fired. The fleabag hotel looks uncommonly clean. A police detective is showing where that one bullet hole from a minor dope bust hit the wall.
That’s thorough. That’s conscientious. That’s sincere.
Our sister photo shows the upshot of close-quarters grief at Hollywood’s dog-dick Padre Hotel. A squawk hits the Hollywood Station switchboard. A man is threatening his estranged wife on the premises. Detectives Clay Hunt and William McRoberts are sent to investigate.
Psycho estranged husband Robert Stewart attacks them on the dark second-floor hallway. He pulls a roscoe and zings out several off-the-mark shots. Hunt and McRoberts fire back and nail Stewart in the arms and neck. Check out this foto: A detective and two patrolmen are marking bullet holes on a wall.
Stewart was rushed to County General and held in the jail ward. He talked to LAPD Detectives A. W. Hubka and J. E. Barrick before he kicked. He told them he did not intend to harm his wife—only to shoot himself in her presence. †
APRIL 14
We’re back to that “walls-are-closing-in-on-me” job. Richard and Ruth Hilda Fredericks had three kids. Richard was an office clerk. Ruth Hilda stayed home and tended the rug rats. The marriage went bad in the classic ticking-time-bomb manner. Ruth Hilda split and got a cocktail-waitress gig. That was September ’52. She spent a short interval out of the crib and foolishly returned. A doctor from Richard’s place of employment huddled with her, concerned. Fellow employees reported that Richard had been acting strangely. One of them found a gun in his locker. Ruth Hilda and the doctor conferred. Ruth Hilda dropped a dime on Richard and had him committed to the psycho ward at L.A. County General Hospital.
Richard did a quick observation jolt and was cut loose. Tick, tick, tick. The walls are closing in. Now, it’s January 7, ’53. Richard Fredericks could not take it one moment longer. He picked up a croquet mallet and beat Ruth Hilda dead.
He cut off her hands and buried them in the backyard.
He dumped Ruth Hilda’s handless body in the trunk of his car and drove south to Mexico. He took his kids with him. He dumped Ruth Hilda in a gulch off the Ensenada coast road. Ruth Hilda remained there, tagged as a Juanita Doe. A sharp-witted neighbor found Ruth Hilda’s absence fishy and tattled Richard to a pal on the LAPD. Richard had driven his brood to his mom’s place in Maplewood, New Jersey, in the meantime. LAPD launched a missing persons investigation. A detective was working a Jersey-based lead on another job at the time—and had Richard escorted out his mom’s pad by the New Jersey cops. He did not suspect Murder One. He expected reticent Richard to remain reticent during his visit to the local hoosegow. Richard revealed the deadly details—and immediately confessed the snuff as self-defense.
J’accuse, J’accuse—at trial he claimed that Ruth Hilda went after him with a kitchen knife. The jury bought it. Richard was sentenced to one to ten years in prison. That was a rank injustice! And—he got a soft berth at Chino, where soul sax Dexter Gordon jammed regularly with other dope-jailed jazz greats. The Fredericks job was a gas chamber bounce if ever there was one! I can only attribute the namby-pamby sentence to misguided empathy on the judge’s part. He was probably prone to night sweats and visions himself. He probably knew that walls-closing-in-on-you gestalt all too well. †
JULY 17
The eternal triangle. The infernal triangle, in this case.
Our crime occurred on 7/17/53 and left all three points of the triangle muerto. It’s a psycho cop scenario with those peeper overtones so dear to my heart. The location was the Veterans Administration Hospital parking lot in West L.A. My dad kicked at the V.A. Hospital in ’65. I was 17. Dad’s last words to me were, “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you”—a legacy that I have fulfilled with mixed results.
Back to 7/17/53. It’s nite. Our tragic troika is converging. Our licentious lover boy is Eugene J. Henry. The straying frau is Harriet Alden. The peeper-gunman is a Valley Division traffic officer named Don M. Alden.
Ooooohhhhh, Daddy-O—five-year-old Ellroy’s got a jive-jumping jones for this dame—she’s dark-haired, wears glasses and could surely dispense the spanking that this tumescently torqued toddler so richly deserves!!!!! Too bad, Ellroy—she’s sitting in a parked car with her beetle-browed boyfriend, and Don Alden—in his LAPD uniform—is creeping up on them in the dark.
He gets to the car. He aims his service revolver in and fires. Eugene Henry is instantly killed. Harriet takes a head shot, gets out and runs toward the administration building, with her hopped-up hubby in hot pursuit.
He corners her. He kills her and kills himself. It made the papers for a mystical microsecond and quickly faded out. Whiskey Bill Parker probably pulled strings. Dragnet was his propaganda baby Then. This pile of postulant publicity surely gored his goat.
Three dead in a hot heartbeat.
Harriet and Gene might not even have been lovers. Intent and vibe do not constitute adultery. We’d all be mortally fucked if they did. †
OCTOBER 4
Ralph T. Avery was a hot-prowl man. He peeped, he prowled, he surveilled, he surreptitiously entered. He targeted houses occupied by unmarried women—career girls’ cribs where young females lived alone or jungled up to save bread on rent. Hot-prowl men are snarky sneak thieves and pulsating pervs. B&E is a sizzling sex kick for these freaks. They’re burglars at base. They often graduate and become full-time rape-o’s. They prowl by nite and shamefully shatter the sanctity of peaceful abodes. L.A. by nite is their refuge. They live in sexual urgency. They’re low-tide predators. Forty clams in a woman’s purse is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig score. Maybe there’s soiled panties in a hamper. Maybe there’s fenceable jewels. Maybe there’s a young ginch sweet enough to take.
LAPD had Avery under surveillance. He lived in Hollyweird, in a perv pad near Melrose and Wilton. The cops suspected him of a score of 459/sex assaults. They ran spot tails on him and watched him case pads on the verge of L.A.’s southside. He finally hit a house at 2714 South Normandie. Three sisters lived there: Shirley, Lucille and Catherine Farrage.
Avery found a ladder in the backyard. He placed it under a dining room window and entered the house. LAPD Detectives J. E. Barrick, W. L. Jackson and L. G. Kohler watched from outside. Avery flashlight-prowled the house. He stayed inside for a short spell and came back down the ladder. The cops yelled out for him to HALT!
The puto perv BOLTED. He vaulted a fence. The cops knocked down the fence in pursuit. Avery leaped another fence, hotfooted it and made for a neighboring driveway. The cops opened fire and nailed him. Avery went down face-first. Let’s reprise the great Don DeLillo’s line. Avery died as a bit player in “the neon epic of Saturday night.” †
JUNE 9
Here’s a rough one. There’s one ray of hope. Sergeant Harry Hansen’s on the job. That’s him pointing to the chalk floor outline and the single word “head.”
Hansen was the lead detective on the celebrated Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia case of January ’47. That case remains unsolved and hovers as Hansen’s idée fixe. He’s a great detective. If anyone can solve the Dahlia snuff, it’s Homicide Harry. Now, it’s 6/8/53—and he’s got a fucking hybrid baffler.
It’s a strong-arm liquor store 211/187 homicide. The robber-killer’s still at large. Here’s the gist—off the record, on the Q.T. and very hush-hush.
The liquor store is situated at Olympic Boulevard and Alvarado. The area was run-down in 1953—but it’s a third-world hellhole Now. Note the interior photos. The store sells rotgut juice. There’s Gallo Muscatel, Regal Pale and Eastside Old Tap Lager beers. There’s also nutritious corn chips, candy bars and salted nuts on sale. The proprietor/victim is a man named Joseph James Reposo. He’s a white male American/age 73.
The caper went down on 5/29/53. Reposo was behind the counter. The presently unknown suspect entered the store and asked him for a bottle of scotch. Reposo proffered a jug. The suspect said it was too expensive. Reposo turned to grab a cheaper bottle. The suspect hit him from behind several times. Reposo slumped to the floor, unconscious. He would later describe the suspect as:
White male American/40 to 45/5′ 9″, 145 lbs, sandy hair. Clad in light gray suit/gray hat.
Reposo was discovered behind the counter a half hour later and was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital. The suspect glommed $25.51 in cash register cash, $61.00 in wallet cash, Reposo’s pocket watch and an elk’s head watch chain.
Reposo was interviewed at the hospital. He looked at a large run of mugshots and did not see the suspect. He stated that a blonde woman loitered in the store on the two days preceding the robbery. She was a white female American/about 28/5′ 2″, 110 lbs. Reposo thought she might have been casing the store and booted her out. Officers led him through a female mug run. Reposo did not see the blonde.
Joseph James Reposo died on 6/8/53. His watch was pawned at Cecil Loan on 6/23/53. The pawner supplied an obvious pseudonym. He signed a pawn ticket. Four hundred handwriting specimens were subsequently checked, with negative results. The case remains unsolved and open.
And deadpan ghastly and blunt-force blunt. Joseph James Reposo, slaughtered for $150 in cash and merchandise. †
JUNE 26
211 P.C.—redux.
The Roost rocked. It was a juke joint on Temple and Rampart—a mile west of downtown L.A. A gambler named Les Bruneman was rubbed out there in ’37. It was a mob hit. The triggermen drew life terms. Now, it’s 16 years later. It’s January ’53. Two out-of-town punks named Glenn Kingsbury and Robert O’Leary decide to clout the joint. LAPD Vice Officers R. D. Long and E. P. Norman are running tavern checks, catastrophically concurrent.
Combustion!
Long covered the front. Norman covered the back. They let the heist go down. Kingsbury and O’Leary burst out the front door. Long told the papers that he yelled for them to halt—but that wasn’t how the game was played in those long-gone/dearly-missed years of yore. Yeah, baby! Officer R. D. Long opened fire and put Kingsbury on the night train to the Big Nowhere!!!!!
Kingsbury stumbled into the Roost and dropped dead, while neighborhood nabobs noshed fried chicken and jacked gin fizzes beside his body. O’Leary sped off in the getaway sled. Officer E. P. Norman radioed in a report. A juvie car chased O’Leary—but the cocksucker ex-caped. He was later apprehended in San Francisco.
Dig the corresponding photographs. They portray a heartwarming moment of racial unity in the Jim Crow ’50s. Black folks are hobnobbing with Mr. Charlie outside the Roost. Inside, white man Kingsbury is covered by a light-colored cotton shroud that somewhat resembles a Klan sheet. Witnesses are bellied up to the bar. It’s an all-male aggregation. Many of the men are smiling. Man, this is a stag nite deluxe!!!!!!!!!! †
NOVEMBER 4
211 P.C.—re-redux.
We’re at the crazy crossroads of Hollywood and Vine. There’s a gin mill called the Melody Lane, affixed with a front door shaped like a keyhole. The door opens into a dank dive and despair den for the determined dipso. And, right now, two determined heist men are taking it down.
They’re more like heist punks, two years out of New York’s Elmira Reformatory. We’ve got Edward Stewart Cogovan and Harold La Verne Riddle, both from Lockport, New York. They were pulling heists and burglaries back east, but they felt cop heat breathing down their scrawny punk necks. They thought L.A. would be Eeeeasy Street. Punks—don’t you know that it’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and there’s a bounty on dipshits like you?
Cogovan and Riddle enter the bar. A sharp-eyed Marine notices that they’re armed and buzzes the fuzz. Officers R. L. Newsletter and David Tutor arrive. And, unknown to the punks, two detectives are lurking out on the sidewalk.
We’re back inside the Melody Lane. Recognition passes—punks to cops. The punks disarm the cops and march them outside at gunpoint. One of the two lurking detectives is Sergeant Don Grant. Dig it: Fireworks pop!
We know Grant. He responded to the man-in-the-swimsuit suicide later in ’53. Remember—infamous “Red Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman accused Grant of beating on him at Hollywood Station. Grant would later watch Chessman suck gas in San Quentin’s green room. Presently, Demon Don’s trigger finger is itching.
Bam! Grant fires. Cogovan gets it in the neck. Riddle is riddled in the chest. Passersby on crowded Holly-weird Boulevard scatter and shriek. The punks are disarmed, cuffed and rushed to the jail ward at County General. Kidnapping charges are filed.
The punks survived. Police teletypes revealed that Cogovan shot his father to death in ’48 and did that juvie jolt in Elmira. The punks were wanted for the recent punk antics in New York—and had only been in L.A. four hours at the time of the shootout.
It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. Pistol-packing punks, verboten. †
DECEMBER 14
You thought the “Rat Pack” was a classy clique comprised of Frank Sinatra, Dino Martin, Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford, didn’t you? Take another think, pendejos. See that cheezy East L.A. niteklub interior? See Ramon “Mundo” Pacheco, dead in the alley behind it? Pacheco’s a pachuco, pendejos. The L.A. Examiner is hot on the trail of Rat Pack Violence.
It’s youth gang intrigue. Malevolent Mexican punks are on the prowl. Five punkolas with a grudge against puto Pacheco stabbed and beat him to death.
The grief began in the niteklub and spilled out to the alley. There were shitloads of eyeball witnesses who told a coroner’s inquest they saw nada. District Attorney S. Ernest Roll thought they’d been coerced into silence.
The Pacheco snuff was the apogee of a Rat Pack Crime Wave. Five tuffs bottle-slashed two youths at the edge of Pershing Square. Three pestilent punks jumped a Marine on a downtown street and killed the 56-year-old man who came to his aid. Woo, woo! L.A.’s roiling with Rat Pack Fever! The Examiner publishes a Rat Pack Exposé. Dig this nihilistic nomenclature of L.A. ’53. The punks are subdivided by age group. “Cherries,” “Midgets” and “Chicks” run 15 to 18. If you’re over 18, you’re a veteran. Gang ranks swell from 20 to 100 members. There’s 35 in the “El Hoyo” mob. “Dogtown” boasts 110. There’s 35 in “Valley Vampires.” There’s only 25 in the “Loma Street Gang.”
Smell the air? Hear that murky music? It’s the scent of testosterone-toasted male madness. It’s malevolent and miasmic and lashing latinlike toward YOU. The Viscounts and “Harlem Nocturne” wail wickedly at all White Male Americans. Sinatra’s Rat Pack is in its impotent infancy. The real rodents are wrapped in rancor and heading OUR way. †
FEBRUARY 6
Jesus Fernandez Munoz. Transient. Wino, stumblebum, derelict, good guy down on his luck. The coroner’s register one-sheet is perfunctory. It’s an accidental death. Men like Munoz are accident-prone. He was walking on or sleeping on a concrete beam below the Aliso Street Bridge. He might have been blitzed on muscatel, terpin hydrate, or white port and lemon juice. He might have scored some red devils or yellow jackets in East L.A. and added them to the brew. He might have been soberly walking west to downtown L.A. Maybe he was looking for handbill-passing trabajo at one of the slave markets on skid row. Maybe he was dreaming of a nice, safe cot at the Midnight Mission. The contents of his pockets went unlisted on the one-sheet. Maybe he possessed the required chump change for a short dog of sweet lucy.
Munoz dropped 50 feet off that bridge. He hit the concrete floor of the L.A. River bed. The L.A. River is a wide runoff sluice. Note the pools of water from a recent winter rain. Note the dead man’s unkempt state. Extrapolate that he is a wino or hophead or both. Extrapolate that he did die asleep. Extrapolate that he died in the middle of a hop dream. Extrapolate that the dream encompassed the scene of his death.
The L.A. River was a frequent location for horror flicks and films noir. It would go on to provide the climactic backdrop for the ’54 giant-ant masterpiece Them! Maybe Munoz was a dope fiend with prophetic powers. Maybe he was seeing those ants in some draconian dreamscape. They’re chasing him. They want to kill him and eat him. They’ve got giant feelers and giant teeth. Munoz thrashes in his sleep and falls off that beam.
Maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe he just poured the pork to a choice chiquita back in Boyle Heights. Maybe he bopped from her bed and vowed to start his life over. There’s the Aliso Street Bridge. That beam looks like a sweet nesting spot. †
DECEMBER 1
We’re in the garage behind the house at 2927 South Rimpau. It’s in the LAPD’s University Division. The area is down at the heels, but not sleazoid. The 10 Freeway will bulldoze cribs near this spot 11 years hence. Right now, a grasshopper named Gilford Brown has got this spot pegged as his launching pad for Cloud 9.
Brown, 37, is Hawaiian by birth. He’s a movie bit player. He’s growing maryjane on his property. That’s a righteous roust in ’53. The Narco cop in the pix is the legendary Pierce Brooks. He’s the policeman as philosopher-king. He’s eyeballing Brown’s marijuana plants, growing outside the garage and draped over a mattress box-spring inside. He’s got a winsome look on his face. He might be wondering why anyone would fuck their life up with dope. He might be pondering Gilford Brown’s psychic disengagement. He might be thinking, “I wish I could transfer to Homicide and slam some real desperadoes.”
Brooks got that wish. He would go on to apprehend sex creep Harvey Glatman in ’58. Glatman was a bondage-rope freak who offed three women in ’57 and ’58. He was a camera fiend who photographed his victims bound and gagged in the moments before he strangled them. Glatman burned in the green room—September ’59. Brooks was there when the pellets dropped.
He went on to the Onion Field job—March ’63. It’s the most celebrated cop-killing in LAPD history. Let’s bop forward to a more recent Then. Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger are working a felony car out of Hollywood Division. Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith are a shitbird oreo team of armed robbers. Combustion and horrible misalliance. Bad moon rising. Powell and Smith kidnap Campbell and Hettinger and drive them to a Kern County onion field. They coldly execute Campbell. Hettinger escapes and later has a mental breakdown. Powell and Smith go through a series of trials and escape the righteous justice of the green room. Pierce Brooks retires from the LAPD as a captain. He creates the VICAP program for catching serial psychos and writes books on policework and penology. Pierce Brooks—LAPD’s philosopher-king. He’s rousting a reefer man. What is he thinking? †
DECEMBER 12
You’re looking at a forlorn cat named Manuel Vela, age 38. He’s outside a tavern on Erwin Street in Van Nuys. Why is Mr. Vela’s face bandaged? Because he got his ass kicked at the tavern earlier that day. Why is Mr. Vela posed with an unloaded gun in his waistband? Because LAPD detectives are staging a reenactment of Mr. Vela’s assault-with-a-deadly-weapon beef.
Here’s the scoop:
Mr. Vela told the cops that a man named “Joe” pounded him. He was treated for cuts and abrasions at Valley Receiving Hospital and got the big bone for payback. He went home, got his roscoe and returned to the tavern. He stood outside and fired four shots through the front door.
Thomas Castillo, age 51, was hit three times. One slug almost hit his heart. He caught another shot in the hips and a third shot in the back. Whew!—close call—for both Castillo and Vela. Castillo was rushed to County General and survived. Thus, Vela dodged the hot seat at San Quentin.
Joe Martinez, 26, was cut by flying glass. He was treated at Valley Receiving Hospital.
Let’s turn an eye to Manuel Vela. He’s got that rodent-reptile hybrid look, common to street riffraff. He’s hangdog. He’s a loser in love. He’s probably hung like a cashew.
And he looks relieved. It ain’t no gas chamber bounce. He got his picture in the paper. He’ll probably draw a three-spot at Chino and be out in a cool deuce. He looks relieved. He’s heard that Chino’s a sweet deal. He can drink pruno and poke sissies up the brown trail. The food’s good at Chino. Dexter Gordon’s there on a dope jolt and honks sax in the prison band. The cops have been nice to him. They haven’t hit him with a phone book. They keep giving him cigarettes.
Things could be worse. Dig the existential gestalt:
He’s made the big gesture. Now THE MAN will take care of him and tell him what to do.
Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. †
NOVEMBER 29
Vandalism.
“Malicious mischief.”
Some punks lug huge pieces of concrete over to a large plate-glass window, late at nite. They look into a high-line women’s store, of the type common to our Then. It’s 11/29/53. The front of the store is full of female mannequins. The vandal or vandals hurl concrete blocks through the glass. The placement of the un-pictured blocks suggests two vandals. They’re sexually driven. They’re impotent and enraged. They enter the store and create a tableau.
They topple a mannequin and pull her arms off. Now, she’s naked and wearing only high heels. Note the seated mannequin. She’s still wearing a pricey mink stole. The vandals did not come to steal.
It’s probably a two-punk caper. It’s got to be. It’s probably teenagers jacked up on model-airplane glue and early-’50s vintage stroke mags. Gent, Knave, Cavalier, Nugget—just enough skin to juice their skin index to THIS!!!!!
Little cocksuckers! LAPD Juvie cops should phone-book these punks and pound them for this perv perfidy!
One mannequin has been folded into a fetal position on the floor. Her blonde wig was dropped a few feet away. Her upper body is mink-stole clad—and only her bald head sticks out.
A mannequin is positioned on her side, facing the window. A dark-colored dress has been pushed up over her hips.
Nightfall.
He Walks by Night.
They Drive by Night.
Film noir. 1953. Provocative women in fetishistic attire. Vandals out at night. Phone-book them and hold them overnight. Have mom and dad make restitution. Write this one off as youthful pervverve. Slam them if they do it again.
But:
It turned out to be a righteous smash-and-grab 459! Desperate B&E men!!! Hopped-up hellions with hot furs to fence!!!
And:
It’s unsolved. †
DECEMBER 18
It’s a week before Christmas ’53. Colored lights are up throughout our beloved Pueblo Grande. Mock-snow-flocked trees adorn Wilshire Boulevard. Whiskey Bill Parker will dress up as Santa Claus at LAPD’s Christmas party for underprivileged kids—and he’ll probably be half in the bag. And Hollywood Division’s got a hot-prowl/sex creep on the loose!
The crime: 288a P.C.—forced oral copulation. The location: 6724 Hollywood Boulevard.
Yeah, motherfuckers—Hollyweird. Home of hepcats, hugger-muggers, hopheads, hypes and hermaphrodite he-shes. And, now, we’ve got this hot-prowl Harry—and he be baaaaaaaaaaad to de bone!
He climbed a fire escape and entered through a narrow bathroom window. He entered in plain view of the bustling Boulevard, all holiday-swarmed. Two detectives are reconstructing the crime. You can tell what they’re thinking. This perv-o is scurvy and skinny—it’s a tight fit through this window space. One detective is out on a fire escape, gazing westbound. Note the Hollywood Theater marquee on the right. I saw many films noir there as a kid. Dig the elevated perspective. The hot-prowl man climbed a good five stories to get to his prey. The detective stares westbound. He knows the perv has fled. He’s staring out at the neon jungle as the neon jungle stares back. He wants to know Who? He wants to know Why? What corrosive causation coursed before this vile violation, and how does he live with himself?
See that sidewalk Christmas tree? It’s right in the detective’s line of sight. How does such festive expression coexist a heartbeat from horror?
The reconstruction continues. The detectives stand at opposite ends of a long hallway. They’re most likely pondering the perv’s means of escape. They’re standing by the bed where the assault occurred. It’s been freshly made. It’s 1953. The victim is most likely being attended by a police physician. A properly solicitous policewoman is surely standing by. †
APRIL 28
It’s 4/28/53. Abortions are euphemized as “illegal operations” in the papers. George R. Davis is a 70-year-old retired osteopath running a clandestine scrape clinic at this home in Highland Park. LAPD’s been investigating him for six months. He aroused suspicion late last year. He testified at the trial of a woman accused of possessing illegal surgical equipment. His testimony secured the woman’s acquittal.
We’re five years shy of David Seville and the Chipmunks’ chart-busting hit “Witch Doctor”—but that’s who this man is.
There’s a full-length mirror in his bedroom. It blocks off a secret operating room with a secret cabinet full of surgical implements. LAPD Detectives Herman Zander, Glen Bates and Danny Galindo pop Davis at his pad/secret clinic, along with a woman identified as his housekeeper. Her tres ’53 name: Hazel Slocum.
“Housekeepers” commonly appear in ’53 police files. They vibe euphemism for “mistress of older, sinister man.” This case presents a case for William H. Parker’s ordered society of Then—decades before the surveillance-camera society of Now.
Davis testified at that woman’s trial the previous year. Said testimony aroused suspicion. Cops are trained in the art of detecting mendacity. Davis vibed un-kosher on the witness stand. Law-enforcement ears perked. Don’t you know when someone’s shitting you? I always do. I’m not a cop. I’ve never wanted to be one. I live to unravel the mysteries of character and motive. So do cops. Look at the Witch Doctor’s orderly home and office. It’s a lurid labyrinth. Theodore Roethke wrote, “Is the stair here? / Where’s the stair? / ‘The stair’s right there, / But it goes nowhere.’ / And the abyss? the abyss? / ‘The abyss you can’t miss. / It’s right where you are— / A step down the stair.’”
MARCH 26
Let’s revisit the kat pictured here. He exemplifies the soundtrack and visual cohort of this book. He’s pure bebop and film noir.
He’s all about the quick rush of titillation and the abandonment to cheap impulse. William H. “Whiskey Bill” Parker hates this motherfucker—and not because he’s black. He hates Ricardo Robert White, alias Rickey White, Negro male American—because he lives a slothful life devoted to SIN.
He’s a hophead, a dope fiend, a junkie, a hype. His daily routine is venally self-serving and meretricious. He’s all capitulation. His very existence is a lie. The hordes of hipsters who buy this book will dig him, nonetheless.
Then/Now, Then/Now, Then/Now.
He looks kool. He’s thin. He’s got a kool Then, kool Now pencil mustache. He plays the sax. He spiels jive talk. He’s straight out of Chester Himes and Iceberg Slim. He’s full of carcinogenic contempt for THE MAN. “Subject does not work, but hangs out in pool halls in the Watts area and around 120th and Central, where he is well known.”
He’s a felonious feline about town. He fulfills our basest urge to morally forfeit. Individual responsibility is a shuck. His kool kat–outlaw look tells us that. Bebop says, “FUCK THE MAN!” Film noir tells us that THE MAN exists solely to squash the poor and muzzle the artist. “Where there is no God, everything is permissible.” Dostoyevsky said that. Ricardo Robert White affirms the horrid pleasures of self-relinquishment. His very being nullifies the fatuous extremes of social critique and extols the wisdom of an unwavering moral compass. What is bebop and film noir abandon to a morally sound person? Three drinks too many and a roll in the hay with someone inappropriate. Ricardo White, living bop and noir Then: thievery, desiccation, abdication.
“Subject plays the saxophone and may be found at jam sessions.”
Get off that pulpit, five-year-old Ellroy! You’re the biggest bop and noir hypocrite in the world! There’s Rickey White, blatting his sax at Club Zombie. That’s you, snapping your fingers and grooving the scene with a spike in your arm! †
JUNE 16 & JULY 3
Jumpers.
6/16/53 and 7/3/53. One Chinese man, one white woman. The man was gravely ill. The woman was “despondent.” The latter is the most commonly ascribed cause of suicide. It covers everything from skunk marriage to postpartum depression to loopy loss of love. “Ill health” is right up there. It requires no further explanation. There’s no known cure for ailments from cancer to the creeping crud. It hurts to live. You’re anxious to get there—however you view the prospect of “THERE.” These two jobs are pure impulse. The jumpers did not purchase rope, score pills, rig up an elaborate asphyxiation tableau. They simply leaped.
Jan Joy was a 40-year-old Chinese man. He checked into the Northern Hotel at 2nd and Clay on Bunker Hill. He left a note behind. It was written in Chinese. The translation: “Been sick long time. No cure. No way out.”
Yeah, baby! There’s NO EXIT!!!!! It’s sock-it-to-me Sartre—that freaky frog—all the way!!!!! Jump, baby, jump!
Cut to 7/3/53. Ruth K. Wilson, age 46, jumps from the ninth floor of L.A.’s vividly venerable Biltmore Hotel. Miss Wilson worked in a café a few blocks away. Nix “despondent”—she had the L.A. blues baaaaaaaaaaaad.
Here’s the skinny, the gist, the gestating gestalt:
You’re like William Bendix in The Blue Dahlia. You’re hearing that meshugana monkey music in your head. The record’s stuck in a groove you can’t unhitch. It’s urging you toward an irrevocable act. You’re Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan and that anarchist fuck who shot President William McKinley. You’re hearing that same terrible tune that all assassins hear. Anything beats the stagnant stasis of life on planet earth. Look, world—I’m here. Look, world—I’m gone.
And—you might survive the jump. You’re trusting fate or some divine source. Your flight and hard landing just might jolt you into a wild new good-luck life.
Yeah, but not these two. †
JUNE 16
George Delbert Greenberg had had enough. He had a bargain basement .38 caliber Iver Johnson revolver and an innocuous late-model Chevy coupe. He was married. His wife’s name was Margaret. They had a pad on Manchester Boulevard, back when that hell-bound hood was hunky-dory. There’s no known backstory on George Delbert Greenberg. His death did not make the papers. All we have is the coroner’s register one-sheet and the pix.
He drove down to the oil fields at 132nd and Figueroa. We’re out of darktown and into Gardena. Greenberg traversed a dirt road and found a spot with some privacy. He stood by the driver’s-side door of the Chevy and shot himself in the chest. He slumped to the ground, with his head wedged between the door and the car seat.
He was only 28. The death pose suggests supplication. The chest wound suggests a broken heart more than a head wound would suggest the urgent need to extinguish all consciousness. What heartsickness could be so ghastly as to preempt the idea of all future heart happiness? “Despondency” is listed as the cause of the suicide. It’s an insufficient explanation.
Who was this guy?
The “Delbert” doesn’t go with the “Greenberg.” Was he Jewish? Was he wigged out from World War II or Korea? Did he have too many kids or too much responsibility too soon, and thus fall behind the crush of his lost youth? Was Margaret cheating on him? Was he cheating on Margaret? Was his girlfriend pregnant and laying down the ultimatum of “her or me”? The Rosenbergs just burned at Sing Sing. Was George Delbert Greenberg wigged over that?
He’d had enough. Maybe he just choked on garden-variety self-pity. The world wasn’t going his way. Fuck it—I’ll show the world I don’t need it. Look at that midshot/close-up. It’s a fastidious pose. The gun is pointing outward. It’s barely visible—but it’s warning us not to take shit so hard. †
SEPTEMBER 24
Douglas DeVorss published “metaphysical” books and sold them out of his own downtown bookshop. The façade bore the painted slogan “Books that inspire success.” Success at what? Was DeVorss a fast-buck, positive-thinking guy? A swoony swami? A rasty Rosicrucian or a zorched-out Zoroastrian? All his office help was felicitously female. Was he a girl-gone guru, running some kind of poontang pyramid scheme in his head? How did he wind up shot dead?
The estranged husband of DeVorss’s housekeeper plugged him. It’s all madcap middle-aged mischief. DeVorss was 53. The killer—Walter Henry “Jack” Kruse—was 52. The housekeeper—Hazel Mary Kruse—was 45. Mr. Kruse was a former Minneapolis mailman on the skids. Mrs. Kruse told LAPD detectives that he was a “psychopathic case” who had been threatening to kill her and her children, and that she had been afraid of him throughout the 27 years of their marriage. Woo, woo—this job has marital mishigas stamped all over it! DeVorss was in marital mourning. His much-younger wife died during childbirth on 6/1/53. He met Mrs. Kruse six weeks before his own death. She told him that she was deathly afraid of her husband and leaned on his shoulder. He installed her as the “Housekeeper” at his millionaire’s metaphysical mansion in Pasadena. Walter Henry “Jack” Kruse got wind of it. Shit turned south from there. Bam!—there’s Doug DeVorss, dead.
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? †
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? †
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. †
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. †
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. †
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? †
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.” †
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. †
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. †
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 presentable 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.
L.A.’s like America. It was that way Then and Now. Everybody dumps on us. Everybody wants to come here, nonetheless. †
Fred Otash served on LAPD from ’45 to ’55. Whiskey Bill Parker harassed him out. He instinctively and properly distrusted Freddy O. He knew that Freddy O. was cunningly rogue. He had no specific dirt to squeeze him with. He shuffled him from division to division, willy-nilly. Freddy took the cue and split. He became a private eye and went to work for Confidential magazine. He employed illegal surveillance methods and got the goods on celebrity pervs. Freddy was strictly shakedown. Freddy knew how to carve a buck.
Freddy lost his P.I.’s license in a horse-doping snafu. He became a freelance mob lapdog then. Fetch, Freddy, fetch!!!!! Freddy worked for all the godless goombahs. Jack Kennedy was playing bring the brisket with Marilyn Monroe. Sam G., Mr. Chi-Town, was considering a squeeze on the Prez. Freddy hot-wired Peter Lawford’s beachfront fuck pad and got audiotape on Jack in the sack. Freddy told me that Jack was a two-minute man. I live for this kind of insider shit—and don’t tell me you don’t!!!!!
I knew Freddy in his declining years and have deployed him as a character in three of my novels. I dug him—but didn’t respect him. He lacked my humility and sterling strength of character. He tried to crash my own shakedown gig when I was a five-year-old L.A. rackets overlord in 1953. Freddy Otash, ex-LAPD: 1922–1992. Thanks for being there Then. †
Everything is connected. We are all as one, connected in the spiritus mundi and the gravely groovy big chain of life. Elmer V. Jackson started at the LAPD in ’37. This ID pic portrays him as a carrot-topped youth. Elmer J. worked Administrative Vice in the late ’40s and was a key player in the Brenda Allen vice scandal of ’48–’49. Said scandal toppled Chief C. B. Horrall and ultimately facilitated the reforming regime of the illustrious William H. Parker. Elmer J.’s a supporting player in my most recent novel, Perfidia. John Gregory Dunne used him as the basis for Lieutenant Tom Spellacy in his splendid 1977 novel, True Confessions. Jackson was Brenda A.’s lover. Ambiguous shit went down with her and sparked the entire scandal. The late Mr. Dunne has Brenda Samuels giving Spellacy a head job in the front seat of his car. An ex-con tries to rob them with a tommy gun. Spellacy drills the guy while Brenda’s gobbling him, tonsil-deep. I portray Brenda Allen and Elmer Jackson’s relationship more delicately.
Sergeant Elmer Jackson worked Wilshire Detectives in ’58. He handled the missing-persons inquiry on one Ruth Rita Mercado. Poor Ruth Rita was snuffed by sex creep Harvey Glatman. Harvey Glatman was briefly a suspect in my mother’s murder case. Pierce Brooks, LAPD’s philosopher-king, popped Horror Harv. See, it’s all connected!
Elmer the J was on the job in our 1953 Then. He was a vibrant 38 years old, with Brenda Allen years behind him. He managed to retain his LAPD tenure after the scandal blew over. Bill Parker surely disapproved of him. There’s surely a story here. †
Feliz Navidad!
We’re back on Hollyweird Boulevard and southward on the Miracle Mile. The sidewalk trees are out. Folks are well-groomed. There’s no crime as a continuing circumstance anywhere to be seen. It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, holiday-dressed.
The Admiral Theater’s running a boss double bill. Gregory Peck toplines an oater. Joe Cotten stars in a crime lox. The Melody Lane is just to the right. That big botched heist shootout is 16 days in the past. Local barflies are still schmoozing it up. The punk-pipsqueaks who ate Sergeant Don Grant’s hot lead are off the critical list. Note the kool kars in style transition. Humpbacked is out, rocket ship is in.
It’s good to be an American, right? It’s good to live in L.A. It doesn’t matter what’s playing. Tuck a short dog of Old Crow in your pocket and nip along with the movies. Head over to Ma Gordon’s Deli, post-flix. It’s the “Home of the Hebrew Hero”—tasty and deadly shit. There’s no hipster riffraff on their computers at Ma’s. There’s just square folks and lonely Joes with big dreams, like you.
You can nosh and stroll down south to the La Brea Tar Pits. You can ponder why no women want you. You can eyeball the statues of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and reflect on eternity. What will the gleaming Miracle Mile look like in, say, 60 years? It’s the sort of shit you teethe on with a double feature, a pint of hooch and a big pastrami sandwich kicking around in you—
Then. †
They’re playing our song.
It’s either the National Anthem or “God Bless America.” The LAPD Band is in full roar. All of the cops are saluting. Many of the civilians have doffed their hats or have placed their hands on their hearts. It’s the ground-breaking ceremony for the new Police Administration Building at 1st and Los Angeles Streets. The celebrated architect Welton Becket designed the space-age modernist structure. It will replace City Hall as the LAPD’s administrative hub and will ultimately and posthumously be named “Parker Center.”
But, fuckers—why mince words or mince at all? City Hall is City Hall. It’s the most magnificent building of L.A. Then and remains the signature building of L.A. Now. It’s the most striking and immediately identifiable seat of municipal government in America today. And, it’s the defiantly donkey-dicked declaration of L.A. and Bill Parker’s LAPD as the epic epicenter and invigorated enforcement arm of film noir.
Yeah, kats—it’s ’53. The LAPD Detective Bureau’s running round-the-clock out of City Hall. What would film noir be without City Hall as an L.A. landmark, L.A. identifier and the fabulously phallic symbol of the fucked-up finger of fate?
Criss Cross, ’49. Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea. Dig it: City Hall’s top-loaded at the start of the flick. There’s an armored-car heist and boocoo sex and death coming up. And what’s the gist?
YOU’RE FUCKED, Daddy-O—and you’re loving it!!!!!
He Walked by Night, ’48. There’s a jejune Jack Webb in this one. A fiend cop-killer’s on the loose. LAPD’s massively mobilizing to bag him. The Detective Bureau’s jam-packed with lurid lowlifes snared in raucous roundups that violate their candy-ass civil rights! City Hall looks good like a motherfucker! Those fucking marble halls gleam!
D.O.A., ’50. Edmond O’Brien’s been dosed with a slow-acting poison and snags his own killer! Man, this cat is cooked! There’s City Hall in the beginning. Soon-to-be dead man O’Brien walks down those long marble halls to tell LAPD Homicide all.
“Mark him dead on arrival” are the last words of the film. The same epitaph could be applied to L.A. Now!!!!!
They’re playing our song.
You can’t go home again.
At least we’ve got History.
At least we’ve got imagination and memory.
At least we’ve got Art. †
It’s a grisly artifact, to be sure. And Caryl Chessman, the “Red Light Bandit,” would not burn today—because he did not commit murder. “Chess” fried under the aegis of the “Little Lindbergh Law,” put into effect after the 1933 kidnap/death of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The law held that kidnapping with grievous bodily harm carried the possible imposition of the death penalty. Caryl Chessman prowled lovers’ lanes in the Hollywood Hills. He drove a dark car with red cellophane affixed to a side spotlight. He impersonated a policeman and abducted women from the automobiles where they sat spooning with their boyfriends. He walked them at gunpoint to his faux unmarked cop car and coerced sexual acts. He returned them to their automobiles and drove off into the night. It was ’47 into ’48. A woman molested was a woman unjustly and permanently stigmatized. Caryl Chessman branded his own scarlet letter into the innocent flesh of a score of young victims.
He battled the green room for a full dozen years. The green room won in the end. The document pictured foretells Chessman’s 2/19/60 date with lethal gas. Chess won that one. The pellets dropped him two and a half months later.
The great chain of life—and death.
Joseph Wambaugh entered the LAPD Academy that day. It was seven years after Sergeant Don Grant’s tavern shootout at Hollywood and Vine and the man-in-the-swimsuit caper.
Chess sits down in the hot seat. Grant’s watching from the other side of the glass. The eggs drop in the acid. Invisible gas fills the green room.
Chessman dies gasping for breath. It’s a horrible moment that would not have occurred today. It was Then. The death penalty is more sparingly and judiciously imposed Now. It is reserved to punish murderers of the most wanton and evil ilk.
Adios, Chess. You got a retrospectively raw deal. But don’t shit a shitter, baby. I never bought that song and dance that you weren’t the Red Light Bandit. The wages of sin are death. †
Clarence “Red” Stromwall. Max Herman. Eddie Benson. Harry Crowder.
Check their youthful I.D. photos.
Add some years, some pounds, some gravitas, some heft. Add four white fedoras—straw for warm weather, felt for winter days. You’ve got LAPD’s legendary “Hat Squad”—and Whiskey Bill Parker’s “Command Presence” defined.
They worked Robbery from ’49 to ’62. Eddie Benson died from the Big “C” in ’70. Red, Max and Harry went to law school, passed the bar exam and practiced law. Max became a criminal defense lawyer. Harry and Red both became Superior Court judges.
Robbery was LAPD’s “Heavy Squad.” They went after men with guns and notched up bandit killings. The minimum height requirement was 6′ 2″. The Hats all topped that tape. They walked tall, they spoke softly. They were sartorially splendid. They tended not to carry roscoes—because they fucked up the lines of their suits. They never tattled their own exploits, post-LAPD career. They pulled some wild-and-woolly shit and took it to their graves. Did Harry Crowder really dangle a suspect out of an upper-floor window at City Hall until he spilled the goods? What about the heist guy they dangled off the Harbor Freeway? They were strong-arm troubleshooters for Bill Parker—we know that. Robbery suspects who had heard the Hats were on their ass often preemptively turned themselves in. In our beloved Then, there was always the hard way and the easy way. The Hats were very bright guys and nice guys. They did not enjoy dispensing hurt. However, if the application of hurt was required . . .
1953.
Then.
Armed robbery.
Cops hiding in false-front refrigerators, waiting to ambush liquor store heisters. Max, Harry, Eddie and Red. They kept it zipped. They held their mud. They left us to ponder—and yearn for their tales. †
He was LAPD’s “Mr. Homicide.”
The title held for ’53, as well as for the decades immediately preceding and following.
He was a tall Bloodhound.
Sergeant Harry Hansen.
His career spanned the Jazz Age to the Sizzling Sixties. He sent husband-slayer Louise Peete to the green room. He was hard at work on the Joseph James Reposo/liquor store–heist snuff in our target year of ’53. He was LAPD’s lead investigator on the most celebrated unsolved murder case in American history.
The victim: Elizabeth Short.
Her moniker: the Black Dahlia.
The Boston girl, bound and hideously tortured. The severed body in the vacant lot at 39th and Norton.
Dylan Thomas wrote, “After the first death, there is no other.”
Harry Hansen worked scores of deaths before and after Betty Short’s. Betty Short was always the first last and death for him. He carried a photo of Betty in his wallet. He talked to her ghost and called her “Elizabeth.” He worked lead after lead after lead, from the 1/15/47 inception of the case, up through his retirement and to the end of his life.
He chased every clue. He assessed every tip and heard out every nut-job theory. He always held that detectives had never talked to the killer. He remained fixated, he remained obsessed. He was a kind man with great good cheer for the world at large. He did not plummet down the deep, dark rabbit whole of obsession. He lived in equanimity and remained forever on task.
He was not the vindictive psycho cop we dig from film noir. He did not carry a necrophile torch for Betty Short. He loved her in an impersonal way commensurate with his assignment of task. Betty Short. The Black Dahlia. Crazy tips still flood the LAPD switchboard—Then to Now. Betty Short and Harry Hansen, heavenly reunited. They know how Betty fell.
No earthly human being shares that ghastly secret! †
He was almost Chief.
He was destined to be Chief.
He was as even-tempered and friendly as Bill Parker was volatile and remote. He missed out on the big job by a quirk of fate off a rat’s pubic hair margin. He was a great detective, while Bill Parker never worked a Detective Division assignment. He became the interim Chief following Parker’s death and held the reins for future Chief Tom Reddin. Ladies, gentlemen and knocked-out numbskull hipsters buying this book in droves—Thad Brown!!!!!
He worked his way up through the ranks during the coruscatingly corrupt pre-Parker era. Policeman, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Inspector, Deputy Chief. Great anti-sabotage work during World War II.
The Brenda Allen vice scandal topples Chief C. B. Horrall. Retired Marine Corps Major General William Worton holds the reins until a new Chief can be appointed, on the basis of civil service exams and a Police Commission vote. General Worton does a crackerjack job as gatekeeper. Brown scores number one on the oral exam. Parker bests him on the written exam. Thad’s got the commission votes, he’s a shoo-in, it’s a lock—but a Commissioner drops dead of a heart attack the day before the vote. The job goes to Whiskey Bill.
How many times have I said this?
It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town—we just live in it.
The great Parker reforms the LAPD. Thad Brown is his Chief of Detectives. Thad’s his main man, his confidential consigliere, his ichiban. Thad presides over the stunningly potent LAPD Detective Bureau of 1950 to 1966.
Interdiction.
Suppression.
Those were Parker’s concepts. The Comprehensive Police Investigation was Thad’s métier. Parker and Brown—American law enforcement’s greatest one-two punch. †
Mayor Tom.
Here’s something you history-phobic hipsters don’t know.
Tom Bradley, L.A.’s longest-serving mayor, was once Lieutenant Tom Bradley, LAPD.
He was Tom “Schoolboy” Bradley when he came on in ’40. It was a less-enlightened era—and Schoolboy Tom got the racial runaround before he was reluctantly admitted to the Police Academy. Schoolboy Tom—the transcendent track star from UCLA. Bradley was an Academy classmate of future Chief Ed Davis. The LAPD badge went from the eagle-top design to the familiar oval shield that year.
Bradley rose to brass-hat status, went to law school part-time and studied for the bar exam during his lag time as the night-watch boss at Wilshire Station.
He was an astute, ambitious policeman-lawyer or lawyer-policeman—take your pick. He exemplified LAPD’s reluctant inclusiveness, even in the pre-Parker era. Lieutenant Tom, Mayor Tom. He honed his deft social skills on the street. Bill Parker disliked him. It wasn’t racial rancor. The two men were simply too much alike.
Tom Bradley—Big City Cop.
Tom Bradley—Big City Mayor! †
