If you are an American of a certain age, you remember the TV
show that started with the dramatic music DUM-DA-DUM-DUM. Then the
serious voice-over: “This is the city. Los Angeles,
California. I work here. I’m a cop.”
“Dragnet,” which originally appeared on NBC in 1951,
was a documentary-style program based on real cases from the Los
Angeles Police Department. It was the first time a government
agency used an entertainment TV show to spread propaganda to the
American public.

Los Angeles is the home of the Dream Factory: Hollywood. It is
also the great American city that blossomed right out of the
desert. L.A. NOIR by John Buntin sounds like the title of a work of
fiction. But as “Dragnet” told us each week, “the
story you are about to see is real.” Only in Buntin’s
book, the names have not been “changed to protect the
innocent” or, in this case, the guilty.

L.A. is also one of the birthplaces of one of America’s
greatest creations: the literary and film genre known as noir. In
Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and the novels of
Raymond Chandler, the noir, or dark side, of the City of Angels
became a metaphor for the corruption at the heart of America that
lives on right up to this day. Buntin captures this reality in his
first paragraph:

“Other cities have histories. Los Angeles has legends.
Advertised to the world as the Eden at the end of the western
frontier, the settlement that the Spaniards called El Pueblo de
Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles turned out to be something
quite different --- not the beatific Our Lady the Queen of the
Angels advertised by its name but rather a dark, dangerous
blonde.”

Because of its proximity to the Dream Factory, the LAPD has been
portrayed in hundreds of books, movies and TV shows besides
“Dragnet.” So parts of L.A. NOIR will be very familiar
if you have seen films such as LA Confidential, Bugsy and
Mulholland Falls or read the work of writers like James
Ellroy and Michael Connelly.

Buntin tells the history of 20th century L.A. through two of its
most influential and powerful figures. One, William H. Parker, was
a bastion of incorruptible law and order and served as police chief
for 16 years. The other, Mickey Cohen, was a gangster, a racketeer
and one of the last of the great high-profile celebrity outlaws in
the mold of Al Capone and “Bugsy” Siegel. These men
created organized crime in America.

They say that what starts as a trend in California eventually
spreads east. In this powerful dual biography, we see that the
influence of these two men still shape America decades after their
deaths. Parker’s often brutal and fascistic methods of
policing preceded by decades of widespread wiretapping and torture
were routinely used by the Federal government in the so-called War
on Terror. And Cohen’s organized crime lives on, still highly
profitable, having branched out from what was once an
Italian/Jewish-dominated concern to one that now includes Mexican
drug cartels, Eastern European mafias and Chinese tongs. 

From the start, Los Angeles was a wide open city for crime and
vice. By 1937 it contained 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800
bookie joints and 23,000 slot machines. The city’s police
force had a long history of corruption. During prohibition, one
chief of police, Louis Oaks, was arrested in San Bernardino in the
backseat of a car with a “half-dressed woman and a half-empty
bottle of whiskey.” Ooops!

No less an expert than Mickey Cohen, a 5’3” former
boxer born in Brooklyn who did his apprentice wiseguy work for
Capone in Chicago, noted that gambling was run by the
“syndicate” in Chicago and New York. “But
here,” he said, meaning L.A., “gambling and everything
like that they did in Jersey, Chicago and New York was completely
run by cops and stool pigeons.”

Into this police force in 1927 comes William Parker, a
transplant from another once lawless frontier town, Deadwood, South
Dakota. Parker was horrified by the corruption he saw in the LAPD.
The portrait that Buntin paints here is of a man of Shakespearean
tragic dimensions: ambitious to the point of ruthlessness in his
quest to reach the top of the LAPD; incorruptible by day but a
drunk by night who possibly beat his first wife; intelligent but
stubborn and highly emotional; and dedicated to public service but
prone to paranoia in his latter years.

Parker was a man of great accomplishment but also great faults.
The L.A. he moved to in 1922 was openly racist. It was advertised
by powerful businessmen and real estate developers, such as Los
Angeles Times owner Harry Chandler, as the “white
spot” of America. Parker, if not overtly racist, fully
supported the city’s racist power structure, denying as late
as 1960 that there was segregation in L.A. Unforgivably, Parker
compared rioters to “monkeys” just as the greatest
urban insurrection in American history up to that time in the Watts
section of the city was beginning in 1965.

Parker invented the term “the thin blue line.” And
he believed it. In his successful struggle to rid the LAPD of mob
influence and corruption, he created a professional, autonomous,
almost paramilitary force. He viewed his police as the last line of
defense for civilization, and while he did not say it, he might
have meant white civilization. Gambling and organized crime
weakened the U.S. and would allow the Soviet Union to defeat us.
Buntin summarizes Parker’s viewpoint: we needed “the
virtues of Sparta, not the indulgences of the Sunset
Strip.”

In Parker’s opinion, the Civil Rights Movement was little
more than a cat’s paw of international communism. Parker was
not just an influential civil servant, he was one of the most
powerful politicians in L.A., often giving two speeches a day. He
viewed Dr. King’s “Dream” speech not as a plea
for justice but a call for blacks to revolt against the United
States of America.

The real thin line is between freedom and fascism, and Parker
easily crossed that line, successfully fighting to keep his cops
free from civilian control and oversight. The LAPD previewed the
America of the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping and Gitmo. Their
Intelligence Division accumulated over two million dossiers on
citizens. The department’s repression of minorities, from the
“Bloody Christmas” assault of five Latinos by up to 50
cops in a police station in 1951 to Rodney King in 1991, led to
riots that bordered on urban guerrilla warfare. And the white
backlash sparked by those uprisings helped right-wing, law and
order politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rise to
power in the United States.

L.A. NOIR is a work of nonfiction that reads like a novel.
Through its pages march figures like “Bugsy” Siegel,
Robert F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover and Malcolm X. There is Betty
Grable being robbed of her diamond necklace by Mickey Cohen one
night in an illegal gambling joint. There is the head of Columbia
Pictures, Harry Cohen, wanting Mickey to “whack” Sammy
Davis Jr. to end the singer’s relationship with Kim Novak.
And then there are lesser known figures like Brenda Allen, whose
gift to history was the invention of the “call girl”
service, and Jimmy Vaus, the wiretap expert who was not above
working both sides of the street.

I do not say this often, but L.A. NOIR is a book that I found
almost impossible to put down. Buntin has written an important and
entertaining book about one of America’s greatest cities in
the 20th century that echoes down to the world we live in
today.