Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
simply entail knowing Frank Sinatra, whom Parker considered “totally tied to the Mafia.”19
But Brown and the Democrats swept the elections, taking control of both houses in Sacramento for the first time in a century, with a well-known enemy of Parker, LA Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk, elected state attorney general. Mosk subsequently repulsed several attempts by Parker to repeal the Cahan decision and restore wiretapping on a broad scale. The chief spied on both Brown and Mosk, but the governor was beyond his reach. Mosk wasn’t. “In July 1963 detectives observed that Mosk boarded a plane for Mexico City with a twenty-three year old woman who was not his wife. Either one of the department’s detectives flew to Mexico or arranged with private detectives to set up a camera and focus it on the window of their hotel room.” In short order Mosk abandoned plans to run for the US Senate. Brown appointed him to the California Supreme Court as compensation.20
Thanks to James Ellroy and other pulp writers, Chief Parker still rules postwar Los Angeles in the imagination. Indeed, he’s the only public figure from the 1950–66 period, aside from celebrity gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, that anyone today is likely to know about. Yet an important and proud chapter in Parker’s biography remains obscure: his service during the Second World War as the designer of the Police and Prisons Plan for the Normandy invasion. Army Captain Parker subsequently accompanied Patton’s Third Army to Paris (earning a Purple Heart en route) and then helped denazify police forces in Germany, where he served under Orlando Wilson, another police reformer with an authoritarian style. (In 1960 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley appointed Wilson as the city’s superintendent of police.) Parker, in other words, had the exhilarating experiences of administering martial law and rebuilding police institutions from scratch. In his study of Black radicalism and the LAPD, historian Bruce Tylor suggests that martial law remained Parker’s favored paradigm, at least for policing South Central L.A.21
The LAPD not only enforced law within the ghetto; it enforced the ghetto itself. Glenn Souza, who graduated from the police academy in 1959, described the department as “completely segregated and by any definition extremely racist,” attesting, “Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Chief William H. Parker was god.” Assigned to the University Division (south of USC), he was amazed at the scope of LAPD power over the Black community: “We were a mercenary army unofficially empowered to arrest anyone at any time for any cause.” One cause was violation of the unwritten curfew that excluded Black people from white residential districts after dark. Souza reminisced:
Black people could not venture north of Beverly or much west of La Brea after dark without a strongly documented purpose. In Hollywood Division, a Negro was an automatic “shake” or field interview with the resultant warrant check or match-up to some vague crime report. A favored location for these shakes was the call box at Outpost Canyon and Mulholland Drive. If there was absolutely no way to arrest the suspect, he was told to start walking.22
Almena Loman, a community journalist and newspaper publisher, once summed up the universal experience of law-abiding Blacks in dealings with the LAPD: “They’re rude, overbearing, and they make the simple act of giving you a ticket an exercise in the deprival of your dignity and adulthood.”23 In July 1960 the NAACP and the ACLU, with attorney Hugh Manes as spokesperson, backed Councilman Roybal’s efforts to revive an initiative from the 1940s to establish a civilian police review board.24 Parker was infuriated by the proposal and unleashed his supporters. The vice president of the Police and Fire Protective League, Captain Ed Davis (a future LAPD chief, 1969–78), denounced it as “shocking” and “an opening wedge for machine politics,” while an angry letter to Roybal warned that his proposal would turn the City of Angels into the “City of Demons.”25
Parker himself reserved a signature rant for a coroner’s jury in 1960 that found one of his men guilty of “criminal homicide” in the death of a 16-year-old Black high school student. “The same forces and philosophies backing the Castro regime in Cuba,” he warned, were behind the finding.26 Meanwhile he simply ignored the charge made by Miller’s Eagle that the police protected the “Spook Hunters”—white gangs based in the industrial suburbs east of Alameda that also had affiliates in Inglewood and neighborhoods west of Vermont. “The Spooks,” said the paper, “lately have been going after junior high school kids, terrorizing Negro youngsters at Mt. Vernon, John Muir and John Adams junior highs. They’re not arrested, say the Negro teenagers.”27
Bugging the Mayor
1961 was an election year, and Parker, universally acknowledged as the most powerful public official in the city, was serene in the certainty that Mayor Poulson, who had been hoisted into office in 1953 by the Times and the Committee of Twenty-Five, would be back for another term. There was no love lost between the chief and the mayor. In 1950 Parker had bugged Congressman Poulson’s hotel room while he was meeting with a lobbyist who later turned out to have left-wing sympathies, and the appliance that he gave Poulson as a gift soon became known as the “Red refrigerator.” As the “downtown mayor,” however, Poulson had learned to sing in the chief’s choir and never criticize him in public.28 Neither took seriously the wild card candidacy of Sam Yorty, a washed-up former congressman who had moved from the far left of the Democratic Party to its extreme right. His current stock among Democrats was particularly low since he was supporting Nixon and had just published a pamphlet (I Cannot Take Kennedy) denouncing JFK for, among other things, his religion. Bookmakers put him barely in third place in a field of nine.
But Yorty retained a constituency among what Nathanael West and Edmund Wilson in the 1930s had denominated the “Folks,” the now-elderly Midwesterners who had flocked to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and then politically oscillated between the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s and Upton Sinclair’s socialistic EPIC movement in the 1930s. Many were once again Republicans, but the mayoralty was nonpartisan, and Nebraska-born Yorty, although perhaps no William Jennings Bryan, was a persuasive, folksy speaker who could articulate liberal and conservative values in the same breath. He also enjoyed support from anti-communist AFL unions, who still considered him a labor candidate. Nonetheless, the addition of geriatric Iowans and trade union conservatives still left Yorty far behind Poulson, who enjoyed endorsements from establishment figures across the political spectrum as well as from all the major newspapers.
Yorty’s evolving strategy during the campaign was to build a broad coalition of city hall outsiders, with emphasis on three issues: ending trash separation (an issue that appealed to housewives), supporting an additional council seat for the Valley, and firing the police commission (it was widely believed that he intended to get rid of Parker as well).29 Most of the Black elite continued to back Poulson, but Celes King, who had been one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen and now owned an important bail bond agency, came out for Yorty, as did a majority of rank-and-file Black voters.30 On the Eastside he had ardent support from one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the community, Dr. Francisco Bravo, the owner of health clinics and a bank. Parker meanwhile responded true to form: spying on the campaign and aiding Poulson with information about Sam’s alleged criminal connections.31 Then on Memorial Day, a carousel operator in Griffith Park accused a Black youth of boarding without a ticket; when the young man contested this, he was wrestled to the ground by white police officers and put into a squad car. A crowd of Black youth surrounded the car, liberated the suspect, and were soon scuffling with the police. One officer opened fire; the crowd replied with bottles. As LAPD reinforcements arrived with their sirens screaming, the teenagers shouted back: “This is not Alabama!” Black voters agreed and saw the election largely as a referendum on Parker.32
Yorty’s victory was an equal shock to Downtown Republicans and Westside Democrats, introducing an unexpected element of populist instability into municipal politics. The Committee of Twenty-Five types were unsure of Yorty’s support for Bunker Hill redevelopment, and with Norman Chandler’s retirement a few months earlier (in favor of his son Otis), they no longer had a veteran general who could keep city hall in line. Westside Democrats, meanwhile, feared that Yorty’s popularity in the Valley could tip the 1962 gubernatorial election to Nixon. Although he would one day become Los Angeles’s equivalent to Alabama’s George Wallace, in the immediate aftermath of the election, Yorty remained