L.A. Noir

reviewed by Ben Pesta

Telling the story of Los Angeles at mid-20th century by juxtaposing the biographies of William Parker and Mickey Cohen was a good idea, and John Buntin has done a good job of it in L.A. Noir. The two men were archetypes who could have sprung out of a classic Warner Bros. gangster film. Bill Parker, born in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1905, was a hard-nosed Catholic cop who became Los Angeles's longest-serving police chief. Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen, born in Brooklyn in 1913, was a pint-size (five-feet-three, stretching up to a full five-feet-five in his ever-present lifts) Edward G. Robinson type who became crime kingpin Bugsy Siegel's chief enforcer, then supplanted his late mentor (some said Mickey engineered the "late" designation) as L.A.'s rackets boss.

In his time, the little gangster's chroniclers included journalists Ben Hecht, coauthor of The Front Page, and the redoubtable Florabel Muir of the New York Daily News. Muir tailed Cohen so closely that during a 1949 attempt on his life she took a ricochet round to the butt. Legend has it that instead of hitting the deck, Muir called her paper to get a photographer on the scene. With amanuenses like these, it's no wonder that in the '40s Cohen quickly came to occupy the currently vacant (since John Gotti's death) position of America's "celebrity gangster."

Cohen naturally grabbed more headlines than Parker, but he left no legacy. There was no Cohen crime organization for heirs to inherit, the way there was after Gotti took over New York's Gambino family.

Parker, who began his LAPD career in 1927, was a more complex character: lawyer, cuckold, alcoholic, racist?an incorruptible cop in an era when the LAPD (like most big-city police departments) was cheerfully corrupt. He helped organize a referendum effort to give police officers and firefighters civil-service protections in discipline cases, which gave the rank and file a measure of insulation from politics. During World War II he took leave to join the army, and in Buntin's words, he "reorganized Axis police departments from Sardinia to Munich, purging them of fascists." In L.A., Parker became chief in 1950 and forged a department famous for military-style professionalism, even if the spit and polish sometimes ran to excess. Parker's LAPD was hard-nosed but honest.

The racially explosive Watts Riots of 1965 be-smirched his department and his legacy; he died the next year. Interestingly, a young inspector by the name of Daryl Gates was temporarily in command of the South Central division when the neighborhood erupted. Twenty-seven years later, universal political dissatisfaction over Chief Gates's handling of the Rodney King riots led to the dismantling of part of Parker's legacy when the office of police chief was stripped of civil-service protection and made a political appointment.

L.A. Noir is an appropriately up-tempo account of a not-so-long-ago period of Los Angeles history. William Parker and Mickey Cohen graced the city in an era of unrestrained newspaper journalism. You just don't see headlines like "Cops So Drunk They Fought Each Other to Beat Us," and "Mad Gunman Captured" anymore. You don't see characters like Parker and Cohen, either. That's probably just as well. Los Angeles is a better, if duller, place without them.

Ben Pesta is a white-collar and criminal defense lawyer and a writer in Century City.

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