The historic center of the city’s underworld was Chinatown, “narrow, dirty, vile-smelling, [and] thoroughly picturesque,” an area just east of the historic plaza that had been the center of town back in Los Angeles’s pueblo days. Its opium dens introduced Angelenos to the seductions of the poppy flower; its fan tan and mah-jongg parlors catered to the area’s still-sizable Chinese population; its fourteen-odd lotteries attracted gamblers of every color and nationality from across the city. Just north of Chinatown was the predominantly Mexican part of the city known as Sonoratown. There women in negligees lolled casually in the open windows of “disorderly houses,” advertising their availability. According to the Los Angeles Record, a hundred known disorderly houses operated in the general vicinity of downtown. The citywide brothel count was 355—and growing fast. (By the mid-1920s, reformers would count 615 brothels.) That was just the high-end prostitution. Streetwalkers offered themselves on Main Street, a thriving but seedy neighborhood of taxi dance halls (so named because a dancing partner could be hired like a taxi for a short period of time), burlesque shows, and “blind pigs” (where a shot of whiskey went for ten cents a gulp). Farther south, down on Central Avenue in the thirty-block area between Fourth Street and Slauson Avenue, an even more tempting scene was taking shape, one offering narcotics, craps, color-blind sex for sale, and a strange new syncopated sound called jazz.
The city also boasted a steamy sex circuit. Upscale “ninety-six clubs”—some just blocks away from City Hall—offered “queers,” “fairies,” or otherwise straight men a place for a discreet “flutter” or “twentieth century” (read: oral) sex in a luxurious setting. The less well-to-do worked a circuit of downtown speakeasies, bars, public baths, and parks along Main and Hill Streets—Maxwell’s, Harold’s, the Crown Jewel, the Waldorf. For those who could not afford “to spend a quarter or fifty cents for a dime’s worth of beer,” there were the parks. The poet Hart Crane, visiting Los Angeles in 1927, would marvel at what he saw in the lush groves of bamboo and banana trees in downtown’s Pershing Square. “The number of faggots cruising around here is legion,” he wrote friends back East. “Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen.” The city itself was horrid, Crane wrote, but the sex was divine.
Then there was gambling. Amid the banks and stock brokerages of Spring Street, bootlegger Milton “Farmer” Page presided over a string of gambling clubs, the most imposing of which, the El Dorado, occupied the entire top floor of a downtown office building. There on a typical evening five to six hundred people would gather to play craps, poker, blackjack, roulette, and other games of skill and chance. At the corner of Spring and W. Third Streets, bookies waited to take the public’s wagers on the Mexican racing tracks or on Pacific Coast League baseball games. Nearby saloons provided upstairs rooms for poker and faro, sometimes even roulette, while younger and less prosperous customers stayed in the alleys to try their luck with the dice in one of the ubiquitous games of craps. Bingo games sucked away the earnings of bored housewives; card rooms distracted their husbands. “Bunco” men (as con men were then known) preyed on the unwitting, selling naive newcomers nonexistent stocks, gold mines, oil fields, and real estate. “Boulevard sheiks” prowled for and preyed on the growing number of working girls making their homes in Los Angeles. Among this teeming underworld’s victims was a seventeen-year-old emigrant from Deadwood, South Dakota, William H. Parker III.
IT’S HARD to imagine better preparation for 1920s Los Angeles than turn-of-the-century Deadwood, a town devoted, as one wag put it, “to gold, guns, and women.” Parker was born into a family that had played a large part in cleaning it up. His grandfather—the first William H. Parker—had arrived in the spring of 1877, less than a year after General Custer and the 210 men under his direct command were killed by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at Little Big Horn, a hundred miles south of the mining camp. College educated, a former colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War who was later appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be the first federal collector for tax revenue and the assistant U.S. attorney in the Colorado territory, Parker cut an imposing figure. Within days of arriving in the frontier settlement, he was made captain of a hastily assembled town militia, formed to protect the booming mining camp. In 1902, he became the district attorney, a position he occupied until 1906, when he was elected to Congress. His willingness to enforce closing hours on casinos and brothels earned him a reputation as a reformer. Prosperous, fierce (“a good hater,” said one acquaintance), aloof (“to many he may have appeared unapproachably chilly,” noted one friend in a memorial address to the Deadwood bar), Congressman Parker was one of Deadwood’s most imposing citizens—“dauntless, proud, imperious.”
Congressman Parker’s position should have ensured that his grandson would grow up as a member of one of Deadwood’s most respected families. Instead, as he was returning home by train from his first year in Washington, the new congressman was suddenly afflicted with terrible abdominal pain. He stopped in Chicago. There a surgeon cut into the freshman representative and discovered that Parker suffered from advanced cirrhosis of the liver—a condition often associated with heavy drinking. He died two months later at the age of sixty-one, leaving behind a family of five sons and two daughters. Bill Parker would not grow up with his grand father’s wealth or prestige. Instead, he would inherit his temperament and, in time, his fondness for whiskey.
As a child, Bill grew up in a house divided. His mother, Mary Kathryn Moore, was a spirited, independent woman who was both deeply religious and good humored. By all accounts, she was intensely proud of Bill, her oldest son, who was born on June 21, 1905. Bill’s father, William Henry Parker Jr., had a personality that can only be called dour. He also had a violent temper. At school, one of Parker’s sisters was once asked what her father did. She answered, “Oh, my father gets up in the morning to fix breakfast and throws pots and pans around in the kitchen.”
These troubles were not debilitating, at least not at first. As a young boy, Parker was diligent and bright, a dogged athlete and a gifted orator. (The Deadwood High School yearbook reported that Parker won the senior year first prize in rhetoric for his stirring recitation of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech—an interesting selection for a gold-mining town.) His final report card in 1922 reveals an excellent student, with an aptitude for math and rhetoric, who enjoyed the high opinion of his teachers.