Overt vice and rampant crime threatened the image that fueled Los Angeles’s growth—and undergirded the fortunes of men like Harry Chandler. “Look-the-other-way” boosterism would no longer do. The image that Harry Chandler and the growth barons had so carefully cultivated was in danger. Chandler resolved to act.
BY 1922, Harry Chandler was accustomed to having his way. A member of more than thirty corporate boards; the hidden hand behind innumerable syndicates, secret trusts, and dummy corporations; a land baron who owned or controlled roughly 300,000 acres in Southern California and, across the border in Mexico, an 860,000-acre ranching and farming operation that included the largest cotton plantation in the world, Chandler was the most powerful businessman in Los Angeles. By 1922, estimates of his fortune ranged from $200 million to half a billion dollars—immense sums for the 1920s. The Los Angeles Times was by far the most influential and profitable paper in Southern California, with nearly double the ad linage of its nearest rival, William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. Local businessmen spoke with a mixture of awe and dread of Chandler’s “thousand dollar lunches”—the occasions on which the business community was summoned to rally behind one of Chandler’s civic improvement initiatives. Chandler’s power was not absolute, but when he and the business community resolved to act, they generally prevailed.
Now was just such a time. Chandler quickly recruited George Cryer, a former assistant city attorney (who bore a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson), to run for mayor. To manage his campaign, Cryer chose a former University of Southern California football star-turned-attorney, Kent Kane Parrot (pronounced “Perot”), a protege of one of Chandler’s closest allies in local politics, Superior Court Judge Gavin Craig.
At first, everything went well. Cryer ran an extremely well-funded campaign, and voters, at the Los Angeles Times‘s urging, obligingly elected him mayor. Kent Parrot became his chief of staff. Mayor Cryer then set out to find a chief of police who could crack down on vice.
The mayor’s first choice, a determined reformer, quit within a matter of months, frustrated at resistance within the department. Cryer’s second choice, a war hero with no experience in police work, launched a vigorous crackdown on prostitution in the downtown hotels. But that was the wrong kind of crackdown. The image of lawlessness was bad, but certain types of lawlessness (notably prostitution and gambling) were widely seen as being good for business, as long as they were done discreetly. Outraged hoteliers soon forced his resignation. Clearly, cleaning up Los Angeles would require a delicate touch.
If Mayor Cryer was disheartened, he didn’t show it. He turned next to detective Louis Oaks, who’d won acclaim for rescuing a society matron from kidnappers. But, alas, he too stumbled. First the chief was observed frequenting one of the very hotels his predecessor had attempted to close down, in the company of not one but two ladies of the night. Then he was arrested in San Bernardino in the backseat of a car with a half-dressed woman and a half-empty bottle of whiskey.
This was embarrassing, to be sure, but it was not what ended his policing career. Chief Oaks was fired only after he crossed Mayor Cryer’s right-hand man, Kent Parrot. Parrot had his own man in the police department, Capt. Lee Heath. Captain Heath acted as Parrot’s proxy, transferring personnel without the chief’s permission and shaking down tour operators to raise funds for the Parrot-Cryer machine. Such behavior from a subordinate was problematic, to say the least. So Chief Oaks decided to dismiss Captain Heath. Parrot responded by having Oaks fired instead. He then made Heath chief.
By firing Oaks and replacing him with Heath, Kent Parrot was sending a clear message: The LAPD was now under his personal control. Harry Chandler was shocked—and furious. The LAPD was supposed to be under his control. For more than a decade, Chandler and his fiercely antiunion father-in-law, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, had relied on the LAPD to do battle with radicals and union organizers.[1] Parrot was supposed to be a business community loyalist, Harry Chandler’s man on the mayor’s staff. Instead, Parrot was building a rival power, one underwritten by L.A.’s booze-fueled underworld, not Harry Chandler.
Bootlegging had been a profitable pastime in Southern California since 1916, when California passed a dry law during the First World War that sought to conserve alcohol for military industrial purposes. The passage of the Volstead Act in 1920 implemented Prohibition nationwide in a far more draconian form, by outlawing beer and wine as well as spirits. It was the Volstead Act that made bootlegging a big business. Within months, high-speed motorboats were unloading Mexican and Canadian booze onto beaches from San Diego to Santa Barbara, primarily from Canadian ships that plied the route from Vancouver to Mexico. Meanwhile, convoys of trucks, many with hidden compartments, made their way up the so-called Bootleg Highway from Tecate to Tijuana to San Diego and thence to L.A. By the most conservative estimate, some 3,700,000 gallons of liquor were being illegally imported every year. Most of that was cheap hooch. However, authorities estimated that the most sophisticated bootleggers were also bringing about 150,000 cases of Scotch a year into Los Angeles. The markup on the Scotch was $35 a case, meaning that the bootleggers were grossing more than $5 million a year—about $50 million in today’s dollars—on Scotch alone.
At first, much of this business was handled by precocious entrepreneurs like Tony “the Hat” Cornero, who, at the age of twenty-two, gave up his job as a taxi driver in San Francisco, moved south to Los Angeles, and started hijacking other bootleggers’ liquor. In short order, he was the bootlegger bringing in the good Scotch, four thousand cases a run on his yacht the SS Lilly (whose home port was Vancouver, British Columbia). The stocky, granite-faced bootlegger with the white Stetson hats, pearl-colored gloves, and the flashing gray eyes quickly became one of Southern California’s most colorful (and quotable) criminals, known for his pungent verbal broadsides against Prohibition. By one estimate, Cornero controlled about a third of Scotch imports coming into the region in these early years. However, Cornero and his gang did not have the field entirely to themselves. Another more powerful criminal cabal was plotting his demise.
In the big eastern cities, crime was largely an immigrant affair. Not in Los Angeles. Fittingly, the “white spot” of America also had a largely American-born criminal overclass. Its ringleader was Charlie “The Gray Wolf” Crawford, owner of the popular Maple Bar at Maple and Fifth Street. Crawford had learned his chops in Seattle during the years that city served as the staging ground for the turn-of-the-century Klondike gold rush in Alaska. However, in the early teens, Crawford was run out of town after he and a close associate, pimp Albert Marco, openly negotiated a lease with the city for a five-hundred-“crib” brothel on Beacon Hill. Crawford was careful not to repeat his mistakes in Los Angeles. The Maple Bar was an intimate affair. While everyone could drink downstairs, only friends of Charlie were allowed upstairs to play craps or roulette or to patronize the prostitutes. Older and wiser, Crawford prospered in Los Angeles. But it was the onset of Prohibition in 1920 that made him big.
Crawford got back in touch with Marco, who, from his base in Seattle, was able to start importing high-grade Canadian Scotch from British Columbia. The pipeline they opened to L.A. was so lucrative that Marco soon decided to move to Southern California too. There Crawford introduced him to slot machine king Robert Gans, Milton “Farmer” Page, and former LAPD vice squad officer Guy “Stringbean” McAfee. Crawford also had the all-important connection to Kent Parrot. He and his associates were prepared to pay handsomely for favors from the department, and Parrot set out to become the man who would satisfy that desire. In order to do that, he needed to establish his control over the police. Chief Oaks’s firing—followed, in short order, by the appointment of Captain Heath as chief of police—left no doubt about who controlled the department.
1
A battle was precisely what it was. In 1910, the steelworkers union had blown up the