L.A. Noir by John Buntin Read Free Book Online Page A

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. * Parrot was supposed to be a businesscommunity 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 townafter 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