LA Noir, John Buntin
If you like police based stories, this is a keeper. If you like true crime, this is filled with
stories and characters. What is so
fascinating is the long history of Police Chief Parker and hoodlum – racket king
Mickey Cohen and how long they could both operate their empires while hating
one another.
The book connects with the popular Dragnet TV and Radio
series that helped publicize and strengthen Parker’s paranoid police empire
while it also brings together Bugsy Siegel with ex-boxer (not a great one)
Mickey Cohen who in the end leaves Bugsy behind and takes over the “White City”
and the pleasure palaces of the growing metropolis.
Thugs and cops, murders and extortions, corrupt politicians,
power broking newspapers – you name it and it was part of the true story of the
city of angels. Robert Mitchum, Sammy
Davis Jr, Frank Sinatra, and other prominent Hollywood royalty have roles in
the story as does Billy Graham the evangelist who befriends Cohen and uses his “conversion”
of the mobster to propel himself to greatest.
Newsman Mike Wallace appears in a prominent story where his ethics were
impeccable, but the pressures on the network (like the Bush destruction of Dan
Rather) forced him off the national airways for a while.
Like a Louis L’Amour western, the anti-gangster William
Parker comes from Deadwood, S. D. (its true) and rides in to the sunset. Now this is straight laced character starts
out like the novelist would want, but power does corrupt and Parker succumbs to
weakness in drink and racism. Unable to
change with the time his death comes almost as a relief to many. Raymond Chandler’s mysteries capture the
mystique of this era as does Chinatown and L. A Confidential.
But the story is not just the Cohen/Parker conflict. It is the relationship between Bobby Kennedy
and Parker, the conflict with J. Edgar Hoover, the Bobby Kennedy assassination,
the Watt’s riots, and all the tensions that required a new way to police a
modern and racially diverse city. It is
both fascinating and exhausting.
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