After the purge of what by LAPD's reckoning was sixty-eight high-ranking officers, Tony Cornero's own troubles began. The syndicate had been conducting its own surveillance against the reformers by placing its man inside city hall. Unbeknownst to Mayor Bowron, his trusted driver was working as a paid informant for the very crime bosses he was fighting. The driver reported back on the Cornero/Richardson/Bowron secret meeting, and the syndicate leaked the news to the press, claiming that Bowron had 'made a deal with Cornero, promising him control of vice and prostitution throughout the city.'
Bowron, left with no alternative, and to prove to his constituency that he was not in league with any gangster, was forced to turn on Cornero and promptly ordered law enforcement to shut down his gambling ships as an illegal operation. Richardson reported that Cornero, while he initially came out swinging in defense of his ships' being legal and outside the jurisdiction of the courts, eventually took the whole thing in stride and resigned himself to the political and philosophical ironies, all with relatively good humor.
Like many gangsters of his day, Cornero was romanticized, and fact soon became fiction: in the 1943 movie
In reality, Cornero was no different than Ben Siegel or Mickey Cohen. Behind the comical Runyonesque slang and purported good humor was a powerfully positioned, politically connected, stone-cold sociopathic killer. Gangsterism was big business in the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, and each crime boss had his own retinue of lawyers and businessmen through whom they owned the men who ran city hall and the police and sheriff's departments. They had the power and the money to make any investigation vanish, and they and those who worked for them were inoculated against criminal prosecution.
When I looked at my father's photographs of Kent Parrot, Tom Evans, and the young Fred Sexton, I realized that the latter two of them were connected to some of the most powerful bosses in the Los Angeles crime syndicates, maybe even having begun their own criminal careers as young henchmen or drivers during Prohibition. George and Fred likely remained connected to these crime figures for the next three decades. I reflected on what Sexton's daughter 'Mary Moe' had told me about her father's youth:
After Dad's death, I discovered something rather strange. He had all these different bank accounts in different names. I don't know what that was all about. . . He used to make his money when he was young from having a floating crap game. I know he made good money. I think he knew Tony Cornero, but I'm not sure. My father's dad was a bootlegger and gambler. My dad's third wife told me she destroyed all Fred's papers and records after he died.
I suspect my father's relationship with the Los Angeles underworld changed dramatically from his early days as a cab driver hustling downtown for whatever he could make from the high tippers at the Biltmore.
But Father abandoned his role as chauffeur after he left Los Angeles and then returned as a medical doctor and skilled surgeon. No need for street hustling now, no longer any need to threaten a passenger in his hack to 'cough up the fare or I'll bust you in the nose.' That was all behind him.
By 1939, as head of L.A. County's venereal disease control office, his relationship with the top crime bosses would put him on a far more powerful footing because, as a respected physician and a man of influence in his own right, perhaps even as their
In addition, we see his documented association with elite members of the California Club and its spin-off, the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, where he came in contact with millionaire businessmen and shared any professional secrets they cared to impart. Perhaps a little bartering could be conducted between them. The doctor could provide prescriptions for prostitutes and drugs for wives and daughters. The businessmen could provide money and protection and share their information with my father, the kind of information that translated into power and influence.
I suspected another source of privileged information that was independently available to Father was the repository of medical files in his possession at his First Street Medical Clinic. There, at his venereal disease clinic, he discreetly treated the rich, the famous, and the powerful for any complications resulting from their personal and private indiscretions. This sensitive information gave George Hodel a tremendous source of power — leverage for exacting favors, or for downright extortion. These suspicions were again, unexpectedly and dramatically, confirmed by my mother's old friend Joe Barrett. By 2002, after our many talks, I had come to think of Joe affectionately as my 'Franklin House mole.' I was grateful for the friendship he had shown Mother and her three young sons during those difficult 'gypsy' years. Joe spoke of his many conversations with my mother during 1948 and 1949, when he roomed at Franklin House. He recalled her interactions with Walter Huston; her working and writing dialogue for John Huston's soon-to-be-released
'Your Mother, Dorothy, and I would talk for hours at the Franklin House,' Joe said:
in the courtyard, the kitchen, in the living room, and in my studio. Dorothy had an elegant mind. Our talks were almost always when George was away from home. Just the two of us. She talked of many things. Here is what I recall her telling me about the First Street Clinic. It was a place where primarily the rich and famous were treated for venereal disease. Top people from the movie industry. Directors, producers, actors, and also police officials. She told me it was a very active place, especially in the late thirties and early to mid-forties, before penicillin had been discovered. George had a partner, a Japanese doctor, who had developed a special treatment, which drew celebrities and important people. The socially elite came to be treated, along with their girlfriends and prostitutes. Dorothy said that George kept detailed files on all his patients and that in her words, 'The files made for some interesting income.' Those were Dorothy's exact words.
Barrett's words verified my suspicions. In 1940s L.A., George Hodel knew too much about too many people in high places. He had all the files and all the names. He knew everything. And now we know from what Mother told Joe Barrett that not only did he possess that highly incriminating information, he was using it to his full advantage. He was actively extorting the rich for cash and the powerfully connected for protection. The medical files under his lock and key were his insurance. Unquestionably, George Hodel made it known to those in power that should anything happen to him, either by way of arrest or personal harm, the knowledge and files he possessed would be made public.*
George Hodel was, in a word, too hot to handle. Knowing this, whatever constraints or concerns he may have felt when he first went on his murder spree must have fallen away. Not only was he a genius, he was untouchable.
*Clearly the Tamar arrest in October 1949 was an aberration. The autonomous Juvenile detectives, unaware of Dr. Hodel's Gangster Squad/Homicide protectors, had acted too quickly, but Tamar's disclosures, which involved not just her father but sixteen others, could not be ignored. It was another example of LAPD's right hand not knowing what the left had done. All Dad's LAPD confederates could do was assure him that they would assist from the inside in helping him 'beat the rap.'
