Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

27

Dahliagate: The Double Cover-up

Sixty years ago Los Angeles politicians had the best police department that money could buy. LAPD was part of the political machine that ran this city. We must never allow ourselves to return to those days.

— Bernard Parks, LAPD chief of police

Jonathan Club Breakfast, April 9, 2002

Deputy Chiefs Thaddeus Finis Brown and William Henry Parker:

Their Fight for Power

IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE some understanding of the political dynamics at work within the Los Angeles Police Department in the fall of 1949 through the summer of 1950. While the local press was blasting away at the LAPD with charges of inefficiency and corruption, the DA's office, as we have just learned, believed that some police officers and detectives were destroying evidence, covering up the facts, even protecting a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French investigations. Also, the DA believed, LAPD commanders were receiving extensive payoffs in return for protection they were offering local gangsters.

By February 1950 public opinion about the LAPD was at an all-time low, worse even than it had been a decade earlier when the sixty-eight high-ranking officers had 'resigned.'

As the heirs apparent to the chief's office, LAPD deputy chiefs Parker and Brown knew that their careers, and indeed the department's collective survival, were at stake. Another major scandal could put a knife right into the heart of the LAPD. Neither man could allow this to happen, no matter what the cost, no matter what scandals had to be covered up. Both Brown and Parker desperately needed to shepherd the department through its current difficulties, hoping they could implement their own remedies at a later date.

Brown and Parker: it was a toss-up which one would be appointed chief of police. They were two very different men, not unlike the U.S. Army generals Patton and Bradley. Like Patton, Parker was hard-drinking — known to his men as 'Whiskey Bill' — arrogant, ambitious, and aggressive. He would certainly not have hesitated to slap around one of his officers if he felt it would do some good. A brilliant strategist, he won every campaign he ever began within the department. LAPD interim chief William Worton favored Parker, who had achieved the highest score on the written examination.

Brown, also a hard drinker, was more the diplomat and, like Omar Bradley, was considered to be the 'GI's general' by his foot soldiers. Officers from the rank of lieutenant on down loved him. While Brown did not possess the academic strengths of Parker, he had superior people skills. During his long and distinguished career, he had built a broad base of informants, and could learn virtually anything about anybody with a simple phone call. He was loyal to his men, and would back them and their plays unquestioningly. At that time, many considered Brown to be the best detective in the United States. Throughout his entire career he had been at the center of many prominent and celebrity investigations, and he had a reputation as not only an effective but an honest cop. Most of the local press gave him high marks, and Norman Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, wanted Brown as 'his chief,' referring to him as 'the master detective.'

Before he joined the LAPD, Parker, like my father, had worked the trenches of 1925 Los Angeles as a downtown-area cab driver, trolling for fares outside the Biltmore Hotel. It was almost certain that they had known each other, working the same job, at the same place, at the same time, since the Yellow Cab Company during those years had only ten cabs and a force of thirty men. They might have even been partners from time to time, working the same cab on different shifts and carrying the same fares from nightspot to nightspot.

Reflecting on his early days as a hackie in an L.A. Herald Examiner article entitled 'Early L.A. Cab Boom: Big Brawls Bump Business in Taxi Heyday,' Chief Parker was quoted as saying this about his first job: 'Driving back then made a man tough enough for anything. As chief, whenever I could, I gave a cabbie every legal break.'

Despite Parkers eminent qualifications, in June 1950 word spread that Thad Brown would be the next chief of police. The police commissioners would vote in early July, and he had the swing in his pocket, which would be just enough to tip the scale in his favor. So assured seemed the outcome of the decision that Chandler's L.A. Times printed a story that Thad Brown had actually been appointed chief of police, having received three votes from the police commissioners.

At the last moment, however, fate intervened. The night before the final vote, Thad Brown's anticipated victory was snatched from him through the unexpected death of Police Commissioner Mrs. Curtis Albro, whose crucial swing vote would have guaranteed his appointment. The balance of power was tipped, and in August 1950 William H. Parker was appointed LAPD's new chief of police. Parker would rule the department as an absolute despot for the next sixteen years, and Brown would remain chief of detectives.

Upon Chief Parker's death from a heart attack shortly after the Watts riots, Thad Brown would be appointed interim chief of police in July of 1966. At the same time, a young rookie Hollywood patrol officer named Steve Hodel would be ordered by his watch commander to attend the swearing-in ceremony at the police administration building, which would shortly thereafter be renamed Parker Center. After the ceremonv, Chief Thad Brown walked out of the auditorium and approached the young officer with the silver nameplate 'Hodel' above his shirt pocket and asked the startled rookie if he would like to have his picture taken with the chief. A photographer at the chief's side walked us outside and snapped a photograph. Apparently, Chief Brown could not resist the temptation to memorialize the irony of the two of us standing together in uniform.

The chief, the rookie patrol officer, and the photographer would quickly go their separate ways from there, never to see each other again. Some weeks later, I received a copy of the photograph through the interdepartment mails as a memento from an unknown sender, which, at the time, was meaningless to me. I threw the photo in my desk, moved it with me in boxes from desk to desk as I advanced up the ranks, and packed it with other memorabilia from the job when I retired. I never looked at it or even wondered about why it was taken in the first place, until I eventually recognized it as a thoughtprint in my own life some thirty-three years later.

Chief Thad Brown retired on January 12, 1968, having served forty-two years on LAPD, his final twenty-one years as a deputy chief. He died only two years later at age sixty-two on the eve of Dr. George Hodel's sixty-first birthday. My father outlived his contemporaries Chief Parker and Chief Brown by some thirty-three and twenty-nine years respectively.

Parker was the department's most respected leader, credited with taking a corrupt and sloppy police force and transforming it into what he said was the world's 'number one police department.' And my own timing was such that I was a Parker man from the get-go. Parker was a living legend for me and my classmates, who believed he possessed near-divine qualities of leadership, intelligence, integrity, and honesty. Parker had my unquestioning respect and devoted loyalty. There is no doubt he made the LAPD a more professional organization than it ever had been in the past. It's also clear he contributed much to reduce the graft and corruption that ran rampant in the decades before he took over.