Washington Boulevard hotel with Elizabeth Short.
26
George Hodel: Underworld
Roots — The 'Hinkies'
'AS YOUR LAST ACT OF LOVE FOR ME you must dispose of all my effects.' This was, as noted, Father's order to June after he suffered a stroke in 1998 and planned on taking his life. He did not want June to handle his personal effects either while he was still alive or after his death. There were secrets he wanted buried with his ashes.
Father wanted his photo album destroyed because it contained his only link to Elizabeth Short, and we now know why. But he had said 'all my effects.' Were there other links to his past that he also wanted erased? I now know that the answer was yes.
Among these personal effects to be destroyed were his early photographs, which June had showed me on a visit to San Francisco some months after Father's death. The photographs, which had been taken in the mid-1920s, had been shown in a Pasadena art gallery as part of his one-man show. There were architectural photos of early L.A. — Long Beach oil derricks, downtown buildings, all artistically composed — plus many portraits: a black man, an oil rigger, construction workers, and others with hard faces, rough men whose visages were etched by years of cunning.
There was also a group of savvy street-smart faces from the 1920s. Who were these men? Friends? Were they people he knew when he was driving a cab in L.A.? His wife didn't know. Perhaps they were nobodies, forgotten people from a distant past. June kept the originals but allowed me to make copies for myself.
Among these photographs were six men I was curious about and wanted to identify. Cops have a term for men with faces like these: we call them
To date I have not been able to obtain positive identifications on all of these men, but in exhibit 60 I do have tentative identifications for three of them.
Based on the fact that three of the six photograph subjects were connected with L.A.'s underworld, there is a strong probability the remaining three have gangster connections as well. I believe that George Hodel and Fred Sexton were either full-fledged henchmen of an early crime gang, or, at least, remained close friends and associates for the next twenty-five years. To me, these photographs are more dark shadows from George Hodel's past, which might well connect him to notorious gangsters and killers of the time.
Photo 2 is especially compelling: it's of Tom Evans at age twenty-six, the convicted rum-running, drug- smuggling con man we have earlier identified as Tony Cornero's bodyguard, the same man who, in his words, was 'rousted' by LAPD in 1949 under suspicion of the kidnappings and murders of both Mimi Boomhower and Jean Spangler. These photographs show that Evans was linked to George Hodel as far back as 1925. What was my father, who prided himself on his intelligence, erudition, and culture, doing hanging around with a thug like Tom Evans? Perhaps the answer lies in photograph 1, which, I suspect, is a much younger picture of early L.A.'s least familiar but most powerful syndicate boss, the notorious Kent Kane Parrot.
Kent Kane Parrot arrived in Los Angeles to attend law school at the University of Southern California in 1907, the same year Father was born. He was a big man, six foot two, and possessed a magnetic personality. He obtained his law degree and was admitted to the state bar.
Parrot was a deal-maker with phenomenal 'people skills,' whose real talent lay in his ability to bring together people of diametrically opposed beliefs and lifestyles — conservatives and liberals, prohibitionists and rum-runners — to establish some common causes that would allow them to unite. He didn't do this out of the goodness of his heart. A consummate broker, he pocketed handsome commissions either in hard cash or by somehow making his clients beholden to him in exchange for some future payment in the coin of power or influence. Through his ability to forge relationships, Parrot got himself into politics, which he once defined very simply as 'people in motion.' And that's exactly how he played the game.
By 1924, Kent Parrot had become the power behind the throne in Los Angeles municipal politics. In the 1921 race for mayor, he successfully selected and got elected George Cryer, who became known as 'Parrot's Puppet,' at which point Parrot quickly aligned himself with Los Angeles's vice lords, including the young bootlegging czar Tony Cornero. Parrot, while publicly discreet in his dealings with the underworld, would entertain its members and broker relationships among them at his private apartment at the city's newest and finest downtown hotel, the Biltmore, about which he once boasted, 'Everyone in the state of California has possibly been there in the official line.'
As Parrot's influence and power grew, he placed more and more importance in the Los Angeles Police Department. Wielding payoffs, bagmen, and vice-supervisors, Parrot wound up with most of LAPD in his pocket and, though out of the public eye, became the most powerful man in Los Angeles politics from the 1920s through the 1940s. Citizen Kent Kane Parrot's word was law, because he owned the law.
In researching Parrot's early days in Los Angeles, hoping to find an early photograph to compare to the one my father had taken, I contacted his old alma mater. They didn't have one, but they were able to provide me with his classmates' prophetic reference to him in his 1909 law school yearbook,
Not all the pumice of our college town
Can smooth the roughness of this New York clown.
On a personal note, I have only seen my father stumble, falter, and find himself at a loss for words on two occasions. The first was in 1965, when he met my wife, his ex-mistress, Kiyo, in the lobby of the Biltmore. The
