second occurred some three years before his death, during a weekend visit in San Francisco, at Sunday brunch. Knowing Father always had a reason for choosing specific names, and knowing that my older brother Michael Paul's namesake was chosen from Mother's close friendship with renowned bacteriologist and 'microbe hunter' Paul De Kruif, and my younger brother, Kelvin George, was named after Father, I asked him what was the source of my own middle name, Kent. Who had I been named after? It seemed as if he was caught off guard, as he hemmed and hawed nervously and finally came out with a most implausible, 'Oh, no reason. It's just a nice-sounding name, that's all.' Though surprised, I took his statement at face value. Armed with today's biographical knowledge, the photograph, their twenty-year friendship, and Father's admiration for the man and his influence and power, I submit that Father chose to honor his old friend, Kent Parrot, by making me his namesake.
Tony Cornero, aka Tony Canaris and Tony Cornero Stralla, got his start in California during Prohibition. A San Francisco cab driver in the early 1920s, he began as a rum-runner, overseeing the unloading and distribution of contraband liquor from ships off the California coast. Smaller boats would taxi the precious cargo to deserted beaches, where Cornero would then receive and coordinate the shipments throughout Los Angeles and Southern California.
On March 11, 1925, the
By 1937, twelve years after his bust, Tony was promoted to 'Admiral Cornero' and owned several large gambling ships off the coast of Los Angeles just outside the three-mile limit. From the pier at Santa Monica, customers could take a twenty-five-cent, ten-minute ride and be drinking the best imported liquor and shooting dice or playing blackjack aboard his lush floating casino, which was triple the size of any of those offered in Las Vegas in those early years before Benny (Bugsy) Siegel built the Flamingo. Night after night, Angelenos lined up by the thousands to try their luck against his blackjack dealers or at the shipboard crap tables. While Cornero's offshore investment profits were a tightly guarded secret, they have been estimated at a nightly net of $30,000.
Like many other local successful businessmen, Cornero bought himself a home in Beverly Hills alongside such prominent neighbors as Benny Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Cornero remained a major crime figure in Los Angeles for almost twenty-five years, though he remained strictly local and did not ally himself with the East Coast or Chicago- based Cosa Nostra families. As a result, he always remained an outsider, never able to establish any onshore gambling establishments, because police and sheriffs quickly shut them down as soon as he started them up. Gangsters Jack Dragna, Benny Siegel — an early investor in Cornero's floating casino the
In 1938, LAPD captain Earle Kynette headed the department's Intelligence Squad. As part of his intelligence- gathering, he wiretapped Mayor Frank Shaw's opposition candidate, fifty or more prominent Los Angeles citizens, and retired LAPD detective Harry Raymond, at that time employed by the reform candidate to obtain information relating to corruption within the mayor's office and LAPD. Kynette and members of his squad decided that Raymond was getting too close to the truth, so they placed a bomb in his car. When he turned the ignition key the explosion totally demolished the vehicle and blew hundreds of pieces of shrapnel into Raymond's body. He was rushed to the hospital, where, in critical condition and about to succumb from his injuries, he put in a call to the crime-fighting city editor of the
Miraculously, Raymond survived, and, though a cover-up was attempted by then LAPD chief James Davis — who had the gall to put Captain Kynette in charge of the car-bombing investigation — the facts eventually came out. Kynette was charged and convicted of the attempted murder of his brother officer and sentenced to a ten-year prison term. Mayor Frank Shaw, under whose auspice the crime was allegedly carried out, was promptly voted out of office in September 1938, replaced by the reform candidate Fletcher Bowron.
In his recently published
Los Angeles, Clinton discovered, was supporting an intricate network of brothels, gambling houses, and clip joints, all of it run by well-organized syndicates headed by gambler Guy McAfee and Bob Gans, chief concessionaire of slot machines throughout the city, with attorneys Kent Parrot and Charles Kradick serving as mouthpieces. Obviously, a number of police were on the take for so many operations — an estimated six hundred brothels, three hundred gambling houses, eighteen hundred bookie joints, twenty-three thousand slot machines — to be flourishing, (p. 168)
Within his first two months in office, Mayor Bowron forced LAPD police chief James Davis to retire, after the bombing investigation showed that, while Davis's memory was hazy about specific details, 'perhaps' he had, after all, ordered Raymond and fifty other city reformers to be placed under surveillance by Kynette's Intelligence Squad. Bowron then met in secret with his good friend James Richardson and asked him to help identify and rid Los Angeles of the corrupt politicians and police officers on the take.
As Richardson wrote in For
The three met in secret at the mayor's home in the Hollywood Hills, where Cornero told Mayor Bowron that he knew all about corruption within the LAPD. In fact, he said, according to Richardson's account, ''I've got their names all written down on this slip of paper.' And he handed Bowron the paper. . . the mayor read the names of twenty-six of the highest ranking officers in the department.'
Bowron hired an ex-FBI agent to investigate all twenty-six, most of whom were the department's most powerful commanders. The mayor's investigator conducted wiretapping and surveillance of all those Cornero had named. One by one they were called before the mayor, who demanded their resignation. If anyone protested or refused to resign, Bowron simply played his tape-recorded conversations. End of story.
According to an official LAPD history of 'the Purge' and Mayor Bowron s campaign to reform the LAPD, as written in
On the morning of March 3, 1939, the Commissioners struck. Citing Charter Section 181, which authorized the retirement of any officer eligible for pension 'for the good of the Police Department,' the Mayor, supported by the Police Board, requested the immediate resignation of 2 3 [sic] high-ranking officers. Included in the 'forced retirement' were former Chief (now Deputy Chief) Roy Steckel, Chief of Detectives Joe Taylor, Assistant Chief George Allen, 11 captains and 9 lieutenants. Within the next six months 45 high-ranking officers resigned, (p.82)
