Free L.A. Noir by John Buntin

twenty-two-year-old Parker (who by then was claiming to be twenty-five) found a kindred spirit. Helen was a devout Catholic, and she loved to hunt and fish. She was also smart, sassy, and, personality-wise, something of a pistol. (It would seem that Bill Parker had no brief for sedate women.) This time there would be no elopement. On May 1, 1928, an announcement of Parker and Helen’s engagement appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
. They were married later that year.
    Happy, at least in his personal life, Parker bore down on his studies. He was now plowing through night school at the Los Angeles College of Law. In 1930, he would finally receive his law degree. Then he could leave the force and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.
    The Great Depression intervened. By 1930, Los Angeles had the highest personal bankruptcy rate in the country. Ruined investors were hurling themselves to their deaths from the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena with such frequency that the city was forced to erect elaborate antisuicide barriers. Nevertheless, Parker’s wife, Helen, assumed that he would leave the force and go to work for a law firm as soon as he completed his degree. As the date drew nearer, however, it dawned on her that her husband might actually enjoy policing more than the practice of law.
    “Statements from Bill kept cropping up about ‘liking the work’ [and] ’every day there is something new,” Helen would later write. So one day she asked him point-blank: Would a law degree help you in a career with the police? He assured her that it would. And so the decision was made. Parker would remain a policeman.



5
“Jewboy”
    “I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”
    —Mickey Cohen
    BY 1927, the Parrot-Cryer Combination seemed to have Los Angeles sewn up tight. Notwithstanding the presence of a few immigrants such as pimp-turned-bootlegger Albert Marco, the criminal underworld of Los Angeles was now a decidedly WASPy affair, one that left little room for an ambitious Jewish hoodlum like Mickey Cohen. The situation was undoubtedly a frustrating one. Mickey realized early on that “putting money together” was what gave him the most pleasure in life. He also realized that bootlegging, muscle jobs, and armed robbery offered excellent opportunities for enrichment. However, without a “fix,” criminal activities could have most unpleasant ramifications, as Mickey learned after his botched box office holdup. But in Los Angeles, the only outfit with a reliable “fix” was the Combination, and the Combination didn’t recruit talent from the east side of the Los Angeles River. Fortunately, that very year Mickey stumbled across a way out of this dead end. His talent for fighting led him to the one group that could challenge the likes of Kent Parrot, Charlie Crawford, and Guy McAfee: the Mob.
    As a condition for his release from reform school, Mickey was required to meet on a weekly basis with a “Big Brother.” Mickey’s was Abe Roth, a well-known fight referee. Where others saw a thuggish street scrapper, Roth saw a talented flyweight boxer. That prizefights were illegal at the time and that Mickey was on probation was no obstacle to Roth’s plan. Roth soon had Mickey fighting four-round bouts in bootleg clubs and “smokers” around the city.
    Mickey was not a disciplined boxer. He rarely trained in a gym, preferring instead to hire his fists out to the newsboys who controlled the most lucrative intersections in the city—the blocks downtown that could bring in $2,000, even $3,000 a year—and who consequently needed help keepingrivals off their turf. In time, Mickey and his little crew (two Jewish kids and one Latino) became those rivals, taking control of corners themselves. By 1925, he had staked out a prime corner downtown at Seventh and Spring Streets. Mickey prospered. He began to carry a roll. (“Even if I only made a couple of hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look