Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles by Lieberman Paul

Author:Lieberman, Paul [Lieberman, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

A Favor for Mr. Dragnet

Police chief William H. Parker went nuts over the Cahan decision, absolutely nuts. His passion seemed surprising given that it was not entirely unexpected that the courts might want the police to get a judge’s OK—a search warrant—before they broke into someone’s house. As a lawyer, Parker knew that the U.S. Supreme Court was pushing the states inexorably in that direction, that it was just a matter of time before all of them enforced the Exclusionary Rule. What’s more, Parker was the first to argue that there needed to be checks against wayward cops, those wicked men who cast disrepute upon all their colleagues—he just didn’t think that setting suspects free was the best way to discourage police misconduct. “The almost positive implication to be drawn from the Cahan case is that the activities of the police are a greater social menace than the activities of the criminal,” Parker said in one of many rants in the wake of the ruling. “This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.”

Parker saw America as imperiled on several fronts at once—by godless Communism, organized crime and degeneracy in society at large, the general lapse of values. It was one gigantic battle with the future of the nation on the line. The Cold War was revving up when he took office and within a year Los Angeles authorities prepared the city for nuclear bombardment. Two thousand firemen fanned out to L.A.’s households in 325 vehicles to deliver 600,000 copies of a booklet entitled Survival Under Atomic Attack. Parker warned a subcommittee of the state legislature that the Cahan decision signaled a setback even in that international war:

One of the basic aims of the Communist Party, as you gentlemen may know, is to drive the police of America into a state of fear. And if the police are driven into a shell of fear, then God help the people of this country!… This is the action long sought by the masters in the Kremlin. The bloody revolution, long the dream of the Comintern, cannot be accomplished in the face of a resolute police.

From the moment of the California Supreme Court ruling, the chief also predicted that crime would rise, and within months he was wielding a pointer before huge graphs streaking upward to show a 31.7 percent increase in robberies and 30.9 percent in auto thefts. “Unfortunately, my prophecy of a crime increase has come true,” he told the city’s most prominent women’s club. The ruling was not only a gift to the Communists but to “members of the underworld who prey upon law-abiding citizens,” and there were plenty of those. In a law review article, Parker estimated that six million Americans made their livings through crime.

This is obviously not a game in which police play “cops and robbers” for the amusement of society … This is a case of a lawless criminal army warring against society itself … The most dangerous criminals are professionals—people who refuse to work productively or legitimately, people who sneer at those who do and refer to them as “suckers” and “chumps.

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