More than any other modern American city, Los Angeles’ history is inextricably intertwined with that of its police force. John Buntin’s “L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City” ($26) makes an important and wonderfully enjoyable contribution to our understanding of that interplay.
This is a highly original and altogether splendid history that can be read for sheer pleasure and belongs on the shelf of indispensable books about America’s most debated and least understood cities.
A Mississippi-born writer for Governing magazine, Buntin came to Los Angeles to write a profile of Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and became mesmerized by the LAPD’s history.
He’s chosen to pick up its story in the early 1920s with the arrival of two essential outsiders — the future police chief William Parker, who grew up in Deadwood, S.D., and Mickey Cohen, the second-grade dropout, Hebrew School reject and onetime-boxer-turned-mobster, whose mother ran a grocery in Boyle Heights around the corner from the Breed Street Shul.
By recounting their biographies in parallel, Buntin creates a social history of Los Angeles in the 20th century, and it makes for compelling reading. Parker and Cohen both were outsiders (one a Catholic and the other a Jew) in a city where commerce and politics weren’t the only white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant possessions — so were the rackets.
The author sets up the two men as polar opposites — and, ultimately, antagonists — in a city rife with vice of every kind. It makes for utterly compelling reading, and Buntin’s research is copious and fresh enough to inform even those steeped in local history.
Buntin strikes a balance in his narrative. The conceit of setting up Parker and Cohen as opposing poles, however, is an interesting one, but it’s hard not to feel that Cohen is so colorful and larger-than-life and far too little is written about of the fascinating portrait of Parker that emerges from his accumulated evidence.
Parker’s real political genius was to join the traditional civic elite’s vision of its “white” metropolis to his own updated notion of a virtuously pristine Eden.
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