They used a look-alike Pac Bell truck to plant bugs, to hell with warrants. They did secret favors for Jack Webb, who glorified the LAPD with his "Dragnet" TV show. They stole evidence from mobsters and neutralized a pesky newspaper columnist. And Jack O'Mara personally set a trap for the showboating Mickey, to prove he was a killer.
There were close calls -- grand jury investigations, lawsuits and a skeptical chief or two -- but they endured through the 1950s. That's when one of their cases changed the ground rules for policing in California and when one of their own -- Jerry Wooters, the most reckless of them all -- grew far too friendly with L.A.'s homegrown hoodlum, Jack "the Enforcer" Whalen.
But when "the Enforcer" made the mistake of confronting Mickey and his crew at a hangout in the Valley, a bullet between the eyes signaled that the Gangster Squad's time was over, and so was a defining era in the city's history.
Noir L.A. was a time and place where truth was not found in the sunlight, and justice not found in marble courthouses, and where not a single gangland killing was solved, not one, for half a century. Not on paper, anyway.
--
Their first assignment: the visitors shaking down Hollywood restaurants and nightclubs. "Hoodlum types from Rhode Island," in O'Mara's words, "what we called 'dandruff.' "
The fear of evil outsiders had been a refrain in L.A. before any of these cops were born. You could go back to 1891, when this was a community of 70,000 with a police force of 75, and hear Chief John Glass warn of "Eastern crooks" seeking warm weather and easy pickings. After the turn of the century, the invaders were upgraded to "Eastern gangsters," and in 1927 Det. Ed "Roughhouse" Brown became a local legend by escorting Al Capone to the train when the notorious mobster was discovered in a downtown hotel. "I thought you folks liked tourists," Capone said before returning to Chicago.
Now a new group of "tourists" was demanding 25% of the take at landmarks such as the Mocambo and Brown Derby, and the club owners did not want to go to court, worried what might happen to their families. A state crime report would warn anew of an "Invasion of Undesirables." "What are you gonna do?" O'Mara asked.
The view was great from the hills off Mulholland Drive. So why not escort these hoodlums up there and, as O'Mara put it, "have a little heart-to-heart talk with 'em, emphasize the fact that this wasn't New York, this wasn't Chicago, this wasn't Cleveland. And we leaned on 'em a little, you know what I mean? Up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it's dark at night."
