Taking on the underworld

Amid that darkness, he would "put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, 'You want to sneeze?' "

That was O'Mara's signature, the gun in the ear and a few suggestive words: "Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?"

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The squad members met on street corners or in parking lots. Their 1940 Fords had 200,000 miles on them and holes in the floorboard so they could pour fluid into the master cylinders. At times five men rode in one, and if several smoked cigars, their suits would stink so bad they'd hang them outdoors at night.

Their three Tommy guns came with 50-round drums and beautiful violin cases, but were a pain -- they couldn't leave them in the trunk and risk having them stolen. O'Mara slept with his under his bed.

When they did get an office, it was a cubbyhole in the decaying Central station, which had horse stalls from the 1880s.

It was tempting to see them as a wrecking crew, with several resembling another new team in town, the football Rams. Doug "Jumbo" Kennard stood 6-foot-4, Archie Case weighed 250 and Benny Williams was construction-strong -- one of the cops who built the Police Academy in their spare time.

But a team needed a quarterback or two, men tough and clever, like Burns, who'd been a gunnery officer during the war. Or Jack O'Mara.

Born in 1917, he spent his toddler years in Portland, Ore., until ice storms inspired his father to pile the family into a Model T and drive south. Jack landed at Manual Arts High, where he wasn't the speediest guy on the track team but never understood how anyone beat him. For fun, he boxed.

Not quite 135 pounds, he had to stuff himself with bananas and ice cream to make the weight for the LAPD, which needed men in the wake of its scandals of the 1930s, when a mayor and chief were caught selling promotions and a rogue squad planted a bomb under the car of a civic reformer. "It was a lousy, crooked department," said Max Solomon, Bugsy Siegel's attorney.

O'Mara became part of a generation that was supposed to change all that. At the academy, he foolishly kept racing the fastest man in the Class of 1940, Tom Bradley, the former UCLA track star and future mayor, though he had no chance of winning.

He worked patrol and traffic until Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. Coast Guard gave him an aptitude test and sent him to a cryptography unit in the Aleutian Islands, part of the effort to intercept Japanese communications and break their code. Who knew he had brains? When he returned, he was a pipe-smoking, 165-pound Spencer Tracy look-alike, and just the sort Burns wanted for his hush-hush unit.