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Audie Prize Nominee, Background, 2013 Midcentury LA: A city sold to the earth as "the white place of America", a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern principles, and Hollywood superstars, protected by the world's most well-known police, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this general public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure females" and crooked cops, ruthless magazine tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Seacoast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld emerged two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most well-known police key - each prepared to fight the other for the soul of the town. Former block thug changed featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen kept the band for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood's favorite gangster - and L.A.'s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis, Jr., palled around with him; Television set journalist Mike Wallace needed his testimonies; evangelist Billy Graham looked for his soul. William H. Parker was the very pleased son of the pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. Like a first year patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he uncovered that L.A. was ruled with a shadowy "Combination" - a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld information where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were applied with shotguns and dynamite. Parker's life quest became to topple it - also to create a police that could never answer to elected officers again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control metropolis - a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and films such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the fight between your underworld and the authorities played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hillsides, from the gritty roadways of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The results of this decades-long entanglement designed modern American policing - for better and then for worse - and helped create the LA we know today. A fascinating study of Los Angeles's underbelly, the Mob, and America's most popular - and reviled - police section, L.A. Noir can be an enlightening, enjoyable, and richly thorough narrative about metropolis originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, "THE CITY of Our Woman the Queen of the Angels."

Category: Organized Crime

Details

Publisher	Tantor Audio
Language	English
ISBN
DATE	2012-06
Author	John Buntin

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