L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
By John Buntin
Harmony, 2009, 432 pages
$17.16 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle
Click on the book image for details or to purchase.

Buntin’s book is a dual biography that weaves together the careers of (a) ruthless and flamboyant mobster Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen, and (b) uncorruptible but racist L.A. police chief William Parker. The Los Angeles criminal scene that Buntin describes, mostly from the Great Depression through the Watts race riots of 1965, is brutal and appalling.

Parker joined the L.A. police in 1927, became chief in 1950, and died in 1966. Before he took over as chief, the police “didn’t fight organized crime, they managed it.” Police were poorly educated, hardly trained, often drunk on the job, and hostile to minorities. City hall was equally corrupt. Parker hired 1,400 new cops and instilled discipline (not respect for civil liberties) in the force.

The diminutive Cohen, kingpin of the Los Angeles underworld, was “Hollywood’s favorite gangster” (Esotouric). Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. hung around with him. He was brought down not by Parker but by the feds twice for tax evasion, for which he served two hitches in the pen. When he died (in his sleep) in 1975, he still owed the USA almost $500,000.

L.A. Noir is entertaining, but Buntin “writes in cliched journalese,” says Jonathan Yardley in his Washington Post review, “and tries to cram too much” into the book. Kirkus called it “a roller coaster ride [and] gripping social history.”