Best Book of the Year The Los Angeles Timesbull;TheWashington Post Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. InA Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.rs"s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir.

Richard Rayner is the author of Drake’s Fortune, The Cloud Sketcher, The Associates, and several other books. His writing appears in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.

1
The Mystery Is Announced

"CHARLIE CRAWFORD AND EDITOR SLAIN!" screamed the headline in theLos Angeles Illustrated Daily News. The date was Thursday, March 20, 1931. At about 4:30 P.M. the previous afternoon the fifty-four-year-old Crawford, nicknamed "The Gray Wolf" because of the silvery-gray hair that waved and curled across his head, had been gunned down in his office on Sunset Boulevard. Also killed was Herbert Spencer, a veteran journalist who'd been with Crawford in the room. "EX-BOSS FALLS TO LONG-FEARED GUNMAN BULLET," theNewswent on. "Crawford, kingpin politician, lived until 8:32 P.M. last night, a little more than four hours after the shooting. He died without revealing the identity of his assailant, according to detectives . . ."

Crawford had been, and many believed he still was, a "boss," a key player in what was known as "The System," a low-profile but all-powerful syndicate that ran the gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets in Los Angeles. "He was the most feared and dictatorial power in the city, its behind-the-scenes czar," wrote Beverly Davis, who ran an upscale brothel for Crawford. "You could get away with murder under his wing." This was L.A.'s brand of gangsterism: Crawford used officers of the Los Angeles Police Department to collect the take from the underworld captains. He worked behind the scenes with Kent Kane Parrot, a fixer who'd had George Cryer, the mayor of Los Angeles from 1921-29, pretty much in his pocket. It was a discreet yet effective arrangement that had been in place since Crawford and Parrot contrived to get Cryer elected. As far as the rackets were concerned, L.A. had been a closed town ever since, locked down by Crawford and The System. "It was the most lucrative, the most efficient, and the best-entrenched graft operation in the country," News city editor Matt Weinstock wrote later. Now somebody was monkeying with that operation, trying to destroy it perhaps, or take it over.

"Racketeer bullets declared open warfare in the Los Angeles underworld yesterday," said theL.A. Examiner. "MAN HUNT ON!" An announcement went out over the newly perfected LAPD radio system: "Wanted for murder--an American, about six feet tall, weighing between 150 and 175 pounds, and between 35 and 40 years of age. Hair, brown. A small black moustache. Dressed in neat blue suit and wearing sailor straw hat."

Was this the killer? It seemed so.

"The political structure rocked precariously while everybody tried to imagine who could have fired the fatal shots," wrote Leslie White, a young detective working in the investigative unit of the District Attorney's office. For White, the case had a particular significance, a poignancy almost. He'd met Charlie Crawford several times and had liked him. "Despite the unanimous opinion that the murder of Crawford was a piece of civic betterment, I felt a pang," White wrote. "Would his death improve the city in any way? I doubted it. A new boss might be less efficiently corrupt. The King was dead--but who would seek the throne?"

White worked downtown, in the Hall of Justice, a new building opposite the even newer white tower of City Hall. On that morning after the shootings, White was in his small cubbyhole of an office, talking with colleagues, trying to figure out who could have pulled the trigger when his boss, Blayney Matthews, the burly and genial head of the D.A.'s investigative unit, came in with the news.

"We're looking for Dave Clark," Matthews said.

Leslie White blinked--unable, for a moment, to believe his ears. "OurDave Clark," he said.

"That's right," Matthews said, and White rocked back in his chair.

Dave Clark--known to the press as "Debonair Dave" or "Ha

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Excerpted from A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L. A. 's Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.