L.A. Politic: The Mayor’s Race

15 February 2005 |permalink | email article

The March 8 primary is the most volatile since 1973 when runoff finalist Tom Bradley beat Mayor Sam Yorty. Mayor Jim Hahn‘s opponents hammer on the so-called “pay-to-play” City Hall scandal. Some charge, and the media report, that Hahn “leads the most investigated administration in Los Angeles since Frank Shaw.” I have researched Shaw’s 1938 recall for a novel and find the comparison without merit. There was no criminal investigation then, or since, to compare with the scope of the current joint federal-county probe of alleged City Hall corruption. Institutional memory is useful. FDR’s Atty. General Frank Murphy said before Shaw fell that Los Angeles was “the most corrupt, graft ridden city in the nation.” F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover received memos from his L.A. field office. But, during his frequent trips to the coast, the G-man was more interested in going to the races at Del Mar and Santa Anita than ferreting out corruption. Unlike today, everything was transparent: the L.A. County D.A. averted his eyes; the LAPD chief was in cahoots with both Shaw and the mob; and the four metro dailies (The Times was the most rabid) endorsed the mayor’s 1937 reelection. Given this good-ole-boy climate, organized crime and vice flourished. It took assassination attempts on the cafeteria owner and civic reformer Clifford Clinton and his private investigator, ex-cop Harry Raymond, to sober up the establishment and trigger public outrage. Shaw’s fixer brother and the captain of LAPD’s notorious Intelligence Squad, based in the mayor’s office, were convicted and sent to San Quentin. 

Major Read:  In the Rose Garden of Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran
                By Christopher de Bellaigue
                Harper-Collins Publishers
                New York Times Book Review Feb. 13, 2005

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