James Ellroy - L. A. Confidential

marked Confidental, dated 1/1 1/5 3,

filed by Lt. Arnold Reddin,

Commander, Hollywood Division Detective

Squad, copies to Personnel and

Administration Divisions:

1/11/53

ANNUAL FITNESS REPORT

DUTY DATES: 3/1/52-12/31/52

SUBJECT: Exley, Edmund J., Badge 1104

GRADE: Detective Sergeant (Civil Serv. Rate 5)

DIVISION: Detective (Hollywood Squad)

COMMANDING OFFICER: Lt. Arnold D. Reddin, Badge 556

Gentlemen:

On Sergeant Exley:

This man has obvious gifts as a detective. He is thorough, intelligent, seems to have no personal life and works very long hours. He is only thirty years old and in his nine months as a detective he has amassed a brilliant arrest record, with a 95 percent conviction rate on the cases (mostly minor felony property crimes) he has made. He is a thorough and succinct report writer.

Exley works poorly with partners and well by himself, so I have let him conduct interviews alone. He is a peerless interrogator and to my mind has gotten many miraculous confessions (without physical force). All well and good, and my overall fitness grade on Exley is a solid "A."

But he is roundly hated by his fellow officers, the result of his serving as an informant in the Christmas shake-up, and he is despised for receiving a Bureau assignment out of it. (It seems to be common knowledge that Exley made the Detective Bureau as a result of his informing.) Also, Exley does not like to employ force with suspects, and most of the men consider him a coward.

Exley has passed the lieutenant's exam with very high marks and an opening is probably coming up for him. I think he is both too young and too inexperienced to be a detective lieutenant and that such a promotion would create great resentment. I think he would be a roundly hated supervisor.

Respectfully,

Lt. Arnold D. Reddin, Badge 556

EXTRACT: L.A. «Daily News», February 9:

IT'S OFFICIAL: CONSTRUCTION

KING EXLEY TO LINK SOUTHLAND

WITH SUPERHIGHWAYS

Today, the Tri-County Highway Commission announced that Preston Exley, ex-San Francisco paperboy and L.A. cop, would be the man to build the freeway system that will link Hollywood to downtown L.A., downtown to San Pedro, Pomona to San Bernardino and the South Bay to the San Fernando Valley.

"Details will be forthcoming," Exley told the News by phone. "I'll be holding a televised press conference tomorrow, and representatives of the State Legislature and the Tn-County Commission will be there with me."

February 1953 issue, «Hush-Hush» Magazine:

L.A. D.A. TAKES TIME OFF FROM

CAMPAIGN-RELAXING WITH COPPER

CUTIE!!!

by Sidney Hudgens

Bill McPherson, the district attorney for the City of Los Angeles, likes them long and leggy, zesty and chesty-and dark and dusky. From Harlem's Sugar Hill to L.A. 's Darktown, the 57-year-old married man with three teenaged daughters is known as a sugar daddy who likes to tss around that long slush-fund green-in dark hot spots where the drinks are tall, the jazz is cool, reefer smoke hangs humid and black-white romance bebops to the jungle throb of a wailing tenor sax.

Can you dig it, hepcat? McPherson, engaged in a reelection campaign, the fight of his political life against ace crimebuster Ellis Loew, needs time to relax. Does he go to the pool at the staid Jonathan Club? No. Does he take the family to Mike Lyman's or the Pacific Dining Car? No. Where «does» he go? To the Darktown Strutter's Ball.

It's all shakin' south of Jefferson, hepcat. It's a different world down there. Get your hair marcelled, get yourself a purple sharkskin suit and trip the dark fantastic. D.A. Bill McPherson does-every Thursday nite.

But let's talk facts. Marion McPherson, Darktown Bill's long-suffering hausfrau, thinks Billy Boy spends Thursday nites watching Mexican bantamweights pound each other silly at the Olympic Auditorium. She's wrongsky-Bad Billy craves amour, not mayhem, on his Thursdays.

Fact numero uno-Bill McPherson is a regular at Minnie Roberts' Casbah-the swankiest colored cathouse on L.A. 's southside. Call it sinuendo, hepcat- but we've heard he likes the thirty-five-dollar milkbath, plied by two very large Congo cuties. Fact numero twosky-McPherson was seen listening to Charlie "Bird" Parker (a notorious hophead) at Tommy Tucker's Playroom, on cloud ten from the Playroom's potent Plantation Punch. His date that night was one Lynette Brown, age eighteen, a dusky deelite with two juvenile arrests for possession of marijuana. Lynette told a secret «Hush-Hush» correspondent, "Bill like his black. He say, 'Once you had black you can't go back.' He dig jazz and he like to party slow. He really married? He really distric' 'turney?"

He sure is, sweet thing. But for how much longer? There's a bunch of Thursdays between now and Election Day, and will Bad Bebop Billy be able to control his dark desires until then?

Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here-off the record, on the Q.T. and «very» Hush-Hush.

EXTRACT: L.A. «Herald-Express», March 1:

BLOODY CHRISTMAS POLICEMAN TO

LEAVE JAIL SOON

On April 2, Richard Alex Stensland leaves Wayside Honor Rancho a free man. Convicted last year on four assault charges related to the 1951 Bloody Christmas police brutality scandal, he walks out an ex-cop with an uncertain future.

Stensland's former partner, Officer Wendell White, spoke to the «Herald». He said, "It was the luck of the draw, that Christmas thing. I was there, and I could have been the guy that swung. It was Dick, though. He made a good cop out of me. I owe him for that and I'm mad at what happened to him. I'm still Dick's friend and I bet he's still got lots of friends in the Department."

And among the civilian population, it appears. Stensland told a «Herald» reporter that upon his release he'll go to work for Abraham Teitlebaum, the owner of Abe's Noshery, a delicatessen in West Los Angeles. Asked whether he bears grudges against any of the people who put him in jail, Stensland said, "Only one. But I'm too law-abiding to do anything about it."

L.A. «Daily News», March 6:

SCANDAL TURNS CLOSE D.A.'S RACE TO

LANDSLIDE

It was expected to go down to the wire: incumbent city D.A. William McPherson vs. Deputy D.A. Ellis Loew, the winner to hold the job as top elected crimefighter in the Southland for the next four years. Both men campaigned on the issues: how to deploy the city's legal budget the best way, how to most efficaciously fight crime. Both men, predictably, claimed they would fight crime the hardest. The L.A. law enforcement establishment considered McPherson soft on crime and too liberal in general and threw their support to Loew. Union organizations supported the incumbent. McPherson stood pat on his status quo record and played off his nice-guy personality, and Loew tried a young firebrand routine that didn't work: he came off as theatrical and vote-hungry. It was a gentleman's campaign until the February issue of «Hush-Hush» magazine hit the stands.

Most people take «Hush-Hush» and other scandal sheets with a grain of salt, but this was election time. An article alleged that D.A. McPherson, happily married for twenty-six years, cavorted with young Negro women. The D.A. ignored the article, which was accompanied by photographs of him and a Negro girl, taken at a nightclub in south central Los Angeles. Mrs. McPherson did not ignore the article-she filed for divorce. Ellis Loew did not mention the article in his campaign, and McPherson began to slip in the polls. Then, three days before the election, Sheriffs deputies raided the Lilac View Motel on the Sunset Strip, acting on the tip of an "unknown informant" who called in with word of an illegal assignation in room 9. The assignators proved to be D.A. McPherson and a young Negro prostitute, age 14. The deputies arrested McPherson on statutory rape charges and heard out the story of Marvell Wilkins, a minor with two soliciting arrests.