Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (23 page)

David Dotson had a similar experience. “He invited me into his office after I’d been in retirement for a while, and he presented me with this nice certificate of service,” recalls Dotson. “And I asked him if there was anything I could help him with, or fill him in on.
But he didn’t want to know anything. And I never heard back from him. It wasn’t that I had all this unique, wonderful information. But nobody else got in to tell him anything either.”

It said a lot about Williams that he didn’t pump Dotson dry for information. Dotson had been the chief of operations responsible for running the department on a day-to-day basis. Over the decades he’d served in just about every executive position in the department, and had publicly testified against Gates to the Christopher Commission. Dotson didn’t just know a lot, he essentially knew
everything
.

Williams might have assumed that Dotson had a self-serving agenda.
And maybe he did. But Basic Police Work 101, like Basic Management 101, is that you take people’s motives into account as you talk and listen, and then come to a conclusion based on multiple sources. But Willie Williams never did.

Richard Riordan and Willie Williams, June 1993, Los Angeles City Hall

Sitting in his office in June of 1993, Los Angeles’s newly elected mayor, Richard Riordan, gave Willie Williams an order in the form of a request—just as he had been accustomed to giving orders for decades as a multimillion-dollar junk-bond speculator, attorney, and businessman.

“I want you to increase the size of the LAPD to
10,500 officers,” he told Williams, “and to do so within five years.” Although
Riordan, according to the
Times
, had already had Williams and his wife for dinner at his home and had once even referred to him as the
best police chief in America, they didn’t really know each other. Nevertheless, they were about to embark on a mutual journey that was vital to the future of Los Angeles, so it was unfortunate to all concerned when Willie Williams replied with the wrong answer. “
Sorry, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “it can’t be done.” And with that, Willie Williams began his swift slide to persona-non-grata status in
Richard Riordan’s world.

A short, sixty-three-year-old Irishman with a weathered face and hair graying at the temples, Richard Riordan looked like he’d been born rough-and-tumble clad in a Wall Street three-piece suit. But there was more to him than that. An ex–New Yorker raised in Queens and suburban New Rochelle, he seemed torn between his desire to amass big money in the mean, cutthroat
junk-bond industry and to do good by
lavishly supporting L.A.’s Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Elected mayor on a slogan of “
Tough Enough to Turn Los Angeles Around,” Riordan had poured
hundreds of thousands of dollars into his own campaign, and secured the strong support of both the LAPD’s then reactionary union—the Police Protective League—and the city’s white voters, who still made up two-thirds of the electorate. He’d run
on a promise to
add three thousand cops to the LAPD, and
that
—as he’d been making clear for months prior to his election—was his bottom-line consideration.

As a corporate CEO who
headed two law firms—one of which specialized in business law—he’d been accustomed to picking up the phone and dictating unquestioned orders. And now, at his first official meeting with Williams, his major campaign promise was being unceremoniously dismissed by a new police chief whom he hardly knew and had had no input in selecting.

No matter that there were sound logistical reasons behind Williams’s negative reply. “The whole idea of training and assimilating that many new officers in that amount of time,” as David Dotson later pointed out, “was ridiculous. That kind of expansion has to be planned and done gradually. Otherwise you’ll get a whole lot of people who have not been properly investigated and aren’t well qualified. The mayor put Willie Williams in
a terrible position.”

So it wasn’t that Williams was wrong in terms of practical policy, just that his answer was politically naïve. The passage into law of the Christopher Commission reforms limited an
LAPD chief’s tenure to two five-year terms. So Richard Riordan’s Police Commission could simply refuse to rehire Williams when his first five-year term expired. But five years was a long time in politics. And in that interval, Richard Riordan would damn Willie Williams with little praise and even less support.

Richard Riordan, 1993

When he was running for mayor, Richard Riordan hadn’t campaigned as an LAPD critic or police reformer. Nor was he one. He may have owed the police union a political debt, but he also loved cops. They were the good guys, the criminals the bad guys. For him it was about as simple as that.

What Richard Riordan was sure he wanted in his LAPD was a bigger, better-run, less controversial crime-fighting machine led by a tough, efficient police chief. One who would change the harsh fact that in 1993, Riordan’s
inaugural year as mayor of Los Angeles, the city had the highest homicide rate in its history. One with whom he was philosophically in sync, with whom he could work, and whom he could back when the going got tough. He wasn’t exactly
opposed
to the kind of reform the city’s liberals were championing, he just believed it was secondary to law and order and didn’t matter very much.

He had a sense of purpose and a few simple goals: strengthen the LAPD and reorganize city government so that it ran more efficiently and was more “
business friendly.”

He wasn’t a wild-eyed, social-wedge-issue, law-and-order Republican of the type that had dominated California Republican politics into the early 1990s and that would lead the charge to pass the state’s notorious 1994 three-strikes law. And he couldn’t be if he hoped to be elected mayor. While many of the lunatic punishments for petty crimes under the law were coming out of Los Angeles courts filled with state-appointed judges, Los Angeles itself was a liberal, immigrant-friendly Democratic city. One that had the largest ACLU chapter in the country, and whose politicians waved from a Cadillac convertible every year in the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade. In short, if Riordan had been a standard-model hard-right, slick-haired, white-male Inland California Republican of the nineties, he would never have been the first Republican in thirty years to be elected mayor of Los Angeles.

**************

It was Richard Riordan’s philanthropy that had first brought him to civic prominence. The Catholic Church had never been the political force in Los Angeles that it had become in cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Instead, during the first seventy years of the twentieth century, Los Angeles politics, culture, and economy had been almost entirely dominated by the conservative sons and daughters of white, native-born, middle-class
Protestant emigrants from the Midwest. For most of those decades Los Angeles’s Catholic establishment and its archdiocese had influence but never decisive power. (
Bill Parker was Catholic, but never a Catholic chief in that sense.) Instead the archdiocese worked with a powerful layman from the Catholic community who served as
its chief fund-raiser, consigliere to its archbishop, and a conduit to the world of the WASP power elite that then controlled L.A.

By the early 1990s, however, that had changed, and the archdiocese was thriving as the beneficiary of the
hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants flooding into its pews and Catholic schools. Meanwhile, the Church was holding
$3 billion in assets and funding an annual
budget of nearly $300 million, covering
284 parishes in L.A. and adjacent Orange County.

In the 1980s a dynamic young Los Angeles cardinal, Roger Mahony, found his consigliere in the person of Richard Riordan. Over the course of eight years,
Riordan would raise over $84 million to create a permanent endowment that would grant scholarships to inner-city students and construction funds for Catholic schools.

Thanks also to Riordan, in 1989
Cardinal Mahony, despite his mission to the poor, also began soaring into the heavens in his new $395,000 blue-and-white Hughes 500D four-passenger helicopter—a gift from a very select group of donors who, like Riordan, had given the archdiocese at least a million dollars in the preceding year. (Mahony was later forced to step down in disgrace as archbishop after covering up for priests accused of sexually abusing children.)

It was this philanthropy, not politics, that first brought Richard Riordan to civic prominence. For his run for mayor he needed an architect to craft both his image and his message, and for that he chose William Wardlaw, a local master of realpolitik, who also knew how to count the votes you needed to get you where you wanted to go. It was he who came up with Riordan’s campaign message: “Tough Enough to Turn Los Angeles Around.”

A well-connected Democrat who began his political career working as a thirteen-year-old in
John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign for president, Wardlaw had been active in both state and national politics ever since, working as a savvy consultant in
Bill Clinton’s crisis-filled first presidential campaign, as well as in almost every important statewide campaign for Democrats in California.

Bill Wardlaw was thus able to quickly build a campaign coalition for the Republican Riordan that included organized labor and the city’s Latino
leadership. Once Riordan was elected, Wardlaw would manage all the mayor’s appointments, including to the Police Commission.

**************

Working for Riordan at the law firm of
Riordan and McKenzie, Wardlaw
had been his protégé, lawyer, partner, and closest friend and associate.

Like Riordan, he was a key fund-raiser for the construction of Cardinal Mahony’s new
$35 million downtown cathedral, and was as well a member of the Regents Council at
Mount St. Mary’s College. In short, William Wardlaw was a very busy guy who rarely left fingerprints.

Although they were both practicing Catholics, neither he nor Riordan had a problem with gays. And at a homophobic time, when Bill Clinton was offering up “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and signing the Defense of Marriage Act, Wardlaw chose openly
gay officials, including a defense attorney and former head of the ACLU, as police commissioners.

Wardlaw was also a Bernard Parks guy.
He liked Bernie Parks, and thought Willie Williams a disaster. It was he, in fact, who would coach Parks in his oral exams to replace Willie Williams as the next LAPD chief. He believed, like Riordan, that in a city plagued by crime, the LAPD needed to be tough.

For the previous decade
Tom Bradley and Daryl Gates had detested each other so strongly that by the end they couldn’t bear to speak with one another. Now Richard Riordan, as a new mayor, was joining a new police chief in the person of Willie Williams. And like Bradley and Gates, their chemistry was also bad. Their estrangement, however, would be a one-sided game of attrition in which Willie Williams wasn’t playing and would always be on the defensive.

Gary Greenebaum, Summer 1993, Parker Center

Once elected mayor, Richard Riordan chose Rabbi Gary Greenebaum as his Police Commission president. At forty-seven, Greenebaum was tall, broad-shouldered, energetic, and witty—a man of casual, cosmopolitan demeanor soothingly offset by his attire of rumpled suits and ties (sans yarmulke).
He was also proud, judgmental, and anxious to get things done.

In 1990 Greenebaum began working with leaders of the city’s ethnic and religious communities—focusing most keenly on improving Jewish-black relations—which in Los Angeles had deteriorated sharply from the glory days of the civil rights movement and their work together in electing Tom Bradley as L.A.’s first black mayor. It quickly became obvious that a major issue for the city’s African-Americans was trying to end the harsh treatment they were receiving at the hands of the LAPD.

After being part of the successful political campaign to codify into law the Christopher Commission reforms, he was now prepared, as a new police commissioner, to see them implemented by the department.

“I’m sure I was
put on the commission partly because I was Jewish,” says Greenebaum. “But I also think it was because Riordan or his advisors felt they needed someone who looked like reform. Later it became clearer and clearer that that’s what I was there for—to represent the reform movement and help change the department.”

During the transition from Jesse
Brewer’s outgoing Police Commission to Gary Greenebaum’s new one, among the first things that Greenebaum did was to meet with Brewer for a working lunch. Sitting at a table in the summer of ’93, Brewer handed Greenebaum a manila folder as he talked about the great job Willie Williams was doing—this despite the fact that he was privately growing increasingly disappointed with him.

Inside the folder was a self-evaluation that Williams had completed that past May. Greenebaum remembers being stunned. After the King beating, the Police Commission had found it nearly impossible to fire Daryl Gates because for over a decade a succession of Police Commissions had let him write his own always “outstanding” job performance evaluations. And here was a post-Gates commission making the same mistake instead of taking ownership of an essential task that was rightfully theirs. Brewer, however, told him that the self-evaluation was “no problem” and that the commission was merely following a “time-honored tradition.”

Examining the performance report later, Greenebaum was even more
shaken. “
Not only was it a self-evaluation,” recalls Greenebaum, “it was a multiple-choice, circle-the-box kind of questionnaire: outstanding, excellent, not so hot, could do better, etc. It didn’t tell me anything about what the guy was capable of or what he was good at and not good at. And, of course, Willie Williams was outstanding in virtually every category.” Williams had also added one concluding comment: “
I believe that I have met all expectations placed upon me as the chief executive in the Police Department in areas such as: restoring community confidence; developing emergency plans; and refocusing department management to work as a team. I have, as an executive, exceeded the usual expected standards.”