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