The Lid Off Los Angeles

"The Lid Off Los Angeles" was a 1939 six-part series of newsmagazine articles that ran in Liberty, an American general interest magazine. The series, written by Dwight F. McKinney and Fred Allhoff, asserted that the Los Angeles Police Department, in cooperation with officials in municipal government, had partnered with organized crime figures in the city for mutual financial benefit but to the detriment of the body politic. The article alleged police protection of gambling, alcohol smuggling, and bordello prostitution in exchange for payoffs by crime bosses, as well bribery, intimidation, spying, dirty tricks, ratfucking, and ultimately violence on the part of the corrupt LAPD to protect gambling-prostitute-bootlegging revenue for crime bosses over a 20-year period, ending under the administrations of Chief of Police James E. Davis and Los Angeles mayor Frank L. Shaw. Frank L. Shaw, who had been removed from Los Angeles City Hall and replaced with Fletcher Bowron by the 1938 Los Angeles mayoral recall election, sued the authors for libel, sued again for a different article in another magazine, and was later countersued by civic reformer Clifford Clinton for making false allegations. A jury in the first lawsuit was unable to reach a verdict. After lengthy court proceedings over several years, all parties settled out of court in 1943. The articles are considered very influential in the history of Los Angeles, and the title has been continuously reused in reference to crime and problems generally in Los Angeles. The title of the series comes from a statement made by Clinton in the wake of the car bomb that almost killed private investigator Harry J. Raymond; he announced he had information about the involvement of elected officials that would "blow the lid off of Los Angeles".^[1]