Had a View

            In The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler called Downtown "the big sordid dirty city". During the booming 1920s, when the city was awash in petroleum dollars, he was a Dabney Oil Syndicate executive whose Olive street office had a view of enough tabloid-worthy mayhem to fuel a life of crime writing. Along with the crooked water schemes and oil graft, Prohibition had turned every thirsty good-time Charlie into a lawbreaker, and underworld scuzzbags morphed into slick bigger-than-life racketeers. Instead of fighting all this criminality, the LAPD decided to "manage" it and thus became corrupt.

excerpt from
Raymond Chandler's Crooktown
Damien Blackshaw
Dtlabook.com
2019

image
Brian Busch
                                    https://www.dtlabook.com/history/crook-town