Tonight the DrsC watched a film called Gangster Squad on the ship's on-demand TV system. The film is a sort of docudrama, a perhaps fictional treatment of things happening to real people in the history of Los Angeles.
The film has L.A. Police Chief Parker effectively "declaring war" on mobster Mickey Cohen. The filmic Parker selects a police sergeant who saw extensive WW II combat and orders him to recruit a group of rough men to battle Cohen.
Their assignment was not to make arrests, since the courts were apparently dirty, witnesses were too frightened to testify and no convictions would ensue. Their job instead was to break up Cohen's operations via vandalism and terror, and to shoot a number of his men along the way. This they did.
The film does a good job of recreating the authentic feel of late 1940s Los Angeles. Think of it as an homage to The Untouchables, set in a somewhat later L.A.
My main interests in the film are twofold: first, I remember Parker and Cohen as real icons of 1949 L.A.; second, I have independent knowledge that LAPD did engage in quasi-vigilante action of the sort depicted in the film. However the examples I know of happened over a decade earlier, before I was born.
