Policemen pointing at each other?

[LLeff]

Hi folks,

Recently got a question that I bet someone either knows or can research. On the 9/11/49 show (used on the September chat, it's the one where Jack's on the tour bus and doesn't appear for most of the show), there's a gag where Frank Nelson talks about the Los Angeles police all sitting around pointing at each other.

Clearly a topical gag...but what happened?

[Brad from Georgia]

Clearly a topical gag...but what happened?

I suspect it was a reference to the Brenda Allen scandal during the summer months of 1949. Brenda Allen, at 36, was the, um, madam of a house of negotiable affection in Los Angeles. It was an upscale place, catering to the film colony elite and to upper-class L.A. males. Sergeant Charles Stoker of the L.A. Vice Squad got interested in Allen's activities and installed a tap on her phone. From the phone tap, Stoker realized that Allen was having regular phone chats with various members of the L.A. Police Department. Eventually Allen went public with allegations of regular payoffs to the cops--to a lot of cops. The police began to accuse each other of being on her payroll, and in July, Police Chief Horrall was forced into retirement. The uproar didn't die off, however, and in the fall of 1949 the LAPD organized the Internal Affairs Division to police the department and insure against further corruption.

Allen's prostitution establishment became the basis for quite a lot of fiction; Raymond Chandler referred to it in one Philip Marlowe book (under a different, fictionalized name), and James Ellroy used a variant of it in his book LA Confidential (it also appears in the movie); the intriguing bit was that some of the women working for Allen had undergone plastic surgery so they resembled movie stars of the era.

Anyway, the frantic accusations and counter-accusations in the LAPD possibly accounts for the "cops pointing at each other" gag.

[Brad from Georgia]

Wish I could edit. In the last sentence of the previous post, read "account" for "accounts."