Charles H. Crawford
Charles H. Crawford (April 22, 1879 – May 20, 1931) was an American political figure. In the 1920s, his loosely organized crime syndicate in Los Angeles, California, was known as the "City Hall Gang." Crawford was reportedly a model for some of Raymond Chandler's villains. Early years In the early 1900s, Crawford operated dance halls and saloons in Seattle, Washington. During the 1910s, Crawford moved to Southern California, where he opened a bar that reportedly also included a casino and bordello frequented by local politicians, judges and public officials. Eventually, Crawford developed a large vice operation in Los Angeles that included many casinos and bordellos. Crawford developed a reputation for his political savvy and connections in the city's government and police department. With his connections, he was reportedly able to provide advance notice of raids to his criminal affiliates. City Hall Gang Crawford's influence peaked during the Prohibition era in Los Angel ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, being the home of the Hollywood film industry, and its sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to it's east. It covers about , and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estim ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
People Murdered In California
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Assassinated American People
Assassination is the murder of a prominent or important person, such as a head of state, head of government, politician, world leader, member of a royal family or CEO. The murder of a celebrity, activist, or artist, though they may not have a direct role in matters of the state, may also sometimes be considered an assassination. An assassination may be prompted by political and military motives, or done for financial gain, to avenge a grievance, from a desire to acquire fame or notoriety, or because of a military, security, insurgent or secret police group's command to carry out the assassination. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times. A person who carries out an assassination is called an assassin or hitman. Etymology The word ''assassin'' may be derived from '' asasiyyin'' (Arabic: أَسَاسِيِّين, ʾasāsiyyīn) from أَسَاس (ʾasās, "foundation, basis") + ـِيّ (-iyy), meaning "people who are faithful to the foundati ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Prohibition-era Gangsters
In the United States from 1920 to 1933, a Constitution of the United States, nationwide constitutional law prohibition, prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. The alcohol industry was curtailed by a succession of state legislatures, and finally ended nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on January 16, 1919. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. Led by Pietism, pietistic Protestantism in the United States, Protestants, prohibitionists first attempted to end the trade in alcoholic drinks during the 19th century. They aimed to heal what they saw as an ill society beset by alcohol-related problems such as alcoholism, Domestic violence, family violence, and Saloon bar, saloon-based political corruption. Many communities introduced al ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
1931 Deaths
Events January * January 2 – South Dakota native Ernest Lawrence invents the cyclotron, used to accelerate particles to study nuclear physics. * January 4 – German pilot Elly Beinhorn begins her flight to Africa. * January 22 – Sir Isaac Isaacs is sworn in as the first Australian-born Governor-General of Australia. * January 25 – Mohandas Gandhi is again released from imprisonment in India. * January 27 – Pierre Laval forms a government in France. February * February 4 – Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gives a speech calling for rapid industrialization, arguing that only strong industrialized countries will win wars, while "weak" nations are "beaten". Stalin states: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." The first five-year plan in the Soviet Union is intensified, for the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. * February 10 – O ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
1879 Births
Events January–March * January 1 – The Specie Resumption Act takes effect. The United States Note is valued the same as gold, for the first time since the American Civil War. * January 11 – The Anglo-Zulu War begins. * January 22 – Anglo-Zulu War – Battle of Isandlwana: A force of 1,200 British soldiers is wiped out by over 20,000 Zulu warriors. * January 23 – Anglo-Zulu War – Battle of Rorke's Drift: Following the previous day's defeat, a smaller British force of 140 successfully repels an attack by 4,000 Zulus. * February 3 – Mosley Street in Newcastle upon Tyne (England) becomes the world's first public highway to be lit by the electric incandescent light bulb invented by Joseph Swan. * February 8 – At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute, engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming first proposes the global adoption of standard time. * March 3 – United States Geological Survey is founded. * March 11 – Th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Richard Rayner
Richard Rayner (born 1955) is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles. Early life He was born on 15 December 1955 in the northern city of Bradford. Rayner attended schools in Yorkshire and Wales before studying philosophy and law at the University of Cambridge. He has worked as an editor at '' Time Out'' Magazine, in London, and later on the literary magazine Granta, then based in Cambridge. First book Rayner is the author of nine books. His first, ''Los Angeles Without A Map'', was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie ''L.A. Without a Map'' (for which Rayner co-wrote the screenplay with director Mika Kaurismäki) starring David Tennant, Vinessa Shaw, Julie Delpy, Vincent Gallo, and, in an uncredited part, Johnny Depp. 1996–present In 1996, Rayner published ''The Blue Suit'', a memoir about his early life that won an Esquire Non-Fiction Award in the UK, and was described as 'a beguiling portrait of the artist as a writer and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Crossroads Of The World
Crossroads of the World is an open-air mall on Sunset Boulevard and Las Palmas in Los Angeles. The mall features a central building designed to resemble an ocean liner surrounded by a small village of cottage-style bungalows. It was designed by Robert V. Derrah, built in 1936, and has been called America's first outdoor shopping mall. Once a busy shopping center, the Crossroads later became private offices, primarily for the entertainment industry with a variety of music publishers and producers, television and film script writers, film and recording companies, novelists, costume designers, publicists, and casting agencies. The owner is planning a new development surrounding the site. History In 1931, after Charles H. Crawford's death, his wife Ella decided to build a multi-national outdoor market - that would feel like «a permanent world's fair with a cosmopolitan atmosphere» - on the land where her husband was shot. She hired the Streamline Moderne architect Robert V. Derrah ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Changeling (film)
''Changeling'' is a 2008 American mystery crime drama film directed, produced, and scored by Clint Eastwood and written by J. Michael Straczynski. The story was based on real-life events, specifically the 1928 Wineville Chicken Coop murders in Mira Loma, California. It stars Angelina Jolie as a woman united with a boy who she realizes is not her missing son. When she tries to demonstrate this to the police and city authorities, she is vilified as delusional, labeled as an unfit mother and confined to a psychiatric ward. The film explores themes of child endangerment, female disempowerment, political corruption, mistreatment of mental health patients and the repercussions of violence. Working in 1983 as a special correspondent for the now defunct ''TV-Cable Week'' magazine, Straczynski first encountered the story of Christine Collins and her son from a Los Angeles City Hall contact. Over the ensuing years he kept researching the story but never felt he was ready to tackle it. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
John Malkovich
John Malkovich (born December 9, 1953) is an American actor. He is the recipient of several accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. Malkovich has appeared in more than 70 films, including ''The Killing Fields'' (1984), ''Empire of the Sun'' (1987), ''Dangerous Liaisons'' (1988), ''Of Mice and Men'' (1992), ''In the Line of Fire'' (1993), ''Mulholland Falls'' (1996), ''Con Air'' (1997), ''Rounders'' (1998), ''Being John Malkovich'' (1999), '' The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc'' (1999), ''Shadow of the Vampire'' (2000), ''Ripley's Game'' (2002), ''Johnny English'' (2003), ''Burn After Reading'' (2008), ''Red'' (2010), '' Transformers: Dark of the Moon'' (2011), ''Warm Bodies'' (2013), '' Cesar Chavez'' (2014), '' Bird Box'' (2018), and ''Velvet Buzzsaw'' (2019). He has also produced films such as '' Ghost World'' (2001), ''Juno' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Westminster Presbyterian Church Los Angeles
Westminster is an area of Central London, part of the wider City of Westminster. The area, which extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street, has many visitor attractions and historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral and much of the West End shopping and entertainment district. The name ( ang, Westmynstre) originated from the informal description of the abbey church and royal peculiar of St Peter's (Westminster Abbey), west of the City of London (until the English Reformation there was also an Eastminster, near the Tower of London, in the East End of London). The abbey's origins date from between the 7th and 10th centuries, but it rose to national prominence when rebuilt by Edward the Confessor in the 11th. Westminster has been the home of England's government since about 1200, and from 1707 the Government of the United Kingdom. In 1539, it became a city. Westminster is often used as a m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |