There’s a plot against Los Angeles. And it goes straight to the top

(With apologies to Raymond Chandler)

The Santa Ana winds were blowing hot and mean over the mountains. It was the kind of weather that sends city council members and rats scurrying for deeper shadows.

I’m a private dick — name’s Marlowe — and I was in my Hollywood Boulevard office, nursing a lukewarm bourbon out of a glass that had seen better days. Just like the city outside my window, Los Angeles. But something was shifting in the smog. The old grifters were getting pushed out. A new syndicate was moving in.

I wish I could tell you this caper launched with a blonde walking through my door with a tear in her eye and a dead husband in her trunk.

No. It started with basketball.

A mid-level fixer with a big Venmo balance hired me to look into noise buzzing around the Lakers. Mark Walter, the Guggenheim money man who thought he owned the world because he owned the Dodgers and our precious purple-and-gold, was sweating. Somebody was making a play for the team, and they weren’t using a bank loan. It was this Kushner kid, capo of the White House family syndicate, and he was rolling into town with bags of cash from Nueva York, Silicon V, maybe Arabia. Neither the green nor his partner Mouse Man provided any real leverage. It was Kushner’s lineage that frightened. He was brother to the son-of-law of the president, who enjoyed bringing federal prosecution on a whim.

Turned out the federales were holding a magnifying glass to Walter’s financial plumbing, threatening to turn the whole Guggenheim machine upside down if he didn’t cough up his LakeShow equity. Give us the keys to the franchise, Marky Mark, or we send in the G-men.

I wanted to stop there. I couldn’t. I kept pulling that thread, and the whole damn shirt of Southern California unraveled

This was the Plot Against Los Angeles.

How far did it go? I drove my old Plymouth over the hill to where the studio lots sit like walled fortresses. The mood there was as cheerful as a mortuary on a slow Tuesday. The trust-fund baby Ellison was moving on Warners after seizing Paramount, and he wasn’t acting alone. The White House family syndicate was backing him and squeezing the state AG. Approve the studio merger, or the industry would move to Tennessee, or worse, the syndicate would audit the town back to the silent era.

You’d think a town with a Pulitzer-winning paper would be screaming blue murder from the rooftops. But the watchdog had its teeth pulled and its mouth wired shut. I took Sepulveda all the way to the Gundo, to visit the L.A. Times. The billionaire doc who bought the paper to play savior had rolled over and showed his belly. Why? Because the South African Sawbones had skeletons in his biotech closet that danced the rumba. RFK Jr. slid into the doctor’s orbit, rasping about health initiatives. Soon the old rag’s owner allied with the anti-vaxxer branch of the syndicate, and the paper 86’d the ed board.

Feeling hot around the collar, I took Imperial west to cool off at the beach. To my surprise, the bad guys were already there on PCH. Howie Lutnick, title of commerce secretary (21st century slang for bag man) wanted the whole damn coast so the syndicate could build, pave, drill oil, launch rockets. That Lutnick lug was using the syndicate’s playbook. Suddenly, the Coastal Commission was under investigation. The play: Drown the watchdogs in federal inquiries while they stole the sand from under Jane Q. Public’s bare feet.

I could barely wrap my arms around a heist this big — Lakers, Paramount, Warner, Malibu — when my phone rang with a tip. These grifters hadn’t stopped at the water. RFK Jr. and HUDsucker Turner were in Echo Park. They had their fingers in two big pots — homeless services and Medi-Cal — and were using anti-woke to justify taking billions for their own purposes. The swamp must be drained! The progressives have failed! Cancel Corruption!

I had to tip my Borsalino hat. It was a beautiful con, smarter than any Eddie Mars pulled off.  On a scale that would make robber barons blush like rookie shoplifters.

The picture was complete, pinned to the corkboard in my mind. The Trump syndicate was tying up every asset SoCal had — the sports, the studios, the beaches, the housing, the media, the social services and soon the Olympics — and denying the cash to anyone who didn’t kiss the ring.

The syndicate is still selling it on the socials as a war on corruption. But looking across my town, where the truth costs more than anyone is willing to pay, I could see what this really was.

This was a stick-up. And Los Angeles, that desperate old dame, was handing over her pearls without even realizing she was bleeding.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.