Earl E. Kynette

In 1938, Kynette was charged with conspiracy in a car-bomb attack on Harry J. Raymond, a private investigator in the employ of local anti-corruption crusaders.

Described in the influential Liberty magazine series "The Lid Off Los Angeles" as "a dough-faced, weak-eyed egomaniac with an army and medical background and considerable intelligence,"[2] Kynette was a native of Council Bluffs, Iowa who graduated from the University of Southern California.

[3] Pharmacist may have been, in part, a cover for "bootlegger," as pharmacies were permitted to dispense alcohol medicinally during Prohibition, which meant drugstores often became centers for illicit production and distribution of intoxicants.

[5] Within 18 months of joining the force, he was a sergeant, working on raiding "blind pigs" (illegal Prohibition-era drinking and gambling establishments).

[9] When Albert Marco was put on trial in 1928 for shooting two people one summer night at the Ship Cafe in Venice, the defense called Kynette as a character witness; he testified that "the defendant is a peaceful man".

Grand juries indicted several of those involved, but the slow pace of the prosecutions led the Supreme Court of California to dismiss the charges en masse for failure to provide a speedy trial...Shuler blamed both the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, Asa Keyes, and Los Angeles City Prosecutor Lloyd Nix for the failure, implying on air that Keyes was in the pocket of the indicted businessmen and that Nix was negligent.

Shuler's broadcast attacks forced Keyes to resign; the disgraced former district attorney would indeed later be convicted of taking a bribe from a Julian executive.

Nix claimed during an interview on another radio station that Shuler had as good as pulled the trigger by inciting public outrage over the acquittals in the first place.

"[16] A close ally of Chief Davis, Kynette was heavily involved in the department's unconstitutional diversion at the state line of migrants to California ("Okies and Arkies"), an action sometimes known as the Bum Blockade.

Quite unironically, Kynette's role was to defend, rather than attack, vice in L.A. "The Lid Off Los Angeles" put it this way: This, then, was Los Angeles in the years of Our Lord 1933 to 1937—a fantastic land of golden opportunity in which the underworld raked toward its vest the blue chips of gambling and prostitution while the Mayor's brother, boss of an administration supported by that underworld, figuratively stood on the steps of City Hall auctioning off everything but his own underpants.

[22] The trial was described by Time magazine as "Southern California's biggest political circus" and revealed that the Intelligence Squad was under direct control of the mayor's brother, and had spied on many local dignitaries including John Anson Ford (the mayor's political opponent in the most recent election) and Buron Rogers Fitts (the district attorney trying the case).

[28] In 1951, Kynette was arrested in the San Francisco Bay Area on a drunkenness charge, and then found to have "an empirin compound and codeine" in his hotel room, and as such, he was sent back to prison.

[33] A civil suit was filed by the family of one of the crash victims, charging that Kynette was driving drunk and was responsible when the car "careened to the top of a 40-foot embankment and dropped down the vertical side to the highway".

Kynette at the police academy in 1925
"Officer Reinstated" Los Angeles Evening Post-Record , December 14, 1927
In 1929 the LAPD homicide squad adopted a stray cat; Kynette named her Madame Pompadour
Julian Thieves in Politics by Bob Shuler drew connections between Julian Petroleum Company executives and local politicians (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Digital Collections)
Kynette in court, February 1938 (L.A. Daily News via UCLA Digital Library)
Inmate record for Kynette (prisoner no. 65444) at San Quentin State Prison (California Department of Corrections via Ancestry.com)