Jack Webb

There has been no other epoch in American history where corruption, debauchery, sleaze and horrific murder has intersected with a society as speciously glittering and innocent as the Los Angeles of the 1940s and 50s.The Tinseltown of that age had movie star glamour on the surface but a dark, violent and unrepentant heart. None knew this dichotomy better than the Los Angeles Police Department, whose story became the most successful police drama in television history, Dragnet. Jack Webb was the star and creator of the show, but much of what he unearthed was too sensational to be broadcast on prime time. Those stories he saved for his classic, The Badge.Crimes like the sex slaying of Betty Short, the Black Dahlia: tortured for days, drained of blood, cut in two and dumped in Leimert Park, the subject of James Ellroy's masterpiece and one of the US's greatest unsolved murders. Narcotics, gambling, prostitution, thrill murders, serial killers -- all take their place in a book that shattered America's delusion of post-war innocence and defines our knowledge of modern crime even today.The Badge comes with an introduction by master of crime noir, James Ellroy.

Before Charlie's Angels, Miami Vice, or NYPD Blue, there was Dragnet. From 1951 to 1959, Jack Webb starred as Sergeant Joe Friday in the most successful police drama in television history. Webb ("Just the facts, ma'am") was also the creator of Dragnet, and what made the show so revolutionary was its documentary-style format and the fact that each episode was "ripped" from the files of the LAPD. But 1950s television censors deemed many of the stories in the LAPD's files too violent or sensational for the airwaves. The Badge is Webb's collection of stories that could not be presented on TV: untold, behind-the-scenes accounts of the Black Dahlia murder, the Brenda Allen confessions, Stephen Nash's "thrill murders," and Donald Bashor's "sleeping lady murders," to name just a few. Case by case, The Badge takes readers on a spine chilling police tour through the dark, shadowy world of Los Angeles crime. It is a journey that, even four decades after it originally appeared in print, no reader is likely to forget.