Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

LA police were not corrupt. It seems paradoxical, or ironic, at first, but it makes sense: in New York City, the gay bars were run by the Mafia, and the Mafia paid off the police to leave them alone most of the time and provide advance warning of raids. The advance warning was to permit the bartenders to remove most of the liquor so it wouldn’t be confiscated, but it also meant that regulars could be warned and only a few random patrons would be arrested. According to Martin Duberman, “a patrolman would stop by Stonewall once a week to pick up the envelopes filled with cash—including those for the captains and desk sergeants, who never collected their payoffs in person. The total cash dispensed to the police each week came to about two thousand dollars.”⁵⁴