Couple of questions about "LA Confidential"

Cafe Society
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  1. The bit at the end where the bad guys get White/Exley together at a spot, give them enough time to work out that it’s a set-up, provide them with a good defensible location and only then show up; how does that work? The bad guys chose the location, why would they not already have the drop on them?

  2. How was Dudley going to take over as kingpin? He was killing off the Cohen lieutenants secretly, he would have needed a lot of manpower to move all that heroin, and there was no real reason for the other crims to accept him as the new boss.

2

This doesn’t answer your question, but it may explain why the ending isn’t very well thought out. In the book, Dudley survives to appear in two or three more James Elroy books. The final scenes of the film are just a way to give closure to a story that actually has dozens more chapters to go.

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The first question has always bugged me about an otherwise perfect movie.
As a police captain Dudley would have known just about every drug dealer in town and if he had product they would have sold it for him. Anyone who tried to freelance would have been killed.