the prologue to L.A. Confidential. By 1950 Dudley had reached the rank of Lieutenant, and he would remain there throughout the 1950s, until his promotion to Captain in 1958. By this time, his personal rivalry with fellow LAPD Captain Edmund Exley resulted in a power struggle between both men, which Edmund Exley won when Smith was attacked by a man named Wylie Bullock. This attack left him with brain damage that rendered him essentially semi-lucid, and only rarely lucid. Also in the attack, he lost an eye, and is paralyzed, and will probably never be able to walk again. It is unknown when Dudley died; however, he is apparently still alive—albeit confined to a nursing home—in 1976, as is revealed in the epilogue to White Jazz. He returns in Perfidia, set in 1941. Smith was thoroughly unscrupulous, ruthless, and evil. He had a large list of crimes that he had committed, including theft, pornography distribution, murder, and most disturbingly, infanticide—Dudley personally strangled the two-day-old baby of the Herrick family in 1937. He was a hard line anti-communist, declaring that he hated the "Red filth worse than Satan". Dudley's racism was also well known, particularly in regards to Jews, and he was a notable proponent of "containment"; as he explained it, keeping the "nigger filth" in African-American areas. Smith is portrayed by James Cromwell in the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential and portrayed in the 2003 television pilot of L.A. Confidential by Tom Nowicki. In a departure from the novel, Smith is killed by Exley at the end of a shootout. Ed Exley Appearances: L.A. Confidential, White Jazz Edmund Jennings Exley is one of the three protagonists in L.A. Confidential, and a major supporting character in White Jazz. He is the son of Preston Exley, former cop turned construction tycoon. The brother of Thomas Exley, also a cop who was gunned down by an unknown purse snatcher (referred to as "Rollo Tomasi" in the film, and kills Preston Exley, instead of Thomas Exley, in the film). Ed is relentlessly ambitious, politically savvy, and highly intelligent, trying to surpass his father as a policeman and live out late Thomas's dreams. He is instilled with a belief in "absolute justice" from his father. He has come from a family of cops. Stated in the novel Exley men have been police since the formation of the Scotland Yard. A summa cum laude graduate of